The Cider House Rules

Senior made terrible mistakes in any complex motor task. While cleaning the carburetor for the Cadillac--a simple job, which Ray Kendall had demonstrated for him many times--Senior inhaled the gas and little carbon particles in the tubes (he sucked in instead of blowing out).

Senior's recent memory was so severely impaired that he wandered for an hour through his own bedroom unable to dress himself; he constantly confused his sock drawer with the drawer for Olive's underwear. One morning he became so enraged at his mistake that he appeared at the breakfast table with each foot tightly tied up in a bra. Normally friendly to Homer and tender to Wally and Olive, he shouted an accusation at Wally--that his own son was wearing his father's socks, which he had taken without his father's permission!--and he ranted at Olive for turning his domicile into a foundling home without asking his permission regarding that.

"You'd be better off at Saint Cloud's than in this house of thieves," he told Homer.

Upon saying this, Senior Worthington burst into tears and begged Homer's forgiveness; he put his head on Homer's shoulder and wept. "My brain is sending poison to my heart," he told Homer, who thought it strange that Senior didn't seem to drink before the late afternoon--yet he appeared to be drunk nearly all the time.

Sometimes it went like this. Senior would not drink for three days--a part of him able to observe that his silliness flourished no less ardently. Yet he would forget to make this point to Olive, or to anyone else, until he'd broken down and had a drink; by the time he remembered to say he had not been drinking, he was drunk. Why do I forget everything? he wondered, and then forgot it.

Yet his long-range memory was quite intact. He sang college songs to Olive (the lines of which she herself was unable to remember), and he sweetly recalled for her the romantic evenings of their courtship; he told Wally stories of Wally as a baby; he entertained Homer by cheerfully recounting the planting of some of the older-tree orchards, including the lone orchard from which the sea was visible.

"It was where I wanted to build the house, Homer," Senior said. It was lunchtime. Wally and Homer had been suckering in the orchard: stripping the inner limbs off the tree or any new, sprouting branches (or "suckers") that are turned inward--the ones not reaching out to the sun. Wally had heard the story; he was distracted; he poured some Coca-Cola on an anthill. Suckering exposes as many of the limbs as possible to the light; it lets the light come through the tree.

"You don't allow an apple tree to grow every which way," Wally had explained to Homer.

"Like a boy!" Senior had shouted, laughing.

"Olive thought it was too windy for a house here," Senior told Homer. "Women are disturbed by the wind more than men are disturbed by it," Senior confided. "That's a fact. Anyway . . ." he paused. He gestured to the sea, as if it were a far-off audience and he meant to include it by the sweep of his hand. He turned to the apple trees around them. . . . They were a slightly more intimate audience, paying closer attention. "The wind . . ." he started to say, and paused again, perhaps waiting for the wind to contribute something. "The house . . ." he started to say.

"You can see this orchard from the second floor of our house. Did you know that?" he asked Homer.

"Right," Homer said. Wally's room was on the second floor. From Wally's window, he could see the orchard from which the sea was visible, but the sea wasn't visible from Wally's window--or from any other window in the house.

"I called the whole place Ocean View," Senior explained, "because I thought the house was going to be here. Right here," he repeated. He looked down at the foaming Coca-Cola that Wally was slowly pouring onto the anthill.

"You use poison oats and poison corn to kill the mice," Senior said. "It stinks." Wally looked up at him; Homer nodded. "You scatter the stuff for the field mice, but you have to find the holes and put it in the tunnels if you want to kill the pine mice," he said.

"We know, Pop," Wally said softly.

"Field mice are the same as meadow mice," Senior explained to Homer, who had already been told this.

"Right," Homer said.

"Meadow mice girdle a tree, and pine mice eat the roots," Senior recited, from his distant memory.

Wally stopped pouring the Coke on the anthill. He and Homer didn't know why Senior had joined them for their lunch break; they'd been suckering in the ocean orchard all morning, and Senior had just shown up. He was driving the old jeep that didn't have any license plat

es; it was strictly for driving around the orchards.

"Pop?" Wally asked him. "What are you doing out here?"

Senior stared blankly at his son. He looked at Homer; he hoped Homer might tell him the answer. He regarded his audience--the apple trees, the far-off ocean.

"I wanted to build the house here, right here," he said to Wally. "But your bossy bitch of a have-it-all-her-own-way mother wouldn't let me--she wouldn't let me, the cunt!" he cried. "Clam-digger cunt, well-digger pussy!" he shouted. He stood up, he looked disoriented; Wally stood up with him.

"Come on, Pop," he said. "I'll drive you home."

They took Wally's pickup. Homer followed them in the old jeep; it was the vehicle he had learned to drive in after Wally had assured him that he couldn't hurt it.

Alcohol, thought Homer Wells; it sure can destroy you.

Senior had all the other symptoms, too. He was fifty-five; he looked seventy. He had periods of paranoia, of grandiosity, of confabulation. His few obnoxious traits--which he'd always had--were exaggerated; in his case, nose-picking, for example. He could explore a nostril for an hour; he put boogers on his pants or on the furniture. Olive's vulgar brother, Bucky Bean, claimed that Senior could have been a well-digger. "The way he roots into his snoot," Bucky said, "I could use him to dig a well."

The Haven Club's lifeguard, whose chest had received the full force of the grasshopper pie, turned out to be not completely mollified. He objected to Candy giving Homer swimming lessons in the shallow end of the pool in the late afternoon. The pool was crowded then, he complained; swimming lessons were regularly scheduled in the early morning--and he--the lifeguard--regularly administered them--for a fee. He was not convinced that he should be flexible about the matter. Homer worked at Ocean View all day, Candy argued. In the late afternoon, when Wally played tennis after work, was the ideal time for Candy to give Homer instructions.

"Ideal for you," the lifeguard argued with Candy; he had a crush on her, it was plain. It was one thing to be jealous of Wally Worthington--everyone was--but quite another to have to suffer the attentions Candy Kendall gave to the hard-luck case from St. Cloud's. At the Haven Club--never in Candy's presence, or in the presence of any of the Worthingtons--Homer was referred to not as the foundling or as the orphan, but as "the hard-luck case from St. Cloud's"--sometimes "the Worthingtons' hard-luck case" was the way it was put.

Homer said he wouldn't mind practicing in the Worthingtons' private pool at Ocean View, but it was nice that he and Candy could be at the Haven Club when Wally finished playing tennis; they could then go off together, to the beach, to Ray Kendall's dock, to wherever. Also, at the Worthingtons' pool there would be Senior to deal with; more and more Olive tried to keep Senior home, away from the Haven Club. She found she could pacify him best by feeding him gin and tonics and keeping him in the pool--floating on a rubber raft. But the real reason it was a bad idea (everyone felt) for Homer to learn to swim in the Worthingtons' unheated pool was that the cold water might be a shock to his heart.