The Cider House Rules

Wally is rumored to have survived the plane crash, and Olive and Candy are hopeful. However, a report from the crash survivors reaches them, and the survivors do not include Wally. The report details how the co-pilot, the radioman and the crew chief—the only three survivors—landed in the Burma jungle and from there made their way to a village; the villagers then led them to a Chinese hospital, and from there they went to an Indian hospital.

Homer and Candy grow closer, even while they mourn Wally. During the nights, they volunteer together at the children’s ward of a local hospital. The doctor at the hospital resents Homer’s knowledge of medical procedures, which is equal or superior to his own. One night, Homer and Candy consummate their relationship in the cider house. Candy becomes pregnant from the encounter, and Homer realizes that he wants Candy to have his child. However, the couple are uncertain about how to break the news of Candy’s pregnancy to Olive, who is still unconvinced of her son’s death. They decide to go to St. Cloud’s, where Candy will have the baby; from there, they will write to Olive and Ray that they have become a couple and have adopted an orphan.

The couple drive to St. Cloud’s, traveling through an increasingly wintry landscape. Dr. Larch and his nurses are happy to see Homer again, and they all immediately take to Candy. They celebrate Thanksgiving there; Homer returns to Ocean View for tree saplings to plant at St. Cloud’s. He continues to resist Dr. Larch’s plans for him to become a doctor. Homer still refuses to perform abortions, though he supports a woman’s right to choose. Meanwhile, Dr. Larch has been writing angry letters to President Roosevelt, asking him to make abortion legal and to remember the plight of poor citizens even in the midst of a war.

Candy has the baby, a healthy boy, whom Dr. Larch delivers. The couple name him Angel, after nurse Angela. One day, while nursing Angel, Candy receives a telegram from Olive, telling her that Wally is alive in Ceylon. He has encephalitis, weighs 105 pounds, and is paralyzed in his legs. Although they do not yet know this, he is also sterile. The chapter shifts to Wally’s point of view, describing how he landed in the Burma jungle after his plane was shot down. Although he lost his compass, he made his way to a river, where he made a crude raft of bamboo. Floating along the river, he was discovered by Burmese villagers working in a rice paddy; these villagers took him in and fed him, disguising him as a Burmese woman so that he would escape the detection of Japanese soldiers. He was then rescued by spies—a British pilot and his Sinhalese crew—who took him to a hospital in Ceylon.

Homer telegrams Ray and Olive, telling them the lie that he and Candy have agreed upon: They have adopted a baby boy and will be returning to Ocean’s View. They keep the news of their relationship a secret. Once at Ocean’s View, Candy stays with her father, and Homer stays with Olive; they alternate caring for the baby. Olive has made an elaborate nursery for Angel. She tells Homer her plans for Wally’s downstairs bedroom, once he returns home. Homer and Candy both suspect that Ray and Olive know the truth about their relationship. Ray has been making his own torpedo from equipment that he has stolen from the Kittery Air Force Base, refusing to tell Candy what the torpedo is for. Homer suspects that he is being secretive in order to punish the couple for their own secretiveness.

The couple debate what to do once Wally returns. Candy suggests keeping the baby’s parentage a permanent secret, but Homer wants Angel to know who his parents are. One day, Candy receives a letter from Wally, who is now in a New Delhi hospital. The letter states that he is paralyzed below his waist but recovering, and that he will be let out of the hospital once he has gained more weight. The letter also alludes to he and Candy marrying in the future. Candy is filled with remorse and guilt.

This chapter takes place 15 years after the previous chapter. Melony and Lorna are now a couple, living together in a women’s boarding house in Bath. Melony makes a good living as an electrician at the shipyard. One day, Lorna announces that she is pregnant. Melony advises her to go to St. Cloud’s to abort the baby, and makes Lorna take a carton with her addressed to Mrs. Grogan, her old dormitory head. In the carton is a giant coat; in one pocket of the coat is the same amount of money that Melony stole when she ran away from the orphanage. When Lorna returns to their apartment, Melony kicks her out.

Dr. Larch and his nurses are increasingly targeted by Mrs. Goodhall and Mr. Gingrich, from the board of directors. Mrs. Goodhall wants to accuse Dr. Larch of being “a nonpracticing homosexual” (459). When nurse Caroline, Homer’s former colleague at the children’s hospital, joins the orphanage, and Mrs. Goodhall learns of Caroline’s socialist views, she hopes to target Dr. Larch through his new employee as well. This in now the 1950s, the era of McCarthyism and widespread panic over socialism and Communism.

At Ocean View, Olive died of cancer before she was able to see Wally return from the war. Ray, Candy’s father, died in an explosion at his house resulting from the torpedo that he was building. Angel is now a teenager, and Wally, Candy and Homer take care of him equally. Angel does not know his parentage and believes that he is an adopted orphan from St. Cloud’s. In turn, Wally does not realize that Angel is Homer’s son, though both Candy and Homer suspect that he knows about their own secret affair. Wally and Candy are now married, while Candy and Homer remain occasional lovers.

Melony is in the habit of picking apples during her work vacations because the work reminds her of her youth. On one of her vacations, she decides to go to Ocean View. She meets Homer and Angel in the apple mart of the orchard and immediately guesses that Angel is Homer’s son. When Candy comes into the apple mart followed by Wally, Melony further guesses the truth of their domestic situation. She confronts Homer angrily and then leaves the orphanage without taking a job. She takes with her a questionnaire from St. Cloud’s that Homer had hanging in his bathroom. Homer suspects that she intends to take revenge on Homer and St. Cloud’s by filling out the questionnaire in a disparaging way.

Homer tells Candy that it is time to reveal the truth to Angel and Wally. He also writes to Dr. Larch, warning him about Melony. Meanwhile, Dr. Larch plots his subterfuge with respect to the board of directors. He engraves one of his old medical bags with the initials F.S.—for Fuzzy Stone—and sends it to Homer, with the implied directive that Homer should take on Fuzzy Stone’s identity and return to St. Cloud’s. He also writes a series of imaginary letters between himself and Fuzzy Stone. Dr. Larch meets with the nurses and tells them about his planned deception, giving them each different roles. Nurse Caroline is to be the informant, since she is the youngest and most recently hired nurse. Finally, Dr. Larch writes to Homer, imploring him to put aside his qualms about performing abortions and return to St. Cloud’s. The chapter ends with a young woman patient arriving at the orphanage; she has a life-threatening infection from what is probably a self-induced late term abortion.

Melony returns to Bath from Ocean View. She meets Lorna, who is now with a new boyfriend in a bar. Melony tells Lorna about her disillusionment with Homer, and Lorna comforts her. Lorna’s boyfriend confronts the two of them, and he and Melony get into a fight; the boyfriend beats Melony up and sends her to the hospital. When Melony returns from the hospital, she and Lorna move back in together. Melony resolves to get revenge on the boyfriend if she encounters him again.

It is picking season at Ocean View, and Mr. Rose and his crew arrive to stay at the cider house. Mr. Rose brought along his teenaged daughter, whose first name is Rose, and her baby, who is nameless. Angel immediately falls in love with Rose and occupies himself by showing her around the orphanage and trying to find a name for her child. Rose seems to like Angel as well, and their relation turns tentatively romantic. However, both she and other members of the crew warn Angel about Mr. Rose, who is known for being menacing and deft with a knife. One day, Rose shows Angel the cuts on her body and implies that her father made the cuts.

At St. Cloud’s, the patient with the self-induced abortion has died. She has no identification, and Dr. Larch and the nurses understand that her death will make their case even harder for the board of trustees to accept. Nurse Caroline writes a letter to Homer, begging him to return to St. Cloud’s and assume Dr. Larch’s role. Homer writes a letter back to both Caroline and Dr. Larch, telling them that he is not a doctor and does not wish to perform abortions. He does not tell them that Melony has not filled out the questionnaire but has instead sent it back to him.

Dr. Larch writes back to Homer, reiterating his demand that Homer come back to St. Cloud’s. He sends the letter off at the train station and then returns to the orphanage and to the dispensary room. There, he takes an unusually large dosage of ether, from which he dies.

Angel learns that Rose is pregnant again, and that she has been trying to abort the baby herself. It becomes clear that the father is Mr. Rose—her own father. Angel tells Homer about Rose’s predicament, and Homer calls St. Cloud’s. This is how he learns of Dr. Larch’s death. Over the phone, Nurse Caroline angrily tells Homer that he will have to find someone else to perform abortions and then hangs up on him. Homer performs an abortion on Rose himself, with medical equipment that Dr. Larch sent to him earlier in an attempt to prepare him for his role as Fuzzy Stone. He realizes in doing so that he will return to St. Cloud’s after all and fulfill the role that Dr. Larch planned for him.

Rose and her baby are now staying in the house with Angel and his family. Mr. Rose, forbidden to see his daughter, stages a strike from work. One night, a picker named Muddy stops by the house on Mr. Rose’s behalf and asks Rose to see her father one more time. Muddy also gives a knife to Angel, asking him to give it to Rose. The following day, Rose and her baby are gone. When Angel and his family confront Mr. Rose, he tells them that his daughter and granddaughter have gone hitchhiking. He also indirectly reveals that Rose stabbed him with Muddy’s knife before leaving. He refuses medical help and dies that day; he instructs Homer while dying that his death should be viewed as a suicide.

On the day that the rest of the work crew departs, Homer tells Angel the truth about his parentage; separately, Candy tells Wally. Homer also writes to St. Cloud’s, telling them that he is ready to assume the identity of Dr. Stone and to become the new director of the orphanage. He meets with the board of directors and successfully convinces them that he is Dr. Stone, recently returned from helping sick children in Asia. He employs some of Wally’s wartime memories of Burma for his story. He leaves Ocean View, while Candy, Wally, and Angel continue their family life, occasionally visiting Homer at St. Cloud’s. Candy and Wally become more and more involved with apple farming; readers are told that Angel will eventually become a novelist.

At St. Cloud’s, Homer settles into his new role, which is both strange and familiar. He begins a romantic relationship with Nurse Caroline, which Candy learns indirectly from one of Homer’s letters; Candy approves of the relationship. One day, a body arrives from the Bath hospital that always supplied Dr. Larch with cadavers. The body turns out to belong to Melony, dead from an electrocution accident. She instructed Lorna to send her body to St. Cloud’s, should anything happen to her. Homer learns of this when he contacts Lorna, who also tells him about she and Melony’s relationship. Instead of practicing on Melony’s cadaver, he gives her a respectful burial. He buries her body under one of the transplanted apple trees from Ocean View. Meanwhile, Homer and all of the nurses at St. Cloud’s keep Dr. Larch’s memory alive by reading from A Brief History of St. Cloud’s, the book that Dr. Larch wrote.