Free The Cider House Rules by John Irving Page A

felt in charge. Despite his memories of the woman opened up before him—and his memories of her transmitted disease, which he was only recently rid of—he felt he was handling a fairly manageable emergency. But when he tried to sew up Mrs. Eames's uterus, his stitches simply pulled through the tissue, which he noticed was the texture of a soft cheese—imagine trying to put stitches in Muenster! He had no choice then; he had to remove the uterus. After all the transfusions, Larch was surprised that Mrs. Eames's condition seemed pretty good.
    He conferred with a senior surgeon in the morning. At the Boston Lying-in it was standard that an obstetrician's background was surgical—Larch had interned in surgery at Mass General—and the senior surgeon shared young Larch's bafflement with the disintegrating consistency of Mrs. Eames's uterus. Even the rupture was a puzzle. There was no scar of a previous Caesarean section that could have given way; the placenta could not have weakened the wall of the uterus because the afterbirth had been on the other side of the uterus from the tear. There had been no tumor.
    For forty-eight hours Mrs. Eames did very well. She consoled young Wilbur on the death of his parents. 'I never knew your mother, of course,' she confided. She again expressed her concern that Wilbur consider her reputation, which Wilbur assured her he would (and had —by refraining from expressing his fears to the senior surgeon that the condition of Mrs. Eames might somehow be the result of gonorrhea). He briefly wondered which story Mrs Eames was using at the moment, regarding her reputation: whether she was claiming to live a proper life in Portland or in Boston; whether a third city was now involved and necessarily a third fictitious life.
    On the third day after the removal of her strange uterus, Mrs. Eames filled up with blood again, and Wilbur Larch reopened her wound; this time he was {67} quite afraid of what he'd find. At: first, he was relieved; there was not as much blood in her abdomen as before. But when he sponged the blood away, he perforated the intestine, which he had hardly touched, and when he lifted up the injured loop to close the hole, his fingers passed as easily through the intestine as through gelatin. If all her organs were this same fragile jelly, Larch knew Mrs. Eames wouldn't live very long.
    She lived three more days. The night she died. Larch had a nightmare—his penis fell oft sf in his hands; he tried to sew it back on but it kept disintegrating; then his fingers gave way in a similar fashion. How like a surgeon! he thought. Fingers are valued above penises. How like Wilbur Larch!
    This helped to strengthen Larch's conviction regarding sexual abstinence. He waited for whatever had destroyed Mrs. Eames to claim him, but the autopsy, which was performed by a distinguished pathologist, seemed off the track.
    'Scurvy,' the pathologist said.
    So much for pathologists, thought Wilbur Larch. Scurvy indeed!
    'Missus Eames was a prostitute,' Larch told the pathologist respectfully. 'She wasn't a sailor.'
    But the pathologist was sure about it. It had nothing to do with the gonorrhea, nothing to do with the pregnancy. Mrs. Eames had died of the sailor's curse; she had not a trace of Vitamin C, and, the pathologist said, 'She had destruction of connective tissue and the tendency to bleed that goes with it.' Scurvy.
    Though this was a puzzle, it convinced Larch that it wasn't a venereal puzzle and he had one good night's sleep before Mrs. Eames's daughter came to see him.
    'It's not my turn, is it?' he sleepily asked the colleague who roused him.
    'She says you're her doctor,' the colleague told him.
    He did not recognize Mrs. Eames's daughter, who had {68} once cost less than Mrs. Eames; now, she would have charged more than her mother could get. If, on the train, she had seemed only a few years younger than Wilbur, now she seemed several years older. Her sullen teen-age quality had matured in a