The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies—and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter.

mountain life (like the life on an ocean, or on the plains, or on open farmland) affords the inhabitant the luxury of a view. Living on land where you can occasionally see a long way provides the soul with a perspective of a beneficially expansive nature—

An orphan is simply more of a child than other children in that essential appreciation of the things that happen daily, on schedule. For everything that promises to last, to stay the same, the orphan is a sucker.

“security is measured by the number of promises kept. Every child understands a promise—if it is kept—and looks forward to the next promise. Among orphans, you build security slowly but regularly.”

Here in St. Cloud’s we would waste our limited energy and our limited imagination by regarding the sordid facts of life as if they were problems.

think,” Nurse Edna once remarked to Dr. Larch, “that he manages to give a sense of the scope of history.” Nurse Angela rolled her eyes. “Whenever I try to listen to him,” she said, “I can think of a hundred good reasons for war.”

Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. (“What in hell else would you read to an orphan?” Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)

Among adults—and among orphans—Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare. “In other parts of the world,” Dr. Larch wrote, “delirious happiness is thought to be a state of mind. Here in St. Cloud’s we recognize that delirious happiness is possible only for the totally mindless. I would call it, therefore, that thing most rare: a state of the soul.”

Larch suspected that the Winkles never stopped moving long enough to mate. Perhaps, he speculated, looking at Billy Winkle, she is not really a woman.

“Honestly, Larch,” the famous bacteriologist said one morning, “the way you look into that microscope, you appear to be plotting revenge!”

The night she died, Larch had a nightmare—his penis fell off in his hands; he tried to sew it back on but it kept disintegrating; then his fingers gave way in a similar fashion. How like a surgeon! he thought. Fingers are valued above penises. How like Wilbur Larch!

Wilbur Larch didn’t think anyone had a soul, but until the middle of the nineteenth century, the common law’s attitude toward abortion was simple and (to Wilbur Larch) sensible: before “quickening”—before the first, felt movement of the fetus—abortion was legal. More important, to the doctor in Wilbur Larch, it was not dangerous to the mother to perform an abortion before the fetus was quick. After the third month, whether the fetus was quick or not, Wilbur Larch knew it had a grip on the uterus that required more force to break.

The French Lunar Solution Mrs. Eames had tried was oil of tansy; she had taken it for such a long time, and in such amounts, that her intestines had lost their ability to absorb Vitamin C. Thus did she turn herself into Muenster. She died, as the pathologist had correctly observed, of scurvy.

“She was angry with me for not giving her an abortion,” Wilbur Larch replied. “Good for you!” said the house officer. But Wilbur Larch failed to see how this was good for anyone. There was a widespread inflammation of the membranes and viscera of the abdominal cavity, the uterus had been perforated twice, and the fetus, which was dead, was true to Mrs. Eames’s daughter’s prediction: it had not been quick.

If pride was a sin, thought Dr. Larch, the greatest sin was moral pride. He had slept with someone’s mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter’s cigar. He could quite comfortably abstain from having sex for the rest of his life, but how could he ever condemn another person for having sex?

A fussy or critical God, thought Wilbur Larch, would strike us all dead.

“In other parts of the world,” wrote Dr. Wilbur Larch upon his arrival in St. Cloud’s, “an ability to act before you think—but to act nonetheless correctly—is essential.

At this time in his life Wilbur Larch seemed destined to a first-and-last existence; one sexual experience, one beer, one abortion.

The true physician’s soul cannot be too broad and gentle.”

Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling; Wilbur Larch felt himself called.

Every night he would murmur aloud to himself that book’s opening passage. It had the effect of a litany—on occasion, it allowed him to sleep peacefully. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

“The night sometimes smells like wood and cigars,” Homer Wells told Dr. Larch, who had his own memory of cigars; the doctor shuddered.

“He’s a doctor. He smells like ether.” “You’re saying this is normal?” Melony asked him. “Right,” said Homer Wells. “Like a dairy farmer?” Melony asked slyly. “He’s supposed to smell like milk and cowshit, right?” “Right,” said Homer Wells, cautiously. “Wrong, Sunshine,” Melony said. “Your favorite doctor smells like he’s got ether inside him—like he’s got ether instead of blood.”

Of course they will, one day, want to know; at the very least, they will be curious. But how does it help anyone to look forward to the past? How are orphans served by having their past to look ahead to? Orphans, especially, must look ahead to their futures.

“I’m not saying it’s right, you understand? I’m saying it’s her choice—it’s a woman’s choice. She’s got a right to have a choice, you understand?”

“How I resent fatherhood! The feelings it gives one: they completely ruin one’s objectivity, they wreck one’s sense of fair play.

Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from one’s vision what correct behavior is.”

In Larch’s opinion, there was no need for Homer to have a notebook of his own. Wilbur Larch had only to look around him to see what paper cost. The trees were gone; they had been replaced by orphans—all for paper.

If he had known only this much, Dr. Larch might have tried to keep Homer Wells away from the place; he might have guessed that Homer’s life would get complicated there. What did an orphan know about gossip, or care about class? But to Wilbur Larch Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock were very pretty names, improved by ether.

In the end, he would be a victim of both Alzheimer’s disease and alcoholism; a happy drunk, with unexplained plunges of mood. In a better, and better-informed world, he would have been cared for like the nearly faultless patient that he was. In this one respect Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock resembled St. Cloud’s: there was no saving Senior Worthington from what was wrong with him, as surely as there had been no saving Fuzzy Stone.

Olive respected Raymond Kendall’s contempt for people who didn’t know their own work and had “no capacity for work of any kind, anyhow.”

The frying pan flew up in her hands, splashing the hot bacon grease on her face. Irene was lucky she didn’t blind herself. Oh, those at-home accidents! How they surprise you.

The stationmaster lived to be shocked.

Like most easily frightened people, the stationmaster was something of a bully when he perceived that he had the upper hand.

Larch knew what he was doing—and for whom. But that quick and not-quick stuff: it didn’t work for Homer Wells. You can call it a fetus, or an embryo, or the products of conception, thought Homer Wells, but whatever you call it, it’s alive.

“I have to tell you that I won’t perform an abortion, not ever,”

Wally glanced at the unread book in Candy’s lap; she picked it up to read every so often, but when she returned the book to her lap, the same page was dog-eared. The book was Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.

He didn’t realize that the bleached-out stains that striped the scarlet were the result of an accident with chemicals—it would often be Curly Day’s misfortune to mistake an accident for something artistically intended.

They’re too young to give their money away, thought Wilbur Larch.

“You should keep bees, too. Fascinating for the kids, and a lot safer than most people think. Have your own honey, and give the kids an education—bees are a model society, a lesson in teamwork!”

He was not good at looking in women’s eyes, Wilbur Larch; he had seen too much of them under the harsh lights. Nurse Angela at times wondered if Dr. Larch even knew how he tended to overlook women; she wondered if this was an occupational hazard among obstetricians, or if men with a tendency to overlook women were drawn to the obstetrical field. Homer Wells did not overlook women; he looked right into their eyes, which might have been why, Nurse Angela thought, he seemed to find their position in the stirrups so troubling.

He has the body of a hero, Dr. Larch thought, remembering the heroes he had tried to help in France, in World War I. Lean but well muscled: that was a hero’s body—and shot full of holes, thought Wilbur Larch. He didn’t know why Wally’s body reminded him of this.

In all his journeys through David Copperfield, at last he understood young David’s first vision of Steerforth. “He was a person of great power in my eyes,” young Copperfield observed. “No veiled future glanced upon him in the moonbeams. There was no shadowy picture of his footsteps, in the garden that I dreamed of walking in all night.”

a perfect history for someone who simply needed to be careful—who needed to stay out of danger. Larch had given his favorite orphan a history that he hoped would keep him safe. He was aware that it was a history a father would construct for his son—if a father could make his son believe it.

He screamed when he discovered that his legs wouldn’t move; the only way he could manage to leave Nurse Angela’s office was on all fours; he went whimpering down the hall like a beaten dog. Dr. Larch blocked his way at the operating room door. “What is the matter with you?” Larch asked the assistant scathingly. “I brought you all his catalogues!”

She allowed Melony to read to the girls that evening; Melony’s voice was oddly flat and passionless. Melony’s reading from Jane Eyre depressed Mrs. Grogan—especially when she read this part: . . . it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it . . . Why, the girl didn’t bat an eye! Mrs. Grogan observed.

Dr. Larch just sat at the typewriter, unmoving. He was composing in his mind the first of many letters he would write to Homer Wells. He was attempting to gentle his anxieties and calm his thoughts. Please be healthy, please be happy, please be careful, Wilbur Larch was thinking

“I care for myself,” Melony read. “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

Sometimes the interest in the literature isn’t in the literature—the boys’ division was an audience like any other: self-interest, personal memories, their secret anxieties crept into their perceptions of what they heard (regardless of what Charles Dickens had done and what Melony did to him).

Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign—wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.