The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

Among orphans, thought Homer Wells, sea gulls are superior to crows—not in intelligence or in personality, he observed, but in the freedom they possess and cherish. It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.

Upon saying this, Senior Worthington burst into tears and begged Homer’s forgiveness; he put his head on Homer’s shoulder and wept. “My brain is sending poison to my heart,” he told Homer, who thought it strange that Senior didn’t seem to drink before the late afternoon—yet he appeared to be drunk nearly all the time.

the activity of the hive generated heat—like an infection, Homer thought suddenly.

At St. Cloud’s, growth was unwanted even when it was delivered—and the process of birth was often interrupted. Now he was engaged in the business of growing things. What he loved about the life at Ocean View was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted.

This mannerism of what he’d seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At St. Cloud’s, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

What it typed were letters from young Fuzzy Stone. Fuzzy began by wanting Dr. Larch to know how much he was looking forward to being a doctor when he grew up, and how much Dr. Larch had inspired him to make this decision.

it might be demonstrated to Dr. Larch that the law should be observed, that abortions should not be performed, and that a safe and informative view of family planning (birth control, and so forth) could in time achieve the desired effect (“. . . without breaking the laws of God or man,” wrote a convincingly creepy Fuzzy Stone).

“I am sorry such training was wasted on someone who refuses to help the living because of a presumptuous point of view taken toward the unborn. You are not the proper doctor for this orphanage, and over my dead body will you ever get my job!”

It was the place he slept best: under a large, familiar machine.

“Anyway, nobody pays no attention to them rules,” Big Dot Taft said. “Every year Olive writes them up, and every year nobody pays no attention.”

“Help me,” she called to him. “I can’t get out.” It was a lie; she was just trying to draw him to the edge of the tank. But orphans have a gullible nature; orphanage life is plain; by comparison, every lie is sophisticated.

“I bet I was easy to deliver,” Wally said cheerfully. I’ll bet you were, imagined Homer Wells, who thought that Wally took everything in the world for granted—not in a selfish or spoiled way, but like a Prince of Maine, like a King of New England; Wally was just born to be in charge.

“Picking imaginary lint off one’s clothes is what neurologists call carphologia. In the progress of deterioration common to Alzheimer’s disease, a patient will frequently echo back what is said to him. This is called echolalia. The inability to name even familiar objects such as a cigarette is due to a failure to recognize the objects. This is called anomia. And the loss of the ability to do any type of skilled or learned movement such as opening the glove compartment is also typical. It is called apraxia.

“Perhaps she sees herself as inheriting Melony’s former position, but she hasn’t the dominating character that usually attends any powerful or leadership role.” That idiot Dr. Gingrich is going to like that, Larch imagined. “Role,” Larch said aloud, scornfully. As if orphans have the luxury of imagining that they have roles.

He was familiar with mean-spiritedness and with injustice, too. But this is evil, isn’t it? wondered Homer Wells. Have I seen evil before? He thought of the woman with the pony’s penis in her mouth. What do you do when you recognize evil? he wondered.

but the prayer that Homer used to calm himself was the end of Chapter 43 of David Copperfield. There being twenty more chapters to go, these words were perhaps too uncertain for a prayer, and Homer spoke them to himself uncertainly—not as if he believed the words were true, but as if he were trying to force them to be true; by repeating and repeating the words he might make the words true for him, for Homer Wells: I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.

On the way back to the apple mart, Olive Worthington said to Homer, “Mister Rose is a real worker. If the rest of them were like him, they could improve themselves.” Homer didn’t understand her tone. Certainly he had heard in her voice admiration, sympathy—and even affection—but there was also in her voice the ice that encases a long-ago and immovable point of view.

Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?

Homer Wells would not leave her mind. “I must part with you for my whole life,” she read, with horror. “I must begin a new existence amongst strange faces and strange scenes.” The truth of that closed the book for her, forever. She slid the book under her bed in the bunkroom in the cider house at York Farm, where she would leave it.

“You got to understand,” Mr. Rose whispered. “They don’t want to know what that thing is. What good it do them to know?”

By the time they passed ground level and began their ascent again, a substantial crowd had formed—but they didn’t appear to be standing in line for the next ride. There were only two couples and one boy by himself sharing the wheel with Homer and Mr. Rose, and when they were at the top of the wheel turn again, Homer realized that the crowd below them had formed to stare at Mr. Rose. “They come to see if niggers fly,” Mr. Rose said, “but I ain’t goin’ nowhere—not for no one’s entertainment. They come to see if the machine is gonna break down, tryin’ to carry a nigger—or maybe they wanna see me throw up.”

‘What fuckin’ business are you in, Mister?’ ” the boy repeated, and Mr. Rose smiled. “I’m in the throwin’-up business!” Mr. Rose said in a humble manner. Someone in the crowd laughed; Homer Wells felt a surge of vast relief; Mr. Rose smiled in such a way that allowed the boy to smile, too. “Sorry if any of it got on you,” Mr. Rose said nicely.

The wide-open jacket of the boy made Homer remember Clara and how a scalpel made no mistakes. Only a hand makes mistakes. His chest was cold, and he was driving too fast.

It was a smaller error than if he’d imagined the human female had two complete uteri and had spread this misinformation to the class, but it was an error; Homer Wells caught it. It was the first time he had been put in a position of correcting an authority. “An orphan is especially uncomfortable and insecure in such a position,” wrote Dr. Wilbur Larch.

His tiredness made him slightly less cadaverous, but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

“When an orphan is depressed,” wrote Wilbur Larch, “he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs. “When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know,” Dr. Larch wrote. “I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate—your own, and everybody else’s.”

Homer tacked the extra questionnaire—which he did not fill out—to the wall of Wally’s room, right by the light switch, so that the questions regarding life at St. Cloud’s occupied a position of ignored authority quite similar to the page of rules that were yearly tacked up in the cider house.

To touch her more would surely be forbidden—by all the rules—and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of a normal life.

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.

“But you made him a promise,” said Homer Wells. “Yes,” Candy said. “Isn’t a promise like waiting and seeing? Did you ever make a promise, and mean it—and break it?” Homer Wells’s reaction was an involuntary cringe, as sudden and uncontrollable as if Candy had called him “Sunshine.”

He might have found out about his pulmonary valve stenosis on the spot, if he had only asked; he might have had an X ray, and an expert reading—he could have learned the truth. But who seeks the truth from unlikable sources?

They made him a captain and gave him what he called “easy work.” “Always be suspicious of easy work,” Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.

“These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn—they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn’s soul—they don’t care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don’t care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children?

In Maine, it is considered wiser just to know something than to talk about it; that no one said Candy Kendall was pregnant didn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t know she was. In Maine, it is a given that any boy can get any girl in trouble. What they do about it is their business; if they want advice, they should ask.

Candy was ashamed that Olive would judge her harshly for her insufficient feelings for Wally—Candy’s faith (in Wally being alive) had not been as strong as Olive’s. It is not unusual for the mother of an only son and the young woman who is the son’s lover to envision themselves as competitors.

Homer was puzzled by Debra’s hostility, and assumed that his years in the orphanage had deprived him of some perfectly sensible explanation for her behavior. It seemed to Homer that Debra had always denied him access to anything more than her friendship. Why was she now incensed that he asked no more of her than that?

He was of use, he was in love—and was loved—and he was expecting a child. What more is there? he thought, making the daily rounds. Other people may look for a break from routine, but an orphan craves daily life.

but mainly he was peeved that he could not control, exactly, the calendar of his life. He’d wanted to plant the trees before Candy delivered. He wanted the hillside entirely planted when the baby was born.

As the baby’s head emerged, a drop of Larch’s sweat baptized the child squarely on its temple—literally before it was entirely born—and Homer Wells could not help thinking that this was not unlike David Copperfield being born with a caul.

Homer had circumcised his son. “You need the practice,” Dr. Larch had told him. “You want me to practice on my son?” Homer had asked. “May it be the only pain you ever cause him,” Wilbur Larch had replied.

People from Maine don’t crowd you; they let you come to your senses in your own, good time.

But people from Maine don’t like the telephone, a rude invention; especially in the case of important news, a telephone catches you too off-guard. A telegram provides you with a decent, respectful interval in which to gather your senses and respond. Olive sent them her secret in a telegram; that gave everyone a little more time.

she remembered the first night she had arrived at the orphanage. Dr. Larch had been reading to the boys from Great Expectations. Candy would never forget the line that she and Homer had walked in on. “ ‘I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness,’ ” Wilbur Larch had read aloud.

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?

He would be taller than his boyish, round-faced father (they were dead even as the summer began), and there was a defined angularity in the bones of his face that made him seem already grown up; even the trace of a beard was there.

Raymond Kendall had died shortly after Wally and Candy were married. He was killed when the lobster pound blew up; his whole dock was blown apart, and his lobster boat sank, and two old heaps of automobiles he was working on were jolted across his parking lot a good twenty-five yards down the coastal highway by the explosion—as if they’d been driven under their own power.

“Oh, I can’t always be right,” Larch said tiredly. “Yes, I know,” Nurse Caroline said sympathetically. “It’s because even a good man can’t always be right that we need a society, that we need certain rules—call them priorities, if you prefer,”

it had been only during that brief period of what seemed to him to be his “married life” with Candy in St. Cloud’s that he had experienced anything of what sex ideally is—it was Homer’s opinion that sex had little to do with love; that love was much more focused and felt in moments of tenderness and of concern. It had been years (for example) since he had seen Candy asleep, or had been the one to waken her; years since he had watched her fall asleep, and had stayed awake to watch her.

Wilbur Larch, straining to see Senator McCarthy through the television’s snow and zigzagging lines, said, “He looks like a drunk to me. I’ll bet he dies young.”

Wally argued, for example, that such televised events as the McCarthy hearings were educational for Angel. “He ought to know,” Wally said, “that the country is always in danger from right-wing nut cases.”