John Irving - The Cider House Rules

He fell asleep, marveling at what seemed to him to be the extreme control Mr. Rose had of his world-he even controlled the speed at which his daughter's daughter would be named (not to mention, probably, the name itself)! Homer woke up near dawn and took a fountain pen from his night table and used it to write, with a heavy finality, over the penciled number on the back of the photograph of the crew of Opportunity Knocks.

With the dark ink he followed the outline of the pencil; this permanency was reassuring-as if ink, as on a contract, was more binding than pencil. He couldn't have known that Candy was also awake; her stomach was upset, and she was looking for some medicine in her and Wally's bathroom. She also found it necessary to address the subject of the two hundred seventy times she and Homer had made love together since Wally had come {644} home from the war, but Candy honored the finality of this number with less significance than Homer honored it. Instead of writing over the number in ink, Candy used her eraser to remove the evidence from the back of the photograph of her teaching Homer how to swim. Then her stomach calmed and she was able to sleep. It astonished her: how completely relaxed she was at the prospect that after the harvest, her life (as she'd grown used to it) would be over.

Homer Wells didn't try to go back to sleep; he knew his history on the subject of sleep; he knew there was no fighting history. He read an article in The New England Journal of Medicine about antibiotic therapy; he'd followed, for many years, the uses of penicillin and streptomycin. He was less familiar with Aureomycin and Terramycin, but he thought that antibiotics were easy to figure out. He read about the limited usage of neomycin; he made note of the fact that Achromycin and tetracycline were the same. He wrote erythromycin in the margin of the article, several times, until he was sure he knew how to spell it; Dr. Larch had taught him that method of familiarizing himself with something new.

'E-R-Y-T-H-R-0-M-Y-C-I-N,' wrote Homer Wells-the apple doctor, as Mr. Rose had called him. He wrote that in the margin, too. 'The apple doctor.' And just before he got out of bed, he wrote, 'A Bedouin Again.'

In the morning, Candy sent Angel to the cider house to inquire if Rose Rose needed anything for the baby, and that was when Angel fell in love. He was shy with girls his own age; boys his own age, and a little older, always teased him about his name. He thought he was the only Angel in Maine. He was even shy in advance of meeting girls, anticipating when he would have to tell them his name. In Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven, the prettier, more confident girls in his class ignored him; they were interested in the older boys. The girls who appeared to like him were plain, sullen gossips who most enjoyed talking to other girls like themselves, about themselves {645} -or about which boys had said what to whom. Every time Angel spoke to a girl, he knew his remarks were relayed that evening over the telephone to every other neglected girl in his class. The following morning, they would all smirk at him-as if he'd said the same, foolish thing to each of them. And so he learned to keep quiet. He watched the older girls in school; he approved of the ones who did the least amount of talking to their girlfriends. They struck him as more mature, by which he meant that they were actually doing things they would not want their girlfriends to know.

In 195-, girls Angel's age looked forward to dating; boys Angel's age-as in other times-looked forward to doing things.

Mr. Rose's daughter was not only the most exotic young woman Angel had ever seen; if she had a daughter, she must also have done things.

It was cold and damp in the cider house in the mornings; when Angel arrived there, Rose Rose was outside, in the sun, washing Baby Rose in a bucket. The baby was splashing, and Rose Rose was talking to her daughter; she didn't hear Angel walking up to her. Perhaps -since Angel had been brought up more by his father than by his mother-Angel was predisposed to be attracted to a Madonna scene. Rose Rose was only a few years older than Angel-she was so young that her maternity was startling. When she was with her baby, her gestures and her expressions were womanly, and she had a full, womanly figure. She was a little taller than Angel. She had a round, boyish face.

'Good morning,' Angel said, startling Baby Rose in the bucket. Rose Rose wrapped her daughter in a towel and stood up.

'You must be Angel,' she said shyly. She had a fine scar that sliced across the flange of one nostril and her upper lip; it made a nick in her gum, which Angel could see when she parted her lips. Later, he would see that the knife had stopped at the eyetooth and removed it, which {646} accounted for her only partial smile. She would explain to him that the wound had killed the root of the tooth and that the tooth had fallen out later. He was so smitten when he first met her that even the scar was beautiful to him; it was her only apparent flaw.

'I wondered if I could help you get anything for the baby,' Angel said.

'She seem to be teethin',' Rose Rose reported on her daughter. 'She kind of cranky today.'

Mr. Rose came out of the cider house; when he saw Angel, he waved and smiled, and then he walked over and put his arm around the boy. 'How you doin'?' he asked. 'You still growin', I think. I used to carry him on top of my head,' he told Rose Rose. 'He used to grab them apples I couldn't reach,' Mr. Rose explained, punching Angel affectionately on the arm.

'I'm counting on growing a little more,' Angel said-for Rose Rose's benefit. He wouldn't want her to think he had stopped growing; he wanted her to know that he would be taller than she, one day.

He wished he'd worn a shirt; it was not that he wasn't muscular, it was somehow more grown-up to wear a shirt. Then he imagined that she might approve of his summer tan, and so he relaxed about not having a shirt; he put his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans, and he wished he'd worn his baseball cap. It was a Boston Red Sox cap, and he had to get hold of it first thing in the morning if he was going to wear it-otherwise, Candy would wear it. They had been meaning to buy another baseball cap for two summers now; Candy owed him one because she'd admitted to tearing one of the sweat holes in the cap by poking a pencil through it.

Candy worked as a checker during the harvest, and she needed her pencil. This would be the second harvest that Angel would be a checker, and the second summer that he got to drive one of the tractors that hauled the apples out of the orchards.

When Angel told his father that Rose Rose's baby was {647} teething, Homer knew what to do. He sent Angel (with Wally) to town to buy some pacifiers, and then he sent Angel back to the cider house with a package of pacifiers and a fifth of bourbon; Wally drank a very little bourbon from time to time, and the bottle was three-quarters full. Homer showed Angel how to dab whiskey on Baby Rose's gums.

'It numbs the gums,' Angel explained to Rose Rose. He dipped his pinky finger in the whiskey, then he stuck his finger in Baby Rose's tiny mouth. At first, he was afraid he'd gag the baby girl, whose eyes instantly grew large and watery at the bourbon fumes; but then Baby Rose went to work on Angel's finger so ferociously that when he removed his finger to apply more bourbon, the baby cried to have the finger back.

'You gonna make her drunk,' Rose Rose warned.

'No, I won't,' Angel assured her. 'I'm just putting her gums to sleep.'

Rose Rose examined the pacifiers. They were rubber nipples, like the nipple on a baby's bottle, but without the hole and attached to a baby-blue plastic ring that was too big to swallow. The problem with using a regular bottle nipple, Angel Wells explained, was that the baby would keep sucking in air through the hole, and the air would give the baby burping fits or a gassy stomach.