Free The Cider House Rules by John Irving Page B

brash and caustic fashion. Her makeup, her jewelry, and her perfume were excessive; her dress was slatternly. Her hair—in a sinrle, thick braid with a sea-gull feather stuck in it—was so severely pulled back from her face that the veins in her temples seemed strained, and her neck muscles were tensed—as if a violent lover had thrown her to her back and held her there by her strong, dark pigtail.
    She greeted Wilbur Larch by roughly handing him a bottle of brown liquid—its pungent odor escaping through a leaky cork stopper. The bottle's label was illegibly stained.
    That's what did her in,' the girl said with a growl. 'I ain't having any. There's other ways.'
    Is it Miss Eames?' Wilbur Larch asked, searching for her memorable cigar breath.
    I said there's other ways!' Miss Eames said. 'I ain't so far along as she was, I ain't quick.'
    Wilbur Larch sniffed the bottle in his hand; he knew what 'quick' meant. If a fetus was quick it meant the mother had felt it move, it meant the mother was about half through her gestation period, usually in her fourth or fifth month; to some doctors, with religion, when a fetus was quick it meant it had a soul. Wilbur Larch didn't think anyone haid a soul, but until the middle of the nineteenth century, the common law's attitude toward abortion was simple and (to Wilbur Larch) sensible: before 'quickeninG'—before the first, felt movement of the fetus—abortion was legal. More important, to the doctor in Wilbur Larch, it was not dangerous to the mother to perform an abortion before the fetus was quick. After the third month, whether the fetus was quick or not, Wilbur Larch knew it had a grip on the uterus that required more force to break. {69}
    For example, the liquid in the bottle Wilbur Larch was holding had not provided sufficient force to break the grip that Mrs. Eames's fetus had on her—although, apparently, it had exerted enough force to kill the fetus and turn Mrs. Eames's insides to mush.
    'It's gotta be pure poison,' Mrs. Eames's tough daughter remarked to Wilbur Larch, who dabbed a little of his beloved ether on the bottle's stained label, cleaning it up enough to read.
    FRENCH LUNAR SOLUTION
    Restores Female Monthly Regularity!
    Stops Suppression!
    (Suppression, young Larch knew, was a euphemism for pregnancy.)
    Caution: Dangerous to Married Women!
    Almost Certainly Causes Miscarriages!
    the label concluded; which, of course, was why Mrs. Eames had taken it and taken it.
    Larch had studied the abuse of aborticides in medical school. Some—like the ergot Larch used to make the uterus contract after delivery, and pituitary extract— directly affected the uterus. Others ruined the intestines —they were simply drastic purgatives. Two of the cadavers Larch had worked with in medical school had been victims of a rather common household aborticide of the time: turpentine. People who didn't Avant babies in the 1880s and 1890s were also killing themselves with strychnine and oil of rue. The French Lunar Solution Mrs. Eames had tried was oil of tansy; she had taken it for such a long time, and in such amounts, that her intestines had lost their ability to absorb Vitamin C. Thus did she turn herself into Muenster. She died, as the pathologist had correctly observed, of scurvy.
    Mrs. Eames could have chosen several other ways of {70}attempting to abort the birth of another child. There were stories that a rather notorious abortionist in the South End was also the district's most successful pimp. Because he charged nearly five hundred dollars for an abortion, which very few poor women could afford, in their indebtedness they became his whores. His quarters —and others like his—were called, simply, 'Off Harrison'—appropriately vague, but not without meaning. One of the facilities of the South Branch of the Boston Lying-in was established on Harrison Street, so that 'Off Harrison,' in street language, correctly implied something unofficial—not to mention, illegal.
    It did not