The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

According to Dr. Larch, the logging camp called Clouds became St. Clouds only because of “the fervent backwoods Catholic instinct to put a Saint before so many things—as if to grant those things a grace they could never quite acquire naturally.”

“Here in St. Cloud’s it is high time something was done for the good of someone. What better place for improvement could there be—for self-improvement, and for the good of all—than a place where evil has so clearly flourished if not altogether triumphed?”

Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, dearly devoted though they were, could not be rushing to each and every baby the second it cried; crying was not of much use at St. Cloud’s (though in his heart of hearts Dr. Larch knew very well that Homer’s capacity for withholding tears was unusual even for an orphan).

Dr. Wilbur Larch that he was known, for years, to hear babies crying in his sleep and to roll over saying, “Homer, Homer, it’s all right now, Homer.” At St. Cloud’s, of course, babies were always crying in everyone’s sleep, but no baby ever woke up crying in quite the manner that Homer Wells managed it.

Living on land where you can occasionally see a long way provides the soul with a perspective of a beneficially expansive nature—or so believed Professor Draper; he was a born teacher. “Unfarmed valley land,” he would intone, “which I associate with forests too low and too dense to provide a view, tends to cramp the uplifting qualities of human nature and enhance those instincts which are mean-spirited and small.”

“Here in St. Cloud’s,” he wrote in his journal, “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.”

It was unquestionably more meaningful that he first saw them as they were taking their leave rather than arriving, full-bellied and undelivered of their problems. Importantly, Homer knew they did not look delivered of all their problems when they left. No one he had seen looked more miserable than those women; he suspected it was no accident that they left in darkness.

“There is no excuse for cruelty, but—at an orphanage—perhaps we are obliged to withhold love; if you fail to withhold love at an orphanage, you will create an orphanage that no orphan will willingly leave. You will create a Homer Wells—a true orphan, because his only home will always be at St. Cloud’s. God (or whoever) forgive me. I have made an orphan; his name is Homer Wells and he will belong to St. Cloud’s forever.”

“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.”

“You mean the Winkles are gone?” Dr. Larch asked. “Swept away,” said Homer Wells. “Whoosh!” That was when Wilbur Larch gave up on finding Homer Wells a home. That was when Dr. Larch said that Homer could stay at St. Cloud’s for as long as Homer felt he belonged there. That was when St. Larch said, “Well, then, Homer, I expect you to be of use.” For Homer Wells, this was easy. Of use, he felt, was all that an orphan was born to be.

Leaving the apartment, he was surprised to hear a commotion almost the instant he closed the door: the grandmother, the iced patient, the husband—all shouting in Lithuanian—and the baby giving forceful voice to its first family quarrel. It was as if the delivery, and Dr. Larch’s entire appearance, had been only a brief interruption to a life of unintelligible turmoil.

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

A child of Maine, Wilbur Larch was used to looking into people’s faces and finding their eyes; now he looked down, or away; like a city person, he made their eyes hunt for his.

Even rich people, who, in Wilbur Larch’s opinion, were the last to learn about anything, even rich people knew about him. He wanted to leave, but now it was his fate that held him. Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling; Wilbur Larch felt himself called.

he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this “the Lord’s work.” And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this “the Devil’s work,” but it was all the Lord’s work to Wilbur Larch. As Mrs. Maxwell had observed: “The true physician’s soul cannot be too broad and gentle.”

Dr. Wilbur Larch, who wrote his good nurses from France that he had seen the real Devil’s work: the Devil worked with shell and grenade fragments, with shrapnel and with the little, dirty bits of clothing carried with a missile into a wound. The Devil’s work was gas bacillus infection, that scourge of the First World War—Wilbur Larch would never forget how it crackled to the touch.

“What is it?” Homer Wells asked. “The Lord’s work,” said Wilbur Larch, that saint of St. Cloud’s, because that was when he realized that this was also the Lord’s work: teaching Homer Wells, telling him everything, making sure he learned right from wrong. It was a lot of work, the Lord’s work, but if one was going to be presumptuous enough to undertake it, one had to do it perfectly.

Homer improved. 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.

“Good night!” he would call. “Good night—you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England!”

He touched his ear very lightly to her stomach but she strongly pressed his face against her; she was like a drum—all pings! and pongs! She was a warm engine—shut off, but still tapping with heat. If Homer had been to the ocean, he would have recognized that she was like the tide, like surf—surging in and out and back and forth.

But Homer Wells knew he was just playing a game by himself, with himself; orphans are notorious for interior games. For example, one of the oldest games that orphans play is imagining that their parents want them back—that their parents are looking for them. But Homer had spent an evening with the mystery baby’s mother; he’d heard all about the mystery baby’s father—and his lack of interest in the matter. Homer knew that the mystery baby’s parents weren’t looking for her; that may have been why he decided he’d look for her. If that baby girl was growing up, and if she was playing the old orphans’ game, wouldn’t it be better if there was at least someone who was looking for her—even if it was just another orphan?

When Homer told Dr. Larch what Melony had done to him, Dr. Larch reconsidered the wisdom of allowing Homer to read to the girls’ division. But to remove this chore from the boy’s duties would constitute, Larch felt, a kind of demotion; Homer might suffer a sense of failure. The work at an orphanage is fairly decisive; when Wilbur Larch felt indecisive, regarding Homer Wells, he knew he was suffering from the natural feelings of a father. The thought that he had allowed himself to become a father and a sufferer of a father’s indecision so depressed Dr. Larch that he sought the good peace of ether—to which he was becoming, steadily, more accustomed.

At first the weight and movement of the snake appeared to make the hawk’s rising a struggle, but the higher the hawk rose, the more easily it flew—as if the higher air had different properties from the air down where the snake had flourished.

“Adolescence,” wrote Wilbur Larch. “Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?”

“Homer,” Dr. Larch had said, “I don’t remember your mother. I don’t even remember you when you were born; you didn’t become you until later.” “I thought there was a law,” Homer said. He meant Melony’s law—a law of records, or written history—but Wilbur Larch was the only historian and the only law at St. Cloud’s. It was an orphanage law: an orphan’s life began when Wilbur Larch remembered it; and if an orphan was adopted before it became memorable (which was the hope), then its life began with whoever had adopted it. That was Larch’s law.

“A teen-ager discovers that deceit is almost as seductive as sex, and much more easily accomplished. It may be especially easy to deceive loved ones—the people who love you are the least willing to acknowledge your deceit. But if you love no one, and feel that no one loves you, there’s no one with the power to sting you by pointing out to you that you’re lying. If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others forever. “For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.”

“Help me, or I’m going to run away,” she told him, “help me, or I’m going to kill someone.” These notions seemed vaguely parallel if not equal to her. Homer realized that it was not easy for him, in the case of Melony, “to be of use,” but he tried.

Wilbur Larch watched Homer carefully. In A Brief History of St. Cloud’s, he would write, “How I resent fatherhood! The feelings it gives one: they completely ruin one’s objectivity, they wreck one’s sense of fair play. I worry that I have caused Homer Wells to skip his childhood—I worry that he has absolutely skipped being a child! But many orphans find it easier to skip childhood altogether than to indulge themselves as children when they are orphans. If I helped Homer Wells to skip his childhood, did I help him skip a bad thing? Damn the confusion of feeling like a father! Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from one’s vision what correct behavior is.”

Wilbur Larch loved Homer Wells—he had never loved anyone as he loved that boy, and he could not imagine enduring a life at St. Cloud’s without him—but the doctor knew that Homer Wells had to have an authentic encounter with society if the boy was going to have a chosen life at all. What Larch dreamed of was that Homer would venture out in the world and then choose to come back to St. Cloud’s. But who would choose such a thing? Larch wondered.

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.

Only last night he had come to a part that always made Melony cringe—which made Homer anxious. It’s near the beginning of Chapter Twelve, when Jane shrewdly observes, “It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.” “Just remember, Sunshine,” Melony interrupted him. “As long as I stay, you stay. A promise is a promise.” But Homer Wells was tired of Melony making him anxious. He repeated the line, this time reading it as if he were personally delivering a threat.

Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Larch whisper, “Good work, Homer.” He felt a second, even lighter kiss. “Good work, my boy,” the doctor said, and then left him. Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried—when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch’s pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.

But what were these worries compared to the business of St. Cloud’s? Compared to the Lord’s work and the Devil’s work, weren’t these concerns trivial? Wasn’t life in nice places shallow? But trouble can come to nice places, too; trouble travels, trouble visits. Trouble even takes holidays from the places where it thrives, from places like St. Cloud’s. The trouble that visited Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock was a fairly trivial and common form of trouble; it began, as trouble often does, with falling in love.

Larch was, after all, the historian of St. Cloud’s; he wrote the only records that were kept there; he usually wrote the not-so-simple history of the place but he had tried his hand at fiction, too. In the case of Fuzzy Stone, for example—and in the other, very few cases of orphans who had died in his care—Wilbur Larch hadn’t liked the actual endings, hadn’t wanted to record the actual outcomes to those small, foreshortened lives. Wasn’t it fair if Larch took liberties—if he occasionally indulged himself with happy endings?

The love of Wilbur Larch for Homer Wells extended even to his tampering with history, a field wherein he was an admitted amateur, but it was nonetheless a field that he respected and also loved. (In an earlier entry in the file on Homer Wells—an entry that Dr. Larch removed, for it lent an incorrect tone of voice, or at least a tone of voice unusual for history—Dr. Larch had written: “I love nothing or no one as much as I love Homer Wells. Period.”)

“Feel that wind,” said Homer Wells; maybe the wind was keeping him up. “It’s a wind coming from the coast,” Wilbur Larch said; he sniffed, deeply, for traces of salt. It was a rare sea breeze, Larch was sure. Wherever it’s from, it’s nice, Homer Wells decided. Both men stood sniffing the wind. Each man thought: What is going to happen to me?

With what they were giving up, Melony thought, one might expect their returning steps to be lighter; and, after all, they were heading downhill. But every time, the women walked more heavily down the hill than they had walked up it—it appeared they’d been given something to carry away with them. Their gait was quite the contrary from what one might expect in the gait of women who’d been, truly, scraped clean.

“The women who come to me are not helped by wishes,” said Wilbur Larch. He put down the medium-sized curette and held out his hand for a smaller one, which Homer Wells had ready for him and handed to him automatically. “I want to be of use,” Homer began, but Dr. Larch wouldn’t listen. “Then you are not permitted to hide,” Larch said. “You are not permitted to look away. It was you who told me, correctly, that if you were going to be of use, if you were going to participate at all, you had to know everything. Nothing could be kept from you. I learned that from you! Well, you’re right,” Larch said. “You were right,” he added. “It’s alive,” said Homer Wells. “That’s the only thing.”

“It’s his heart,” said Wilbur Larch. “I’ve not told him about it because I haven’t wanted to worry him. It’s the sort of condition that could be made worse by his worrying about it,” Dr. Larch confided to these two good-hearted innocents, who gave him their rapt attention. “Just so he’s not exposed to anything too strenuous, or to anything too violent in the way of exercise—or to anything too shocking,” said Wilbur Larch, who had created 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.

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

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—the darkness edging in around him, the supplicant hands of the murdered baby from Three Mile Falls reaching out to him.

Never mind that Melony murdered every moment of Dickensian wit with her ferocity, or that the rich and colorful details of character and place were turned uniformly drab by her voice. “The girl has no lilt,” Nurse Edna complained. Never mind: the boys were terrified of Melony, and their fears made them pay more attention to her than they had ever paid to Homer Wells. 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).

“I think her heart is broken,” said Mrs. Grogan miserably. 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.

They crammed the tank in Ray Kendall’s lobster pound, crawling over each other, their claws pegged shut so that they wielded them underwater like ineffective clubs. Homer knew he had seen a good reason for learning how to swim. If one ever fell in the sea, one wouldn’t want to fall to the bottom where these creatures lived. It was some while before Homer learned that the lobsters did not cover the ocean’s floor in such density as they occupied the tank. The first question that leaped to his mind did not concern how a lobster ate or how it multiplied—but why it lived at all. “There’s got to be something that picks up what’s lying around,” Ray Kendall advised Homer.

“Lobsters and sea gulls,” Candy said, “they take what’s left over.” Wilbur Larch might have observed that they were given the orphan’s share. This occurred to Homer Wells, who discovered he could spend time watching lobsters, with dread, and sea gulls, with pleasure—while watching both with awe and respect.

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.

“Mrs. Worthington is very nice.” (I could have guessed that! thought Wilbur Larch.) “She knows everything about apples. “Candy’s father is very nice, too,” Homer Wells wrote to Dr. Larch. “He takes me out on his lobster boat, and he is teaching me how an engine works.” (Do you wear a life jacket on the lobster boat? Wilbur Larch wanted to know. You think an engine is so special? I could teach you how the heart works, thought Wilbur Larch—his own heart teaching him about itself, and much more than its function as a muscle.)

They agreed Homer could have written something and sent it sooner than six weeks, but they argued that this indicated only how happy he was—how busy and how glad to be busy, too. And what experience did Homer Wells have with writing letters, or with writing of any kind? they wanted to know. “You want him to be a doctor, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said, “but it’s his life.” “Do you expect him to be a writer, too?” Nurse Angela chimed in. “And never get married?” Nurse Edna asked dangerously. I expect him to be of use, thought Wilbur Larch tiredly. And I want him with me; this last wish he knew was unfair. In the dispensary, he rested from the summer heat. All that glass and steel were somehow cooling, and the ether fumes evaporated more slowly in the humidity. He seemed to be traveling both farther away and for longer in his ether dreams now. When he came out of the ether, he seemed to come out of it more slowly. I’m getting older, he repeated to himself.

A beautiful and untouched copy of Jane Eyre arrived from Mrs. Worthington, and Wilbur Larch read more spiritedly to the girls—the newness of the story refreshed him. It even enlivened his weary approach to the sad conclusion to Great Expectations. (He never believed the part about Pip and Estella being happy ever after; he never believed that about anyone.)

Dr. Larch provided Homer Wells with a virtual alumni newsletter and with a calendar of hospital and social events. His letters to Homer Wells were longer than his longest entries in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s, and they were written and mailed the day following Dr. Larch’s receipt of the most minimal scrawl from Homer. “You can’t expect the boy to keep up with you, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna advised Dr. Larch. “You can’t expect him to compete with you,” Nurse Angela said.