The Cider House Rules (42 page)

The druggist and his wife were not a beautiful couple. They were well off and good-hearted; but they had not been born to a life of ease, and it seemed unlikely that they would ever adjust to anything resembling gracious living. They had
striven
to their station in life, and their idea of helping their fellow man seemed rooted in the notion that their fellow man should be taught how to
strive.
They had requested an older orphan; they wanted someone capable of doing a few hours’ work in the drugstore after school.

They saw their childlessness as entirely God’s decision and agreed that God had meant for them to find a foundling and educate him in the methods of self-support and self-improvement, for which the foundling would be broadly rewarded by inheriting the young couple’s pharmacy, and with it the means to care for them in their apparently eagerly anticipated old age.

They were practical and Christian people—albeit grim when they reviewed for Larch their earlier efforts to have a child of their own. Before he met the couple—at a time when he had only corresponded with them by mail—Larch had hoped he might persuade them to allow Curly to keep his first name. When an orphan gets to be as old as Curly, Larch argued, the name has more than casual significance. But Larch’s hopes sank when he saw the couple; the young man was prematurely bald—so perfectly bald that Larch wondered if the fellow had not suffered from the application of an untested pharmaceutical product—and the young wife’s hair was fine and lank. The couple seemed shocked at the wealth of Curly Day’s curly hair, and Larch imagined that their first family trip would probably include a visit to the barber.

Curly himself seemed as unenthusiastic about the couple as the couple were unenthusiastic about his name, yet he wanted to leave St. Cloud’s—badly. Larch saw that the boy still hoped for an adoption as dazzling as the one he’d imagined, for a couple as glittering with the promise of another life as Candy and Wally were. Of the very plain young couple from Boothbay, Curly Day said to Dr. Larch: “They’re okay. They’re nice, I guess. And Boothbay
is
on the coast. I think I’d like the ocean.”

Larch did not say to the boy that the couple adopting him did not appear to be a boating couple, or a beach couple, or even a fishing-off-a-dock couple; he suspected them of thinking that a life of
playing
with, on, or in the sea was frivolous, something for tourists. (Larch thought that way himself.) Larch expected that the drugstore remained open every daylight hour of the summer, and that the hardworking young couple remained in the store every minute—selling tanning oil to summer people while they themselves stayed as pale as the winter, and were proud of it.

“You can’t be too choosy, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said. “If the boy gets sick, there’ll be lots of pills and cough medicines around.”

“He’ll still be Curly to me,” Nurse Angela said defiantly.

Worse, Larch imagined: he’ll always be Curly to Curly. But Larch let him go; it was high time for him to be gone—that was the main reason.

The couple’s name was Rinfret; they called Curly “Roy.” And so Roy “Curly” Rinfret took up residence in Boothbay. Rinfret’s Pharmacy was a harborfront store; the family lived several miles inland, where the sea was out of sight. “But not out of
scent,
” Mrs. Rinfret had maintained; she declared that, when the wind was right, the ocean could be smelled from the house.

Not with Curly’s nose, Dr. Larch imagined: Curly’s nose was such a constant streamer, Dr. Larch suspected that Curly had no sense of smell at all.

“Let us be happy for Curly Day,” Dr. Larch announced to the boys’ division one evening in August in 194_—over David Copperfield’s steady sobs. “Curly Day has found a family,” Dr. Larch said. “Good night, Curly!”

“G’night,
Burly
!” young Copperfield cried.

When Homer Wells received the letter telling him the news of Curly’s adoption, he read it again and again—in the moonlight streaming through Wally’s window, while Wally slept.

A druggist! thought Homer Wells. He’d been upset enough by the news to talk about it with Wally and Candy. They’d sat in the moonlight, earlier that evening, throwing snails off Ray Kendall’s dock.
Ploink!
Ploink!
went the periwinkles; Homer Wells talked and talked. He told them about the litany—“Let us be happy for Curly Day,” and so forth; he tried to explain how it had felt to be addressed as a Prince of Maine, as a King of New England.

“I guess I imagined someone who looked like you,” Homer said to Wally.

Candy remembered that Dr. Larch had said this to her, too: that he’d told her that her babies would be these princes, these kings. “But I didn’t know what he meant,” she said. “I mean, he was nice—but it was unimaginable.”

“It still is unimaginable to me,” Wally said. “I mean, what you saw,” he said to Homer. “What all of you imagined—it must have been different, for each of you.” Wally was unwilling to accept the notion that someone who looked like himself would ever be adequate to the expression.

“It sounds a little mocking,” Candy said. “I just can’t see what he meant.”

“Yeah,” Wally agreed. “It sounds a little cynical.”

“Maybe it was,” said Homer Wells. “Maybe he said it for himself and not for us.”

He told them about Melony, but not everything about her. He took a deep breath and told them about Fuzzy Stone; he imitated the breathing contraption admirably—he had them both so roaring with laughter at the racket he was making that they drowned out the insignificant
ploink
of the snails dropping into the sea. Wally and Candy didn’t know they were at the end of the story until Homer simply arrived at it. “Fuzzy Stone has found a new family,” he repeated to them. “Good night, Fuzzy,” he concluded hollowly.

There wasn’t a sound, then, not even a snail; the sea lapped at the dock posts; the boats moored around them rocked on the water. When a line was pulled taut and yanked out of the water, you could hear the water drip off the line; when the thicker ropes were stretched, they made a noise like grinding teeth.

“Curly Day was the first boy I circumcised,” Homer Wells announced—just to change the subject from Fuzzy Stone. “Doctor Larch was there when I did it,” Homer said, “and a circumcision is no big deal—it’s really easy.” Wally felt his own penis inch toward itself like a snail. Candy felt a cramp knot in her calf and she stopped swinging her legs off the edge of the dock; she drew her heels up to her buttocks and hugged her knees. “Curly was the first one,” Homer said. “I made it a little lopsided,” he confessed.

“We could drive up to Boothbay and see how he’s doing,” Wally suggested.

What would we see? Candy wondered. She imagined Curly peeing all over the Cadillac again, and telling them again that he was the best one.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Homer said.

He went with Wally back to Ocean View and wrote Dr. Larch a long letter—his longest so far. He tried to tell Larch about the drive-in movie, but the letter degenerated into a critique of the movie itself, and so he tried to change the subject.

Should he tell him about Herb Fowler carrying all the prophylactics? (Although Dr. Larch approved of everyone using prophylactics, he would hardly have approved of Herb Fowler.) Should he tell Larch that he had learned the real purpose of the drive-in? Wasn’t it to tease oneself and one’s date into a state of sexual frenzy—which neither of you were allowed to act upon? (Dr. Larch would certainly not think highly of that.) Should he tell Dr. Larch what Grace Lynch had said and done, or how he dreamed about her—or how he imagined he was falling in love, or already had fallen in love, with Candy (which he knew was forbidden)? And how do I say, “I miss you”? he wondered—when I don’t mean, “I want to come back!”?

And so he ended the letter in his fashion; he ended it inexactly. “I remember when you kissed me,” he wrote to Dr. Larch. “I wasn’t really asleep.”

Yes, thought Dr. Larch, I remember that, too. He rested in the dispensary. Why didn’t I kiss him more—why not all the time? In other parts of the world, he dreamed, they have drive-in movies!

He always used more ether than he should have before the annual meeting of St. Cloud’s board of trustees. He’d never quite understood what a board of trustees was for, and his impatience with the routine inquiries was growing. In the old days, there’d been the Maine State board of medical examiners; they’d never asked him any questions—they never wanted to hear from him. Now it appeared to Wilbur Larch that there was a board of trustees for everything. This year there were two new board members who’d never before seen the orphanage, and so the meeting had been scheduled to take place in St. Cloud’s—the board usually met in Portland. The new members wanted to see the place; the old members agreed they should refresh themselves with the atmosphere.

It was a perfect August morning, with more indications of September in the air’s crispness than there were indications of the stifling carry-over of July’s humidity and hazy heat; but Larch was irritable.

“I don’t know, ‘exactly,’ what a drive-in movie is,” he said crossly to Nurse Angela. “Homer doesn’t say, ‘exactly.’ ”

Nurse Angela looked frustrated. “No, he doesn’t,” she agreed, going over the letter again and again.

“What do you do with your cars when you’re watching the movie?” Nurse Edna asked.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Larch said. “I assume that if you drive
into
something to see the movie, you must stay in your cars.”

“But
what
do you drive into, Wilbur?” Nurse Edna asked.

“That’s what I don’t know!” Larch shouted.

“Well, aren’t we in a lovely mood?” Nurse Angela said.

“Why would you want to bring your car to a movie in the first place?” Nurse Edna asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that, either,” Dr. Larch said tiredly.

Unfortunately, he looked tired during the trustees meeting, too. Nurse Angela tried to present some of the orphanage’s priorities for him; she didn’t want him to get bad-tempered with anyone on the board. The two new members seemed in an awful hurry to demonstrate that they already understood everything—and Nurse Angela detected Dr. Larch looking at these younger members with something of the look he had formerly reserved for Clara, in the days when Larch would discover that Homer’s cadaver hadn’t been put away properly.

The new woman on the board had been appointed for her abilities at fund-raising; she was especially aggressive. She’d been married to a Congregationalist missionary who’d committed suicide in Japan, and she had returned to her home state of Maine with a zeal for putting her considerable energies to work for something “doable.” Japan had not been at all “doable,” she kept saying. Maine’s problems, by comparison, were entirely surmountable. She believed that all Maine needed—or lacked—was organization, and she believed every solution began with “new blood”—a phrase, Nurse Angela observed, that caused Dr. Larch to pale as if his own blood were trickling away from him.

“That’s an unfortunate expression for those of us familiar with hospital work,” Dr. Larch snapped once, but the woman—Mrs. Goodhall—did not look sufficiently bitten.

Mrs. Goodhall expressed, albeit coldly, her admiration for the severity and the duration of Dr. Larch’s “undertaking” and her respect for how much experience Larch and his assistants had with administering St. Cloud’s; perhaps they all could be invigorated by a
younger
assistant. “A young intern—a willing toiler, and with some new ideas in the obstetrical field,” Mrs. Goodhall suggested.

“I keep up with the field,” Dr. Larch said. “And I keep up with the number of babies born here.”

“Well, then, how about a new administrative assistant?” Mrs. Goodhall suggested. “Leave the medical practice to you—I’m talking about someone with a grasp of some of the newer adoption procedures, or just someone who could handle the correspondence and the interviewing for you.”

“I could use a new typewriter,” Dr. Larch said. “Just get me a new typewriter, and you can keep the assistant—or give the assistant to someone who’s
really
doddering around.”

The new man on the board was a psychiatrist; he was rather new at psychiatry, which was rather new in Maine in 194_. His name was Gingrich; even with people he had just met, he had a way of assuming he understood what pressure they were under—he was quite sure that everyone was under some pressure. Even if he was correct (about the particular pressure you were under), and even if you agreed with him (that there indeed
was
a certain pressure, and indeed you were under it), he had a way of assuming he knew
other
pressures that preyed upon you (which were always unseen by you). For example, had he seen the movie that began with the Bedouin on the camel, Dr. Gingrich might have assumed that the captive woman was under great pressure to marry someone—although it was clearly her opinion that all she wanted was to get free. His eyes and introductory smile communicated a cloying sympathy that you perhaps did not deserve—as if he were imparting by the imposed gentleness of his voice and the slowness with which he spoke, the assurance that everything is much more subtle than we can suppose.

The older members of the board—all men, all as elderly as Larch—were intimidated by this new man who spoke in whispers and by this new woman who was so loud. In tandem, they seemed so sure of themselves; they viewed their new roles on the board not as learning experiences, or even as an introduction to orphanage life, but as opportunities for taking charge.

Oh dear, Nurse Edna thought.

There’s going to be trouble, as if we need any, Nurse Angela thought. It wouldn’t have hurt to have a young intern around, or an administrative assistant, either; but she knew that Wilbur Larch was protecting his ability to perform the abortions. How could he accept new appointees without knowing the person’s
beliefs
?

“Now, Doctor Larch,” Dr. Gingrich said softly, “surely you know we don’t think of you as doddering.”