The Cider House Rules / Правила виноделов. Джон Ирвинг
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was legal. By the time he got back to Portland, he had made a decision. He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this “the Lord's work.” And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this “the Devil's work,” but it was all the Lord's work to Wilbur Larch.
He decided to deliver babies. He decided to deliver mothers, too.
In Portland, a letter from St. Cloud's waited for him. The Maine State board of medical examiners sent him to St. Cloud's.
In the first week spent in St. Cloud's, Wilbur Larch founded an orphanage (because it was needed), delivered three babies (one wanted, two unwanted – one became another orphan), and performed one abortion (his third). Dr Larch educated the population about birth control. Over the years, there was one abortion for every five births.
During World War I, when Wilbur Larch went to France, the replacement doctor at the orphanage did not perform abortions; the number of orphans doubled, but the doctor said to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela that he was put on this earth to do the Lord's work, not the Devil's. Dr Wilbur Larch wrote his good nurses from France that he had seen the real Devil's work: the Devil worked with weapon. The Devil's work was gas bacillus infection.
“Tell him,” Larch wrote Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, “the work at the orphanage is all the Lord's work – everything you do, you do for the orphans!”
And when the war was over, and Wilbur Larch came home to St. Cloud's, Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela were already familiar with the language for the work of St. Cloud's – the Lord's work and the Devil's work, they called it, just to make it clear between themselves which operation was being performed. Wilbur Larch didn't mind – it was useful language – but both nurses agreed with Larch: that it was all the Lord's work.
It was not until 193— that they had their first problem. His name was Homer Wells. He went out into the world and came back to St. Cloud's so many times that it was necessary to put him to work; by the time a boy is a teen-ager, he should be of use.
After the Lord's work, or after the Devil's, the wastebasket contained the same things. In most cases: blood, cotton, gauze, placenta. Sometimes in the wastebaskets that Homer Wells carried to the cremator there were human fetuses.
And that is how Homer Wells (when he was thirteen) discovered that both the babies and the fetuses were delivered at St. Cloud's. One day, walking back from the cremator, he saw a fetus on the ground: it had fallen from the wastebasket, but when he saw it, he thought it had fallen from the sky. He looked for a nest but there were no trees.
Holding the thing in one hand, Homer ran with it to Dr Larch. Larch was sitting at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; he was writing a letter.
“I found something,” Homer Wells said. Larch took the fetus from him and placed it on a clean white piece of paper on Nurse Angela's desk. It was about three months. “What is it?” Homer Wells asked.
“The Lord's work,” said Wilbur Larch, that saint of St. Cloud's, because at that moment he realized that this was also the Lord's work: teaching Homer Wells, telling him everything, explaining what was good and what was bad. It was a lot of work, the Lord's work.
3. Princes of Maine, Kings of New England
“Here in St. Cloud's,” Dr Larch wrote, “we treat orphans like children from royal families.”
In the boys' division, after the bedtime reading Dr Larch shouted his nightly blessing over the beds standing in rows in the darkness.
In 193—, soon after Homer Wells saw his first fetus, he began reading David Copperfield, as a bedtime story, to the boys, just twenty minutes every night, no more, no less.
Then the lights were switched off and Dr Larch opened the door from the hall.
“Good night!” he said in a loud voice. “Good night, Princes of Maine, Kings of New England!”
Then the door closed, and the orphans were left in a new blackness. They were dreaming of their future. They imagined royal foster families and princesses who loved them.
For Homer Wells, it was different. The Princes of Maine that Homer saw, the Kings of New England that he imagined were at the court of St. Cloud's, they traveled nowhere. But even to Homer Wells Dr Larch's benediction was full of hope. These Princes of Maine, these Kings of New England, these orphans of St. Cloud's – they were the heroes of their own lives. Homer understood it clearly; Dr Larch, like a father, gave him that idea.
You can behave like a prince or like a king even at St. Cloud's, Dr Larch meant.
Homer Wells dreamed that he was a prince. He lifted up his eyes to his king: he watched St. Larch's every move. Homer couldn't forget the coolness of the fetus.
“Because it was dead, right?” he asked Dr Larch. “That's why it was cool, right?”
“Yes,” said Dr Larch. “I can tell you, Homer, it was never alive.”
“Never alive,” said Homer Wells.
“Sometimes,” Dr Larch said, “a woman just can't force herself to stop a pregnancy, she feels the baby is already a baby – and she has to have it – although she doesn't want it and she can't take care of it – and so she comes to us and has her baby here. She leaves it here, with us. She trusts us to find it a home.”
“She makes an orphan,” said Homer Wells. “Someone has to adopt it.”
“Someone usually adopts it,” Dr Larch said.
“Usually,” said Homer Wells. “Maybe.”
“Eventually,” Dr Larch said.
“And sometimes,” said Homer Wells, “the woman doesn't want to have a baby, right?”
“Sometimes,” said Dr Larch, “the woman knows very early in her pregnancy that this child is unwanted.”
“An orphan, from the start,” said Homer Wells.
“You can say so,” said Wilbur Larch.
“So she kills it,” said Homer Wells.
“You can say so,” said Wilbur Larch. “You can also say that she stops it before it becomes a child – she just stops it. In the first three or four months, the fetus – or the embryo (I don't say, then, “the child”) – it does not have a life of its own. It hasn't developed.”
“It has developed only a little,” said Homer Wells.
“It can't move,” said Dr Larch.
“It doesn't have a proper nose,” said Homer Wells, remembering it. On the thing which he found there was no nose; it had the nostrils of a pig.
“Sometimes,” said Dr Larch, “when a woman is very strong and knows that no one will care for this baby, and she doesn't want to bring a child into the world and try to find it a home – she comes to me and I stop it.”
Tell me again, what's stopping it called?” asked Homer Wells.
“An abortion,” Dr Larch said.
“Right,” said Homer Wells. “An abortion.”
“And what you held in your hand, Homer, was an aborted fetus,” Dr Larch said. “An embryo, about three to four months.”
“An aborted fetus, an embryo, about three to four months,” said Homer Wells, who usually repeated the last words of sentences.
“And that's why,” Dr Larch said patiently, “some of the women who come here don't look pregnant… the embryo, the fetus, is very small.”
“But they all are pregnant,” said Homer Wells. “All the women who come here either going to have an orphan, or they're going to stop it, right?”
“That's right,” Dr Larch said. “I'm just the doctor. I help them have what they want. An orphan or an abortion.”
“An orphan or an abortion,” said Homer Wells.
Nurse