John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'He was almost as calm as you, Wilbur,' Nurse Edna said admiringly. 'You can be real proud of him.'

'He is an angel, in my opinion,' Nurse Angela said.

'He looked a little grirn when he had to break the water,' Nurse Edna remembered, 'but he did everything just right.'

'He was as sure as snow,' Nurse Angela said.

He did almost everything right, Wilbur Ls.rch was thinking; it really was amazing. Larch thought it was a slight error that Homer had failed to record the exact number of convulsions in the second twelve-hour period (especially after correctly counting them in the first twelve hours), and Homer had not mentioned the number or the severity of the convulsions (or if there were any) in the ten-hour period after the patient's labor contractions began and before she delivered. Minor criticism. Wilbur Larch was a good teacher; he knew that this criticism was better withheld. Homer Wells had performed all the hard parts correctly; his procedure had been perfect.

'He's not even twenty-is he?' Larch asked. But Nurse Edna had gone to bed, she was exhausted; in her dream she would mingle Homer's heroism with her already con-{174} siderable love for Larch; she would sleep very well. Nurse Angela was still up, in her office, and when Dr. Larch asked her why the premature baby had not been named, she told Larch that it was Nurse Edna's turn and Nurse Edna had been too tired.

'Well, it's just a matter of form,' said Wilbur Larch.! 'You name it, then-I want it named. It won't kill you to go out of turn, will it?'

But Nurse Angela had a better idea. It was Homer's baby-he had saved it, and the mother. Homer Wells should name this one, Nurse Angela said.

'Yes, you're right, he should,' Dr. Larch replied, filling with pride in his wonderful creation.

Homer Wells would wake to a day of naming. In the same day he would be faced with naming body number three and his first orphan. He would name the new body Clara, and what else could he have named a baby boy except David Copperfield? He was reading Great Expectations at the time and he preferred Great Expectations to David Copperfield as a book. But he would not name anyone Pip, and he didn't care for the character of Pip as much as he cared for little David. It was an easy decision, and he woke that morning very refreshed and capable of more demanding decisions than that one.

He had slept almost through the night. He woke only once on the dispensary bed, aware that Dr. Larch was back; Larch was in the room probably looking at him, but Homer kept his eyes closed. He somehow knew Larch was there because of the sweet scent of ether, which Larch wore like cologne, and because of the steadiness of Larch's breathing. Then he felt Larch's hand-a doctor's hand, feeling for fever-pass very lightly over his forehead. Homer Wells, not yet twenty-quite accomplished in obstetrical procedure and as knowledgeable as almost any doctor on the care of 'the female organs of generation'-lay very still, pretending to sleep.

Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Larch whisper, 'Good work, {175}Homer.' He felt a second, even lighter kiss. 'Good work, my boy,' the doctor said, and then left him.

Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried-when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch's pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.

Of course Melony had kissed him; she didn't do it much anymore, but she had. And Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had kissed him silly, but they kissed everyone. Dr. Larch had never kissed him before, and now he had kissed him twice.

Homer Wells cried because he'd never known how nice a father's kisses could be, and he cried because he doubted that Wilbur Larch would ever do it again-or would have done it, if he'd thought Homer was awake.

Dr. Larch went to marvel at the good health of the eclampsia patient and at her thriving, tiny child-who, in the morning, would become the orphan David Copperfield ('David Copperfield, Junior,' Dr. Larch would enjoy saying). Then Larch went to the familiar typewriter in Nurse Angela's office, but he couldn't write anything. He couldn't even think, he was so agitated from kissing Homer Wells. If Homer Wells had received his first fatherly kisses, Dr. Larch had given the first kisses he had ever given-fatherly, or otherwise-since the day in the Portland boardinghouse when he caught the clap from Mrs. Eames. And the kisses he gave ':o Mrs. Eaines were more in the nature of explorations than they were gifts of love. Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what will happen to me when Homer has to go?

Where he would go was hardly a place of comparable excitement, of comparable challenge, of comparable sadness, of comparable gloom; but where he would go {176}was nice, and what would Homer Wells, with his background, make of nice? Wouldn't it simply seduce him? Wouldn't anyone rather have nice?

What did Heart's Haven or Heart's Rock know of trouble, and what did anyone do there to be of use?

Yes, Olive Worthington suffered her brother Bucky's intrusions-his well-digging slime in her swimming pool and his trekking across her rugs. Big deal. Yes, Olive worried if young Wally would have gumption, if he would really learn and contribute to the apple-growing business-or would the pretty boy become, like Senior, a good-timer turning pathetic? But what were these worries compared to the business of St. Cloud's? Compared to the Lord's work and the Devil's work, weren't these concerns trivial? Wasn't life in nice places shallow?

But trouble can come to nice places, too; trouble travels, trouble visits. Trouble even takes holidays from the places where it thrives, from places like St. Cloud's. The trouble that visited Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock was a fairly trivial and common form of trouble; it began, as trouble often does, with falling in love.

'Here in St. Cloud's,' wrote Wilbur Larch, 'I don't imagine that anyone falls in love; it would be too evident a luxury, to fall in love here.' Larch didn't know that Nurse Edna had been in love with him from day one, but he was correct in supposing that it hadn't been exactly love that passed between Melony and Homer Wells. And what clung to each of them after the first passion had passed was surety not love. And that picture of Mrs. Eames's daughter with the pony's penis in her mouth: that photograph was the oldest resident of St. Cloud's -and surely it had no love in it. That picture was as far from love as Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock were from St. Cloud's.

'In other parts of the world,' wrote Wilbur Larch, I imagine that people fall in love all the time.'

If not all the time, a lot. Young Wally Worthington, {177}for example, thought he'd been in love twice before he was twenty, and once when he was twenty-one; now, in 194- (he was just three years older than Homer Wells), Wally fell full-force in loveior the fourth time. He didn't know that this time would be for keeps.

The girl young Wally's heart would select for life was a lobsterman's daughter; he was no ordinary lobsterman, and it was no surprise to anyone that he had an extraordinary daughter. Raymond Kendall was so good at lobstering that other lobstermen, through binoculars, watched him pull and bait a pot. When he changed his mooring lines, they changed theirs. When he didn't go to sea but stayed at home, or at his dock mending pots, they stayed home, too, and mended theirs. But they couldn't match him; he had so many pots in the water l:hat his personalized black and orange buoys gave the Heart's Haven harbor the razzle-dazzle of collegiate competition. Once a contingent of Yale men from the Haven Club beseeched Raymond Kendall to change his colors to blue and white, but Kendall only muttered that he didn't have time for games. Other contingents from the Haven Club would beseech him; the subject was rarely the color of his lobster buoys.