John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Dr. Larch began another letter to Harry Truman, before {626} he remembered that Eisenhower had been President for a few years. He had written several letters to Roosevelt after Roosevelt had died, and he'd written many more to Eleanor, but the Roosevelts had never written back. Harry Truman had never written back, either, and Larch couldn't remember if he'd written to Mrs. Truman, too, or to Truman's daughter-whichever one it was hadn't answered, either.

He tried not to get depressed at the thought of writing to Eisenhower; he tried to recall how he'd begun the last one. He'd begun 'Dear General,' but after that he couldn't remember; he'd said something about how he'd been a doctor to the 'troops' in World War I-he'd tried to sneak up on his real subject, a kind of flanking maneuver. Maybe it was time to try Mrs. Eisenhower. But when Larch wrote 'Dear Mamie,' he felt ridiculous.

Oh, what's the use? thought Wilbur Larch. You have to be crazy to write to Eisenhower about abortion. He tore the letter out of the typewriter; out of the blue, he decided that the President's head resembled that of a baby.

Then he remembered that Melony had the questionnaire. There was no time to fool around. He told Nurse Angela that there would be a meeting after supper, after the children had been put to bed.

Nurse Angela could not recall that there had ever been a meeting at St. Cloud's, except that most uncomfortable meeting with the board of trustees; she assumed that if there was going to be another meeting, the board was probably involved.

'Oh dear, a meeting,' Nurse Edna said; she fretted all day.

Mrs. Grogan was worried, too. She was concerned about where the meeting would take place-as if it would be possible to miss it or not find it.

'I think we can narrow down the possibilities,' Nurse Caroline assured her.

All day Wilbur Larch worked in Nurse Angela's office. {627} No babies were born that day; and the one woman who wanted an abortion was welcomed, and made comfortable, and told that she could have her abortion tomorrow. Wilbur Larch would not leave Nurse Angela's office, not even for lunch, not even for tea, and not even for the Lord's work.

He was reviewing and putting the finishing touches to the history of Fuzzy Stone, that good doctor; Larch was also writing the obituary of Homer Wells. Poor Homer's heart: the rigors of,an agricultural life and a highcholesterol diet-'An orphan is a meat eater, an orphan is always hungry,' wrote Wilbur Larch.

Dr. Stone, on the other hand, was not a typical orphan. Larch characterized Fuzzy Stone as 'lean and mean.' After all, who among the orphans had ever dared to challenge Dr. Larch? And here was Fuzzy Stone threatening to turn his old mentor in! Not only did he dare to attack Dr. Larch's beliefs regarding the abortions, but also Fuzzy had such strong views on the subject that he repeatedly threatened to expose Dr. Larch to the board, And now Fuzzy's zeal was fired with the selfrighteousness of a true missionary, for Larch knew that the safest place for Dr. Stone to be practising medicine was where the board could never trace him. Fuzzy was fighting diarrhea amid the dying children of Asia. Larch had just read an article in The Lancet about diarrhea being the number one killer of kids in that part of the world. (Homer Wells, who did not know that bis heart had given out, had read the same article.) The other little details about Burma and India-which lent such a missionary authenticity to Fuzzy's angry letters to Wilbur Larch-were things that Larch remembered hearing about Wally's excruciating travels there.

It had been an exhausting day for Larch, who had also written-in other voices-to the board of trustees. He would have preferred ether to supper, although supper, he knew, would make him more stable for the meeting that his bullied staff was dreading. Larch read such a {628} short passage from Jane Eyre that every girl in the girls' division was still awake when he left them, and he read such a short section of David Copperfield that two of the boys complained.

'I'm sorry, that's all that happened to David Copperfield today,' Dr. Larch told them. 'David didn't have a very big day.'

Wilbur Larch had had a big day, and Mrs. Grogan and his nurses knew it. He made them all meet in Nurse Angela's office, as if he took comfort from the litter of paper and the gloomy, surrounding presence of his massive A Brief History of St. Cloud's, which was gathered around him. He leaned on his overworked typewriter as if the machine were a podium.

'Now!' he said, because the women were chatting. 'Now!' he repeated, using the word like a gavel to call the meeting to order. 'Now we're going to head them off at the pass.'

Nurse Edna wondered if he'd been sneaking down to the train station to watch the Westerns on the TV with the stationmaster; Nurse Edna did this quite often. She liked Roy Rogers better than Hopalong Cassidy; she wished Roy wouldn't sing; she preferred Tom Mix to them all. Although she loathed the Lone Ranger, she had a soft spot in her heart for Tonto-for all the world's sidekicks.

'Whom are we heading off?' Nurse Caroline asked aggressively.

'And you!' Dr. Larch said to Nurse Caroline, pointing his finger at her. 'You're my top gun. You're the one who's going to pull the trigger. You get to fire the first shot.'

Mrs. Grogan, who feared for her own sanity, feared that Dr. Larch had finally lost his. Nurse Angela suspected Larch had been slipping for a long time. Nurse Edna loved him so much that she couldn't judge him. Nurse Caroline just wanted the facts.{629}

'Okay,' Nurse Caroline said. 'Let's begin at the beginning. Whom do I shoot?'

'You're going to turn me in,' Larch told her. 'You're going to blow the whistle on me-on all of us here.'

'I'll do no such thing!' Nurse Caroline said.

Very patiently, he explained it to them. It was so simple-to him it was simple because he'd been thinking of it for years. It was not simple to the rest of them, and he had to take them very slowly through the steps toward their salvation.

They must assume that Melony would respond to the questionnaire. They must believe that her response would be negative-not because Melony was necessarily negative, as Larch pointed out to Mrs. Grogan (who was ready to defend her), but because Melony was angry.

'She was born angry, she will always be angry, and even if she means us no harm, one day she will be angry enough-about something, about anything -so that she will respond to the questionnaire. And she'll say what she knows,' Larch added, 'because, whatever else Melony is, she's no liar.'

Therefore, he argued, he wanted the board to hear that he was an abortionist from someone else first. It was the only way they might be saved. Nurse Caroline was the logical betrayer; she was young, she was relatively new, she had struggled with her conscience for an acceptably short period of time, and she had decided that she could remain silent no longer. Mrs. Grogan and the older nurses had been bullied into accepting; a doctor's authority as absolute; Nurse Caroline would maintain that they were not to blame. Nurse Caroline, however, had a challenging attitude toward the authority figures of this (or of any) society. She would present her protest as a matter of women's rights-that even nurses; should never allow doctors to tyrannize them; that when a doctor was breaking the law, even if it was not a nurse's role to challenge him, it was her right and her moral obligation {630} to expose him. Larch was sure that Mrs. Goodhall would like that bit about 'moral obligation'-Mrs. Goodhall doubtlessly labored under the illusion that her own moral obligations were the guiding lights of her life, and Dr. Larch felt that it was the overwhelming burden of these obligations that had made her a sour, joyless woman.