The Cider House Rules (53 page)

For some reason the foreman felt a strong desire to leave with Melony; he surprised himself by muttering out loud, “I hope it snows soon.”

“What?” one of the apple-mart women said.

“So long!” the foreman called to Melony, but she didn’t answer him.

“Good riddance,” said one of the women in the mart.

“The slut,” another one said.

“What makes her a slut?” the foreman asked sharply. “Who you seen her sleepin’ with?”

“She’s just a tramp,” one of them said.

“At least she’s
interesting,
” the foreman snapped. The women regarded him for a moment before one of them spoke up.

“Got a crush on her, do you?” she asked.

“I’ll bet you wish you was that boyfriend she’s lookin’ for,” another woman said, which drew a teasing sort of laughter from all the mart women.

“It’s not that!” the foreman snapped. “I hope she never finds that boyfriend—for his sake!” the foreman said. “And for hers,” he added.

The woman whose fat husband had tried to rape Melony turned away from this conversation. She opened the large, communal thermos on the table next to the cash register; but when she tried to pour herself some coffee, none came out. What came out instead was poison oats and poison corn. If Melony had actually meant to poison any of them, she would have been more restrained in the proportions. It was clearly just a message, and the apple-mart women regarded it as silently as if they were trying to read bones.

“You see what I mean?” the foreman asked them. He picked up an apple from a display basket on the counter and took a healthy chomp; the apple had been left out in the cold so long that it was partially frozen, and so mealy in the foreman’s mouth that he instantly spat it out.

It was very cold on the road to the coast, but the walking warmed Melony up; also, since there was no traffic, she had no choice about walking. When she reached the coastal highway, she didn’t have to wait long for a ride. A pale but jolly boy driving a panel truck stopped for her.

“Yarmouth Paint and Shellac, at your service,” the boy said to Melony; he was a little younger than Homer Wells, and—in Melony’s opinion—not nearly so worldly-looking. The truck reeked of wood-stain smells and of varnish and creosote. “I’m a wood-treatment expert,” the boy said to her proudly.

At best, a salesman, Melony thought; more likely, a delivery boy. She smiled tightly, not showing her chipped teeth. The boy fidgeted, awaiting some form of greeting from her. I can make anyone nervous in less than a minute, Melony thought.

“Uh, where you goin’?” the boy asked her—the panel truck sloshing along.

“The city,” Melony said.

“What city?” the boy asked.

Now Melony allowed her lips to part with her smile—the worried boy now staring at the troubled history of her mouth.

“You tell me,” Melony said.

“I gotta go to Bath,” the boy said nervously. Melony stared at him as if he’d said he had to
have
a bath.

“Bath,” she repeated.

“It’s a city, sort of,” the wood-treatment expert told her.

It was Clara’s city! Dr. Larch or Homer Wells could have told Melony—old Clara had come to St. Cloud’s from Bath! But Melony didn’t know that, and wouldn’t have cared; her relationship to Clara had been unpleasantly envious. Homer Wells knew Clara more intimately than he knew Melony. It might have interested Melony that Bath would put her much closer to Ocean View than she’d been at York Farm—that there might even be residents of Bath who would have heard of an Ocean View Orchards; there were certainly many Bath residents who could have directed her to Heart’s Haven or to Heart’s Rock.

“You wanna go to Bath?” the boy asked her cautiously.

Again Melony showed him her damaged teeth; she was displaying less of a smile than of the manner in which a dog might show its hackles. “Right,” she said.

Wally came home for Thanksgiving; Candy had been home for several weekends in the early fall, but Homer had not known how to initiate seeing her without Wally. Wally was surprised that Homer and Candy hadn’t seen each other; and, from Candy’s embarrassment with Wally’s surprise, Homer detected that she had been equally troubled about initiating a meeting with him. But the turkey had to be basted every fifteen minutes, the table had to be set, and Olive was too obviously enjoying having a full house again—there was no time to feel awkward.

Raymond Kendall had shared a Thanksgiving dinner with the Worthingtons before, but never without Senior’s semi-presence; Ray went through a few minutes of struggling to be overly polite before he relaxed and talked shop with Olive.

“Dad acts like he’s having a date,” Candy said to Olive in the kitchen.

“I’m flattered,” Olive said, squeezing Candy’s arm and laughing. But that was the end of any further nonsense.

Homer volunteered to carve the turkey. He did such a good job that Olive said, “You should be a surgeon, Homer!”

Wally laughed; Candy looked at her plate, or at her hands in her lap, and Ray Kendall said, “The boy’s just good with his hands. If you’ve got good hands, once you do a thing your hands won’t forget how.”

“That’s like you, Ray,” Olive said, which moved the attention away from Homer’s work with the knife; he carved every bit of meat off the bones as quickly as possible.

Wally talked about the war. He said he’d thought about dropping out of college to go to flying school. “So if there
is
a war—if we get into it, I mean—then I’ll already know how to fly.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Olive said to him.

“Why would you
want
to do such a thing?” Candy asked him. “I think you’re being selfish.”

“What do you mean,
selfish
?” Wally asked. “A war is for your country, it’s serving your country!”

“To you, it’s an adventure,” Candy said. “That’s what’s selfish about it.”

“You’ll do no such thing, anyway,” Olive repeated.

“I was too young to go to the last war,” Ray said, “and if there’s another one, I’ll be too old.”

“Lucky you!” Olive said.

“That’s right,” Candy said.

Ray shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted to go to the last one. I tried to lie about my age, but someone told on me.”

“Now you know better,” Olive said.

“I’m not so sure of that,” Ray said. “If there’s a new one, there’ll be lots of new weapons—they’re buildin’ stuff you can’t even imagine.”

“I try to imagine it,” Wally said. “I imagine the war all the time.”

“Except the dying, Wally,” Olive Worthington said, carrying the turkey carcass out to the kitchen. “I don’t think you’ve imagined the dying.”

“Right,” said Homer Wells, who imagined the dying all the time. Candy looked at him and smiled.

“You should have called me on the weekends, Homer,” she said.

“Yeah, why didn’t you?” Wally asked him. “Too busy with Debra Pettigrew, that’s why.” Homer just shook his head.

“Too busy with the practical anatomy of the rabbit!” Olive called from the kitchen.

“The
what
?” Wally said.

But Olive was wrong. It had taken Homer only about three weeks of Senior Biology to realize that he knew more about the particular animal under scrutiny and its relation to human anatomy than did his cadaverous teacher, Mr. Hood.

It was, as Wilbur Larch could have guessed, the urogenital system that revealed Mr. Hood’s deficiencies in comparison to the experience of young Dr. Wells. In discussing the three stages of specialization of the uterus, Mr. Hood became confused. The intrauterine life of the rabbit embryo is only thirty days; between five to eight young are born. In keeping with the primitive nature of the little animal, the rabbit has two complete uteri—the structure of the organ at this stage is called
uterus duplex.
The structure of the organ in the human female, which Homer Wells knew very well—wherein two uterine tubes open into a single uterine cavity—is called
uterus simplex.
The third stage of uterine structure falls between the two—a partially fused condition existing in some mammals (sheep, for example); it is called
uterus bicornis.

Poor Mr. Hood, attempting to reveal the secrets of the uterus upon the chalky blackboard, confused his
duplex
with his
bicornis;
he called a sheep a rabbit (and vice versa). It was a smaller error than if he’d imagined the human female had two complete uteri and had spread this misinformation to the class, but it was an error; Homer Wells caught it. It was the first time he had been put in a position of correcting an authority. “An orphan is especially uncomfortable and insecure in such a position,” wrote Dr. Wilbur Larch.

“Excuse me, sir?” said Homer Wells.

“Yes, Homer?” said Mr. Hood. His gauntness, in a certain light, made him appear as exposed as the many rabbit cadavers lying open on the students’ laboratory tables. He looked skinned, almost ready for labeling. A kind but weary patience was in his eyes; they were the man’s only alert features.

“It’s the other way around, sir,” said Homer Wells.

“Pardon me?” said Mr. Hood.

“The rabbit has two complete uteri, the rabbit is
uterus duplex—
not the sheep, sir,” Homer said. “The sheep’s uterus is partially fused together, it’s almost one—the sheep is
uterus bicornis.
”

The class waited. Mr. Hood blinked; for a moment, he looked like a lizard regarding a fly, but he suddenly retreated. “Isn’t that what I said?” he asked, smiling.

“No,” the class murmured, “you said it the other way around.”

“Well, it’s my mistake, then,” Mr. Hood said almost cheerfully. “I meant it just the way you said it, Homer,” he said.

“Maybe I misunderstood you, sir,” Homer said, but the class murmured, “No, you got it right.”

The short boy named Bucky, with whom Homer had to share his rabbit cadaver, nudged Homer in the ribs. “How come you know all about cunts?” he asked Homer.

“Search me,” said Homer Wells. He had learned that phrase from Debra Pettigrew. It was the one game they played. He would ask her something she couldn’t answer. She would say “Search me.” And Homer Wells, saying “Okay,” would begin to search her. “Not
there
!” Debra would cry, pushing his hand away, but laughing. Always laughing, but always pushing his hand away. There was no way Homer Wells would gain admittance to the
uterus simplex
of Debra Pettigrew.

“Not unless I ask her to marry me,” he told Wally, when they were back together in Wally’s bedroom, Thanksgiving night.

“I wouldn’t go that far, old boy,” Wally said.

Homer didn’t tell Wally about embarrassing Mr. Hood, or how the man seemed changed by the incident. If Mr. Hood had always been cadaverous, now there was an insomnia about his presence, too—as if he were not only dead but also working too hard; staying up late; boning up on his rabbit anatomy; trying to keep
all
the uteri straight. His tiredness made him slightly less cadaverous, but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human. Mr. Hood began to look as if he were waiting for his retirement, hoping that he could get there.

Where have I seen that look before? wondered Homer Wells.

Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or even Mrs. Grogan, could have reminded him; they were all familiar with that look—that strained combination of exhaustion and expectation, that fierce contradiction between grim anxiety and childlike faith. For years that look had penetrated even the most innocent expressions of Wilbur Larch; lately, Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and even Mrs. Grogan, had recognized the look in their own expressions.

“What are we waiting for?” Nurse Edna asked Nurse Angela one morning. There was an aura of something pending, some form of inevitable change. These good women were as insulted by the now-famous Goodhall-Gingrich questionnaire as they felt sure Dr. Larch had been; Larch did seem unusually cheered by the remarks of the former Snowy Meadows; the board had thought Snowy’s response was so praiseworthy that they’d sent it along for Dr. Larch to see.

To the question of being “properly supervised,” Snowy said that Dr. Larch and the nurses never let him out of their sight. To the question regarding whether or not the medical attention was “adequate,” Snowy Meadows advised the board to “just ask Fuzzy Stone.” In Snowy’s opinion, Dr. Larch had
breathed
for Fuzzy. “You never heard a worse set of lungs,” said Snowy Meadows, “but old Larch just hooked the kid up to a real life-saver.” And to the question of whether or not the foster home was “carefully and correctly chosen,” Snowy Meadows claimed that Dr. Larch was a genius at this delicate guesswork. “How could the guy have known that I was going to fit right in with a furniture family? Well, I’m telling you, he did know,” Snowy Meadows (now Robert Marsh) wrote to the board. “You know, private property, the world of personal possessions—that doesn’t mean the world to everybody. But let me tell you,” Snowy Meadows said, “furniture means the world to an orphan.”

“One of you must have dropped that boy on his head,” Wilbur Larch said to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela, although they could tell he was very pleased by Snowy’s remarks.

But just to be fair, the board sent Larch Curly Day’s slightly less enthusiastic response to the questionnaire. Roy Rinfret of Boothbay was seething with resentment. “I was no more prepared to be adopted by druggists than I was prepared to have my belly-cord cut,” wrote Roy “Curly” Rinfret. “The most beautiful couple in the world walked off with someone who didn’t even need or want to be adopted, and I got nabbed by druggists!” Curly complained. “You call it being supervised when little children are stumbling over dead bodies?” Curly Day asked the board. “Imagine this: on the day I find a dead man in the grass, the couple of my dreams adopts someone else, Dr. Larch tells me that an orphanage is not a pet store, and shortly thereafter, two druggists hire me to work in their drugstore for free—and you call that being adopted!”

“Why, that ungrateful little snot!” said Nurse Angela.

“Why, Curly Day, aren’t you ashamed?” Nurse Edna asked the indifferent air.