John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Olive had a vision of her silent mother, Maud, mesmerized by her own fading image in the makeup mirror -clams everywhere around her. The little cotton balls dabbed with cosmetics (the color of the clay on her brother Bucky's terrible boots) were flecked with the ashes from the cigarettes overstuffing the clam-shell ashtray. These images strengthened Olive. She knew the life she had escaped, and at Ocean View Orchards she more than earned her keep; she took the farm out of Senior's careless hands, and she ran it very intelligently for him.

At night, coming back from the Haven Club (she always drove), Olive would leave Senior passed out in the passenger seat and put a note on her son Wally's pillow, asking him, when he got home, to remember to carry his father up to bed. Wally always did so; he was a golden boy, riot just a picture of one. The one night that young Wally had drunk too much to carry his father to bed, Olive Worthington was quick to point out to her son the error of his ways.

'You may resemble your father, with my pel-mission, in every aspect but in his drunkenness,' she told Wally. 'If you resemble him in that aspect, you will lose this farm-and every penny made by every apple. Do you think your father could prevent me from doing that to you?'

Wally looked at his father, whom he had allowed to sleep all night in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, now mottled by spraying chemicals. It was obvious to the boy that Senior Worthington could prevent nothing.

'No, Mom,' Wally said to his mother respectfully- not just because he was educated and polite (he could have taught tennis and manners at the Haven Club, and taught them well), but also because he knew his mother, Olive Worthington, hadn't 'married into' anything more than a little working cash. The work had been supplied {162} by her; Wilbur Larch would have respected that.

The sadness was that Olive, too, misjudged poor Senior, who was only a tangential victim of alcoholism and a nearly complete victim of Alzheimer's disease.

There are things that the societies of towns know about you, and things that they miss. Senior Worthington was baffled by his own deterioration, which he also believed to be the result of the evils of drink. When he drank less-and still couldn't remember in the morning what he'd said or done the evening before; still saw no relenting of his remarkable speeded-up process of aging; still hopped from one activity to the next, leaving a jacket in one place, a hat in another, his car keys in the lost jacket-when he drank less and still behaved like a fool, this bewildered him to such an extreme that he began to drink more. In the end, he would be a victim of both Alzheimer's disease and alcoholism; a happy drunk, with unexplained plunges of mood. In a better, and betterinformed world, he would have been cared for like the nearly faultless patient that he was.

In this one respect Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock resembled St. Cloud's: there was no saving Senior Worthington from what was wrong with him, as surely as there had been no saving Fuzzy Stone.

In 193-, Homer Wells began Gray's Anatomy -at the beginning. He began with osteology, the skeleton. He began with bones. In 194-, he was making his third journey through Gray's Anatomy, some of which he shared with Melony. Melony showed a wayward concentration, though she confessed interest in the complexity of the nervous system, specifically the description of the twelfth or hypoglossal nerve, which is the motor nerve of the tongue.

'What's a motor nerve?' Melony asked, sticking out her tongue. Homer tried to explain, but he felt tired. He was making his sixth journey through David Copperfield, his seventh through Great Expectations, his fourth through {163} Jane Eyre. Only last night he had come to a part that always made Melony cringe-which made Homer anxious.

It's near the beginning of Chapter Twelve, when Jane shrewdly observes, 'It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.'

'Just remember, Sunshine,' Melony interrupted him. 'As long as I stay, you stay. A promise is a promise.'

But Homer Wells was tired of Melony making him anxious. He repeated the line, this time reading it as if he were personally delivering a threat.

'It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.' Mrs. Grogan looked taken aback at the ominousness in his voice.

He copied the line in a handwriting nearly as orderly and cramped as Dr. Larch's; Homer typed it on Nurse Angela's typewriter, making only a few mistakes. And when Wilbur Larch was 'just resting' in the dispensary, Homer crept up on the tired saint and placed the piece of paper with the quotation from Jane Eyre on Dr. Larch's rising and falling chest. Dr. Larch felt less threatened by the actual text of the quotation than he felt a general unease: that Homer knew Dr. Larch's ether habit so exactly that the boy could approach his bed undetected. Or am I using a little more of this stuff than I used to? Larch wondered.

Was it meant as a message that Homer had used the ether cone to hold the Jane Eyre quotation to Larch's chest?

'History,' wrote Dr. Larch, 'is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes.'

He may have been referring to something as small as the apostrophe that someone added to the original St. Clouds. His point is also illuminated by the case of the heart in both Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock, a case similar in error to how Melody became forever a Melony. 164 The explorer credited with the discovery of the fine, pretty harbor at Heart's Haven-a seafaring man named Reginald Hart-was also the first settler of Heart's Rock to clear land and try to be a farmer. The general illiteracy of the times, and of the times following Reginald Hart's death, prevailed; no one knew of any written difference between one heart and another. The first settlers of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock, probably never knowing that Reginald Hart had been given the name of a deer, quite comfortably named their towns after an organ.

'A hollow muscular organ of conical form,' as Homer Wells could recite, by rote, from Gray's Anatomy, '… enclosed in the cavity of the PERICARDIUM.' By 194-Homer had looked at each of the hearts in the three cadavers Dr. Larch had acquired for him (each cadaver outliving its usefulness for exploratory purposes in about two years' time).

The cadavers were female; it hardly served Dr. Larch's purpose-in the process of educating Homer Wells in obstetrical procedure and procedures of a related kind-to have his student examining male cadavers. There was always a problem getting a body (once one was delivered in water that was supposed to be ice; another had to be disposed of because the embalming fluid had clearly been old or too weak). Homer remembered the three cadavers distinctly. It was not until the third body that he developed enough of a sense of humor to give the body a name; they called her Clara after David Copperfield's wimpish mother-that poor, weak woman who'd allowed herself and young David to be so bullied by the terrible Mr. Murdstone.

'You should call her Jane,' Melony advised Homer; Melony was alternately sick of Jane Eyre and completely identified with her.

'I could have called her Melony,' Homer responded, but humor was not reliably to be found in Melony, who preferred to play her own jokes.

Body number two provided Homer with the essential {165}practice that prepared him for his first Caesarean section; for that one, he had felt Dr. Larch's eyes so riveted to his hands that his hands seemed not his own-they moved with such smooth purpose that Homer was sure that Dr. Larch had discovered a way to make that perfect, no-bigger-than-necessary incision in the uterus with his mind (no need for using hands, at all).