The Cider House Rules (14 page)

Dr. Larch knew that Melony was one of the few orphans still at St. Cloud’s who was not born at St. Cloud’s. She’d been left at the hospital entrance one early morning when she’d been four or five; she was always so big for her age, it had been hard to tell how old she was. She hadn’t talked until she was eight or nine. At first, Larch thought she might be retarded, but that wasn’t the problem.

“Melony was always angry,” Dr. Larch tried to explain. “We don’t know about her origins, or her early years, and she may not know herself what all the sources of her anger are.” Larch was deliberating—whether or not he should tell Homer Wells that Melony had been adopted and had been returned more times than Homer. “Melony had several unfortunate experiences in foster homes,” Dr. Larch said cautiously. “If you have the opportunity to ask her about her experiences—and if she wants to talk about them—it might provide her with a welcome release for some of her anger.”

“Ask her about her experiences,” said Homer Wells, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried to
talk
to her.”

Dr. Larch already regretted his suggestion. Perhaps Melony would remember her first foster family and tell Homer about them; they had sent her back because she allegedly bit the family dog in an altercation concerning a ball. It wasn’t just the one fracas that upset the family; they claimed that Melony repeatedly bit the dog. For weeks after the incident, she would creep up on the animal and surprise it when it was eating, or when it was asleep. The family accused Melony of driving the dog crazy.

Melony had run away from the second and third families, alleging that the men in the families, either fathers or brothers, had taken a sexual interest in her. The fourth family claimed that Melony had taken a sexual interest in a younger, female child. In the case of number five: the husband and wife eventually separated because of Melony’s relationship with the husband—the wife claimed that her husband had seduced Melony, the husband claimed that Melony had seduced (he said “attacked”) him. Melony was not ambiguous about the matter. “No one seduces me!” she told Mrs. Grogan proudly. In the case of number six: the husband had died of a heart attack shortly after Melony’s arrival, and the wife had sent the girl back to St. Cloud’s because she felt unequipped for the task of raising Melony alone. (Melony’s only remark to Mrs. Grogan had been: “You bet she’s unequipped!”)

All this, suddenly, Dr. Larch imagined Homer hearing firsthand from Melony; the vision disturbed him. He feared that he had made Homer Wells his apprentice—an attendant to the gritty operation of St. Cloud’s—while at the same time he could not resist screening the boy from some of the harder truths.

It was so like Nurse Angela, of course, to call Homer Wells “angelic,” and so like Nurse Edna to speak of the boy’s “perfection” and of his “innocence,” but Dr. Larch worried about Homer’s contact with the damaged women who sought the services of St. Cloud’s—those departing mothers in whose characters and histories the boy must be seeking some definition of his own mother. And the troubled women who were scraped clean and went away leaving no one behind (just the products of conception)—what impression did they make on the boy?

Homer Wells had a good, open face; it was not a face that could hide things—every feeling and thought was visible upon it, the way a lake in the open reflects every weather. He had a good hand for holding and eyes you could confess to; Dr. Larch was worried about the specific details of the life stories Homer would be exposed to—not simply the sordidness but also the abundant rationalizations he would hear.

And now Melony, the undisputed heavyweight of the girls’ division, had disturbed the boy with her anger—with what Dr. Larch suspected was only the tip of the iceberg of her power; her potential for educating Homer Wells seemed to be both terrible and vast.

Melony began her contribution to Homer’s education the very next evening when he read to the girls’ division. Homer had arrived early (hoping to leave early), but he found the girls’ dormitory quarters in disarray. Many of the girls were out of their beds—some of them shrieking when they saw him; their legs were bare. Homer was embarrassed; he stood under the hanging bulb in the communal bedroom, searching the room without success for Mrs. Grogan, who was always nice to him, and clutching his copy of
Jane Eyre
in both hands—as if the wild girls were likely to tear it away from him.

He did notice that Melony was already in her usual position, in her expected, brief attire. He met her eyes, which were piercing but withholding opinion; then he looked down, or away, or at his hands holding
Jane Eyre.

“Hey, you,” he heard Melony say to him—and he heard a subsequent hush fall among the other girls. “Hey, you,” Melony repeated. When he looked up at her, she was kneeling on her bed and shoving toward him the biggest bare ass he’d ever seen. A blue shadow (perhaps a bruise) discolored one of Melony’s straining thighs; between the bulging, flexed cheeks of her intimidating buttocks, a single dark eye stared at Homer Wells. “Hey,
Sunshine,
” Melony said to Homer, who blushed the color of the sun at sunrise or sunset. “Hey, Sunshine,” Melony crooned sweetly to him—thus giving to the orphan Homer Wells her own name for him:
Sunshine.

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
in
decisive, 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.

There were no curtains at St. Cloud’s. The hospital dispensary was a corner room; it had a south window and an east window, and it was the east window, in Nurse Edna’s opinion, that made Dr. Larch such an early riser. The slim, white-iron hospital bed never looked slept in; Dr. Larch was the last to bed and the first to rise—enhancing the rumor that he never slept at all. If he slept, it was generally agreed that he slept in the dispensary. He did his writing at night, at the typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office. The nurses had long ago forgotten why this room was called Nurse Angela’s office; it was St. Cloud’s only office room, and Dr. Larch had always used it for his writing. Since the dispensary was where he slept, perhaps Dr. Larch felt the need to say that the office belonged to someone else.

The dispensary had two doors (one leading to a toilet and shower), which in such a small room created a problem with furniture. With a window on the south end and on the east wall, and a door on the north and on the west, there was no wall one could put anything
against
; the stark bed fit under the east window. The closed and locked cupboards with their frail glass doors formed an awkward maze around the dispensary counter in the middle of the room; it seemed fitting, for a dispensary, that the medicines and the ether cans and the hardware of small surgery should occupy the most central space, but Larch had other reasons for arranging the room this way. The labyrinth of cabinets in the middle of the room not only left access to the hall and bathroom doors; it also blocked the bed from view of the hall door, which, like all the doors in the orphanage, had no lock.

The cluttered dispensary afforded him some privacy for his ether frolics. How Larch liked the heft of that quarter-pound can. Ether is a matter of experience and technique. Imbibing ether is pungent but light, even though ether is twice as heavy as air; inducing ether anesthesia—bringing one’s patients through the panic of that suffocating odor—is different. With his more delicate patients, Larch often preceded his ether administration with five or six drops of oil of orange. For himself, he required no aromatic preparation, no fruity disguise. He was always conscious of the bump the ether can made when he set it on the floor by the bed; he was not always conscious of the moment when his fingers lost their grip on the mask; the cone—by the force of his own exhalations—fell from his face. He was usually conscious of the limp hand that had released the cone; oddly, that hand was the first part of him to wake up, often reaching for the mask that was no longer there. He could usually hear voices outside the dispensary—if they were calling him. He was confident that he would always have time to recover.

“Doctor Larch?” Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or Homer Wells, would ask, which was all Larch needed to be brought back from his ether voy-age.

“Right here!” Larch would answer. “Just resting.”

It was the dispensary, after all; don’t the dispensaries of surgeons always smell of ether? And for a man who worked so hard and slept so little (if he slept at all), wasn’t it natural that he would need an occasional nap?

It was Melony who first suggested to Homer Wells that Dr. Larch possessed certain remote habits and singular powers.

“Listen, Sunshine,” Melony told Homer, “how come your favorite doctor doesn’t look at women? He doesn’t—believe me. He won’t even look at me, and every male everywhere, every time, looks at me—men and boys look at me. Even you, Sunshine. You look at me.” But Homer Wells looked away.

“And what’s the smell he carries around?” Melony asked.

“Ether,” said Homer Wells. “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.”

Homer let this pass. The top of his dark head measured up to Melony’s shoulder. They were walking on the tree-stripped and eroded riverbank in the part of St. Cloud’s where the abandoned buildings had remained abandoned; the river there had eroded not only the bank but also the foundations of these buildings, which in several cases did not have proper foundations or even cellar holes—some of these buildings were set on posts, which were visible and rotting in the gnawing water at the river’s edge.

The building Homer and Melony preferred had a porch that had not been designed to overhang the river, though it hung over the river now; through the porch’s broken floorboards, Homer and Melony could watch the bruise-colored water rush by.

The building had been a kind of dormitory for the rough men who worked in the saw mills and lumberyards of the old St. Cloud’s; it was not a building of sufficient style for the bosses or even the foremen—the Ramses Paper Company people had kept rooms in the whore hotel. It was a building for the sawyers, the stackers, the yardmen—the men who broke up the logjams, who drove the logs downstream, who hauled the logs and cut lumber overland; the men who worked the mills.

Usually, Homer and Melony stayed outside the building, on the porch. Inside, there were only an empty communal kitchen and the countless, sordid bunkrooms—the ruptured mattresses infested with mice. Because of the railroad, hoboes had come and gone, staking out their territory in the manner of dogs, by peeing around it, thus isolating the mattresses least overrun by the mice. Even with the window glass gone and the rooms half filling with snow in the winters, there was no ridding the inside of that building from the smell of urine.

One day, when the weak spring sun had lured a black snake, sluggish with cold, to warm itself on the floorboards of the porch, Melony said to Homer Wells, “Watch this, Sunshine.” With surprising quickness of hand for such a big girl, she seized the napping snake behind its head. It was a milk shake—almost three feet long, and it twined around Melony’s arm, but Melony held it the proper way, tightly, behind the head, not choking it. Once she had caught it, she seemed to pay no attention to it; she watched the sky as if for a sign and went on talking to Homer Wells.

“Your favorite doctor, Sunshine,” Melony said. “He knows more about you than you know. And more about me than I know, maybe.”

Homer let this pass. He was wary of Melody, especially now that she had a snake. She could grab hold of me just as quickly, he was thinking. She could do something to me with the snake.

“You ever think about your mother?” Melody asked, still searching the sky. “You ever wish you knew who she was, why she didn’t keep you, who your father was—you know, those things?”

“Right,” said Homer Wells, who kept his eyes on the snake. It wound itself around Melody’s arm; then it uncoiled itself and hung like a rope; then it thickened and thinned, all by itself. Tentatively, it explored around Melody’s big hip; appearing to feel more secure, it settled around her thick waist—it could just reach.

“I was told I was left at the door,” Melony said. “Maybe so, maybe not.”

“I was born here,” said Homer Wells.

“So you were told,” Melony said.

“Nurse Angela named me,” Homer offered in evidence.

“Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna would have named you if you’d been
left,
” Melony said. She still watched the sky, she remained indifferent to the snake. She’s bigger than I am, she’s older than I am, she knows more than I do, thought Homer Wells. And she has a snake, he reminded himself, letting Melony’s last remark pass.

“Sunshine,” Melony said absently. “Just think about it: if you were born here in Saint Cloud’s, there’s got to be a record of it. Your favorite doctor knows who your mother is. He’s got to have her name on file. You’re written down, on paper. It’s a law.”

“A law,” Homer Wells said flatly.

“It’s a law that there’s got to be a record of you,” Melony said. “In writing—a record, a file. You’re history, Sunshine.”

“History,” said Homer Wells. He had an image of Dr. Larch sitting at the typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office; if there were records, that was where they would be.