Read Online The Cider House Rules by John Irving - Free Book Online Page A

gaze spoke for her. Wilbur never told his father that there was some contradiction regarding which town Mrs. Eames had a good reputation in, and he never told his father that he caught the clap from Mrs. Eames, who might not have known she had it.
    At medical school, Wilbur learned that gonorrhea could live in the Fallopian tubes of females for years. Only the appearance of an abscess in the pelvis might allow the woman to know that she carried the disease. The symptomatology, the discharge and so forth, could go unnoticed for a long time. It did not go unnoticed in Wilbur Larch; the bacterial infection, in these prepenicillin days, lived on for months in young Wilbur, giving him his passionate interest in bacteriology before burning itself out. It left his urethra scarred and his prostate rocky. It left him fond of ether, too—because the ether sleeps he occasionally administered to himself relieved him of the burning sensation he experienced, both when he urinated and when he dreamed. This singular and painful encounter with sexual pleasure—in combination with Wilbur’s memory of his parents’ loveless marriage—convinced the would-be doctor that a life of sexual abstinence was both medically and philosophically sound.
    In the same year, 188_, that Wilbur Larch became a doctor, Neal Dow died. In grief, Wilbur Larch’s mother shortly followed her temperance hero to the grave. A few days later, Wilbur’s father auctioned every item from their servants’ rooms in the former mayor’s mansion and rode the Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal, a town less temperance-minded than Portland, and where Wilbur Larch’s father pushed his liver beyond limits. His body was returned to Portland on the same Grand Trunk Railway that had carried the former lathe operator away. Wilbur Larch met the train; he played the porter to his father’s remains. From the near-cadavers of the cirrhotic that he had seen during his first internship, young Dr. Larch knew exactly what must have been his father’s condition at the end. Cirrhosis turns the liver to a mass of scars and lumps, the skin reflects the bile of jaundice, the stools lighten, the urine darkens, the blood doesn’t clot. Dr. Larch doubted that his father would have even noticed the accompanying impotence.
    How moving to conclude that young Larch chose to be an obstetrician because the loss of his parents inspired him to bring more children into the world, but the road that led Larch to obstetrics was strewn with bacteria. The demonstrator of bacteriology at Harvard Medical School, a Dr. Harold Ernst, is best remembered as one of the first college baseball pitchers to throw a curve ball; he was also the first college baseball player to become a bacteriologist. In the early morning laboratory, before Dr. Ernst—the former curve-ball pitcher—would arrive to set up his demonstrations, young Wilbur Larch would be all alone. He didn’t feel alone in the presence of so many bacteria growing in the little Petri dishes, in the presence of the bacteria inhabiting his urethra and his prostate gland.
    He would milk a drop of pus from his penis onto an ordinary stained slide. Magnified more than a thousand times, the villains he spotted every morning under the microscope were still smaller than common red ants.
    Years later Larch would write that the gonococci looked stooped, like too-tall visitors in an igloo. (“They bend,” he wrote, “as if they have waists and are bowing to each other.”)
    Young Larch would stare at his pus until Dr. Ernst would arrive and greet his little living experiments all over the lab (as if they were his old baseball teammates).
    “Honestly, Larch,” the famous bacteriologist said one morning, “the way you look into that microscope, you appear to be plotting revenge!”
    But it was not the smirk of vengeance that Dr. Ernst recognized on Wilbur Larch’s face. It was simply the intensity with which Larch was emerging from his ether-daze. The young