John Irving - The Cider House Rules

In the sad, dingy dining room in Ogunquit, while the rain pelted down, Mrs. Goodhall said, 'It's just not normal. Doctor Larch, those old nurse-the whole bit. If someone new, in some capacity, isn't hired soon, I say we send a janitor up there-just anyone who can look the place over and tell us how bad it is.'

'Maybe it's not as bad as we think,' Dr. Gingrich said {566} tiredly. He had seen the young couple leave the hotel, and they had filled him with melancholy.

'Let somebody go there and see,' Mrs. Goodhall said, the dark chandelier above her small gray head.

Then, in the nick of time-in everyone's opinion- a new nurse came to St. Cloud's. Remarkably, she appeared to have found out about the place all by herself. Nurse Caroline, they called her; she was constantly of use, and a great help when Melony's present for Mrs. Grogan arrived.

'What is it?' Mrs. Grogan asked. The carton was almost too heavy for her to lift; Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had brought it over to the girls' division together. It was a sweltering summer afternoon; still, because it had been a perfectly windless day, Nurse Edna had sprayed the apple trees.

Dr. Larch came to the girls' division to see what was in the package.

'Well, go on, open it,' he said to Mrs. Grogan. 'I haven't got all day.'

Mrs. Grogan was not sure how to attack the carton, which was sealed with wire and twine and tape-as if a savage had attempted to contain a wild animal. Nurse Caroline was called for her help.

What would they do without Nurse Caroline? Larch wondered. Before the package for Mrs. Grogan, Nurse Caroline had been the only large gift that anyone sent to St. Cloud's; Homer Wells had sent her from the hospital in Cape Kenneth. Homer Wells knew that Nurse Caroline believed in the Lord's work, and he had persuaded her to go where her devotion would be welcome. But Nurse Caroline had trouble opening Melony's present.

'Who left it?' Mrs. Grogan asked.

'Someone named Lorna,' Nurse Angela said. 'I never saw her before.'

'I never saw her before, either,' said Wilbur Larch.{567}

When the package was opened, there was still a mystery. Inside was a huge coat, much too large for Mrs. Grogan. An Army surplus coat, made for the Alaskan service, it had a hood and a fur collar and was so heavy that when Mrs. Grogan tried it on, it almost dragged her to the floor-she lost her balance a little and wobbled around like a top losing its spin. The coat had all sorts of secret pockets, which were probably for weapons or mess kits-'Or the severed arms and legs of enemies,' said Dr. Larch.

Mrs. Grogan, lost in the coat and perspiring, said, 'I don't get it,' Then she felt the money in one of the pockets. She took out several loose bills and counted them, which was when she remembered that it was the exact amount of money that Melony had stolen from her when Melony had left St. Cloud's-and taken Mrs. Grogan's coat with her-more than fifteen years ago.

'Oh, my God!' Mrs. Grogan cried, fainting.

Nurse Caroline ran to the train station, but Lorna's train had already left. When Mrs. Grogan was revived, she cried and cried.

'Oh, that dear girl!' she cried, while everyone soothed her and no one spoke; Larch and Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna remembered Melony as anything but 'dear.' Larch tried on the coat, which was also too big and heavy for him; he staggered around in it for a while, frightening one of the smaller girls in the girls' division who'd come into the lobby to investigate Mrs. Grogan's cries.

Larch found something in another pocket: the snipped, twisted ends of some copper wire and a pair of rubber-handled, insulated wire-cutters.

On his way back to the boys' division, Larch whispered to Nurse Angela: 'I'll bet she robbed some electrician.'

'A big electrician,' Nurse Angela said.

'You two,' Nurse Edna scolded them. 'It's a warm coat, anyway-at least it will keep her warm.'

'It'll give her a heart attack, lugging it around,' Dr. Larch said. {568}

'I can wear it,' Nurse Caroline commented. It was the first time that Larch and his old nurses realized that Nurse Caroline was not only young and energetic, she was also big and strong-and, in a much less crude and vulgar way, a little reminiscent of Melony (if Melony had been a Marxist, thought Wilbur Larch-and an angel).

Larch had trouble with the word 'angel' since Homer Wells and Candy had taken their son away from St. Cloud's. Larch had trouble with the whole idea of how Homer was living. For fifteen years, Wilbur Larch had been amazed that the three of them-Homer and Candy and Wally-had managed it; he wasn't at all sure what they had managed, or at what cost. He knew, of course, that Angel was a wanted child, and well loved, and well looked after-or else Larch couldn't have remained silent. It was difficult for him to remain silent about the rest of it. How had they arranged it?

But who am I to advocate honesty in all relationships? he wondered. Me with my fictional histories, me with my fictional heart defects-me with my Fuzzy Stone.

And who was he to ask exactly what the sexual relationship was? Did he need to remind himself that he had slept with someone else's mother and dressed himself in the light of her daughter's cigar? That he had allowed to die a woman who had put a pony's penis in her mouth for money?

Larch looked out the window at the apple orchard on the hill. That summer of 195-, the trees were thriving; the apples were mostly pale green and pink, the leaves were a vibrant dark green. The trees were almost too tall for Nurse Edna to spray with the Indian pump. I should ask Nurse Caroline to take over the tending of them. Dr.

Larch thought. He wrote a note to himself and left it in the typewriter. The heat made him drowsy. He went to the dispensary and stretched himself out on the bed.

In the summer, with the windows open, he could risk a slightly heavier dose, he thought. {569}

The last summer that Mr. Rose was in charge of the picking crew at Ocean View was the summer of 195-, when Angel Wells was fifteen. All that summer, Angel had been looking forward to the next summer-when he would be sixteen, old enough to have his driver's license. By that time, he imagined, he would have saved enough money-from his summer jobs in the orchards and from his contribution to the harvests-to buy his first car.

His father, Homer Wells, didn't own a car. When Homer went shopping in town or when he volunteered at the hospital in Cape Kenneth, he used one of the farm vehicles. The old Cadillac, which had been equipped with a hand-operated brake and accelerator so Wally could drive it, was often available, and Candy had her own car-a lemon-yellow Jeep, in which she had taught Angel to drive and which was as reliable in the orchards as it was sturdy on the public roads.

'I taught your father how to swim,' Candy always told Angel. 'I guess I can teach you how to drive.'

Of course Angel knew how to drive all the farm vehicles, too. He knew how to mow, and how to spray, and how to operate the forklift. The driver's license was simply necessary, official approval of something Angel already did very well on the farm.

And, for a fifteen-year-old, he looked much older. He could have driven all over Maine and no one would have questioned him. He would be taller than his boyish, round-faced father (they were dead-even as the summer began), and there was a defined angularity in the bones of his face that made him seem already grown up; even the trace of a beard was there. The shadows under his eyes were not unhealthy-looking; they served only to accent the vivid darkness of his eyes. It was a joke between father and son: that the shadows under Angel's eyes were 'inherited.' 'You get your insomnia from me,' Homer Wells would tell his son, who still thought he was adopted. 'You've got no reason to feel adopted,' his father {570} had told him. 'You've got three parents, really. The best that most people get is two.'