The Cider House Rules (59 page)

There was a ban on shore lights by the end of that summer; there was no Ferris wheel to watch at night, no magic lights to call by other names, but these blackout conditions didn’t keep the pickers off the roof. They would sit in the dark, looking at the dark, and Mr. Rose would say, “It used to be over there—it was much higher than this roof, and brighter than all the stars if you hitched the stars all together. It went ’round and ’round,” Mr. Rose would say, the tall, heavy woman leaning against him, the dark heads above the roofline nodding. “Now there’s stuff out there, under the ocean—stuff with bombs, underwater guns. That stuff knows when there’s a light on, and the bombs get drawn to the lights—like metal to them magnets. It happens automatically.”

“There’s no people, holding no triggers?” someone asked.

“There’s no triggers,” said Mr. Rose. “Everythin’s automatic. But there’s people. They just there to look the stuff over, make sure it work right.”

“There’s people out there, under the ocean?” someone asked.

“Sure,” said Mr. Rose. “Lots of people. They real smart. They got this stuff so they can see you.”

“On land?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Rose. “They can see you anywhere.”

A kind of communal sighing made the sitters on the roof resemble a chorus resting between numbers. In Wally’s bedroom Homer marveled how the world was simultaneously being invented and destroyed.

Nothing marvelous about that, Dr. Larch would have assured him. At St. Cloud’s, except for the irritation about sugar stamps and other aspects of the rationing, very little was changed by the war. (Or by what other people once singled out as the Depression, thought Wilbur Larch.)

We are an orphanage; we provide these services; we stay the same—if we’re allowed to stay the same, he thought. When he would almost despair, when the ether was too overpowering, when his own age seemed like the last obstacle and the vulnerability of his illegal enterprise was as apparent to him as the silhouettes of the fir trees against the sharp night skies of autumn, Wilbur Larch would save himself with this one thought: I love Homer Wells, and I have saved him from the war.

Homer Wells did not feel saved. Did anyone who was in love and was unsatisfied with how he was loved in return ever feel
saved
? On the contrary, Homer Wells felt that he’d been singled out for special persecution. What young man—even an orphan—is patient enough to wait and see about love? And if Wilbur Larch had saved Homer Wells from the war, even Dr. Larch was powerless to interfere with Melony.

During the harvest that year, Wally moved again—to Perrin Field in Sherman, Texas (basic training, Company D)—but Melony moved five times. She had enough money; she didn’t need to work. She took a job in one orchard after another, leaving as soon as she discovered that no one working there had ever heard of an Ocean View. She worked in an orchard in Harpswell, and in another in Arrowsic; she worked as far north as Rockport, and as far inland as Appleton and Lisbon. She took a side trip to Wiscasset because someone told her there was an Ocean View there; there was, but it was a rooming house. An ice-cream vendor told her he’d seen an Ocean View in Friendship; it turned out to be the name of a resident sailboat. Melony got in a fistfight with a head waiter in a seafood restaurant in South Thomaston because she insisted on asking each of the patrons about Ocean View; she won the fight, but she was fined for creating a disturbance; she was a little low on money when she passed through Boothbay Harbor in early November. The sea was slate gray and whitecapped, the pretty boats of summer were in dry dock, the wind had plenty of the coming winter in it; Melony’s own pores, as well as the earth’s, were closing as tightly as her disappointed heart.

She did not recognize the sallow-faced, sulky juvenile who served the ice-cream sodas to the candy-counter customers in Rinfret’s Pharmacy, but young Roy Rinfret—the former (and deeply disappointed) Curly Day—recognized Melony in an instant.

“I used to be Curly Day! Remember me?” Curly asked Melony excitedly. He thrust a lot of free candy and chewing gum at her and insisted on treating her to an ice-cream soda. “A double scooper, on me,” Curly said; his adoptive parents would have disapproved.

“Boy, you didn’t turn out so good,” Melony told him. She meant nothing insulting by this remark; it was a reference to his color, which was pasty, and to his size—he hadn’t grown very much. She meant nothing more, but the remark triggered everything that was morose and waiting to be fired in Curly Day.

“You’re not kidding, I didn’t turn out so good,” he said angrily. “I got ditched. Homer Wells stole the people
I
was meant for.”

Melony’s teeth were too weak for chewing gum, but she pocketed it, anyway; it would make a nice gift for Lorna. Melony’s cavities howled when she sucked hard candy, but she liked it occasionally in spite of this pain—or perhaps because of it—and she had never had an ice-cream soda before.

To demonstrate his loathing for his environment, Curly Day squirted a runny glob of strawberry syrup on the floor—checking, first, to be sure that only Melony could see. He did this as if he were exercising the nozzle before he squirted the stuff on Melony’s soda. “It draws ants,” he explained; Melony doubted there were many ants left in November. “That’s what they’re always telling me,” Curly said. “ ‘Don’t spill, it draws ants.’ ” He squirted the floor a few more times. “I’m tryin’ to get the ants to carry this place away.”

“You still pissed at Homer Wells?” Melony asked him slyly.

She explained that Curly should simply inquire—of every customer—about Ocean View. Curly had never thought concretely about what he would do or say to Homer Wells if he ever encountered him again; he was resentful, but he was not a vengeful boy and he had a sudden, clear memory of Melony’s violence. He became suspicious.

“What do you want to find Homer for?” Curly asked.

“What
for
?” Melony asked sweetly; it wasn’t clear if she had considered it. “Well, what would
you
like to find him for, Curly?” she asked.

“Well,” Curly said, struggling. “I guess I’d just like to see him, and tell him that I was really fucked up by his going off and leaving me there—when I thought I was the one who should be going, instead of him.” When Curly thought about it, he realized he’d just like to see Homer Wells—maybe be his friend, maybe do stuff together. He’d always admired Homer. If he felt a little deserted by him, that was all he felt. He started to cry. Melony used the paper napkin that went with her ice-cream soda to wipe Curly’s tears for him.

“Hey, I know what you mean,” she said nicely. “I know how you feel. I got left, too, you know. Really, I just miss the guy. I just want to see him.”

Curly’s weeping attracted the attention of one of his adoptive parents, Mr. Rinfret, the pharmacist, who was stationed in that end of the store where the serious drugs were dispensed.

“I’m from Saint Cloud’s,” Melony explained to Mr. Rinfret. “We were all so close there—whenever we run into each other, it takes a little gettin’ used to.” She hugged Curly in a motherly, if somewhat burly way, and Mr. Rinfret allowed them their privacy.

“Try to remember, Curly,” Melony whispered, rocking the boy in her arms as if she were telling him a bedtime story. “Ocean View, just keep asking about Ocean View.” When she calmed him down, she gave him Lorna’s address in Bath.

On her way back to Bath, Melony hoped that the shipyards would hire her back and that the so-called war effort would keep the stuff on the assembly line changing—that she might look forward to a task somewhat different from the insertion of those ball bearings into that hamlike sprocket. With that thought she removed Lorna’s gift mitten from the pocket of Mrs. Grogan’s overcoat; she had not yet needed it as a weapon but many nights its presence had comforted her. And it’s not been a thoroughly wasted year, Melony reflected warmly, socking the heavy mitten with a painful smack into the palm of her big hand. Now there are four of us looking for you, Sunshine.

They kept Wally in Texas, yet they moved him once more—to Lubbock Flying School (Barracks 12, D3). He would spend November and most of December there, but the Army Air Corps had promised to send him home for Christmas.

“Soon to be in the bosom of my family!” he wrote to Candy, and Homer, and Olive—and even to Ray, who had contributed to the war effort by joining the force of mechanics at the Navy Yard in Kittery; Ray was building torpedoes. He had hired some local boys who were still in school to help him keep his lobster business from sinking, and he worked on the vehicles at Ocean View on the weekends. He enthusiastically demonstrated the gyroscope on Olive’s kitchen table to Olive and Homer Wells.

“Before a fella can fathom the torpedo,” Ray liked to say, “he has to understand the gyroscope.” Homer was interested, Olive was polite—and what’s more, thoroughly dependent on Ray; if he didn’t fix all the machinery at Ocean View, Olive was convinced that the apples would stop growing.

Candy was cross much of the time—everyone’s war effort seemed to depress her, although she had volunteered to pitch in herself and had worked some very long hours at the Cape Kenneth Hospital as a nurse’s aide. She agreed it would be “indulgent” to go to college, and she’d had no trouble convincing Homer that he should pitch in, too—with his background, he could be a more useful nurse’s aide than most.

“Right,” Homer had said.

But if Homer had returned to a semi-hospital life against his will, he soon found he felt comfortable there; however, it was at times difficult to withhold his expert opinion on certain subjects and to play the beginner in a role he was disquietingly born to. Even the nurses were condescending to the nurse’s aides, and Homer was irritated to see that the doctors were condescending to everyone—most of all, to their patients.

Candy and Homer were not allowed to give shots or medication, but they had more to do than make beds, empty bedpans, give back rubs and baths, and run those errands of friendliness that gave the modern hospital such a constant scuff of feet. They were given delivery-room duties, for example; Homer was unimpressed with the obstetrical procedure he witnessed. It could not hold a candle to Dr. Larch’s work, and in some cases it could not hold a candle to his own. If Dr. Larch had often criticized Homer for his heavy touch with ether, Homer could not imagine how the old man would react to the heavy-handedness that was applied to that inhalation at Cape Kenneth Hospital. In St. Cloud’s, Homer had seen many patients who were so lightly etherized that they could converse throughout their own operations; in Cape Kenneth’s recovery rooms, the patients struggling to emerge from their ether doses looked bludgeoned—they snored gap-mouthed, with their hands hanging deadweight and the muscles in their cheeks so slack that at times their eyes were pulled half open.

It especially angered Homer to see how they dosed the children—as if the doctors or the anesthesiologists were so uninformed that they didn’t pause to consider the patient’s body weight.

One day he sat with Candy on either side of a five-year-old boy who was recovering from a tonsillectomy. That was nurses’-aide work: you sat with the patients coming out of ether, especially the children, especially the tonsillectomies—they were often frightened and in pain and nauseous when they woke. Homer claimed they wouldn’t be nearly so nauseous if they’d been given a little less ether.

One of the nurses was in the recovery room with them; it was the one they liked—a young, homely girl about their age. Her name was Caroline, and she was nice to the patients and tough to the doctors.

“You know a lot about ether, Homer,” Nurse Caroline said.

“It seems overused to me, in certain cases,” Homer mumbled.

“Hospitals aren’t perfect, they’re just expected to be,” Nurse Caroline said. “And doctors aren’t perfect, either; they just think they are.”

“Right,” said Homer Wells.

The five-year-old’s throat was very sore when he finally woke up, and he went on retching for quite some time before any ice cream would slide down his throat, and stay down. One of the things the nurses’ aides did was to be sure that the children, in such condition, didn’t choke on their own vomit. Homer explained to Candy that it was very important that the child, in a semi-etherized state, not
aspirate,
or inhale, any fluid such as vomit into the lungs.

“Aspirate,” Nurse Caroline said. “Was your father a doctor, Homer?”

“Not exactly,” said Homer Wells.

It was Nurse Caroline who introduced Homer to young Dr. Harlow, who was in the throes of growing out his bangs; a cowlick persisted in making his forehead look meager; a floppy shelf of straw-colored hair gave Dr. Harlow’s eyes the constant anxiousness of someone peering from under the brim of a hat.

“Oh yes, Wells—our ether expert,” Dr. Harlow said snidely.

“I grew up in an orphanage,” said Homer Wells. “I did a lot of helping out around the hospital.”

“But surely you never administered any ether?” said Dr. Harlow.

“Surely not,” lied Homer Wells. As Dr. Larch had discovered with the board of trustees, it was especially gratifying to lie to unlikable people.

“Don’t show off,” Candy told Homer when they were driving back to Heart’s Haven together. “It doesn’t become you, and it could get your Doctor Larch in trouble.”

“When did I show off?” Homer asked.

“You really haven’t, yet,” Candy said. “Just don’t, okay?”

Homer sulked.

“And don’t sulk,” Candy told him. “That doesn’t become you, either.”

“I’m just waiting and seeing,” said Homer Wells. “You know how that is.” He let her out at the lobster pound; he usually came in with her and chatted with Ray. But Homer was mistaken to confuse Candy’s irritability either with coldness toward him or with anything but the profoundest confusion of her own.

She slammed the door and walked around to his side of the van before he could drive away. She indicated he should roll down his window. Then she leaned inside and kissed him on the mouth, she yanked his hair, hard—with both hands, tilting his head back—and then she bit him, quite sharply, in the throat. She banged her head on the window frame when she pulled herself back from him; her eyes were watery, but no tears spilled to her face.