The Cider House Rules

"I slipped on the shower room floor," Mary Agnes moaned. "It was real wet."

"Melony!" Dr. Larch called. Melony was hanging around in the hall. "Melony, would you like to observe how we set a broken bone?" Melony walked into the dispensary, which was a small, crowded area--especially with Nurse Edna and Mrs. Grogan standing there, and with Nurse Angela leading Mary Agnes away for her X ray. Seeing everyone together, Larch realized how old and frail he and his colleagues looked alongside Melony. "Would you like to participate in the setting of a broken bone, Melony?" Larch asked the sturdy and imposing young woman.

"Nope," Melony said. "I got things to do." She waved the copy of Little Dorrit a trifle threateningly. "And I gotta look at what I'm gonna read tonight," she added.

She went back to the girls' division, to her window there, while Dr. Larch set Mary Agnes's collarbone. Melony tried again to comprehend the power of the sun in Marseilles.

"The very dust was scorched brown," she read to herself, "and something quivered in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting." Oh, Sunshine, she thought, why didn't you take me anywhere? It wouldn't have to have been to France, although that would have been nice.

She daydreamed as she read and therefore she missed the transition between the "universal stare" of the sun in Marseilles and the atmosphere of the prison in the same town. Suddenly, she discovered she was in the prison. "A prison taint was on everything . . ." she read. "Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside . . ." She stopped reading. She left Little Dorrit on her pillow. She stripped a pillowcase off a bed neater than her own, and into the pillowcase she stuffed her canvas bag of toilet articles and some clothes. She also put Jane Eyre in the bag.

In Mrs. Grogan's rather Spartan room, Melony had no difficulty locating Mrs. Grogan's purse--she robbed Mrs. Grogan of her money (there wasn't much), and also took Mrs. Grogan's heavy winter coat (in the summer, the coat would be useful if she had to sleep on the ground). Mrs. Grogan was still at the hospital, worrying about Mary Agnes Cork's collarbone; Melony would have liked to say good-bye to Mrs. Grogan (even after robbing her), but she knew the train schedule by heart--actually, she knew it by ear; the sound of every arrival and departure reached her window.

At the train station she bought a ticket only as far as Livermore Falls. She knew that even the new and stupid young stationmaster would be able to remember that, and he would tell Dr. Larch and Mrs. Grogan that Melony had gone to Livermore Falls. She also knew that once she was on the train she could purchase a ticket to some place much farther away than Livermore Falls. Can I afford Portland? she wondered. It was the coast that she would need to explore, eventually--because, below the Cadillac's gold monogram on that Red Delicious apple, inscribed (also in gold) against the vivid green background of the apple leaf, she had been able to read OCEAN VIEW ORCHARDS. That had to be within sight of the coast, and the Cadillac had a Maine license plate. It mattered not to Melony that there were thousands of miles of coastline in the state of Maine. As her train pulled away from St. Cloud's, Melony said to herself--so vehemently that her breath fogged the window and obscured the abandoned buildings in that forsaken town from her view--"I'm gonna find you, Sunshine."

Dr. Larch tried to comfort Mrs. Grogan, who said she wished only that she'd had more money for Melony to steal. "And my coat's not waterproof," Mrs. Grogan complained. "She should have a real raincoat in this state."

Dr. Larch tried to reassure Mrs. Grogan; he asserted that Melony was not a little girl. "She's twenty-four or twenty-five," Larch reminded Mrs. Grogan.

"I think her heart is broken," said Mrs. Grogan miserably.

Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign--wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she'll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.

The book that Melony had left behind was a puzzle to both Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch. They read the dedication to Homer "Sunshine" Wells, which touched Mrs. Grogan deeply.

Neither of them had any luck reading Little Dorrit, either. Mrs. Grogan never would get to the "villainous" prison; the staring sun in Marseilles outstared her, it was too powerfully blinding. Dr. Larch, who--in the absence of Homer Wells and Melony--resumed his responsibilities as the nightly reader to both the boys' and the girls' divisions, attempted to read Little Dorrit to the girls; wasn't the main character a girl? But the contrast between the scorched air in the Marseilles sun and the tainted air in the Marseilles prison created such a powerful sleeplessness among the girls that Larch was relieved to give up on the book in Chapter Three, which had an unfortunate title, for orphans: "Home." He began the description of London on a Sunday evening--hounded by church bells.

" 'Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot,' " read Dr. Larch, and then he stopped; we need no more melancholy here, he thought.

"Wouldn't we rather wait, and read Jane Eyre again?" Dr. Larch asked; the girls nodded eagerly.

Knowing that the beautiful boy with the face of a benefactor must have a mother with the heart for benefiting those who existed in (as she had written herself) "less fortunate circumstances," Dr. Larch wrote Olive Worthington.

My Dear Mrs. Worthington,

Here in St. Cloud's, we depend on our few luxuries and imagine (and pray) they will last forever. If you would be so kind, please tell Homer that his friend Melony has left us--her whereabouts are unknown--and that she took with her our only copy of Jane Eyre. The orphans in the girls' division were accustomed to hearing this book read aloud--in fact, Homer used to read to them. If Homer could discover a replacement copy, the little girls and I would remain in his debt. In other parts of the world, there are bookshops . . .

Thus, Larch knew, he had accomplished two things. Olive Worthington herself would send him a replacement Jane Eyre (he doubted very much that it would be a secondhand copy), and Homer would receive the important message: Melony was out. She was loose in the world. Larch thought that Homer should know this, that he might want to keep an eye open for her.

As for Little Dorrit, Nurse Edna read Melony's inscription and wept. She was not a big reader, Edna; she penetrated no farther than the inscription. Nurse Angela had already been defeated by Dickens; she blinked once, briefly, at the sun in Marseilles and failed to turn the page.

For years Candy's unread copy would rest in Nurse Angela's office; those nervously awaiting interviews with Dr. Larch would pick up Little Dorrit as they would pick up a magazine--restlessly, inattentively. Larch rarely kept anyone waiting past the first glare of the sun. And most preferred to scan the odd assortment of catalogues. The seeds, the fishing equipment, the stupendous undergarments--the latter modeled in an otherworldly way: on those headless, legless, armless stumps that were the period's version of the standard dressmaker's dummy.

"In other parts of the world," Dr. Larch began once, "they have nursing bras." But this thought led him nowhere; it fell as a fragment into the many, many pages of A Brief History of St. Cloud's.

Little Dorrit seemed condemned to an unread life. Even Candy, who replaced her stolen copy (and always wondered what happened to it), would never finish the book, although it was required reading for her class. She, too, could not navigate past the sun's initial assault on her senses; she suspected her difficulty with the book arose from its power to remind her of her discomfort on the long journey to and from St. Cloud's--and of what had happened to her there.

She would especially remember the ride back to the coast--how she'd stretched out in the back seat, with only the dash lights of the Cadillac and the glowing ash end of Wally's cigarette shining bright but small in the surrounding darkness. The tires of the big car hummed soothingly; she was grateful for

Homer's presence because she didn't have to talk to--or listen to--Wally. She couldn't even hear what Wally and Homer were saying to each other. "Life stories," Wally would say to her later. "That kid's had quite a life, but I should let him tell you."

The drone of their conversation was as rhythmic as the tire song, but--as weary as she was--she couldn't sleep. She thought about how much she was bleeding--maybe more than she should be, she worried. Between St. Cloud's and the coast, she asked Wally three times to stop the car. She kept checking her bleeding and changing the pad; Dr. Larch had given her quite a few pads--but would there be enough, and how much bleeding was too much? She looked at the back of Homer's head. If it's worse tomorrow, or as bad the next day, she thought, I'll have to ask him.

When Wally went to the men's room and left them alone in the car, Homer spoke to her, but he didn't turn around. "You're probably having cramps, about as bad as you get with your period," he said. "You're probably bleeding, but not like you bleed during your period--nothing near what it is, at your heaviest time. If the stains on the pad are only two or three inches in diameter, that's okay. It's expected."

"Thank you," Candy whispered.

"The bleeding should taper off tomorrow, and get much lighter the next day. If you're worried, you should ask me," he said.