The Cider House Rules (80 page)

Candy hurried to unmake the bed; in the darkness, she probably wasn’t refolding the blankets and the linen very neatly, and Homer had to help her roll up the mattress.

“It’s Wally!” Candy whispered, and indeed the car sounded like the Cadillac, which (since Raymond Kendall’s death) had lost its pinpoint timing. In fact, Homer remembered, the Cadillac’s muffler was loose, and it had a rebuilt engine, which already needed a valve job. And it was too heavy and low-built a car for proper use on the ragged dirt roads that wound through the orchards.

But how could Wally have managed it? wondered Homer Wells. Wally would have had to crawl to the Cadillac (Homer himself had parked it behind one of the storage barns, where the road was much too rocky and broken up for the wheelchair).

“Maybe it’s some local kid,” Homer whispered to Candy; the cider house was not unknown to a few locals; the orchard roads had been lovers’ lanes for more than one couple.

The heavy car pulled right up to the cider house wall. Candy and Homer felt the front bumper nudge against the building.

“It’s Wally!” Candy whispered; why would some local kid bother to park so close? The motor knocked for a while after the key was turned off. And then there was that ping of engine heat from the heavy car as it settled into place.

Homer let go of Candy; he tripped on the doctor’s bag as he started for the door, and Candy caught hold of him, pulling him back against her.

“I’m not going to make him
crawl
in here,” Homer said to her, but Candy could not make herself move out of the darkest corner of the cider house.

Homer picked up the doctor’s bag and felt his way into the dark kitchen; his hand groped for the light switch, his hand brushing over his new list of rules. He had not heard the car door open, but he suddenly heard low voices; he paused, with his hand on the light switch. Oh Wally, this isn’t fair! he thought; if there were voices Homer knew that Wally had brought Angel with him. That would have made it easier for Wally to get to the Cadillac—Angel could have brought the car around for him. But regardless of the torment that burdened Wally, Homer was angry at his friend for involving Angel. But wasn’t Angel involved in it, anyway? Homer wondered. (Now they turned the headlights on—to light their way to the door?)

It was not the way Homer had imagined telling them both, but what did the way matter? Homer Wells turned on the light, which momentarily blinded him. He thought that he must be as lit up as a Christmas tree in the cider house door. And, he thought, wasn’t it fitting that it had been the Cadillac that had rescued him from St. Cloud’s, and now here was the Cadillac—in a way, come to rescue him again? For here he was, with the well-worn doctor’s bag in hand, at last prepared to tell the truth—ready, at last, to take his medicine.

In the bright light, he nervously picked the imaginary lint off his clothes. He remembered what the neurologists call it: carphologia.

He tightened his grip on Dr. Larch’s bag and peered into the darkness. Suddenly, it was clear to him—where he was going. He was only what he always was: an orphan who’d never been adopted. He had managed to steal some time away from the orphanage, but St. Cloud’s had the only legitimate claim to him. In his forties, a man should know where he belongs.

Dr. Larch began another letter to Harry Truman, before he remembered that Eisenhower had been President for a few years. He had written several letters to Roosevelt after Roosevelt had died, and he’d written many more to Eleanor, but the Roosevelts had never written back. Harry Truman had never written back, either, and Larch couldn’t remember if he’d written to Mrs. Truman, too, or to Truman’s daughter—whichever one it was hadn’t answered, either.

He tried not to get depressed at the thought of writing to Eisenhower; he tried to recall how he’d begun the last one. He’d begun “Dear General,” but after that he couldn’t remember; he’d said something about how he’d been a doctor to the “troops” in World War I—he’d tried to sneak up on his real subject, a kind of flanking maneuver. Maybe it was time to try Mrs. Eisenhower. But when Larch wrote “Dear Mamie,” he felt ridiculous.

Oh, what’s the use? thought Wilbur Larch. You have to be crazy to write to Eisenhower about abortion. He tore the letter out of the typewriter; out of the blue, he decided that the President’s head resembled that of a baby.

Then he remembered that Melony had the questionnaire. There was no time to fool around. He told Nurse Angela that there would be a meeting after supper, after the children had been put to bed.

Nurse Angela could not recall that there had ever been a meeting at St. Cloud’s, except that most uncomfortable meeting with the board of trustees; she assumed that if there was going to be another meeting, the board was probably involved.

“Oh dear, a meeting,” Nurse Edna said; she fretted all day.

Mrs. Grogan was worried, too. She was concerned about where the meeting would take place—as if it would be possible to miss it or not find it.

“I think we can narrow down the possibilities,” Nurse Caroline assured her.

All day Wilbur Larch worked in Nurse Angela’s office. No babies were born that day; and the one woman who wanted an abortion was welcomed, and made comfortable, and told that she could have her abortion tomorrow. Wilbur Larch would not leave Nurse Angela’s office, not even for lunch, not even for tea, and not even for the Lord’s work.

He was reviewing and putting the finishing touches to the history of Fuzzy Stone, that good doctor; Larch was also writing the obituary of Homer Wells. Poor Homer’s heart: the rigors of an agricultural life and a high-cholesterol diet—“An orphan is a meat eater, an orphan is always hungry,” wrote Wilbur Larch.

Dr. Stone, on the other hand, was not a typical orphan. Larch characterized Fuzzy Stone as “lean and mean.” After all, who among the orphans had ever dared to challenge Dr. Larch? And here was Fuzzy Stone threatening to turn his old mentor in! Not only did he dare to attack Dr. Larch’s beliefs regarding the abortions, but also Fuzzy had such strong views on the subject that he repeatedly threatened to expose Dr. Larch to the board. And now Fuzzy’s zeal was fired with the self-righteousness of a true missionary, for Larch knew that the safest place for Dr. Stone to be practicing medicine was where the board could never trace him. Fuzzy was fighting diarrhea amid the dying children of Asia. Larch had just read an article in
The Lancet
about diarrhea being the number one killer of kids in that part of the world. (Homer Wells, who did not know that his heart had given out, had read the same article.) The other little details about Burma and India—which lent such a missionary authenticity to Fuzzy’s angry letters to Wilbur Larch—were things that Larch remembered hearing about Wally’s excruciating travels there.

It had been an exhausting day for Larch, who had also written—in other voices—to the board of trustees. He would have preferred ether to supper, although supper, he knew, would make him more stable for the meeting that his bullied staff was dreading. Larch read such a short passage from
Jane Eyre
that every girl in the girls’ division was still awake when he left them, and he read such a short section of
David Copperfield
that two of the boys complained.

“I’m sorry, that’s all that happened to David Copperfield today,” Dr. Larch told them. “David didn’t have a very big day.”

Wilbur Larch had had a big day, and Mrs. Grogan and his nurses knew it. He made them all meet in Nurse Angela’s office, as if he took comfort from the litter of paper and the gloomy, surrounding presence of his massive
A Brief History of St. Cloud’s,
which was gathered around him. He leaned on his overworked typewriter as if the machine were a podium.

“Now!” he said, because the women were chatting. “Now!” he repeated, using the word like a gavel to call the meeting to order. “Now we’re going to head them off at the pass.”

Nurse Edna wondered if he’d been sneaking down to the train station to watch the Westerns on the TV with the stationmaster; Nurse Edna did this quite often. She liked Roy Rogers better than Hopalong Cassidy; she wished Roy wouldn’t sing; she preferred Tom Mix to them all. Although she loathed the Lone Ranger, she had a soft spot in her heart for Tonto—for all the world’s sidekicks.

“
Whom
are we heading off?” Nurse Caroline asked aggressively.

“And
you
!” Dr. Larch said to Nurse Caroline, pointing his finger at her. “You’re my top gun. You’re the one who’s going to pull the trigger. You get to fire the first shot.”

Mrs. Grogan, who feared for her own sanity, feared that Dr. Larch had finally lost his. Nurse Angela suspected Larch had been slipping for a long time. Nurse Edna loved him so much that she couldn’t judge him. Nurse Caroline just wanted the facts.

“Okay,” Nurse Caroline said. “Let’s begin at the beginning.
Whom
do I shoot?”

“You’re going to turn me in,” Larch told her. “You’re going to blow the whistle on me—on all of us here.”

“I’ll do no such thing!” Nurse Caroline said.

Very patiently, he explained it to them. It was so simple—to
him
it was simple because he’d been thinking of it for years. It was not simple to the rest of them, and he had to take them very slowly through the steps toward their salvation.

They must assume that Melony would respond to the questionnaire. They must believe that her response would be negative—not because Melony was necessarily negative, as Larch pointed out to Mrs. Grogan (who was ready to defend her), but because Melony was angry. “She was born angry, she will always be angry, and even if she means us no harm, one day she will be angry enough—about something, about
anything—
so that she will respond to the questionnaire. And she’ll say what she knows,” Larch added, “because, whatever else Melony is, she’s no liar.”

Therefore, he argued, he wanted the board to hear that he was an abortionist from someone else first. It was the only way they might be saved. Nurse Caroline was the logical betrayer; she was young, she was relatively new, she had struggled with her conscience for an acceptably short period of time, and she had decided that she could remain silent no longer. Mrs. Grogan and the older nurses had been bullied into accepting a doctor’s authority as absolute; Nurse Caroline would maintain that they were not to blame. Nurse Caroline, however, had a challenging attitude toward the authority figures of this (or of any) society. She would present her protest as a matter of women’s rights—that even nurses should never allow doctors to tyrannize them; that when a doctor was breaking the law, even if it was not a nurse’s role to challenge him, it was her right and her moral obligation to expose him. Larch was sure that Mrs. Goodhall would like that bit about “moral obligation”—Mrs. Goodhall doubtlessly labored under the illusion that her own moral obligations were the guiding lights of her life, and Dr. Larch felt that it was the overwhelming burden of these obligations that had made her a sour, joyless woman.

Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela listened to Larch as if they were baby birds awaiting a parent’s return to the nest; their heads were sunk into their shoulders, their faces were tilted up, their mouths silently forming the words they heard Larch speak—in anticipation of swallowing worms.

Mrs. Grogan wished that she’d brought her knitting; if this was what a meeting was, she never wanted to attend another. But Nurse Caroline began to see; she had a basically brave and a fundamentally political conscience; and once she grasped the portrait of the board as her enemy, she was most attentive to her commander who had so arduously plotted the board’s defeat. It was a kind of revolt, and Nurse Caroline was all for revolution.

“Also,” Larch pointed out to her, “you need to win a few points with the right-wingers on the board; they’ve colored you pink. Now you color yourself Christian. They’re not only going to end up forgiving you, they’re also going to want to promote you. They’re going to want you in charge.

“And
you,
” Larch said, pointing to Nurse Angela.

“Me?” said Nurse Angela; she looked frightened, but Larch knew that she would be the perfect one to recommend Fuzzy Stone. Hadn’t she named him? And hadn’t she almost dared, all those times, to join Fuzzy in his righteous debate with Dr. Larch? Because Fuzzy knew them all, and loved them all; he knew what they needed, and his beliefs (regarding the abortions) were so much more in sympathy with Nurse Angela’s own beliefs.

“They
are
?” Nurse Angela said. “But I believe in abortion!”

“Of course you do!” Larch said. “And if you want Saint Cloud’s to continue to offer abortions, you better pretend that you’re on the other side. You’d better
all
pretend.”

“What do
I
pretend, Wilbur?” Nurse Edna asked.

“That it’s a great load off your conscience—that I have been caught,” Larch told her. Perhaps, if Fuzzy Stone came back, Nurse Edna’s conscience would let her sleep. And Mrs. Grogan could lighten up on the praying; perhaps she would not be so driven to pray, if they had that wonderfully decent Dr. Stone around.

Not that we don’t all
adore
Dr. Larch! Nurse Angela would tell the board. And not that the poor old man didn’t believe in himself, and in what he was doing—and for whom he was doing it. He was always devoted to the orphans. It was just that this social problem got the best of him and of his judgment. And how this issue has upset us all! How it has taken its toll!

How, indeed, Nurse Edna thought, her mouth still open, her head lolling between her shoulders—she was more in love with him than ever. He really
was
devoted to his orphans; he really would do anything for them.

“But what will happen to you, Wilbur—if we expose you?” Nurse Edna asked, a slim tear making its difficult way down her wrinkled cheek.

“I’m almost a hundred years old, Edna,” he said softly. “I suppose, I’ll retire.”

“You won’t go away, will you?” Mrs. Grogan asked him.

“I wouldn’t get very far, if I tried,” he said.