The Cider House Rules (71 page)

Aside from the darkness in his eyes and an ability to {573} sustain a pensive, faraway look that was both alert and dreaming, Angel Wells resembled his father very little. He never thought of himself as an orphan, he knew he had been adopted, and he knew he came from where his father came from. And he knew he was loved; he had always felt it. What did it matter that he called Candy 'Candy' and Homer 'Dad'— and Wally 'Wally'?

This was the second summer that Angel Wells had been strong enough to carry Wally—up some steps, or into the surf, or out of the shallow end of the pool and back into the wheelchair. Homer had taught Angel how to carry Wally into the surf, when they went to the beach. Wally was a better swimmer than any of them, but he needed to get into deep enough water so that he could either float over a wave or duck under one.

'You just can't let him get dragged around in the shallow water,' Homer had explained to his son.

There were some rules regarding Wally (there were always rules;, Angel had observed). As good a swimmer as he was, Wally was never allowed to swim alone, and for many summers now, Angel Wells had been Wally's lifeguard whenever Wally swam his laps or just floated in the pool. Almost half the physical contact between Wally and Angel occurred in the water, where they resembled otters or seals. They wrestled and dunked each other so ferociously that Candy couldn't help being anxious at times for both of them.

And Wally was not allowed to drive alone; even though the Cadillac had hand-operated controls, someone else had to collapse the wheelchair and put it in or take it out of the back of the car. The first collapsible wheelchairs were quite heavy. Although Wally would occasionally drag himself through the ground floor of the house using one of those metal walkers, his legs were mere props; in unfamiliar terrain, he needed his wheelchair—and in rough terrain, he needed a pusher.

So many times the pusher had been Angel; and so many times Angel had been the passenger in the {574} Cadillac. Although Homer and Candy might have complained if they had known, Wally had long ago taught Angel to drive the Cadillac.

'The hand controls make it easy, kiddo,' Wally would say. 'Your legs don't have to be long enough to reach the pedals.' That was not what Candy had told Angel about teaching him to drive in the Jeep. 'Just as soon as your legs are long enough to reach the pedals,' she had told him, kissing him (which she did whenever she had the excuse), Til teach you how to drive.'

When the time came, it never occurred to Candy that Angel had been so easy to teach because he'd been driving the Cadillac for years.

'Some rules are good rules, kiddo,' Wally would tell the boy, kissing him (which Wally did a lot, especially in the water). 'But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully.'

'It's dumb that I have to be sixteen before I get a driver's license,' Angel told his father.

'Right,' said Homer Wells. 'They should make an exception for kids who grow up on farms.'

Sometimes Angel played tennis with Candy, but more often he hit balls back to Wally, who maintained his good strokes even sitting down. The club members had complained a little about the wheelchair tracks on the clay—but what would the Haven Club have been without tolerating one or another Worthington eccentricity? Wally would set the wheelchair in a fixed position and hit only forehands for fifteen or twenty minutes; Angel's responsibility was to get the ball exactly to him. Then Wally would move the chair and hit only backhands.

'It's actually better practice for you than for me, kiddo,' Wally would tell Angel. 'At least, I'm not getting any better.' Angel got a lot better; he was so much better than Candy that it sometimes hurt his mother's feelings when she detected how boring it was for Angel to play with her.

Homer Wells didn't play tennis. He had never been a {575} games man, he had resisted even the indoor football at St. Cloud's—although he occasionally dreamed of stickball, usually with Nurse Angela pitching; she was always the hardest to hit. And Homer Wells had no hobbies— nothing beyond following Angel around, as if Homer were his son's pet, a dog waiting to be played with. Pillow fights in the dark; they'd been popular for a few years. Kissing each other good night, and then finding excuses to repeat the ritual—and finding novel ways to wake each other in the mornings. If Homer was bored, he was also busy. He had continued his volunteer work for Cape Kenneth Hospital; in a sense, he had never stopped his; war effort, his service as a nurses' aide. And he was a veteran reader of medical literature.
The Journal of the American Medical Association
and
The New England Journal of Medicine
were very acceptably piled up on the tables and in the bookcases of the Ocean View house. Candy objected to the illustrations in
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

'I need a little intellectual stimulation around here,' Homer Wells would say whenever Candy complained about the graphic nature of this material.

'I just don't think that Angel has to see it,' Candy said.

'He knows I have a little background in the subject,' Homer said.

'I don't object to what he knows, I object to the pictures,' Candy said.

'There's no reason to mystify the subject for the child,' Wally said, taking Homer's side.

'There's no need to make the subject grotesque, either,' Candy argued.

'I don't think it's either a mystery or grotesque,' Angel said, that summer he was fifteen. 'It's just interesting.'

'You're not even going out with girls, yet,' Candy said, laughing, and taking the opportunity to kiss him. But when she bent over him to kiss him, she saw in her son's lap the illustration that was featured in an article on vaginal operations. The illustration indicated the lines of {576} incision for the removal of the vulva and a primary tumor in an extended radical vulvectomy.

'Homer!' Candy shouted. Homer was upstairs in his very spare bedroom. His life was so spare, he'd tacked only two things on his walls—and one of those was in his bathroom. By his bed he had a picture of Wally in his flier's scarf and sheepskin. Wally was posing with the crew of
Opportunity Knocks;
the shadow from the wing of the dark plane completely obscured the face of the radioman, and the glare of the Indian sun completely whited out the face of the crew chief (who had eventually died of his colon complication); only Wally and the co-pilot were correctly illuminated, although Homer had seen better pictures of them both. The copilot sent Wally a picture of himself and his growing family every Christmas; he had five or six children and a plump wife; but every year the co-pilot looked thinner (the amoeba he'd contracted in Burma had never entirely left him).

And in the bathroom Homer had tacked up the blank questionnaire, the extra copy—the one he'd never sent to the board of trustees of St. Cloud's. The exposure to the steam from the shower had given to the paper of the questionnaire the texture of a parchment lampshade, but each question had remained readable and idiotic.

The master bed was higher than most (because, in his day, Senior Worthington had enjoyed looking out the window while lying down); it was a feature Homer also appreciated about the bed. He could oversee the pool from up there, and he could see the cider house roof; he liked to lie on that bed for hours, just looking out the window. 'Homer!' Candy called to him. 'Please come see what your son is reading!'

That was the way they all talked. Candy said 'your son' to Homer, and that's how Wally spoke, too, and Angel always said 'Dad' or 'Pop' when he addressed his father. It had been an uninterrupted, fifteen-year relationship —Homer and Angel upstairs, Wally and Candy {577} in the former dining room downstairs. The four of them ate their meals together.

Some nights—especially in winter, wh«!n the bare trees permitted more of a view of the lit dining room and kitchen windows of strangers' houses—Homer Wells liked to take a short car ride before dinner. He wondered about the families who were eating dinner together— what were their real lives like? St. Cloud's had been more predictable. What did anyone really know about all those families sitting down to have a meal?

'We
are
a family. Isn't that the main thing?' Candy asked Homer Wells, whenever Homer appeared to her to be taking longer and longer drives before dinner.

'Angel has a family, a really wonderful family. Yes, that's the main thing,' Homer agreed.

And when Wally would tell her how happy he was, how he felt: he was the luckiest man alive—how anyone would give up his legs to be as happy as Wally was—those were the nights that Candy couldn't sleep; those were the nights when she'd be aware of Homer Wells, who was wide awake, too. Some nights they would meet in the kitchen—they'd have some rnilk and apple pie. Some nights, when it was warm, they'd sit by the swimming pool not touching each other; to any observer, the space between them would have indicated a quarrel (although they rarely quarreled), or else indifference (but they were never indifferent to each other). The way they sat by the pool reminded them both of how they used to sit on Ray Kendall's dock, before they'd sat closer together. If ever they were too conscious of this memory—and of missing that dock, or of missing Ray (who'd died before Angel was old enough to have any memory of him)—this would spoil their evening by the swimming pool and they would be forced back to their separate bedrooms, where they would lie awake a little longer.

As he grew older (and almost as insomniac as his father), Angel Wells would often watch Homer and {578} Candy sitting by the pool, which he could also see out the window of his room. If Angel ever thought anything about the two of them sitting out there, it was why such old friends sat so far apart.

Raymond Kendall had died shortly after Wally and Candy were married. He was killed when the lobster pound blew up; his whole dock was blown apart, and his lobster boat sank, and two old heaps of automobiles he was working on were jolted across his parking lot a good twenty-five yards down the coastal highway by the explosion—as if they'd been driven under their own power. Even the picture window at the Haven Club was collapsed by the blast, but it happened so late at night that the bar was closed and none of the Haven Club's regular drinkers was on hand to see their favorite eyesore obliterated from their view of Heart's Haven Harbor.

Ray had been tinkering with his homemade torpedo; for all of his legendary mechanical genius, he must have found out something about a torpedo that he didn't know. The misfortune of someone you love can bring out the guilt in you; Candy regretted that she'd not told her father about Homer and Angel Wells. It was no consolation to her that she imagined Ray already knew everything; she had been able to understand, by his silences, that he wanted to hear it from her. Yet not even the death of her father could prompt Candy Kendall to tell her story to anyone.

As far south along the coastal highway as Powell's Ice Cream Palace, there had been dead lobsters and lobster parts in the parking lot and in the road. This had prompted Herb Fowler (who was never caught without something funny to say) to ask old Mr. Powell if he was inventing a new ice cream flavor.

Herb had waited for the summer that Angel Wells was fifteen before he flicked Angel his first rubber. Angel's feelings were slightly hurt that Herb had not initiated him sooner. Angel's pal and co-worker, pudgy Pete Hyde, was only a few months older than Angel (and not {579} nearly so grown up, in countless ways), and Angel knew that Herb Fowler had bounced a rubber off Pete Hyde's head when Pete was only thirteen. What Angel hadn't yet fathomed was that Pete Hyde was a part of Ocean View's working-class family, and Angel—although he worked with the workers—was from the boss's family.

The workers knew that Homer Wells ran Ocean View. He was the one most in charge. This would not have surprised Olive, and it was clear that Candy and Wally were grateful for Homer's authority. Perhaps because the workers knew that Homer had come from St. Cloud's, they felt that he was closer to them; he lived in what Big Dot Taft called 'the fancy house,' but he was like one of them. None of the workers resented that Homer was the boss, with the possible exception of Vernon Lynch, who resented any and every authority—all the more so since Grace Lynch had died.

Candy, who looked into the matters concerning the workers' wives, discovered that Grace had been pregnant; she'd died of acute peritonitis, following a misguided attempt to abort herself. Homer, who would often wonder why she had not chosen to make a second trip to St. Cloud's, liked to think that she had not died in vain. It had been her death (and Dr. Harlow's particularly unsympathetic response to it) that had prompted Nurse Caroline to resign from the Cape Kenneth Hospital staff, as Homer Wells had been encouraging her to do. Nurse Caroline finally took Homer's suggestion and offered her services to St. Cloud's.

'Homer Wells sent me,' Nurse Caroline said,
when
she introduced herself to Wilbur Larch. The old man had not grown too careless.

'Sent you for what?' Larch asked.

I'm a trained nurse,' she said. 'I'm here to help you.'

'Help me do what?' asked Larch, who was not very convincing at portraying innocence.

'I believe in the Lord's work,' Nurse Caroline said, exasperated.{580}

'Well, why didn't you say so?' Wilbur Larch asked.

So he's given me something besides apple trees, the old man mused. So there's still hope for him.

Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna were so relieved to get Nurse Caroline that they weren't even jealous. Here was the new blood that might hold the board of trustees at bay a while longer.

'The new nurse is a definite improvement to the situation,' Dr. Gingrich confided to the board. 'I would say that she takes a lot of pressure off making any immediate decision.' (As if they weren't trying to replace the old man every minute!)

'I'd prefer a young doctor to a young nurse,' Mrs Goodhall declared. 'A young doctor
and
a young administrator. You know how I feel about the records; the records of that place are pure whimsy. But it's at least a temporary improvement; I'll buy that,' she said.