John Irving: The Cider House Rules

Homer Wells listened to these steady rhythms like a visitor from another world trying to decipher a strange tribe's drums. He couldn't quite catch on. The seeming constancy of everyone was overwhelming. He wouldn't know until he was much older just which it was that didn't set well with him-the implicit (and explicit) and self-congratulatory dogooderism, or the heartiness with which life was tediously over-simplified. {29}

Whichever it was, he stopped liking it; it became an obstacle in the path he was looking for that led to himself -to who he was, or should be. He remembered various Thanksgivings at St. Cloud's. They were not so cheery as the Waterville Thanksgiving with the Draper family, but they seemed a lot more real. He remembered how he had felt of use. There were always babies who couldn't feed themselves. There was the likelihood of a snowstorm that would knock out the electricity; Homer was put in charge of the candles and the kerosene lamps:. He was also in charge of helping the kitchen staff clear, of helping Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna comfort the crying- of being Dr. Larch's messenger: the most prized responsibility that was conferred in the boys' division. Before he was ten, and long before he would be given such explicit instruction from Dr. Larch, Homer felt full of usefulness at St. Cloud's.

What was it about Thanksgiving at the Drapers' that contrasted so severely with the same event at St. Cloud's? Mom had no match as a cook; it couldn't have been the food-which, at St. Cloud's, suffered from a visible and seemingly terminal grayness. Was it the saying of grace? At St. Cloud's, grace was a rather blunt instrument- Dr. Larch not being a religious man.

'Let us be thankful,' he would say, and then pause- as if he were truly wondering, What for? 'Let us be thankful for what kindness we have received,' Larch would say, cautiously looking at the unwanted and abandoned around him. 'Let us be thankful for Nurse Angela and for Nurse Edna,' he would add, with more assurance in his voice. 'Let us be thankful that we've got options, that we've got second chances,' he added once, looking at Homer Wells.

The event of grace-at Thanksgiving, at St. Cloud's- was shrouded with chance, with understandable caution, with typically Larchlike reserve.

Grace at the Drapers' was effusive and strange. It seemed somehow connected with the professor's defini-{30} tion of the meaning of 'repentance.' Professor Draper said that the start of real repentance was to accept yourself as vile. For grace, the professor cried out, 'Say after me: I am vile, I abhor myself, but I am thankful for everyone in my family!' They all said so-even Homer, even Mom (who for once withheld her recommended grain of salt).

St. Cloud's was a sober place, but its manner of giving what little thanks it could seemed frank, sincere. Some contradiction in the Draper family occurred to Homer Wells for the first time at Thanksgiving. Unlike St. Cloud's, life in Waterville seemed good-babies, for example, were wanted. Where did 'repentance' come from, then? Was there guilt attached to feeling lucky? And if Larch (as Homer had been told) was named from a tree, God (whom Homer heard a lot about in Waterville) seemed to be named from even tougher stuff: maybe from mountain, maybe from ice. If God was sobering in Waterville, the Draper Thanksgiving was-to Homer's surprise -a drunken occasion.

The professor was, in Mom's words, 'in his cups.' This, Homer deduced, meant that the professor had consumed more than his normal, daily amount of alcohol-which, in Mom's words, made him only 'tipsy.' Homer was shocked to see the two married daughters and the married son behave as if they were in their cups, too. And since Thanksgiving was special and he was allowed to stay up late-with all the grandchildren-Homer observed that nightly occurrence he had previously only heard as he was falling asleep: the thudding, dragging, shuffling sound, and the muffled voice of reason, which was the professor slurring his protest of the fact that Mom forcibly assisted him upstairs and with astonishing strength lifted him to and deposited him upon the bed.

'Value of exercise!' shouted the grown and married son, before toppling from the green chaise and collapsing upon the rug- beside old Ruf us-as if he'd been poisoned.

'Like father, like son!' said one of the married daughters. The other married daughter, Homer noted, had {31} nothing to say. She slept peacefully in the rocking chair; her whole hand-above the second knuckle joints-was submerged in her nearly full drink, which rested precariously in her lap.

The unmanaged grandchildren violated the house's million rules. The professor's passionate readings of various riot acts were seemingly ignored for Thanksgiving.

Homer Wells, not yet ten, crept quietly to his bed. Invoking an especially sad memory of St. Cloud's was a way he frequently forced sleep upon himself. What he remembered was the time he saw the mothers leaving the orphanage hospital, which was within view of the girls' division and which adjoined the boys' division-they were architecturally linked by a long shed, formerly a storage room for spare blades to the circular saw. It was early morning, but it was still dark out and Homer needed the coach lights in order to see that it was snowing. He slept badly and was often awake for the arrival of the coach, which came from the railroad station and delivered to St. Cloud's the kitchen and cleaning staff and the first hospital shift. The coach was simply an abandoned railroad car; set on sled runners in the winter, it was a converted sleigh, pulled by horses. When there wasn't enough snow on the dirt road, the sled runners struck sparks against the stones in the ground and made a terrible grating noise (they were reluctant to change the runners for wheels until they knew the winter was over). A bright light, like a flare, sputtered by the heavily blanketed driver on the makeshift carriage seat; softer lights winked inside the coach car.

This morning, Homer noted, there were women waiting in the snow to be picked up by the coach. Homer Wells didn't recognize the women, who fidgeted the whole time it took the St. Cloud's staff to unload. There seemed to be a certain tension between these groups -the women waiting to board appeared shy, even ashamed; the men and women coming to work seemed, by comparison, arrogant, even superior, and one of {32} them (it was a woman) made a rough remark to the women waiting to leave. Homer couldn't hear the remark, but its effect drove the waiting women away from the coach like a blast of the winter wind. The women who boarded the coach did not look back, or even at each other. They didn't even speak, and the driver, who struck Homer as a friendly man who had something to say to nearly everyone in any weather, had no word for them. The coach simply turned around and glided across the snow to the station; in the lit windows, Homer Wells could see that several of the women had their faces in their hands, or sat as stonily as the other kind of mourner at a funeral-the one who must assume an attitude of total disinterest or else risk total loss of control.

He had never before seen the mothers who had their unwanted babies at St. Cloud's and then left them there, and he didn't see them very clearly this time. It was unquestionably more meaningful that he first saw them as they were taking their leave rather than arriving, fullbellied and undelivered of their problems. Importantly, Homer knew they did not look delivered of all their problems when they left. No one he had seen looked more miserable than those women; he suspected it was no accident that they left in darkness.

When he tried to put himself to sleep, Thanksgiving night with the Drapers in Waterville, Homer Wells saw the mothers leaving in the snow, but he also saw more than he'd actually seen. On the nights he couldn't sleep, Homer rode in the coach to the station with the women, he boarded the train with them, he went to their homes with them; he singled out his mother and followed her. It was hard to see what she looked like and where she lived, where she'd come from, if she'd gone back there-and harder still was to imagine who his father was, and if she went back to him. Like most orphans, Homer Wells imagined that he saw his missing parents often, but he was always unrecognized by them. As a child he was {33} embarrassed to be caught staring at adults, sometimes affectionately, other times with an instinctual hostility he would not have recognized on his own face.