The Cider House Rules (86 page)

'Get me down, get me off,' Candy said to them. Muddy and Peaches took her arms and Black Pan preceded them to the ladder. Even walking down the roof, Candy tried to keep stamping her feet.

Going down the ladder, she called, 'Rose!' She could not say the ridiculous name of 'Rose Rose,' and she couldn't make herself say 'Mister Rose,' either. 'Rose!' she called ambiguously. She wasn't even sure which one she was summoning, but it was Mr. Rose who met her at the cider house door. He was still getting dressed—he was tucking his shirt in and buttoning his trousers. He looked thinner and older to her than he'd looked before, and although he smiled at her, he didn't look into her eyes with his usual confidence—with his usual, polite indifference.

'Don't you speak to me,' Candy told him, but what would he have said? 'Your daughter and her baby are coming with me.' Candy walked by him into the cider house; she felt the tattered rules with her fingers as she found the light.

Rose Rose was sitting up on the bed. She had pulled her blue jeans on, but she hadn't closed them, and she had pulled the T-shirt on, but she held Candy's bathing suit in her lap—she was unfamiliar with wearing it, and she'd not been able to put it on in a hurry. She had found only one of her work shoes, which she held in one hand.{692} The other one was under the bed. Candy found it and put it on the correct foot—Rose Rose wore no socks. Then Candy tied the laces for her, too. Rose Rose just sat on the bed while Candy put on and tied her other shoe.

'You're coming with me. Your baby, too,' Candy told the girl.

'Yes, ma'am,' Rose Rose said.

Candy took the bathing suit from her and used the suit to wipe the tears from Rose Rose's face.

'You're fine, you're just fine,' Candy said to the girl. 'And you're going to feel better. No one's going to hurt you.'

Baby Rose was sound asleep, and Candy was careful not to wake her when she picked her up and handed her to her mother. Rose Rose moved uncertainly and Candy put her arm around her when they walked out of the cider house together. 'You're going to be just fine,' Candy said to Rose Rose; she kissed the young woman on her neck, and Rose Rose, who was sweating, leaned against her.

Mr. Rose was standing in the darkness between the Jeep and the cider house, but the rest of the men still sat on the roof.

'You comin' back,' Mr. Rose said—nothing was raised at the end of his voice; it was not a question.

'I told you not to speak to me,' Candy told him. She helped Rose Rose and her baby into the Jeep.

'I was speakin' to my daughter,' Mr. Rose said with dignity.

But Rose Rose would not answer her father. She sat like a statue of a woman with a baby in her arms while Candy turned the Jeep around and drove away. Before they went into the fancy house together, Rose Rose slumped against Candy and said to her, 'I never could do nothin' about it.'

'Of course you couldn't,' Candy told her.

'He hated the father of the other one,' Rose Rose said. 'He been after me ever since.' {693}

'You're going to be all right now,' Candy told the girl before they went inside; through the windows, they could watch Wally flying back and forth in the house.

'I know my father, Missus Worthington,' Rose Rose whispered. 'He gonna want me back.'

'He can't have you,' Candy told her. 'He can't make you go back to him.'

'He makes his own rules,' said Rose Rose.

'And the father of your beautiful daughter?' Candy asked, holding the door open for Rose Rose and her baby girl. 'Where is he?'

'My father cut him up. He long gone,' Rose Rose said. 'He don't wanna be involved with me no more.'

'And your mother?' Candy asked, as they went in the house.

'She dead,' Rose Rose said.

That was when Wally told Candy that Dr. Larch was dead, too. She would not have known it to look at Homer, who was all business; an orphan learns how to hold back, how to keep things in.

'Are you all right?' Candy asked Homer, while Wally wheeled Baby Rose around the downstairs of the house and Angel took Rose Rose to his room, which was prepared for her.

'I'm a little nervous,' Homer admitted to Candy. 'It's certainly not a matter of technique, and I've got everything I need—I know I can do it. It's just that, to me, it is a living human being. I can't describe to you what it feels like—just to hold the curette, for example. When living tissue is touched, it responds—somehow,' Homer said, but Candy cut him off.

'It may help you to know who the father is,' she said. 'It's Mister Rose. Her father is the father—if that makes it any easier.'

The crisply made-up bed in Angel's childhood room and the gleaming instruments—which were displayed so neatly in the adjacent bed—made Rose Rose both talkative and rigid.{694}

'This don't look like no fun,' the girl said, holding her fists in her lap. 'They took the other one out through the top—not the way she was supposed to come out,' Rose Rose explained. She'd had a Caesarean, Homer Wells could see, perhaps because of her age and her size at the time. But Homer could not quite convince her that this time everything would be much easier. He wouldn't need to take anything 'out through the top.'

'Go stay with Wally, Angel,' Candy told the boy. 'Go give Baby Rose a ride in the wheelchair. Knock over all the furniture, if you want,'she told him, kissing her son.

'Yeah, you go away,' Rose Rose told Angel.

'Don't be afraid,' Candy told Rose Rose. 'Homer knows what he's doing. You're in very safe hands.' She swabbed Rose Rose with the red Merthiolate, while Homer began to show Rose Rose the instruments.

'This is a speculum,'he said to her.
'It may feel cold,
but it doesn't hurt. You won't feel any of this,' he assured her. These are dilators,' Homer said, but Rose Rose shut her eyes.

'You done this before, ain't you?' Rose Rose asked him. He had the ether ready.

'Just breathe normally,' he told her. At the first whiff, she opened her eyes and turned her face away from the mask, but Candy put her hands at Rose Rose's temples and very gently moved her head into the right position. The first smell is the sharpest,' said Homer Wells.

'Please, have you done this before?' Rose Rose asked him. Her voice was muffled under the mask.

'I'm a good doctor—I really am,' Homer Wells told her. 'Just relax, and breathe normally.'

'Don't be afraid,' Rose Rose heard Candy tell her just before the ether began to take her out of her body.

'I can ride it,' she said. Rose Rose meant a bicycle. Homer watched her wiggle her toes. Rose Rose was getting her first feel of the sand; the beach was warm. The tide was coming in; she felt the water around her ankles. 'No big deal,' she murmured. Rose Rose meant the ocean.{695}

Homer Wells, adjusting the speculum until he had a perfect view of the cervix, introduced the first dilator until the os opened like an eye looking back at him. The cervix looked softened and slightly enlarged, and it was bathed in a healthy, clear mucus—it was the most breathtaking pink color that Homer had ever seen. Downstairs, he heard the wheelchair careening through the house—there was a wild and nonstop giggling from Baby Rose.

'Tell them not to get that baby overexcited,' Homer said to Candy, as if she were his nurse of long-standing and he was used to giving her directions and she was used to following them, exactly. He did not let the ruckus (or Candy trying to quiet them down) distract him; he watched the cervix open until it opened wide enough. He chose the curette of the correct size. After the first one, thought Homer Wells, this might get easier. Because he knew now that he couldn't play God in the worst sense; if he could operate on Rose Rose, how could he refuse to help a stranger? How could he refuse anyone? Only a god makes that kind of decision. I'll just give them what they want, he thought. An orphan or an abortion.

Homer Wells breathed slowly and regularly; the steadiness of his hand surprised him. He did not even blink when he felt the curette make contact; he did not divert his eyes from witnessing the miracle.

For that night, Candy slept in the extra bed in Angel's room—she wanted to be close by if Rose Rose needed anything, but Rose Rose slept like a rock. The gap left by her missing tooth made a small whistling noise when her lips were parted it was not at all disturbing, and Candy slept quite soundly, too.

Angel slept downstairs, sharing the big bed with Wally. They stayed awake quite late, talking. Wally told Angel about the time he first fell in love with Candy; although Angel had heard the story before, he listened to it more attentively—now that he thought he had fallen {696} in love with Rose Rose. Wally also told Angel that he must never underestimate the darker necessities of the world where his father had grown up.

'It's the old story,' Wally said to Angel. 'You can get Homer out of Saint Cloud's, but you can't get Saint Cloud's out of Homer. And the thing about being in love,' Wally said to Angel, 'is that you can't force anyone. It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard,' he added, 'because you often feel like interfering —you want to be the one who makes the plans.'

'It's hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,' Angel pointed out.

'You can't protect people, kiddo,' Wally said. 'All you can do is love them.'

When he fell asleep, Wally felt the movement of the raft on the Irrawaddy. One of his friendly Burmese rescuers was offering to catheterize him. First he dipped the bamboo shoot in the brown river, then he wiped it dry on one of the strips of silk that bound up his head basket, then he spat on it. 'You want to
pees
now?' the Burmese asked Wally.

'No, thank you,' Wally said in his sleep. 'No piss now,' he said aloud, which made Angel smile before he fell asleep, too.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom. Homer Wells was wide awake. He'd volunteered to have Baby Rose for the night. 'Because I'll be up all night, anyway,' he said. He'd forgotten how much he enjoyed having a baby to look after. Babies reminded Homer of himself; they were always wanting something in the middle of the night. But after he'd given Baby Rose her bottle, the child went back to sleep and left Homer Wells alone again; it was nonetheless a pleasure having the little girl to look at. Her black face in the bed beside him was no bigger than his {697} hand, and occasionally her hands would reach up and her fingers would open and close, grasping at something she saw in her sleep. The presence of another breather in the room reminded Homer Wells of the sleeping quarters in St. Cloud's, where he had some difficulty imagining the necessary announcement.

'Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,' Homer said softly. 'Doctor Larch has found a family. Good night, Doctor Larch.' He tried to imagine which one of them would have said it. He imagined it would have been Nurse Angela, and so it was to her that he sent the letter.

Now that Dr. Larch had died, Mrs. Goodhall's pleasure at the thought of replacing the old, nonpractising homosexual was less intense; it did stimulate her, however, to imagine replacing him with that young missionary who had antagonized him so. Dr. Gingrich saw some faint justice appear on the horizon at the thought of replacing Larch with someone who'd clearly driven the old man crazy, but Dr. Gingrich was not so interested in the outcome of the situation in St. Cloud's as he was fascinated with his secretive study of Mrs. Goodhall's mind, in which he found such a complex broth of righteous delusion and inspired hatred.

Of course, Dr. Gingrich and the other board members were eager to meet young Dr. Stone, but Dr. Gingrich was particularly eager to observe Mrs. Coodhall at such a meeting. Mrs. Goodhall had developed a tic—whenever someone provided her with unusual pleasure or displeasure, the right side of her face suffered an involuntary muscular contraction. Dr. Gingrich imagined that, upon meeting the missionary doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would enter a phase of nearly constant spasm, and he could not wait to observe this.

'You must stall the board,' Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. 'Tell them that your efforts to reach Dr. Stone are hampered by the doctor being in transit between two of the mission's hospitals in India. Say Assam is one, say New Delhi is the other. Say you don't expect to be able to {698} communicate with him for a week or more, and that—if he was willing to consider the position at St. Cloud's—he couldn't possibly be available before November.'

Homer Wells hoped that this would allow him the time to tell Angel everything, and to be finished with the harveSt.

'You'll have to convince the board that you are competent midwives, in addition to being good nurses, and that you'll be able to recognize the patients who should be referred to a physician,' Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. 'You must forgive me for needing all this time, but perhaps I will seem more believable to the board of trustees if everyone has to wait for me. It takes time to leave Asia.'

He also requested that they send him the available history of Fuzzy Stone, and tell him anything that Larch might have omitted—although Homer could not imagine that St. Larch had left out anything. It was with the shortest possible sentence that Homer told Nurse Angela that he had loved Larch 'like a father,' and that they had 'nothing to fear from Melony.'

Poor Bob, who had broken her nose and her arm, had plenty to fear from Melony, however, but Bob wasn't smart enough to be afraid of her. When the cast would come off her arm, and when her nose looked more or less normal again, Melony and Lorna would cruise the old, familiar spots—the pizza bar in Bath, among them—and Bob would have the charmless instinct to annoy them again. Melony would disarm him with her shy smile—the one that humbly revealed her bad teeth to him—and while Bob turned his oafish attention to Lorna, Melony snipped off the top half of his ear with her wire-cutters (the electrician's common and trusty tool). Then Melony broke several of Bob's ribs and his nose and beat him unconscious with a chair. She had her heart in the right place, regarding St. Cloud's, but Melony was an eye-for-an-eye and a tit-for-tat girl.