IN THE CITY WHERE MARCUS AURELIUS DIED

 

WHEN JENNY took Garp to Europe, Garp was better prepared for the solitary confinement of a writer's life than most eighteen-year-olds. He was already thriving in a world of his own imagination: after all, he had been brought up by a woman who thought that solitary confinement was a perfectly natural way to live. It would be years before Garp noticed that he didn't have any friends, and this oddity never struck Jenny Fields as odd. In his distant and polite fashion, Ernie Holm was the first friend Jenny Fields ever had.

Before Jenny and Garp found an apartment, they lived in more than a dozen pensions all over Vienna. It was Mr. Tinch's idea that this would be the ideal way for them to choose the part of the city they liked best: they would live in all the districts and decide for themselves. But short-term life in a pension must have been more pleasant for Tinch in the summer of 1913; when Jenny and Garp came to Vienna, it was 1961; they quickly tired of lugging their typewriters from pension to pension. It was this experience, however, that gave Garp the material for his first major short story, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp hadn't even known what a pension was before he came to Vienna, but he quickly discovered that a pension had somewhat less to offer than a hotel: it was always smaller, and never elegant; it sometimes offered breakfast, and sometimes not. A pension was sometimes a bargain and sometimes a mistake. Jenny and Garp found pensions that were clean and comfortable and friendly, but they were often seedy.

Jenny and Garp wasted little time deciding that they wanted to live within or near the Ringstrasse, the great round street that circles the heart of the old city, it was the part of the city where almost everything was, and where Jenny could manage a little better without speaking any German—it was the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan part of Vienna, if there really is such a part of Vienna.

It was fun for Garp to be in charge of his mother; three years of Steering German made Garp their leader, and he clearly enjoyed being Jenny's boss.

“Have the schnitzel, Mom.” he would tell her.

“I thought this Kalbsnieren sounded interesting,” Jenny said.

“Veal kidney, Mom,” Garp said. “Do you like kidney?”

“I don't know,” Jenny admitted. “Probably not.”

When they finally moved into a place of their own, Garp took over the shopping. Jenny had spent eighteen years eating in the Steering dining halls, she had never learned how to cook, and now she couldn't read the directions. It was in Vienna that Garp learned how he loved to cook, but the first thing he claimed to like about Europe was the W.C.—the water closet. In his time spent in pensions, Garp discovered that a water closet was a tiny room with nothing but a toilet in it; it was the first thing about Europe that made sense to Garp. He wrote Helen that “is the wisest system—to urinate and move your bowels in one place, and to brush your teeth in another.” The W.C., of course, would also feature prominently in Garp's story, “The Pension Grillparzer,” but Garp would not write that story, or anything else, for a while.

Although he was unusually self-disciplined for an eighteen-year-old, there were simply too many things to see: together with those things he was suddenly responsible for Garp was very busv and for months the only satisfying writing he did was to Helen. He was too excited with his new territory to develop the necessary routine for writing, although he tried.

He tried to write a story about a family; all he knew when he began was that the farmily had an interesting life and the members were all close to each other. That was not enough to know.

Jenny and Garp moved into a cream-colored, high-ceilinged apartment on the second floor of an old building on the Schwindgasse, a little street in the fourth district. They were right around the corner from the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, the Schwarzenbergplatz, and the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Garp eventually went to all the art museums in the city, but Jenny never went to any except the Upper Belvedere. Garp explained to her that the Upper Belvedere contained only the nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, but Jenny said that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were enough for her. Garp explained that she could at least walk through the gardens to the Lower Belvedere and see the baroque collection, but Jenny shook her head; she had taken several art history courses at Steering—she'd had enough education, she said.

“And the Brueghels, Mom!” Garp said. “You just take the Strassenbahn up the Ring and get off at Mariahilferstrasse. The big museum across from the streetcar stop is the Kunsthistorisches.”

“But I can walk to the Belvedere,” Jenny said. “Why take a streetcar?”

She could also walk to the Karlskirche, and there were some interesting-looking embassy buildings a short distance up Argentinierstrasse. The Bulgarian Embassy was right across the street from their apartment on the Schwindgasse. Jenny said she liked staying in her own neighborhood. There was a coffeehouse a block away and she sometimes went there and read the newspapers in English. She never went out to eat anywhere unless Garp took her; and unless he cooked for her in their apartment, she didn't eat anything at home. She was completely taken with the idea of writing something—more taken at this phase, than Garp.

“I don't have time to be a tourist at this point in my life,” she told her son. “But you go ahead, soak up the culture. That's what you should be doing.”

“Absorb, ab-ab-absorb,” Tinch had told them. That seemed to Jenny to be just what Garp should do; for herself, she found she'd already absorbed enough to have plenty to say. Jenny Fields was forty-one. She imagined that the interesting part of her life was behind her; all she wanted to do was write about it.

Garp gave her a piece of paper to carry with her. It had her address written on it, in case she got lost: Schwindgasse 15/2, Wien IV. Garp had to teach her how to pronounce her address—a tedious lesson. “Schwindgassefьnfzehnzwei! ” Jenny spat.

“Again,” Garp said. “Do you want to stay lost when you get lost?”

Garp investigated the city by day and found places to take Jenny to at night, and in the late afternoons when she was through her writing; they would have a beer, or a glass of wine, and Garp would describe his whole day to her. Jenny listened politely. Wine or beer made her sleepy. Usually they ate a nice dinner somewhere and Garp escorted Jenny home on the Strassenbahn; he took special pride in never using taxis, because he had learned the streetcar system so thoroughly. Sometimes he went to the open markets in the morning and came home early and cooked all afternoon. Jenny never complained; it didn't matter to her whether they ate in or out.

“This is a Gumpoldskirchner,” Garp would say, explaining the wine. “It goes very well with the Schweinebraten.”

“What funny words,” Jenny remarked.

In a typical evaluation of Jenny's prose style, Garp later wrote: “My mother had such a struggle with her English, it's no wonder she never bothered to learn German.”

Although Jenny Fields sat every day at her typewriter, she did not know how to write. Although she was—physically—writing, she did not enjoy reading over what she'd written. Before long, she tried to remember the good things she'd read and what made them different from her own first-draft attempt. She'd simply begun at the beginning. “I was born,” and so forth. “My parents wanted me to stay at Wellesley: however...” And, of course: “I decided I wanted a child of my own and eventually got one in the following manner...” But Jenny had read enough good stories to know that hers didn't sound like the good stories in her memory. She wondered what could be wrong, and she frequently sent Garp on errands to the few bookstores that sold books in English. She wanted to look more closely at how books began: she had quickly produced over three hundred typed pages, yet she felt that her book never really started .

But Jenny suffered her writing problems silently; she was cheerful with Garp, even if she was rarely very attentive. Jenny Fields felt all her life that things began and came to an end. Like Garp's education—like her own. Like Sergeant Garp. She had not lost any affection for her son, but she felt that a phase of her mothering him was over; she felt she had brought Garp along this far, and now she should let him find something to do by himself. She could not go through their lives signing him up for wrestling, or for something else. Jenny liked living with her son; in fact, it didn't occur to her that they would ever live apart. But Jenny expected Garp to entertain himself every day in Vienna, and so Garp did.

He had gotten no further with his story about a close, interesting family except that he had found something interesting for them to do. The father of the family was some sort of inspector and his family went with him when he did his job. The job involved scrutinizing all the restaurants and hotels and pensions in Austria—evaluating them and giving them a rating according to A, B, C. It was a job Garp imagined that he'd like to have. In a country like Austria, so dependent on tourism, the classification and reclassification of the places the tourists ate in and slept in should have a kind of desperate importance, but Garp couldn't imagine what could be important about it—or for whom. So far all he had was this family: they had a funny job. They exposed flaws; they gave out the grades. So what? It was easier to write to Helen.

That late summer and early fall, Garp walked and rode the trolleys all over Vienna, meeting no one. He wrote Helen that “a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you". Garp wrote that he believed Vienna enhanced that feeling in him “because in Vienna there really isn't anyone like myself around.”

His perception was at least numerically correct. There were very few people in Vienna who were even the same age as Garp. Not many Viennese were born in 1943, for that matter, not many Viennese were born from the start of the Nazi occupation in 1938 through the end of the war in 1945. And although there were a surprising number of babies born out of rapes, not many Viennese wanted babies until after 1955—the end of the Russian occupation. Vienna was a city occupied by foreigners for seventeen years. To most Viennese, it is understandable, those seventeen years did not seem like a good and wise time to have children. It was Garp's experience to live in a city that made him feel peculiar to be eighteen years old. This must have made him grow older faster, and this must have contributed to his increasing sense that Vienna was more of “a museum housing a dead city"—as he wrote Helen—than it was a city that was still alive.

Garp's observation was not offered as criticism. Garp liked wandering around in a museum. “A more real city might not have suited me so well,” he later wrote. “But Vienna was in its death phase, it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.”

Thus T. S. Garp spent the warm months noticing Vienna, writing letters to Helen Holm, and managing the domestic life of his mother who had added the isolation of writing to her chosen life of solitude. “My mother, the writer,” Garp referred to her, facetiously, in countless letters to Helen. But he envied Jenny, that she was writing at all. He felt stuck with his story. He realized he could go on giving his made-up family one adventure after another, but where were they going? To one more B restaurant with such a weakness in their desserts that an A rating was a lifetime out of reach; to one more B hotel, sliding to C as surely as the mildew smell in the lobby would never go away. Perhaps someone in the inspector's family could be poisoned, in a class A restaurant, but what would it mean ? And there could be crazy people, or even criminals, hiding out in one of the pensions, but what would they have to do with the scheme of things?

Garp knew that he did not have a scheme of things.

He saw a four-member circus unload from Hungary, or Yugoslavia, at a railroad station. He tried to imagine them in his story. There had been a bear who rode a motorcycle, around and around a parking lot. A small crowd gathered and a man who walked on his hands collected money for the bear's performance in a pot balanced on the soles of his feet; he fell, occasionally, but so did the bear.

Finally, the motorcycle wouldn't start anymore. It never became clear what the two other members of this circus did; just as they were meant to take over for the bear and the man who walked on his hands, the police came and asked them to fill out a lot of forms. That had not been interesting to watch and the crowd—what there was of one—had gone away. Garp had stayed the longest, not because he was interested in further performances by this decrepit circus but because he was interested in getting them into his story. He couldn't imagine how. As Garp was leaving the railroad station, he could hear the bear throwing up.

For weeks Garp's only progress with his story was a title: “The Austrian Tourist Bureau.” He didn't like it. He went back to being a tourist instead of a writer.

But when the weather grew colder, Garp tired of tourism; he took to carping at Helen for not writing him back enough—a sign he was writing to her too much. She was much busier than he was; she was in college, where she'd been accepted with sophomore standing, and she was carrying more than double the average load of courses. If Helen and Garp were similar, in these early years, it was that they both behaved as if they were going somewhere in a hurry . “Leave poor Helen alone,” Jenny advised him. “I thought you were going to write something beside letters.” But Garp did not like to think of competing in the same apartment with his mother. Her typewriter never paused for thought; Garp knew that its steady pounding would probably end his career as a writer before he could properly begin. “My mother never knew about the silence of revision,” Garp once remarked.

By November Jenny had six hundred manuscript pages, but still she had the feeling that she had not really begun. Garp had no subject that could spill out of him in this fashion. Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

His “breakthrough,” as he would call it when he wrote Helen, occurred one cold and snowy day in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna. It was a museum within easy walking distance of the Schwindgasse; somehow he had skipped seeing it, knowing he could walk there any day. Jenny told him about it. It was one of the two or three places she had actually visited herself, only because it was right across the Karlsplatz and well within what she called her neighborhood.

She mentioned there was a writer's room in the museum; she forgot whose. She'd thought having a writer's room in a museum was an interesting idea.

“A writer's room , Mom?” Garp asked.

“Yes, it's a whole room,” Jenny said. “They took all the writer's furniture, and maybe the walls and floor, too. I don't know how they did it.”

“I don't know why they did it,” Garp said. “The whole room is in the museum?”

“Yes, I think it was a bedroom,” Jenny said, “but it was also where the writer actually wrote .”

Garp rolled his eyes. It sounded obscene to him. Would the writer's toothbrush be there? And the chamber pot?

It was a perfectly ordinary room, but the bed looked too small—like a child's bed. The writing table looked small, too. Not the bed or the table of an expansive writer, Garp thought. The wood was dark; everything looked easily breakable; Garp thought his mother had a better room to write in. The writer whose room was enshrined in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna was named Franz Grillparzer; Garp had never heard of him.

Franz Grillparzer died in 1872; he was an Austrian poet and dramatist, whom very few people outside Austria have ever heard of. He is one of those nineteenth-century writers who did not survive the nineteenth century with any enduring popularity, and Garp would later argue that Grillparzer did not deserve to survive the nineteenth century. Garp was not interested in plays and poems, but he went to the library and read what is considered to be Grillparzer's outstanding prose work: the long short story “The Poor Fiddler.” Perhaps, Garp thought, his three years of Steering German were not enough to allow him to appreciate the story; in German, he hated it. He then found an English translation of the story, in a secondhand bookstore on Habsburgergasse: he still hated it.

Garp thought that Grillparzer's famous story was a ludicrous melodrama: he also thought it was ineptly told and baldly sentimental. It was only vaguely remindful to him of nineteenth-century Russian stories, where often the character is an indecisive procrastinator and a failure in every aspect of practical life: but Dostoevsky, in Garp's opinion, could compel you to be interested in such a wretch; Grillparzer bored you with tearful trivia.

In the same secondhand bookstore Garp bought an English translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; he had been made to read Marcus Aurelius in a Latin class at Steering but he had never read him in English before. He bought the book because the bookstore owner told Garp that Marcus Aurelius had died in Vienna.

“In the life of a man,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” Garp somehow thought that Marcus Aurelius must have lived in Vienna when he wrote that.

The subject of Marcus Aurelius's dreary observations was certainly the subject of most serious writing, Garp thought; between Grillparzer and Dostoevsky the difference was not subject matter. The difference, Garp concluded, was intelligence and grace; the difference was art. Somehow this obvious discovery pleased him. Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was “sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.”

“Maybe so,” Garp wrote. “But he was also an extremely bad writer.”

Garp's conviction that Franz Grillparzer was a “bad” writer seemed to provide the young man with his first real confidence as an artist—even before he had written anything. Perhaps in every writer's life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job. Garp's killer instinct in regard to poor Grillparzer was almost a wrestling secret; it was as if Garp had observed an opponent in a match with another wrestler; spotting the weaknesses, Garp knew he could do better. He even forced Jenny to read “The Poor Fiddler.” It was one of the few times he would seek her literary judgment.

“Trash,” Jenny pronounced it. “Simplistic. Maudlin. Cream puff.”

They were both delighted.

“I didn't like his room, really,” Jenny told Garp. “It was just not a writer's room.”

“Well, I don't think that matters, Mom,” Garp said.

“But it was a very cramped room,” Jenny complained. “It was too dark, and it looked very fussy .”

Garp peered into his mother's room. Over her bed and dresser, and taped to her wall mirror—nearly obscuring his mother's own image—were the scattered pages of her incredibly long and messy manuscript. Garp didn't think his mother's room looked very much like a writer's room, either, but he didn't say so.

He wrote Helen a long, cocky letter, quoting Marcus Aurelius and slamming Franz Grillparzer. In Garp's opinion, “Franz Grillparzer died forever in 1872 and like a cheap local wine does not travel very far from Vienna without spoiling.” The letter was a kind of muscle-flexing; perhaps Helen knew that. The letter was calisthenics; Garp made a carbon copy of it and decided he liked it so well that he kept the original and sent Helen the carbon. “I feel a little like a library,” Helen wrote him. “It's as if you intend to use me as your file drawer.”

Was Helen really complaining? Garp was not sensitive enough to Helen's own life to bother to ask her. He merely wrote back that he was “getting ready to write.” He was confident she would like the results. Helen may have felt warned away from him, but she didn't indicate any anxiety. At college she was gobbling courses at nearly triple the average rate. Approaching the end of her first semester, she was about to become a second-semester junior. The self-absorption and ego of a young writer did not frighten Helen Holm, she was moving at her own remarkable pace and she appreciated someone who was determined. Also she liked Garp's writing to her: she had an ego, too, and his letters, she kept telling him, were awfully well written.

In Vienna Jenny and Garp went on a spree of Grillparzer jokes. They began to uncover little signs of the dead Grillparzer all over the city. There was a Grillparzergasse, there was a Kaffeehaus des Grillparzers; and one day in a pastry shop they were amazed to find a sort of layer cake named after him: Grillparzertorte! It was much too sweet. Thus, when Garp cooked for his mother, he asked her if she wanted her egg soft-boiled or Grillparzered. And one day, at the Schцnbrunn Zoo, they observed a particularly gangling antelope, its flanks spindly and beshitted; the antelope stood sadly in its narrow and foul winter quarters. Garp identified it: der Gnu des Grillparzers.

Of her own writing, Jenny one day remarked to Garp that she was guilty of “doing a Grillparzer.” She explained that this meant she had introduced a scene or a character “like an alarm going off.” The scene she had in mind was the scene in the movie house in Boston when the soldier had approached her. “At the movie,” wrote Jenny Fields, “a soldier consumed with lust approached me.”

“That's awful, Mom,” Garp admitted. The phrase “consumed with lust” was what Jenny meant by “doing a Grillparzer.”

“But that's what it was ,” Jenny said. “It was lust, all right.”

“It's better to say he was thick with lust,” Garp suggested.

“Yuck,” Jenny said. Another Grillparzer. It was the lust she didn't care for, in general. They discussed lust, as best they could. Garp confessed his lust for Cushie Percy and rendered a suitably tame version of the consummation scene. Jenny did not like it. “And Helen?” Jenny asked. “Do you feel that for Helen?”

Garp admitted he did.

“How terrible,” Jenny said. She did not understand the feeling and did not see how Garp could ever associate it with pleasure, much less with affection.

“"All that is body is as coursing waters,"” Garp said lamely, quoting Marcus Aurelius; his mother just shook her head. They ate dinner in a very red restaurant in the vicinity of Blutgasse. “Blood Street,” Garp translated for her, happily.

“Stop translating everything,” Jenny told him. “I don't want to know everything.” She thought the decor of the restaurant was too red and the food was too expensive. The service was slow and they started for home too late. It was very cold and the gay lights of the Kдrntnerstrasse did little to warm them.

“Let's get a taxi,” Jenny said. But Garp insisted that in another five blocks they could take a streetcar just as easily. “You and your damn Strassenbahns,” Jenny said.

It was clear that the subject of “lust” had spoiled their evening.

The first district glittered with Christmas gaudiness; between the towering spires of Saint Stephen's and the massive bulk of the opera house lay seven blocks of shops and bars and hotels; in those seven blocks, they could have been anywhere in the world at wintertime. “Some night we've got to go to the opera, Mom,” Garp suggested. They had been in Vienna for six months without going to the opera, but Jenny did not like to stay up late at night.

“Go by yourself,” Jenny said. She saw, ahead of them, three women standing in long fur coats: one of them had a matching fur muff and she held the muff in front of her face and breathed into it to warm her hands. She was quite elegant to look at, although there was something of the tinsel of Christmas about the other two women with her. Jenny envied the woman her muff. “That's what I want,” Jenny announced. “Where can I get one of those?” She pointed to the women ahead of them but Garp didn't know what she meant.

The women, he knew, were whores.

When the whores saw Jenny coming up the street with Garp, they were puzzled at the relationship. They saw a handsome boy with a plain but handsome woman who was old enough to be his mother, but Jenny hooked Garp's arm rather formally when she walked with him, and there was something like tension and confusion in the conversation Garp and Jenny were having—which made the whores think Jenny could not have been Garp's mother. Then Jenny pointed at them and they were angry—they thought Jenny was another whore who was working their territory and had snagged a boy who looked well-off and not sinister—a pretty boy who might have paid them .

In Vienna, prostitution is legal and complexly controlled. There is something like a union; there are medical certificates, periodical checkups, identification cards. Only the best-looking prostitutes are allowed to work the posh streets in the first district. In the outlying districts the prostitutes are uglier or older, or both; they are also cheaper, of course. District by district, their prices are supposed to be fixed. When the whores saw Jenny they stepped out on the sidewalk to block Jenny's and Garp's way. They had quickly decided that Jenny was not quite up to the standard of a first-district prostitute, and that she was probably working independently—which is illegal—or had stepped out of her assigned district to try to pull a little more money; that would get her in a lot of trouble with the other prostitutes.

In truth, Jenny would not have been mistaken for a prostitute by most neople, but it is hard to say exactly what she looked like. She had dressed as a nurse for so many years that she did not really know how to dress in Vienna; she tended to overdress when she went out with Garp, perhaps in compensation for the old bathrobe in which she wrote. She had no experience in buying clothes for herself, and in a foreign city all the clothes looked slightly different to her. With no particular taste in mind, she simply bought the more expensive things: after all, she did have money and she did not have the patience or the interest for any comparative shopping. As a consequence, she looked new and shiny in her clothes, and beside Garp she did not look as if she came from the same family. Garp's constant dress, at Steering, had been a jacket and tie and comfortable pants—a kind of sloppy city standard uniform that made him anonymous almost anywhere.

“Would you ask that woman where she got that muff?” Jenny said to Garp. To her surprise, the women blocked the sidewalk to meet them.

“They're whores , Mom,” Garp whispered to her.

Jenny Fields froze. The woman with the muff spoke sharply to her. Jenny didn't understand a word, of course, she stared at Garp for a translation. The woman spoke a stream of things to Jenny, who never took her eyes off her son.

“My mother wanted to ask you where you got your pretty muff.” Garp said in his slow German.

“Oh, they're foreigners ,” said one.

“God, it's his mother ,” said another.

The woman with the muff stared at Jenny, who now stared at the woman's muff. One of the whores was a young girl with her hair piled very high and sprinkled with little gold and silver stars; she also had a green star tattoo on one cheek and a scar, which pulled her upper lip only slightly out of line—so that, for a moment, you didn't know what was wrong with her face, only that something was wrong. There was nothing at all wrong with her body, though: she was tall and lean and very hard to look at, though Jenny now found herself staring at her.

“Ask her how old she is,” Jenny said to Garp.

“Ich bin eighteen,” the girl said. “I know good English.”

“That's how old my son is,” Jenny said, nudging Garp. She did not understand that the they had mistaken her for one of them; when Garp told her, later, she was furious—but only at herself. “It's my clothes!” she cried. “I don't know how to dress!” And from that moment on, Jenny Fields would never dress as anything but a nurse: she put her uniform back on and wore it everywhere—as if she were forever on duty, though she would never be a nurse again.

“May I see your muff?” Jenny asked the woman who had one. Jenny had assumed that they all spoke English, but only the young girl knew the language. Garp translated and the woman reluctantly removed her muff—a scent of perfume emerging from the warm nest where her long hands, sparkling with rings, had been clutched together.

The third whore had a pockmark on her forehead, like an impression made with a peach pit. Aside from this flaw, and a small fat mouth like the mouth of an overweight child, she was standardly ripe—in her twenties, Garp guessed; she probably had an enormous bosom, but under her black fur coat it was hard to be sure.

The woman with the muff, Garp thought, was beautiful. She had a long, potentially sad face. Her body, Garp imagined, was serene. Her mouth was very calm. Only her eyes and her bare hands in the cold night let Garp see that she was his mother's age, at least. Maybe she was older. “It was a gift,” she said to Garp, about the muff. “It came with the coat.” They were a silver-blond fur, very sleek.

“It is the real thing,” said the young whore who spoke English; she obviously admired everything about the older prostitute.

“Of course, you can buy something, not quite so expensive almost anywhere,” the pockmarked woman told Garp. “Go to Stef's,” she said, in a queer slang that Garp barely understood, and she pointed up the Kдrntnerstrasse. But Jenny didn't look and Garp only nodded and continued to gaze at the older woman's long bare fingers twinkling with rings.

“My hands are cold,” she said softly to Garp, and Garp took the muff from Jenny and gave it back to the whore. Jenny seemed in a daze.

“Let's talk to her,” Jenny told Garp. “I want to ask her about it.”

“About what , Mom?” Garp said. “Jesus Christ.”

“What we were talking about,” Jenny said. “I want to ask her about lust .”

The two older whores looked at the one who knew English but her English was not fast enough to catch any of this.

“It's cold, Mom,” Garp complained. “And it's late. Let's just go home.”

“Tell her we want to go to some place warm, just to sit and talk,” Jenny said. “She'll let us pay her for that , won't she?”

“I suppose so,” Garp groaned. “Mom, she doesn't know anything about lust. They probably don't feel anything very much like that.”

“I want to know about male lust,” Jenny said. “About your lust. She must know something about that .”

“For God's sake, Mom!” Garp said.

“Was macht's? ” the lovely prostitute asked him. “What's the matter?” she asked. “What's going on here? Does she want to buy the muff?”

“No, no,” Garp said. “She wants to buy you .”

The older whore looked stunned; the whore with the pockmark laughed.

“No, no,” Garp explained. “Just to talk . My mother just wants to ask you some questions.”

“It's cold,” the whore told him, suspiciously.

“Some place inside?” Garp suggested. “Any place you like.”

“Ask her what she charges,” Jenny said.

“Wie viel kostet? ” mumbled Garp.

“It costs five hundred schillings,” the whore said, “usually.” Garp had to explain to Jenny that this was about twenty dollars. Jenny Fields would live for more than a year in Austria and never learn the numbers, in German, or the money system.

“Twenty dollars, just to talk?” Jenny said.

“No, no, Mom,” Garp said, “that's for the usual .” Jenny thought. Was twenty dollars a lot for the usual? She didn't know.

“Tell her we'll give her ten,” Jenny said, but the whore looked doubtful—as if talk, for her, might be more difficult than the “usual.” Her indecision was influenced by more than price, however; she didn't trust Garp and Jenny. She asked the young whore who spoke English if they were British or American. Americans, she was told—this seemed to relieve her, slightly.

“The British are often perverse,” she told Garp, simply. “Americans are usually ordinary.”

“We just want to talk with you,” Garp insisted, but he could see that the prostitute firmly imagined some mother-and-son act of monstrous oddity.

“Two hundred and fifty schillings,” the lady with the mink muff finally agreed. “And you buy my coffee.”

So they went to the place all the whores went to get warm, a tiny bar with miniature tables; the phone rang all the time but only a few men lurked sullenly by the coat rack, looking the women over. There was some rule that the women could not be approached when they were in this bar; the bar was a kind of home base, a time-out zone.

“Ask her how old she is,” Jenny said to Garp; but when he asked her, the woman softly shut her eyes and shook her head. “Okay,” said Jenny, “ask her why she thinks men like her.” Garp rolled his eyes. “Well, you do like her?” Jenny asked him. Garp said he did. “Well, what is it about her that you want ?” Jenny asked him. “I don't mean just her sex parts, I mean is there something else that's satisfying? Something to imagine, something to think about, some kind of aura ?” Jenny asked.

“Why don't you pay me two hundred and fifty schillings and not ask her any questions, Mom,” Garp said tiredly.

“Don't be fresh,” Jenny said. “I want to know if it degrades her to feel wanted in that way—and then to be had in that way, I suppose—or whether she thinks it only degrades the men?” Garp struggled to translate this. The woman appeared to think very seriously about it; or else she didn't understand the question, or Garp's German.

“I don't know,” she finally said.

“I have other questions,” Jenny said.

For an hour, it continued. When the whore said she had to get back to work, Jenny seemed neither satisfied nor disappointed by the interview's lack of concrete results; she just seemed insatiably curious. Garp had never wanted anyone as much as he wanted the woman.

“Do you want her?” Jenny asked him, so suddenly that he couldn't lie. “I mean, after all this—and looking at her, and talking with her—do you really want to have sex with her, too?”

“Of course, Mom,” Garp said, miserably. Jenny looked no closer to understanding lust than she was before dinner. She looked puzzled and surprised at her son.

“All right,” she said. She handed him the 250 schillings that they owed the woman, and another 500 schillings. “You do what you want to do,” she told him, “or what you have to do, I guess. But please take me home first.”

The whore had watched the money change hands; she had an eye for recognizing the correct amount. “Look,” she said to Garp, and touched his hand with her fingers, as cold as her rings. “It's all right with me if your mother wants to buy me for you, but she can't come along with us. I will not have her watch us, absolutely not. I'm still a Catholic, believe it or not,” she said, “and if you want anything funny like that, you'll have to ask Tina.”

Garp wondered who Tina was; he gave a shudder at the thought that nothing must be too “funny” for her. “I'm going to take my mother home,” Garp told the beautiful woman. “And I won't be back to see you.” But she smiled at him and he thought his erection would burst through his pocket of loose schillings and worthless groschen. Just one of her perfect teeth—but it was a big front upper tooth—was all gold.

In the taxi (that Garp agreed to take home) Garp explained to his mother the Viennese system of prostitution. Jenny was not surprised to hear that prostitution was legal: she was surprised to learn that it was illegal in so many other places. “Why shouldn't it be legal?” she asked. “Why can't a woman use her body the way she wants to? If someone wants to pay for it, it's just one more crummy deal. Is twenty dollars a lot of money for it?”

“No, that's pretty good,” Garp said. “At least, it's a very low price for the good-looking ones.”

Jenny slapped him. “You know all about it!” she said. Then she said she was sorry—she had never struck him before, she just didn't understand this fucking lust, lust, lust! at all.

At the Schwindgasse apartment, Garp made a point of not going out: in fact, he was in his own bed and asleep before Jenny, who paced through her manuscript pages in her wild room. A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

Garp dreamed of other prostitutes; he had visited two or three of them in Vienna—but he had never paid the first-district prices. The next evening, after an early supper at the Schwindgasse, Garp went to see the woman with the mink muff streaked with light.

Her working name was Charlotte. She was not surprised to see him. Charlotte was old enough to know when she'd successfully hooked someone, although she never did tell Garp exactly how old she was. She had taken very fine care of herself, and only when she was completely undressed was her age apparent anywhere except in the veins on her long hands. There were stretch marks on her belly and her breasts, but she told Garp that the child had died a long time ago. She did not mind if Garp touched the Cesarean scar.

After he had seen Charlotte four times at the fixed first-district rate, he happened to run into her at the Naschmarkt on a Saturday morning. She was buying fruit. Her hair was probably a little dirty; she'd covered it with a scarf and wore it like a young girl's—with bangs and two short braids. The bangs were slightly greasy against her forehead which seemed paler in the daylight. She had no makeup on and wore a pair of American jeans and tennis sneakers and a long coatstyle sweater with a high roll collar. Garp would not have recognized her if he hadn't seen her hands clutching the fruit; she had all her rings on.

At first she wouldn't answer him when he spoke to her but he had already told her that he did all the shopping and the cooking for himself and his mother, and she found this amusing. After her irritation at meeting a customer in her off-duty hours, she seemed good-humored. It did not become clear to Garp, for a while, that he was the same age as Charlotte's child would have been. Charlotte took some vicarious interest in the way Garp was living with his mother.

“How's your mother's writing coming?” Charlotte would ask him.

“She's still pounding away,” Garp would say. “I don't think she's solved the lust problem yet.”

But only to a point did Charlotte allow Garp to joke about his mother.

Garp was insecure enough about himself with Charlotte that he never told her he was trying to write, too; he knew she would think he was too young. Sometimes, he thought so, too. And his story wasn't ready to tell someone about. The most he had done was change the title. He now called it “The Pension Grillparzer,” and that title was the first thing about it that solidly pleased him. It helped him to focus. Now he had a place in mind, just one place where almost everything that was important was going to happen. This helped him to think in a more focused way about his characters, too. About the family of classifiers, about the other residents of one small, sad pension somewhere (it would have to be small and sad, and in Vienna, to be named after Franz Grillparzer). Those “other residents” would include a kind of circus; not a very good kind, either, he imagined, but a circus with no other place to stay. No other place would have them.

In the world of ratings, the whole thing would be a kind of C experience. This kind of imagining got Garp started, slowly, in what he thought was a real direction; he was right about that, but it was too new to write it down—or even to write about it. Anyway, the more he wrote to Helen the less he wrote in other, important ways: and he couldn't discuss this with his mother: imagination was not her greatest strength. Of course, he'd have felt foolish discussing any of this with Charlotte.

Garp often met Charlotte at the Naschmarkt on Saturdays. They shopped and sometimes they ate lunch together in a Serbian place not far from the Stadtpark. On these occasions Charlotte paid for herself. At one such lunch Garp confessed to her that the first-district rate was hard for him to pay regularly without admitting to his mother where this steady flow of money was going. Charlotte was angry at him for bringing up business when she wasn't working. She would have been angrier if he'd admitted that he was seeing less of her, professionally, because the sixth-district prices of someone whom he met at the corner of Karl Schweighofergasse and Mariahilfer were much easier to conceal from Jenny.

Charlotte had a low opinion of her colleagues who operated out of the first district. She'd once told Garp she was planning to retire at the first sign that her first-district appeal was slipping. She would never do business in the outer districts. She had a lot of money saved, she told him, and she was going to move to Munich (where nobody knew she was a whore) and marry a young doctor who could take care of her, in every way, until she died: it was unnecessary for her to explain to Garp that she had always appealed to younger men, but Garp thoroughly resented her assumption that doctors were—in the long run—desirable. It may be this early exposure to the desirability of doctors that caused Garp, in his literary career, often to people his novels and stories with such unlikely characters from the medical profession. If so, it didn't occur to him until later. There is no doctor in “The Pension Grillparzer.” In this beginning there is very little about death, either, although that is the subject the story would come to. In the beginning Garp had only a dream of death, but it was a whale of a dream and he gave it to the oldest person alive in his story: a grandmother. Garp guessed this meant that she would be the first to die.

The Pension Grillparzer

My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau. It was my mother's idea that our family travel with him when he went on the road as a Tourist Bureau spy. My mother and brother and I would accompany him on his secretive missions to uncover the discourtesy, the dust, the badly cooked food, the shortcuts taken by Austrian restaurants and hotels and pensions. We were instructed to create difficulties whenever we could, never to order exactly what was on the menu, to imitate a foreigner's odd requests—the hours we would like to have our baths, the need for aspirin and directions to the zoo. We were instructed to be civilized but troublesome; and when the visit was over, we reported to my father in the car.

My mother would say, “The hairdresser is always closed in the morning. But they make suitable recommendations outside. I guess it's all right, provided they don't claim to have a hairdresser actually in the hotel.”

“Well, they do claim it,” my father would say. He'd note this in a giant pad.

I was always the driver. I said, “The car is parked off the street, but someone put fourteen kilometers on the gauge between the time we handed it over to the doorman and picked it up at the hotel garage.”

“That is a matter to report directly to the management,” my father said, jotting it down.

“The toilet leaked,” I said.

“I couldn't open the door to the W.C.,” said my brother, Robo. “Robo,” Mother said, “you always have trouble with doors.”

“Was that supposed to be Class C ?” I asked.

“I'm afraid not,” Father said, “it is still listed as Class B.” We drove for a short while in silence; our most serious judgment concerned changing a hotel's or a pension's rating. We did not suggest reclassification frivolously.

“I think this calls for a letter to the management,” Mother suggested. “Not too nice a letter, but not a really rough one. Just state the facts.”

“Yes, I rather liked him,” Father said. He always made a point of getting to meet the managers.

“Don't forget the business of them driving our car,” I said. “That's really unforgivable.”

“And the eggs were bad,” said Robo; he was not yet ten and his judgments were not considered seriously.

We became a far harsher team of evaluators when my grandfather died and we inherited Grandmother—my mother's mother, who thereafter accompanied us on our travels. A regal dame, Johanna was accustomed to Class A travel, and my father's duties more frequently called for investigations of Class B and Class C lodgings. They were the places, the B and C hotels (and the pensions), that most interested the tourists. At restaurants we did a little better. People who couldn't afford the classy places to sleep were still interested in the best places to eat.

“I shall not have dubious food tested on me,” Johanna told us. “This strange employment may give you all glee about having free vacations, but I can see there is a terrible price paid: the anxiety of not knowing what sort of quarters you'll have for the night. Americans may find it charming that we still have rooms without private baths and toilets, but I am an old woman and I'm not charmed by walking down a public corridor in search of cleanliness and my relievement. Anxiety is only half of it. Actual diseases are possible—and not only from food. If the bed is questionable, I promise I shan't put my head down. And the children are young and impressionable; you should think of the clientele in some of these lodgings and seriously ask yourselves about the influences.” My mother and father nodded; they said nothing. “Slow down!” Grandmother said sharply to me. “You're just a young boy who likes to show off.” I slowed down. “Vienna,” Grandmother sighed. “In Vienna I always stayed at the Ambassador.”

“Johanna, the Ambassador is not under investigation,” Father said.

“I should think not,” Johanna said. “I suppose we're not even headed toward a Class A place?”

“Well, it's a B trip,” my father admitted. “For the most part.”

“I trust,” Grandmother said, “that you mean there is one A place en route?”

“No,” Father admitted. “There is one C place.”

“It's okay,” Robo said. “There are fights in Class C.”

“I should imagine so,” Johanna said.

“It's a Class C pension, very small,” Father said, as if the size of the place forgave it.

“And they're applying for a B,” said Mother.

“But there have been some complaints,” I added.

“I'm sure there have,” Johanna said.

“And animals,” I added. My mother gave me a look.

“Animals?” said Johanna.

“Animals,” I admitted.

“A suspicion of animals,” my mother corrected me. “Yes, be fair,” Father said.

“Oh, wonderful!” Grandmother said. “A suspicion of animals. Their hair on the rugs? Their terrible waste in the corners? Did you know that my asthma reacts, severely, to any room in which there has recently been a cat?”

“The complaint was not about cats,” I said. My mother elbowed me sharply. “Dogs?” Johanna said. “Rabid dogs! Biting you on the way to the bathroom.”

“No,” I said. “Not dogs.”

“Bears!” Robo cried.

But my mother said, “We don't know for sure about the bear, Robo.”

“This isn't serious,” Johanna said.

“Of course it's not serious!” Father said. “How could there be bears in a pension?”

“There was a letter saying so,” I said. “Of course, the Tourist Bureau assumed it was a crank complaint. But then there was another sighting—and a second letter claiming there had been a bear.”

My father used the rear-view mirror to scowl at me, but I thought that if we were all supposed to be in on the investigation, it would be wise to have Grandmother on her toes.

“It's probably not a real bear,” Robo said, with obvious disappointment.

“A man in a bear suit!” Johanna cried. “What unheard-of perversion is that ? A beast of a man sneaking about in disguise! Up to what? It's a man in a bear suit, I know it is,” she said. “I want to go to that one first . If there's going to be a Class C experience on this trip, lets get it over with as soon as possible.”

“But we haven't got reservations for tonight,” Mother said.

“Yes, we might as well give them a chance to be at their best,” Father said. Although he never revealed to his victims that he worked for the Tourist Bureau, Father believed that reservations were simply a decent way of allowing the personnel to be as prepared as they could be.

“I'm sure we don't need to make a reservation in a place frequented by men who disguise themselves as animals,” Johanna said. “I'm sure there is always a vacancy there. I'm sure the guests are regularly dying in their beds—of fright, or else of whatever unspeakable injury the madman in the foul bear suit does to them.”

“It's probably a real bear,” Robo said, hopefully—for in the turn the conversation was taking, Robo certainly saw that a real bear would be preferable to Grandmother's imagined ghoul. Robo had no fear, I think, of a real bear.

I drove us as inconspicuously as possible to the dark, dwarfed corner of Planken and Seilergasse. We were looking for the Class C pension that wanted to be a B.

“No place to park,” I said to Father, who was already making note of that in his pad.

I doubled-parked and we sat in the car and peered up at the Pension Grillparzer; it rose only four slender stories between a pastry shop and a Tabak Trafik.

“See?” Father said. “No bears.”

“No men , I hope,” said Grandmother.

“They come at night,” Robo said, looking cautiously up and down the street.

We went inside to meet the manager, a Herr Theobald, who instantly put Johanna on her guard. “Three generations traveling together!” he cried. “Like the old days,” he added, especially to Grandmother, “before all these divorces and the young people wanting apartments by themselves. This is a family pension! I just wish you had made a reservation—so I could put you more closely together.”

“We're not accustomed to sleeping in the same room,” Grandmother told him.

“Of course not!” Theobald cried. “I just meant that I wished your rooms could be closer together.” This worried Grandmother, clearly.

“How far apart must we be put?” she asked.

“Well, I've only two rooms left,” he said. “And only one of them is large enough for the two boys to share with their parents.”

“And my room is how far from theirs?” Johanna asked coolly.

“You're right across from the W.C.!” Theobald told her, as if this were a plus.

But as we were shown to our rooms, Grandmother staying With Father—contemptuously to the rear of our procession—I heard her mutter, “This is not how I conceived of my retirement. Across the hall from a W.C., listening to all the visitors.”

“Not one of these rooms is the same,” Theobald told us. “The furniture is all from my family.” We could believe it. The one large room Robo and I were to share with my parents was a hall-sized museum of knickknacks, every dresser with a different style of knob. On the other hand, the sink had brass faucets and the headboard of the bed was carved. I could see my father balancing things up for future notation in the giant pad.

“You may do that later,” Johanna informed him. “Where do I stay?”

As a family, we dutifully followed Theobald and my grandmother down the long, twining hall, my father counting the paces to the W.C. The hall rug was thin, the color of a shadow. Along the walls were old photographs of speed-skating teams—on their feet the strange blades curled up at the tips like court jesters' shoes or the runners of ancient sleds.

Robo, running far ahead, announced his discovery of the W.C.

Grandmother's room was full of china, polished wood, and the hint of mold. The drapes were damp. The bed had an unsettling ridge at its center, like fur risen on a dog's spine—it was almost as if a very slender body lay stretched beneath the bedspread.

Grandmother said nothing, and when Theobald reeled out of the room like a wounded man who's been told he'll live, Grandmother asked my father, “On what basis can the Pension Grillparzer hope to get a B?”

“Quite decidedly C,” Father said.

“Born C and will die C,” I said.

“I would say, myself,” Grandmother told us, “that it was E or F.”

In the dim tearoom a man without a tie sang a Hungarian song. “It does not mean he's Hungarian,” Father reassured Johanna, but she was skeptical.

"I'd say the odds are not in his favor,” she suggested. She would not have tea or coffee, Robo ate a little cake, which he claimed to like. My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit and I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us—in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone.

“He's a great guest,” Herr Theabold whispered to my father; he indicated the singer. “He knows songs from all over.”

“From Hungary, at least,” Grandmother said, but she smiled.

A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on his lean face, spoke to my grandmother. He wore a clean white shirt (but yellow from age and laundering), suit pants, and an unmatching jacket.

“Pardon me?” said Grandmother.

“I said that I tell dreams,” the man informed her.

“You tell dreams,” Grandmother said. “Meaning, you have them?”

“Have them and tell them,” he said mysteriously. The singer stopped singing.

“Any dreams you want to know,” said the singer. “He can tell it.”

“I'm quite sure I don't want to know any,” Grandmother said. She viewed with displeasure the ascot of dark hair bursting out at the open throat of the singer's shirt. She would not regard the man who “told” dreams at all.

“I can see you are a lady,” the dream man told Grandmother. “You don't respond to just every dream that comes along.”

“Certainly not,” said Grandmother. She shot my father one of her how-could-you-have-let-this-happen-to-me? looks.

“But I know one,” said the dream man; he shut his eyes. The singer slipped a chair forward and we suddenly realized he was sitting very close to us. Robo, though he was much too old for it, sat in Father's lap. “In a great castle,” the dream man began, “a woman lay beside her husband. She was wide awake, suddenly, in the middle of the night. She woke up without the slightest idea of what had awakened her, and she felt as alert as if she'd been up for hours. It was also clear to her, without a look, a word, or a touch, that her husband was wide awake too—and just as suddenly.”

“I hope this is suitable for the child to hear, ha ha,” Herr Theobald said, but no one even looked at him. My grandmother folded her hands in her lap and stared at them—her knees together, her heels tucked under her straight-backed chair. My mother held my father's hand.

I sat next to the dream man, whose jacket smelled like a zoo. He said, “The woman and her husband lay awake listening for sounds in the castle, which they were only renting and did not know intimately. They listened for sounds in the courtyard, which they never bothered to lock. The village people always took walks by the castle; the village children were allowed to swing on the great courtyard door. What had woken them?”

“Bears?” said Robo, but Father touched his fingertips to Robo's mouth.

“They heard horses,” said the dream man. Old Johanna, her eyes shut, her head inclined toward her lap, seemed to shudder in her stiff chair. “They heard the breathing and stamping of horses who were trying to keep still,” the dream man said. “The husband reached out and touched his wife. “Horses?", he said. The woman got out of bed and went to the courtyard window. She would swear to this day that the courtyard was full of soldiers on horseback—but what soldiers they were! They wore armor ! The visors on their helmets were closed and their murmuring voices were as tinny and difficult to hear as voices on a fading radio station. Their armor clanked as their horses shifted restlessly under them.

“There was an old dry bowl of a former fountain, there in the castle's courtyard, but the woman saw that the fountain was flowing; the water lopped over the worn curb and the horses were drinking it. The knights were wary, they would not dismount; they looked up at the castle's dark windows, as if they knew they were uninvited at this watering trough—this rest station on their way, somewhere.

“In the moonlight the woman saw their big shields glint. She crept back to bed and lay rigidly against her husband.

“"What is it?"” he asked her.

“"Horses,"” she told him.

“"I thought so,"” he said. “They'll eat the flowers!”

“"Who built this castle?"” she asked him. It was a very old castle, they both knew that.

“"Charlemagne,"” he told her; he was going back to sleep.

“But the woman lay awake, listening to the water which now seemed to be running all through the castle, gurgling in every drain, as if the old fountain were drawing water from every available source. And there were the distorted voices of the whispering knights—Charlemagne's  soldiers speaking their dead language! To this woman, the soldiers' voices were as morbid as the eighth century and the people called Franks. The horses kept drinking.

“The woman lay awake a long time, waiting for the soldiers to leave; she had no fear of actual attack from them—she was sure they were on a journey and had only stopped to rest at a place they once knew. But for as long as the water ran she felt that she mustn't disturb the castle's stillness or its darkness. When she fell asleep, she thought Charlemagne's men were still there.

“In the morning her husband asked her, “Did you hear water running, too?” Yes, she had, of course. But the fountain was dry, of course, and out the window they could see that the flowers weren't eaten—and everyone knows horses eat flowers.

“"Look,"” said her husband; he went into the courtyard with her. “There are no hoofprints, there are no droppings. We must have dreamed we heard horses!” She did not tell him that there were soldiers, too; or that, in her opinion, it was unlikely that two people would dream the same dream. She did not remind him that he was a heavy smoker who never smelled the soup simmering; the aroma of horses in the fresh air was too subtle for him.

“She saw the soldiers, or dreamed them, twice more while they stayed there, but her husband never again woke up with her. It was always sudden. Once she woke with the taste of metal on her tongue as if she'd touched some old, sour iron to her mouth—a sword, a chest plate, chain mail, a thigh guard. They were out there again, in colder weather. From the water in the fountain a dense fog shrouded them; the horses were snowy with frost. And there were not so many of them the next time—as if the winter or their skirmishes were reducing their numbers. The last time the horses looked gaunt to her, and the men looked more like unoccupied suits of armor balanced delicately in the saddles. The horses wore long masks of ice on their muzzles. Their breathing (or the men's breathing) was congested.

“Her husband,” said the dream man, “would die of a respiratory infection. But the woman did not know it when she dreamed this dream.”

My grandmother looked up from her lap and slapped the dream man's beard-gray face. Robo stiffened in my father's lap; my mother caught her mother's hand. The singer shoved back his chair and jumped to his feet, frightened, or ready to fight someone, but the dream man simply bowed to Grandmother and left the gloomy tearoom. It was as if he'd made a contract with Johanna that was final but gave neither of them any joy. My father wrote something in the giant pad.

“Well, wasn't that some story?” said Herr Theobald. “Ha ha.” He rumpled Robo's hair—something Robo always hated.

“Herr Theobald,” my mother said, still holding Johanna's hand, “my father died of a respirafory infection .”

“Oh, dear shit,” said Herr Theobald. “I'm sorry, meine Frau ,” he told Grandmother, but old Johanna would not speak to him.

We took Grandmother out to eat in a Class A restaurant, but she hardly touched her food. “That person was a gypsy,” she told us. “A satanic being, and a Hungarian.”

“Please, Mother,” my mother said. “He couldn't have known about Father.”

“He knew more than you know,” Grandmother snapped. “The schnitzel is excellent,” Father said, writing in the pad. “The Gumpoldskirchner is just right with it.”

“The Kalbsnieren are fine,” I said.

“The eggs are okay,” said Robo.

Grandmother said nothing until we returned to the Pension Grillparzer, where we noticed that the door to the W.C. was hung a foot or more off the floor, so that it resembled the bottom half of an American toilet-stall door or a saloon door in the Western movies. “I'm certainly glad I used the W.C. at the restaurant,” Grandmother said. “How revolting! I shall try to pass the night without exposing myself where every passerby can peer at my ankles!”

In our family room Father said, “Didn't Johanna live in a castle? Once upon a time, I thought she and Grandpa rented some castle.”

“Yes, it was before I was born,” Mother said. “They rented Schloss Katzelsdorf. I saw the photographs.”

“Well, that's why the Hungarian's dream upset her, Father said.

“Someone is riding a bike in the hall,” Robo said. “I saw a wheel go by—under our door.”

“Robo, go to sleep,” Mother said.

“It went “squeak squeak"” Robo said.

“Good night, boys,” said Father.

“If you can talk, we can talk,” I said.

“Then talk to each other,” Father said. “I'm talking to your mother.”

“I want to go to sleep,” Mother said. “I wish no one would talk.”

We tried. Perhaps we slept. Then Robo whispered to me that he had to use the W.C.

“You know where it is,” I said.

Robo went out the door, leaving it slightly open; I heard him walk down the corridor, brushing his hand along the wall. He was back very quickly.

“There's someone in the W.C.,” he said.

“Wait for them to finish,” I said.

“The light wasn't on,” Robo said, “but I could see under the door. Someone is in there, in the dark.”

“I prefer the dark myself,” I said.

But Robo insisted on telling me exactly what he'd seen. He said that under the door was a pair of hands .

“Hands?” I said.

“Yes, where the feet should have been,” Robo said; he claimed that there was a hand on either side of the toilet—instead of a foot.

“Get out of here, Robo!” I said.

“Please come see,” he begged. I went down the hall with him but there was no one in the W.C. “They've gone,” he said.

“Walked off on their hands, no doubt,” I said. “Go pee. I'll wait for you.”

He went into the W.C. and peed sadly in the dark. When we were almost back to our room together, a small dark man with the same kind of skin and clothes as the dream man who had angered Grandmother passed us in the hall. He winked at us, and smiled. I had to notice that he was walking on his hands.

“You see?” Robo whispered to me. We went into our room and shut the door.

“What is it?” Mother asked.

“A man walking on his hands,” I said.

“A man peeing on his hands,” Robo said.

“Class C,” Father murmured in his sleep; Father often dreamed that he was making notes in the giant pad.

“We'll talk about it in the morning,” Mother said.

“He was probably just an acrobat who was showing off for you, because you're a kid,” I told Robo.

“How did he know I was a kid when he was in the W.C.?” Robo asked me.

“Go to sleep ,” Mother whispered.

Then we heard Grandmother scream down the hall.

Mother put on her pretty green dressing gown; Father put on his bathrobe and his glasses; I pulled on a pair of pants, over my pajamas. Robo was in the hall first. We saw the light coming from the W.C. door. Grandmother was screaming rhythmically in there.

“Here we are!” I called to her.

“Mother, what is it?” my mother asked.

We gathered in the broad slot of light. We could see Grandmother's mauve slippers and her porcelain-white ankles under the door. She stopped screaming. “I heard whispers when I was in my bed,” she said.

“It was Robo and me,” I told her.

“Then, when everyone seemed to have gone, I came into the W.C.,” Johanna said. “I left the light off . I was very quiet,” she told us. “Then I saw and heard the wheel.”

“The wheel ?” Father asked.

“A wheel went by the door a few times,” Grandmother said. “it rolled by and came back and rolled by again.”

Father made his fingers roll like wheels alongside his head, he made a face at Mother. “Somebody needs a new set of wheels,” he whispered, but Mother looked crossly at him.

“I turned on the light,” Grandmother said, “and the wheel went away.”

“I told you there was a bike in the hall,” said Robo.

“Shut up, Robo,” Father said.

“No, it was not a bicycle,” Grandmother said. “There was only one wheel.”

Father was making his hands go crazy beside his head. “She's got a wheel or two missing ,” he hissed at my mother, but she cuffed him and knocked his glasses askew on his face.

“Then someone came and looked under the door,” Grandmother said, “and that is when I screamed.”

“Someone?” said Father.

“I saw his hands, a man's hands—there was hair on his knuckles,” Grandmother said. “His hands were on the rug right outside the door. He must have been looking up at me.”

“No, Grandmother,” I said. “I think he was just standing out here on his hands.”

“Don't be fresh,” my mother said.

“But we saw a man walking on his hands,” Robo said.

“You did not ,” Father said.

“We did ,” I said.

“We're going to wake everyone up,” Mother cautioned us.

The toilet flushed and Grandmother shuffled out the door with only a little of her former dignity intact. She was wearing a gown over a gown over a gown; her neck was very long and her face was creamed white. Grandmother looked like a troubled goose. “He was evil and vile,” she said to us. “He knew terrible magic.”

“The man who looked at you?” Mother asked.

“That man who told my dream ,” Grandmother said. Now a tear made its way through her furrows of face cream. “That was my dream,” she said, “and he told everyone. It is unspeakable that he even knew it,” she hissed to us. “My dream—of Charlemagne's horses and soldiers—I am the only one who should know it. I had that dream before you were born,” she told Mother. “And that vile evil magic man told my dream as if it were news .

“I never even told your father all there was to that dream. I was never sure that it was a dream. And now there are men on their hands, and their knuckles are hairy, and there are magic wheels. I want the boys to sleep with me .”

So that was how Robo and I came to share the large family room, far away from the W.C., with Grandmother who lay on my mother's and father's pillows with her creamed face shining like the face of a wet ghost. Robo lay awake watching her. I do not think Johanna slept very well; I imagine she was dreaming her dream of death again, reliving the last winter of Charlemagne's cold soldiers with their strange metal clothes covered with frost and their armor frozen shut.

When it was obvious that I had to go to the W.C., Robo's round, bright eyes followed me to the door.

There was someone in the W.C. There was no light shining from under the door, but there was a unicycle parked against the wall outside. Its rider sat in the dark W.C.; the toilet was flushing over and over again—like a child, the unicyclist was not giving the tank time to refill.

I went closer to the gap under the W.C. door, but the occupant was not standing on his or her hands. I saw what were clearly feet, in almost the expected position, but the feet did not touch the floor; their soles tilted up to me—dark, bruise-colored pads. They were huge feet attached to short, furry shins. They were a bear's feet, only there were no claws. A bear's claws are not retractable, like a cat's; if a bear had claws, you would see them. Here, then, was an imposter in a bear suit, or a declowed bear. A domestic bear, perhaps. At least—by its presence in the W.C.—a housebroken bear. For by its smell I could tell it was no man in a bear suit; it was all bear. It was real bear.

I backed into the door of Grandmother's former room, behind which my father lurked, waiting for further disturbances. He snapped open the door and I fell inside, frightening us both. Mother sat up in bed and pulled the feather quilt over her head. “Got him!” Father cried, dropping down on me. The floor trembled; the bear's unicycle slipped against the wall and fell into the door of the W.C., out of which the bear suddenly shambled, stumbling over its unicycle and lunging for its balance. Worriedly, it stared across the hall, through the open door, at Father sitting on my chest. It picked up the unicycle in its front paws. “Grauf? ” said the bear. Father slammed the door.

Down the hall we heard a woman call, “Where are you, Duna?”

“Harf! ” the bear said.

Father and I heard the woman come closer. She said, “Oh, Duna, practicing again? Always practicing! But it's better in the daytime.” The bear said nothing. Father opened the door.

“Don't let anyone else in,” Mother said, still under the featherbed.

In the hall a pretty, aging woman stood beside the bear, who now balanced in place on its unicycle, one huge paw on the woman's shoulder. She wore a vivid red turban and a long wrap-around dress that resembled a curtain. Perched on her high bosom was a necklace strung with bear claws; her earrings touched the shoulder of her curtain-dress and her other, bare shoulder where my father and I stared at her fetching mole. “Good evening,” she said to Father. “I'm sorry if we've disturbed you. Duna is forbidden to practice at night—but he loves his work.”

The bear muttered, pedaling away from the woman. The bear had very good balance but he was careless; he brushed against the walls of the hall and touched the photographs of the speed-skating teams with his paws. The woman, bowing away from Father, went after the bear calling, “Duna, Duna,” and straightening the photographs as she followed him down the hall.

“Duna is the Hungarian word for the Danube,” Father told me. “That bear is named after our beloved Donau .” Sometimes it seemed to surprise my family that the Hungarians could love a river too.

“Is the bear a real bear?” Mother asked—still under the featherbed—but I left Father to explain it all to her. I knew that in the morning Herr Theobald would have much to explain, and I would hear everything reviewed at that time.

I went across the hall to the W.C. My task there was hurried by the bear's lingering odor, and by my suspicion of bear hair on everything; it was only my suspicion, though, for the bear had left everything quite tidy—or at least neat for a bear.

“I saw the bear,” I whispered to Robo, back in our room, but Robo had crept into Grandmother's bed and had fallen asleep beside her. Old Johanna was awake, however.

“I saw fewer and fewer soldiers,” she said. “The last time they came there were only nine of them. Everyone looked so hungry; they must have eaten the extra horses. It was so cold. Of course I wanted to help them! But we weren't alive at the same time; how could I help them if I wasn't even born? Of course I knew they would die! But it took such a long time.

“The last time they came, the fountain was frozen. They used their swords and their long pikes to break the ice into chunks. They built a fire and melted the ice in a pot. They took bones from their saddlebags—bones of all kinds—and threw them in the soup. It must have been a very thin broth because the bones had long ago been gnawed clean. I don't know what bones they were. Rabbits, I suppose, and maybe a deer or a wild boar. Maybe the extra horses. I do not choose to think,” said Grandmother, “that they were the bones of the missing soldiers.”

“Go to sleep, Grandmother,” I said.

“Don't worry about the bear,” she said.

And then what? Garp wondered. What can happen next? He wasn't altogether sure what had happened, or why. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all—everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world? Garp knew he did not know enough, not yet. He trusted his instincts; they had brought him this far with “The Pension Grillparzer"; now he had to trust the instinct that told him not to go any further until he knew much more.

What made Garp older and wiser than his nineteen years, had nothing to do with his experience or with what he had learned. He had some instincts, some determination, better than average patience; he loved to work hard. Altogether, with the grammar Tinch had taught him, that was all. Only two facts impressed Garp: that his mother actually believed she could write a book and that the most meaningful relationship in his present life was with a whore. These facts contributed greatly to the young man's developing sense of humor.

He put “The Pension Grillparzer"—as they say—aside. It will come, Garp thought. He knew he had to know more; all he could do was look at Vienna and learn. It was holding still for him. Life seemed to be holding still for him. He made a great many observations of Charlotte, too, and he noticed everything his mother did, but he was being too young. What I need is vision , he knew. An overall scheme of things, a vision all his own. It will come, he repeated to himself, as if he were training for another wrestling season—jumping rope, running laps on a smail track, lifting weights, something almost that mindless but that necessary.

Even Charlotte has a vision, he thought, he certainly knew that his mother had one. Garp had no parallel wisdom for the absolute clarity of the world according to Jenny Fields. But he knew it would take only time to imagine a world of his own—with a little help from the real world. The real world would soon cooperate.

 

THE PENSION GRILLPARZER

 

WHEN spring came to Vienna, Garp had still not finished “The Pension Grillparzer"; he had not, of course, even written to Helen about his life with Charlotte and her colleagues, Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a hiqher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her since that night she discussed lust with Garp and Charlotte: it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly began the book that would make her famous.

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny wrote, “you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.” The sentence set a tone for the book, which the book had been lacking; Jenny was discovering that when she began with that sentence, an aura was cast over her autobiography that bound the disharmonious parts of her life's story together—the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape, the way heat reaches through a rambling house into every room. That sentence inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.

“I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone,” she wrote. “That made me A Sexual Suspect .” And that gave her a title, too. A Sexual Suspect , the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale that could keep Jenny, and a regiment of nurses, in new uniform, for a century.

“Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one,” Jenny wrote. “That made me A Sexual Suspect , too.” Thus Jenny had found the string with which to sew her messy book together.

But when spring came to Vienna, Garp felt like a trip; maybe Italy; possibly, they could rent a car.

“Do you know how to drive?” Jenny asked him. She knew perfectly well that he hadn't ever learned; there had never been a need. “Well, I don't know how, either,” she told him. “And besides, I'm working; I can't stop now. If you want to take a trip, take a trip by yourself.”

It was in the American Express office, where Garp and Jenny got their mail, that Garp met his first traveling young Americans. Two girls who had formerly gone to Dibbs, and a boy named Boo who had gone to Bath. “Hey, how about us?” one of the girls said to Garp, when they had all met. “We're all prep school stuff.”

Her name was Flossie and it appeared to Garp that she had a relationship with Boo. The other girl was called Vivian, and under the tiny cafй table on the Schwarzenbergplatz, Vivian squeezed Garp's knee between her own and drooled while sipping her wine. “I just went to a denthisht ,” she explained to him. “Got so much Novocain in my goddamn mouth I don't know whether it's open or shut.”

“Sort of half and half,” Garp said to her. But he thought, “Oh, what the hell". He missed Cushie Percy, and his relationships with prostitutes were beginning to make him feel like A Sexual Suspect . Charlotte, it was now clear, was interested in mothering him—though he tried to imagine her on another level, he knew, sadly, that this level would never carry beyond the professional.

Flossie and Vivian and Boo were all going to Greece but they let Garp show them Vienna for three days. In that time Garp slept twice with Vivian, whose Novocain finally wore off; he also slept once with Flossie, while Boo was out cashing travelers' checks and changing the oil in the car. There was no love lost between Steering and Bath boys, Garp knew; but Boo had the last laugh.

It is impossible to know whether Garp got gonorrhea from Vivian or from Flossie, but Garp was convinced that the source of the dose was Boo. It was, in Garp's opinion, “Bath clap.” By the time of the first symptoms, of course, the threesome had left for Greece and Garp faced the dripping and the burning alone. There could be no worse a case of clap to catch in all of Europe, he thought. “I caught a dose of Boo's goo,” he wrote, but much later; it was not funny when it happened, and he didn't dare seek his mother's professional advice. He knew she would refuse to believe that he hadn't caught it from a whore. He got up the nerve to ask Charlotte to recommend a doctor who was familiar with the matter; he thought she would know. He thought later that Jenny would possibly have been less angry with him.

“You'd think Americans would know a little simple hygiene!” Charlotte said furiously. “You should think of your mother! I'd expect you to have better taste. People who give it away for free to someone they hardly know—well, they should make you suspicious, shouldn't they?” Once again, Garp had been caught without a condom.

Thus Garp winced his way to Charlotte's personal physician, a hearty man named Thalhammer who was missing his left thumb. “And I was once left-handed,” Herr Doktor Thalhammer told Garp. “But everything is surmountable if we have energy. We can learn anything we can set our minds to!” he said, with firm good cheer; he demonstrated for Garp how he could write the prescription, with an enviable penmanship, with his right hand. It was a simple and painless cure. In Jenny's day, at good old Boston Mercy, they would have given Garp the Valentine treatment and he'd have learned, more emphatically, how not all rich kids are clean kids.

He didn't write Helen about this, either.

His spirits slumped; spring wore on, the city opened in many small ways—like buds. But Garp felt he had walked Vienna out. He could barely get his mother to stop writing long enough to eat dinner with him. When he sought out Charlotte, her colleague told him she was sick; she hadn't worked for weeks. For three Saturdays, Garp did not see her at the Naschmarkt. When he stopped her colleagues one May evening on the Kдrntnerstrasse, he saw they were reluctant to discuss Charlotte. The whore whose forehead appeared to have beep pockmarked by a peach pit merely told Garp that Charlotte was sicker than she first thought. The young girl, Garp's age, with the misshapen lip and the half-knowledge of English, tried to explain to him. “Her sex is sick,” she said.

That was a curious way to put it, Garp thought. Garp was not surprised to hear that anyone's sex was sick, but when he smiled at the remark, the young whore who spoke English frowned at him and wallied away.

“You don't understand,” said the overlush prostitute with the pockmark. “Forget Charlotte.”

It was mid-June, and Charlote had still not come back, when Garp called Herr Doktor Thalhammer and asked where he could find her. “I doubt that she wants to see anybody,” Thalhammer told him, “but human beings can adjust to almost anything.”

Very near Grinzing and the Vienna Woods, out in the nineteenth district where the whores don't go, Vienna looks like a village imitation of itself; in these suburbs, many of the streets are still cobblestoned and trees grow along the sidewalks. Unfamiliar with this part of the city, Garp rode the No. 38 Strassenbahn too far out the Grinzinger Allee; he had to walk back to the corner of Billrothstrasse and Rudolfinergasse to the hospital.

The Rudolfinerhaus is a private hospital in a city of socialized medicine: its old stone walls are the same Maria Theresa yellow as the palace at Schцnbrunn, or the Upper and Lower Belvedere. Its own gardens are enclosed in its own courtyard, and it costs as much as almost any hospital in the United States. The Rudolfinerhaus does not normally provide pajamas for its patients, for example, because its patients usually prefer their own nightclothes. The well-to-do Viennese treat themselves to the luxury of being sick there—and most foreigners who are afraid of socialized medicine end up there, where they are shocked at the prices.

In June, when Garp went there, the hospital struck him as full of pretty young mothers who'd just delivered babies. But it was also full of well-off people who'd come there to get seriously well again, and it was partially full of well-off people, like Charlotte, who'd come there to die.

Charlotte had a private room because, she said, there was no reason to save her money now. Garp knew she was dying as soon as he saw her. She had lost almost thirty pounds. Garp saw that she wore what was left of her rings on her index and middle fingers: her other fingers were so shrunken that her rings would slide off. Charlotte was the color of the dull ice on the brackish Steering River. She did not appear very surprised to see Garp, but she was so heavily anesthetized that Garp imagined Charlotte was fairly unsurprised in general. Garp had brought a basket of fruit; since they had shopped together, he knew what Charlotte liked to eat, but she had a tube down her throat for several hours each day and it left her throat too sore to swallow anything but liquid. Garp ate a few cherries while Charlotte enumerated the parts of her body that had been removed. Her sex parts, she thought, and much of her digestive tract, and something that had to do with the process of elimination. “Oh, and my breasts, I think,” she said, the whites of her eyes very gray and her hands held above her chest where she flattered herself to imagine her breasts used to be. To Garp it appeared that they had not touched her breasts; under the sheet, there was still something there. But he later thought that Charlotte had been such a lovely woman that she could hold her body in such a way as to inspire the illusion of breasts.

“Thank God I've got money,” Charlotte said. “Isn't this a Class A place?”

Garp nodded. The next day he brought a bottle of wine; the hospital was very relaxed about liquor and visitors; perhaps this was one of the luxuries one paid for. “Even if I got out,” Charlotte said, “what could I do? They cut my purse out.” She tried to drink some wine, then fell asleep. Garp asked a nurse's aide to explain what Charlotte meant by her “purse,” though he thought he knew. The nurse's aide was Garp's age, nineteen or maybe younger, and she blushed and looked away from him when she translated the slang.

A purse was a prostitute's word for her vagina.

“Thank you,” Garp said.

Once or twice when he visited Charlotte he encountered her two colleagues, who were shy and girlish with Garp in the daylight of Charlotte's sunny room. The young one who spoke English was named Wanga; she had cut her lip that way as a child when she tripped while running home from the store with a jar of mayonnaise. “We were on a picnic going,” she explained, “but my whole family had me instead to the hospital to bring.”

The riper, sulkish woman with the peach pit pockmark on her forehead, and the breasts like two full pails, did not offer to explain her scar; she was the notorious “Tina,” for whom nothing was too “funny.”

Occasionally Garp ran into Herr Doktor Thalhammer there, and once he walked with Thalhammer to Thalhammer's car, they happened to be leaving the hospital together. “Do you want a lift?” Thalhammer offered him, pleasantly. In the car was a pretty young schoolgirl whom Thalhammer introduced to Garp is his daughter. They all talked easily about Die Vereinigten Staaten and Thalhammer assured Garp it was no trouble to drive Garp all the way to his doorstep at the Schwindgasse. Thalhammer's daughter reminded Garp of Helen, but he could not even imagine asking to see the girl again; that her father had recently treated him for clap seemed to Garp to be an insurmountable awkwardness—despite Thalhammer's optimism that people can adjust to anything . Garp doubted that Thalhammer could have adjusted to that.

All around Garp, now, the city looked ripe with dying. The teeming parks and gardens reeked of decay to him, and the subject of the great painters in the great museums was always death. There were always cripples and old people riding the No. 38 Strassenbahn out to Grinzinger Allee, and the heady flowers planted along the pruned paths of the courtyard in the Rudolfinerhaus reminded Garp only of funeral parlors. He recalled the pensions he and Jenny had stayed in when they first arrived, over a year ago: the faded and unmatched wallpaper, the dusty bric-a-brac, the chipped china, the hinges crying for oil. “In the life of a man,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “his time is but a moment...his body a prey of worms...”

The young nurse's aide whom Garp had embarrassed by asking about Charlotte's “purse” was increasingly snotty to him. One day when he arrived early, before visitors were permitted, she asked him a little too aggressively what he was to Charlotte, anyway. A member of the family? She had seen Charlotte's other visitors—her gaudy colleagues—and she assumed Garp was just an old hooker's customer. “She's my mother,” Garp said; he didn't know why, but he appreciated the shock of the young nurse's aide, and her subsequent respect.

“What did you tell them?” Charlotte whispered to him, a few days later. “They think you're my son .” He confessed his lie; Charlotte confessed she had done nothing to correct it. “Thank you,” she whispered. “It's nice to trick the swine. They think they're so superior.” And mustering her former and fading lewdness, she said, “I'd let you have it once for free, if I still had the equipment. Maybe twice for half price,” she said.

He was touched and cried in front of her.

“Don't be a baby,” she said. “What am I to you, really?” When she was asleep, he read on her hospital chart that she was fifty-one.

She died a week later. When Garp went to her room, it was whisked clean, the bed stripped back, the windows wide open. When he asked for her, there was a nurse in charge of the floor whom he didn't recognize—an iron-gray maiden who kept shaking her head. “Frдulein Charlotte,” Garp said. “She was Herr Doktor Thalhammer's patient.”

“He has lots of patients,” said the iron-gray maiden. She was consulting a list, but Garp did not know Charlotte's real name. Finally, he could think of no other way to identify her.

“The whore,” he said. “She was a whore.” The gray woman regarded him coolly; if Garp could detect no satisfaction in her expression, he could detect no sympathy either.

“The prostitute is dead,” the old nurse said. Perhaps Garp only imagined that he heard a little triumph in her voice.

“One day, meine Frau ,” he said to her, “you will be dead, too.” And that, he thought—leaving the Rudolfinerhaus—was a properly Viennese thing to say. Take that, you old gray city, you dead bitch, he thought.

He went to his first opera that night; to his surprise, it was in Italian, and since he understood none of it, he took the whole performance to be a kind of religious service. He walked in the night to the fit spires of Saint Stephen's; the south tower of the cathedral, he read on some plaque, was started in the middle of the fourteenth century and completed in 1439. Vienna, Garp thought, was a cadaver; all Europe, maybe, was a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin. “In the life of a man,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “his time is but a moment...his fortune dark...”

In this mood Garp walked home on the Kдrntnerstrasse, where he met the notorious Tina. Her deep pockmark, harboring the neon of the city lights, was a greenish blue.

“Guten Abend , Herr Garp,” she said. “Guess what?”

Tina explained that Charlotte had bought Garp a favor. The favor was that Garp could have Tina and Wanga for free; he could have them one at a time or both together, Tina explained. Together, Tina thought, was more interesting—and quicker. But perhaps Garp did not like both of them. Garp admitted that Wanga did not appeal to him; she was too close to his own age, and though he would never say this if she were here and her feelings could be hurt, he did not care for the way the mayonnaise jar had pulled her lip askew.

“Then you can have me twice,” Tina said, cheerfully. “Once now, and once,” she added, “after you've had a long time to catch your breath. Forget Charlotte,” Tina said. Death happened to everyone, Tina explained. Even so, Garp politely declined the offer.

“Well, it's here,” Tina said. “When you want it.” She reached out and frankly cupped him in her warm palm; her big hand was an ample codpiece for him, but Garp only smiled and bowed to her—as the Viennese do—and walked home to his mother.

He enjoyed his slight pain. He took pleasure in this silly self-denial—and more pleasure in his imagination of Tina, he suspected, than he ever could have derived from her vaguely gross flesh. The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.

What Garp was savoring was the beginning of a writer's long-sought trance, wherein the world falls under one embracing tone of voice. “All that is body is as coursing waters,” Garp remembered, “all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.” It was July when Garp went back to work on “The Pension Grillparzer". His mother was finishing up the manuscript that would soon change both their lives.

It was August when Jenny finished her book and announced that she was ready to travel, to at last see something of Europe—maybe Greece? she suggested. “Let's take the train somewhere,” she said. “I always wanted to take the Orient Express. Where's it go?”

“From Paris to Istanbul, I think,” Garp said. “But you take it, Mom. I've got too much work to do.”

Tit for tat, Jenny had to admit. She was so sick of A Sexual Suspect that she couldn't even proofread it one more time. She didn't even know what to do with it, now; did one just go to New York and hand over one's life story to a stranger? She wanted Garp to read it, but she saw that Garp was at last engrossed in a task of his own, she felt sbe shouldn't bother him. Besides, she was unsure; a large part of her life story was his life story, too—she thought the story might upset him.

Garp worked through August on the conclusion of his short story, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Helen, exasperated, wrote to Jenny. “Is Garp dead?” she asked, “Kindly send details.” That Helen Holm is a bright girl, Jenny thought. Helen got more of an answer than she counted on. Jenny sent her a copy of the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect with a note explaining that this was what she'd been doing all year, and now Garp was writing something, too. Jenny said she would appreciate Helen's candid opinion of the manuscript. Perhaps, said Jenny, some of Helen's college teachers would know what one did with a finished book?

Garp relaxed, when he wasn't writing, by going to the zoo: it was a part of the great grounds and gardens surrounding the Schцnbrunn Palace. It appeared to Garp that many of the buildings in the zoo were war ruins, three-quarters destroyed; they had been partially restored to house the animals. This gave Garp the eerie impression that the zoo still existed in Vienna's war period; it also interested him in the period. To fall asleep at night he took to reading some very specific, historical accounts of Vienna during the Nazi and the Russian occupations. This was not unrelated to the death themes that haunted his writing of “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else. Vienna was dying, the zoo was not as well restored from the war damage as the homes the people lived in; the history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. He felt the holes from the machine-gun fire in the stone walls of the lobby of the apartment on the Schwindgasse.

Now he knew what the grandmother's dream meant.

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!

Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan ?

He did not revise, at all, his letter back to her; he said he was too busy writing to take the time to explain it to her: she would have to read what he was working on and judge for herself how serious he was.

“I don't doubt that you're quite serious,” she told him. “And right now I have more to read than I need to know.”

She did not tell him that she was referring to Jenny's book, A Sexual Suspect ; it was 1,158 manuscript pages long. Though Helen would later agree with Garp that it was no literary jewel, she had to admit that it was a very compelling story.

While Garp put the finishing touches on his much shorter story, Jenny Fields plotted her next move. In her restlessness she had bought an American news magazine at a large Vienna newsstand, in it she had read that a courageous New York editor at a well-known publishing house had just rejected the manuscript submitted by an infamous former member of the government who had been convicted of stealing government money. The book was a thinly disguised “fiction” of the criminal's own sordid, pitty, political dealings. “It was a lousy novel,” the editor was quoted as saying. “The man can't write. Why should he make any money off his crummy life?” The book, of course, would be published elsewhere, and it would eventually make its despicable author and its publisher lots of money. “Sometimes I feel it is my responsibility to say no,” the editor was quoted as saying, “even if I know people do want to read this slop.” The slop, eventually, would be treated to several serious reviews, just as if it were a serious book, but Jenny was greatly impressed with the editor who had said no and she clipped the article out of the news magazine. She drew a circle around the editor's name—a plain name, almost like an actor's name, or the name of an animal in a children's book: John Wolf. There was a picture of John Wolf in the magazine; he looked like a man who took care of himself, and he was very well dressed; he looked like any number of people who work and live in New York—where good business and good sense suggest that you'd better take care of yourself and dress as well as you can—but to Jenny Fields he looked like an angel. He was going to be her publisher, she was sure. She was convinced that her life was not “crummy,” and that John Wolf would believe she deserved to make money off it.

Garp had other ambitions for “The Pension Grillparzer.” It would never make him much money; it would first appear in a “serious” magazine where almost no one would read it. Years later, when he was better known, it would be published in a more attentive way, and several appreciative things, would be written about it, but in his lifetime “The Pension Grillparzer” wouldn't make Garp enough money to buy a good car. Garp, however, expected more than money or transportation from “The Pension Grillparzer.” Very simply, he expected to get Helen Holm to live with him—even marry him.

When he finished “The Pension Grillparzer,” he announced to his mother that he wanted to go home and see Helen; he would send her a copy of the story and she could have read it by the time he arrived back in the United States. Poor Helen, Jenny thought; Jenny knew that Helen had a lot to read. Jenny also worried how Garp referred to Steering as “home"; but she had reasons of her own for wanting to see Helen, and Ernie Holm would not mind their company for a few days. There was always the parental mansion at Dog's Head Harbor—if Garp and Jenny needed a place to recover, or to make their plans.

Garp and Jenny were such singularly obsessed people that they did not pause to wonder why they had seen so little of Europe, and now they were leaving. Jenny packed her nursing uniforms. There remained, in Garp's mind, only the favors that Charlotte had left up to Tina's devising.

Garp's imagination of these favors had sustained him during the writing of “The Pension Grillparzer,” but as he would learn all his life, the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar. His imagination sustained him when he was writing; now that he wasn't writing, he wanted Tina. He went to look for her on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but the mayonnaise-jar whore, who spoke English, told him that Tina had moved from the first district.

“So goes it,” Wanga said. “Forget Tina.”

Garp found that he could forget her; lust, as his mother called it, was tricky that way. And time, he discovered, had softened his dislike of Wanga's mayonnaise-jar lip, suddenly, he liked it. And so he had her , twice, and as he would learn all his life, nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Garp and Jenny had spent fifteen months in Vienna. It was September. Garp and Helen were only nineteen, and Helen would be going back to college very soon. The plane flew from Vienna to Frankfurt. The slight tingling (that was Wanga) quietly left Garp's flesh. When Garp thought of Charlotte, he imagined that Charlotte had been happy. After all, she had never had to leave the first district.

The plane flew from Frankfurt to London, Garp reread “The Pension Grillparzer” and hoped that Helen would not turn him down. From London to New York, Jenny read her son's story. In terms of what she'd spent more than a year doing, Garp's story struck Jenny as rather unreal. But her taste for literature was never keen and she marveled at her son's imagination. Later she would say that “The Pension Grillparzer” was just the sort of story she'd expect a boy without a proper family to make up.

Maybe so. Helen would later say that it is in the conclusion of “The Pension Grillparzer” that we can glimpse what the world according to Garp would be like.

The Pension Grillparzer [Conclusion]

In the breakfast room of the Pension Grillparzer we confronted Herr Theobald with the menagerie of his other guests who had disrupted our evening. I knew that (as never before) my father was planning to reveal himself as a Tourist Bureau spy.

“Men walking about on their hands,” said Father.

“Men looking under the floor of the W.C.,” said Grandmother.

“That man,” I said, and pointed to the small, sulking fellow at the corner table, seated for breakfast with his cohorts—the dream man and the Hungarian singer.

“He does it for his living,” Herr Theobold told us, and as if to demonstrate that this was so, the man who stood on his hands began to stand on his hands.

“Make him stop that,” Father said. “We know he can do it.”

“But did you know that he can't do it any other way?” the dream man asked suddenly. “Did you know his legs were useless? He has no shinbones. It is wonderful that he can walk on his hands! Otherwise, he wouldn't walk at all.” The man, although it was clearly hard to do while standing on his hands, nodded his head.

“Please sit down,” Mother said.

“It is perfectly all right to be crippled,” Grandmother said, boldly. “But you are evil,” she told the dream man. “You know things you have no right to know. He knew my dream,” she told Herr Theobald, as if she were reporting a theft from her room.

“He is a little evil, I know,” Theobald admitted. “But not usually! And he behaves better and better. He can't help what he knows.”

“I was just trying to straighten you out,” the dream man told Grandmother. “I thought it would do you good. Your husband has been dead quite a while, after all, and it's about time you stopped making so much of that dream. You're not the only person who's had such a dream.”

“Stop it,” Grandmother said.

“Well, you ought to know,” said the dream man.

“No, be quiet, please,” Herr Theobald told him.

“I am from the Tourist Bureau,” Father announced, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

“Oh my God shit!” Herr Theobald said.

“It's not Theobald's fault,” said the singer. “It's our fault. He's nice to put up with us, though it costs him his reputation.”

“They married my sister,” Theobald told us. “They are family, you see. What can I do?”

“They married your sister?” Mother said.

“Well, she married me first,” said the dream man.

“And then she heard me sing!” the singer said.

“She's never been married to the other one,” Theobald said, and everyone looked apologetically toward the man who could only walk on his hands.

Theobald said, “They were once a circus act, but politics got them in trouble.”

“We were the best in Hungary,” said the singer. “You ever hear of the Circus Szolnok?”

“No, I'm afraid not,” Father said, seriously.

“We played in Miskolc, in Szeged, in Debrecen,” said the dream man.

“Twice in Szeged,” the singer said.

“We would have made it to Budapest if it hadn't been for the Russians,” said the man who walked on his hands.

“Yes, it was the Russians who removed his shinbones!” said the dream man.

“Tell the truth,” the singer said. “He was born without shinbones. But it's true that we couldn't get along with the Russians.”

“They tried to jail the bear,” said the dream man.

“Tell the truth,” Theobald said.

“We rescued his sister from them,” said the man who walked on his hands.

“So of course I must put them up,” said Herr Theobald, “and they work as hard as they can. But who's interested in their act in this country? It's a Hungarian thing. There's no tradition of bears on unicycles here,” Theobald told us. “And the damn dreams mean nothing to us Viennese.”

“Tell the truth,” said the dream man. “It is because I have told the wrong dreams. We worked a nightclub on the Kдrntnerstrasse, but then we got banned.”

“You should never have told that dream,” the singer said gravely.

“Well, it was your wife's responsibility, too!” the dream man said.

“She was your wife, then,” the singer said.

“Please stop it,” Theobald begged.

“We get to do the balls for children's diseases,” the dream man said. “And some of the state hospitals—especially at Christmas.”

“If you would only do more with the bear,” Herr Theobald advised them.

“Speak to your sister about that,” said the singer. “It's her bear—she's trained him, she's let him get lazy and sloppy and full of bad habits.”

“He is the only one of you who never makes fun of me,” said the man who could only walk on his hands.

“I would like to leave all this,” Grandmother said. “This is, for me, an awful experience.”

“Please, dear lady,” Herr Theobold said, “we only wanted to show you that we meant no offense. These are hard times. I need the B rating to attract more tourists, and I can't—in my heart—throw out the Circus Szolnok.”

“In his heart , my ass!” said the dream man. “He's afraid of his sister. He wouldn't dream of throwing us out.”

“If he dreamed it, you would know it!” cried the man on his hands.

“I am afraid of the bear,” Herr Theobald said. “It does everything she tells it to do.”

“Say “he", not “it",” said the man on his hands. “He is a fine bear, and he never hurt anybody. He has no claws, you know perfectly well—and very few teeth, either.”

“The poor thing has a terribly hard time eating,” Herr Theobald admitted. “He is quite old, and he's messy.”

Over my father's shoulder, I saw him write in the giant pad: “A depressed bear and an unemployed circus. This family is centered on the sister.”

At that moment, out on the sidewalk, we could see her tending to the bear. It was early morning and the street was not especially busy. By law, of course, she had the bear on a leash, but it was a token control. In her startling red turban the woman walked up and down the sidewalk, following the lazy movements of the bear on his unicycle. The animal pedaled easily from parking meter to parking meter, sometimes leaning a paw on the meter as he turned. He was very talented on the unicycle, you could tell, but you could also tell that the unicycle was a dead end for him. You could see that the bear felt he could go no further with unicycling.

“She should bring him off the street now,” Herr Theobald fretted. “The people in the pastry shop next door complain to me,” he told us. “They say the bear drives their customers away.”

“That bear makes the customers come !” said the man on his hands.

“It makes some people come, it turns some away,” said the dream man. He was suddenly somber, as if his profundity had depressed him.

But we had been so taken up with the antics of the Circus Szolnok that we had neglected old Johanna. When my mother saw that Grandmother was quietly crying, she told me to bring the car around.

“It's been too much for her,” my father whispered to Theobald. The Circus Szolnok looked ashamed of themselves.

Outside on the sidewalk the bear pedaled up to me and handed me the keys; the car was parked at the curb. “Not everyone likes to be given the keys in that fashion,” Herr Theobald told his sister.

“Oh, I thought he'd rather like it,” she said, rumpling my hair. She was as appealing as a barmaid, which is to say that she was more appealing at night; in the daylight I could see that she was older than her brother, and older than her husbands too—and in time, I imagined, she would cease being lover and sister to them, respectively, and become a mother to them all. She was already a mother to the bear.

“Come over here,” she said to him. He pedaled listlessly in place on his unicycle, holding on to a parking meter for support. He licked the little glass face of the meter. She tugged his leash. He stared at her. She tugged again. Insolently, the bear began to pedal—first one way, then the next. It was as if he took interest, seeing that he had an audience. He began to show off.

“Don't try anything,” the sister said to him, but the bear pedaled faster and faster, going forward, going backward, angling sharply and veering among the parking meters; the sister had to let go of the leash. “Duna, stop it!” she cried, but the bear was out of control. He let the wheel roll too close to the curb and the unicycle pitched him hard into the fender of a parked car. He sat on the sidewalk with the unicycle beside him; you could tell that he hadn't injured himself but he looked very embarrassed and nobody laughed. “Oh, Duna,” the sister said, scoldingly, but she went over and crouched beside him at the curb. “Duna, Duna,” she reproved him, gently. He shook his big head; he would not look at her. There was some saliva strung on the fur near his mouth and she wiped this away with her hand. He pushed her hand away with his paw.

“Come back again!” cried Herr Theobald, miserably, as we got into our car.

Mother sat in the car with her eyes closed and her fingers massaging her temples; this way she seemed to hear nothing we said. She claimed it was her only defense against traveling with such a contentious family.

I did not want to report on the usual business concerning the care of the car, but I saw that Father was trying to maintain order and calm; he had the giant pad spread on his lap as if we'd just completed a routine investigation. “What does the gauge tell us?” he asked.

“Someone put thirty-five kilometers on it,” I said.

“That terrible bear has been in here,” Grandmother said. “There are hairs from the beast on the back seat, and I can smell him.”

“I don't smell anything,” Father said.

“And the perfume of that gypsy in the turban,” Grandmother said. “It is hovering near the ceiling of the car.” Father and I sniffed. Mother continued to massage her temples.

On the floor by the brake and clutch pedals I saw several of the mint-green toothpicks that the Hungarian singer was in the habit of wearing like a scar at the corner of his mouth. I didn't mention them. It was enough to imagine them all—out on the town, in our car. The singing driver, the man, on his hands beside him—waving out the window with his feet. And in back, separating the dream man from his former wife—his great head brushing the upholstered roof, his mauling paws relaxed in his large lap—the old bear slouched like a benign drunk.

“Those poor people,” Mother said, her eyes still closed.

“Liars and criminals,” Grandmother said. “Mystics and refugees and broken-down animals.”

“They were trying hard,” Father said, “but they weren't coming up with the prizes.”

“Better off in a zoo,” said Grandmother.

“I had a good time,” Robo said.

“It's hard to break out of Class C,” I said.

“They have fallen post Z,” said old Johanna. “They have disappeared from the human alphabet.”

“I think this calls for a letter,” Mother said.

But Father raised his hand—as if he were going to bless us—and we were quiet. He was writing in the giant pad and wished to be undisturbed. His face was stern. I knew that Grandmother felt confident of his verdict. Mother knew it was useless to argue. Robo was already bored. I steered us off through the tiny streets; I took Spiegelgasse to Lobkowitzplatz. Spiegelgasse is so narrow that you can see the reflection of your own car in the windows of the shops you pass, and I felt our movement through Vienna was superimposed(like that)—like a trick with a movie camera, as if we made a fairy-tale journey through a toy city.

When Grandmother was asleep in the car, Mother said, “I don't suppose that in this case a change in the classification will matter very much, one way or another.”

“No,” Father said, “not much at all.” He was right about that, though it would be years until I saw the Pension Grillparzer again.

When Grandmother died, rather suddenly and in her sleep, Mother announced that she was tired of traveling. The real reason, however, was that she began to find herself plagued by Grandmothers dream. “The horses are so thin,” she told me, once. “I mean, I always knew they would be thin, but not this thin. And the soldiers—I knew they were miserable,” she said, “but not that miserable.”

Father resigned from the Tourist Bureau and found a job with a local detective agency specializing in hotels and department stores. It was a satisfactory job for him, though he refused to work durinq the Christmas season—when, he said, some people ought to be allowed to steal a little.

My parents seemed to me to relax as they got older, and I really felt they were fairly happy near the end. I know that the strength of Grandmother's dream was dimmed by the real world, and specifically by what happened to Robo. He went to a private school and was well liked there, but he was killed by a homemade bomb in his first year at the university. He was not even “political.” In his last letter to my parents he wrote: “The self-seriousness of the radical factions among the students is much overrated. And the food is execrable.” Then Robo went to his history class, and his classroom was blown apart.

It was after my parents died that I gave up smoking and took up traveling again. I took my second wife back to the Pension Grillparzer. With my first wife, I never got as far as Vienna.

The Grillparzer had not kept Father's B rating very long, and it had fallen from the ratings altogether by the time I returned to it. Herr Theobald's sister was in charge of the place. Gone was her tort appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.

The Hungarian singer had gone away—another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away —to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.

Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pin-striped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.

The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator—where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed—marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.

After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna and the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced, Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.

For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbear-like and devious—only pretending to sleep—and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schцnbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.

His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schцnbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification—the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.

In the cold courtyard of the building I looked in the bear's empty cage. The birds hadn't left a fruit seed, but in a corner of his cage was a looming mound of the bear's ossified droppings—void of life, and even odor, as the corpses captured by the holocaust at Pompeii. I couldn't help thinking of Robo; of the bear, there were more remains.

In the car I was further depressed to notice that not one kilometer had been added to the gauge, not one kilometer had been driven in secret. There was no one around to take liberties anymore.

“When we're a safe distance away from your precious Pension Grillparzer,” my second wife said to me, “I'd like you to tell me why you brought me to such a shabby place.”

“It's a long story,” I admitted.

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her —as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.

 

MORE LUST

 

And so she married him; she did what he asked. Helen thought it was a pretty good story for a start. Old Tinch liked it, too. “It is rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow,” Tinch told Garp. Tinch recommended that Garp send “The Pension Grillparzer” to Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp waited three months for this reply:

The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.

Garp was puzzled and he showed the rejection to Tinch. Tinch was also puzzled.

“I guess they're interested in n-n-newer fiction,” Tinch said.

“What's that?” Garp asked.

Tinch admitted he didn't really know. “The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess,” Tinch said. “But I don't understand what it's really about. Sometimes it's about it-it-itself, I think,” Tinch said.

“About itself?” Garp said.

“It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction ,” Tinch told him.

Garp still didn't understand, but what mattered to Garp was that Helen liked the story.

Almost fifteen years later, when Garp published his third novel, that same editor at Tinch's favorite magazine would write Garp a letter. The letter would be very flattering to Garp, and to his work, and it would ask Garp to submit anything new he might have written to Tinch's favorite magazine. But T. S. Garp had a tenacious memory and the indignation of a badger. He found the old rejection note that had called his Grillparzer story “only mildly interesting", the note was crusty with coffee stains and had been folded so many times that it was torn at the creases, but Garp enclosed it with a letter to the editor at Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp's letter said:

I am only mildly interested in your magazine, and I am still doing nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for asking me, though.

Garp had a foolish ego that went out of its way to remember insults to and rejections of his work. It is fortunate for Helen that she had a ferocious ego of her own, for if she hadn't highly esteemed herself, she would have ended up hating him. As it was, they were lucky. Many couples live together and discover they're not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awkward moments in their lives. In the case of Garp and Helen, they hardly knew each other but they had their hunches—and in their stubborn, deliberate ways they fell in love with each other sometime after they had married.

Perhaps because they were so busy pursuing their singular careers they did not overscrutinize their relationship. Helen would graduate from college two years after she began; she would have a Ph.D. in English literature when she was only twenty-three, and her first job—an assistant professor at a women's college—when she was twenty-four. It would take Garp five years to finish his first novel, but it would be a good novel and it would earn him a respectable reputation for a young writer—even if it wouldn't make him any money. By then, Helen would be making money for them. All the time that Helen went to school, and Garp was writing, Jenny took care of the money.

Jenny's book was more of a shock to Helen, when she first read it, than it was to Garp—who, after all, had lived with his mother and was unsurprised by her eccentricity; it had become commonplace to him. Garp, however, was shocked by the book's success. He had not counted on becoming a public figure—a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own.

The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.

“There's a nurse to see you,” his secretary said, rolling her eyes—as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny's suitcase so heavy.

“It's about me,” she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. “When can you read it?” It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office while he read it. He glanced at the first sentence ("In this dirty-minded world..."), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of this one?

Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!—they would certainly publish this! —he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).

“Where can they go every night?” Jenny asked. “They don't come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don't even have a car.”

They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.

“They say they want children,” Ernie complained. “Helen should finish her education.”

“Garp will never finish a book, with children,” Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she'd had to wait eighteen years to begin her book.

“They're both hard workers,” Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.

“They'll have to be,” Jenny said.

“I don't know why they can't just live together,” Ernie said. “And if it works out, then let them get married—then let them have a baby.”

“I don't know why anyone wants to live with anyone else,” said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.

“Well, you like Garp living with you,” he reminded her, “and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she's away at school.”

“It's lust ,” Jenny said, ominously. “The world is sick with lust.”

Ernie felt worried about her; he didn't know she was about to become rich and famous forever. “Do you want a beer?” he asked Jenny.

“No, thank you,” Jenny said.

“They're good kids,” Ernie reminded her.

“But lust gets them all, in the end,” said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.

It was the “lust” chapter of A Sexual Suspect that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need—his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.

“Lust makes the best men behave out of character,” wrote Jenny Fields—a line that particularly infuriated Garp.

“What the hell does she know about it?” he screamed. “She never felt it, not once. Some authority she is! It's like listening to a plant describe the motives of a mammal!”

But other reviewers were kinder to Jenny; though the more serious journals occasionally chided her for her actual writing, the media, in general, felt warmly toward the book. “The first truly feminist autobiography that is as full of celebrating one kind of life as it is full of putting down another,” somebody wrote. “This brave book makes the important assertion that a woman can have a whole life without a sexual attachment of any kind,” wrote somebody else.

“These days,” John Wolf had forewarned Jenny, “you're either going to be taken as the right voice at the right time, or you're going to be put down as all wrong.” She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse's uniform—in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers—felt discomfort at the word feminism . She was not sure what it meant, but the word reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment. After all, her formal training had been nursing. She said shyly that she'd only thought she made the right choice about how to live her life, and since it had not been a popular choice, she'd felt goaded into saying something to defend it. Ironically, a rash of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee found Jenny's choice very popular; they generated a small controversy by plotting their own pregnancies. For a while, in New York, this syndrome among singular-minded women was called “doing a Jenny Fields.” But Garp always called it “doing a Grillparzer.” As for Jenny, she felt only that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

John Wolf liked Jenny Fields very much, and he did what he could to warn her that she might not understand either the attacks or the praise her book would receive. But Jenny never wholly understood how “political” a book it was—or how it would be used as such a book.

“I was trained to be a nurse,” she said later, in one of her disarming interviews. “Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy—and I have always been bealthy—to help people who weren't healthy or who couldn't help themselves. I think it was simply in that spirit that I wanted to write a book, too.”

In Garp's opinion, his mother never stopped being a nurse. She had nursed him through the Steering School; she had been a plodding midwife to her own strange life story; finally, she became a kind of nurse to women with problems. She became a figure of famous strength; women sought her advice. With the sudden success of A Sexual Suspect , Jenny Fields uncovered a nation of women who faced making choices about how to live; these women felt encouraged by Jenny's own example of making unpopular decisions.

She could have started an advice column for any newspaper, but Jenny Fields felt through with writing, now—just as she'd decided, once before, that she was through with education; just as she'd decided she was through with Europe. In a way, she was never through with nursing. Her father, the shocked shoe king, died of a heart attack shortly after the publication of A Sexual Suspect ; although Jenny's mother never blamed Jenny's book for the tragedy—and Jenny never blamed herself—Jenny knew that her mother could not live alone. Unlike Jenny Fields, Jenny's mother had developed a habit of living with someone else; she was old now, and Jenny thought of her as rattling about in the great rooms at Dog's Head Harbor, purposeless and wholly without her few remaining wits in the absence of her mate.

Jenny went to care for her, and it was at the Dog's Head Harbor Mansion that Jenny first began her role as counselor to the women who sought some comfort from her no-nonsense ability to make decisions.

“Even weird decisions!” Garp wailed, but he was happy, and taken care of. He and Helen had their first child, almost immediately. It was a boy named Duncan. Garp often joked that the reason his first novel was written with so many short chapters was because of Duncan. Garp wrote between feedings and naps and changes of diapers. “It was a novel of short takes,” he claimed, later, “and the credit is wholly Duncan's.” Helen was at school every day; she had agreed to have a child only if Garp would agree to take care of it. Garp loved the idea of never having to go out. He wrote and took care of Duncan; he cooked and wrote and took care of Duncan some more. When Helen came home, she came home to a reasonably happy homemaker; as long as Garp's novel progressed, no routine, however mindless, could upset him. In fact, the more mindless, the better. He left Duncan for two hours every day with the woman in the downstairs apartment; he went to the gym. He later became an oddity at the women's college where Helen taught—running endless laps around the field hockey field, or jumping rope for half an hour in a corner of the gymnasium reserved for gymnastics. He missed wrestling and complained to Helen that she should have gotten a job somewhere where there was a wrestling team; Helen complained that the English Department was too small, and she disliked having no male students in her classes, but it was a good job and she would keep it until something better came along.

Everything in New England is at least near everything else. They got to visit Jenny at the shore and Ernie at Steering. Garp would take Duncan to the Steering wrestling room and roll him around like a ball. “This is where your daddy wrestled,” he told him.

“It's where your daddy did everything ,” Helen told Duncan, referring—of course—to Duncan's own conception, and to her first rainy night with Garp in the locked and empty Seabrook Gymnasium, on the warm crimson mats stretching wall to wall.

“Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom .

When Jenny's mother died, Jenny visited Helen and Garp more frequently, though Garp objected to what he called his mother's “entourage.” Jenny Fields traveled with a small core of adorers, or with occasional other figures who felt they were part of what would be called the women's movement; they often wanted Jenny's support or her endorsement. There was often a case or a cause that needed Jenny's pure white uniform on the speaker's platform, although Jenny rarely spoke very much or for very long.

After the other speeches, they would introduce the author of A Sexual Suspect . In her nurse's uniform, she was instantly recognizable. Into her fifties, Jenny Fields would remain an athletically attractive woman, crisp and plain. She would rise and say, “This is right.” Or, sometimes, “This is wrong"—depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who'd made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman's problem.

The logic behind all this made Garp fume and stew for days, and once an interviewer from a women's magazine asked if she could come interview him about what it was like to be the son of a famous feminist. When the interviewer discovered Garp's chosen life, his “housewife's role,” as she gleefully called it, Garp blew up at her.

“I'm doing what I want to do,” he said. “Don't call it by any other name. I'm just doing what I want to do—and that's all my mother ever did, too. Just what she wanted to do.”

The interviewer pressed him; she said he sounded bitter. Of course, it must be hard, she suggested, being an unknown writer with a mother whose book was known around the world. Garp said it was mainly painful to be misunderstood, and that he did not resent his mother's success; he only occasionally disliked her new associates. “Those stooges who are living off her,” he said.

The article in the women's magazine pointed out that Garp was also “living off” his mother, very comfortably, and that he had no right to be hostile toward the women's movement. That was the first time Garp heard of it: “the women's movement.”

It was not many days after this that Jenny came to visit him. One of her goons, as Garp called them, was with her: a large, silent, sullen woman who lurked in the doorway of Garp's apartment and declined to take her coat off. She looked warily at little Duncan, as if she awaited, with extreme displeasure, the moment when the child might touch her.

“Helen's at the library,” Garp told Jenny. “I was going to take Duncan for a walk. You want to come?” Jenny looked questioningly at the big woman with her; the woman shrugged. Garp thought that mother's greatest weakness, since her success, was to be, in his words, “used by all the crippled and infirm women who wished they'd written A Sexual Suspect , or something equally successful.”

Garp resented standing cowed in his own apartment by his mother's speechless companion, a woman large enough to be his mother's bodyguard. Perhaps that's what she is, he thought. And an unpleasant image of his mother with a tough dyke escort crossed his mind—a vicious killer who would keep the men's hands off Jenny's white uniform.

“Is there something the matter with that woman's tongue , Mom?” Garp whispered to Jenny. The superiority of the big woman's silence outraged him; Duncan was trying to talk with her, but the woman merely fixed the child with a quieting eye. Jenny quietly informed Garp that the woman wasn't talking because the woman was without a tongue. Literally.

“It was cut off,” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Garp whispered. “How'd it happen?”

Jenny rolled her eyes; it was a habit she'd picked up from her son. “You really read nothing, don't you?” Jenny asked him. “You just never have bothered to keep up with what's going on.” What was “going on,” in Garp's opinion, was never as important as what he was making up—what he was working on. One of the things that upset him about his mother (since she'd been adopted by women's politics) was that she was always discussing the news .

“This is news , you mean?” Garp said. “It's such a famous tongue accident that I should have heard about it?”

“Oh, God,” Jenny said wearily. “Not a famous accident. Very deliberate.”

“Mother, did someone cut her tongue off?”

“Precisely.” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Garp said.

“You haven't heard of Ellen James?” Jenny asked.

“No.” Garp admitted.

“Well, there's a whole society of women now,” Jenny informed him, “because of what happened to Ellen James.”

“What happened to her?” Garp asked.

“Two men raped her when she was eleven years old,” Jenny said. “Then they cut her tongue off so she couldn't tell anyone who they were or what they looked like. They were so stupid that they didn't know an eleven-year-old could write . Ellen James wrote a very careful description of the men, and they were caught, and they were tried and convicted. In jail, someone murdered them.”

“Wow,” Garp said. “So that's Ellen James?” he whispered, indicating the big quiet woman with new respect.

Jenny rolled her eyes again. “No,” she said. “That is someone from the Ellen James Society . Ellen James is still a child, she's a wispy-looking little blond girl.”

“You mean this Ellen James Society goes around not talking,” Garp said, “as if they didn't have any tongues?”

“No, I mean they don't have any tongues,” Jenny said. “People in the Ellen James Society have their tongues cut off . To protest what happened to Ellen James.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said, looking at the large woman with renewed dislike.

“They call themselves Ellen Jamesians,” Jenny said.

“I don't want to hear any more of this shit, Mom,” Garp said.

“Well, that woman there is an Ellen Jamesian,” Jenny said. “You wanted to know.”

“How old is Ellen James now?” Garp asked.

“She's twelve,” Jenny said. “It happened only a year ago.”

“And these Ellen Jamesians,” Garp asked, “do they have meetings, and elect presidents and treasurers and stuff like that?”

“Why don't you ask her?” Jenny said, indicating the lunk by the door. “I thought you didn't want to hear any more about it.”

“How can I ask her if she doesn't have a tongue to answer me?” Garp hissed.

“She writes ,” Jenny said. “All Ellen Jamesians carry little note pads around with them and they write you what they want to say. You know what writing is, don't you?”

Fortunately, Helen came home.

Garp would see more of the Ellen Jamesians. Although he felt deeply disturbed by what had happened to Ellen James, he felt only disgust at her grown-up, sour imitators whose habit was to present you with a card. The card said something like:

Hello, I'm Martha. I'm an Ellen Jamesian. Do you know what an Ellen Jamesian is?

And if you didn't know, you were handed another card.

The Ellen Jamesians represented, for Garp, the kind of women who lionized his mother and sought to use her to help further their crude causes.

“I'll tell you something about those women, Mom,” he said to Jenny once. They were probably all lousy at talking, anyway; they probably never had a worthwhile thing to say in their lives—so their tongues were no great sacrifice; in fact, it probably saves them considerable embarrassment. If you see what I mean.”

“You're a little short on sympathy,” Jenny told him.

“I have lots of sympathy—for Ellen James,” Garp said.

“These women must have suffered, in other ways, themselves,” Jenny said. “That's what makes them want to get closer to each other.”

“And inflict more suffering on themselves, Mom?”

“Rape is every woman's problem,” Jenny said. Garp hated his mother's “everyone” language most of all. A case, he thought, of carrying democracy to an idiotic extreme.

“It's every man's problem, too, Mom. The next time there's a rape, suppose I cut my prick off and wear it around my neck. Would you respect that , too?”

“We're talking about sincere gestures,” Jenny said.

“We're talking about stupid gestures,” Garp said.

But he would always remember his first Ellen Jamesian—the big woman who came to his apartment with his mother; when she left, she wrote Garp out a note and slipped it into his hand as if it were a tip. ”

Mom's got a new bodyguard,” Garp whispered to Helen as they waved good-bye. Then he read the bodyguard's note.

Your mother is worth 2 of you,

the note said.

But he couldn't really complain about his mother; for the first five years Garp and Helen were married, Jenny paid their bills.

Garp joked that he called his first novel Procrastination because it had taken him so long to write it, but he had worked on it steadily and carefully; Garp was rarely a procrastinator.

The novel was called “historical.” It is set in the Vienna of the war years, 1938-45, and through the period of the Russian occupation. The main character is a young anarchist who has to lie low, after the Anschluss, waiting for just the right blow he can strike against the Nazis. He waits too long. The point being, he should better have struck before the Nazi takeover; but there is nothing he can be sure of, then, and he is too young to recognize what is happening. Also, his mother—a widow—cherishes her private life; unconcerned with politics, she hoards her dead husband's money.

Through the war years, the young anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schцnbrunn. When the population of Vienna begins seriously starving, and midnight raids on the zoo are a common source of stolen food, the anarchist decides to liberate the remaining animals—who are, of course, innocent of his country's own procrastination and its acquiescence to Nazi Germany. But by then the animals themselves are starving; when the anarchist frees them, they eat him. “That was only natural,” Garp wrote. The animals, in turn, are slaughtered easily by a starving mob now roaming Vienna for food—just ahead of the Russian forces. That, too, was “only natural.”

The anarchist's mother survives the war and lives in the Russian zone of occupation (Garp gave her the same apartment he and his mother shared on the Schwindgasse); the miserly widow's tolerance is finally wearied by the repeated atrocities she now sees committed by the Soviets—rape, chief among them. She watches the city restored to moderation and complacency, and she remembers her own inertia during the Nazi rise to power with great regret. Finally, the Russians leave; it is 1956, and Vienna retreats into itself again. But the woman mourns her son and her damaged country; she strolls the partially rebuilt and once again healthy zoo at Schцnbrunn every weekend, recalling her secretive visits to her son there, during the war. It is the Hungarian Revolution that prompts the old lady's final action. Hundreds of thousands of new refugees come into Vienna.

In an effort to awaken the complacent city—that it must not sit back and watch things develop again—the mother tries to do what her son did: she releases the animals in the Schцnbrunn Zoo. But the animals are well fed and content now; only a few of them can even be goaded into leaving their cages, and those who do wander out are easily confined in the Schцnbrunn paths and gardens; eventually they're returned to their cages, unharmed. One elderly bear suffers a bout of violent diarrhea. The old woman's gesture of liberation is well intended but it is completely meaningless and totally unrealized. The old woman is arrested and an examining police doctor discovers that she has cancer; she is a terminal case.

Finally, and ironically, her hoarded money is of some use to her. She dies in luxury—in Vienna's only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus. In her death dream she imagines that some animals escape from the zoo: a couple of young Asiatic Black Bears. She imagines them surviving and multiplying so successfully that they become famous as a new animal species in the valley of the Danube.

But this is only her imagination. The novel ends—after the old woman's death—with the death of the diarrhetic bear in the Schцnbrunn Zoo. “So much for revolution in modern times,” wrote one reviewer, who called Procrastination “an anti-Marxist novel.”

The novel was praised for the accuracy of its historical research—a point of no particular interest to Garp. It was also cited for originality and for having unusual scope for a first novel by such a young author. John Wolf had been Garp's publisher, and although he had agreed with Garp not to mention on the jacket flap that this was the first novel by the son of the feminist heroine Jenny Fields, there were few reviewers who failed to sound that chime.

“It is amazing that the now-famous son of Jenny Fields,” wrote one, “has actually grown up to be what he said he wanted to be when be grew up.” This, and other irrelevant cuteness concerning Garp's relationship to Jenny., made Garp very angry that his book couldn't be read and discussed for its own faults and/or merits, but John Wolf explained to him the hard fact that most readers were probably more interested in who he was than in what he'd actually written.

“Young Mr. Garp is still writing about bears,” chided one wit, who'd been energetic enough to uncover the Grillparzer story from its obscure publication. “Perhaps, when he grows up, he'll write something about people.”

But altogether, it was a literary debut more astonishing than most and more noticed. It was, of course, never a popular book, and it hardly made T. S. Garp into a brand name; it would not make him “the household product"—as he called her—that his mother had become. But it was not that kind of book; he was not that kind of writer, and never would be, John Wolf told him.

“What do you expect?” John Wolf wrote him. “If you want to be rich and famous, get in another line. If you're serious about it, don't bitch. You wrote a serious book, it was published seriously. If you want to make a living off it, you're talking about another world. And remember: you're twenty-four years old. I think you'll write a lot more books.”

John Wolf was an honorable and intelligent man, but Garp wasn't sure—and he wasn't content. He had made a little money, and now Helen had a salary; now that he didn't need Jenny's money, Garp felt all right about accepting some when she simply gave it out. And he felt he'd at least earned another reward to himself: he asked Helen to have another baby. Duncan was four; he was old enough to appreciate a brother or a sister. Helen agreed, knowing how easy Garp had made it for her to have Duncan. If he wanted to change diapers between the chapters of his next book, that was up to him.

But it was actually more than merely wanting a second child that prompted Garp to reproduce again. He knew he was an overwatchful, worrisome father and he felt he might relieve Duncan of some of the pressure of fatherly fears if there was another child to absorb some of Garp's excess anxiety.

“I'm very happy,” Helen told him. “If you want another baby, we'll make one. I just wish you'd relax , I wish you'd be happier. You wrote a good book, now you'll write another one. Isn't it just what you always wanted?”

But he bitched about the reviews of Procrastination , and he moaned about the sales. He carped at his mother, and roared about her “sycophantic friends.” Finally Helen said to him, “You want too much. Too much unqualified praise, or love—or something that's unqualified, anyway. You want the world to say, “I love your writing, I love you,” and that's too much to want. That's really sick, in fact.”

“That's what you said,” he reminded her, “I love your writing, I love you.” That's exactly what you said.”

“But there can only be one of me,” Helen reminded him.

Indeed, there would only be one of her, and he loved her very much. He would always call her “the wisest of my life's decisions.” He made some unwise decisions, he would admit; but in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, he was unfaithful to her only once—and it was brief.

It was a baby-sitter from the college where Helen taught, a freshman girl from Helen's Freshman English class; she was nice with Duncan, though Helen said that the girl was not a very special student. Her name was Cindy; she had read Garp's Procrastination , and she'd been properly awed. When he drove her home, she would ask him one question after another about his writing: How did you think of THAT? and what made you do it THIS way? She was a tiny thing, all flutters and twitches and coos—as trusting, as constant, and as stupid as a Steering pigeon. “Little Squab Bones,” Helen called her, but Garp was attracted; he called her nothing. The Percy family had given him a permanent dislike of nicknames. And he liked Cindy's questions.

Cindy was dropping out of school because she felt a women's college was not right for her; she needed to live with grownups, and with men, she said, and although the college allowed her to move off-campus—into her own apartment, in the second semester of her freshman year—still she felt the college was too “restricted” and she wanted to live in a “more real environment.” She imagined that Garp's Vienna had been a “more real environment,” though Garp struggled to assure her that it had not been. Little Squab Bones, Garp thought, was puppy-brained, and as soft and as easily influenced as a banana. But he wanted her, he realized, and he saw her as simply available—like the whores on the Kдrntnerstrasse, she would be there when he asked her. And she would cost him only lies.

Helen read him a review from a famous news magazine; the review called Procrastination “a complex and moving novel with sharp historic resonances...the drama encompasses the longings and agonies of youth.”

“Oh fuck “the longings and agonies of youth,"” Garp said. One of those youthful longings was embarrassing him now.

As for the “drama": in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, T. S. Garp experienced only one real-life drama, and it did not have that much to do with him.

Garp had been running in the city park when he found the girl, a naked ten-year-old running ahead of him on the bridle path. When she realized he was gaining on her, she fell down and covered her face, then covered her crotch, then tried to hide her insubstantial breasts. It was a cold day, late fall, and Garp saw the blood on the child's thighs and her frightened, swollen eyes. She screamed and screamed at him.

“What happened to you?” he asked, though he knew very well. He looked all around them, but there was no one there. She hugged her raw knees to her chest and screamed. “I won't hurt you,” Garp said. “I want to help you.” But the child wailed even louder. My God, of course! Garp thought: the terrible molester had probably said those very words to her, not long ago. “Where did he go?” Garp asked her. Then he changed his tone, trying to convince her he was on her side. “I'll kill him for you,” he told her. She stared quietly at him, her head shaking and shaking, her fingers pinching and pinching the tight skin on her arms. “Please,” Garp said, “can you tell me where your clothes are?” He had nothing to give her to wear except his sweaty T-shirt. He was dressed in his running shorts, his running shoes. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and felt instantly cold; the girl cried out, awfully loud, and hid her face. “No, don't be frightened, it's for you to put on,” Garp told her. He let the T-shirt drop on her but she writhed out from under it and kicked at it; then she opened her mouth very wide and bit her own fist.

“She was not old enough to be Boy or Girl yet,” Garp, wrote. “Only in the pudginess around her nipples was there anything faintly girlish. There was certainly no visible sex about her hairless pudenda, and she had a child's sexless hands. Perhaps there was something sensual about her mouth—her lips were puffy—but she had not done that to herself.”

Garp began to cry. The sky was gray, dead leaves were all around them, and when Garp began to wail aloud, the girl picked up his T-shirt and covered herself with it. They were in this queer position to each other—the child crouched under Garp's T-shirt, cringing at Garp's feet with Garp crying over her—when the mounted park police, a twosome, rode up the bridle path and spotted the apparent child molester with his victim. Garp wrote that one of the policemen split the girl and Garp apart by steering his horse between them, “nearly trampling the girl.” The other policeman brought his billy down on Garp's collarbone; one side of his body, he wrote, felt paralyzed—"but not the other.” With “the other” Garp unseated the policeman and tipped him from the saddle. “It's not me , you son of a bitch!” Garp howled. “I just found her, just here—just a minute ago.”

The policeman, sprawled in the leaves, held his drawn gun very still. The other policeman, mounted and prancing, shouted to the girl. “Is it him ?” he yelled. The child seemed terrified of the horses. She stared back and forth from the horses to Garp. She probably isn't sure what happened , Garp thought—much less who. But the girl, violently, shook her head. “Where'd he go?” said the policeman on his horse. But the girl still looked at Garp. She tugged her chin and rubbed her cheeks—she tried to talk to him with her hands. Apparently, her words were gone; or her tongue, Garp thought, recalling Ellen James.

“It's the beard ,” said the cop in the leaves; he had gotten to his feet but he had not holstered his gun. “She's telling us there was a beard,” Garp had a beard then.

“It was someone with a beard,” said Garp. “Like mine ?” he asked the girl, stroking his dark, round beard, glossy with sweat. But she shook her head and ran her fingers over her sore upper lip.

“A mustache!” cried Garp, and the girl nodded.

She pointed back the way Garp had come, but Garp remembered seeing no one near the entrance to the park. The policeman hunched on his horse and through the thrown leaves he rode away from them. The other policeman was calming his horse, but he had not remounted. “Cover her, or find her clothes,” Garp said to him; he started to run down the bridle path after the first policeman; he knew there were things you could see from ground level that you couldn't see on a horse. Also, Garp was such a fool about his running that he imagined he could outlast, if not outrun, any horse.

“Hey, you better wait here!” the policeman called after him, but Garp was in stride and clearly not stopping.

He followed the great rents in the ground that the horse had made. He had not gone even half a mile back along the path before he saw the bent figure of a man, maybe twenty-five yards off the path and almost hidden by the trees. Garp yelled at the figure, an elderly gentleman with a white mustache, who looked over his shoulder at Garp with an expression so surprised and ashamed that Garp was sure he'd found the child molester. He thundered through the vines and small, whiplike trees to the man, who had been peeing and was hastening to fold himself back into his trousers. He looked very much like a man caught doing something he shouldn't have done.

“I was just...” the man began, but Garp was upon him and thrust his stiff, cropped beard into the man's face. Garp sniffed him over like a hound.

“If it's you, you bastard, I can smell it on you!” Garp said. The man flinched away from this half-naked brute, but Garp seized both the man's wrists and snapped the man's hands up under his nose. He sniffed again, and the man cried out as if he feared Garp was going to bite him. “Hold still!” Garp said. “Did you do it? Where are the child's clothes?”

“Please!” the man piped. “I was just going to the bathroom.” He had not had time to close his fly and Garp eyed his crotch suspiciously.

“There is no smell like sex,” Garp wrote. “You cannot disguise it. It is as rich and clear as spilled beer.”

So Garp dropped to his knees in the woods and unbuckled the man's belt and tore open the man's pants and yanked the man's undershorts straight down to the man's ankles; he stared at the man's frightened equipment.

“Help!” the old gentleman screamed. Garp took a deep sniff and the man collapsed in the young trees; staggering like a puppet strung under the arms, he thrashed in a thicket of slender trunks and branches too dense to allow him to fall. “Help, God !” he cried, but Garp was already running back out to the bridle path, his legs digging through the leaves, his arms pummeling the air, his struck collarbone throbbing.

At the entrance to the park the mounted policeman clattered about the parking lot, peering in parked cars, circling the squat brick hut where the rest rooms were. A few people watched him, sensing his eagerness. “No mustaches,” the policeman called to Garp.

“If he got back here before you did, he could have driven away,” Garp said.

“Go look in the men's room,” the policeman said, riding toward a woman with a baby carriage piled high with blankets.

Every men's room made Garp remember every W.C.; at the door to this sour place, Garp passed a young man who was just leaving. He was clean-shaven, his upper lip so smooth that it almost shone; he looked like a college kid. Garp entered the men's room like a dog with his hair standing up on the back of his neck and his hackles curling. He checked for feet under the crapper-stall doors; he would not have been surprised to see a pair of hands—or a bear. He looked for backs turned toward him at the long urinal—or for anyone at the dirty brown sinks, peering into the pitted mirrors. But there was no one in the men's room. Garp sniffed. He had worn a full but trimmed beard for a long time and the smell of shaving cream was not instantly recognizable to him. He just knew he smelled something foreign to this dank place. Then he looked in the nearest sink: he saw the gobs of lather, he saw the whiskers rimming the bowl.

The young, clean-shaven man who looked like a college kid was crossing the parking lot, quickly but calmly, when Garp came out the men's room door. “It's him !” Garp hollered. The mounted cop looked at the young molester, puzzled.

“He doesn't have a mustache,” the policeman said.

“He just shaved it off!” Garp cried; he ran across the lot, straight at the kid, who began to run toward the maze of paths lacing the park. A litter of things flew out from under his jacket as he ran: Garp saw the scissors, a razor, a shaving cream can, and then came the little batches of clothes—the girl's, of course. Her jeans with a ladybug sewn at the hip, a jersey with the beaming face of a frog on the breast. Of course there was no bra; there was no need. It was her panties that got to Garp. They were simply cotton, and a simple blue, stitched at the waistband was a blue flower, sniffed at by a blue bunny.

The mounted policeman simply rode over the kid who was running away. The chest of the horse pounded the kid face forward into the cinder entry path and one rear hoof took a U-shaped bite of flesh out of the kid's calf; he curled, fetal, on the ground, holding his leg. Garp came up then, the girl's blue-bunny panties in his hand; he gave them to the mounted cop. Other people—the woman with the blanketed carriage, two boys on bikes, a thin man carrying a newspaper—approached them. They brought the cop the other things the kid had dropped. The razor, the rest of the girl's clothes. Nobody spoke, Garp wrote later that at that moment he saw the short history of the young child molester spread out at the horse's hooves: the scissors, the shaving cream can. Of course! The kid would grow a mustache, attack a child, shave the mustache (which would be all most children would remember).

“Have you done this before?” Garp asked the kid. ”

You're not supposed to ask him anything,” the policeman said. But the kid grinned stupidly at Garp. “I've never been caught before,” he told him, cockily. When he smiled, Garp saw that the young man had no upper front teeth: the horse had kicked them out. There was just a bleeding flap of gum. Garp realized that something had probably happened to this kid so that he didn't feel very much—not much pain, not much of anything else.

Out of the woods at the end of the bridle path the second policeman came walking his horse—the child in the saddle, covered by the policeman's coat. She clutched Garp's T-shirt in her hands. She did not seem to recognize anybody. The policeman led her right up to where the molester lay on the ground, but she didn't really look at him. The first policeman dismounted; he went to the molester and tilted his bleeding face up toward the child. “Him?” he asked her. She stared at the young man, blankly. The molester gave a short laugh, spat out a mouthful of blood; the child made no response. Then Garp gently touched his finger to the molester's mouth; with the blood on his finger, Garp lightly smeared a mustache on the young man's upper lip, tbe child began to scream and scream. The horses needed quieting. The child kept screaming until the second policeman took the molester away. Then she stopped screaming and gave Garp back his T-shirt. She kept patting the thick ridge of black hair on the back of the horse's neck as if she had never been on a horse before.

Garp thought it must have hurt her to sit on horse back, but suddenly she asked, “Can I have another ride?” Garp was at least glad to hear that she had a tongue.

It was then that Garp saw the nattily dressed, elderly gentleman whose mustache had been innocent; he was making his meek way out of the park, coming cautiously into the parking lot, looking anxiously about for the madman who'd so savagely snatched his pants down and sniffed him like some dangerous omnivore. When the man saw Garp standing beside the policeman, he seemed relieved—he assumed Garp had been apprehended—and he more boldly walked toward them. Garp contemplated running—to avoid the confusion, the explanation—but just then the policeman said, “I have to get your name. And what it is that you do. Besides run in the park.” He laughed.

“I'm a writer,” Garp told him. The policeman was apologetic that he hadn't heard of Garp, but at the time Garp hadn't published anything except “The Pension Grillparzer"—there was very little the policeman could have read. This seemed to puzzle the policeman.

“An unpublished writer?” he asked. Garp was rather glum about it. “Then what do you do for a living?” the policeman said.

“My wife and my mother support me,” Garp admitted.

“Well, I have to ask you what they do,” the policeman said. “For the record, we like to know how everyone makes a living.”

The offended gentleman with the white mustache, who had overheard only the last bits of this interrogation, said, “Just as I would have thought! A vagrant, a despicable bum!”

The policeman stared at him. In his early, unpublished years Garp felt angry whenever he was forced to admit how he had enough to live on; he felt more like inviting confusion at this moment than he felt moved to clear things up.

“I'm glad to see you've caught him, anyway,” the old gentleman said. “This used to be a nice park, but the people who get in here these days—you ought to patrol it more closely,” he told the policeman, who guessed that the old man was referring to the child molester. The cop didn't want the business discussed in front of the child, so he rolled his eyes up toward her—she sat rigid in the saddle—and tried to indicate to the old gentleman why he shouldn't continue.

“Oh no, he didn't do it to that child! ” the man cried, as if he'd just noticed her, mounted beside him, or just noticed she was not dressed under the policeman's coat—her small clothes bugged in her arms. “How vile!” he cried, glaring at Garp. “How disgusting! You'll want my name, of course?” he asked the policeman.

“What for?” the policeman said. Garp had to smile.

“Look at him smirking there!” the old man cried. “Why, as a witness , of course—I'd tell my story to any court in the country, if it could condemn such a man as that!”

“But what were you a witness to?” the policeman said.

“Why, he did that...thing...to me , too!” the man said.

The policeman looked at Garp; Garp rolled his eyes. The policeman still clung to the sanity that the old gentleman was referring to the child molester, but he didn't understand why Garp was being treated with such abuse. “Well, sure,” the policeman said, to humor the old fool. He took his name and address.

Months later Garp was buying a package of three prophylactics when this same old gentleman walked into the drugstore.

“What?! It's you !” the old man shouted. “They let you out already, did they? I thought they'd put you away for years! ”

It took Garp a moment to recognize the person. The druggist assumed that the old codger was a lunatic. The gentleman in his trimmed, white mustache advanced cautiously on Garp.

“What's the law coming to?” he asked. “I suppose you're out on good behavior? No old men or young girls to sniff in prison, I suppose! Or some lawyer got you off on some slick technicality? That poor child traumatized for all her years and you're free to roam the parks!”

“You've made a mistake,” Garp told him.

“Yes, this is Mr. Garp,” the druggist said. He didn't add, “the writer.” If he'd considered adding anything, Garp knew, it would have been “the hero,” because the druggist had seen the ludicrous newspaper headlines about the crime and capture in the park.

UNSUCCESSFUL WRITER NO FAILURE AS HERO!

CITIZEN CATCHES PARK PERVERT;

SON OF FAMOUS FEMINIST HAS KNACK FOR HELPING GIRLS...

Garp was unable to write for months because of it, but the article impressed all the locals who knew Garp only from the super-market, the gymnasium, the drugstore. In the meantime, Procrastination had been published—but almost no one seemed to know. For weeks, clerks and salespeople would introduce him to other customers: “Here's Mr. Garp, the one who nabbed that molester in the park.”

“What molester?”

“That one in city park. The Mustache Kid. He went after little girls.”

“Children?”

“Well, Mr. Garp here is the one who got him.”

“Well, actually,” Garp would say, “it was the policeman on his horse.”

“Knocked all his teeth down his throat, too!” they would crow with delight—the druggist and the clerk and the salespeople here and there.

“Well, that was actually the horse,” Garp admitted, modestly.

And sometimes someone would ask, “And what is it you do , Mister Garp?”

The following silence would pain Garp, as he stood thinking that it was probably best to say that he ran —for a living. He cruised the parks, a molester-nabber by profession. He hung around phone booths, like that man in the cape—waiting for disasters. Any of this would make more sense to them than what he really did.

“I write,” Garp would finally admit. Disappointment—even suspicion—all over their once-admiring faces.

In the drugstore—to make matters worse—Garp dropped the package of three prophylactics.

“A-ha !” the old man cried. “Look there! What's he up to with those?”

Garp wondered what options there were for what he could be up to with those.

“A pervert on the loose,” the old man assured the druggist. “Looking for innocence to violate and defile!”

The old geezer's self-righteousness was irritating to the point that Garp had no desire to settle the misunderstanding; in fact, he rather enjoyed the “memory of unpantsing the old bird in the park and he was not in the least sorry for the accident.

It was some time later when Garp realized that the old gentleman had no monopoly on self-righteousness. Garp took Duncan to a high school basketball game and was appalled that the ticket-taker was none other than the Mustache Kid—the real molester, the attacker of that helpless child in the city park.

“You're out ,” Garp said, amazed. The pervert smiled openly at Duncan.

“One adult, one kiddy,” he said, tearing off tickets.

“How'd you ever get free?” Garp asked; he felt himself tremble with violence.

“Nobody proved nothing,” the kid said, haughtily. “That dumb girl wouldn't even talk .” Garp thought again of Ellen James with her tongue cut off at eleven.

He felt a sudden sympathy for the madness of the old man he had so unpleasantly unpantsed. He felt such a terrible sense of injustice that he could even imagine some very unhappy woman despairing enough to cut off her own tongue. He knew that he wanted to hurt the Mustache Kid, on the spot—in front of Duncan. He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.

But there was a crowd wanting basketball tickets; Garp was holding things up.

“Move along, hair pie,” the kid said to Garp. In the kid's expression, Garp thought he recognized the leer of the world. On the kid's upper lip was the insipid evidence that he was growing another mustache...

It was years later when he saw the child, a girl grown up; it was only because she recognized him that he recognized her. He was coming out of a movie theater in another town; she was in the line waiting to come in. Some of her friends were with her.

“Hello, how are you?” Garp asked. He was glad to see she had friends. That meant, to Garp, that she was normal.

“Is it a good movie?” the girl asked.

“You've certainly grown!” Garp said; the girl blushed and Garp realized what a stupid thing he'd said. “Well, I mean it's been a long time—and it was a time well worth forgetting!” he added, heartily. Her friends were moving inside the movie theater and the girl gave a quick look after them to make sure she was really alone with Garp.

“Yes, I'm graduating this month,” she said.

“High school?” Garp wondered aloud. Could it have been that long ago?

“Oh no, junior high,” the girl said, laughing nervously.

“Wonderful!” Garp said. And without knowing why, he said, “I'll try to come.”

But the girl looked suddenly stricken. “No, please,” she said. “Please don't come.”

“Okay, I won't,” Garp agreed quickly.

He saw her several times after this meeting, but she never recognized him again because he shaved off his beard. “Why don't you grow another beard?” Helen occasionally asked him. “Or at least a mustache.” But whenever Garp encountered the molested girl, and escaped unrecognized, he was convinced he should remain clean-shaven.

“I feel uneasy,” Garp wrote, “that my life has come in contact with so much rape.” Apparently, he was referring to the ten-year-old in the city park, to the eleven-year-old Ellen James and her terrible society—his mother's wounded women with their symbolic, self-inflicted speechlessness. And later he would write a novel, which would make Garp more of “a household product,” which would have much to do with rape. Perhaps rape's offensiveness to Garp was that it was an act that disgusted him with himself—with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise so unassailable. He never felt like raping anyone; but rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilt by association.

In Garp's own case, he likened his guilt for the seduction of Little Squab Bones to a rapelike situation. But it was hardly a rape. It was deliberate, though. He even bought the condoms weeks in advance, knowing what he would use them for. Are not the worst crimes premeditated? It would not be a sudden passion for the baby-sitter that Garp would succumb to; he would plan, and be ready when Cindy succumbed to her passion for him. It must have given him a twinge, then, to know what those rubbers were for when he dropped them in front of the gentleman from the city park and heard the old man accuse him: “Looking for innocence to violate and defile!” How true.

Still, he arranged obstacles in the path of his desire for the girl; he twice hid the prophylactics, but he also remembered where he'd hidden them. And the day of the last evening that Cindy would baby-sit for them, Garp made desperate love to Helen in the late afternoon. When they should have been dressing for dinner, or fixing Duncan's supper, Garp locked the bedroom and wrestled Helen out of her closet.

“Are you crazy?” she asked him. “We're going out.”

“Terrible lust,” he pleaded. “Don't deny it.”

She teased him. “Please , sir, I make a point of never doing it before the hors d'oeuvres.”

“You're the hors d'oeuvres,” Garp said.

“Oh, thanks ,” said Helen.

“Hey, the door's locked,” Duncan said, knocking. “Duncan,” Garp called, “go tell us what the weather is doing.”

“The weather?” Duncan said, trying to force the bedroom door.

“I think it's snowing in the backyard!” Garp called. “Go see.”

Helen stifled her laughter, and her other sounds, against his hard shoulder; he came so quickly he surprised her. Duncan trotted back to the bedroom door, reporting that it was springtime in the backyard, and everywhere else. Garp let him in the bedroom now that he was finished.

But he wasn't finished. He knew it—driving home with Helen from the party, he knew exactly where the rubbers were: under his typewriter, quiet these dull months since the publication of Procrastination .

“You look tired,” Helen said. “Want me to take Cindy home?”

“No, that's okay,” he mumbled. “I'll do it.”

Helen smiled at him and nuzzled her cheek against his mouth. “My wild afternoon lover,” she whispered. “You can always take me out to dinner that way, if you like.”

He sat a long time with Little Squab Bones in the car outside her dark apartment. He had chosen the time well—the college was letting out; Cindy was leaving town. She was already upset at having to say goodbye to her favorite writer; he was, at least, the only writer she'd actually met.

“I'm sure you'll have a good year, next year, Cindy," he said. “And if you come back to see anyone, please stop and see us, Duncan will miss you.” The girl stared into the cold lights of the dashboard, then looked over at Garp, miserably—tears and the whole flushed story on her face.

“I'll miss you ,” she whined.

“No, no,” Garp said. “Don't miss me.”

“I love you,” she whispered, and let her slim head bump awkwardly against his shoulder.

“No, don't say that,” he said, not touching her. Not yet.

The three-pack of condoms nestled patiently in his pocket, coiled like snakes.

In her musty apartment, he used only one of them. To his surprise, all her furniture had been moved out; they jammed her lumpy suitcases together and made an uncomfortable bed. He was careful not to stay a second more than necessary, lest Helen think he'd spent too long a time for even a literary goodbye.

A thick swollen stream ran through the women's college grounds and Garp discarded the remaining two prophylactics there, throwing them furtively out the window of his moving car—imagining that an alert campus cop might have seen him and would already be scrambling down the bank to retrieve the evidence: the rubbers plucked out of the current! The discovered weapon that leads back to the crime for which it was used.

But no one saw him, no one found him out. Even Helen, already asleep, would not have found the smell of sex peculiar: after all, only hours before, he had legitimately acquired the odor. Even so, Garp showered, and slipped cleanly into his own safe bed; he curled against Helen, who murmured some affection; instinctively, she thrust one long thigh over his hip. When he failed to respond, she forced her buttocks back against him. Garp's throat ached at her trust, and at his love for her. He felt fondly the slight swell of Helen's pregnancy.

Duncan was a healthy, bright child. Garp's first novel had at least made him what he said he wanted to be. Lust still troubled Garp's young life, but he was fortunate that his wife still lusted for him, and he for her. Now a second child would join their careful, orderly adventure. He felt Helen's belly anxiously—for a kick, a sign of life. Although he'd agreed with Helen that it would be nice to have a girl, Garp hoped for another boy.

Why? he thought. He recalled the girl in the park, his image of the tongueless Ellen James, his own mother's difficult decisions. He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate her. But he remembered the Kдrntnerstrasse whores, and Cushie Percy (who would die making a baby). And now—her scent still on him, or at least on his mind, although he had washed—the plundered Little Squab Bones. Cindy had cried under him, her back bent against a suitcase. A blue vein had pulsed at her temple, which was the translucent temple of a fair-skinned child. And though Cindy still had her tongue, she'd been unable to speak to him when he left her.

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men . Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me .

 

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