The Cider House Rules (57 page)

“I can be patient,” said Homer Wells.

Melony could be patient, too. And Ray Kendall, at his window above his dock—he could be patient, too. A mechanic is also patient; a mechanic has to wait for something to break before he can fix it. Ray stared at the distance between his daughter’s feet and the feet of Homer Wells; it was not much of a distance, and he had observed his daughter on his dock many times in Wally’s arms, and, before that, when Candy and Wally had also sat on that dock with their feet not touching.

They were three good kids, Ray was thinking. But he was a mechanic; he knew better than to interfere. When it breaks, then he would fix it; he felt sorry for them all.

“I can drive you back to school tomorrow,” Homer said.

“My dad can drive me back,” Candy said. “I think he likes to.”

Olive Worthington looked at the clock on her night table and turned out her reading lamp; Homer never stayed out this late with Debra Pettigrew, she was thinking. Olive had no trouble imagining Candy’s attraction to Homer Wells; Olive had the greatest respect for Homer’s diligence. She had seen him be a better student—and of the rabbit, of all things!—than Wally had ever been, and she knew he was a reliable and friendly companion, too. Olive fumed to herself. She felt that typical contradiction a parent so often feels: completely on her son’s side—she even wanted to warn him, to help his cause—but at the same time Wally could stand to be taught a lesson. Just maybe not
this
lesson, Olive thought.

“Well, thank goodness, they are three nice people!” she said aloud, her own voice in the empty house surprising her and thoroughly waking her up. Some hot chocolate would be soothing, she thought; and when Homer comes home, he can have some with me.

But in the kitchen Olive was struck by how the fog, shot through with a cloudy moonlight, made the raft in the swimming pool look quite ghostly. The raft was poised at the side of the pool, half in the water and half out, like a very gray and shadowy photograph of itself. The image disturbed her, and Olive decided she’d had enough of that raft. She put on a pair of boots and a long winter coat over her nightgown. It bothered her that the outdoor patio light was not working; only the underwater lights would turn on, and she was surprised to see that the water in the pool had finally frozen. That was the reason for the raft’s arrested position. It was trapped as rigidly as a statue, like a ship seized in an ice floe. Being careful to hold tight to the pool curb, she kicked tentatively at the ice with the heel of her boot, but when she tugged the raft, it would not come free. If I walk out there, I’ll fall right through, she thought.

That was when Homer came home. She heard the van in the driveway and she called to him.

“What do you want done with it?” Homer asked Olive about the raft.

“Just get it out,” Olive said to him.

“And then what?” he asked.

“Throw it away,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”

Homer struggled with the raft. The ice, which would not support all his weight, was hard enough to have a firm grip on the raft. Very cleverly, he eased himself onto the raft, hoping it still had enough air in it so that it wouldn’t sink once he broke the bond with the ice. He rocked back and forth on his knees on the raft until he could feel the ice breaking. Then he rocked his way through more of the ice and climbed up on the pool curb and pulled the raft out of the pool after him. Ice still clung to it; it was so heavy, he had to drag it. When he got to the trash barrels, he needed to deflate the raft in order to stuff it in a barrel. The nozzle was rusted shut, and even by jumping with both feet, he couldn’t break the tough canvas hide.

He went into the garden shed and found a pair of hedge shears; with the thinner blade, he stabbed a gash in the raft and snipped upward—the stale, rubbery air blasting into his face. It was moist and fetid, and when he tore the hole wider, the smell washed over him—strangely warm in the cold night air, and strangely foul. It was not only the smell of someone’s old sneakers left out in the rain; there was also something putrid about it and he couldn’t help viewing the slashed object as he might have viewed a ripped intestine. He stuffed the raft into a trash barrel, but when he went into the house for his hot-chocolate reward, the smell remained on his hands even after he had washed them. He stuck his nose into the hollow in the palm of his hand; the smell was still there. Then he recognized the smell: it was what was left on his hands after he removed the rubber gloves.

“How’s Candy?” Olive asked.

“Fine,” said Homer Wells.

They sipped their hot chocolate—like mother and son, both of them were thinking; and, at the same time,
not
like mother and son, they both thought.

“And how are
you
?” Olive asked him, after a while.

“Just fine,” said Homer Wells, but what he thought was: I’m going to wait and see.

Wilbur Larch, inhaling and seeing the stars race across the ceiling of the dispensary, knew what a luxury it was: to be able to wait and see. Even if I last, he thought, I might get caught; an abortionist believes in odds. He had been in the business too long. What are the odds that someone will blow the whistle before I’m through? the old man wondered.

Only yesterday he had made a new enemy—a woman in her eighth month who said it was only her fourth. He had to refuse her. When the women were hysterical, he usually could wait them out; if they required firmness, he gave them Nurse Angela; Nurse Edna was better at handholding. In time, they calmed down. If, in his opinion, a woman was simply too late—if he felt he had to refuse to perform the abortion—he usually could convince the woman she would be safe at St. Cloud’s; that he would deliver the baby and find it a home, and that this was preferable to the risk involved in a late abortion.

But not this woman. There had been no hysterics. The peacefulness of a long-standing hatred made the woman almost serene.

“So that’s it—you won’t do it,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Larch said.

“How much do you want?” the woman asked him. “I can get it.”

“Whatever you can afford to donate to the orphanage would be appreciated,” Larch said. “If you can’t afford anything, then everything is free. An abortion is free, delivery is free. A donation is appreciated. If you have nowhere to go, you’re welcome to stay here. You don’t have long to wait.”

“Just tell me what I have to do,” the woman said. “Do I fuck you? Okay, I’ll fuck you.”

“I want you to have this baby and let me find it a home,” Wilbur Larch said. “That’s all I want you to do.”

But the woman had stared right through him. She struggled out of the overstuffed chair in Nurse Angela’s office. She regarded the paperweight on Larch’s desk; it was a weighted vaginal speculum, but it held down a lot of paper and most of the would-be foster families didn’t know what it was. The woman who wanted the late abortion clearly knew what it was; she stared at it as if the sight of it gave her cramps. Then she looked out the window, where (Dr. Larch imagined) she intended to hurl the paperweight.

She picked up the weighted speculum and pointed the jaw of the thing at Larch, as if it were a gun.

“You’ll be sorry,” the woman said.

In his ether haze, Wilbur Larch saw the woman point the speculum at him again. How will I be sorry? he wondered.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud. Nurse Edna, passing in the hall—ever passing—thought, You’re forgiven; I forgive you.

It was Sunday, and overcast—as usual. The same Fred Astaire movie that was entertaining the residents of Bath was playing in Orono, and the students at the University of Maine in 194_ were not yet so cynical that they failed to enjoy it. Wally went to the movie with some of his friends. During the afternoon matinee, they didn’t interrupt the show with the news that interrupted the rest of the world. They allowed Fred Astaire to dance on, and on, and the moviegoers heard the news after the show, when they stepped out of the comforting dark of the theater into the late-afternoon daylight of downtown Orono.

Candy was returning to Camden with her father. Raymond Kendall was especially proud of the radio reception he had engineered for his Chevrolet; it was much clearer reception than was possible, at the time, in a standard car radio, and Ray had made the whiplash antenna himself. Candy and her father heard the news as soon as anyone in Maine heard it, and they heard it loud and clear.

Olive always had the radio on, and so she was one of those people who needed to hear things several times before she really heard them at all. She was baking an apple pie, and simmering applesauce, and only the unusual urgency in the announcer’s voice caused her to pay attention to the radio at all.

Homer Wells was in Wally’s room, reading
David Copperfield
and thinking about Heaven—“. . . that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.” I think I would prefer to love Candy
here,
“on earth,” Homer Wells was thinking—when Olive interrupted him.

“Homer!” Olive called upstairs. “Where is Pearl Harbor?”

He was the wrong person to ask; Homer Wells had seen the whole world only once, and briefly—and flat against the blackboard. He’d had difficulty locating South Carolina; not only did he not know where Pearl Harbor was, he also didn’t know
what
it was.

“I don’t know!” he called downstairs.

“Well, the Japanese have just bombed it!” Olive called to him.

“You mean, with planes?” asked Homer Wells. “From the sky?”

“Of course from the sky!” Olive shouted. “You better come listen to this.”

“Where is Pearl Harbor?” Candy asked her father.

“Ssshhh!” said Raymond Kendall. “If we just listen, maybe they’ll say.”

“How could they get away with an attack?” Candy asked.

“Because someone wasn’t doing his job,” Ray said.

The first reports were garbled. There was mention of California falling under attack, or even being invaded. Many listeners were confused from the beginning; they thought Pearl Harbor was in California.

“Where is Hawaii?” Mrs. Grogan asked. They were having tea and cookies and listening to the radio, for music, when they’d heard the news.

“Hawaii is in the Pacific,” said Wilbur Larch.

“Oh, that’s very far away,” Nurse Edna said.

“Not far enough away,” Dr. Larch said.

“There’s going to be another war, isn’t there?” Nurse Angela asked.

“I guess it’s already started,” said Wilbur Larch, while Wally—to whom this war would mean the most—watched Fred Astaire; Fred just kept dancing and dancing, and Wally thought he could go on watching such a display of grace for hours.

Melony and Lorna were listening to the radio in the parlor of the boardinghouse where Lorna lived. It was a women-only boardinghouse; the women were either quite old or, like Lorna, only recently separated from their husbands. On this Sunday afternoon, most of the women listening to the radio were old.

“We should just bomb Japan,” Melony said. “No messing around—just blow up the whole country.”

“You know how come Japs got squinty eyes?” Lorna asked. Melony, and all the old women, listened intently. “Because they masturbate all the time—both the men and the women. They just do it all the time.”

There was either a polite or a stunned silence, or both. In Melony’s case, her silence was polite.

“Is this a joke?” she asked her friend respectfully.

“Of course it’s a joke!” Lorna cried.

“I don’t get it, I guess,” Melony admitted.

“How come Japs got squinty eyes?” Lorna asked. “Because they masturbate all the time.” She paused.

“That’s what I thought you said,” Melony said.

“Because they shut their eyes every time they come!” Lorna said. “Their eyes get tired from all that opening and closing. That’s why they can’t open their eyes all the way! Get it?” Lorna asked triumphantly.

Still self-conscious about her teeth, Melony managed a tight-lipped smile. Anyone seeing the old women in the boardinghouse parlor would not have known exactly what filled them with fear and trembling: the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, or Lorna and Melony.

And young Wally Worthington, who was so itchy to be a hero, danced out on the streets of Orono, where he heard the news. President Roosevelt would call it a “day of infamy,” but that day meant more than infamy to Wally, whose noble and adventurous heart longed to fly a B-24 Liberator: a heavy bomber, four engines, used for bombing bridges, oil refineries, fuel depots, railroad tracks, and so forth. Somewhere, on that “day of infamy,” there was a B-24 Liberator bomber waiting for young Wally Worthington to learn how to fly it.

People in Heart’s Haven and in Heart’s Rock always said that Wally had everything: money, looks, goodness, charm, the girl of his dreams—but he had courage, too, and he had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and restlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

Wally enlisted in the Army Air Corps before Christmas, but they allowed him to spend Christmas at home. It would take the Army Air Corps more than a year to teach Wally the grim arts of aerial warfare.

“By that time,” he told Olive and Candy in the kitchen at Ocean View, “all the fighting will probably be over. That would be just my luck.”

“That
would
be lucky,” Olive said. Candy nodded her head.

“Right!” said Homer Wells, from the other room. He was still thinking about being excused from his physical; Dr. Larch’s account of Homer’s heart history had sufficed. Physical examinations were given only to people who were Class I. Homer Wells was Class IV. According to his family physician, Homer had congenital pulmonic stenosis; Homer’s “family physician” was Dr. Larch, whose letter to the local medical advisory board had been accepted as evidence enough for Homer’s deferment—Larch was also a member of the local board.

“I asked her to marry me, but she wouldn’t,” Wally told Homer in their shared bedroom. “She said she’d wait for me, but she wouldn’t marry me. She said she’d be my wife, but not my widow.”