The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

“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.

he paused. He gestured to the sea, as if it were a far-off audience and he meant to include it by the sweep of his hand. He turned to the apple trees around them. . . . They were a slightly more intimate audience, paying closer attention. “The wind . . .” he started to say, and paused again, perhaps waiting for the wind to contribute something. “The house . . .” he started to say.

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 feeling caused Homer to remember the affection Dr. Larch had for him—and Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had for him, too. When the movie was over, he realized he was crying; he realized that although he loved where he was, he loved Dr. Larch more than anyone else—at this point in his life, he still loved Larch more than he loved Candy—and he realized that he missed Larch, too—while at the same time he hoped he would never again set foot in St. Cloud’s.

Home, thought Homer Wells. He knew that for the Bedouin—come from nowhere, going nowhere—there was no home.

Should he tell Dr. Larch what Grace Lynch had said and done, or how he dreamed about her—or how he imagined he was falling in love, or already had fallen in love, with Candy (which he knew was forbidden)? And how do I say, “I miss you”? he wondered—when I don’t mean, “I want to come back!”? And so he ended the letter in his fashion; he ended it inexactly. “I remember when you kissed me,” he wrote to Dr. Larch. “I wasn’t really asleep.”

There was not much moonlight; therefore, Larch felt unobserved. He bent over Copperfield and kissed him, much in the manner that he remembered kissing Homer Wells. Larch moved to the next bed and kissed Smoky Fields, who tasted vaguely like hot dogs; yet the experience was soothing to Larch. How he wished he had kissed Homer more, when he’d had the chance! He went from bed to bed, kissing the boys; it occurred to him, he didn’t know all their names, but he kissed them anyway. He kissed all of them.

By the light switch, there was a tack that pinned a piece of typing paper to the wall—the type itself was very faint, from long exposure to the sunlight that came through the kitchen’s curtainless windows. It was some kind of list; the bottom quarter of the page had been torn away; whatever it was, it was incomplete. Homer pulled the tack out of the wall and would have crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trash barrel if the top line of type hadn’t caught his attention. CIDER HOUSE RULES

1. Please don’t operate the grinder or the press if you’ve been drinking. 2. Please don’t smoke in bed or use candles. 3. Please don’t go up on the roof if you’ve been drinking—especially at night. 4. Please wash out the press cloths the same day or night they are used. 5. Please remove the rotary screen immediately after you’ve finished pressing and hose it clean WHEN THE POMACE IS STILL WET ON IT! 6. Please don’t take bottles with you when you go up on the roof. 7. Please—even if you are very hot (or if you’ve been drinking)—don’t go into the cold-storage room to sleep. 8. Please give your shopping list to the crew boss by seven o’clock in the morning. 9. There should be no more than half a dozen people on the roof at any one time.

He thought about the broken knife he’d found on the cider house roof. Was it there because he was supposed to find it? And the broken glass, a piece of which had signaled to him in his insomnia at Wally’s window: was the glass on the roof in order to provide him with some message?

Because he loved Wally, he resolved to keep his mind off Candy. It was the kind of bold resolve that his sense of elevation, on the Ferris wheel, enhanced. And this evening there was a plan; Homer Wells—an orphan attached to routine—liked for every evening to have a plan, even if he was not that excited about this one.

He considered taking the rubber out of his pocket and presenting it to Debra Pettigrew. If the argument was that an accidental pregnancy was really the only reason for not doing it, what did she think of the alternative that Herb Fowler so repeatedly presented? But by arguing in this fashion, wouldn’t he be suggesting that all intimacy could be crudely accounted for—or was crude itself? Or was intimacy crude only for him?

“Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at the last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.

When all the lights were out, Melony felt Sandra sit on her bed beside her; if it had been Ma, she knew, her bed would have sagged more heavily. “You ask me, you better forget that boyfriend,” Sandra said. “If he didn’t tell you how to find him, he ain’t no good, anyway.” Melony had not felt anyone stroke her temples since Mrs. Grogan in the girls’ division at St. Cloud’s; she realized she missed Mrs. Grogan very much, and for a while this took her mind off Homer Wells.

When everyone else was asleep, Melony turned her reading light back on; whatever failure Jane Eyre might be for someone else, it had always worked for Melony—it had helped her—and she felt in need of its help, now. She read another twenty pages, or so, but 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.

Homer had detected nothing hostile in the looks from the people; as an orphan, he always suspected that people singled him out to stare at—and so he had not felt especially singled out in the company of Mr. Rose. But now he noticed more of the looks and realized that the looks an orphan might detect were only imagined, by comparison.

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.”

At night, now, Homer’s insomnia kept time to a new music; the winter branches of the picked apple trees rattling against each other in the early December wind made a brittle click-clack sound. Lying in his bed—a moonlight the color of bone starkly outlining his hands folded on his chest—Homer Wells thought the trees might be trying to shake the snow off their branches, in advance of the snow itself. Perhaps the trees knew that a war was coming, too, but Olive Worthington didn’t think about it.

He had never said the words: I am in love with you. He was unprepared for the struggle involved in saying them. No doubt he misunderstood the unfamiliar weight he felt upon his heart—he must have associated the constriction of that big muscle in his chest with Dr. Larch’s recent news; what he felt was only love, but what he thought he felt was his pulmonary valve stenosis. He let go of Candy’s hand and put both his hands to his chest. He had seen the sternum shears at work—he knew the autopsy procedure—but never had it been so hard and painful to breathe.

Homer Wells was in Wally’s room, reading David Copperfield and thinking about Heaven—“. . . that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.” I think I would prefer to love Candy here, “on earth,” Homer Wells was thinking—when Olive interrupted him.

Wally—to whom this war would mean the most—watched Fred Astaire; Fred just kept dancing and dancing, and Wally thought he could go on watching such a display of grace for hours.

Homer Wells did not feel saved. Did anyone who was in love and was unsatisfied with how he was loved in return ever feel saved? On the contrary, Homer Wells felt that he’d been singled out for special persecution. What young man—even an orphan—is patient enough to wait and see about love? And if Wilbur Larch had saved Homer Wells from the war, even Dr. Larch was powerless to interfere with Melony.

He thought about rules. That sailor with the slashed hand had not been in a knife fight that was according to anyone’s rules. In a fight with Mr. Rose, there would be Mr. Rose’s own rules, whatever they were. A knife fight with Mr. Rose would be like being pecked to death by a small bird, thought Homer Wells. Mr. Rose was an artist—he would take just the tip of a nose, just a button or a nipple. The real cider house rules were Mr. Rose’s. And what were the rules at St. Cloud’s? What were Larch’s rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace—and with what confidence? Clearly Candy was observing some rules, but whose? And did Wally know what the rules were? And Melony—did Melony obey any rules? wondered Homer Wells.

It was horrible to imagine Wally suffering, and not even Homer’s longing for Candy could allow him any comfort with the idea that Wally was already dead; in that case, Homer knew, Candy would always imagine that she loved Wally best. Reality, for orphans, is so often outdistanced by their ideals; if Homer wanted Candy, he wanted her ideally. In order for Candy to choose Homer, Wally had to be alive; and because Homer loved Wally, he also wanted Wally’s blessing. Wouldn’t any other way be compromising to them all?

Have you forgotten how to be of use? Don’t think so badly of compromises; we don’t always get to choose the ways we can be of use. You say you love her—then let her use you. It may not be the way you had in mind, but if you love her, you have to give her what she needs—and when she needs it, not necessarily when you think the time is right. And what can she give you of herself? Only what she has left—and if that’s not everything you had in mind, whose fault is that? Are you not going to accept her because she hasn’t got 100 percent of herself to give? Some of her is over Burma—are you going to reject the rest? Are you going to hold out for all or nothing? And do you call that being of use?”

“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? They condemn others for the accident of conception; they condemn the poor—as if the poor can help being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to be in control of the size of their families. I thought that freedom of choice was obviously democratic—was obviously American!

Wilbur Larch woke up. “I know how busy you both are,” he said to the Roosevelts, although he gradually recognized Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela—their tired arms held out to him. “My faithful friends,” he said, as if he were addressing a vast audience of well-wishers. “My fellow laborers,” said Wilbur Larch, as if he were running for reelection—a little tiredly, but no less earnestly seeking the support of his companions who also honored the Lord’s work.

Ray knew, was more like Ray; it wasn’t that Ray preferred Homer Wells to Wally—it was that Ray understood Homer better. Yet Ray did not disrupt a single snail while he sat on his dock; he knew that it took a snail too long to get where it was going.

And if Homer had discovered that Wally had died in terrible pain or with prolonged suffering—if Wally had been tortured, or had burned to death, or had been eaten by an animal—Homer certainly would have lied about that. If Homer Wells had been an amateur historian, he would have been as much of a revisionist as Wilbur Larch—he would have tried to make everything come out all right in the end. Homer Wells, who always said to Wilbur Larch that he (Larch) was the doctor, was more of a doctor than he knew.

Homer thought that his desire for Candy had changed everything, even the natural process of the grinding smooth of stones and shells. If he and Wally went back to the beach, would they still be beachcombers, or was it inevitable that the love of a woman would alter even their most commonplace experiences together? Was he my friend for five minutes? wondered Homer Wells—and my rival for the rest of my life?

Are there things you can’t ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it—it seems to cut on its own—but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.

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?

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.

“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.

“You have a low opinion of religion,” Nurse Caroline remarked to him. “I suppose so,” he said cautiously. She was a little too young and quick for him, he knew. “Well, what do you suppose a drug dependency is—if not a kind of religion?” Nurse Caroline asked.

In the bright light, he nervously picked the imaginary lint off his clothes. He remembered what the neurologists call it: carphologia. He tightened his grip on Dr. Larch’s bag and peered into the darkness. Suddenly, it was clear to him—where he was going. He was only what he always was: an orphan who’d never been adopted. He had managed to steal some time away from the orphanage, but St. Cloud’s had the only legitimate claim to him. In his forties, a man should know where he belongs.

“Young people find risk-taking admirable. They find it heroic,” Larch argued. “If abortions were legal, you could refuse—in fact, given your beliefs, you should refuse. But as long as they’re against the law, how can you refuse? How can you allow yourself a choice in the matter when there are so many women who haven’t the freedom to make the choice themselves? The women have no choice. I know you know that’s not right, but how can you—you of all people, knowing what you know—HOW CAN YOU FEEL FREE TO CHOOSE NOT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT FREE TO GET OTHER HELP? You have to help them because you know how. Think about who’s going to help them if you refuse.” Wilbur Larch was so tired that if he had allowed himself to go to sleep, the bark would have grown over his eyes.

“You are my work of art,” Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. “Everything else has just been a job. I don’t know if you’ve got a work of art in you,” Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, “but I know what your job is, and you know what it is, too. You’re the doctor.”

“Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,” she said to the attentive children. “Doctor Larch has found a family. Good night, Doctor Larch,” Nurse Angela said. “Good night, Doctor Larch!” the children called. “Good night, Wilbur!” Nurse Edna managed to say, while Nurse Angela summoned her strength for the usual refrain, and Nurse Caroline, who hoped the evening wind would dry her tears, marched down the hill to the railroad station—once again to inform the frightened stationmaster that there was a body in St. Cloud’s.

‘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,’ ” he recited from memory.

“It’s the old story,” Wally said to Angel. “You can get Homer out of Saint Cloud’s, but you can’t get Saint Cloud’s out of Homer. And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans.” “It’s hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,” Angel pointed out. “You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.”