The Cider House Rules Page 35

  "Dog food Pop," Senior repeated.

  "It's like he don't remember, Wally," Bert Sanborn said.

  "We told him he didn't have a dog," Mildred said.

  "I remember doing it to you, Milly!" Senior shouted.

  "There he goes again," Bert said. "Senior, Senior," he said gently. "We're all your friends here."

  "I have to feed Blinky," Senior said.

  "Blinky was his dog when he was a boy," Milly Sanborn told Wally.

  "If Blinky was still alive, Senior," Bert Sanborn said, "he'd be older than we are."

  "Older than we are," Senior said.

  "Let's go home, Pop," Wally said.

  "Home Pop," Senior said, but he let Homer and Wally lead him to the van.

  "I tell you Wally, it's not booze," said Warren Titus, who opened the side door of the van for them. "It's not on his breath, not this time."

  "It's something else, Wally," Bert Sanborn said.

  "Who are you?" Senior asked Homer.

  "I'm Homer Wells, Mister Worthington," Homer said.

  "Mister Worthington," Senior said.

  When they'd driven for almost five minutes, in silence, Senior shouted, "Everyone just shut up!"

  When they got to Ocean View, Olive met the van in the driveway; she ignored Senior and spoke to Wally. "I don't know what he's had this morning, unless it's vodka; it wasn't on his breath when he left. I wouldn't have let him take the van if I thought he'd been drinking."

  "I think it's something else, Mom," Wally said. With Homer's help, he led Senior to the bedroom, got his shoes off, and coaxed him to lie down on the bed.

  "You know, I drilled Milly once," Senior told his son.

  "Sure you did, Pop," said Wally.

  "I drilled Milly! I drilled Milly!" Senior said.

  Wally tried to humor Senior with a limerick; Senior had taught Wally a lot of limericks, but Senior had difficulty remembering a limerick now, even if Wally talked him through it, line by line.

  "Remember the Duchess of Kent, Pop?" Wally asked his father.

  "Sure," Senior said, but he didn't say anything more.

  "Oh, pity the Duchess of Kent!" Wally began, but Senior just listened. "Her cunt is so dreadfully bent," Wally said.

  "Bent?" Senior said.

  Wally tried again, two lines at a time.

  Oh, pity the Duchess of Kent!

  Her cunt is so dreadfully bent . . .

  "Dreadfully bent!" Senior sang out.

  Oh, pity the Duchess of Kent!

  Her cunt is so dreadfully bent,

  The poor wench doth stammer,

  "I need a sledgehammer

  To pound a man into my vent."

  My God! thought Homer Wells. But Senior appeared to be baffled; he said nothing. Wally and Homer left him when they thought he'd fallen asleep.

  Downstairs, Homer Wells told Olive and Wally that he thought it was something neurological.

  "Neurological?" Olive said.

  "What's that mean?" Wally said.

  They heard Senior cry out from upstairs. "Vent!" he shouted.

  Homer Wells, who had a habit of repeating the pigtails of sentences, knew that Senior's repetitions were insane. That habit was the first symptom he described in his letter about Senior Worthington to Dr. Larch. "He repeats everything," he wrote to Dr. Larch. Homer also noted that Senior appeared to forget the names of the most common things; he recalled how the man had become stuck asking Wally for a cigarette--he had just kept pointing at Wally's breast pocket. "I think the word for cigarette had escaped him," wrote Homer Wells. Homer had also observed that Senior could not operate the latch on the glove compartment the last time that Homer had driven him to Sanborn's for some simple shopping. And the man had the oddest habit of picking at his clothes all the time. "It's as if he thinks he's got dirt, or hair, or lint on his clothes," wrote Homer Wells. "But there's nothing there."

  Olive Worthington assured Homer that the family doctor, a geezer even older than Dr. Larch, was quite certain that Senior's problems were entirely "alcohol-related."

  "Doc Perkins is too old to be a doctor anymore, Mom," Wally said.

  "Doc Perkins delivered you--I guess he knows what he's doing," Olive said.

  "I bet I was easy to deliver," Wally said cheerfully.

  I'll bet you were, imagined Homer Wells, who thought that Wally took everything in the world for granted--not in a selfish or spoiled way, but like a Prince of Maine, like a King of New England; Wally was just born to be in charge.

  Dr. Larch's letter to Homer Wells was so impressive that Homer immediately showed it to Mrs. Worthington.

  "What you have described to me, Homer, sounds like some kind of evolving organic brain syndrome," Dr. Larch wrote. "In a man of this age, there aren't a lot of diagnoses to choose from. I'd say your best bet is Alzheimer's presenile dementia; it's pretty rare; I looked it up in one of my bound volumes of the New England Journal of Medicine.

  "Picking imaginary lint off one's clothes is what neurologists call carphologia. In the progress of deterioration common to Alzheimer's disease, a patient will frequently echo back what is said to him. This is called echolalia. The inability to name even familiar objects such as a cigarette is due to a failure to recognize the objects. This is called anomia. And the loss of the ability to do any type of skilled or learned movement such as opening the glove compartment is also typical. It is called apraxia.

  "You should prevail upon Mrs. Worthington to have her husband examined by a neurologist. I know there is at least one in Maine. It's only my guess that it's Alzheimer's disease."

  "Alzheimer's disease?" asked Olive Worthington.

  "You mean it's a disease--what's wrong with him?" Wally asked Homer.

  Wally cried in the car on the way to the neurologist. "I'm sorry, Pop," he said. But Senior seemed delighted.

  When the neurologist confirmed Dr. Larch's diagnosis, Senior Worthington was exuberant.

  "I have a disease!" he yelled proudly--even happily. It was almost as if someone had announced that he was cured; what he had was quite incurable. "I have a disease!" He was euphoric about it.

  What a relief it must have been to him--for a moment, anyway--to learn that he wasn't simply a drunk. It was such an enormous relief to Olive that she wept on Wally's shoulder; she hugged and kissed Homer with an energy Homer had not known since he left the arms of Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. Mrs. Worthington thanked Homer over and over again. It meant a great deal to Olive (although she had long ago fallen out of love with Senior, if she had ever truly loved him) to know that this new information permitted her to renew her respect for Senior. She was overwhelmingly grateful to Homer and to Dr. Larch for restoring Senior's self-esteem--and for restoring some of her esteem for Senior, too.

  All this contributed to the special atmosphere that surrounded Senior's death at the end of the summer, shortly before the harvest; a sense of relief was far more prevalent than was a sense of grief. That Senior Worthington was on his way to death had been certain for some time; that, in the nick of time, he had managed to die with some honor-- ". . . of a bona fide disease!" Bert Sanborn said--was a welcome surprise.

  Of course, the residents of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven had some difficulty with the term--Alzheimer was not a name familiar to the coast of Maine in 194_. The workers at Ocean View had particular trouble with it; Ray Kendall, one day, made it easier for everyone to understand. "Senior got Al's Hammer disease," he announced. Al's Hammer! Now there was a disease anyone could understand.

  "I just hope it ain't catchin'," said Big Dot Taft.

  "Maybe you got to be rich to get it?" wondered Meany Hyde.

  "No, it's neurological," Homer Wells insisted, but that didn't mean anything to anyone except Homer.

  And so the men and women at Ocean View developed a new saying as they got ready for the harvest that year. "You better watch out," Herb Fowler would say, "or you'll get Al's Hammer."

  And when Louise Tobey would show up late, Florence
Hyde (or Irene Titcomb, or Big Dot Taft) would ask her, "What's the matter, you got your period or Al's Hammer?" And when Grace Lynch would show up with a limp, or with a noticeable bruise, everyone would think but never say out loud, "She caught old Al's Hammer last night, for sure."

  "It seems to me," Wally said to Homer Wells, "that you ought to be a doctor--you obviously have an instinct for it."

  "Doctor Larch is the doctor," said Homer Wells. "I'm the Bedouin."

  Just before the harvest--when Olive Worthington had put fresh flowers in the bedroom wing of the cider house and had typed a clean page of rules (almost exactly the same rules from the previous years) and had tacked them next to the light switch by the kitchen door--she offered the Bedouin a home.

  "I always hate it when Wally goes back to college," Olive told Homer. "And this year, with Senior gone, I'm going to hate it more. I would like it very much if you thought you could be happy here, Homer--you could stay in Wally's room. I like having someone in the house at night, and someone to talk to in the morning." Olive was keeping her back to Homer while she looked out the bay window in the Worthingtons' kitchen. The rubber raft that Senior used to ride was bobbing in the water within her view, but Homer couldn't be sure if Olive was looking at the raft.

  "I'm not sure how Doctor Larch would feel about it," Homer said.

  "Doctor Larch would like you to go to college one day," Olive said. "And so would I. I would be happy to inquire, at the high school in Cape Kenneth, if they'd work with you--if they'd try to evaluate what you know and what you need to learn. You've had a very . . . odd education. I know that Doctor Larch is interested in having you take all the sciences." (Homer understood that her mind must have been recalling this from a letter from Dr. Larch.) "And Latin," said Olive Worthington.

  "Latin," said Homer Wells. This was surely Dr. Larch's work. Cutaneus maximus, thought Homer Wells, dura mater, not to mention good old umbilicus. "Doctor Larch wants me to be a doctor," Homer said to Mrs. Worthington. "But I don't want to be."

  "I think he wants you to have the option of becoming a doctor, should you change your mind," Olive said. "I think he said Latin or Greek."

  They must have had quite some correspondence, thought Homer Wells, but all he said was, "I really like working on the farm."

  "Well, I certainly want you to keep working here," Olive told him. "I need your help--through the harvest, especially. I don't imagine you'd be a full-time student; I have to talk to the high school, but I'm sure they'd view you as something of an experiment."

  "An experiment," said Homer Wells. Wasn't everything an experiment for a Bedouin?

  He thought about the broken knife he'd found on the cider house roof. Was it there because he was supposed to find it? And the broken glass, a piece of which had signaled to him in his insomnia at Wally's window: was the glass on the roof in order to provide him with some message?

  He wrote to Dr. Larch, requesting Larch's permission to stay at Ocean View. "I'll take biology," Homer Wells wrote, "and anything scientific. But do I have to take Latin? Nobody even speaks it anymore."

  Where did he get to be such a know-it-all? wondered Wilbur Larch, who nevertheless saw certain advantages to Homer Wells not knowing Latin or Greek, both the root of so many medical terms. Like coarctation of the aorta, Dr. Larch was thinking. It can be a relatively mild form of a congenital heart disorder that could decrease as the patient grew older; by the time the patient was Homer's age, the patient might have no murmur at all and only a trained eye could detect, in an X ray, the slight enlargement of the aorta. In a mild case, the only symptoms might be a hypertension in the upper extremities. So don't learn Latin if you don't want to, thought Wilbur Larch.

  As for the best congenital heart defect for Homer Wells, Dr. Larch was leaning toward pulmonary valve stenosis. "From infancy, and throughout his early childhood, Homer Wells had a loud heart murmur," Dr. Larch wrote--for the record, just to hear how it sounded. "At twenty-one," he noted elsewhere, "Homer's old heart murmur is difficult to detect; however, I find that the stenosis of the pulmonary valve is still apparent in an X ray." It might be barely detectable, he knew; Homer's heart defect was not for everyone to see--that was the point. What was necessary was that it just be there.

  "Don't take Latin or Greek if you don't want to," Dr. Larch wrote to Homer Wells. "It's a free country, isn't it?"

  Homer Wells was beginning to wonder. In the same envelope with Dr. Larch's letter was a letter Dr. Larch had forwarded to him from good old Snowy Meadows. In Wilbur Larch's opinion, Snowy was a fool, "but a persistent one."

  "Hi, Homer, it's me--Snowy," Snowy Meadows began. He explained that his name was now Robert Marsh--"of the Bangor Marshes, we're the big furniture family," Snowy wrote.

  The furniture family? thought Homer Wells.

  Snowy went on and on about how he'd met and married the girl of his dreams, and how he'd chosen the furniture business over going to college, and how happy he was that he'd gotten out of St. Cloud's; Snowy added that he hoped Homer had "gotten out," too.

  "And what do you hear from Fuzzy Stone?" Snowy Meadows wanted to know. "Old Larch says Fuzzy is doing well. I'd like to write Fuzzy, if you know his address."

  Fuzzy Stone's address! thought Homer Wells. And what did "old Larch" mean (that "Fuzzy is doing well")? Doing well at what? wondered Homer Wells, but he wrote to Snowy Meadows that Fuzzy was, indeed, doing well; that he had misplaced Fuzzy's address for the moment; and that he found apple farming to be healthy and satisfying work. Homer added that he had no immediate plans to visit Bangor; he would surely look up "the furniture Marshes" if he was ever in town. And, no, he concluded, he didn't agree with Snowy that "a kind of reunion in St. Cloud's" was such a hot idea; he said he was sure that Dr. Larch would never approve of such a plan; he confessed that he did miss Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and of course Dr. Larch himself, but wasn't the place better left behind? "Isn't that what it's for?" Homer Wells asked Snowy Meadows. "Isn't an orphanage supposed to be left behind?"

  Then Homer wrote to Dr. Larch.

  "What's this about Fuzzy Stone 'doing well'--doing well at WHAT? I know that Snowy Meadows is an idiot, but if you're going to tell him some stuff about Fuzzy Stone, don't you think you better tell me, too?"

  In time, in time, thought Wilbur Larch wearily; he was feeling harassed. Dr. Gingrich and Mrs. Goodhall had prevailed upon the board of trustees; the board had requested that Larch comply with Dr. Gingrich's recommendation of a "follow-up report" on the status of each orphan's success (or failure) in each foster home. If this added paperwork was too tedious for Dr. Larch, the board recommended that Larch take Mrs. Goodhall's suggestion and accept an administrative assistant. Don't I have enough history to attend to, as is? Larch wondered. He rested in the dispensary; he sniffed a little ether and composed himself. Gingrich and Goodhall, he said to himself. Ginghall and Goodrich, he muttered. Richhall and Ginggood! Goodging and Hallrich! He woke himself, giggling.

  "What are you so merry about?" Nurse Angela said sharply to him from the hall outside the dispensary.

  "Goodballs and Ding Dong!" Wilbur Larch said to her.

  He went to Nurse Angela's office, with a vengeance. He had plans for Fuzzy Stone. He called Bowdoin College (where Fuzzy Stone would successfully complete his undergraduate studies) and Harvard Medical School (where Larch intended Fuzzy to do very, very well). He told the registrar's office at Bowdoin that a sum of money had been donated to the orphanage at St. Cloud's for the express purpose of paying the medical school expenses of an exceptional young man or woman who would be willing--more than willing, even dedicated--to serve St. Cloud's. Could Dr. Larch have access to the transcripts of Bowdoin's recent graduates who had gone on to medical school? He told a slightly different story to Harvard Medical School; he wanted access to transcripts, of course, but in this case the sum of money had been donated to establish a training fellowship in obstetrics.

  It was the first traveling Wilbur Larch had done since he'd ch
ased after Clara, the first time he'd slept in a place other than the dispensary since World War I; but he needed to familiarize himself with the transcript forms at Bowdoin and at Harvard Medical School. Only in this way could he create a transcript for F. Stone; he begged the use of a typewriter and some paper--"one of your blank transcript forms will make it easier for me"--and pretended to type out the names and credentials of a few interesting candidates. "I see so many who'd be perfect," he told them at Bowdoin and Harvard, "but it's impossible to know if any of them could tolerate Saint Cloud's. We're very isolated," he confessed, thanking them for their help, handing them back their transcripts (Fuzzy's in the proper place, among the S's).

  When he had returned to St. Cloud's, Dr. Larch wrote to Bowdoin and Harvard, requesting copies of the transcripts of a few outstanding graduates; he had narrowed the choices down to these few, he told them. A copy of Fuzzy's transcript came in the mail with the others.

  When Larch had visited Harvard Medical School, he'd taken a Cambridge post office box in Fuzzy's name. Now he wrote to the postmaster there, requesting the mail for F. Stone be forwarded to St. Cloud's. The P.O. box address would be useful, too, if young Dr. Stone were to pursue his zealous instincts to a mission abroad. Then he sent an empty envelope to the Cambridge address and waited for its return.

  When the letter came back to him--when he was sure the system worked--he composed the rest of the history regarding F. Stone and his adoptive family (named Eames) and sent it along to the board of trustees, together with Fuzzy's address. He did not have to invent anything regarding Curly Day; he cringed to write the name Roy Rinfret; and he told the truth regarding Snowy Meadows and most of the others, although he had difficulty typing "the furniture Marshes" without laughing out loud, and when he came to the case of Homer Wells, he thought very carefully about how to word the matter of Homer's heart.

  Among the members of the board, there wasn't a heart specialist or a radiologist, or even a surgeon; there was a very old GP who, Dr. Larch felt sure, never read anything at all. Larch didn't count Dr. Gingrich as a doctor; he counted psychiatrists as nothing at all, and he felt confident that he could bully Mrs. Goodhall with the slightest terminology.

  He confessed to the board (isn't everyone flattered by a confidence?) that he had refrained from mentioning the matter of Homer's heart to Homer; he admitted to stalling but argued that worrying the boy might contribute to his problem, and he wanted the boy to gain confidence in the outside world before burdening him with this dangerous knowledge--yet he intended to burden Homer with it, shortly. Larch said he had informed the Worthingtons of the heart defect; they might therefore be more than usually protective of Homer; he had not bothered to explain the presence of the actual murmur to them, or to detail the exact characteristics of pulmonary valve stenosis. He would be happy to provide the board with such details, should they request them. He had fun imagining Mrs. Goodhall scrutinizing an X ray.