by John Irving
our own rules, every day. Ain’t that right, Homer?
HOMER
Right.
There’s an uncomfortable look that passes between
father and daughter in the midst of Mr. Rose’s speech, before Homer burns the rules in the wood stove. The scene ends with the camera on Candy; she’s uncomfortable, too.
Mr. Rose is breaking the rules, but so are Homer and Candy, and so is Dr. Larch. (This echoes Larch’s feelings, which he expresses to Angela, about her not being “holy”
to him about the law.)
Here is an axiom of storytelling that applies to novels and films: the right atmosphere can justify, or at least make believable, any action. The more insupportable or unbe-lievable the action, the more vivid and accurate the detail must be. Take the apple-orchard location for the film—
Scott Farm in Dummerston,Vermont. It was perfectly in-period, just right. The cider house bunk room, the mill room, and the roof—they all had to be correctly atmospheric, and they were. But the casting of the pickers themselves is where the real credibility of detail lies. Delroy Lindo was the linchpin to this part of Homer Wells’s
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odyssey, but Delroy’s supporting black cast also had to be excellent. They were.
One day on that set in Dummerston, I felt that my almost-fourteen-year odyssey to see The Cider House Rules made into a movie was finally complete. It wasn’t even a specific scene that gave me the feeling; it was lunchtime in the big tent, where the crew ate. I was in the serving line, looking over the salad bar. I got my food and began to consider where I wanted to sit. There was Richard at a table with someone from Miramax. There was Lasse with his
wife and children at another table. And then I saw them: Mr. Rose and his picking crew were all alone at one table, just the men; no one else was eating with them. I started toward them—there was lots of room for me at their table.
But they were so complete, so utterly themselves. They were in costume, of course; they were wearing the migrant rags that wardrobe had selected for them, and Delroy had his wig on. They were a migrant black crew of apple pickers from the 1940s, and I felt as HomerWells must have felt when he first met them (and when he said good-bye to them, too): namely, that this was as close as I would ever get to them.
I had created them, but here they were—alone at their table, as if their lives had both pre-existed and outlasted my act of creation. At that moment, I had much more that I wanted to say to them—that is, in addition to telling them how perfect they were. And there was nothing,
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really, that I needed to say to Lasse or to Richard; yet I went to sit with either Lasse or Richard. (I can’t remember now which; I was too distracted.)
I kept glancing over at the table of migrant apple pickers. In a few minutes, all the tables would start filling up; other actors and members of the film crew would join the black actors at their table, and that singular vision of them would be lost. But, for that moment, it was as if these migrant apple pickers existed only in The Cider House Rules.
No one else could sit with them—no more than I could enter the novel or the screenplay I had written, or alter a word of the book I had published way back in 1985.
It is arguably the most memorable moment in my col-
lected experience of seeing (and not seeing) my novels made into films, and it hadn’t happened onscreen. It had happened, like The Cider House Rules itself, in my imagination.
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T H E D I S A P P R O V I N G
S T A T I O N M A S T E R
He is in only two scenes in the movie,and he
doesn’t say a word; he’s described merely as “the
disapproving stationmaster,” but in the novel he is
a figure of dire lunacy and sorrow. He’s also a minor character of mythic stupidity. I began Chapter Five of The Cider House Rules by describing him.
The stationmaster at St. Cloud’s was a lonely, unattractive man—a victim of mail-order catalogues and of an especially crackpot mail-order religion. The latter, whose publication took an almost comic book form, was delivered monthly; the last month’s issue, for example, had a cover illustration of a skeleton in soldier’s clothes flying on a winged zebra over a battlefield that vaguely resembled the
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trenches of World War I. The other mail-order catalogues were of a more standard variety, but the stationmaster was such a victim of his superstitions that his dreams frequently confused the images of his mail-order religious material with the household gadgets, nursing bras, folding chairs, and giant zucchinis he saw advertised in the catalogues.
Thus it was not unusual for him to be awakened in a
night terror by a vision of coffins levitating from a picture-perfect garden—the prize-winning vegetables taking
flight with the corpses. There was one catalogue devoted entirely to fishing equipment; the stationmaster’s cadav-ers were often seen in waders or carrying rods and nets; and then there were the undergarment catalogues, advertising bras and girdles. The flying dead in bras and girdles especially frightened the stationmaster.
In the novel, the stationmaster embodies a category of fearfulness that is beyond rescue; in fact, he will scare himself to death. “To the stationmaster, the notion of Judgment Day was as tangible as the weather. . . . Judgment Day was at hand (always sooner than it was last expected, and always with more terrifying verve). The stationmaster lived to be shocked.”
He is afraid of everything. He especially dreads the ca-davers sloshing in embalming fluid—Dr. Larch orders
them so that Homer Wells can further his studies of
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anatomy. But the stationmaster is terrified of mere fruits and vegetables, too. “A hole in a tomato could cause him to escalate his predawn bouts of feverish prayer.”
One night he sees the elongated shadows of Dr. Larch and Homer Wells stretching into the woods, even into the sky; he has a heart attack, imagining them to be sorcerers or giant bats. (Larch and Homer are simply backlit by a light shining from an orphanage window.)
However, in the movie, we never see the stationmaster’s fear—only his obdurate disapproval. In one of his two scenes, the stationmaster is on hand to observe Homer’s return to St. Cloud’s. It’s a winter day; the station platform is ankle-deep in snow. The stationmaster may recognize the well-dressed young man who steps off the train, or he may not. He may know that this is an orphan who left St. Cloud’s as a boy and is now returning as a young doctor—Dr. Larch’s replacement, because Larch is dead—or he may not know any of this. All we know is that when the stationmaster looks at Homer, he disapproves of him.
The first Friday in October started out sunny and turned overcast—a brisk fall day in Bellows Falls,Vermont, the location for the train station in St. Cloud’s. The solitary line of tracks indicated the necessary abandonment of the orphanage. Indeed, the Bellows Falls train station and its attendant buildings showed all the usual signs of neglect; it required only some period automobiles, and of course the steam en-
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gine and the vintage passenger cars, to look like St. Cloud’s, Maine, in the 1940s. (With a change of automobiles, the station was redressed for the one glimpse we have of it in the opening credits—when the period is the 1920s.)
When I arrived on the set early
that morning, they’d been making snow for a couple of hours; the logs on the flatcars were encrusted with it. They were firing up the steam engine. Uphill from the shabby station, they were feeding breakfast to the extras. Most of them would be the passengers on the train—women with children, men too old to serve in the war, soldiers.
The first shot of the morning would be Homer Wells
returning to St. Cloud’s, looking every inch the doctor.
When Homer steps off the train, only the disapproving stationmaster is there to give him a sullen greeting. It’s supposed to be early November, 1944, shortly after Halloween, but there’s already snow in St. Cloud’s. In the novel, it’s a new stationmaster who greets Homer Wells upon his return to St. Cloud’s; he is the former stationmaster’s “idiot brother,” and he thinks for a passing moment that he recognizes Homer, but the doctor’s bag fools him. In the film, the original stationmaster doesn’t die.
Lasse shot the scene about half a dozen times, as the man-made snow melted and turned to slush on the station platform, and the steam from the engine billowed at the feet of Homer and the stationmaster.
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I was the stationmaster. I had asked for the part. For almost twenty years, I had envisioned Homer stepping off that train and coming “home.” I told Richard that I wanted to see that scene from the perspective of the stationmaster, who has witnessed so many pregnant women come to St.
Cloud’s and leave without their babies. Richard and Lasse, who were used to my nearly constant criticism of everything, were confident that I could be sufficiently disapproving.
As for the combination of the sunny morning turning
overcast and gray, and the more gradual graying of the man-made snow, the weather in Bellows Falls was exactly as I had described it for Homer’s homecoming at the end of the novel: “There was sometimes in the storm-coming air that leaden, heart-sinking feeling that was the essence of the air of St. Cloud’s.”
Tobey had a restrained, sly smile as he stepped onto the station platform. I thought it was just how Homer would have looked—the returning impostor. I don’t know what I looked like—disapproving, I hoped. In truth, I felt elated.
In the movie, Homer Wells has been absent from St.
Cloud’s for fifteen months; in the novel, fifteen years. But the boy who belonged to St. Cloud’s had been in my imagination for eighteen years; he’d been a long time coming home.
In makeup, they had cut my hair to conform to a 1940s
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stationmaster; they’d also powdered my forehead and
nose. In wardrobe, they had fitted me to the unfamiliar uniform and cap, and the steel-toed black shoes. I’d dressed alone in my trailer, feeling as I once had when I’d put on a rented tuxedo for my first formal dance.
You will not recognize me; I’m not in any close-ups.
You may not even be aware of the stationmaster’s disapproval. I just wanted to be there, in the stationmaster’s wretched persona, to see Homer get off that train.
It was growing dark when I went to my trailer and took off my costume. I neatly hung the stationmaster’s uniform in the trailer closet, as if in anticipation of a second stationmaster—perhaps the real one, needing his uniform back, unwrinkled. I dressed in my own clothes and crossed the train tracks to the parking lot; by then I could see lights in the other trailers.
It was dark as I drove home. (I live about an hour from Bellows Falls.) Leaves were already falling, although it was only the second day of October. Tomorrow would be my son Everett’s seventh birthday; he was not even half as old as The Cider House Rules. I hadn’t even met Everett’s mother when Homer Wells first tried to leave and then came back to St. Cloud’s.
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F U Z Z Y
His full name is Fuzzy Stone.In the book,he’s nine,
in the film, six. He lives virtually imprisoned in a humidified tent, his breathing apparatus a con-traption that Dr. Larch has constructed with a water-wheel and a fan; it is powered by a car battery. Fuzzy has been born prematurely; his lungs have never adequately developed. The only “developed” thing about him are his bronchial infections, which are continual. According to Larch, Fuzzy is “susceptible to every damn thing that comes along.”
In the novel, I wrote: “In the daylight Fuzzy seemed almost transparent, as if—if you held him up to a bright enough source of light—you could see right through him, see all his frail organs working to save him.”
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But Fuzzy can’t be saved, and Dr. Larch knows it. In the novel, Fuzzy dies while Homer is still at the orphanage; Fuzzy’s death breaks Homer’s heart. In the film, Fuzzy dies after Homer has left St. Cloud’s—it was Larch’s heart that I wanted to break.
The night Fuzzy dies, Larch is showing him the movie King Kong—a private screening in the orphanage dining room. The film breaks in the predictable place, where it always breaks, which usually elicits an argument between Homer and Dr. Larch. (Homer calls it Larch’s splice, Larch calls it Homer’s.) But there’s no argument this time.
Homer is gone. Larch is alone with Fuzzy, who loves King Kong because he believes the giant ape thinks Fay Wray is his mother.
When the film breaks, we see Dr. Larch’s face in the harsh, flickering light of the projector.We see that Fuzzy’s breathing tent is still—Larch sees it, too. “Fuzzy?” Larch asks. He peers into the tent. “Fuzz?”
When Michael Caine, who plays Dr. Larch, did that
scene on the set of the abandoned state hospital in
Northampton, Massachusetts, even the grips and the elec-tricians were in tears. Yes, they were crying because Michael’s performance was that good, but they were also crying for Fuzzy (Erik Per Sullivan); in every scene he was in, Erik was more Fuzzy than Fuzzy.
Over lunch one Sunday in Vermont, Michael said: “That boy is a treasure.” True. He was a gift to the film.
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The day after we shot Fuzzy’s death scene, I saw Erik with his mother by the caterer’s truck at the old state hospital.
“Mr. Irving!” he called to me. “Did you see me die?”
“Yes! You died very well, Erik,” I told him. He beamed.
That was how he played Fuzzy, the dying boy—beam-
ing.
In the novel, I wrote: “It was not until Homer Wells had some experience with dilatation and curettage that he would know what Fuzzy Stone resembled: he looked like an embryo—Fuzzy Stone looked like a walking, talking fetus. That was what was peculiar about the way you could almost see through Fuzzy’s skin, and his slightly caved-in shape; that was what made him appear so especially vul-nerable. He looked as if he were not yet alive but still in some stage of development that should properly be carried on inside the womb.”
How similar this is to my description of a different character in a different novel, five years later. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, I wrote the following description of Owen:
“He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times—especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon).”
All writers repeat themselves; repetition is the neces-
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sary concomitant of
having anything worthwhile to say. In another life, Fuzzy Stone became Owen Meany. Thus,
when I saw Fuzzy die in his breathing tent, I was doubly moved—Owen Meany dies prematurely, too.
For the film, I wrote a scene between Fuzzy and Dr.
Larch—the initial motivation for which was my concern about Michael Caine’s accent. Dr. Larch is born in Maine, educated at Bowdoin and at Harvard, and he interns in Boston. Michael is from London.While it wasn’t necessary for Larch to have a Maine accent—his education could easily have dispelled that—what if Michael’s speech occasionally sounded British? (In conversation, Mr. Caine pro-nounces “Maine” as “Mine.”)
In the novel, Larch grows up in Portland—in the ser-
vants’ quarters of the mayor’s mansion, where his mother serves on the staff of cooks and housekeepers for the mayor of Portland. Larch’s father is a lathe operator and a drunk.
In the screenplay, I have Homer reading to the boys in the bunk room while Dr. Larch is adjusting Fuzzy’s breathing tent. Fuzzy hears Homer reading that part from David Copperfield about little David not having a father.
HOMER ( continues reading)
“I was a posthumous child.
My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it.”
FUZZY ( whispers to Larch)
His father’s dead, right?
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LARCH ( whispering back)
That’s right, Fuzz.
( Close on Fuzzy. )
HOMER (O.S.) ( continues reading)
“There is something
strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me . . .”
( As Larch bends over Fuzzy to fix the breathing apparatus, Fuzzy whispers. )
FUZZY
Is your father dead?
LARCH
( nods, whispers) Cirrhosis—it’s a disease of the liver.
FUZZY
Liver killed him?