The Cider House Rules by John Irving Read Free Book Online

the business of manufacturing sensations for people who were so removed from any sensations of their own making or circumstances that only high (but simulated) adventure could provoke any response from them at all. Dr. Larch was not impressed with the Winkles' 'business'; he knew that they were simply rich people who did exactly what they wanted to do and needed to call what they did something more serious-sounding than play. What impressed Larch with the Winkles was that they were deliriously happy. Among adults—and among orphans—Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
    'In other parts of the world,' Dr. Larch wrote, 'delirious happiness is thought to be a state of mind. Here in St. Cloud's we recognize that delirious happiness is possible only for the totally mindless. I would call it, therefore, that thing most rare: a state of the soul.' Larch was often facetious when he discussed the soul. He liked to tease Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela in the operating room, where the subject of the soul could catch the dear nurses off-guard.
    Once, with a body open on the table, Larch pointed dramatically to a smooth, maroon shape beneath the rib cage and above the belly's viscera; it looked like a, threepound loaf of bread, or a slug with two great lobes. 'Look!' Larch whispered. 'You rarely see it, but we've caught it napping. Look quickly before it moves!' The nurses gaped. 'The soul,' Larch whispered reverentially. In fact, it was the body's largest gland, empowered with skills also ascribed to the soul—for example, it could regenerate its own abused cells. It was the liver, which Larch thought more of than he thought of the soul. {46}
    But whether the delirious happiness of the Winkles was a state of mind or a state of the soul, Wilbur Larch wished that some of it could rub off on Homer Wells. The Winkles had always wanted a child—'to share the world of nature with us,' they said, 'and just to make a child happy, of course.' Looking at them, Dr. Larch had his own ideas as to why they could not successfully breed. Lack of the essential concentration, Larch thought; Larch suspected that the Winkles never stopped moving long enough to mate. Perhaps, he speculated, looking at
    Billy Winkle, she is not really a woman. Grant had a plan. He has no face, Dr. Larch noticed, trying to discern the man's blunt features, somewhere between his blond beard and his blonder hair. The hair was cropped in bangs, completely concealing a low forehead. The cheeks, or what Larch could see of them, were a ridge, the eyes hidden behind them. The rest was beard—a blond underbrush that Dr. Larch imagined Billy Winkle needed her machete to hack through. Grant's plan was that they borrow Homer for a little moose-watching. The Winkles were going on a canoe trip and portage through the northern State Forest, the principal fun of which was to see moose. A secondary pleasure would be introducing Homer Wells to a little white water.
    St. Larch felt that such a trip, in the massive hands of the Winkles, wouldn't be dangerous for Homer. He felt less sure that Homer would want to stay with these people, to actually be adopted by them. He hardly worried that the Winkles' craziness would bother the boy, and it wouldn't have. What boy is troubled by perpetual adventure? What Wilbur Larch suspected was that the Winkles would bore Homer to tears, if not to death. A camping trip in the State Forest—white water now and then, a moose or two—might give the boy an idea of whether or not he could stand Grant and Billy forever.
    'And if you have a good time in the woods,' Grant Winkle told Homer cheerfully, 'then we'll take you out {47} on the ocean!' They probably ride whales, Homer imagined. They tease sharks, Dr. Larch thought.
    But Dr. Larch wanted Homer to try it, and Homer Wells was willing—he would try anything for St. Larch.
    'Nothing dangerous,' Larch said sternly to the Winkles.
    'Oh, no, cross our hearts!' cried Billy; Grant crossed his,