John Irving - The Cider House Rules

For forty-eight hours Mrs. Eames did very well. She consoled young Wilbur on the death of his parents. 'I never knew your mother, of course,' she confided. She again expressed her concern that Wilbur consider her reputation, which Wilbur assured her he would (and had -by refraining from expressing his fears to the senior surgeon that the condition of Mrs. Eames might somehow be the result of gonorrhea). He briefly wondered which story Mrs Eames was using at the moment, regarding her reputation: whether she was claiming to live a proper life in Portland or in Boston; whether a third city was now involved and necessarily a third fictitious life.

On the third day after the removal of her strange uterus, Mrs. Eames filled up with blood again, and Wilbur Larch reopened her wound; this time he was {67} quite afraid of what he'd find. At: first, he was relieved; there was not as much blood in her abdomen as before. But when he sponged the blood away, he perforated the intestine, which he had hardly touched, and when he lifted up the injured loop to close the hole, his fingers passed as easily through the intestine as through gelatin. If all her organs were this same fragile jelly, Larch knew Mrs. Eames wouldn't live very long.

She lived three more days. The night she died. Larch had a nightmare-his penis fell oft sf in his hands; he tried to sew it back on but it kept disintegrating; then his fingers gave way in a similar fashion. How like a surgeon! he thought. Fingers are valued above penises. How like Wilbur Larch!

This helped to strengthen Larch's conviction regarding sexual abstinence. He waited for whatever had destroyed Mrs. Eames to claim him, but the autopsy, which was performed by a distinguished pathologist, seemed off the track.

'Scurvy,' the pathologist said.

So much for pathologists, thought Wilbur Larch. Scurvy indeed!

'Missus Eames was a prostitute,' Larch told the pathologist respectfully. 'She wasn't a sailor.'

But the pathologist was sure about it. It had nothing to do with the gonorrhea, nothing to do with the pregnancy. Mrs. Eames had died of the sailor's curse; she had not a trace of Vitamin C, and, the pathologist said, 'She had destruction of connective tissue and the tendency to bleed that goes with it.' Scurvy.

Though this was a puzzle, it convinced Larch that it wasn't a venereal puzzle and he had one good night's sleep before Mrs. Eames's daughter came to see him.

'It's not my turn, is it?' he sleepily asked the colleague who roused him.

'She says you're her doctor,' the colleague told him.

He did not recognize Mrs. Eames's daughter, who had {68} once cost less than Mrs. Eames; now, she would have charged more than her mother could get. If, on the train, she had seemed only a few years younger than Wilbur, now she seemed several years older. Her sullen teen-age quality had matured in a brash and caustic fashion. Her makeup, her jewelry, and her perfume were excessive; her dress was slatternly. Her hair-in a sinrle, thick braid with a sea-gull feather stuck in it-was so severely pulled back from her face that the veins in her temples seemed strained, and her neck muscles were tensed-as if a violent lover had thrown her to her back and held her there by her strong, dark pigtail.

She greeted Wilbur Larch by roughly handing him a bottle of brown liquid-its pungent odor escaping through a leaky cork stopper. The bottle's label was illegibly stained.

That's what did her in,' the girl said with a growl. 'I ain't having any. There's other ways.'

Is it Miss Eames?' Wilbur Larch asked, searching for her memorable cigar breath.

I said there's other ways!' Miss Eames said. 'I ain't so far along as she was, I ain't quick.'

Wilbur Larch sniffed the bottle in his hand; he knew what 'quick' meant. If a fetus was quick it meant the mother had felt it move, it meant the mother was about half through her gestation period, usually in her fourth or fifth month; to some doctors, with religion, when a fetus was quick it meant it had a soul. Wilbur Larch didn't think anyone haid a soul, but until the middle of the nineteenth century, the common law's attitude toward abortion was simple and (to Wilbur Larch) sensible: before 'quickeninG'-before the first, felt movement of the fetus-abortion was legal. More important, to the doctor in Wilbur Larch, it was not dangerous to the mother to perform an abortion before the fetus was quick. After the third month, whether the fetus was quick or not, Wilbur Larch knew it had a grip on the uterus that required more force to break. {69}

For example, the liquid in the bottle Wilbur Larch was holding had not provided sufficient force to break the grip that Mrs. Eames's fetus had on her-although, apparently, it had exerted enough force to kill the fetus and turn Mrs. Eames's insides to mush.

'It's gotta be pure poison,' Mrs. Eames's tough daughter remarked to Wilbur Larch, who dabbed a little of his beloved ether on the bottle's stained label, cleaning it up enough to read.

FRENCH LUNAR SOLUTION

Restores Female Monthly Regularity!

Stops Suppression!

(Suppression, young Larch knew, was a euphemism for pregnancy.)

Caution: Dangerous to Married Women!

Almost Certainly Causes Miscarriages!

the label concluded; which, of course, was why Mrs. Eames had taken it and taken it.

Larch had studied the abuse of aborticides in medical school. Some-like the ergot Larch used to make the uterus contract after delivery, and pituitary extract- directly affected the uterus. Others ruined the intestines -they were simply drastic purgatives. Two of the cadavers Larch had worked with in medical school had been victims of a rather common household aborticide of the time: turpentine. People who didn't Avant babies in the 1880s and 1890s were also killing themselves with strychnine and oil of rue. The French Lunar Solution Mrs. Eames had tried was oil of tansy; she had taken it for such a long time, and in such amounts, that her intestines had lost their ability to absorb Vitamin C. Thus did she turn herself into Muenster. She died, as the pathologist had correctly observed, of scurvy.

Mrs. Eames could have chosen several other ways of {70}attempting to abort the birth of another child. There were stories that a rather notorious abortionist in the South End was also the district's most successful pimp. Because he charged nearly five hundred dollars for an abortion, which very few poor women could afford, in their indebtedness they became his whores. His quarters -and others like his-were called, simply, 'Off Harrison'-appropriately vague, but not without meaning. One of the facilities of the South Branch of the Boston Lying-in was established on Harrison Street, so that 'Off Harrison,' in street language, correctly implied something unofficial-not to mention, illegal.

It did not make much sense to have an abortion 'Off Harrison' as Mrs. Eames, perhaps, had reason to know. Her daughter also knew the methods of that place, which was why she gave Wilbur Larch a chance to do the job-and gave herself a chance to have the job done well.

'I said I ain't quick,' Mrs. Eames's daughter told young Larch. 'I'd be easy. I'd get out of here in just a couple of minutes.'

It was after midnight at the South Branch. The house officer was asleep; the nurse-practitioner, an anesthetist, was also asleep. The colleague who had woken Larch-he'd gone to sleep, too.

The dilation of the cervix at any stage of pregnancy usually leads to uterine contractions, which expel the contents of the uterus. Larch also knew that any irritant to the uterus would usually have the desired effect: contraction, expulsion. Young Wilbur Larch stared at Mrs. Eames's daughter; his legs felt rocky. Perhaps he was still standing with his hand on the back of Mrs. Eames's seat on that swaying train from Portland, before he knew he had the clap.