John Irving - The Cider House Rules

When Angel and Candy came out of the house-they were ready to go to the beach-Homer watched his son closely, to see if Angel had noticed that Homer had referred to Candy as 'your mother,' but Angel was the way he always was, and Homer couldn't tell if Angel had caught the slip. Homer wondered if he should tell Candy that Wally had caught it.

They took Candy's lemon-yellow Jeep. Candy drove; Wally sat up front, in the comfortable seat, and Homer and Angel shared the back. All the way to the beach, Wally just looked out the window intently, as if he were seeing the road between Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven for the first time. As if, thought Homer Wells, Wally had just abandoned the plane-over Burma-a.nd his chute had just opened, and he was searching for a spot to land.

That was the first time that Homer knew for certain that Candy was right.

He knows, Homer thought. Wally knows.

The apple mart never changed. It was also a family. {592} Only Debra Pettigrew was gone; Big Dot Taf t's kid sister had married a man from New Hampshire, and she came back to Heart's Rock only at Christmas. Every Christmas, Homer Wells took Angel to St. Cloud's. They had an early Christmas breakfast with Candy and Wally, and a lot of opening presents; then they took a lot more presents to St. Cloud's. They would arrive late in the day, or in the early evening, and have Christmas dinner with everyone. How Nurse Angela cried! Nurse Edna cried when they left. Dr. Larch was friendly but reserved.

The apple mart was nearly as constant as St. Cloud's-in some ways, the apple mart was more constant, because the people didn't change, and at St. Cloud's the orphans were always changing.

Herb Fowler still went out with Louise Tobey, who was still called Squeeze Louise; she was almost fifty, now; she'd never married Herb (she'd never been asked), yet she had acquired a wife's matronly charms and postures. Herb Fowler was still a very coarse, very worn-out joke (about the rubbers); he was one of those thin, gray men in his sixties, with an outrageous pot belly (for such a skinny fellow); he carried his paunch like something stolen and badly hidden beneath his shirt. And Meany Hyde was uniformly fat and bald, and as nice as ever; his wife, Florence, and Big Dot Taft still ruled the roost in the apple mart. Only momentarily sobered by Grace Lynch's death, these two women (with their thigh-sized upper arms) still kept Irene Titcomb giggling (and she still turned the side of her face with the burn scar away). Everett Taft, who was the mellowest foreman, seemed relieved that Homer did the hiring, now, and that the burden of hiring the extra help at harvest had been lifted off him. And Vernon Lynch's resentment was so monumental that it didn't confine itself to mere particulars- either to Homer's being in charge, or to Grace's death. It was just anger that possessed him-seething and constant and unrestrained by the ravages of Vernon's sixtysomething years.{593}

Homer Wells said that Vernon Lynch had a constant brain tumor; it never grew, it always exerted the same pressure and the same interference. 'It's just there, like the weather, huh?' Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper, kidded with Homer. Ira was sixty-five, but he had another number marked on the trailer he used to carry his hives: the number of times he'd been stung by his bees.

'Only two hundred and forty-one times,' Ira said. 'I been keepin' bees since I was nineteen,' he said, 'so that amounts to only five point two stings a year. Pretty good, huh?' Ira asked Homer.

'Right,' mumbled Homer Wells, ducking the expected punch, cringing in anticipation of the baseball whistling toward his face at the speed of Mr. Rose's knife work.

Homer kept his own accounts, of course. The number of times he'd made love with Candy since Wally came home from the war was written in pencil (and then erased, and then rewritten) on the back of the photograph of Wally with the crew of Opportunity Knocks. Two hundred seventy-only a few more times than Ira Titcomb had been stung by bees. What Homer didn't know was that Candy also kept a record-also written in pencil, she wrote '270' on the back of another print of the photograph of her teaching Homer how to swim. She kept the photograph, almost casually, in the bathroom she shared with Wally, where the photograph was always partially concealed by a box of tissues, or a bottle of shampoo. It was a cluttered bathroom, which Olive had outfitted properly beifore she died, and before Wally came home; it had the convenient handrails Wally needed to help himself on and off the toilet and in and out of the tub.

'It's your standard cripple's bathroom,' Wally would say. 'An ape would have a good time in there. There's all that stuff to swing from.'

And once, that summer, returning from the beach, they had stopped the car at the playground of the elementary school in Heart's Haven. Wally and Angel wanted to play on the jungle gym. Angel was very agile {594} on the thing, and Wally's arms were so developed that he could move through it with an alarmingly apelike strength and grace-the two of them hooting like monkeys at Homer and Candy, who waited in the car.

'Our two children,' Homer had said to the love of his life.

'Yes, our family,' Candy had said, smiling-watching Wally and Angel climb and swing, climb and swing.

'It's better for them than watching television,' said Homer Wells, who would always think of Wally and Angel as children. Homer and Candy shared the opinion that Wally watched too much television, which was a bad influence on Angel, who liked to watch it with him.

Wally was so fond of television that he had even given a TV to Homer to take to St. Cloud's. Of course the reception was very poor up there, which had perhaps improved the McCarthy hearings, which had been Wilbur Larch's first, sustained experience with television.

Thank God it didn't come in clearly,' he wrote to Homer.

Nurse Caroline had been in a bad mood all that year. If the U.S. Army really was 'coddling Communists,' as Senator McCarthy claimed, Nurse Caroline said that she'd consider joining up.

Wilbur Larch, straining to see Senator McCarthy through the television's snow and zigzagging lines, said,'He looks like a drunk to me. I'll bet he dies young.'

'Not young enough to suit me,' Nurse Caroline said.

Finally, they gave the television away. Nurse Edna and Mrs Grogan were becoming addicted to it, and Larch considered that it was worse for the orphans than organized religion. 'It's better for anyone than ether, Wilbur,' Nurse Edna complained, but Larch was firm. He gave the thing to the stationmaster, who (in Larch's opinion) was the perfect sort of moron for the invention; it was just the right thing to occupy the mind of someone who waited all day for trains. It was Wilbur Larch who {595} was the first man in Maine to call a television what it was: 'an idiot box.' Maine, of course-and St. Cloud's, especially-seemed to get everything more slowly than the rest of the country.

But Wally loved to watch it, and Angel watched it with him whenever Candy and Homer didn't object. Wally argued, for example, that such televised events as the McCarthy hearings were educational for Angel. 'He ought to know,' Wally said, 'that the country is always in danger from right-wing nut cases.'

Although Senator McCarthy lost the support of millions of people as a result of the hearings-and although the Senate condemned him for his 'contemptuous' conduct toward a subcommittee that had investigated his finances and for his abuse of a committee that recommended he be censured, the board of trustees of St. Cloud's had been favorably impressed by Senator McCarthy. Mrs. Goodhall and Dr. Gingrich, especially, were encouraged to complain about Nurse Caroline's socialist views and involvements, which they considered tinged the orphanage a shade of pink.