The Cider House Rules Read Free Page B

didn't have those dreams anymore—the ones that could awaken every living soul in St. Cloud's, the dreams that caused one night watchman to resign ('My heart,' he said, 'won't take another night of that boy') and that resided so soundly in the memory of Dr. Wilbur Larch that he was known, for years, to hear babies crying in his sleep and to roll over saying, 'Homer, Homer, it's all right now, Homer.'
    At St. Cloud's, of course, babies were always crying in everyone's sleep, but no baby ever woke up crying in quite the manner that Homer Wells managed it.
    'Lord, it's as if he was being stabbed,' Nurse Edna would say.
    'As if he was being burned with a cigarette,' Nurse Angela would say. {25}
    But only Wilbur Larch knew what it was really like—that way that Homer Wells woke up and (in his violent waking) woke everyone else. 'As if he were being circumcised,' Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. 'As if someone were snipping his little penis—over and over again, just snipping it and snipping it.'
    The third foster family to fail with Homer Wells was a family of such rare and championship qualities that to judge humanity by this family's example would be foolish. They were that good a family. They were that perfect, or Dr. Larch would not have let Homer go to them. After the family from Three Mile Falls, Dr. Larch was being especially careful with Homer.
    Professor Draper and his wife of nearly forty years lived in Waterville, Maine. Waterville was not much of a college town in 193-, when Homer Wells went there; but if you compared Waterville to St. Cloud's, or to Three Mile Falls, you would have to say that Waterville was a community of moral and social giants. Though still inland, it was of considerably higher elevation—there were nearby mountains, and from these there were actual vistas; mountain life (like the life on an ocean, or on the plains, or on open farmland) affords the inhabitant the luxury of a view. Living on land where you can occasionally see a long way provides the soul with a perspective of a beneficially expansive nature—or so believed Professor Draper; he was a born teacher.
    'Unfarmed valley land,' he would intone, 'which I associate with forests too low and too dense to provide a view, tends to cramp the uplifting qualities of human nature and enhance those instincts which are meanspirited and small.'
    'Now, Homer,' Mrs. Draper would say. 'The professor is a born teacher. You have to take him with a grain of salt.'
    Everyone called her Mom. No one (including his grown children and his grandchildren) called him any-{26} thing but Professor. Even Dr. Larch didn't know what his first name was. If his tone was professorial, at times even officious, he was a man of very regular habits and temperament, and his manner was jocular.
    'Wet shoes,' the professor once said to Homer, 'are a fact of Maine. They are a given. Your method, Homer, of putting wet shoes on a windowsill where they might be dried by the faint appearance, albeit rare, of the Maine sun, is admirable for its positivism, its determined optimism. However,' the professor would go on, 'a method I would recommend for wet shoes—a method, I must add, that is independent of the weather—involves a more reliable source of heat in Maine: namely, the furnace. When you consider that the days when shoes get wet are days, as a rule, when we don't see the sun, you'll recognize the furnace-room method as having certain advantages.'
    'With a grain of salt, Homer,' Mrs. Draper would tell the boy. Even the professor called her Mom; even Mom called him Professor.
    If Homer Wells found the professor's conversation abounding in pithy maxims, he didn't complain. If Professor Draper's students at the college and his colleagues in the history department thought that the professor was a sententious bore—and tended to flee his path like rabbits escaping the slow but nose-to-the-ground hound— they could not influence Homer's opinion of the first father figure in his