John Irving - The Cider House Rules

The Haven Club faced the far jetty of Heart's Haven Harbor, where Raymond Kendall's lobster pound and dock were long established. Kendall lived above the pound, which might have enticed a more superficial man to comply with the Haven Club's requests that he beautify his immediate environs. His establishment was considered, by summer people's standards, an eyesore on a harborfront of otherwise natural and/or expensively groomed beauty. Even his bedroom window we.s hung with buoys in various stages of repainting. The lobster pots undergoing repairs were piled so high on his dock that it was impossible, from shore, to see if boats were moored on the far side of the dock. The parking lot for the lobster pound was nearly full-and not of customers' cars (there was never enough room for the customers {178}); it was full of the various trucks and cars that Raymond Kendall was 'working on,' and full of the vast and oily inboard engines for his lobster boats.

Everything surrounding the harborfront property of Raymond Kendall was teeming with a messy mechanic's condition of total overhaul; everything was in progress, incomplete, dismantled, still wet, waiting for parts – and, for noise, there were the constant grinding sounds of the generator that ran the water tanks for the lobsters in the pound and the greasy belching of an inboard engine idling at the dock. And then there was the smell: of tarred rope, of that slightly-different-from-fishy fishiness that a lobster has, of the fuel and motor oil that slicked the ocean at his dock (which was matted with seaweed, studded with periwinkles, festooned with yellow oilskin suits hung out to dry). Raymond Kendall lived his work; he liked his work in evidence around him; the jetty end of Heart's Haven Harbor was his artist's studio.

He was not just an artist with lobster, he also was an expert at fixing things-at keeping everything anyone else would throw away running. If asked, Raymond Kendall wouldn't tell you he was a lobsterman; it was not that he was ashamed of it, but he was prouder of his qualities as a mechanic. 'I'm just a tinkerer,' he liked to say.

And if the Haven Club complained about the constant evidence of his tinkering, which they strongly felt tarnished their splendid view, they didn't complain too much; Raymond Kendall fixed what belonged to them, too. For example, he repaired the filter system for their swimming pool-in the days when no one had pools, when no one else would have touched it and Ray Kendall himself had never seen a filter system before. 'I suppose it just does what you'd think it should,' he said, taking ten minutes with the job.

It was rumored that the only thing Ray Kendall threw away was uneaten food, which he threw overboard or off {179}the end of his dock. 'J us t: feeding the lobsters, which feed me,' he would say to anyone who complained. 'Just feeding the sea gulls, who are hungrier than you and me.'

It was rumored he had more money than Senior Worthington; there was almost no evidence of his spending any-except on his daughter. Like the children of the Haven Club members, she went to a private boarding school; and Raymond Kendall paid the considerable annual dues for a Haven Club membership-not for himself (he went to the club only on request: to fix things) but for his daughter, who'd learned to swim in the heated pool there, and who'd taken her tennis lessons on the same courts graced by young Wally Worthington. Kendall's daughter had her own car, too-it looked out of place in the Haven Club parking lot. It was a lobsterpound-parking-lot sort of car, a mishmash of the parts that were still serviceable from other cars; one of its fenders was unpainted and was attached with wires; it had a Ford insignia on its hood and a Chrysler emblem on the trunk, and the passenger-side door was sealed completely shut. However, its battery never went dead in the Haven Club lot; it was never this relic that wouldn't start; when one of the Haven Club members had a car that v/ouldn't start, he went looking for Raymond Kendall's daughter, who kept jumper cables in her sturdy wreck and had been taught by her father how to use them.

Some of the fabulous money Raymond Kendall was rumored to have, and to hoard, was paid him as salary by Olive Worthington; in addition to his lobstering, Ray Kendall kept the vehicles and machinery of the Ocean View Orchards running. Olive Worthington paid him a full foreman's salary because he knew almost as much about apples as he knew about lobsters (and he was indispensable as the farm's mechanic), but Ray refused to work more than two hours a day. He picked his own two hours, too-sometimes coming first thing, saying it was a bad time to go to sea, and sometimes showing up at the {180} end of the workday, just in time to hear the orchardmen's complaints about what was wrong with the nozzle of the Hardie or with the pump of the Bean sprayer, or what was plugged in the carburetor of the Deere tractor, or out of tune with the International Harvester. He saw instantly what was crooked in the mower blades, fucked up in the forklift, jammed in the conveyor, dead in the pickup, or out of alignment in the cider mill. Raymond Kendall did in two hours what another mechanic would have spent a day doing a half-assed job of, and he almost never came to Olive and told her that she had to get a new this or a new that.

It was always Olive who made the first suggestion: that something should be replaced.

'Isn't the clutch on the Deere always in need of adjustment, Ray?' she would politely ask him. 'Would you recommend its replacement?'

But Raymond Kendall was a surgeon among tinkerers -he had a doctor's hearty denial of death-and he found replacing something an admission of weakness, of failure. He would almost always say, 'Well, now, Olive -if I fixed it before, I can fix it again. I can always just goon fixing it.'

Olive respected Raymond Kendall's contempt for people who didn't know their own work and had 'no capacity for work of any kind, anyhow.' She agreed with him completely, and she also appreciated that he never included in his contempt either Senior or her father, Bruce Bean. Besides, Senior Worthington knew enough about managing money with his left hand that he'd been very successful without working more than an hour a day-usually on the telephone.

'The crop,' Olive would say, of her beloved apples, 'can survive bad weather even at blossom time.' By which she meant wind; a stiff offshore breeze would keep Ira Titcomb's bees in their hives, and the wild bees would be blown back into the woods, where they pollinated everything but apple trees. 'The crop can even survive a {181} bad harvest,' Olive said. She might have meant rain, when the fruit is slippery, gets dropped, gets bruised, is then good only for cider; or even a hurricane, which is a real danger for a coastal orchard, 'The crop couid even survive something happening to me,' Olive claimed-at which modesty both Senior Worthington and young Wally would voice protest. 'But what the crop could never survive,' Olive would say, 'is losing Ray Kendall.' She meant that without Raymond nothing would work, or that they'd have to buy new everything, which soon wouldn't work any better than the old stuff that only Ray could keep running.

'I doubt very much, Mother,' said young Wally, 'if either Heart's Haven or Heart's Rock could survive without Raymond Kendall.'

'I'll drink to that,' Senior Worthington said, and promptly did so, causing Olive to look tragic and inspiring young Wally to change the subject.

Despite the fact that Ray Kendall worked two hours every day at Ocean View, he was never seen to eat an apple; only rarely did he eat lobster (he preferred chicken or pork chops, or even hamburger). During a Haven Club regatta, several sailors claimed that they could smell Ray Kendall frying hamburger aboard his lobster boat while he was pulling in his pots.