John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Wilbur Larch was aware that Missy Channing-Peabody's skin was changing color beside him. She went from milk to mustard to spring-grass green, and almost back to milk before she fainted. Her skin was quite cool and clammy, and when Wilbur Larch looked at her, he saw that her eyes were almost completely rolled up into her head. Her mother and the cross young man in tennis whites, the Cabot or the Chadwick, whisked her away from the table-'She needs air,' Mrs. Channing-Peabody announced, but air was not in short supply in Maine.

Wilbur Larch already knew what Missy needed. She needed an abortion. It came to him through the visible anger of young Chadwick or Cabot, it came to him over the babbling senility of the old surgeon inquiring about 'modern' obstetrical procedure, it came to him through the absence of other conversation and through the noise of the knives and the forks and the plates. That was why he'd been invited: Missy Channing-Peabody, suffering from morning sickness, needed an abortion. Rich people needed them, too. Even rich people, who, in Wilbur Larch's opinion, were the last to learn about anything, {89} even rich people knew about him. He wanted to leave, but now it was his fate that held him. Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling; Wilbur Larch felt himself called. The letter from the prostitute from St. Cloud's was on its way to him and he would go there, but first he was being called to perform-here.

He rose from the table. The men were being sent to some special room-for cigars. The women had gathered around someone's baby-a nurse or a governess (a servant, thought Wilbur Larch) had brought a baby into the dining room, and the women were having a look. Wilbur Larch had a look, too. The women made room for him. The baby was rosy-looking and cheerful, about three months old, but Dr. Larch noticed the forceps mark on its cheek: a definite indentation, it would leave a scar. I can do better work than this, he thought.

'Isn't that a darling baby, Doctor Larch?' one of the women asked him.

'It's too bad about that forceps mark,' Larch said, and that shut them all up.

Mrs. Channing-Peabody took him out into the hall. He let her lead him to the room that: had been prepared for him. On the way she said, 'We have this little problem.'

'How many months along is she?' he asked Mrs. Channing-Peabody. 'Is she quick?'

Quick or not, Missy Channing-Peabody had certainly been prepared. The family had converted a small reading room into an operating theater. There were old pictures of men in uniform, and books (looking long untouched) stood at attention. In the grim room's foreground was a solid table appropriately set with cotton batting and rubber sheeting, and Missy herself w as lying in the correct examining position. She was already shaved, already swabbed with the bichloride solution. Someone had done the necessary homework; perhaps they'd pumped the senile family surgeon for details. Dr. Larch saw the alcohol, the green soap, the nail brush {90} (which he proceeded, immediately, to use). There was a set of six metal dilators, and a set of three curettes in a leather-covered, satin-lined case. There was chloroform and a chloroform inhaler, and this one mistake-that they didn't know Wilbur Larch's preference for ether- made Larch almost forgive them.

What Wilbur Larch could not forgive was the obvious loathing they felt for him. There was an old woman in attendance, perhaps some faithful household servant who had played midwife to countless little Channing-Peabodys, maybe even midwife to Missy. The old woman was particularly chisel-faced and sharp-eyed when she looked at Larch, as if she expected him to congratulate her-at which moment she would not acknowledge that he'd spoken to her-for her precision in readying the patient. Mrs. Channing-Peabody herself seemed unable to touch him; she did offer to hold his coat, which he let her take before he asked her to leave.

'Send that young man,' Larch told her. 'He should be here, I think.' He meant the particularly hostile young man in tennis whites, whether he was the outraged brother or the guilty lover or both. These people need me but they hate me, Larch was thinking, as he scrubbed under his nails. While he let his arms soak in the alcohol bath, he wondered how many doctors the Channing-Peabodys must know (how many must be in the family!), but they would never have asked one of their kind for help with this 'little problem.' They were too pure for it.

'You want my help?' the sullen young man asked Larch.

'Not really,' Larch replied. 'Don't touch anything and stand to my left. Just look over my shoulder, and be sure you can see everything.'

That class-conscious look of scorn had all but left young Chadwick's (or young Cabot's) face when Wilbur Larch went to work with the curette; with the first appearance of the products of conception, the young man's expression opened-that certain, judgmental {91} air was not discernible in any aspect of his face, which seemed softened and resembled his tennis whites in its color.

'I have made this observation about the wall of the uterus,' Dr. Larch told the ghostly young man. 'It is a good, hard, muscular wall, and when you've scraped it clean, it responds with a gritty sound. That's how you know when you've got all of it-all the products of conception. You just listen for that gritty sound.' He scraped some more. 'Can you hear it?' he asked.

'No,' the young man whispered.

'Well, perhaps “sound” isn't the right word,' Wilbur Larch said. 'Perhaps it's more like a gritty feeling, but it's a sound to me. Gritty,' he said, as young Cabot or young Chadwick attempted to catch his own vomit in his cupped hands.

'Take her temperature every hour,' Larch told the rigid servant who held the sterile towels. 'If there's more than a little bleeding, or if she has a fever, I should be called. And treat her like a princess,' Wilbur Larch told the old woman and the ashen, empty young man. 'No one should be allowed to make her feel ashamed.'

He would have departed like a gentleman after he looked under Missy's eyelids at her chloroform gaze; but when he put his coat on, he felt the envelope bulge in the breast pocket. He didn't count the money, but he saw there were several hundred dollars. It was the mayor's mansion all over again, the servant's quarters treatment; it meant the Channing-Peabody's wouldn't ask him back for tennis or croquet or a sail.

He promptly handed about fifty dollars to the old woman who had bathed Missy's genitals with the bichloride solution and had covered her with a sterile vulval pad. He gave about twenty dollars to the young tennis player, who had opened the door to the patio to breathe a little of the garden air. Larch was going to leave. Then, when he shoved his hands in his coat pockets and found the panties again, on an impulse he grabbed the placenta 92 forceps and took the instrument with him. He went off looking for the old surgeon, but there were only servants in the dining room-still clearing the table. He gave each of them about twenty or thirty dollars.

He found the senile doctor asleep in a reading chair in another room. He optened the mouth of the forceps, clamped the pair of panties from 'Off Harrison' in it, and then clamped the whole business to the old snorer's lapel.

He found the kitchen, and several servants busy in it, and gave away about two hundred dollars there.

He went out on the grounds and gave the last of the money, another two hundred dollars, to a gardener who was on his knees in a flower bed by the main door. He would have liked to have handed the empty envelope back to Mrs. Channing-Peabody; the grand lady was hiding from him. He tried to fold the envelope and pin it to the main door under the big brass door knocker; the envelope kept blowing free in the wind. Then he got angry and wadded it up in a ball and threw it into a manicured circle of green lawn, which served as a rotary for the main driveway. Two croquet players on a far lawn held up their game and stared first at the crumpled envelope and then at the blue summer sky, as if a lightning bolt, at the very least, were momentarily expected to strike Larch dead.