Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  “I wasn’t callin’ nothin’ ‘shit,’ man—I was just sayin’ it,” Peaches said.

  “Just pipe down,” Black Pan said. He observed the bicycle lesson. “How it comin’ with that?” he asked.

  “They tryin’ hard,” Muddy said.

  “They inventin’ a new sport,” Peaches said, and everyone laughed.

  “Show some respect,” said Mr. Rose, and everyone piped down. Black Pan went back inside the cider house.

  “What you bet he burns the bread?” Peaches asked quietly.

  “If he burns it, it ’cause he took the time to kick your ass,” Muddy told him.

  The bicycle was broken; either the rear wheel wouldn’t turn, or else the chain was jammed in the wheel.

  “There’s another bicycle,” Angel told Rose Rose. “You try that one, while I fix this one.” But while he fixed Candy’s bicycle, Rose Rose had to suffer with a boy’s bicycle, so that in addition to her troubles, she slipped and hurt her crotch against the crossbar. Homer was actually worried about how hard a fall she had, and he asked her if she was all right.

  “It just like a cramp,” she called to him, but she remained bent over until Angel managed to get Candy’s bicycle running again.

  “It looks hopeless,” Homer confided to Mr. Rose.

  “What about them rules?” Mr. Rose asked him. Homer put the candle in his pocket. He and Mr. Rose regarded each other—it was almost a contest, the way they looked at each other.

  “I’m worried about your daughter,” said Homer Wells, after a while. Together they watched Rose Rose fall off the bicycle again.

  “Don’t worry about her,” said Mr. Rose.

  “She looks unhappy, sometimes,” Homer said.

  “She ain’t unhappy,” Mr. Rose said.

  “Are you worried about her?” Homer asked him.

  “Once you start worryin’, you can worry ’bout anybody, can’t you?” said Mr. Rose.

  It appeared to Homer Wells that her fall against the crossbar was still giving Rose Rose some pain because she stood for a while with her hands on her knees and her head down (as if her stomach hurt her) each time she fell off the bicycle.

  Homer and Mr. Rose missed the moment when she gave up. They just noticed that she was running off, in the direction of the orchard called Frying Pan, and that Angel was running after her; both bicycles were left behind.

  “That’s too bad,” Homer said. “They would have had a good time at the beach. Maybe I can convince them to let me drive them there.”

  “Leave ’em alone,” said Mr. Rose; the way Homer heard it, it was more of a command than a suggestion. “They don’t have to go to no beach,” Mr. Rose said, more mildly. “They just young, they not sure how to have a good time,” he said. “Just think what might happen at the beach. They might get drowned. Or some people might not like seein’ a white boy with a colored girl—and they both in bathin’ suits. It better they don’t go nowhere,” Mr. Rose concluded. That was the end of that subject, because then Mr. Rose asked, “Are you happy, Homer?”

  “Am I happy?” said Homer Wells.

  “Why you repeat every single thing?” Mr. Rose asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Homer said. “I’m happy, sometimes,” he said cautiously.

  “That good,” said Mr. Rose. “And Mistuh and Missus Worthington—are they happy?”

  “I think they’re pretty happy, most of the time,” Homer told him.

  “That good,” said Mr. Rose.

  Peaches, who’d had a few beers, approached Angel’s bicycle warily, as if the machine were dangerous even when it was lying on the ground.

  “Careful it don’t bite you,” Muddy warned him. Peaches mounted the bike and grinned at the men.

  “How do it start?” he asked them, and they all laughed.

  Muddy got up from against the wall and went over to Candy’s bicycle.

  “I have you a race,” he said to Peaches.

  “Yeah,” said Black Pan, in the cider house door. “We see which one of you falls down first.”

  “Mine ain’t got no middle,” Muddy observed of Candy’s bike.

  “That make it go faster,” Peaches said. He tried to move Angel’s bike forward, as if his feet were paddles.

  “You ain’t ridin’ that thing, you fuckin’ it,” one of the men said, and everyone laughed. Black Pan ran up behind Peaches and started pushing him faster.

  “Cut that shit out!” Peaches cried, but Black Pan got the bike rolling so fast that he couldn’t keep up with it.

  “I can’t be in no race if someone don’t push me, too,” Muddy said, and two of the men got him rolling faster than Peaches, who had disappeared over a hill into the next field (from which the men could hear him screaming).

  “Holy shit!” said Muddy, when he was under way. He pedaled so hard that the front wheel rose off the ground, and then the bicycle rode right out from under him. The men were howling now, and Black Pan picked up Muddy’s fallen bicycle; he was the next to try it.

  “You gonna try it, too?” Mr. Rose asked Homer.

  As long as Angel and Candy weren’t around to watch him, Homer thought he would. “Sure,” Homer said. “I’m next!” he yelled at Black Pan, who was balancing the bicycle in place, his feet slipping off the pedals; he fell over on his side before he could get moving.

  “That was no real turn!” Black Pan said. “I get another try.”

  “Are you going to try it?” Homer asked Mr. Rose.

  “Not me,” said Mr. Rose.

  “The baby’s cryin’,” someone said.

  “Go pick her up,” said someone else.

  “I’ll take care of that,” said Mr. Rose to all of them. “I’ll watch the baby—you all play.”

  Peaches appeared over the hill; he was walking the bicycle beside him, and he was limping.

  “It hit a tree,” he explained. “It went right at the tree like the tree was its enemy.”

  “You supposed to steer it,” Muddy told him.

  “It steer itself,” Peaches said. “It don’t listen to me.”

  Homer supported Black Pan while the cook mounted Candy’s bike a second time. “Here we go,” Black Pan said with determination, but he kept one arm wrapped around Homer’s neck; he had only one hand on the handlebars, and he wasn’t pedaling.

  “You’ve got to pedal it, to make it go,” Homer told him.

  “You got to push me first,” Black Pan said.

  “Somethin’ burnin’!” someone shouted.

  “Oh shit, my corn bread!” Black Pan said. He lunged to one side, his arm still around Homer’s neck so that Homer fell over with him—on top of the bicycle.

  “I told you he was gonna burn that bread,” Peaches told Muddy.

  “Give me that bike,” Muddy said, taking Angel’s bike away from Peaches.

  Two of the men were giving Homer a push.

  “I got it, I got it,” Homer told them, so they let go. But he didn’t have it. He veered sharply in one direction, then he veered back toward the men, who had to run out of his way; then he jackknifed the bike and went tumbling one way—the bike went another.

  Everyone was laughing now. Peaches looked at Homer Wells lying on the ground.

  “Sometimes, it don’t help if you white!” Peaches told Homer, and everyone howled.

  “It help, if you white, most of the time,” said Mr. Rose. He stood in the cider house door, the smoke from the burning corn bread billowing behind him, his daughter’s daughter in his arms—the pacifier a seemingly permanent fixture in her mouth. And after Mr. Rose had spoken, he stuck a pacifier in his mouth, too.

  In the heart of the valley that was at the bottom of Frying Pan, where the ocean might be a hundred miles away and no breath from the sea ever reached, Rose Rose was stretched out in the dark grass under a Northern Spy that no one had picked yet; Angel Wells was stretched out beside her. She let her arm loll on his waist; he ran his finger very lightly over her face, following the line of her scar down her n
ose to her lip. When he got to her lip, she held his hand still and kissed his finger.

  She had taken off the work shoes and the blue jeans, but she kept Candy’s bathing suit and the T-shirt on.

  “Wouldn’t of had no fun at no beach, anyway,” she said.

  “We’ll go another day,” Angel said.

  “We won’t go nowhere,” she said. They kissed each other for a while. Then Rose Rose said, “Tell me ’bout it again.” Angel Wells began to describe the ocean, but she interrupted him. “No, not that part,” she said. “I don’t care ’bout no ocean. Tell me ’bout the other part—where we all livin’ together in the same house. You and me and my baby and your father and Mistuh and Missus Worthington,” Rose Rose said. “That the part that get to me,” she said, smiling.

  And he began again: about how it was possible. He was sure that his father and Wally and Candy wouldn’t object.

  “You all crazy,” she told Angel. “But go on,” she said.

  There was plenty of room, Angel assured her.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna mind ’bout the baby?” she asked him; she shut her eyes; with her eyes shut, she could see what Angel was describing a little better.

  That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That’s when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that’s when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all—even on a sunny Indian summer day—it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible. Angel talked all day; he just went on and on and on; he would be a novelist before nightfall. In his story, Rose Rose and everyone else got along famously. No one objected to anything anyone else did. All of it, as they say in Maine, worked out.

  Sometimes, Rose Rose cried a little; more often, they just kissed. Only a few times did she interrupt him, usually because she wanted him to repeat something that had seemed especially unlikely to her. “Hold on a minute,” she’d say to Angel. “Better go over that again, ’cause I must be slow.”

  In the late afternoon, the mosquitoes began to bother them, and it crossed Angel’s mind how, some evening, Rose Rose could ask Wally to tell her what the rice paddy mosquitoes were like.

  “An Ocean View mosquito isn’t anything compared to a Japanese B mosquito,” Wally would have told her, but Angel didn’t get to tell Rose Rose this part of the fantasy. She was starting to stand up when an apparent cramp, or the pain from her fall against the bicycle’s crossbar, dropped her to her knees as if she’d been kicked, and Angel caught her around her shoulders.

  “You hurt yourself on the bicycle, didn’t you?” he asked her.

  “I was tryin’ to,” she said then.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “I was tryin’ to hurt myself,” Rose Rose told him, “but I don’t think I hurt myself enough.”

  “Enough for what?” he asked.

  “To lose the baby,” she told him.

  “You’re pregnant?” Angel asked her.

  “Again,” she said. “Again and again, I guess,” she said. “Somebody must want me to keep havin’ babies.”

  “Who?” Angel asked her.

  “Never mind,” she told him.

  “Someone who’s not here?” he asked.

  “Oh, he here,” Rose Rose said. “But never mind.”

  “The father is here?” Angel asked.

  “The father of this one—yeah, he here,” she said, patting her flat stomach.

  “Who is he?” Angel asked.

  “Never mind who he is,” she told Angel. “Tell me that part again—only better make it two babies. Now they me and you, and everybody else, and two babies,” she said. “Won’t we all have fun?”

  Angel looked as if she’d slapped him; Rose Rose kissed him and hugged him—and she changed her tone of voice.

  “You see?” she whispered to him, holding him tight. “We wouldn’t of had no fun at no beach, Angel.”

  “Do you want the baby?” he asked her.

  “I want the one I got,” she told him. “I don’t want this other one!” She struck herself as hard as she could when she said “other”; she bent herself over again, she’d knocked the wind out of herself. She lay in the grass in what Angel could not help observing was a fetal position.

  “You wanna love me or help me?” she asked him.

  “Both,” he said miserably.

  “Ain’t no such thing as both,” she said. “If you smart, you just stick with helpin’ me—that easier.”

  “You can stay with me,” Angel began—again.

  “Don’t tell me no more ’bout that!” Rose Rose said angrily. “Don’t tell me no more names for my baby, either. Just plain help me,” she said.

  “How?” Angel asked. “Anything,” he told her.

  “Just get me an abortion,” Rose Rose said. “I don’t live ’round here, I don’t know nobody to ask, and I got no money.”

  Angel thought that the money he’d been saving to buy his first car would probably be enough money for an abortion—he had saved about five hundred dollars—but the problem was that the money was in a savings account, the trustees of which were his father and Candy; Angel couldn’t take any money out without their signatures. And when Angel called Herb Fowler at home, the news regarding the abortionist was typically vague.

  “There’s some old fart named Hood who does ’em,” Herb told Angel. “He’s a retired doctor from Cape Kenneth. But he does the business in his summer house over on Drinkwater. Lucky for you it’s still almost summer. I heard he does ’em in the summer house even if it’s the middle of the winter.”

  “Do you know what it costs?” Angel asked Herb.

  “A lot,” Herb said. “But it don’t cost as much as a baby.”

  “Thanks, Herb,” Angel said.

  “Congratulations,” Herb Fowler told the boy. “I didn’t know your pecker was long enough.”

  “It’s long enough,” Angel said bravely.

  But when Angel looked in the phone book, there was no Dr. Hood among the many Hoods in that part of Maine, and Herb Fowler didn’t know the man’s first name. Angel knew he couldn’t call everyone named Hood and ask, each time, if this was the abortionist. Angel also knew he’d have to speak to Candy and his father in order to get the money, and so he didn’t delay in telling them the whole story.

  “God, what a good boy Angel is!” Wally would say later. “He never tries to keep anything from anybody. He just comes right out with it—no matter what it is.”

  “She wouldn’t tell you who the father is?” Homer Wells asked Angel.

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Angel said.

  “Maybe Muddy,” Wally said.

  “Probably Peaches,” Candy said.

  “What’s it matter if she doesn’t want to say who the father is? The main thing is she doesn’t want the baby,” said Homer Wells. “The main thing is to get her an abortion.” Wally and Candy were quiet; they wouldn’t question Homer’s authority on this subject.

  “The problem is, how do we know which Hood to call, when the phone book doesn’t say which one is the doctor?” Angel asked.

  “I know which one it is,” Homer said, “and he’s not a doctor.”

  “Herb said he was a retired doctor,” Angel said.

  “He’s a retired biology teacher,” said Homer Wells, who knew exactly which Mr. Hood it was. Homer also remembered that Mr. Hood had once confused a rabbit’s uteri with a sheep’s. He wondered how many uteri Mr. Hood imagined women had? And would he be more careful if he knew a woman had only one?

  “A biology teacher?” Angel asked.

  “Not a very good one, either,” Homer said.

  “Herb Fowler has never known shit about anything,” Wally said.

  The thought of what Mr. Hood might not know gave Homer Wells the shivers.

  “She’s not going anywhere near Mister Hood,” Homer said. “You’ll have to tak
e her to Saint Cloud’s,” he told Angel.

  “But I don’t think she wants to have the baby,” Angel said. “And if she had it, I don’t think she’d want to leave it in the orphanage.”

  “Angel,” Homer said, “she doesn’t have to have a baby in Saint Cloud’s. She can have an abortion there.”

  Wally moved the wheelchair back and forth.

  Candy said: “I had an abortion there, once, Angel.”

  “You did?” Angel said.

  “At the time,” Wally told the boy, “we thought we’d always be able to have another baby.”

  “It was before Wally was hurt—before the war,” Candy began.

  “Doctor Larch does it?” Angel asked his father.

  “Right,” said Homer Wells. He was thinking that he should put Angel and Rose Rose on a train to St. Cloud’s as soon as possible; with all the “evidence” that had been submitted to the board of trustees, Homer didn’t know how much more time Dr. Larch would have to practice.

  “I’ll call Doctor Larch right now,” Homer said. “We’ll put you and Rose Rose on the next train.”

  “Or I could drive them in the Cadillac,” Wally said.

  “It’s too far for you to drive, Wally,” Homer told him.

  “Baby Rose can stay here, with me,” Candy said.

  They decided that it would be best if Candy went to the cider house and brought Rose Rose and her baby back to the house. Mr. Rose might give Rose Rose an argument if Angel showed up at night, wanting Rose Rose and the baby to go off with him.

  “He won’t argue with me,” Candy said. “I’ll just say I’ve found a lot of old baby clothes, and that Rose Rose and I are going to dress up the baby in everything that fits her.”

  “At night?” Wally said. “For Christ’s sake, Mister Rose isn’t a fool.”

  “I don’t care if he believes me,” Candy said. “I just want to get the girl and her baby out of there.”

  “Is there that much of a rush?” Wally asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid there is,” said Homer Wells. He had not told Candy or Wally about Dr. Larch’s desire to replace himself, or what revelations and fictions had been delivered to the board. An orphan learns to keep things to himself; an orphan holds things in. What comes out of orphans comes out of them slowly.