John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Larch even got Melony a job as live-in help for a wellto-do old woman in Three Mile Falls. It may have been that the woman was a cranky invalid who would have complained about anyone; she certainly complained about Melony-she said Melony was 'insensitive,' that she was never 'forthcominG' with conversation, and that, in regard to such physical attentions as helping her in and out of her bath, the girl was 'unbelievably rough.' Dr. Larch could believe it, and Melony herself complained; she said she preferred to live at St. Cloud's; if she had to have a job, she wanted one she could go to and then leave.

I want to come home at night,' she told Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch. Home? Larch thought.

There was another job, in town, but it required that Melony know how to drive. Although Dr. Larch even found a local boy to teach Melony, her driving thoroughly frightened the young man and she needed to take the driver's examination for her license three times in order to pass it once. She then lost the job-delivering parts and tools for a building contractor. She was unable {153} to account for more than two hundred miles that had accumulated in one week on the delivery van's odometer.

'I just drove to places because I was bored,' she told Dr. Larch, shrugging. 'And there was a guy I was seeing, for a couple of days.'

Larch fretted that Melony, who was almost twenty, was now unemployable and unadoptable; she had grown dependent on her proximity to Homer Wells, although whole days passed when there didn't appear to be a word between them-in fact, no intercourse beyond mere presence was observable for weeks in succession (if Melony's presence could ever be called 'mere'). Because of how much Melony depressed Dr. Larch, Dr. Larch assumed that her presence was depressing to Homer Wells.

Wilbur Larch loved Homer Wells-he had never loved anyone as he loved that boy, and he could not imagine enduring a life at St. Cloud's without him- but the doctor knew that Homer Wells had to have an authentic encounter with society if the boy was going to have a chosen life at all. What Larch dreamed of was that Homer would venture out in the world and then choose to come back to St. Cloud's. But who would choose such a thing? Larch wondered.

Maine had many towns; there wasn't one as charmless as St. Cloud's.

Larch lay down in the dispensary and sniffed a little ether. Fie recalled Portland's safe harbor; his mind ticked off the towns, either east or inland from Portland, and his lips tried the towns with the good, Maine names.

(Inhale, exhale.) Wilbur Larch could almost taste those towns, their vapory names. There was Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, there was Vassalborough and Nobleboro and Waldoboro, there was Wiscasset and West Bath, Damariscotta and Friendship, Penobscot Bay and Sagadahoc Bay, Yarmouth and Camden, Rockport and Arundel, Rumford and Biddeford and Livermore Falls. {154} East of Cape Kenneth, the tourist trap, lies Heart's Haven; inland from the small, pretty harbor town that's called a haven squats the town of Heart's Rock. The rock in Heart's Rock is named for the uninhabited rock island that appears to float like a dead whale in the otherwise perfect harbor of Heart's Haven. It is an eyesore island, unloved by the people of Heart's Haven; perhaps they were moved to name the eyesore town of Heart's Rock after their bird-beshitted and fish-belly-white rock. Nearly covered at high tide, and lying fairly flat in the water, it lists slightly-hence its name: Dead Whale Rock. There is no actual 'rock' in Heart's Rock, which is not a town deserving to be looked down upon; it is only five miles inland, and from some of its hills the ocean is visible; in most of the town, the sea breeze is refreshingly felt.

But compared to Heart's Haven, every other town is a mongrel. When condemning Heart's Rock, the people of Heart's Haven do not mention the simple quaintness of the town's only stores-Sanborn's General Store and Titus Hardware and Plumbing. The people of Heart's Haven are more likely to mention Drinkwater Lake, and the summer cottages on its murky shores. A notvery-fresh freshwater lake, more of a pond-because by mid-July the bottom is cloudy and rank with algae- Drinkwater Lake is Heart's Rock's only offering to summer people. People who summer on Drinkwater Lake have not traveled far; they may live elsewhere in Heart's Rock-or, even more rustically, in Kenneth Corners. The summer camps and cottages that dot the lakeshore are also used during the hunting-season weekends in the fall. The cottages and camps have names of a striving wishfulness. Echo's End, and Buck's Last Stand (this one is decked with antlers); there is one called Endless Weekend, with a floating dock; one called Wee Three, suggesting inhabitants of an almost unbearable cuteness; and a frank sort of place called Sherman's Hole in the Ground, which is an accurate description. {155}

In 194- Drinkwater Lake was already cluttered, and by 195- it would become intolerably busy with powerboats and water skis-propellers fouled and oars festooned with the slime-green algae stirred up from the bottom. The lake is too woodsy to let the wind through; sailboats always die on the dead-calm surface, which is perfect for hatching mosquitoes, and over the years the accumulated children's urine and gasoline would give the lake an unwell, glossy sheen. There are wonderfully remote lakes in Maine, but Drinkwater Lake was never one of them. The occasional, bewildered canoeist looking for the wilderness would not find it there. The wildhearted, departed Winkles would not have favored the place. You would not willingly drink the water of Drinkwater Lake, and there are many tiresome jokes on that subject, all conceived in Heart's Haven, where the habit of judging Heart's Rock by its single, sorry body of water is long-standing.

When Homer Wells would first see Drinkwater Lake, he would imagine that if there were ever a summer camp for the luckless orphans of St. Cloud's, it would be situated in the bog that separates Echo's End from Sherman's Hole in the Ground.

Not all of Heart's Rock was so ugly. It was a town of stay-put people on fairly open, neatly farmed land; it was dairy-cow country, and fruit-tree country. In 194-, the Ocean View Orchard on Drinkwater Road, which connected Heart's Rock to Heart's Haven, was pretty and plentiful-even by the standards of the spoiled and hard-to-please of Heart's Haven. Although the Ocean View Orchards were in Heart's Rock, there was a Heart's Haven look to the place; the farmhouse had flagstone patios, the grounds were landscaped with rose bushes -like the Heart's Haven homes on the more elegant coast-and the lawns spreading from the main house to the swimming pool, all the way to the nearest apple orchard, were kept up and fussed over by the same yard {156} gangs who made the Heart's Haven lawns look so much like putting greens.

The owner of Ocean View Orchards, Wallace Worthington, even had a Heart's Haven kind of name- meaning, it was not a local-sounding name. Indeed not, because Wallace Worthington was from New York; he'd fled investments for apple farming just before everyone's investments crashed, and if he didn't know all there was to know about apples-being a gentleman farmer, in soul and in bones (and in clothes)-he knew almost everything about money and had hired the right foremen to run Ocean View (men who did know apples).

Worthington was a perpetual board member at the Haven Club; he was the only member whose position on the board was never voted-and the only Heart's Rock resident who was a Haven Club member. Since his orchard employed half the locals of Heart's Rock,

Wallace Worthington had the rare distinction of being appreciated in both towns. Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion-the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.