The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  "That little bitch," she'd tell Homer. "If there was anybody with a bulge in his pants, she couldn't keep her eyes off it."

  "Right," Homer would say, and together they would demolish a building--just shove it into time. When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

  Melony discovered that she could think like this for one minute; but in the next minute, when she thought of Homer Wells, she thought she'd like to kill him.

  When Lorna came back from St. Cloud's and went to the boardinghouse to retrieve her things, she found that everything had been neatly packed and boxed and gathered in one corner of the room; Melony was at work, so Lorna took her things and left.

  After that, they would see each other perhaps once a week at the shipyard, or at the pizza bar in Bath where everyone from the yard went; on these occasions, they were polite but silent. Only once did Melony speak to her.

  "The old woman, Grogan--she was alive?" Melony asked.

  "I didn't bring the box back, did I?" Lorna asked.

  "So you gave it to her?" Melony asked. "And you didn't say nothing?"

  "I just asked if she was alive, and one of the nurses said she was, so I gave the carton to one of the nurses--as I was leavin'," Lorna said.

  "And the doctor?" Melony asked. "Old Larch--is he alive?"

  "Barely," Lorna said.

  "I'll be damned," said Melony. "Did it hurt?"

  "Not much," Lorna said cautiously.

  "Too bad," Melony said. "It shoulda hurt a lot."

  In her boardinghouse, where she was now the sole superintendent, she took from a very old electrician's catalogue a yellowed article and photograph from the local newspaper. She went to the antiques shop that was run by her old, dim-witted devotee, Mary Agnes Cork, whose adoptive parents had treated her well; they'd even put her in charge of the family store. Melony asked Mary Agnes for a suitable frame for the newspaper article and the photograph, and Mary Agnes was delighted to come up with something perfect. It was a genuine Victorian frame taken from a ship that had been overhauled in the Bath yards. Mary Agnes sold Melony the frame for much less than it was worth, even though Melony was rich. Electricians are well paid, and Melony had been working full-time for the shipyard for fifteen years; because she was the superintendent of the boardinghouse, she lived almost rent-free. She didn't own a car and she bought all her clothes at Sam's Army-Navy Men's Store.

  It was fitting that the frame was teak--the wood of the tree that had held Wally Worthington in the air over Burma for one whole night--because the newspaper article was about Captain Worthington, and the picture--which Melony had recognized, fifteen years ago--was also of Wally. The article was all about the miraculous rescue of the downed (and paralyzed) pilot, who had been awarded the Purple Heart. As far as Melony was concerned, the whole story resembled the plot of a cheap and unlikely adventure movie, but she liked the picture--and the part of the article that said Wally was a local hero, a Worthington from those Worthingtons who for years had owned and managed the Ocean View Orchards in Heart's Rock.

  In her bedroom, in her boardinghouse in Bath, Melony hung the antique frame containing the article and photograph over her bed. In the darkness she liked knowing it was there--over her head, like history. She liked that as much as looking at the photograph in the daylight hours. And in the darkness, she would linger over the syllables of that hero's name.

  "Worthington," she liked to say aloud. "Ocean View," she said, at other times; she was more familiar with saying this. "Heart's Rock," she would say, quickly spitting the short words out.

  In those predawn hours, which are the toughest for insomniacs, Melony would whisper, "Fifteen years." And just before she would fall asleep, she would ask of the first, flat light that crept into her bedroom, "Are you still there, Sunshine?" What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

  For fifteen years, Homer Wells had taken responsibility for the writing and the posting of the cider house rules. Every year, it was the last thing he attached to the wall after the fresh coat of paint had dried. Some years he tried being jolly with the rules; other years he tried sounding nonchalant; perhaps it had been Olive's tone and not the rules themselves that had caused some offense, and thereby made it a matter of pride with the migrants that the rules should never be obeyed.

  The rules themselves did not change much. The rotary screen had to be cleaned out. A word of warning about the drinking and the falling asleep in the cold-storage room was mandatory. And long after the Ferris wheel at Cape Kenneth was torn down and there were so many lights on the coast that the view from the cider house roof resembled a glimpse of some distant city, the migrants still sat on the roof and drank too much and fell off, and Homer Wells would ask (or tell) them not to. Rules, he guessed, never asked; rules told.

  But he tried to make the cider house rules seem friendly. He phrased the rules in a confiding voice. "There have been some accidents on the roof, over the years--especially at night, and especially in combination with having a great deal to drink while sitting on the roof. We recommend that you do your drinking with both feet on the ground," Homer would write.

  But every year, the piece of paper itself would become worn and tattered and used for other things--a kind of desperation grocery list, for example, always by someone who couldn't spell.

  CORN MEEL

  REGULAR FLOWER

  was written across Homer's rules one year.

  At times, the solitary sheet of paper gathered little insults and mockeries of a semi-literate nature.

  "No fucking on the roof!" or "Beat-off only in cold storage!"

  Wally told Homer that only Mr. Rose knew how to write; that the pranks, and insults, and shopping lists were all composed by Mr. Rose, but Homer could never be sure.

  Every summer Mr. Rose would write to Wally and Wally would tell Mr. Rose how many pickers he needed--and Mr. Rose would say how many he was bringing and the day they would arrive (give or take). No contract ever existed--just the short, reliable assurances from Mr. Rose.

  Some summers he came with a woman--large and soft and quiet, with a baby girl riding her hip. By the time the little girl could run around and get into trouble (she was about the age of Angel Wells), Mr. Rose stopped bringing her or the woman.

  For fifteen years the only migrant who was as constant as Mr. Rose was Black Pan, the cook.

  "How's your little girl?" Homer Wells would ask Mr. Rose--every year that the woman and the daughter didn't show up again.

  "She growin', like your boy," Mr. Rose would say.

  "And how's your lady?" Homer would ask.

  "She lookin' after the little girl," Mr. Rose would say.

  Only once in fifteen years did Homer Wells approach Mr. Rose on the subject of the cider house rules. "I hope they don't offend anyone," Homer began. "I'm responsible--I write them, every year--and if anyone takes offense, I hope you'll tell me."

  "No offense," said Mr. Rose, smiling.

  "They're just little rules," Homer said.

  "Yes," said Mr. Rose. "They are."

  "But it does concern me that no one seems to pay attention to them," Homer finally said.

  Mr. Rose, whose bland face was unchanged by the years and whose body had remained thin and lithe, looked at Homer mildly. "We got our own rules, too, Homer," he said.

  "Your own rules," said Homer Wells.

  " 'Bout lots of things," said Mr. Rose. " 'Bout how much we can have to do with you, for one thing."

  "With me?" Homer said.

  "With white people," said Mr. Rose. "We got our rules about that."

  "I see," Homer said, but he didn't really see.

  "And about fightin'," said Mr. Rose.

  "Fighting," said Homer Wells.

  "With each other," said Mr. Rose. "One rule is, we can't cut each other bad. Not bad en
ough for no hospital, not bad enough for no police. We can cut each other, but not bad."

  "I see," Homer said.

  "No, you don't," said Mr. Rose. "You don't see--that's the point. We can cut each other only so bad that you never see--you never know we was cut. You see?"

  "Right," said Homer Wells.

  "When you gonna say something' else?" Mr. Rose asked, smiling.

  "Just be careful on the roof," Homer advised him.

  "Nothin' too bad can happen up there," Mr. Rose told him. "Worse things can happen on the ground."

  Homer Wells was on the verge of saying "Right," again, when he discovered that he couldn't talk; Mr. Rose had seized his tongue between his blunt, square-ended index finger and his thumb. A vague taste, like dust, was in Homer's mouth; Mr. Rose's hand had been so fast, Homer had never seen it--he never knew before that someone could actually catch hold of someone's tongue.

  "Caught ya," said Mr. Rose, smiling; he let Homer's tongue go.

  Homer managed to say, "You're very fast."

  "Right," said Mr. Rose alertly. "Ain't no one faster."

  Wally complained to Homer about the yearly wear and tear on the cider house roof. Every two or three years, they had to re-tin the roof, or fix the flashing, or put up new gutters.

  "What's having his own rules got to do with not paying attention to ours?" Wally asked Homer.

  "I don't know," Homer said. "Write him a letter and ask him."

  But no one wanted to offend Mr. Rose; he was a reliable crew boss. He made the picking and the pressing go smoothly every harvest.

  Candy, who managed the money at Ocean View, claimed that whatever costs they absorbed in repairs to the cider house roof were more than compensated for by Mr. Rose's reliability.

  "There's something a little gangland style about the guy," Wally said--not exactly complaining. "I mean, I don't really want to know how he gets all those pickers to behave themselves."

  "But they do behave themselves," Homer said.

  "He does a good job," Candy said. "Let him have his own rules."

  Homer Wells looked away; he knew that rules, for Candy, were all private contracts.

  Fifteen years ago, they had made their own rules--or, really, Candy had made them (before Wally came home). They stood in the cider house (after Angel was born, on a night when Olive was looking after Angel). They had just made love, but not happily; something was wrong. It would be wrong for fifteen years, but that night Candy had said, "Let's agree to something."

  "Okay," Homer said.

  "Whatever happens, we share Angel."

  "Of course," Homer said.

  "I mean, you get to be his father--you get all the father time you want to have--and I get to have all the mother time I need," Candy said.

  "Always," said Homer Wells, but something was wrong.

  "I mean, regardless of what happens--whether I'm with you, or with Wally," Candy said.

  Homer was quiet for a while. "So you're leaning toward Wally?" he asked.

  "I'm not leaning anywhere," Candy said. "I'm standing right here, and we're agreeing to certain rules."

  "I didn't know they were rules," said Homer Wells.

  "We share Angel," Candy said. "We both get to live with him. We get to be his family. Nobody ever moves out."

  "Even if you're with Wally?" Homer said, after a while.

  "Remember what you told me when you wanted me to have Angel?" Candy asked him.

  Homer Wells was cautious, now. "Remind me," he said.

  "You said that he was your baby, too--that he was ours. That I couldn't decide, all by myself, not to have him--that was the point," Candy said.

  "Yes," Homer said. "I remember."

  "Well, if he was ours then, he's ours now--whatever happens," Candy repeated.

  "In the same house?" asked Homer Wells. "Even if you go with Wally?"

  "Like a family," Candy said.

  "Like a family," said Homer Wells. It was a word that took a strong grip of him. An orphan is a child, forever; an orphan detests change; an orphan hates to move; an orphan loves routine.

  For fifteen years, Homer Wells knew that there were possibly as many cider house rules as there were people who had passed through the cider house. Even so, every year, he posted a fresh list.

  For fifteen years, the board of trustees had tried and failed to replace Dr. Larch; they couldn't find anyone who wanted the job. There were people dying to throw themselves into unrewarded service of their fellow man, but there were more exotic places than St. Cloud's where their services were needed--and where they could also suffer. The board of trustees couldn't manage to entice a new nurse into service there, either; they couldn't hire even an administrative assistant.

  When Dr. Gingrich retired--not from the board; he would never retire from the board--he mused about accepting the position in St. Cloud's, but Mrs. Goodhall pointed out to him that he wasn't an obstetrician. His psychiatric practice had never flourished in Maine, yet Dr. Gingrich was surprised and a little hurt to learn that Mrs. Goodhall enjoyed pointing this out to him. Mrs. Goodhall had reached retirement age herself, but nothing could have been farther from that woman's zealous mind. Wilbur Larch was ninety-something, and Mrs. Goodhall was obsessed with retiring him before he died; she realized that to have Larch die, while still in service, would register as a kind of defeat for her.

  Not long ago--perhaps in an effort to invigorate the board--Dr. Gingrich had proposed they hold a meeting in an off-season hotel in Ogunquit, simply to break the routine of meeting in their usual offices in Portland. "Make it a kind of outing," he proposed. "The ocean air and all."

  But it rained. In the colder weather, the wood shrank; the sand got in the windows and doors and crunched underfoot; the drapes and the towels and the bedsheets were gritty. The wind was off the ocean; no one could sit on the veranda because the wind blew the rain under the roof. The hotel provided them with a long, dark, empty dining room; they held their meeting under a chandelier that no one could turn on--no one could find the right switch.

  It was appropriate to their discussion of St. Cloud's that they attempted to conduct their business in a former ballroom that had seen better days, in a hotel so deeply in the off-season that anyone seeing them there would have suspected they'd been quarantined. In fact, when he got a glimpse of them, that is what Homer Wells thought; he and Candy were the hotel's only other off-season guests. They had taken a room for half the day; they were a long way from Ocean View, but they'd come this far to be sure that no one would recognize them.

  It was time for them to leave. They stood outside on the veranda, Candy with her back against Homer's chest, his arms wrapped around her; they both faced out to sea. He appeared to like the way the wind whipped her hair back in his face, and neither of them seemed to mind the rain.

  Inside the hotel, Mrs. Goodhall looked through the streaked window, frowning at the weather and at the young couple braving the elements. In her opinion, nothing could ever be normal enough. That was what was wrong with Larch; not everyone who is ninety-something is senile, she would grant you, but Larch wasn't normal. And even if they were a young married couple, public displays of affection were not acceptable to Mrs. Goodhall--and they were calling all the more attention to themselves by their defiance of the rain.

  "What's more," she remarked to Dr. Gingrich, who was given no warning and had no map with which he could have followed her thoughts, "I'll bet they're not married."

  The young couple, he thought, looked a little sad. Perhaps they needed a psychiatrist; perhaps it was the weather--they'd been planning to sail.

  "I've figured out what he is," Mrs. Goodhall told Dr. Gingrich, who thought she was referring to the young man, Homer Wells. "He's a nonpracticing homosexual," Mrs. Goodhall announced. She meant Dr. Larch, who was on her mind night and day.

  Dr. Gingrich was rather amazed at what struck him as Mrs. Goodhall's wild guess, but he looked at the young man with renewed interest. True, he was not actually
fondling the young woman; he seemed a trifle distant.

  "If we could catch him at it, we'd have him out in a minute," Mrs. Goodhall observed. "Of course we'd still have to find someone willing to replace him."

  Dr. Gingrich was lost. He realized that Mrs. Goodhall couldn't be interested in replacing the young man on the veranda, and that therefore she was still thinking about Dr. Larch. But if Dr. Larch were a "nonpracticing homosexual," what could they ever catch him at?

  "We would catch him at being a homosexual, just not practicing as such?" Dr. Gingrich asked cautiously; it was not hard to rile Mrs. Goodhall.

  "He's obviously queer," she snapped.

  Dr. Gingrich, in all his years of psychiatric service to Maine, had never been moved to apply the label of "nonpracticing homosexual" to anyone, although he had often heard of such a thing; usually, someone was complaining about someone else's peculiarity. In Mrs. Goodhall's case, she despised men who lived alone. It wasn't normal. And she despised young couples who displayed their affection, or weren't married, or both; too much of what was normal also enraged her. Although he shared with Mrs. Goodhall the desire to replace Dr. Larch and his staff at St. Cloud's, it occurred to Dr. Gingrich that he should have had Mrs. Goodhall as a patient--she might have kept him out of retirement for a few more years.

  When the young couple came inside the hotel, Mrs. Goodhall gave them such a look that the young woman turned away.

  "Did you see her turn away in shame?" Mrs. Goodhall would ask Dr. Gingrich, later.

  But the young man stared her down. He looked right through her! Dr. Gingrich marveled. It was one of the best looks, in the tradition of "withering," that Dr. Gingrich had ever seen and he found himself smiling at the young couple.

  "Did you see that couple?" Candy asked him later, in the long drive back to Ocean View.

  "I don't think they were married," said Homer Wells. "Or if they're married, they hate each other."

  "Maybe that's why I thought they were married," Candy said.

  "He looked a little stupid, and she looked completely crazy," Homer said.

  "I know they were married," Candy said.

  In the sad, dingy dining room in Ogunquit, while the rain pelted down, Mrs. Goodhall said, "It's just not normal. Doctor Larch, those old nurses--the whole bit. If someone new, in some capacity, isn't hired soon, I say we send a janitor up there--just anyone who can look the place over and tell us how bad it is."