The Cider House Rules

"Of course, while you're looking up the file on me you can look up yourself--if you're interested," Melony added. She took her finger away. "Give me your finger, Sunshine," she said, but Homer Wells, holding the photograph in both hands, decided to let this request pass. "Come on," Melony coaxed. "I won't hurt you." He gave her his left hand, keeping the photograph in his right; he actually extended his closed fist to her so that it was necessary for her to open his hand before she could slip his left index finger into her mouth. "Look at the picture, Sunshine," she told him; he did as he was told. She tapped his finger against her teeth while she managed to say, "Just get me the file and you know what you'll get. Just keep the picture and think about it," Melony said.

What Homer thought was that the anxiety of looking at the photograph with his finger in Melony's mouth, kneeling beside her on the mattress home of countless mice, would be eternal. But there was such a startling thump! on the roof of the building--like a falling body, followed by a lighter thump (as if the body had bounced)--that Melony bit down hard on his finger before he could, instinctively, retrieve it from her mouth. Still on their knees, they lurched into each other's arms; they hugged each other and held their breath. Homer Wells could feel his heart pound against Melony's breasts. "What the hell was that?" Melony asked.

Homer Wells let the question pass. He was imagining the ghost of the woodsman whose photograph he clutched in his hand, the actual body of the sawmill laborer landing on the roof, a man with a rusty ripsaw in each hand, a man whose ears would hear, in eternity, only the whine of those lumberyard blades. In that thump! of dead weight upon the roof of the abandoned building, Homer himself heard the snarling pitch of those long-ago saws--but what was that sharp, almost human noise he heard singing above the buzz? It was the sound of cries, Homer imagined: the paper-thin wails of the babies on the hill, those first orphans of St. Cloud's.

His hot cheek felt the flutter of the pulse in Melony's throat. The lightest, most delicate footsteps seemed to walk the roof--as if the body of the ghost, after his fall, were changing back to spirit.

"Jesus!" Melony said, shoving Homer Wells away from her so forcefully that he fell against the wall. The noise Homer made caused the spirit on the roof to scurry, and to emit a piercing, two-syllable shriek--the easily identified whistle of the red-shouldered hawk.

"Kee-yer!" the hawk said.

The hawk's cry was apparently not recognizable to Melony, who screamed, but Homer knew instantly what was on the roof; he rushed down the stairs, across the porch to the wrecked rail. He was in time to see the hawk ascending; this time the snake appeared easier to carry--it hung straight down, as true as a plumb line. It was impossible to know if the hawk had lost control of the snake, or if the bird had dropped the snake intentionally--realizing that this was a sure, if not entirely professional, way to kill it. No matter: the long fall to the roof had clearly finished the snake, and its dead weight was easier to bear away than when it had lived and writhed in the hawk's talons and had repeatedly struck at the hawk's breast. Homer noted that the snake was slightly longer and not quite as thick as the pony's penis.

Melony, out of breath, stood on the porch beside Homer. When the hawk was out of sight, she repeated her promise to him. "Just keep the picture and think about it," she repeated.

Not that Homer Wells needed any instruction to "think about it." What a lot he had to think about!

"Adolescence," wrote Wilbur Larch. "Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?"

For the first time in his life, Homer Wells was hiding something from Dr. Larch--and from Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. And with the photograph of the pony with its penis in the woman's mouth, Homer Wells was also hiding his first misgivings concerning St. Larch. With the photograph, he hid his first lust--not only for the woman who gagged on the pony's amazing instrument but also for the inspired promise Melony had made him. Hidden with the photograph (under his hospital-bed mattress, pinned against the bedsprings) were Homer's anxieties concerning what he might discover in the so-called files--in the imagined record of his birth at St. Cloud's. His own mother's history lay in hiding with that photograph, which Homer found he was more and more drawn to.

He took it out from under the mattress and looked at it three or four times a day; and at night, when he couldn't sleep, he looked at it in candlelight--a drowsy light in which the woman's eyes appeared to bulge less violently, a light in the flicker of which Homer imagined he could see the woman's cheeks actually move. The movement of the candlelight appeared to stir the pony's mane. One night when he was looking at the picture, he heard John Wilbur wet his bed. More often, Homer looked at the picture to the accompaniment of Fuzzy Stone's dramatic gasps--the cacophony of lungs, waterwheel and fan seemed appropriate to the woman-and-pony act that Homer Wells so fully memorized and imagined.

Something changed in Homer's insomnia; Dr. Larch detected the difference, or else it was the deception within him that made Homer Wells conscious of Dr. Larch's observations of him. When Homer would tiptoe down to Nurse Angela's office, late at night, it seemed to him that Dr. Larch was always at the typewriter--and that he would always notice Homer's careful movement in the hall.

"Anything I can do for you, Homer?" Dr. Larch would ask.

"Just can't sleep," Homer would reply.

"So what's new?" Dr. Larch would ask.

Did the man write all night? In the daytime, Nurse Angela's office was busy--it was the only room for interviews and phone calls. It was full of Dr. Larch's papers, too--his correspondence with other orphanages, with adoption agencies, with prospective parents; his noteworthy (if occasionally facetious) journal, his whatnot diary, which he called A Brief History of St. Cloud's. It was no longer "brief," and it grew daily--every entry faithfully beginning, "Here in St. Cloud's . . ." or, "In other parts of the world . . ."

Dr. Larch's papers also included extensive family histories--but only of the families who adopted the orphans. Contrary to Melony's belief, no records were kept of the orphans' actual mothers and fathers. An orphan's history began with its date of birth--its sex, its length in inches, its weight in pounds, its nurse-given name (if it was a boy) or the name Mrs. Grogan or the girls' division secretary gave it (if it was a girl). This, with a record of the orphans' sicknesses and shots, was all there was. A substantially thicker file was kept on the orphans' adoptive families--knowing what he could about those families was important to Dr. Larch.

"Here in St. Cloud's," he wrote, "I try to consider, with each rule I make or break, that my first priority is an orphan's future. It is for his or her future, for example, that I destroy any record of the identity of his or her natural mother. The unfortunate women who give birth here have made a very difficult decision; they should not, later in their lives, be faced with making this decision again. And in almost every case the orphans should be spared any later search for the biological parents; certainly, the orphans should, in most cases, be spared the discovery of the actual parents.

"I am thinking of them, always of them--only of the orphans! Of course they will, one day, want to know; at the very least, they will be curious. But how does it help anyone to look forward to the past? How are orphans served by having their past to look ahead to? Orphans, especially, must look ahead to their futures.

"And would an orphan be served by having his or her biological parent, in later years, regret the decision to give birth here? If there were records, it would always be possible for the real parents to trace their children. I am not in the business of reuniting orphans with their biological beginnings! That is the storytelling business. I am in the business for the orphans."

That is the passage from A Brief History of St. Cloud's that Wilbur Larch showed to Homer Wells, when he caught Homer in Nurse Angela's office going through his papers.

"I was just looking for something, and I couldn't find it," Homer stammered to Dr. Larch.

"I know what you were looking for, Homer," Dr. Larch told him, "and it is not to be found."

That is what the note said, the one Homer passed to Melony when he went to the girls' division to read Jane Eyre. Each night they had repeated a wordless habit: Melony would stick her finger in her mouth--she appeared to stick it halfway down her throat, her eyes bulging in mockery of the woman with the pony--and Homer Wells would simply shake his head, indicating that he hadn't found what he was looking for. The note that said "Not to Be Found" provoked a look of profound suspicion on Melony's restless countenance.

"Homer," Dr. Larch had said, "I don't remember your mother. I don't even remember you when you were born; you didn't become you until later."

"I thought there was a law," Homer said. He meant Melony's law--a law of records, or written history--but Wilbur Larch was the only historian and the only law at St. Cloud's. It was an orphanage law: an orphan's life began when Wilbur Larch remembered it; and if an orphan was adopted before it became memorable (which was the hope), then its life began with whoever had adopted it. That was Larch's law. After all, he had taken the necessary responsibility to follow the common law regarding when a fetus was quick or not yet quick; the rules governing whether he delivered a baby or whether he delivered a mother were his rules, too.

"I've been thinking about you, Homer," Dr. Larch told the boy. "I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time--or yours--thinking about who you were before I knew you."

Larch showed Homer a letter he was writing--it was still in the typewriter. It was a letter to someone at The New England Home for Little Wanderers, which had been an orphanage even longer than St. Cloud's.

The letter was friendly and familiar; Larch's correspondent appeared to be an old colleague if not an old friend. There was in the tone of Larch's argument, too, the sparkle of frequent debate--as if the correspondent were someone Larch had often