The Cider House Rules (23 page)

It was rumored he had more money than Senior Worthington; there was almost no evidence of his spending any—except on his daughter. Like the children of the Haven Club members, she went to a private boarding school; and Raymond Kendall paid the considerable annual dues for a Haven Club membership—not for himself (he went to the club only on request: to fix things) but for his daughter, who’d learned to swim in the heated pool there, and who’d taken her tennis lessons on the same courts graced by young Wally Worthington. Kendall’s daughter had her own car, too—it looked out of place in the Haven Club parking lot. It was a lobster-pound-parking-lot sort of car, a mishmash of the parts that were still serviceable from other cars; one of its fenders was unpainted and was attached with wires; it had a Ford insignia on its hood and a Chrysler emblem on the trunk, and the passenger-side door was sealed completely shut. However,
its
battery never went dead in the Haven Club lot; it was never
this relic
that wouldn’t start; when one of the Haven Club members had a car that wouldn’t start, he went looking for Raymond Kendall’s daughter, who kept jumper cables in her sturdy wreck and had been taught by her father how to use them.

Some of the fabulous money Raymond Kendall was rumored to have, and to hoard, was paid him as salary by Olive Worthington; in addition to his lobstering, Ray Kendall kept the vehicles and machinery of the Ocean View Orchards running. Olive Worthington paid him a full foreman’s salary because he knew almost as much about apples as he knew about lobsters (and he was indispensable as the farm’s mechanic), but Ray refused to work more than two hours a day. He picked his own two hours, too—sometimes coming first thing, saying it was a bad time to go to sea, and sometimes showing up at the end of the workday, just in time to hear the orchardmen’s complaints about what was wrong with the nozzle of the Hardie or with the pump of the Bean sprayer, or what was plugged in the carburetor of the Deere tractor, or out of tune with the International Harvester. He saw instantly what was crooked in the mower blades, fucked up in the forklift, jammed in the conveyor, dead in the pickup, or out of alignment in the cider mill. Raymond Kendall did in two hours what another mechanic would have spent a day doing a half-assed job of, and he almost never came to Olive and told her that she had to get a new this or a new that.

It was always Olive who made the first suggestion: that something should be replaced.

“Isn’t the clutch on the Deere always in need of adjustment, Ray?” she would politely ask him. “Would you recommend its replacement?”

But Raymond Kendall was a surgeon among tinkerers—he had a doctor’s hearty denial of death—and he found replacing something an admission of weakness, of failure. He would almost always say, “Well, now, Olive—if I fixed it before, I can fix it again. I can always just go on fixing it.”

Olive respected Raymond Kendall’s contempt for people who didn’t know their own work and had “no capacity for work of any kind, anyhow.” She agreed with him completely, and she also appreciated that he never included in his contempt either Senior or her father, Bruce Bean. Besides, Senior Worthington knew enough about managing money with his left hand that he’d been very successful without working more than an hour a day—usually on the telephone.

“The crop,” Olive would say, of her beloved apples, “can survive bad weather even at blossom time.” By which she meant wind; a stiff offshore breeze would keep Ira Titcomb’s bees in their hives, and the wild bees would be blown back into the woods, where they pollinated everything but apple trees. “The crop can even survive a bad harvest,” Olive said. She might have meant rain, when the fruit is slippery, gets dropped, gets bruised, is then good only for cider; or even a hurricane, which is a real danger for a coastal orchard. “The crop could even survive something happening to
me,
” Olive claimed—at which modesty both Senior Worthington and young Wally would voice protest. “But what the crop could never survive,” Olive would say, “is losing Ray Kendall.” She meant that without Raymond nothing would work, or that they’d have to buy new
everything,
which soon wouldn’t work any better than the old stuff that only Ray could keep running.

“I doubt very much, Mother,” said young Wally, “if either Heart’s Haven or Heart’s Rock could survive without Raymond Kendall.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Senior Worthington said, and promptly did so, causing Olive to look tragic and inspiring young Wally to change the subject.

Despite the fact that Ray Kendall worked two hours every day at Ocean View, he was never seen to eat an apple; only rarely did he eat lobster (he preferred chicken or pork chops, or even hamburger). During a Haven Club regatta, several sailors claimed that they could smell Ray Kendall frying hamburger aboard his lobster boat while he was pulling in his pots.

But whatever legend of the work ethic Ray represented, and whatever griping was done on account of the evidence of his work with which Raymond Kendall preferred to surround himself, no fault could be found with his beautiful daughter—except the fault of her name, which was not her fault (who would ever have named herself a Candice, and therefore been a Candy to all?) and which everyone knew had been the name of her dead mother, and therefore was not the mother’s fault, either. Candice “Candy” Kendall was named after her mother, who had died in childbirth. Raymond had named his daughter in memory of his departed wife, whom everyone had liked and who, in her day, had kept the environs of the lobster pound and the dock slightly better picked up. Who could find fault with any name that was given out of love?

You had only to know her to know that she was not a Candy; she was lovely, but never falsely sweet; she was a great and natural beauty, but no crowd-pleaser. She had daily reliability written all over her, she was at once friendly and practical—she was courteous, energetic, and substantial in an argument without ever being shrill. She complained only about her name, and she was always good-humored about it (she would never hurt her father’s feelings—or anyone else’s feelings, willingly). She appeared to combine her father’s enraptured embrace of the work ethic with the education and the refinements he had allowed her—she took to both labor and sophistication with ease. If other girls at the Haven Club (or in the rest of Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock) were jealous of the attention young Wally Worthington gave to her, there was still no one who disliked her. If she’d been born an orphan, even at St. Cloud’s, half the population
there
would have fallen in love with her.

Even Olive Worthington liked her, and Olive was suspicious of the girls who dated Wally; she questioned what they wanted from him. She could never forget how much she had wanted to get out of her life and into a Worthington’s green and apple-bright existence at Ocean View, and this memory of her younger self gave Olive an eye for girls who might be more interested in the Ocean View life than they were interested in Wally. Olive knew this wasn’t the case with Candy, who seemed to think that her own life above Ray Kendall’s crawling, live-lobster pound was perfect; she was as fond of her father’s orneriness as she was deservedly proud of his industry. She was well cared for by the latter. She wasn’t looking for money, and she preferred taking Wally for an ocean swim—off her father’s treacherous and crowded dock—to swimming in the Haven Club pool or in the Worthingtons’ private swimming pool, where she knew she was welcome. In truth, Olive Worthington thought that Candy Kendall might be too good for her son, whom she knew to be rather unsettled, or at least
not
industrious—she would grant you he was charming and genuinely good-natured.

And then there was the uncertain pain that Candy caused in Olive’s memory of her mother, Maud (frozen among her cosmetics and clams): Olive envied Candy her perfect love of
her
mother (whom she’d never seen); the girl’s absolute goodness made Olive feel guilty for how much she despised her own origins (her mother’s silence, her father’s failure, her brother’s vulgarity).

Candy worshiped at the little shrines to her mother that Raymond Kendall constructed—there were actual altarpieces assembled—all over the upstairs rooms of the lobster pound, where they lived above the gurgle of the lobster tank. And everywhere were gathered the photographs of Candy’s young mother, many taken with Candy’s young father (who was so unrecognizably youthful, whose smile was so unrecognizably constant in the pictures that Candy looked at Ray, at times, as if he were as much a stranger to her as her mother).

Candy’s mother was said to have smoothed out Ray’s rough edges. She’d had a sunny spirit, she’d kept on top of everything, she’d had the boundless energy that Raymond Kendall possessed for his work and Candy had in abundance for everything. On the coffee table, in the kitchen, alongside a disassembled magneto case and ignition system (for the Evinrude), was a triptych of pictures of Ray and Candice at their wedding, which had been the only time Ray Kendall had attended an event at the Haven Club when he was not dressed to repair something.

In Ray’s bedroom, on the night table, next to the broken toggle-switch to the Johnson (the inboard Johnson; there was an outboard, too), was a picture of Candice and Ray—both in their oilskin slickers, both pulling pots, on a rough sea (and it was clear to anyone, especially to Candy, that Candice was pregnant
and
hard at work).

In her own bedroom, Candy kept the picture of her mother when her mother had been Candy’s age (which was Homer Wells’s age, exactly): young Candice Talbot, of the Heart’s Haven Talbots—the longstanding Haven Club Talbots. She was in a long white dress (for tennis, of all things!), and she looked just like Candy. The picture was taken the summer she met Ray (an older boy, strong and dark and determined to fix everything, to make everything
work
); if he had seemed a hick, or a little too serious, he was at least not grim about his ambitions, and alongisde him the boys at the Haven Club had appeared as court dandies, as spoiled, upper-class fops.

Candy had her mother’s blondness; it was darker than Wally’s blondness—and much darker than her mother’s and than Olive Worthington’s former blondness. She had her father’s dark skin and dark brown eyes, and her father’s height. Ray Kendall was a tall man (a disadvantage for a lobsterman, and for a mechanic, he used to say good-naturedly, because of the strain on the lower back when pulling lobster pots—there is nearly constant lifting in that work—and because of a mechanic’s need to crawl under and bend over things). Candy was extremely tall for a woman, which intimidated Olive Worthington—just a bit—but was felt by Olive as only a mild flaw in Olive’s near-perfect satisfaction with Candy Kendall as the correct match for Wally.

Olive Worthington was fairly tall herself (taller than Senior, especially when Senior was staggering), and she looked in a somewhat unfriendly fashion upon everyone who was taller than she. Her son, Wally, was taller than she, too, which Olive still found difficult at times—especially when she desired to reprimand him.

“Is Candy taller than you, Wally?” she asked him once, a sudden alarm in her voice.

“No, Mom, we’re exactly the same height,” Wally told his mother. That was another thing that slightly bothered her about the two of them being together: they seemed so alike physically. Was their attraction to each other a form of narcissism? Olive worried. And since each of them was an only child, were they seeing in each other the brother or sister they always wanted? Wilbur Larch would have got along with Olive Worthington; she was a born worrier. Together they could have outworried the rest of the world.

They shared the concept that there
was
a “rest of the world,” by which they meant the
whole
rest of the world—the world outside their making. They were both smart enough to know why they feared this other world so much: they fully understood that, despite their considerable efforts, they were only marginally in control of the worlds of their own delicate making.

When Candy Kendall and Wally Worthington fell in love with each other, in the summer of 194_, everyone in Heart’s Haven and in Heart’s Rock always knew they would—it was a wonder only that it had taken them this long to discover it themselves. For years, both towns had thought them perfect for each other. Even crusty Raymond Kendall approved. Ray thought Wally was unfocused, but that was not the same as lazy, and anyone could see the boy was good-hearted. Ray also approved of Wally’s mother; he had a thorough liking for the way Olive Worthington respected work.

Everyone felt sorry for how out of it poor Senior seemed, how his drinking (they thought) had aged him overnight. “It won’t be long, Alice, before the guy’s pissing his pants in public,” the charmless Bucky Bean said to Olive.

And Candy thought that Olive Worthington would be a perfect mother-in-law. When Candy dreamed of her own mother—grown older than she’d been allowed to grow in this life; grown naturally older in a better world—she always thought her mother would have aged to resemble Olive Worthington. Candy hoped, at least, that her mother would have managed Olive’s refinement, if not perhaps her college-learned New British. Candy would be going to college in a year, she assumed, and she had no intentions of learning an accent there. But except for the accent, Candy thought Olive Worthington was wonderful; it was sad about Senior, but the man was certainly sweet.

So everyone was happy with this love affair that was as certain to become a marriage made in heaven as any love affair Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock had seen. It was understood that Wally would finish college first, and that Candy would be allowed to finish college—if she wanted to—before they got married. But with Olive Worthington’s instincts for worry, one might have assumed that Olive would have foreseen the possible causes for a change of plans. After all, it was 194_; there was a war in Europe; there were many people who thought that more than Europe would be involved before long. But Olive had a mother’s wish to keep war out of her mind.