The Cider House Rules (18 page)

He sent Homer to the river to catch a frog; then he made Homer dissect it, although not everything in the frog could be properly accounted for in
Gray’s Anatomy.
It was Homer’s first visit to the river since he had fled from Melony’s destruction of the so-called sawyers’ lodge, and Homer was impressed to see that truly half the building was gone.

Homer was also impressed with the first live birth he was asked to observe—not so much with any special skill that seemed to be required of Dr. Larch, and not with the formal, efficient procedures carried out by Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. What impressed Homer was the process that was already so much under way before Dr. Larch’s procedure began; what impressed Homer was how much had happened to the woman and her child that was, internally, just their natural progress—the actual rhythm of the labor (you could set a watch to it), the power of the woman’s pushing muscles, the urgency of the child to be born. The most unnatural thing about it, to Homer Wells, was how clearly hostile the child found the environment in which it first exercised its lungs—how clearly unfriendly, though not unexciting, the child’s new world was to the child, whose first choice (had it been given a choice) might have been to remain where it was. Not a bad reaction, Melony might have observed, had she been there. However much Homer enjoyed having sex with Melony, he was troubled that the act was more arbitrary than birth.

When Homer went to read
Jane Eyre
to the girls’ division, Melony seemed subdued to him, not defeated or even resigned; something in her had been tired out, something about her look was worn down. She had been wrong, after all, about the existence of her history in Dr. Larch’s hands—and being wrong about important things is exhausting. She had been humiliated, too—first by the incredible shrinking penis of little Homer Wells, and second by how quickly Homer appeared to take sex with her for granted. And, Homer thought, she must be
physically
tired—after all, she had single-handedly obliterated a sizable chunk of the man-made history of St. Cloud’s. She had pushed half a building into the flow of time. She has a right to look worn out, thought Homer Wells.

Something in the way he read
Jane Eyre
struck Homer as different too—as if this or any story were newly informed by the recent experiences in his life: a woman with a pony’s penis in her mouth, his first sexual failure, his first routine sex,
Gray’s Anatomy,
and a live birth. He read with more appreciation of Jane’s anxiety, which had struck him earlier as tedious. Jane has a right to be anxious, he thought.

It was unfortunate timing—after what he and Melony had been through together—that he encountered that passage in the middle of Chapter Ten, where Jane imagines how it might be to leave her orphanage, where she realizes that the real world is “wide,” and that her own existence is “not enough.” Did Homer only imagine there was a new reverence in the girls’ division when he read this section—that Melony, especially, seemed poised above the sentences, as if she were hearing them for the first time? And then he hit this line:

I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon.

His mouth went dry when he read it; he needed to swallow, which gave the line more emphasis than he wanted to give it. When he tried to begin again, Melony stopped him.

“What was that? Read that again, Sunshine.”

“ ‘I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon,’ ” Homer Wells read aloud.

“I know just how she feels,” Melony said bitterly, but quietly.

“It hurts me to hear you say that, Melony,” Mrs. Grogan began softly.

“I know just how she feels!” Melony repeated. “And so do you, Sunshine!” she added. “Little Jane should try fifteen or sixteen or seventeen years,” Melony announced loudly. “She should try it and see if she doesn’t ‘tire’ of
that
routine!”

“You’ll only hurt yourself, dear, if you keep on like that,” Mrs. Grogan said. And indeed, this seemed true; Melony was crying. She was such a big girl—to put her head in Mrs. Grogan’s lap and allow her to stroke her hair—but she just went on crying, quietly. Mrs. Grogan could not remember when she’d last held Melony’s head in her lap. Homer caught the look from Mrs. Grogan: that he should leave. It was not the end of the chapter, not even the end of the scene, or even of a paragraph. There was more to read; the next line began:

I desired liberty . . .

But it would have been cruel to continue. Jane Eyre had already made her point. Homer and Melony had already had several such afternoons—those days that tire you out about your whole life!

This night the air between the girls’ and boys’ division seemed odorless and void of history. It was simply dark outside.

When he went back to the boys’ division, Nurse Angela told him that John Wilbur was gone
—adopted!

“A nice family,” Nurse Angela told Homer happily. “The father of the family used to be a bed-wetter. They’re going to be very sympathetic.”

As was Dr. Larch’s habit, when someone was adopted, his routine benediction to the boys in the darkness was altered slightly. Before he addressed them as “Princes of Maine,” as “Kings of New England,” he made an oddly formal announcement.

“Let us be happy for John Wilbur,” Wilbur Larch said. “He has found a family. Good night, John,” Dr. Larch said, and the boys murmured after him:

“Good night, John!”

“Good night, John Wilbur.”

And Dr. Larch would pause respectfully before saying the usual: “Good night, you Princes of Maine—you Kings of New England!”

Homer Wells looked at a little of
Gray’s Anatomy
in the candlelight allowed him before he tried to go to sleep. It was not just John Wilbur’s peeing that was missing from the night; something else was gone. It took Homer a while to detect what was absent; it was the silence that finally informed him. Fuzzy Stone and his noisy apparatus had been taken to the hospital. Apparently, the breathing contraption—and Fuzzy—required more careful monitoring, and Dr. Larch had moved the whole business into the private room, next to surgery, where Nurse Edna or Nurse Angela could keep a closer eye on Fuzzy.

It was not until Homer Wells had some experience with dilatation and curettage that he would know what Fuzzy Stone resembled: he looked like an embryo—Fuzzy Stone looked like a walking, talking fetus. That was what was peculiar about the way you could almost see through Fuzzy’s skin, and his slightly caved-in shape; that was what made him appear so especially vulnerable. He looked as if he were not yet alive but still in some stage of development that should properly be carried on inside the womb. Dr. Larch told Homer that Fuzzy had been born prematurely—that Fuzzy’s lungs had never adequately developed. Homer would not have a picture of what this meant until he confronted the few recognizable parts in his first look at the standard procedure for removing the products of conception.

“Are you listening, Homer?” Wilbur Larch asked, when the procedure was over.

“Yes,” Homer Wells said.

“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?” Larch asked.

“Right,” said Homer Wells.

When he couldn’t sleep, he thought about Fuzzy Stone. When Homer went down to the private room, next to surgery, he couldn’t hear the breathing apparatus. He stood very still and listened; he could always track Fuzzy down by his sound—lungs, waterwheel and fan—but the silence Homer Wells listened to made a more startling noise to him than the sound of that snake hitting the roof while his finger was in Melony’s mouth.

Poor Melony, he thought. She now listened to
Jane Eyre
as if it were her life story being told to her, and the only thing she ever said to Homer Wells was to remind him of his promise. (“You won’t leave here before I do, remember? You promised.”)

“Where is he?” Homer asked Dr. Larch. “Where’s Fuzzy?”

Dr. Larch was at the typewriter in Nurse Angela’s office, where he was—very late—almost every night.

“I was thinking of a way to tell you,” Larch said.

“You said I was your apprentice, right?” Homer asked him. “If that’s what I am, I should be told. If you’re teaching me, you can’t leave anything out. Right?”

“That’s right, Homer,” Dr. Larch agreed. How the boy had changed! How does one mark the passage of time in an orphanage? Why hadn’t Larch noticed that Homer Wells needed a shave? Why hadn’t Larch taught him to do that? I am responsible for everything—if I am going to be responsible at all, Larch reminded himself.

“Fuzzy’s lungs weren’t strong enough, Homer,” Dr. Larch said. “They never developed properly. He was susceptible to every respiratory infection that I ever saw.”

Homer Wells let it pass. He regretted that Fuzzy had seen the photograph. Homer was growing up; he was starting the process of holding himself responsible for things. That photograph had upset Fuzzy Stone; there was nothing Homer, or even Dr. Larch, could have done for Fuzzy’s lungs, but the photograph hadn’t been necessary.

“What are you going to tell the little ones?” Homer asked Dr. Larch.

Wilbur Larch looked at Homer; God, how he loved what he saw! Proud as a father, he had trouble speaking. His affection for Homer Wells had virtually etherized him. “What do you think I should say, Homer?” Dr. Larch asked.

It was Homer’s first decision as an adult. He thought about it very carefully. In 193_, he was almost sixteen. He was beginning the process of learning how to be a doctor at a time when most boys his age were learning how to drive a car. Homer had not yet learned how to drive a car; Wilbur Larch had never learned how to drive a car.

“I think,” said Homer Wells, “that you should tell the little ones what you usually tell them. You should tell them that Fuzzy has been adopted.”

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.” When he wrote that line, Wilbur Larch saw the cloud created in the photographer’s studio, the cloud that so falsely edged the photograph of Mrs. Eames’s daughter with the pony; he launched off into a paragraph on “clouds.” (The terrible weather in inland Maine; “the
clouds
of St. Cloud’s,” and so forth.)

When Homer Wells suggested to Dr. Larch that he tell the little ones that Fuzzy Stone had been adopted, Larch knew that Homer was right; there were no clouds around that decision. The next night, Wilbur Larch followed the advice of his young apprentice. Perhaps because he was lying, he forgot the proper routine. Instead of beginning with the announcement about Fuzzy Stone, he gave the usual benediction; he got the whole business out of order.

“Good night, you Princes of Maine—you Kings of New England!” Dr. Larch addressed them in the darkness. Then he remembered what he was supposed to say. “Oh!” he said aloud, in a startled voice that caused one of the little orphans to leap in his bed in fright.

“What’s wrong?” cried Snowy Meadows, who was always throwing up; he did not throw up only when confronted with the image of a woman with what he thought was a pony’s intestines in her mouth.

“Nothing’s wrong!” Dr. Larch said heartily, but the whole room of boys was charged with anxiety. Into this jumpy atmosphere, Larch tried to say the usual about the unusual. “Let us be happy for Fuzzy Stone,” Dr. Larch said. Homer Wells knew what was meant when it was said that you could hear a pin drop. “Fuzzy Stone has found a family,” Dr. Larch said. “Good night, Fuzzy.”

“Good night, Fuzzy!” someone said. But Homer Wells heard a pause in the air; it had all been done out of order, and not everyone was completely convinced.

“Good night, Fuzzy!” Homer Wells said with authority, and a few of the little voices followed him.

“Good night, Fuzzy!”

“Good night, Fuzzy Stone!”

Homer Wells also knew what was meant when it was said that silence could be deafening. After Dr. Larch had left them, little Snowy Meadows was the first to speak.

“Homer?” Snowy said.

“Right here,” said Homer Wells in the darkness.

“How could anyone adopt Fuzzy Stone, Homer?” Snowy Meadows asked.

“Who could do it?” said little Wilbur Walsh.

“Someone with a better machine,” said Homer Wells. “Someone who had a better breathing machine than the one Doctor Larch built for Fuzzy. It’s a family that knows all about breathing machines. It’s the family business,” he added. “Breathing machines.”

“Lucky Fuzzy!” someone said in a wondering voice.

Homer knew he had convinced them when Snowy Meadows said, “Good night, Fuzzy.”

Homer Wells, not yet sixteen—an apprentice surgeon, a veteran insomniac—walked down to the river that had carried away so many pieces of the history of St. Cloud’s. The loudness of the river was a comfort to Homer, more comforting than the silence in the sleeping room that night. He stood on the riverbank where the porch to the sawyers’ lodge had been, where he’d seen the hawk come from the sky more quickly than the snake could swim to shore—and the snake had been very fast.

If Wilbur Larch had seen Homer there, he would have worried that the boy was saying good-bye to his own childhood—too soon. But Dr. Larch had ether to help him sleep, and Homer Wells had no cure for his insomnia.

“Good night, Fuzzy,” Homer said over the river. The Maine woods, typically, let the remark pass, but Homer insisted that he be heard. “Good night, Fuzzy!” he cried as loud as he could. And then louder, “Good night, Fuzzy!” He yelled it and yelled it—the grown-up boy whose crying had once been a legend upriver in Three Mile Falls.