The Cider House Rules (38 page)

Years later, when she became the proud owner of the first TV set in Heart’s Rock, Olive Worthington would say that Homer Wells was the only person who ever pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the tank in Ray Kendall’s lobster pound “as if he were watching the news on television.”

Homer pulled lobster pots with Candy’s father on Sundays—not for money but to be out on the water and to be around Ray. Six days a week Homer worked with Wally in the orchards. The ocean was visible from only one of Ocean View’s several orchards but the presence of the sea was felt throughout the farm, especially in the early-morning fog, and when a sea breeze freshened the summer heat—and because of the sea gulls who circled inland and occasionally perched in the trees. They were more partial to blueberries than to apples but their presence was an irritation to Olive, who from her early years among the clams had no love for the raucous birds, and who fought with the gulls over the small plot of blueberries she was cultivating—the blueberries were protected with low-hung nets, but the gulls and the crows were smart enough to walk under the nets.

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.

Wilbur Larch knew that freedom was an orphan’s most dangerous illusion, and when he finally heard from Homer, he scanned the oddly formal letter, which was disappointing in its lack of detail. Regarding illusions, and all the rest, there was simply no evidence.

“I am learning to swim,” wrote Homer Wells. (I know! I know!
Tell
me about it! thought Wilbur Larch.) “I do better at driving,” Homer added.

“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.)

“Candy and Wally are wonderful!” Homer wrote. “I go everywhere with them. I sleep in Wally’s room. I wear his clothes. It’s great that we’re the same size, although he is stronger. Candy and Wally are getting married, one day, and they want to have lots of children.” (Tell me about the swimming lessons, thought Wilbur Larch. Watch out for the swimming lessons.)

“Poor Mr. Worthington—everyone calls him Senior,” Homer wrote. (Ah
-ha
! thought Wilbur Larch. So something isn’t perfect, is it? What’s “poor” about Mr. Worthington?)

He asked Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna what they thought of the name “Senior.” They agreed it was different.

“It sounds stupid to me,” said Wilbur Larch.

Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna told him he wasn’t being fair. The boy had departed with his blessings—more, with his encouragement. 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.)

A pattern of correspondence slowly developed between Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells. Homer would sketch the barest facts of his life in Heart’s Rock and Heart’s Haven; he would give Dr. Larch a glimpse, like the far-off visibility of the ocean from the one orchard at Ocean View where sighting the sea was possible. He would send Dr. Larch a page, maybe two pages once a week or every other week. To this speck on the horizon Dr. Larch would respond with the full orchestration of the written word: questions (which would never be answered) regarding the specificity that was lacking in Homer’s last letter (“What precisely is the matter with Mr. Worthington?”) and a flood of details concerning the daily grimness of St. Cloud’s. As much as Dr. Larch disdained the gossipy instinct of Snowy Meadows for “keeping up” with the orphanage, 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.

“What the hell is wrong with this Senior Worthington character?” Dr. Larch asked.

“Homer said it was a drinking problem, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna reminded him.

“What do you want to know—the brand of hooch?” Nurse Angela asked.

But what Wilbur Larch expected from his young apprentice was only what he thought he had taught him: clinical analysis, the exact definition of characteristics associated with light, medium, or heavy drinking. Are we talking about a guy who makes a fool out of himself at parties? Wilbur Larch wondered. Or is this something severe and chronic?

Because Homer Wells had never seen a drunk before, he was—at first—even more easily deceived by Senior Worthington’s appearance than Senior’s immediate family and friends were; and Homer was as ready as they were to accept Senior’s deterioration in cognition as the natural result of alcoholism. A man long admired in Heart’s Rock and Heart’s Haven, especially for the sweetness of his disposition, Senior had become short-tempered, irritable, and even aggressive on occasion. Following the incident with the grasshopper pie, Olive wouldn’t allow him to go to the Haven Club without her: Senior had plastered an entire grasshopper pie against the chest of a nice, young lifeguard and needed to be restrained, then, from further smearing the pale-green ingredients on the rump of a nice, young waitress. “He was showing off,” Senior said of the lifeguard. “He was just
standing there,
” he explained.

“And the waitress?” Olive asked. Senior appeared confused and began to cry.

“I thought she was someone else,” he said faintly. Olive had taken him home; Wally had made up to the waitress; it was Candy who had charmed and reassured the lifeguard.

Senior became lost driving to other than routine places; Olive never allowed him to have the car unless Wally or Homer went with him. Eventually, he became lost trying to get to familiar places; Homer had to lead him back to Ocean View from Ray Kendall’s lobster pound—even Homer, who was unfamiliar with the network of small roads to and from the coast, could tell that Senior had made a wrong turn.

Senior made terrible mistakes in any complex motor task. While cleaning the carburetor for the Cadillac—a simple job, which Ray Kendall had demonstrated for him many times—Senior inhaled the gas and little carbon particles in the tubes (he sucked
in
instead of blowing
out
).

Senior’s recent memory was so severely impaired that he wandered for an hour through his own bedroom unable to dress himself; he constantly confused his sock drawer with the drawer for Olive’s underwear. One morning he became so enraged at his mistake that he appeared at the breakfast table with each foot tightly tied up in a bra. Normally friendly to Homer and tender to Wally and Olive, he shouted an accusation at Wally—that his own son was wearing his father’s socks, which he had taken without his father’s permission!—and he ranted at Olive for turning his domicile into a foundling home without asking his permission regarding
that.

“You’d be better off at Saint Cloud’s than in this house of thieves,” he told Homer.

Upon saying this, Senior Worthington burst into tears and begged Homer’s forgiveness; he put his head on Homer’s shoulder and wept. “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.

Sometimes it went like this. Senior would not drink for three days—a part of him able to observe that his silliness flourished no less ardently. Yet he would forget to make this point to Olive, or to anyone else, until he’d broken down and had a drink; by the time he remembered to say he had
not
been drinking, he was drunk. Why do I forget everything? he wondered, and then forgot it.

Yet his long-range memory was quite intact. He sang college songs to Olive (the lines of which she herself was unable to remember), and he sweetly recalled for her the romantic evenings of their courtship; he told Wally stories of Wally as a baby; he entertained Homer by cheerfully recounting the planting of some of the older-tree orchards, including the lone orchard from which the sea was visible.

“It was where I wanted to build the house, Homer,” Senior said. It was lunchtime. Wally and Homer had been suckering in the orchard: stripping the inner limbs off the tree or any new, sprouting branches (or “suckers”) that are turned inward—the ones not reaching out to the sun. Wally had heard the story; he was distracted; he poured some Coca-Cola on an anthill. Suckering exposes as many of the limbs as possible to the light; it lets the light come through the tree.

“You don’t allow an apple tree to grow every which way,” Wally had explained to Homer.

“Like a boy!” Senior had shouted, laughing.

“Olive thought it was too windy for a house here,” Senior told Homer. “Women are disturbed by the wind more than men are disturbed by it,” Senior confided. “That’s a fact. Anyway . . .” 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.

“You can see this orchard from the second floor of our house. Did you know that?” he asked Homer.

“Right,” Homer said. Wally’s room was on the second floor. From Wally’s window, he could see the orchard from which the sea was visible, but the sea wasn’t visible from Wally’s window—or from any other window in the house.

“I called the whole place Ocean View,” Senior explained, “because I thought the house was going to be here. Right here,” he repeated. He looked down at the foaming Coca-Cola that Wally was slowly pouring onto the anthill.

“You use poison oats and poison corn to kill the mice,” Senior said. “It stinks.” Wally looked up at him; Homer nodded. “You scatter the stuff for the field mice, but you have to find the holes and put it in the tunnels if you want to kill the pine mice,” he said.

“We know, Pop,” Wally said softly.

“Field mice are the same as meadow mice,” Senior explained to Homer, who had already been told this.

“Right,” Homer said.

“Meadow mice girdle a tree, and pine mice eat the roots,” Senior recited, from his distant memory.

Wally stopped pouring the Coke on the anthill. He and Homer didn’t know why Senior had joined them for their lunch break; they’d been suckering in the ocean orchard all morning, and Senior had just shown up. He was driving the old jeep that didn’t have any license plates; it was strictly for driving around the orchards.

“Pop?” Wally asked him. “What are you doing out here?”

Senior stared blankly at his son. He looked at Homer; he hoped Homer might tell him the answer. He regarded his audience—the apple trees, the far-off ocean.

“I wanted to build the house here,
right here,
” he said to Wally. “But your bossy bitch of a have-it-all-her-own-way mother wouldn’t let me—she wouldn’t let me, the
cunt
!” he cried. “Clam-digger cunt, well-digger
pussy
!” he shouted. He stood up, he looked disoriented; Wally stood up with him.

“Come on, Pop,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

They took Wally’s pickup. Homer followed them in the old jeep; it was the vehicle he had learned to drive in after Wally had assured him that he couldn’t hurt it.

Alcohol, thought Homer Wells; it sure can destroy you.

Senior had all the other symptoms, too. He was fifty-five; he looked seventy. He had periods of paranoia, of grandiosity, of confabulation. His few obnoxious traits—which he’d always had—were exaggerated; in his case, nose-picking, for example. He could explore a nostril for an hour; he put boogers on his pants or on the furniture. Olive’s vulgar brother, Bucky Bean, claimed that Senior could have been a well-digger. “The way he roots into his snoot,” Bucky said, “I could use him to dig a well.”

The Haven Club’s lifeguard, whose chest had received the full force of the grasshopper pie, turned out to be not completely mollified. He objected to Candy giving Homer swimming lessons in the shallow end of the pool in the late afternoon. The pool was crowded then, he complained; swimming lessons were regularly scheduled in the early morning—and he—the lifeguard—regularly administered them—for a fee. He was not convinced that he should be flexible about the matter. Homer worked at Ocean View all day, Candy argued. In the late afternoon, when Wally played tennis after work, was the ideal time for Candy to give Homer instructions.