The Cider House Rules

"The boy said you go left," Candy said to Wally. "Go left."

Mrs. Grogan, across the road in the girls' division entrance, observed the Cadillac's hesitation. She had not seen Curly Day flee from the car and she did not recognize the small child in the pretty girl's lap. Mrs. Grogan assumed that the child belonged to the pretty girl--she wondered if she'd ever seen a girl that pretty. And her young man was certainly handsome--almost too handsome for a husband, as they say in Maine.

In Mrs. Grogan's opinion, they looked too young to be adopting anyone--too bad, she mused, because they certainly seemed well off. A Cadillac meant nothing to Mrs. Grogan; it was the people themselves who appeared expensive to her. She was puzzled by how charmed she felt to be looking at these lovely people. Her few glimpses of the very rich had not charmed Mrs. Grogan in the past; those glimpses had only made her feel bitter--on behalf of the unadopted girls. She was all for her girls, Mrs. Grogan was; there was nothing personal in her bitterness--and very little that was personal in her whole life, really.

The car stood still, giving Mrs. Grogan a long view. Oh, the poor dears, she thought. They are not married, they have had this child together, either he or she is being disinherited--they have both, clearly, been disgraced--and now they have come to give up their child. But they are hesitating! She wanted to rush out and tell them: keep the child! Drive away! She felt paralyzed by the drama she was imagining. Don't do it! she whispered, mustering the strength for an enormous telepathic signal.

It was the signal Wally felt when he told Candy that she didn't have to. But then the car started up again--it was not turning around, it was heading straight for the hospital entrance of the boys' division--and Mrs. Grogan's heart sank. Boy or girl? she wondered, numbly.

What the fuck is going on? wondered Melony, at her bitter window.

Because of the harsh overhead light in the dormitory, Melony could see her own face reflected in the window; she watched the white Cadillac halt on her upper lip. Curly Day escaped across her cheek, and the pretty blond girl's arms enclosed David Copperfield at Melony's throat.

It was as close as Melony came to looking in a mirror. It was not that she was troubled by the heaviness of her face, or how close together her eyes were, or how her hair rebelled; it was her own expression that upset her--the vacantness, the absence of energy (formerly, she imagined, she had at least had energy). She couldn't remember when she'd last looked at herself in a mirror.

What troubled her, now, was that she'd just seen this familiar vacantness on the face of Homer Wells when he'd lifted the stationmaster's body--it wasn't the absence of strain, it was that look of zero surprise. Melony was afraid of Homer. How things had changed! she thought. She'd wanted to remind him of his promise. You won't leave, will you? she'd almost asked. You'll take me, if you run away, she'd wanted to say, but her familiarity with his new expression (because it was her nearly constant expression, she was sure) had paralyzed her.

Now who are these pretty people? she wondered. Some car, she thought. She'd not seen their faces, but even the backs of their heads had discomforted her. The man's blond hair had contrasted so perfectly with the smooth, tanned back of his neck that it had given her a shiver. And how could the back of the girl's head be so perfect--the bounce and swing of her hair so accurate? Was there some trick to aligning the length of the hair so exactly with the girl's straight but small shoulders? And it was positively graceful how she'd picked up young Copperfield and held him in her lap--that little runt, thought Melony. She must have said the word "runt" half aloud, because her breath fogged the window at that instant; she lost sight of her own mouth and nose. When the window cleared, she saw the car move on, toward the hospital entrance. People like that are too perfect to need an abortion, Melony imagined. They're too perfect to fuck, she thought bitterly. They're too clean to do it. The pretty girl wonders why she can't get pregnant. She doesn't know you have to fuck first. They're considering adopting someone, but they won't find anyone here. There's no one who's good enough for them, thought Melony--hating them. She spat straight into her own dull reflection and watched her spit run down the pane. She hadn't the energy to move. There was a time, she thought, when I would have at least gone outdoors and poked around the Cadillac. Maybe they would leave something in the car--something good enough to steal. But now, not even the thought of something to steal could move Melony from her window.

Dr. Larch had performed the first abortion with Nurse Edna's assistance; Larch had asked Homer to check on the contractions of the expectant mother from Damariscotta. Nurse Angela was assisting Larch with the second abortion, but Dr. Larch had insisted on Homer's presence, too. He had supervised Homer's ether application; Dr. Larch had such a light touch with ether that the first abortion patient had been speaking to Nurse Edna throughout the operation and yet the woman hadn't felt a thing. She talked and talked: a kind of airy list of non sequiturs to which Nurse Edna responded with enthusiasm.

Homer had put the second woman out, and he was clearly cross with himself for sedating the woman more heavily than he'd meant to. "Better safe than sorry," Nurse Angela said encouragingly--her hands on the woman's pale temples, which she instinctively smoothed with her soft hands. Larch had asked Homer to insert the vaginal speculum, and Homer now stared darkly at the woman's shiny cervix, at the puckered opening of the uterus. Bathed in a clear mucus, it had an aura of morning mist, of dew, of the pink clouds of a sunrise gathered around it. If Wally Worthington had peered through the speculum, he would have imagined that he was viewing an apple in some pale, ethereal phase of its development. But what is that little opening? he might have wondered.

"How's it look?" Larch asked.

"It looks fine," said Homer Wells. To his surprise, Larch handed him the cervical stabilizer--a simple instrument. It was for grabbing the upper lip of the cervix and stabilizing the cervix, which was then sounded for depth and dilated.

"Didn't you get what I told you?" Homer asked Dr. Larch.

"Do you disapprove of touching the cervix, Homer?" Larch asked.

Homer reached for the lip of the woman's cervix and seized it, correctly. I won't touch a single dilator, he thought. He won't make me.

But Larch didn't even ask. He said, "Thank you, that's a help." He sounded and dilated the cervix himself. When he asked for the curette, Homer handed it to him.

"You remember that I asked you if it was necessary for me to even be here?" Homer asked quietly. "I said that, if it was all the same to you, I'd just as soon not watch. You remember?"

"It's necessary for you to watch," said Wilbur Larch, who listened to the scrape of his curette; his breathing was shallow but regular.

"I believe," said Dr. Larch, "that you should participate to the degree of watching, of lending some amateur assistance, of understanding the process, of learning how to perform it--whether you ever choose to perform it or not.

"Do I interfere?" Larch asked. "When absolutely helpless women tell me that they simply can't have an abortion, that they simply must go through with having another--and yet another--orphan: do I interfere? Do I?

"I do not," he said, scraping. "I deliver it, Goddamn it. And do you think there are largely happy histories for the babies born here? Do you think the futures of these orphans are rosy? Do you?

"You don't," Larch said. "But do I resist? I do not. I do not even recommend. I give them what they want: an orphan or an abortion," Larch said.

"Well, I'm an orphan," said Homer Wells.

"Do I insist that we have the same ideas? I do not," Dr. Larch said.

"You wish it," said Homer Wells.

"The women who come to me are not helped by wishes," said Wilbur Larch. He put down the medium-sized curette and held out his hand for a smaller one, which Homer Wells had ready for him and handed to him automatically.

"I want to be of use," Homer began, but Dr. Larch wouldn't listen.

"Then you are not permitted to hide," Larch said. "You are not permitted to look away. It was you who told me, correctly, that if you were going to be of use, if you were going to participate at all, you had to know everything. Nothing could be kept from you. I learned that from you! Well, you're right," Larch said. "You were right," he added.