The Cider House Rules (83 page)

Rose Rose examined the pacifiers. They were rubber nipples, like the nipple on a baby’s bottle, but without the hole and attached to a baby-blue plastic ring that was too big to swallow. The problem with using a regular bottle nipple, Angel Wells explained, was that the baby would keep sucking in air through the hole, and the air would give the baby burping fits or a gassy stomach.

“How come you know so much?” Rose Rose asked Angel, smiling. “How old are you?”

“I’m almost sixteen,” Angel said. “How old are you?”

“ ’Bout your age,” she told him.

In the afternoon, when Angel came back to the cider house to see how the teething was going, Baby Rose was not the only Rose with a pacifier stuck in her mouth. Mr. Rose was sitting on the cider house roof, and Angel could see—from a considerable distance, because of the unreal, baby-blue hue of the plastic ring—that he had a pacifier in his mouth.

“Are you teething, too?” Angel called up to him. Mr. Rose removed the pacifier from his mouth slowly—the way he did everything.

“I’m cuttin’ out smokin’,” said Mr. Rose. “You got a nipple in your mouth all day, who needs a cigarette?” He stuck the pacifier back in his mouth and grinned at Angel broadly.

In the cider house, Baby Rose had fallen asleep with a pacifier in her mouth and Angel surprised Rose Rose as she was washing her hair. She was bent over the kitchen sink with her back to him; he couldn’t see her breasts, although she was bare from the waist up.

“Is that you?” she asked ambiguously, keeping her back turned to him—but not jumping to cover herself.

“Sorry,” Angel said, stepping back outside. “I should have knocked.” Then she jumped and covered herself, her hair still soapy; she must have thought it was her father.

“I was checking on how the teething was going,” Angel explained.

“It goin’ fine,” Rose Rose said. “You a good doctor. You my hero, for today.” She was smiling her partial smile.

A stream of bright suds from the shampoo ran around her neck and down her chest, over her arms, which she’d folded, with a towel, across her unseen breasts. Angel Wells, smiling, backed so far away from the cider house door that he bumped into the old car, which was parked close enough against the cider house to appear to be helping hold the building up. He heard a tiny pebble come rolling down the cider house roof, but when it hit him on the head—even though he’d had time to steal the baseball cap away from Candy and now wore it at a casual angle, with the visor shading his forehead—the pebble hurt. He looked up at Mr. Rose, who had rolled the pebble in his direction—a perfect shot.

“Gotcha!” Mr. Rose said, smiling.

But it was Rose Rose who’d really gotten him; Angel staggered back to the apple mart and into the fancy house as if he’d been struck by a boulder.

Who was the baby’s father? Angel Wells wondered. And where was he? And where was Mrs. Rose? Were Mr. Rose and his daughter all alone?

Angel went to his room and began to compose a list of names—girls’ names. He took some names he liked out of the dictionary, and then he added other names that the dictionary had overlooked. How else do you impress a girl who hasn’t been able to think of a name for her baby?

Angel would have been a blessing to St. Cloud’s, where the practice of naming the babies was a little worn out. Although Nurse Caroline had contributed her youthful energy to the nearly constant occasion, her rather political choices had been met with some resistance. She was fond of Karl (for Marx), and Eugene (for Debs), but everyone balked at Friedrich (for Engels), and so she had been reduced to Fred (which she didn’t like). Nurse Angela also complained about Norman (for Thomas)—to her it was a name like Wilbur. But it was difficult to know if Angel Wells could have kept his passion for names intact when the task was almost a daily business. Finding a name for Rose Rose’s daughter was a devotion quite unexpected—yet it was typical of a boy’s first love.

Abby? thought Angel Wells. Alberta? Alexandra? Amanda? Amelia? Antoinette? Audrey? Aurora? “Aurora Rose,” Angel said aloud. “God, no,” he said, plunging into the alphabet. The scar on the face of the young woman he loved was so extremely thin, so very fine—Angel imagined that if he could kiss that scar, he could make it disappear; and he began working his way through the B’s.

Bathsheba? Beatrice? Bernice? Bianca? Blanche? Bridget?

Dr. Larch was facing a different problem. The dead patient had come to St. Cloud’s without a scrap of identification—she’d brought only her burning infection, her overpowering discharge, her dead but unexpelled fetus (and several of the instruments she—or someone else—had put into herself in order to expel the fetus), her punctured uterus, her unstoppable fever, her acute peritonitis. She reached Dr. Larch too late for him to save her, yet Larch blamed himself.

“She was alive when she got here,” Larch told Nurse Caroline. “I’m supposed to be a doctor.”

“Then
be
one,” Nurse Caroline said, “and stop being maudlin.”

“I’m too old,” Larch said. “Someone younger, someone quicker, might have saved her.”

“If that’s what you think, maybe you
are
too old,” Nurse Caroline told him. “You’re not seeing things as they are.”

“As they are,” said Wilbur Larch, who closed himself off in the dispensary. He’d never been good about losing patients, but this one, Nurse Caroline knew, was quite lost when she’d arrived.

“If he can hold himself responsible for a case like that,” Nurse Caroline told Nurse Angela, “then I think he ought to be replaced—he
is
too old.”

Nurse Angela agreed. “It’s not that he’s incompetent, but once he starts thinking he’s incompetent, he’s had it.”

Nurse Edna would not contribute to this conversation. She went and stood outside the dispensary door, where she repeated, and repeated, “You’re
not
too old, you’re
not
incompetent, you’re
not
too old,” but Wilbur Larch could not hear her; he was under ether, and he was traveling. He was far away, in Burma—which he saw almost as clearly as Wally ever saw it, although Larch (even with ether’s assistance) could never have imagined such heat. The shade that he saw under the peepul trees was deceiving; it was not really cool there—not at that time of the day that the Burmese refer to as “when feet are silent.” Larch was observing the missionary Dr. Stone making his rounds. Even the noonday heat would not keep Fuzzy Stone from saving the diarrhetic children.

Wally could have informed Larch’s dream with some better detail. How slippery the bamboo leaves were when one was trying to walk uphill—for example. How the sleeping mats were always damp with sweat; how it seemed (to Wally) to be a country of submagistrates, corrupted by the British—either into being like the British, or into being consumed by their hatred of the British. Wally had once been carried across a plateau shot through with sprouting weeds and befouled with pigshit; on it was a former tennis court, built by someone British. The net was now a magistrate’s hammock. The court itself, because of the high fence that enclosed it, was a good place to keep the pigs; the fence, which had once kept tennis balls from being lost in the jungle, now made it more difficult for the leopards to kill the pigs. At that way station, Wally would remember, the magistrate himself had instrumented his urinary tract for him; a kindly, round-faced man with patient, steady hands, he had used a long, silver swizzle stick—something else the British had left behind. Although the magistrate’s English was poor, Wally had made him understand what the swizzle stick was for.

“British ees crazy,” the Burmese gentleman had said to Wally. “Yes?”

“Yes, I think so,” Wally had agreed. He hadn’t known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to—and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.

The silver swizzle stick was too inflexible for a proper catheter, and the top of the thing was adorned with a kind of heraldic shield, Queen Victoria’s stern face presiding (in this one case, she was observing a use of the instrument she adorned that might have shocked her).

“Only British ees crazy enough to make something to stir a drink,” the magistrate said, chuckling. He lubricated the catheter with his own saliva.

Through his tears, Wally tried to laugh.

And in the rounds that Dr. Stone was making, wouldn’t many of the diarrhetic children suffer urinary retention, wouldn’t Dr. Stone have to relieve their little, distended bladders, and wouldn’t his catheter be proper and his method of instrumentation sound? In Wilbur Larch’s eyes, which were over Burma, Dr. Stone would be perfect—Fuzzy Stone wouldn’t lose a single patient.

Nurse Caroline, understanding that the coincidence of the woman dying without a name would not sit well alongside the recent “evidence” submitted to the board of trustees, knew it was time for her to write to Homer Wells. While Dr. Larch rested in the dispensary, Nurse Caroline worked with a vengeance over the typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office.

“Don’t be a hypocrite,” she began. “I hope you recall how vehemently you were always telling me to leave Cape Kenneth, that my services were more needed here—and you were right. And do you think your services aren’t needed here, or that they aren’t needed right now? Do you think the apples can’t grow without you? Just who do you think the board’s going to replace him with if you don’t step forward? One of the usual cowards who does what he’s told, one of your typically careful, mousy, medical men—a little law-abiding citizen who will be of absolutely NO USE!”

She mailed that letter at the same time she alerted the stationmaster that there was a body at the orphanage; various authorities would have to be sent for. It had been a long time since the stationmaster had seen bodies at the orphanage, but he would never forget the bodies he had seen—not his predecessor, after the sternum shears had opened him up, and certainly never the fetal autopsy from Three Mile Falls.

“A body?” the stationmaster asked. He gripped the sides of the small table where the constant television revealed to him its blurry, fade-in and fade-out images—any one of which the stationmaster found preferable to the more vivid picture of those long-ago bodies.

“Someone who didn’t want to have a baby,” Nurse Caroline told him. “She butchered herself, trying to get the baby out. She got to us too late for us to be able to do anything about it.”

Unanswering, and never taking his eyes from the snowy, zigzagging figures on the TV screen, the stationmaster clung to the table as if it were an altar and the television was his god—at least, he knew, he would never see on that television anything resembling what Nurse Caroline described, and so the stationmaster continued to watch the TV instead of looking into Nurse Caroline’s eyes.

Carmen? Cecelia? Charity? Claudia? Constance? Cookie? Cordelia? Angel Wells cocked the Red Sox cap at the correct angle; although it was cool in the early morning, he elected not to wear a shirt. Dagmar? he thought. Daisy? Dolores? Dotty?

“Where are you going in my hat?” Candy asked him; she was picking up the breakfast dishes.

“It’s
my
hat,” Angel said, going out the door.

“Love is blind,” Wally said, pushing his wheelchair away from the table.

Does he mean me or Angel? Candy wondered. Homer and Wally were worried about Angel’s puppylike infatuation with Rose Rose, but that is all it seemed to Candy: puppylike. Candy knew that Rose Rose had too much experience to allow Angel to get carried away. That wasn’t the point, Homer had said. Candy imagined that Rose Rose had more experience in her little finger than . . . but that wasn’t the point, either, Wally had said.

“Well, I hope the point isn’t that she’s
colored,
” Candy had said.

“The point is Mister Rose,” Wally had said. The word “Right!” had been almost visible on Homer’s lips. Men want to control everything, Candy thought.

Homer Wells was in the apple-mart office. In the mail there was a letter for him from Dr. Larch, but Homer didn’t look through the mail. That was Wally’s job; besides, the picking crew had arrived. The harvest would be starting as soon as Homer could get it organized. He looked out the office window and saw his son not wearing any shirt and talking to Big Dot Taft. He opened the screen door and hollered at Angel. “Hey, it’s cold this morning—put on a shirt!” Angel was already walking toward the barns beyond the apple mart.

“I got to warm up the tractor!” he told his father.

“Warm yourself up first!” Homer told him, but the boy was already very warm this morning.

Edith? Angel asked himself. Ernestine? Esmeralda? Eve! he thought.

He bumped into Vernon Lynch, who was glowering over a cup of hot coffee.

“Watch where yer goin’,” Vernon told Angel.

“Faith!” Angel said to him. “Felicia! Francesca! Frederica!”

“Asshole,” said Vernon Lynch.

“No, that’s you,” Big Dot Taft told him. “You’re the asshole, Vernon.”

“God, I love the harvest!” Wally said, cruising around the kitchen table, while Candy washed the dishes. “It’s my favorite time.”

“Mine, too,” Candy said, smiling. What she thought was: I have six more weeks to live.

Black Pan, the cook, was back; Candy had to hurry—she had to take Black Pan shopping. A man named Peaches had picked for them before, but not for several years; he was called Peaches because his beard never grew. Also, a man named Muddy was back; no one had seen Muddy for years. He’d been badly knifed at the cider house one night, and Homer had driven him to the hospital in Cape Kenneth. Muddy had taken one hundred twenty-three stitches; Homer Wells thought he’d looked like a kind of experimental sausage.

The man who’d cut him was long gone. That was one of Mr. Rose’s rules; Homer guessed it might have been the dominant rule of the cider house. No hurting each other. You cut people to scare them, to show them who’s boss, but you don’t send people to the hospital. Then the law comes, and everyone at the cider house feels small. The man who’d cut Muddy hadn’t been thinking about the community.