The Cider House Rules

The German Choir blasted him at the door with the little sign that promised the return of menstruation electrically. There was a harsh and out-of-tune piano--no oboe, no English horn, no mezzo-soprano--yet Larch thought the music was remindful of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Years later, when he first heard the scream-concealing sound of the water rushing through Three Mile Falls, he would remember the abortionist's songs that pumped like jism "Off Harrison." He beat on the door--he could have screamed--but no one heard him. When he opened the door and stepped inside, no one bothered to look at him; The German Choir kept singing. The only instrument was a piano, and there were not nearly enough chairs for the women, and there were only a few music stands; the men stood huddled in two groups, far from the women; there weren't enough copies of the sheet music to go around. The choir conductor stood by the piano. A lean, bald man without a shirt, he wore a dirty-white shirt collar (perhaps to catch the sweat) and kept his eyes half closed, as if in prayer, while his arms wildly pummeled the air--as if the air, which was full of cigar smoke and the urine-like stink of cheap draft beer, were hard to move. The choir pursued the man's wild arms.

A fussy or critical God, thought Wilbur Larch, would strike us all dead. Larch walked behind the piano and through the only open door. He entered into a room with nothing in it--not a piece of furniture, not a window. There was only a closed door. Larch opened it and found himself in what was obviously the waiting room--at least people appeared to be waiting there. There were even newspapers and fresh flowers and an open window; four people sat in pairs. No one read the papers or sniffed the flowers or looked out the window; everyone looked down and continued to look down when Wilbur Larch walked in. At a desk, with only a pad of paper and a cashbox on it, sat an alert man eating something that looked like navy beans out of a bowl. The man appeared young and strong and indifferent; he wore a pair of work overalls and a sleeveless undershirt; around his neck, like a gym instructor's whistle, hung a key--obviously to the cashbox. He was as bald as the choir conductor; Larch considered that their heads were shaved.

Without looking at Wilbur Larch, the man, who might have been one of the choir sitting out a song or two, said: "Hey, you don't come here. You just have the lady come by herself, or with a lady friend."

In the front room, Wilbur Larch heard them singing something about someone's "dear mother"--wasn't that what "mutterlein" meant?

"I'm a doctor," Dr. Larch said.

The cashbox man kept eating, but he looked up at Larch. The singers took a deep breath, and in the split-second silence Larch heard the man's swift, skillful spoon scrape against the bowl--and, from another room, the sound of someone retching, quickly followed by the splash of vomit in a metal basin. One of the women in the waiting room began to cry, but before Larch could identify which of the women it was, the singers caught their breath and bore down again. Something about Christ's blood, Larch thought.

"What do you want?" the man asked Larch.

"I'm a doctor, I want to see the doctor here," Larch said.

"No doctor here," the man said. "Just you."

"Then I want to give advice," Larch said. "Medical advice. Free medical advice."

The man studied Larch's face; he appeared to think that a response to Larch's offer could be found there. "You're not the first one here," the man said, after a while. "You wait your turn."

That seemed to satisfy both men for the moment, and Larch looked for a seat--taking a chair precisely between the twosomes of women already in the room. He was too shocked by everything to be surprised when he recognized one of the couples: the Lithuanian woman whose child he'd delivered (his first delivery) sat mutely with her mole-faced mother. They wouldn't look up at him; Larch smiled at them and nodded. The woman was very pregnant--too pregnant for an easy abortion, under the safest of circumstances. Larch realized, with panic, that he couldn't convey this to her; she spoke only Lithuanian. She would associate him with delivering only live babies! Also, he knew nothing of what might have become of her first baby--nothing of what her life with that baby had been, or was now. He tapped his foot nervously and looked at the other couple--also, clearly, a mother and her daughter, but both of them were younger than the Lithuanians and it was hard to tell which of them was pregnant. This abortion, at least, looked easier to perform. The daughter looked too young to be pregnant, but then why, Larch wondered, had the mother brought the girl here? Did she need the

company so badly, or was this meant as a lesson? Watch out--this could happen to you! In the front room, the singers grew hysterical on the subject of God's love and something that sounded like "blinding destiny"--verblendenen Geschike.

Wilbur Larch stared at the shut door, behind which he had heard unmistakable vomiting. A bee, crazily out of place, buzzed in the open window and seemed to find the flowers fakes; it buzzed straight out again. When Larch looked at the Lithuanian couple, he saw that the grandmother had recognized him--and she had discovered a new way to exhibit her mole, which had grown additional and longer hairs and had slightly changed color. Pinching her fingers to either side of the mole, the grandmother inflamed the surrounding skin and made the mole appear to explode from her face--like a boil come to a head, about to burst. The pregnant woman seemed not to notice her mother's charmless demonstration, and when she stared at Larch she appeared not to recognize him; for Larch, there was only Lithuanian written on her face. Perhaps, Larch thought, her husband threw her baby out the window and drove her mad. For a moment Larch thought that the choir might be Lithuanian, but he recognized something about a battle between Gott und Schicksal--clearly German, clearly God and Fate.

The scream that cut through the shut door had no difficulty rising above the voices declaring that God had won. The young girl jumped from her seat, sat down, hugged herself, cried out; she put her face in her mother's lap to muffle her cries. Larch realized she'd been the one to cry before. He also realized that she must be the one needing the abortion--not her mother. The girl didn't look older than ten or twelve.

"Excuse me," Larch said to the mother. "I'm a doctor."

He felt like an actor with good potential who'd been crippled with a single stupid line--it was all he had to say. "I'm a doctor." What followed from that?

"So you're a doctor," the mother said, bitterly, but Larch was happy to hear she didn't speak Lithuanian. "So what help are you?" the mother asked him.

"How many months is she?" Larch asked the mother.

"Maybe three," the mother said suspiciously. "But I already paid them here."

"How old is she?" Larch asked.

The girl looked up from her mother's lap; a strand of her dirty-blond hair caught in her mouth. "I'm fourteen," she said defensively.

"She'll be fourteen, next year," the mother said.

Larch stood up and said to the man with the cashbox key, "Pay them back. I'll help the girl."

"I thought you came for advice," the man said.

"To give it," Dr. Larch said.

"Why not take some while you're here?" the man said. "When you pay, there's a deposit. You don't get a deposit back."

"How much is the deposit?" Larch asked. The man shrugged; he drummed his fingers on the cashbox.

"Maybe half," he said.

"Eure ganze Macht!" the choir sang. "Your whole power," translated Wilbur Larch. Many medical students were good in German.