WHAT HE WANTED TO BE WHEN HE GREW UP

 

In 1781 the widow and children of Everett Steering founded Steering Academy, as it was first called, because Everett Steering had announced to his family, while carving his last Christmas goose, that his only disappointment with his town was that he had not provided his boys with an academy capable of preparing them for a higher education. He did not mention his girls. He was a shipbuilder in a village whose life-link to the sea was a doomed river; Everett knew the river was doomed. He was a smart man, and not usually playful, but after Christmas dinner he indulged in a snowball fight with both his boys and his girls. He died of apoplexy before nightfall. Everett Steering was seventy-two; even his boys and his girls were too old for snowball fights, but he had a right to call the town of Steering his town.

It had been named after him in a glut of enthusiasm for the town's independence following the Revolutionary War. Everett Steering had organized the installation of mounted cannons at strategic points along the river shore; these cannons were meant to discourage an attack that never came—from the British, who were expected to sail up the river from the sea at Great Bay. The river was called Great River then, but after the war it was called the Steering River; and the town, which had no proper name—but had always been called The Meadows, because it lay in the salt- and fresh-water marshes only a few miles inland from Great Bay—was also called Steering.

Many families in Steering were dependent on shipbuilding, or on other business that came up the river from the sea; since it was first called The Meadows, the village had been a backup port to Great Bay. But along with his wishes to found a boys' academy, Everett Steering told his family that Steering would not be a port for very long. The river, he noticed, was choking with silt.

In all his life, Everett Steering was known to tell only one joke, and only to his family. The joke was that the only river to have been named after him was full of mud; and it was getting fuller by the minute. The land was all marsh and meadow, from Steering to the sea, and unless people decided that Steering was worth maintaining as a port, and gouged a deeper channel for the river, Everett knew that even a rowboat would eventually have trouble making it from Steering to Great Bay (unless there was a very high tide). Everett knew that the tide would one day fill in the riverbed from his home town to the Atlantic.

In the next century, the Steering family was wise to stake its life-support system on the textile mills they constructed to span the waterfall on the freshwater part of the Steering River. By the time of the Civil War the only business in the town of Steering, on the Steering River, was the Steering Mills. The family got out of boats and into textiles when the time was ripe.

Another shipbuilding family in Steering was not so lucky; this family's last ship made it only half the way from Steering to the sea. In a once-notorious part of the river, called The Gut, the last ship made in Steering settled into the mud forever, and for years it could be seen from the road, half out of the water at high tide and completely dry at low tide. Kids played in it until it listed to its side and crushed someone's dog. A pig farmer named Gilmore salvaged the ship's masts to raise his barn. And by the time young Garp attended Steering, the varsity crew could row their shells on the river only at high tide. At low tide the Steering River is one wet mudflat from Steering to the sea.

It was, therefore, due to Everett Steering's instincts about water that a boys' academy was founded in 1781. After a century or so, it flourished.

“Over all those years,” Garp wrote, “the shrewd Steering genes must have suffered some dilution; the family instincts regarding water went from good to very bad.” Garp enjoyed referring to Midge Steering Percy in this way. “A Steering whose water instincts had run their course,” he said. Garp thought it wonderfully ironic “that the Steering genes for water sense ran out of chromosomes when they got to Midge. Her sense of water was so perverse,” Garp wrote, “that it attracted her first to Hawaii and then to the United States Navy—in the form of Fat Stew.”

Midge Steering Percy was the end of the bloodline. The Steering School itself would become the last Steering after her, and perhaps old Everett foresaw that, too; many families have left less, or worse, behind. In Garp's day, at least, the Steering School was still relentless and definite in its purpose: “the preparing of young men for a higher education.” And in Garp's case, he had a mother who also took that purpose seriously. Garp himself took the school so seriously that even Everett Steering, with his one joke in a lifetime, would have been pleased.

Garp knew what to take for courses and whom to have for teachers. That is often the difference between doing well or poorly in a school. He was not really a gifted student, but he had direction; many of his courses were still fresh in Jenny's mind, and she was a good drillmaster. Garp was probably no more of a natural at intellectual pursuits than his mother, but he had Jenny's powerful discipline; a nurse is a natural at establishing a routine, and Garp believed in his mother.

If Jenny was remiss in her advice, it was in only one area. She had never paid any attention to the sports at Steering; she could offer Garp no suggestions as to what games he might like to play. She could tell him that he would like East Asian Civilization with Mr. Merrill more than he would like Tudor England with Mr. Langdell. But, for example, Jenny did not know the differences in pleasure and pain between football and soccer. She had observed only that her son was small, strong, well balanced, quick, and solitary; she assumed he already knew what games he liked to play. He did not.

Crew, he thought, was stupid. Rowing a boat in unison, a galley slave dipping your oar in foul water and the Steering River was indeed foul. The river was afloat with factory scum and human turds—and always the after-tide, salt-water slime was on the mudflats (a muck the texture of refrigerated bacon fat). Everett Steering's river was full of more than mud, but even if it had been sparkling clean, Garp was no oarsman. And no tennis player, either. In one of his earliest essays—his freshman year at Steering—Garp wrote: “I do not care for balls. The ball stands between the athlete and his exercise. So do hockey pucks, and badminton birdies—and skates, like skis, intrude between the body and the ground. And when one further removes one's body from the contest by an extension device—such as a racket, a bat, or a stick—all purity of movement, strength, and focus is lost.” Even at fifteen, one could sense his instinct for a personal aesthetic.

Since he was too small for football, and soccer certainly involved a ball, he ran long distance, which was called cross-country, but he stepped in too many puddles and suffered all fall from a perpetual cold.

When the winter sports season opened, Jenny was distressed at how much restlessness her son exhibited; she criticized him for making too much of a mere athletic decision—why didn't he know what form of exercise he might prefer? But sports did not feel like recreation to Garp. Nothing felt like recreation to Garp. From the beginning, he appeared to believe there was something strenuous to achieve. ("Writers do not read for fun,” Garp would write, later, speaking for himself.) Even before young Garp knew he was going to be a writer, or knew what he wanted to be, it appears he did nothing “for fun.”

Garp was confined to the infirmary on the day he was supposed to sign up for a winter sport. Jenny would not let him get out of bed. “You don't know what you want to sign up for, anyway,” she told him. All Garp could do was cough.

“This is silly beyond mortal belief,” Jenny told him. “Fifteen years in this snotty, rude community and you fall to pieces trying to decide what game you're going to play to occupy your afternoons.”

“I haven't found my sport, Mom,” Garp croaked. “I've got to have a sport.”

“Why?” Jenny asked.

“I don't know,” he moaned. He coughed and coughed.

“God, listen to you,” Jenny complained. “I'll find you a sport,” she said. “I'll go over to the gym and sign you up for something.”

“No!” Garp begged.

And Jenny pronounced what was for Garp, in his four years at Steering, her litany. “I know more than you do, don't I?", she said. Garp fell back on his sweaty pillow.

“Not about this , Mom,” he said. “You took all the courses but you never played on any of the teams .”

If Jenny Fields recognized this as a rare oversight, she did not admit it. It was a typical Steering December day, the ground glassy with frozen slush and the snow gray and muddy from the boots of eight hundred boys. Jenny Fields bundled up and trudged across the winter-grim campus like the convinced and determined mother she was. She looked like a nurse resigned to bring what slim hope she could to the bitter Russian front. In such a manner Jenny Fields approached the Steering gym. In her fifteen years at Steering, Jenny had never been there; she had not known it was important. At the far end of the Steering campus, ringed by the acres of playing fields, the hockey rinks, the tennis courts like the cross section of a huge, human hive, Jenny saw the giant gymnasium loom out of the dirty snow like a battle she had not anticipated, and her heart filled with worry and with gloom.

The Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House—and the Seabrook Stadium, and the Seabrook Ice Hockey Rinks—were named after the superb athlete and World War I flying ace Miles Seabrook, whose face and massive torso greeted Jenny in a triptych of photographs enshrined in the display case in the gym's vast entrance-way: Miles Seabrook, '09, his head in a leather football helmet, his shoulder pads probably unnecessary. Beneath the photo of old No. 32 was the near-demolished jersey itself: faded and frequently under the attack of moths, the jersey lay in a heap in the locked trophy case under the first third of Miles Seabrook's triptych photograph. A sign said: HIS ACTUAL SHIRT.

The center shot in the triptych showed Miles Seabrook as a hockey goalie—in those old days the goalies wore pads, but the brave face was naked, the eyes clear and challenging, the scar tissue everywhere. Miles Seabrook's bulk filled the dwarfed net. How could anyone have scored on Miles Seabrook, his cat-quick and bear-sized leather paws, his club-like stick and swollen chest protector, his skates like the long claws of a giant anteater? Beneath the football and the hockey pictures were the scores of the annual big games: in every Steering sport, the season ended in the traditional contest with Bath Academy, nearly as old and famous as Steering, and every Steering schoolboy's hated rival. The vile Bath boys in their gold and green (in Garp's day, these colors were called puke and baby-shit): STEERING 7, BATH 6; STEERING 3, BATH 0. Nobody scored on Miles.

Captain Miles Seabrook, as he was called in the third photo in the triptych, stared back at Jenny Fields in a uniform all too familiar to her. It was a flyboy's suit, she saw in an instant; although the costumes changed between world wars, they did not change so much that Jenny failed to recognize the Reece-lined collar of the flight jacket, turned up at a cocky angle, and the confident, untied chin strap of the flight cap, the tipped up earmuffs (miles Seabrook's ears could never get cold!), and the goggles pushed carelessly up off the forehead. At his throat, the pure white scarf. No score was cited beneath this portrait, but if anyone in the Steering Athletic Department had possessed a sense of humor, Jenny might have read: UNITED STATES 16, GERMANY 1. Sixteen was the number of planes Miles Seabrook shot down before the Germans scored on him.

Ribbons and medals lay dusty in the locked trophy case, like offerings at an altar to Miles Seabrook. There was a battered wooden thing, which Jenny mistook for part of Miles Seabrook's shot-down plane; she was prepared for any tastelessness, but the wood was only all that remained of his last hockey stick. Why not his jock? thought Jenny Fields. Or, like a keepsake of a dead baby, a lock of his hair? Which was, in all three photos, covered by a helmet or a cap or a big striped sock. Perhaps, Jenny thought—with characteristic scorn—Miles Seabrook was hairless.

Jenny resented the implications lying honored in that dusty case. The warrior-athlete, merely undergoing an other change of uniform. Each time the body was offered only a pretense of protection: as a Steering School nurse, Jenny had seen fifteen years of football and hockey injuries, in spite of helmets, masks, straps, buckles, hinges, and pads. And Sergeant Garp, and the others, had shown Jenny that men at war had the most illusory protection of all.

Wearily, Jenny moved on; when she passed the display cases, she felt she was moving toward the engine of a dangerous machine. She avoided the arena-sized spaces in the gymnasium, where she could hear the shouts and grunts of contest. She sought the dark corridors, where, she supposed, the offices were. Have I spent fifteen years, she thought, to lose my child to this ?

She recognized a part of the smell. Disinfectant. Years of strenuous scrubbing. No doubt that a gym was a place where germs of monstrous potential lay waiting for a chance to breed. That part of the smell reminded her of hospitals, and of the Steering infirmary—bottled, post-operative air. But here in the huge house built to the memory of Miles Seabrook there was another smell, as distasteful to Jenny Fields as the smell of sex. The complex of gym and field house had been erected in 1919, less than a year before she was born: what Jenny smelled was almost forty years of the forced farts and the sweat of boys under stress and strain. What Jenny smelled was competition , fierce and full of disappointment. She was such an outsider, it had never been part of her growing up.

In a corridor that seemed separated from the central areas of the gym's various energies, Jenny stood still and listened. Somewhere near her was a weight-lifting room; she heard the iron bashing and the terrible heaves of hernias in progress—a nurse's view of such exertion. In fact, it seemed to Jenny that the whole building groaned and pushed, as if every schoolboy at Steering suffered constipation and sought relievement in the horrid gym.

Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.

The bleeding wrestler was at that instant upon her. Jenny was not sure how the groggy, dripping boy had surprised her, but a door opened off this corridor of small, innocuous-appearing rooms, and the matted face of the wrestler was smack in front of her with his ear guards pulled so askew on his head that the chin strap had slipped to his mouth, where it tugged his upper lip into a fishlike sneer. The little bowl of the strap, which had once cupped his chin, now brimmed with blood from his streaming nose.

As a nurse, Jenny was not over impressed with blood, but she cringed at her anticipated collision with the thick, wet, hard-looking boy, who somehow dodged her, lunging sideways. With admirable trajectory and volume, he vomited on his fellow wrestler who was struggling to support him. “Excuse me,” he burbled, for most of the boys at Steering were well brought up.

His fellow wrestler did him the favor of pulling his head gear off, so that the hapless puker would not choke or strangle; quite unmindful of his own bespattering, he called loudly back into the open door of the wrestling room, “Carlisle didn't make it!”

From the door of that room, whose heat beckoned Jenny in the way a tropical greenhouse might be alluring in midwinter, a man's clear tenor voice responded. “Carlisle! You had two helpings of that dining-hall slop for lunch, Carlisle! One helping and you deserve to lose it! No sympathy , Carlisle!”

Carlisle, for whom there was no sympathy, continued his lurching progress down the corridor; he bled and barfed his way to a door, through which he made his smeared escape. His fellow wrestler, who in Jenny's opinion had also withheld his sympathy, dropped Carlisle's headgear in the corridor with the rest of Carlisle's muck; then he followed Carlisle to the lockers. Jenny hoped that he was going somewhere to change his clothes.

She looked at the wrestling room's open door; she breathed deeply and stepped inside. Immediately, she felt off-balance. Underfoot was a soft fleshy feel, and the wall sank under her touch when she leaned against it; she was inside a padded cell, the floor and the wall mats warm and yielding, the air so stifling hot and stench-full of sweat that she hardly dared to breathe.

“Shut the door!” said the man's tenor voice—because wrestlers, Jenny would later know, love the heat and their own sweat, especially when they're cutting weight, and they thrive when the walls and floors are as hot and giving as the buttocks of sleeping girls.

Jenny shut the door. Even the door had a mat on it, and she slumped against it, imagining someone might open the door from the outside and mercifully release her. The man with the tenor voice was the coach and Jenny, through the shimmering heat, watched him pace against the long room's wall, unable to stand still while he squinted at his struggling wrestlers. “Thirty seconds!” he screamed to them. The couples on the mat bucked as if they were electrically stimulated. The batches of twosomes around the wrestling room were each locked in some violent tangle, the intent of each wrestler, in Jenny's eye, as deliberate and as desperate as rape.

“Fifteen seconds!” the coach screamed. “Push it!”

The twisted pair nearest Jenny suddenly came apart, their limbs unknotting, the veins on their arms and necks popping. A breathless cry and a string of saliva broke from one boy's mouth as his opponent broke free of him and they uncoupled, bashing into the padded wall.

“Time's up!” the coach screamed. He did not use a whistle. The wrestlers went suddenly limp, untying each other from each other with great slowness. A half dozen of them now lumbered toward Jenny at the door; they had the water fountain and fresh air on their minds, though Jenny assumed they were all heading for the hall in order to throw up, or bleed in peace—or both.

Jenny and the coach were the only standing bodies left in the wrestling room. Jenny observed that the coach was a neat, small man, as compact as a spring; she also observed he was nearly blind, because the coach now squinted in her direction, recognizing that her whiteness and her shape were foreign to the wrestling room. He began to grope for his glasses, which he usually stashed above the wall mats, at about head level—where they would not be so easily crushed by a wrestler who was flung upon them. Jenny observed that the coach was about her age, and that she had never seen him on or about the Steering campus before—with or without his glasses.

The coach was new at Steering. His name was Ernie Holm, and so far he had found the Steering community to be just as snotty as Jenny had found it. Ernie Holm had been a two-time Big Ten wrestling champion at the University of Iowa, but he had never won a national title and he had coached in high schools all over Iowa for fifteen years while trying to raise his only child, a daughter, all by himself. He was bone-tired of the Midwest, as he would have said it himself, and he had come East to assure his daughter of a classy education—as he would also have said it. She was the brains of the family, he was fond of saying—and she had her mother's fine looks, which he never mentioned.

Helen Holm, at fifteen, had spent a lifetime of three-hour afternoons sitting in wrestling rooms, from Iowa to Steering, watching boys of many sizes sweat and throw each other around. Helen would remark, years later, that spending her childhood as the only girl in a wrestling room had made her a reader. “I was brought up to be a spectator,” Helen said. “I was raised to be a voyeur.”

She was such a good and nonstop reader, in fact, that Ernie Holm had moved East just for her. He took the job at Steering for Helen's sake, because he had read in his contract that the children of the faculty and staff could attend the Steering School for free—or they could receive a comparable sum of money toward their tuition at another private school. Ernie Holm was a bad reader, himself; he had somehow overlooked the fact that Steering admitted only boys.

He found himself moving into the chilly Steering community in the fall, with his brainy daughter once more enrolled in a small, bad public school. In fact, the public school in the town of Steering was probably worse than most public schools because the smart boys in the town went to Steering, and the smart girls went away. Ernie Holm hadn't figured he'd have to send his daughter away from him—that had been why he'd moved: to stay with her. So while Ernie Holm was getting used to his new duties at Steering, Helen Holm wandered the fringes of the great school, devouring its bookstore and its library (hearing stories, no doubt, of the community's other great reader: Jenny Fields); and Helen continued to be bored, as she had been bored in Iowa, by her boring classmates in her boring public school.

Ernie Holm was sensitive to people who were bored. He had married a nurse sixteen years earlier; when Helen had been born, the nurse gave up her nursing to be a full-time mother. After six months she wanted to be a nurse again, but there were no day-care centers in Iowa in those years, and Ernie Holm's new wife grew gradually more distant under the strain of being a full-time mother and an ex-nurse. One day she left him. She left him with a full-time daughter and no explanation.

So Helen Holm grew up in wrestling rooms, which are very safe for children—being padded everywhere, and always warm. Books had kept Helen from being bored, although Ernie Holm worried how long his daughter's studiousness could continue to be nourished in a vacuum. Ernie was sure that the genes for being bored were in his daughter.

Thus he came to Steering. Thus Helen, who also wore glasses—as needfully as her father—was with him that day Jenny Fields walked into the wrestling room. Jenny didn't notice Helen; few people noticed Helen, when Helen was fifteen. Helen, however, noticed Jenny right away; Helen was unlike her father in that she didn't wrestle with the boys, or demonstrate moves and holds, and so she kept her glasses on .

Helen Holm was forever on the lookout for nurses because she was forever on the lookout for her disappeared mother, whom Ernie had made no attempt to find. With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer. But when Helen had been small, Ernie had indulged her with a speculative fable he no doubt liked to imagine himself—it was a story that had always intrigued Helen, too. “One day,” went the story, “you might see a pretty nurse, sort of looking like she doesn't know where she is anymore, and she might look at you like she doesn't know who you are, either—but she might look curious to find out.”

“And that will be my mom?” Helen used to ask her father.

“And that will be your mom!” Ernie used to say.

So when Helen Holm looked up from her book in the Steering wrestling room, she thought she saw her mother. Jenny Fields in her white uniform was forever appearing out of place; there on the crimson mats of the Steering School, she looked dark and healthy, strong-boned and handsome if not exactly pretty, and Helen Hohn must have thought that no other woman would have ventured into this soft-floored inferno where her father worked. Helen's glasses fogged, she closed her book; in her anonymous gray sweat suit, which hid her gawky fifteen-year-old frame—her hard hips and her small breasts—she stood up awkwardly against the wrestling-room wall and waited for her father's sign of recognition.

But Ernie Holm was still groping for his glasses; in a blur he saw the white figure—vaguely womanly, perhaps a nurse—and his heart paused at the possibility he had never really believed in: his wife's return, her saying, “Oh, how I've missed you and our daughter!” What other nurse would enter his place of employment?

Helen saw her father's fumbling, she took this to be the necessary sign. She stepped toward Jenny across the blood-warm mats, and Jenny thought: My God, that's a girl ! A pretty girl with glasses. What's a pretty girl doing in a place like this?

“Mom?” the girl said to Jenny. “It's me , Mom! It's Helen ,” she said, bursting into tears; she flung her slim arms around Jenny's shoulders and pressed her wet face to Jenny's throat.

“Jesus Christ!” said Jenny Fields, who was never a woman who liked to be touched. Still, she was a nurse and she must have felt Helen's need; she did not shove the girl away from her, though she knew very well she was not Helen's mother. Jenny Fields thought that having been a mother once was enough. She coolly patted the weeping girl's back and looked imploringly at the wrestling coach, who had just found his glasses. “I'm not your mother, either,” Jenny said politely to him, because he was looking at her with the same brief relief in his face that Jenny had seen in the face of the pretty girl.

What Ernie Holm thought was that the resemblance went deeper than the uniform and the coincidence of a wrestling room in two nurses' lives; but Jenny stopped short of being as pretty as Ernie's runaway wife, and Ernie was reflecting that even fifteen years would not have made his wife as plain and merely handsome as Jenny. Still, Jenny looked all right to Ernie Holm, who smiled an unclear, apologetic smile that his wrestlers were familiar with, when they lost.

“My daughter thought you were her mother,” Ernie Holm said to Jenny. “She hasn't seen her mother in quite a while.”

Obviously , thought Jenny Fields. She felt the girl tense and spring out of her arms.

“That's not your mom, darlin',” Ernie Holm said to Helen, who retreated to the wrestling-room wall; she was a tough-minded girl, not at all in the habit of emotionally displaying herself—not even to her father.

“And did you think I was your wife ?” Jenny asked Ernie, because it had looked to her, for a moment, that Ernie had mistaken her, too. She wondered how long a “while” Mrs. Holm had been missing.

“You fooled me, for a minute,” Ernie said, politely; he had a shy grin, which be used sparingly.

Helen crouched in a corner of the wrestling room, fiercely eyeing Jenny as if Jenny were deliberately responsible for her embarrassment. Jenny felt moved by the girl; it had been years since Garp had hugged her like that, and it was a feeling that even a very selective mother, like Jenny, remembered missing.

“What's your name?” she asked Helen. “My name is Jenny Fields.”

It was a name Helen Holm knew, of course. She was the other mystery reader around the Steering School. Also, Helen had not previously given to anyone the feelings she reserved for a mother; even though it had been an accident that she'd flung those feelings around Jenny, Helen found it hard to call them back entirely. She had her father's shy smile and she looked thankfully at Jenny; oddly, Helen felt she would like to hug Jenny again, but she restrained herself. There were wrestlers shuffling back into the room, gasping from the drinking fountain, where those who were cutting weight had only rinsed their mouths.

“No more practice,” Ernie Holm told them, waving them out of the room. “That's it for today. Go run your laps!” Obediently, even relieved, they bobbed in the doorway of the crimson room; they picked up their headgear, their rubber sweat suits, their spools of tape. Ernie Holm waited for the room to clear, while his daughter and Jenny Fields waited for him to explain; at the very least, an explanation was in order, he felt, and there was nowhere Ernie felt as comfortable as he felt in a wrestling room. For him it was the natural place to tell someone a story, even a difficult story with no ending—and even to a stranger. So when his wrestlers had left to run their laps, Ernie very patiently began his father-and-daughter tale, the brief history of the nurse who left them, and of the Midwest they only recently had left. It was a story Jenny could appreciate, of course, because Jenny did not know an other single parent with a single child. And although she may have felt tempted to tell them her story—there being interesting similarities, and differences—Jenny merely repeated her standard version: the father of Garp was a soldier, and so forth. And who takes the time for weddings when there is a war? Though it was not the whole story, it clearly appealed to Helen and Ernie, who had met no one else in the Steering community as receptive and frank as Jenny.

There in the warm red wrestling room, on the soft mats, surrounded by those padded walls—in such an environment, sudden and inexplicable closeness is possible.

Of course Helen would remember that first hug her whole life; however her feelings for Jenny might change, and change back, from that moment in the wrestling room Jenny Fields was more of a mother to Helen than Helen had ever had. Jenny would also remember how it felt to be hugged like a mother, and would even note, in her autobiography, how a daughter's hug was different from a son's. It is at least ironic that her one experience for making such a pronouncement occurred that December day in the giant gymnasium erected to the memory of Miles Seabrook.

It is unfortunate if Ernie Holm felt any desire toward Jenny Fields, and if he imagined, even briefly, that here might be another woman with whom he might live his life. Because Jenny Fields was given to no such feelings; she thought only that Ernie was a nice, good man—perhaps, she hoped, he would be her friend. If he would be, he would be her first.

And it must have perplexed Ernie and Helen when Jenny asked if she could stay a moment, in the wrestling room, just by herself. What for? they must have wondered. Ernie then remembered to ask her why she had come.

“To sign my son up for wrestling,” Jenny said quickly. She hoped Garp would approve.

“Well, sure,” Ernie said. “And you'll turn out the lights, and the heaters, when you leave? The door locks itself.”

Thus alone, Jenny turned off the lights and heard the great blow heaters hum down to stillness. There in the dark room, the door ajar, she took off her shoes and she paced the mat. Despite the apparent violence of this sport, she was thinking, “why do I feel so safe here? Is it him?” she wondered, but Ernie passed quickly through her mind—simply a small, neat, muscular man with glasses. If Jenny thought of men at all, and she never really did, she thought they were more tolerable when they were small and neat, and she preferred men and women to have muscles—to be strong. She enjoyed people with glasses the way only someone who doesn't need to wear glasses can enjoy glasses on other people—can find them “nice.” But mostly it is this room , she thought—the red wrestling room, huge but contained, padded against pain, she imagined. She dropped thud! to her knees, just to hear the way the mats received her. She did a somersault and split her dress; then she sat on the mat and looked at the heavy boy who loomed in the doorway of the blackened room. It was Carlisle, the wrestler who'd lost his lunch; he had changed his equipment and come back for more punishment, and he peered across the dark crimson mats at the glowing white nurse who crouched like a she-bear in her cave.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” he said. “I was just looking for someone to work out with.”

“Well, don't look at me ,” Jenny said. “Go run your laps!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Carlisle said, and he trotted off.

When she closed the door and it locked behind her, she realized she'd left her shoes inside. A janitor did not seem able to find the right key, but he lent her a large boy's basketball shoes that had turned up in Lost and Found. Jenny trudged across the frozen slush to the infirmary, feeling that her first trip to the world of sports had left her more than a little changed.

In the annex, in his bed, Garp still coughed and coughed. “Wrestling!” he croaked. “Good God, Mother, are you trying to get me killed?”

“I think you'll like the coach,” Jenny said. “I met him, and he's a nice man. I met his daughter, too.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Garp groaned. “His daughter wrestles?”

“No, she reads a lot,” Jenny said, approvingly.

“Sounds exciting, Mom,” Garp said. “You realize that setting me up with the wrestling coach's daughter may cost me my neck? Do you want that?”

But Jenny was innocent of such a scheme. She really had only been thinking about the wrestling room, and Ernie Holm; her feelings for Helen were entirely motherly, and when her crude young son suggested the possibility of matchmaking—of his taking an interest in young Helen Holm—Jenny was rather alarmed. She had not previously thought of the possibility of her son's being interested in anyone, in that way—at least, she'd thought, he wouldn't be interested for a long time. It was very disquieting to her and she could only say to him, “You're only fifteen-years old. Remember that.”

“Well, how old is the daughter?” Garp asked. “And what's her name?”

“Helen,” Jenny answered. “She's only fifteen, too. And she wears glasses ,” she added, hypocritically. After all, she knew what she thought of glasses; maybe Garp liked them, too. “They're from Iowa ,” she added, and felt she was being a more terrible snob than those hated dandies who thrived in the Steering School community.

“God, wrestling ,” Garp groaned, again, and Jenny felt relieved that he had passed on from the subject of Helen. Jenny was embarrassed at herself for how much she clearly objected to the possibility. The girl is pretty, she thought—though not in an obvious way; and don't young boys like only obvious girls? And would I prefer it if Garp were interested in one of those?

As for those kind of girls, Jenny had her eye on Cushie Percy—a little too saucy with her mouth, a little too slack about her appearance; and should a fifteen-year-old of Cushman Percy's breeding be so developed already? Then Jenny hated herself for even thinking of the word breeding .

It had been a confusing day for her. She fell asleep, for once untroubled by her son's coughing because it seemed that more serious troubles might lie ahead for him. Just when I was thinking we were home free! Jenny thought. She must discuss boys with someone—Ernie Holm, maybe; she hoped she'd been right about him.

She was right about the wrestling room, it turned out—and what intense comfort it gave to her Garp. The boy liked Ernie, too. In that first wrestling season at Steering, Garp worked hard and happily at learning his moves and his holds. Though he was soundly trounced by the varsity boys in his weight class, he never complained. He knew he had found his sport and his pastime; it would take the best of his energy until the writing came along. He loved the singleness of the combat, and the frightening confines of that circle inscribed on the mat; the terrific conditioning; the mental constancy of keeping his weight down. And in that first season at Steering, Jenny was relieved to note, Garp hardly mentioned Helen Holm, who sat in her glasses, in her gray sweat suit, reading. She occasionally looked up, when there was an unusually loud slam on the mat or a cry of pain.

It had been Helen who returned Jenny's shoes to the infirmary annex, and Jenny embarrassed herself by not even asking the girl to come in. For a moment, they had seemed so close. But Garp had been in. Jenny did not want to introduce them. And besides—Garp had a cold.

One day, in the wrestling room, Garp sat beside Helen. He was conscious of a pimple on his neck and how much he was sweating. Her glasses looked so fogged, Garp doubted she could see what she was reading. “You sure read a lot,” he said to her.

“Not as much as your mother,” Helen said, not looking at him.

Two months later Garp said to Helen, “Maybe you'll wreck your eyes, reading in a hot place like this.” Shelooked at him, her glasses very clear this time and magnifying her eyes in a way that startled him.

“I've already got wrecked eyes,” she said. “I was born with ruined eyes.” But to Garp they looked like very nice eyes; so nice, in fact, that he could think of nothing further to say to her.

Then the wrestling season was over. Garp got a junior varsity letter and signed up for track and field events, his listless choice for a spring sport. His condition from the wrestling season was good enough so that he ran the mile; he was the third-best miler on the Steering team, but he would never get any better. At the end of a mile, Garp felt he was just getting started. ("A novelist, even then—though I didn't know it,” Garp would write, years later.) He also threw the javelin, but not far.

The javelin throwers at Steering practiced behind the football stadium, where they spent much of their time spearing frogs. The upper, freshwater reaches of the Steering River ran behind Seabrook Stadium; many javelins were lost there, and many frogs were slain. Spring is no good, thought Garp, who was restless, who missed wrestling; if he couldn't have wrestling, at least let the summer come, he thought, and he would run long-distance on the road to the beach at Dog's Head Harbor.

One day, in the top row of empty Seabrook Stadium, he saw Helen Holm alone with a book. He climbed up the stadium stairs to her, clicking his javelin against the cement so that she wouldn't be startled by seeing him so suddenly beside her. She wasn't startled. She had been watching him and the other javelin throwers for weeks.

“Killed enough little animals for today?” Helen asked him. “Hunting something else?”

“From the very beginning,” Garp wrote, “Helen knew how to get the words in.”

“With all the reading you do, I think you're going to be a writer,” Garp told Helen; he was trying to be casual, but he guiltily hid the point of his javelin with his foot.

“No chance,” Helen said. She had no doubt about it.

“Well, maybe you'll marry a writer,” Garp said to her. She looked up at him, her face very serious, her new prescription sunglasses better suited to her wide cheekbones than her last pair that always slid down her nose.

“If I marry anybody , I'll marry a writer,” Helen said. “But I doubt I'll marry anybody.”

Garp had been trying to joke; Helen's seriousness made him nervous. He said, “Well, I'm sure you won't marry a wrestler .”

“You can be very sure,” Helen said. Perhaps young Garp could not conceal his pain, because Helen added, “Unless it's a wrestler who's also a writer.”

“But a writer first and foremost,” Garp guessed.

“Yes, a real writer,” Helen said, mysteriously—but ready to define what she meant by that. Garp didn't dare ask her. He let her go back to her book.

It was a long walk down the stadium stairs, dragging his javelin behind him. Will she ever wear anything but that gray sweat suit? he wondered. Garp wrote later that he first discovered he had an imagination while trying to imagine Helen Holm's body. “With her always in that damn sweat suit,” he wrote, “I had to imagine her body; there was no other way to see it.” Garp imagined that Helen had a very good body—and nowhere in his writing does he say he was disappointed when he finally saw the real thing.

It was that afternoon in the empty stadium, with frog gore on the point of his javelin, when Helen Holm provoked his imagination and T. S. Garp decided he was going to be a writer. A real writer, as Helen had said.

 

GRADUATION

 

T. S. GARP wrote a short story every month he was at Steering, from the end of his freshman year until his graduation, but it wasn't until his junior year that he showed anything he wrote to Helen. After her first year as a spectator at Steering, Helen was sent to Talbot Academy for girls, and Garp saw her only on occasional weekends. She would sometimes attend the home wrestling meets. It was after one such match that Garp saw her and asked her to wait for him until he'd showered; he had something in his locker he wanted to give her.

“Oh boy,” Helen said. “Your old elbow pads?”

She didn't come to the wrestling room anymore, even if she was home from Talbot on a long vacation. She wore dark green knee socks and a gray flannel skirt, with pleats; often her sweater, always a dark and solid color, matched her knee socks, and always her long dark hair was up, twirled in a braid on top of her head, or complexly pinned. She had a wide mouth with very thin lips and she never wore lipstick. Garp knew that she always smelled nice, but he never touched her. He did not imagine that anyone did; she was as slender and nearly as tall as a young tree—she was taller than Garp by two inches or more—and she had sharp, almost painful-looking bones in her face, although her eyes behind her glasses were always soft and large, and a rich honey-brown.

“Your old wrestling shoes?” Helen asked him, inquiring of the large-sized, lumpy envelope that was sealed.

“It's something to read,” Garp said.

“I've got plenty to read,” Helen said.

“It's something I wrote,” Garp told her.

“Oh boy,” Helen said.

“You don't have to read it now,” Garp told her. “You can take it back to school and write me a letter.”

“I've got plenty to write,” Helen said. “I've got papers due all the time.”

“Then we can talk about it, later,” Garp said. “Are you going to be here for Easter?”

“Yes, but I have a date,” Helen said.

“Oh boy,” said Garp. But when be reached to take back his story, the knuckles of her long hand were very white and she would not let go of the package.

In the 133-pound class, his junior year, Garp finished the season with a won-lost record of 12-1, losing only in the finals of the New England championships. In his senior year, he would win everything—captain the team, be voted Most Valuable Wrestler, and take the New England title. His team would represent the beginning of an almost twenty-year dominance of New England wrestling by Ernie Holm's Steering teams. In this part of the country, Ernie had what he called an Iowa advantage. When Ernie was gone, Steering wrestling would go downhill. And perhaps because Garp was the first of many Steering stars, he was always special to Ernie Holm.

Helen couldn't have cared less. She was glad when her father's wrestlers won, because that made her father happy. But in Garp's senior year, when he captained the Steering team, Helen never attended a single match. She did return his story, though—in the mail from Talbot, with this letter.

 

Dear Garp,

This story shows promise, although I do think, at this point, you are more of a wrestler than a writer. There is a care taken with the language, and a feeling for people, but the situation seems rather contrived and the ending of this story is pretty juvenile. I do appreciate you showing it to me, though.

Yours,

Helen

 

There would be other rejection letters in Garp's writing career, of course, but none would mean as much to him as this one. Helen had actually been kind. The story Garp gave her was about two young lovers who are murdered in a cemetery by the girl's father, who thinks they are grave robbers. After this unfortunate error, the lovers are buried side by side; for some completely unknown reason, their graves are promptly robbed. It is not certain what becomes of the father—not to mention the grave robber.

Jenny told Garp that his first efforts at writing were rather unreal, but Garp was encouraged by his English teacher—the closest thing Steering had to a writer-in-residence, a frail man with a stutter whose name was Tinch. He had very bad breath, remindful to Garp of the dog breath of Bonkers—a closed room of dead geraniums. But what Tinch said, though odorous, was kind. He applauded Garp's imagination, and he taught Garp, once and for all, good old grammar and a love of exact language. Tinch was called Stench by the Steering boys of Garp's day, and messages were constantly left for him about his halitosis. Mouthwash deposited on his desk. Toothbrushes in the campus mail.

It was after one such message—a package of spearmint breath fresheners taped to the map of Literary England—that Tinch asked his composition class if they thought he had bad breath. The class sat as still as moss, but Tinch singled out young Garp, his favorite, his most trusted, and he asked him directly, “Would you say, Garp, that my b-b-breath was bad?”

Truth moved in and out of the open windows on this spring day of Garp's senior year. Garp was known for his humorless honesty, his wrestling, his English composition. His other grades were indifferent to poor. From an early age, Garp later claimed, he sought perfection and did not spread himself thin. His test scores, for general aptitude, showed that he wasn't very apt at anything; he was no natural. This came as no surprise to Garp, who shared with his mother a belief that nothing came naturally. But when a reviewer, after Garp's second novel, called Garp “a born writer,” Garp had a fit of mischief. He sent a copy of the review to the testing people in Princeton, New Jersey, with a note suggesting that they double-check their previous ratings. Then he sent a copy of his test scores to the reviewer, with a note that said: “Thank you very much, but I wasn't “born” anything.” In Garp's opinion, he was no more a “born” writer than he was a born nurse or a born ball turret gunner.

"G-G-Garp?” stuttered Mr. Tinch, bending close to the boy—who smelled the terrible truth in Senior Honors English Composition. Garp knew he would win the annual creative writing prize. The sole judge was always Tinch. And if he could just pass third-year math, which he was taking for the second time, he would respectably graduate and make his mother very happy. “Do I have b-b-bad breath, Garp?” Tinch asked.

“"Good” and “bad” are matters of opinion, sir,” Garp said.

“In your opinion, G-G-Garp?” Tinch said.

“In my opinion,” Garp said, without batting an eye, “you've got the best breath of any teacher at this school.” And he looked hard across the classroom at Benny Potter from New York—a born wise-ass, even Garp would agree—and he stared Benny's grin off Benny's face because Garp's eyes said to Benny that Garp would break Benny's neck if he made a peep.

And Tinch said, “Thank you, Garp,” who won the writing prize, despite the note submitted with his last paper.

 

Mr. Tinch: I lied in class because I didn't want those other assholes to laugh at you. You should know, however, that your breath is really pretty bad. Sorry.

T. S. Garp

 

“You know w-w-what?” Tinch asked Garp when they were alone together, talking about Garp's last story.

“What?” Garp said.

“There's nothing I can d-d-do about my breath,” Tinch said. “I think it's because I'm d-d-dying,” he said, with a twinkle. “I'm r-r-rotting from the inside out!” But Garp was not amused and he watched for news of Tinch for years after his graduation, relieved that the old gentleman did not appear to have anything terminal.

Tinch would die in the Steering quadrangle one winter night of causes wholly unrelated to his bad breath. He was coming home from a faculty party, where it was admitted that he'd possibly had too much to drink, and he slipped on the ice and knocked himself unconscious on the frozen footpath. The night watchman did not find the body until almost dawn, by which time Tinch had frozen to death.

It is unfortunate that wise-ass Benny Potter was the first to tell Garp the news. Garp ran into Potter in New York, where Potter worked for a magazine. Garp's low opinion of Potter was enhanced by Garp's low opinion of magazines, and by Garp's belief that Potter always envied Garp for Garp's more significant output as a writer. “Potter is one of those wretches who has a dozen novels hidden in his drawers,” Garp wrote, “but he wouldn't dare show them to anybody.”

In Garp's Steering years, however, Garp was also not outgoing at showing his work around. Only Jenny and Tinch got to see his progress—and there was the one story he gave Helen Holm. Garp decided he wouldn't give Helen another story until he wrote one that was so good she wouldn't be able to say anything bad about it.

“Did you hear?” Benny Potter asked Garp in New York. “What?” Garp said.

“Old Stench kicked off,” Benny said. “He f-f-froze to death.”

“What did you say?” Garp said.

“Old Stench,” Potter said. Garp had never liked that nickname. “He got drunk and went wobbling home through the quad—fell down and cracked his noggin, and never woke up in the morning.”

“You asshole,” Garp said.

“It's the truth, Garp,” Benny said. “It was fucking fifteen-below. Although,” he added, dangerously, “I'd have thought that old furnace of a mouth of his would have kept him w-w-warm.”

They were in the bar of a nice hotel, somewhere in the Fifties, somewhere between Park Avenue and Third; Garp never knew where he was when he was in New York. He was meeting someone else for lunch and had run into Potter, who had brought him here. Garp picked Potter up by his armpits and sat him on the bar.

“You little gnat, Potter,” Garp said.

“You never liked me,” Benny said.

Garp tipped Benny Potter backward on the bar so that the pockets of Potter's open suit jacket were dipped into the bar sink. “Leave me alone!” Benny said. “You were always old Stench's favorite ass-wipe!”

Garp shoved Benny so that Benny's rump slouched into the bar sink; the sink was full of soaking glasses, and the water sloshed up on the bar.

“Please don't sit on the bar, sir,” the bartender said to Benny. “Jesus Christ, I'm being assaulted, you moron!” Benny said. Garp was already leaving and the bartender had to pull Benny Potter out of the sink and set him down, off the bar. “That son of a bitch, my ass is all wet!” Benny cried.

“Would you please watch your language here, sir?” the bartender said. “My fucking wallet is soaked!” Benny said, wringing out the seat of his pants and holding up his sodden wallet to the bartender. “Garp!” Benny hollered, but Garp was gone. “You always had a lousy sense of humor, Garp!”

It is fair to say, especially in Garp's Steering days, that he was at least rather humorless about his wrestling and his writing—his favorite pastime and his would-be career.

“How do you know you're going to be a writer,” Cushie Percy asked him once.

It was Garp's senior year and they were walking out of town along the Steering River to a place Cushie said she knew. She was home for the weekend from Dibbs. The Dibbs School was the fifth prep school for girls that Cushie Percy had attended; she'd started out at Talbot, in Helen's class, but Cushie had disciplinary problems and she'd been asked to leave. The disciplinary problems had repeated themselves at three other schools. Among the boys at Steering, the Dibbs School was famous—and popular—for its girls with disciplinary problems.

It was high tide on the Steering River and Garp watched an eight-oared shell glide out on the water; a sea gull followed it. Cushie Percy took Garp's hand. Cushie had many complicated ways of testing a boy's affection for her. Many of the Steering boys were willing to handle Cushie when they were alone with her, but most of them did not like to be seen demonstrating any affection for her. Garp, Cushie noticed, didn't care. He held her hand firmly; of course, they had grown up together, but she did not think they were very good or close friends. At least, Cushie thought, if Garp wanted what the others wanted, he was not embarrassed to be seen pursuing it. Cushie liked him for this.

“I thought you were going to be a wrestler,” Cushie said to Garp.

“I am a wrestler,” Garp said. “I'm going to be a writer.”

“And you're going to marry Helen Holm,” Cushie teased him.

“Maybe,” Garp said; his hand went a little limp in hers. Cushie knew this was another humorless topic with him—Helen Holm—and she should be careful.

A group of Steering boys came up the river path toward them; they passed, and one of them called back, “What are you getting into, Garp?”

Cushie squeezed his hand. “Don't let them bother you,” she said.

“They don't bother me,” Garp said.

“What are you going to write about?” Cushie asked him.

“I don't know,” Garp said.

He didn't even know if he was going to college. Some schools in the Midwest had been interested in his wrestling, and Ernie Holm had written some letters. Two places had asked to see him and Garp had visited them. In their wrestling rooms, he had not felt so much outclassed as he had felt outwanted . The college wrestlers seemed to want to beat him more than he wanted to beat them. But one school had made him a cautious offer—a little money, and no promises beyond the first year. Fair enough, considering he was from New England. But Ernie had told him this already. “It's a different sport out there, kid. I mean, you've got the ability—and if I do say so myself, you've had the coaching. What you haven't had is the competition. And you've got to be hungry for it, Garp. You've got to really be interested, you know.”

And when he asked Tinch about where he should go to school, for his writing , Tinch had appeared at a typical loss. “Some g-g-good school, I guess,” he said. “But if you're going to w-w-write,” Tinch said, “won't you d-d-do it anywhere?”

“You have a nice body,” Cushie Percy whispered to Garp, and he squeezed her hand back.

“So do you ,” he told her, honestly. She had, in fact, an absurd body. Small but wholly bloomed, a compact blossom. Her name, Garp thought, should not have been Cushman but Cushion —and since their childhood together, he had sometimes called her that. “Hey, Cushion, want to take a walk?” She said she knew a place.

“Where are you taking me?” Garp asked her.

“Ha!” she said. “You're taking me . I'm just showing you the way. And the place,” she said.

They went off the path by the part of the Steering River that long ago was called The Gut. A ship had been mired there once, but there was no visible evidence. Only the shore betrayed a history. It was at this narrow bend that Everett Steering had imagined obliterating the British—and here were Everett's cannons, three huge iron tubes, rusting into the concrete mountings. Once they had swiveled, of course, but the later-day town fathers had fixed them forever in place. Beside them was a permanent cluster of cannon balls, grown together in cement. The balls were greenish and red with rust, as if they belonged to a vessel long undersea, and the concrete platform where the cannons were mounted was now littered with youthful trash—beer cans and broken glass. The grassy slope leading down to the still and almost empty river was trampled, as if nibbled by sheep—but Garp knew it was merely pounded by countless Steering schoolboys and their dates. Cushie's choice of a place to go was not very original, though it was like her, Garp thought.

Garp liked Cushie, and William Percy had always treated Garp well. Garp had been too young to know Stewie Two, and Dopey was Dopey. Young Pooh was a strange, scary child, Garp thought, but Cushie's touching brainlessness was straight from her mother, Midge Steering Percy. Garp felt dishonest with Cushie for not mentioning what he took to be the utter assholery of her father, Fat Stew.

“Haven't you ever been here before?” Cushie asked Garp.

“Maybe with my mother,” Garp said, “but it's been a while.” Of course he knew what “the cannons” were. The pet phrase at Steering was “getting banged at the cannons"—as in “I got banged at the cannons last weekend,” or “You should have seen old Fenley blasting away at the cannons.” Even the cannons themselves bore these informal inscriptions: “Paul banged Betty, '58,” and “M. Overton, '59, shot his wad here.”

Across the languid river Garp watched the golfers from the Steering Country Club. Even far away, their ridiculous clothing looked unnatural against the green fairway and beyond the marsh grass that grew down to the mudflats. Their madras prints and plaids among the green-brown, gray-brown shoreline made them look like cautious and out-of-place land animals following their hopping white dots across a lake. “Jesus, golf is silly,” Garp said. His thesis of games with balls and clubs, again; Cushie had heard it before and wasn't interested. She settled down in a soft place—the river below them, bushes around them, and over their shoulders the yawning mouths of the great cannons. Garp looked up into the mouth of the nearest cannon and was startled to see the head of a smashed doll, one glassy eye on him.

Cushie unbuttoned his shirt and lightly bit his nipples.

“I like you,” she said.

“I like you , Cushion,” he said.

“Does it spoil it?” Cushie asked him. “Us being old friends?”

“Oh no,” he said. He hoped they would hurry ahead to “it” because it had never happened to Garp before, and he was counting on Cushie for her experience. They kissed wetly in the well-pounded grass; Cushie was an open-mouthed kisser, artfully jamming her hard little teeth into his.

Honest, even at this age, Garp tried to mumble to her that he thought her father was an idiot.

“Of course he is,” Cushie agreed. “Your mother's a little strange, too, don't you think?”

Well, yes, Garp supposed she was. “But I like her anyway,” he said, most faithful of sons. Even then.

“Oh, I like her, too,” Cushie said. Thus having said what was necessary, Cushie undressed. Garp undressed, but she asked him, suddenly, “Come on, where is it?”

Garp panicked. Where was what ? He'd thought she was holding it.

“Where's your thing ?” Cushie demanded, tugging what Garp thought was his thing.

“What?” Garp said.

“Oh wow, didn't you bring any?” Cushie asked him. Garp wondered what he was supposed to have brought.

“What?” he said.

“Oh, Garp,” Cushie said. “Don't you have any rubbers ?”

He looked apologetically at her. He was only a boy who'd lived his whole life with his mother, and the only rubber he'd seen had been slipped over the doorknob of their apartment in the infirmary annex, probably by a fiendish boy named Meckler—long since graduated and gone on to destroy himself.

Still, he should have known: Garp had heard much conversation of rubbers, of course.

“Come here,” Cushie said. She led him to the cannons. “You've never done this, have you?” she asked him. He shook his head, honest to his sheepish core. “Oh, Garp,” she said. “If you weren't such an old friend.” She smiled at him, but he knew she wouldn't let him do it, now. She pointed into the mouth of the middle cannon. “Look,” she said. He looked. A jewel-like sparkle of ground glass, like pebbles he imagined might make up a tropical beach; and something else, not so pleasant. “Rubbers,” Cushle told him.

The cannon was crammed with old condoms. Hundreds of prophylactics! A display of arrested reproduction. Like dogs urinating around the borders of their territory, the boys of the Steering School had left their messes in the mouth of the mammoth cannon guarding the Steering River. The modern world had left its stain upon another historical landmark.

Cushie was getting dressed. “You don't know anything,” she teased him, “so what are you going to write about?” He had suspected this would pose a problem for a few years—a kink in his career plans.

He was about to get dressed but she made him lie down so that she could look at him. “You are beautiful,” she said. “And it's all right.” She kissed him.

“I can go get some rubbers,” he said. “It wouldn't take long, would it? And we could come back.”

“My train leaves at five,” Cushie said, but she smiled sympathetically.

“I didn't think you had to be back at any special time,” Garp said.

“Well, even Dibbs has some rules, you know,” Cushie said; she sounded hurt by her school's lax reputation. “And besides,” she said, “you see Helen. I know you do, don't you?”

“Not like this,” he admitted.

“Garp, you shouldn't tell anybody everything,” Cushie said.

It was a problem with his writing, too; Mr. Tinch had told him.

“You're too serious, all the time,” Cushie said, because for once she was in a position where she could lecture him.

On the river below them an eight-oared shell sleeked through the narrow channel of water remaining in The Gut and rowed toward the Steering boathouse before the tide went out and left them without enough water to get home on.

Then Garp and Cushie saw the golfer. He had come down through the marsh grass on the other side of the river; with his violet madras slacks rolled up above his knees, he waded into the mud flats where the tide had already receded. Ahead of him, on the wetter mud flats, lay his golf ball, perhaps six feet from the edge of the remaining water. Gingerly, the golfer stepped forward, but the mud now rose above his calf; using his golf club for balance, he dipped the shiny head into the muck and swore.

“Harry, come back!” someone called to him. It was his golfing partner, a man dressed with equal vividness, knee-length shorts of a green that no grass ever was and yellow knee socks. The golfer called Harry grimly stepped closer to his ball. He looked like a rare aquatic bird pursuing its egg in an oil slick.

“Harry, you're going to sink in that shit!” his friend warned him. It was then that Garp recognized Harry's partner: the man in green and yellow was Cushie's father, Fat Stew.

“It's a new ball!” Harry yelled; then his left leg disappeared, up to the hip; trying to turn back, Harry lost his balance and sat down. Quickly, he was mired to his waist, his frantic face very red above his powder-blue shirt—bluer than any sky. He waved his club but it slipped out of his hand and sailed into the mud, inches from his ball, impossibly white and forever out of Harry's reach.

“Help!” Harry screamed. But on all fours he was able to move a few feet toward Fat Stew and the safety of shore. “It feels like eels!” he cried. He moved forward on the trunk of his body, using his arms the way a seal on land will use its flippers. An awful slorping noise pursued him through the mud flats, as if beneath the mud some mouth was gasping to suck him in.

Garp and Cushie stifled their laughter in the bushes. Harry made his last lunge for shore. Stewart Percy, trying to help, stepped on the mud flats with just one foot and promptly lost a golf shoe and a yellow sock to the suction.

“Ssshhh! And lie still ,” Cushie demanded. They both noticed Garp was erect. “Oh, that's too bad,” Cushie whispered, looking sadly at his erection, but when he tried to tug her down in the grass with him, she said, “I don't want babies, Garp. Not even yours. And yours might be a Jap baby, you know,” Cushie said. “And I surely don't want one of those.”

“What?” Garp said. It was one thing not to know about rubbers, but what's this about Jap babies? he wondered.

“Ssshhh,” Cushie whispered. “I'm going to give you something to write about.”

The furious golfers were already slashing their way through the marsh grass, back to the immaculate fairway, when Cushie's mouth nipped the edge of Garp's tight belly button. Garp was never sure if his actual memory was jolted by that word Jap , and if at that moment he truly recalled bleeding in the Percys' house—little Cushie telling her parents that “Bonkie bit Garp” (and the scrutiny the child Garp had undergone in front of the naked Fat Stew). It may have been then that Garp remembered Fat Stew saying he had Jap eyes, and a view of his personal history clicked into perspective; regardless, at this moment Garp resolved to ask his mother for more details than she had offered him up to now. He felt the need to know more than that his father had been a soldier, and so forth. But he also felt Cushie Percy's soft lips on his belly, and when she took him suddenly into her warm mouth, he was very surprised and his sense of resolve was as quickly blown as the rest of him. There under the triple barrels of the Steering family cannons, T. S. Garp was first treated to sex in this relatively safe and nonreproductive manner. Of course, from Cushie's point of view, it was nonreciprocal, too.

They walked back along the Steering River holding hands.

“I want to see you next weekend,” Garp told her. He resolved he would not forget the rubbers.

“I know you really love Helen,” Cushie said. She probably hated Helen Holm, if she really knew her at all. Helen was such a snob about her brains.

“I still want to see you,” Garp said.

“You're nice,” Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. “And you're my oldest friend.” But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

“Who told you my father was Japanese?” Garp asked her.

“I don't know,” Cushie said. “I don't know if he really is, either.”

“I don't either,” Garp admitted.

“I don't know why you don't ask your mother,” Cushie said. But of course he had asked, and Jenny was absolutely unwavering from her first and only version.

When Garp phoned Cushie at Dibbs, she said, “Wow, it's you ! My father just called and told me I was not to see you or write to you or talk to you. Or even read your letters—as if you wrote any. I think some golfer saw us leaving the cannons.” She thought it was very funny, but Garp only saw that his future at the cannons had slipped from him. “I'll be home that weekend you graduate,” Cushie told him. But Garp wondered: If he bought the condoms now, would they still be usable for graduation? Could rubbers go bad? In how many weeks? And should you keep them in the refrigerator? There was no one to ask.

Garp thought of asking Ernie Holm, but he was already fearful that Helen would hear of his being with Cushie Percy, and although he had no real relationship with Helen that he could be unfaithful to, Garp did have his imagination and his plans.

He wrote Helen a long confessional letter about his “lust,” as he called it—and how it did not compare to his higher feelings for her, as he referred to them. Helen replied promptly that she didn't know why he was telling her all this, but that in her opinion he wrote about it very well. It was better writing than the story he'd shown her, for example, and she hoped he would continue to show her his writing. She added that her opinion of Cushie Percy, from what little she knew of the girl, was that she was rather stupid . “But pleasant,” Helen wrote. And if Garp was given to this lust, as he called it, wasn't he fortunate to have someone like Cushie around?

Garp wrote back that he would not show her another story until he wrote one that was good enough for her. He also discussed his feelings for not going to college. First, he thought, the only reason to go to college was to wrestle, and he wasn't sure he cared enough about it to wrestle at that level. He saw no point in simply continuing to wrestle at some small college where the sport wasn't emphasized. “It's only worth doing,” Garp wrote to Helen, “if I'm going to try to be the best.” He thought that trying to be the best at wrestling was not what he wanted; also, he knew, it was not likely he could be the best. And whoever heard of going to college to be the best at writing ?

And where did he get this idea of wanting to be the best?

Helen wrote him that he should go to Europe, and Garp discussed this idea with Jenny.

To his surprise, Jenny had never thought he would go to college; she did not accept that this was what prep schools were for . “If the Steering School is supposed to give everyone such a first-rate education,” Jenny said, “what on earth do you need more education for? I mean, if you've been paying attention, now you're educated. Right?” Garp didn't feel educated but he said he supposed he was. He thought he had been paying attention. As for Europe, Jenny was interested. “Well, I'd certainly like to try that,” she said. “It beats staying here.”

It was then that Garp realized his mother meant to stay with him.

“I'll find out the best place for a writer to go in Europe,” Jenny said to him. “I was thinking of writing something myself.”

Garp felt so awful he went to bed. When he got up, he wrote Helen that he was doomed to be followed by his mother the rest of his life. “How can I write,” he wrote to Helen, “with my mom looking over my sboulder?” Helen had no answers for that one; she said she would mention the problem to her father, and maybe Ernie would give Jenny some advice. Ernie Holm liked Jenny; he occasionally took her to a movie. Jenny had even become something of a wrestling fan, and although there couldn't have been anything more than friendship between them, Ernie was very sensitive to the unwed mother story—he had heard and accepted Jenny's version as all he needed to know, and he defended Jenny rather fiercely to those in the Steering community who suggested they were curious to know more.

But Jenny took her advice on cultural matters from Tinch. She asked him where a boy and his mother could go in Europe—which was the most artistic climate, the best place to write. Mr. Tinch had last been to Europe in 1913. He had stayed only for the summer. He had gone to England first, where there were several living Tinches, his British ancestry, but his old family frightened him by asking him for money—they asked for so much, and so rudely, that Tinch quickly fled to the Continent. But people were rude to him in France, and loud to him in Germany. He had a nervous stomach and was afraid of Italian cooking, so Tinch had gone to Austria. “In Vienna,” Tinch told Jenny, “I found the real Europe. It was c-c-contemplative and artistic,” Tinch said. “You could sense the sadness and the g-g-grandness.”

A year later, World War I began. In 1918 the Spanish grippe would kill many of the Viennese who had survived the war. The flu would kill old Klimt, and it would kill young Schiele and Schiele's young wife. Forty percent of the remaining male population would not survive World War II. The Vienna that Tinch would send Jenny and Garp to was a city whose life was over. Its tiredness could still be mistaken for a c-c-contemplative nature, but Vienna was hard-put to show much g-g-grandness anymore. Among the half-truths of Tinch, Jenny and Garp would still sense the sadness. “And any place can be artistic,” Garp later wrote, “if there's an artist working there.”

“Vienna?” Garp said to Jenny. He said it in the way he had said “Wrestling?” to her, over three years ago, lying on his sickbed and doubtful of her ability to pick out a sport for him. But he remembered she had been right then, and he knew nothing about Europe, and very little about any place else. Garp had taken three years of German at Steering, so there was some help, and Jenny (who was not good with languages) had read a book about the strange bedfellows of Austrian history: Maria Theresa and fascism. From Empire to Anschluss!  was the name of the book. Garp had seen it in the bathroom, for years, but now no one could find it. Perhaps it was lost to the whirlpool bath.

“The last person I saw with it was Ulfelder,” Jenny told Garp.

“Ulfelder graduated three years ago, Mom,” Garp reminded her.

When Jenny told Dean Bodger that she would be leaving, Bodger said that Steering would miss her and would always be glad to have her back. Jenny did not want to be impolite, but she mumbled that one could be a nurse almost anywhere, she supposed; she did not know, of course, that she would never be a nurse again. Bodger was puzzled by Garp's not going to college. In the dean's opinion, Garp had not been a disciplinary problem at Steering since he had survived the roof of the infirmary annex at the age of five, and Bodger's fondness for the role he played in that rescue had always given him a fondness for Garp. Also, Dean Bodger was a wrestling fan, and one of Jenny's few admirers. But Bodger accepted that the boy seemed convinced by “the writing business,” as Bodger called it. Jenny did not tell Bodger, of course, that she planned to do some writing of her own.

This part of the plan made Garp the most uncomfortable, but be did not even say a word of it to Helen. Everything was happening very fast and Garp could express his apprehension only to his wrestling coach, Ernie Holm.

“Your mom knows what she's doing, I'm sure,” Ernie told him. “You just be sure about you .”

Even old Tinch was full of optimism for the plan. “It's a little ec-ec-eccentric,” Tinch told Garp, “but many good ideas are.” Years later Garp would recall that Tinch's endearing stutter was like a message to Tinch from Tinch's body. Garp wrote that Tinch's body was trying to tell Tinch that he was going to f-f-freeze to death one day.

Jenny was saying that they would leave shortly after graduation, but Garp had hoped to stay around Steering for the summer. “What on earth for?” Jenny asked him.

For Helen, he wanted to tell her, but he had no stories good enough for Helen; he had already said so. There was nothing to do but go away and write them. And he could never expect Jenny to stay another summer in Steering so that he could keep his appointment at the cannons with Cushie Percy; perhaps that was not meant to be. Still, he was hopeful that he could connect with Cushie on graduation weekend.

For Garp's graduation, it rained. The rain washed over the soggy Steering campus in sheets; the storm sewers bogged and the out-of-state cars plowed through the streets like yachts in a squall. The women looked helpless in their summer dresses; the loading of station wagons was hurried and miserable. A great crimson tent was erected in front of the Miles Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House, and the diplomas were handed out in this stale circus air; the speeches were lost in the rain beating the crimson canvas overhead.

Nobody stayed around. The big boats left town. Helen had not come because Talbot had its graduation the following weekend and she was still taking exams. Cushie Percy had been in attendance at the disappointing ceremony, Garp was sure; but he had not seen her. He knew she would be with her ridiculous family and Garp was wise to keep a safe distance from Fat Stew—an outraged father was still a father, after all, even if Cushman Percy's honor had long ago been lost.

When the late-aftemoon sun came out, it hardly mattered. Steering was steamy and the ground—from Seabrook Stadium to the cannons—would be sodden for days. Garp imagined the deep ruts of water that he knew would be coursing through the soft grass at the cannons; even the Steering River would be swollen. The cannons themselves would be overflowing; the barrels were tilted up, and they filled with water every time it rained. In such weather, the cannons dribbled streams of broken glass and left slick puddles of old condoms on the stained concrete. There would be no enticing Cushie to the cannons this weekend, Garp knew.

But the three-pack of prophylactics crackled in his pocket like a tiny, dry fire of hope.

“Look,” said Jenny. “I bought some beer. Go ahead and get drunk, if you want to.”

“Jesus, Mom,” Garp said, but he drank a few with her. They sat by themselves on his graduation night, the infirmary empty beside them, and every bed in the annex was empty and stripped of linen, too—except for the beds they would sleep in. Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax; he reassured himself by thinking of the few good stories he had read, but though he had a Steering education, he was no reader—no match for Helen, or Jenny, for example. Garp's way with a story was to find one he liked and read it again and again; it would spoil him for reading any other story for a long while. When he was at Steering he read Joseph Conrad's “The Secret Sharer” thirty-four times. He also read D. H. Lawrence's “The Man Who Loved Islands” twenty-one times; he felt ready to read it again, now.

Outside the windows of the tiny apartment in the infirmary annex, the Steering campus lay dark and wet and deserted.

“Well, look at it this way,” Jenny said; she could see he was feeling let down. “It took you only four years to graduate from Steering, but I've been going to this damn school for eighteen.” She was not much of a drinker, Jenny: half the way through her second beer, she fell asleep. Garp carried her into her bedroom; she had already taken off her shoes, and Garp removed only her nurse's pin—so that she wouldn't roll over and stick herself with it. It was a warm night, so he didn't cover her.

He drank another beer and then took a walk.

Of course he knew where he was going.

The Percy family house—originally the Steering family house—sat on its damp lawn not far from the infirmary annex. Only one light was on in Stewart Percy's house, and Garp knew whose light it was: little Pooh Percy, now fourteen, could not sleep with her light out. Cushie had also told Garp that Bainbridge was still inclined to wear a diaper—perhaps, Garp thought, because her family still insisted on calling her Pooh.

“Well,” Cushie said, “I don't see what's wrong with it. She doesn't use the diapers, you know; I mean, she's housebroken , and all that. Pooh just likes to wear diapers—occasionally.”

Garp stood on the misty grass beneath Pooh Percy's window and tried to remember which room was Cushie's. Since he couldn't remember, he decided to wake up Pooh; she was sure to recognize him, and she was sure to tell Cushie. But Pooh came to her window like a ghost; she did not immediately appear to recognize Garp, who clung tenaciously to the ivy outside her window. Bainbridge Percy had eyes like a deer paralyzed in a car's headlights, about to be hit.

“For Christ's sake, Pooh, it's me ,” Garp whispered to her.

“You want Cushie, don't you?” Pooh asked him, sullenly.

“Yes!” Garp grunted. Then the ivy tore and he fell into the hedges below. Cushie, who slept in her bathing suit, helped extricate him.

“Wow, you're going to wake up the whole house,” she said. “Have you been drinking?”

“I've been falling ,” Garp said, irritably. “Your sister is really weird.”

“It's wet outside, all over,” Cushie said to him. “Where can we go?”

Garp had thought of that. In the infirmary, he knew, were sixty empty beds.

But Garp and Cushie were not even past the Percy porch when Bonkers confronted them. The black beast was already out of breath, from descending the porch stairs, and his iron-gray muzzle was flecked with froth; his breath reached Garp like old sod flung in his face. Bonkers was growling, but even his growl had slowed down.

“Tell him to beat it,” Garp whispered to Cushie.

“He's deaf,” Cushie said. “He's very old.”

“I know how old he is,” Garp said.

Bonkers barked, a creaky and sharp sound, like the hinge of an unused door being forced open. He was thinner, but he easily weighed one hundred and forty pounds. A victim of ear mites and mange, old dog bite and barbed wire, Bonkers sniffed his enemy and held Garp cornered against the porch.

“Go away , Bonkie!” Cushie hissed.

Garp tried to sidestep the dog and noticed how slowly Bonkers reacted.

“He's half-blind ,” Garp whispered.

“And his nose doesn't smell much anymore,” Cushie said.

“He ought to be dead,” Garp whispered to himself, but he tried to step around the dog. Dimly, Bonkers followed. His mouth still reminded Garp of a steam shovel's power, and the loose flap of muscle on his black and shaggy chest indicated to Garp how hard the dog could lunge—but long ago.

“Just ignore him,” Cushie suggested, just as Bonkers lunged.

The dog was slow enough so that Garp could spin behind him; he pulled the dog's forepaws from under him and dropped his own weight, from his chest, on the dog's back. Bonkers buckled forward, he slid into the ground nose first—his hind legs still clawing. Garp now controlled the crumpled forepaws but the great dog's head was held down only by the weight of Garp's chest. A terrifying snarling developed as Garp bore down on the animal's spine and drove his chin into the dog's dense neck. In the scuffle, an ear appeared—in Garp's mouth—and Garp bit it. He bit as hard as he could, and Bonkers howled. He bit Bonker's ear in memory of his own missing flesh, he bit him for the four years he'd spent at Steering—and for his mother's eighteen years.

It was only when lights came on in the Percy house that Garp let old Bonkers go.

“Run!” Cushie suggested. Garp grabbed her hand and she came with him. A vile taste was in his mouth. “Wow, did you have to bite him?” Cushie asked.

“He bit me,” Garp reminded her.

“I remember,” Cushie said. She squeezed his hand and he led her where he wanted to go.

“What the hell is going on here?” they heard Stewart Percy yelling.

“It's Bonkie, it's Bonkie!” Pooh Percy called into the night.

“Bonkers!” called Fat Stew. “Here, Bonkers! Here, Bonkers!” And they all heard the deaf dog's resounding caterwaul.

It was a commotion capable of carrying across an empty campus. It woke Jenny Fields, who peered out her window in the infirmary annex. Fortunately for Garp, he saw her turn on a light. He made Cushie hide behind him, in a corridor of the unoccupied annex, while he sought Jenny's medical advice.

“What happened to you?” Jenny asked him. Garp wanted to know if the blood running down his chin was his own or entirely Bonkers'. At the kitchen table, Jenny washed away a black scablike thing that was stuck to Garp. It fell off Garp's throat and landed on the table—it was the size of a silver dollar. They both stared at it.

“What is it?” Jenny asked.

“An ear,” Garp said. “Or part of one.”

On the white enamel table lay the black leathery remnant of an ear, curling slightly at the edges and cracked like an old, dry glove.

“I ran into Bonkers,” Garp said.

“An ear for an ear,” said Jenny Fields.

There was not a mark on Garp; the blood belonged solely to Bonkers.

When Jenny went back to her bedroom, Garp snuck Cushie into the tunnel that led to the main infirmary. For eighteen years he had learned the way. He took her to the wing farthest from his mother's apartment in the annex; it was over the main admittance room, near the rooms for surgery and anesthesia.

Thus sex for Garp would forever be associated with certain smells and sensations. The experience would remain secretive but relaxed: a final reward in harrowing times. The odor would stay in his mind as deeply personal and yet vaguely hospital . The surroundings would forever seem to be deserted. Sex for Garp would remain in his mind as a solitary act committed in an abandoned universe—sometime after it had rained. It was always an act of terrific optimism.

Cushie, of course, evoked for Garp many images of cannons. When the third condom of the three-pack was exhausted, she asked if that was all he had—if he'd bought only one package. A wrestler loves nothing so much as hard-earned exhaustion; Garp fell asleep to Cushie complaining.

“The first time you don't have any,” she was saying, “and now you ran out? It is lucky we're such old friends.”

It was still dark and far from dawn when Stewart Percy woke them. Fat Stew's voice violated the old infirmary like an unnamable disease. “Open up!” they heard him hollering, and they crept to the window to see.

On the green, green lawn, in his bathrobe and slippers—and with Bonkers leashed beside him—Cushie's father bleated at the windows of the infirmary annex. It was not long before Jenny appeared in the light.

“Are you ill?” she asked Stewart.

“I want my daughter!” Stewart yelled.

“Are you drunk?” Jenny asked.

“You let me in!” Stewart screamed.

“The doctor is out,” said Jenny Fields, “and I doubt there is anything I can treat you for.”

“Bitch!” Stewart bellowed. “Your bastard son has seduced my daughter! I know they're in there, in that fucking infirmary!”

It is a fucking infirmary now, Garp thought, delighting in the touch and scent of Cushie trembling beside him. In the cool air, through the dark window, they shivered in silence.

“You should see my dog !” Stewart screeched to Jenny. “Blood everywhere! The dog hiding under the hammock! Blood on the porch!” Stewart croaked. “What the hell did that bastard do to Bonkers?”

Garp felt Cushie flinch beside him when his mother spoke. What Jenny said must have made Cushie Percy remember her remark, thirteen years earlier. What Jenny Fields said was, “Garp bit Bonkie.” Then her light went out, and in the darkness cast over the infirmary and its annex only Fat Stew's breathing was audible with the runoff from the rain—washing over the Steering School, rinsing everything clean.

 

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