The Cider House Rules (2 page)

In his
A Brief History of St. Cloud’s,
Dr. Larch documented that at least one of these prostitutes knew how to read and write. On the last barge downriver, following the Ramses Paper Company to a new civilization, a relatively literate prostitute sent a letter addressed to: WHICHEVER OFFICIAL OF THE STATE OF MAINE WHO IS CONCERNED WITH ORPHANS!

Somehow, this letter actually reached someone. Forwarded many times (“for its curiosity,” Dr. Larch wrote, “as much as for its urgency”), the letter was delivered to the state board of medical examiners. The youngest member of this board—“a puppy, right out of medical school,” as Dr. Larch described himself—was shown the prostitute’s letter as a kind of bait. The rest of the board thought that young Larch was “the one hopelessly naïve Democrat and liberal” among them. The letter said: THERE SHOULD BE A GODDAMNED DOCTOR, AND A GODDAMNED SCHOOL, AND EVEN A GODDAMNED POLICEMAN AND A GODDAMNED LAWYER IN ST. CLOUD’S, WHICH HAS BEEN DESERTED BY ITS GODDAMN MEN (WHO WERE NEVER MUCH) AND LEFT TO HELPLESS WOMEN AND ORPHANS!

The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.

“Why don’t you look into this mush, Larch?” the chairman said, little knowing that out of this invitation a state-supported facility—for orphans!—would soon develop. It would one day gain at least partial federal support, and even that most vague and least dependable support offered by “private benefactors.”

Anyway, in 190_, as the twentieth century—so young and full of promise—blossomed (even in inland Maine), Dr. Wilbur Larch undertook the task of righting the wrongs of St. Cloud’s. He had his work cut out for him. For almost twenty years, Dr. Larch would leave St. Cloud’s only once—for World War I, where it is doubtful he was more needed. What better man could be imagined for the job of undoing what the Ramses Paper Company had done than a man named after one of the world’s coniferous trees? In his journal—as he was only beginning—Dr. Larch wrote: “Here in St. Cloud’s it is high time something was done for the
good
of someone. What better place for improvement could there be—for self-improvement,
and
for the good of all—than a place where evil has so clearly flourished if not altogether triumphed?”

In 192_, when Homer Wells was born and had his little penis snipped and was named, Nurse Edna (who was in love) and Nurse Angela (who wasn’t) had in common a pet name of their own for St. Cloud’s founder, physician, town historian, war hero (he was even decorated), and director of the boys’ division.

“
Saint
Larch,” they called him—and why not?

When Wilbur Larch granted Homer Wells permission to remain at St. Cloud’s for as long as the boy felt he belonged there, the doctor was merely exercising his considerable, and earned, authority. On the issue of belonging to St. Cloud’s, Dr. Larch was an authority. St. Larch had found his place—in the twentieth century—to be, as he put it, “of use.” And that is precisely how Dr. Larch instructed Homer Wells, when the doctor sternly accepted the boy’s need to stay at St. Cloud’s.

“Well, then, Homer,” said St. Larch, “I expect you to be of use.”

He was nothing (Homer Wells) if not of use. His sense of usefulness appears to predate Dr. Larch’s instructions. His first foster parents returned him to St. Cloud’s; they thought there was something wrong with him—he never cried. The foster parents complained that they would wake to the same silence that had prompted them to adopt a child in the first place. They’d wake up alarmed that the baby hadn’t woken them, they’d rush into the baby’s room, expecting to find him dead, but Homer Wells would be toothlessly biting his lip, perhaps grimacing, but not protesting that he was unfed and unattended. Homer’s foster parents always suspected that he’d been awake, quietly suffering, for hours. They thought this wasn’t normal.

Dr. Larch explained to them that the babies of St. Cloud’s were used to lying in their beds unattended. Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, dearly devoted though they were, could not be rushing to each and every baby the second it cried; crying was not of much use at St. Cloud’s (though in his heart of hearts Dr. Larch knew very well that Homer’s capacity for withholding tears was unusual even for an orphan).

It was Dr. Larch’s experience that foster parents who could so easily be deterred from wanting a baby were not the best parents for an orphan. Homer’s first foster parents were so quick to assume they’d been given a wrong one—retarded, a lemon, brain-damaged—that Dr. Larch didn’t extend himself to assure them that Homer was a very fit baby, bound to have a courageous long haul in the life ahead.

His second foster family responded differently to Homer’s lack of sound—his stiff-upper-lip and bite-the-bullet-while-just-lying-there placidity. His second foster family beat the baby so regularly that they managed to get some appropriately babylike noise out of him. Homer’s crying saved him.

If he’d proven himself to be stalwart at resisting tears, now when he saw that tears and howls and shrieks seemed to be what his foster family most desired of him, he tried to be of use and gave, with his whole heart, the lustiest wails he could deliver. He had been such a creature of contentment, Dr. Larch was surprised to learn that the new baby from St. Cloud’s was disturbing the peace in the fortunately small and nearby town of Three Mile Falls. It’s fortunate that Three Mile Falls was small, because the stories of Homer’s cries were the center of the area’s gossip for several weeks; and it’s fortunate that Three Mile Falls was nearby, because the stories found their way to St. Cloud’s and to Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, who had cornered the gossip market in all those river, wood, and paper towns. When they heard the tales of how their Homer Wells was keeping Three Mile Falls awake until the small hours, and how he would wake up the town before it was light, the nurses’ good memories did not forsake them; they went straight to St. Larch.

“That’s not
my
Homer!” Nurse Angela cried.

“He’s not a
natural
at crying, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said—taking every opportunity she had to pronounce that name so dear to her heart: Wilbur! It always made Nurse Angela cross with her (whenever Nurse Edna indulged her desire to call Dr. Larch a
Wilbur
to his face).

“
Doctor
Larch,” Nurse Angela said, with pointed and excessive formality, “if Homer Wells is waking up Three Mile Falls, that family you let have him must be burning that boy with their cigarettes.”

They weren’t
that
kind of family. That was a favorite fantasy of Nurse Angela’s—she hated smoking; just the look of a cigarette dangling from anyone’s mouth made her remember a French-speaking Indian who’d come to see her father about digging a well and had stuck his cigarette in one of her cat’s faces, burning its nose!—the cat, an especially friendly spayed female, had jumped up in the Indian’s lap. That cat had been named Bandit—she’d had the classic masked face of a raccoon. Nurse Angela had restrained herself from naming any of the orphans after Bandit—she thought of Bandit as a girl’s name.

But the family from Three Mile Falls were not sadists of a very known kind. An older man and his younger wife lived with his grown-up children of a previous marriage; the young wife wanted a child of her own, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Everyone in the family thought it would be nice for the young wife to have her own baby. What no one mentioned was that one of the grown-up children from the previous marriage had had a baby, illegitimately, and she hadn’t cared for it very well, and the baby had cried and cried and cried. Everyone complained about the baby crying, night and day, and one morning the grown-up daughter had simply taken her baby and gone. She left only this note behind:

I’M SICK OF HEARING FROM ALL OF YOU ABOUT HOW MUCH MY BABY CRIES. I GUESS IF I GO YOU WON’T MISS THE CRYING OR ME EITHER.

But they
did
miss the crying—everyone missed that wonderful, bawling baby and the dear, dim-witted daughter who had taken it away.

“Be sure nice to have a baby crying around here again,” someone in the family had remarked, and so they went and got themselves a baby from St. Cloud’s.

They were the wrong family to be given a baby who wouldn’t cry. Homer’s silence was such a disappointment to them that they took it as a kind of affront and challenged each other to discover who among them could make the baby cry first; after first they progressed to loudest, after loudest came longest.

They first made him cry by not feeding him, but they made him cry loudest by hurting him; this usually meant pinching him or punching him, but there was ample evidence that the baby had been bitten, too. They made him cry longest by frightening him; they discovered that startling babies was the best way to frighten them. They must have been very accomplished at achieving the loudest and longest in order to have made Homer Wells’s crying a legend in Three Mile Falls. It was especially hard to hear anything in Three Mile Falls—not to mention how hard it was to make a legend out of anything there.

The falls themselves made such a steady roar that Three Mile Falls was the perfect town for murder; no one there could hear a shot or a scream. If you murdered someone in Three Mile Falls and threw the body in the river at the falls, the body couldn’t possibly be stopped (or even slowed down, not to mention found) until it went three miles downriver to St. Cloud’s. It was therefore all the more remarkable that the whole town heard the kind of crying Homer Wells made.

It took Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna about a year before Homer Wells stopped waking up with a scream or letting out a wail whenever someone crossed his field of vision, or whenever he heard a human sound, even a chair being dragged across the floor, or even a bed creak, a window shut, a door open. Every sight and sound connected with a human being who might possibly be headed in Homer’s direction produced a high, stammering shout and such tearful blubbering that anyone visiting the boys’ division would have thought that the orphanage was, in fairy-tale fashion, a torture shop, a prison of child molestation and abuse beyond imagining.

“Homer, Homer,” Dr. Larch would say soothingly—while the boy burned scarlet and refilled his lungs. “Homer, you’re going to get us investigated for murder! You’re going to get us shut down.”

Poor Nurse Edna and poor Nurse Angela were probably more permanently scarred by the family from Three Mile Falls than Homer Wells was, and the good and the great St. Larch never fully recovered from the incident. He had met the family; he’d interviewed them all—and been horribly wrong about them; and he’d seen them all again on the day he went to Three Mile Falls to bring Homer Wells back to St. Cloud’s.

What Dr. Larch would always remember was the fright in all of their expressions when he’d marched into their house and taken Homer up in his arms. The fear in their faces would haunt Dr. Larch forever, the epitome of everything he could never understand about the great ambiguity in the feelings people had for children. There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to
want
babies—and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter. Sometimes the mind didn’t want the babies, but sometimes the mind was so perverse that it made other people have babies they knew they didn’t want. For whom was this insisting done? Dr. Larch wondered. For whom did some minds insist that babies, even clearly unwanted ones,
must
be brought, screaming, into the world?

And when other minds thought they wanted babies but then couldn’t (or wouldn’t) take proper care of them . . . well, what were these minds thinking? When Dr. Larch’s mind ran away with him on the subject, it was always the fear in those faces of the family from Three Mile Falls that he saw, and Homer Wells’s legendary howl that he heard. The fear in that family was fixed in St. Larch’s vision; no one, he believed, who had seen such fear should ever make a woman have a baby she didn’t want to have. “NO ONE!” Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. “Not even someone from the Ramses Paper Company!”

If you had an ounce of sanity, you would not speak against abortion to Dr. Wilbur Larch—or you would suffer every detail there was to know about the six weeks Homer Wells spent with the family from Three Mile Falls. This was Larch’s only way of discussing the issue (which was not even open to debate with him). He was an obstetrician, but when he was asked—and when it was safe—he was an abortionist, too.

By the time Homer was four he didn’t have those dreams anymore—the ones that could awaken every living soul in St. Cloud’s, the dreams that caused one night watchman to resign (“My heart,” he said, “won’t take another night of that boy”) and that resided so soundly in the memory of Dr. Wilbur Larch that he was known, for years, to hear babies crying in his sleep and to roll over saying, “Homer, Homer, it’s all right now, Homer.”

At St. Cloud’s, of course, babies were always crying in everyone’s sleep, but no baby ever woke up crying in quite the manner that Homer Wells managed it.

“Lord, it’s as if he was being
stabbed,
” Nurse Edna would say.

“As if he was being burned with a cigarette,” Nurse Angela would say.

But only Wilbur Larch knew what it was really like—that way that Homer Wells woke up and (in his violent waking) woke everyone else. “As if he were being circumcised,” Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. “As if someone were snipping his little penis—over and over again, just snipping it and snipping it.”

The third foster family to fail with Homer Wells was a family of such rare and championship qualities that to judge humanity by this family’s example would be foolish. They were that good a family. They were that perfect, or Dr. Larch would not have let Homer go to them. After the family from Three Mile Falls, Dr. Larch was being especially careful with Homer.

Professor Draper and his wife of nearly forty years lived in Waterville, Maine. Waterville was not much of a college town in 193_, when Homer Wells went there; but if you compared Waterville to St. Cloud’s, or to Three Mile Falls, you would have to say that Waterville was a community of moral and social giants. Though still inland, it was of considerably higher elevation—there were nearby mountains, and from these there were actual vistas; mountain life (like the life on an ocean, or on the plains, or on open farmland) affords the inhabitant the luxury of a view. Living on land where you can occasionally see a long way provides the soul with a perspective of a beneficially expansive nature—or so believed Professor Draper; he was a born teacher.