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THE FIRST FEMINIST FUNERAL, AND OTHER FUNERALS



 

EVER since Walt died,” wrote T. S. Garp, “my life has felt like an epilogue.”

When Jenny Fields died, Garp must have felt his bewilderment increase—that sense of time passing with a plan. But what was the plan?

Garp sat in John Wolf's New York office, trying to comprehend the plethora of plans surrounding his mother's death.

“I didn't authorize a funeral,” Garp said. “How can there be a funeral? Where is the body, Roberta?”

Roberta Muldoon said patiently that the body was where Jenny wanted her body to go. It was not her body that mattered, Roberta said. There was simply going to be a kind of memorial service; it was better not to think of it as a “funeral.”

The newspapers had said it was to be the first feminist funeral in New York.

The police had said that violence was expected.

“The first feminist funeral?” Garp said.

“She meant so much to so many women,” Roberta said. “Don't be angry. You didn't own her, you know.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes.

Duncan Garp looked out the window of John Wolf's office, forty floors above Manhattan. It probably felt to Duncan a little like being on the plane he had just got off.

Helen was making a phone call in another office. She was trying to reach her father in the good old town of Steering; she wanted Ernie to meet their plane out of New York when it landed in Boston.

“All right,” Garp said, slowly; he held the baby, little Jenny Garp, on his knee. “All right. You know I don't approve of this, Roberta, but I'll go.”

“You'll go ?” John Wolf said.

“No!” Roberta said. “I mean, you don't have to,” she said.

“I know,” Garp said. “But yo're right. She probably would have liked such a thing, so I'll go. What's going to happen at it?”

“There's going to be a lot of speeches,” Roberta said. “You don't want to go.”

“And they're going to read from her book,” John Wolf said. “We've donated some copies.”

“But you don't want to go, Garp,” Roberta said, nervously. “Please don't go.”

“I want to go,” Garp said. “I promise you I won't hiss or boo—no matter what the assholes say about her. I have something of hers I might read myself, if anyone's interested,” he said. “Did you ever see that thing she wrote about being called a feminist?” Roberta and John Wolf looked at each other; they looked stricken and gray. “She said, “I hate being called one, because it's a label I didn't choose to describe my feelings about men or the way I write."”

“I don't want to argue with you, Garp,” Roberta said. “Not now. You know perfectly well she said other things, too. She was a feminist, whether she liked the label or not. She was simply one for pointing out all the injustices to women; she was simply for allowing women to live their own lives and make their own choices.”

“Oh?” said Garp. “And did she believe that everything that happened to women happened to them because they were women?”

“You have to be stupid to believe that, Garp,” Roberta said. “You make us all sound like Ellen Jamesians.”

“Please stop it, both of you,” John Wolf said.

Jenny Garp squawked briefly and slapped Garp's knee; he looked at her, surprised—as if he'd forgotten she was a live thing there in his lap.

“What is it?” he asked her. But the baby was quiet again, watching some pattern in the landscape of John Wolf's office that was invisible to the rest of them.

“What time is this wingding?” Garp asked Roberta.

“Five o'clock in the afternoon,” Roberta said.

“I believe it was chosen,” John Wolf said, “so that half the secretaries in New York could walk off their jobs an hour early.”

“Not all the working women in New York are secretaries,” Roberta said.

“The secretaries,” said John Wolf, “are the only ones who'll be missed between four and five.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

Helen came in and announced that she could not reach her father on the phone.

“He's at wrestling practice,” Garp said.

“The wrestling season hasn't begun yet,” Helen said. Garp looked at the calendar on his watch, which was several hours out of sync with the United States; he had last set it in Vienna. But Garp knew that wrestling at Steering did not officially begin until after Thanksgiving. Helen was right.

“When I called his office at the gym, they said he was at home,” Helen told Garp. “And when I called home, there was no answer.”

“We'll rent a car at the airport,” Garp said. “And anyway, we can't leave until tonight. I have to go to this damn funeral.”

“No, you don't have to,” Roberta insisted.

“In fact,” Helen said, “you can't .”

Roberta and John Wolf again looked stricken and gray; Garp simply looked uninformed.

“What do you mean, I can't?” he asked.

“It's a feminist funeral,” Helen said. “Did you read the paper, or did you stop at the headlines?”

Garp looked accusingly at Roberta Muldoon, but she looked at Duncan looking out the window. Duncan had his telescope out, spying on Manhattan.

“You can't go, Garp,” Roberta admitted. “It's true. I didn't tell you because I thought it would really piss you off. I didn't think you'd want to go, anyway.”

“I'm not allowed ?” Garp said.

“It's a funeral for women ,” Roberta said. “Women loved her, women will mourn her. That's how we wanted it.”

Garp glared at Roberta Muldoon. “I loved her,” he said. “I'm her only child. Do you mean I can't go to this wingding because I'm a man?”

“I wish you wouldn't call it a wingding,” Roberta said.

“What's a wingding?” Duncan asked.

Jenny Garp squawked again, but Garp didn't listen to her. Helen took her from him.

“Do you mean no men are allowed at my mother's funeral?” Garp asked Roberta.

“It's not exactly a funeral, as I told you,” Roberta said. “It's more like a rally—it's a kind of reverent demonstration.”

“I'm going, Roberta,” Garp said. “I don't care what you call it.”

“Oh boy,” Helen said. She walked out of the office with baby Jenny. “I'm going to try to get my father again,” she said.

“I see a man with one arm,” Duncan said.

“Please don't go, Garp,” Roberta said softly.

“She's right,” John Wolf said. “I wanted to go, too. I was her editor, after all. But let them have it their way, Garp. I think Jenny would have liked the idea.”

“I don't care what she would have liked,” Garp said.

“That's probably true,” Roberta said. “That's another reason you shouldn't be there.”

“You don't know, Garp, how some of the women's movement people have reacted to your book ,” John Wolf advised him.

Roberta Muldoon rolled her eyes. The accusation that Garp was cashing in on his mother's reputation, and the women's movement, had been made before. Roberta had seen the advertisement for The World According to Bensenhaver , which John Wolf had instantly authorized upon Jenny's assassination. Garp's book appeared to cash in on that tragedy, too—the ad conveyed a sick sense of a poor author who's lost a son “and now a mother, too.”

It is fortunate Garp never saw that ad; even John Wolf regretted it.

The World According to Bensenhaver sold and sold and sold. For years it would be controversial; it would be taught in colleges. Fortunately, Garp's other books would be taught in colleges, sporadically, too. One course taught Jenny's autobiography together with Garp's three novels and Stewart Percy's A History of Everett Steering's Academy . The purpose of that course, apparently, was to figure out everything about Garp's life by hunting through the books for those things that appeared to be true .

It is fortunate Garp never knew anything about that course, either.

“I see a man with one leg,” announced Duncan Garp, searching the streets and windows of Manhattan for all the crippled and misarranged—a task that could take years.

“Please stop it, Duncan,” Garp said to him.

“If you really want to go, Garp,” Roberta Muldoon whispered to him, “you'll have to go in drag.”

“If it's all that tough for a man to get in,” Garp snapped at Roberta, “you better hope they don't have a chromosome check at the door.” He felt instantly sorry he'd said that; he saw Roberta wince as if he'd slapped her and he took both her big hands in his and held them until he felt her squeeze him back. “Sorry,” he whispered. “If I've got to go in drag, it's a good thing you're here to help me dress up. I mean, you're an old hand at that, right?”

“Right,” Roberta said.

“This is ridiculous,” John Wolf said.

“If some of those women recognize you,” Roberta told Garp, “they'll tear you limb from limb. At the very least, they won't let you in the door.”

Helen came back in the office, with Jenny Garp squawking on her hip.

“I've called Dean Bodger,” she told Garp. “I asked him to try to reach Daddy. It's just not like him, to be nowhere.”

Garp shook his head.

“We should just go to the airport now,” Helen told him. “Rent a car in Boston, drive to Steering. Let the children rest,” she said. “Then if you want to run back to New York on some crusade, you can do it.”

You go,” Garp said. “I'll take a plane and rent my own car later.”

“That's silly,” Helen said.

“And needlessly expensive,” Roberta said.

“I have a lot of money now,” Garp said; his wry smile to John Wolf was not returned.

John Wolf volunteered to take Helen and the kids to the airport.

“One man with one arm, one man with one leg, two people who limped,” said Duncan, “and someone without any nose.”

“You should wait awhile and get a look at your father,” Roberta Muldoon said.

Garp thought of himself: a grieving ex-wrestler, in drag for his mother's memorial service. He kissed Helen and the children, and even John Wolf. “Don't worry about your dad,” Garp told Helen.

“And don't worry about Garp,” Roberta told Helen. “I'm going to disguise him so that everyone will leave him alone.”

“I wish you'd try to leave everyone alone,” Helen told Garp.

There was suddenly another woman in John Wolf's crowded office; no one had noticed her, but she had been trying to get John Wolf's attention. When she spoke, she spoke out in a single, clear moment of silence and everyone looked at her.

“Mr. Wolf?” the woman said. She was old and brown-black-gray, and her feet appeared to be killing her; she wore an electrical extension cord, wrapped twice around her thick waist.

“Yes, Jillsy?” John Wolf said, and Garp stared at the woman. It was Jillsy Sloper, of course; John Wolf should have known that writers remember names.

“I was wonderin',” Jillsy said, “if I could get off early this afternoon—if you'd say a word for me, because I want to go to that funeral.” She spoke with her chin down, a stiff mutter of bitten words—as few as possible. She did not like to open her mouth around strangers; also, she recognized Garp and she didn't want to be introduced to him—not ever.

“Yes, of course you can,” John Wolf said, quickly. He didn't want to introduce Jillsy Sloper to Garp any more than she wanted it.

“Just a minute,” Garp said. Jillsy Sloper and John Wolf froze. “Are you Jillsy Sloper?” Garp asked her.

“No!” John Wolf blurted. Garp glared at him.

“How do you do?” Jillsy said to Garp; she would not look at him.

“How do you do?” Garp said. He could see at a glance that this sorrowful woman had not , as John Wolf said, “loved” his book.

“I'm sorry about your mom,” Jillsy said.

“Thank you very much,” Garp said, but he could see—they all could see—that Jillsy Sloper was seething about something.

“She was worth two or three of you! ” Jillsy suddenly cried to Garp. There were tears in her muddy-yellow eyes. “She was worth four or five of your terrible books!” she crooned. “Lawd,” she muttered, leaving them all in John Wolf's office. “Lawd, Lawd!”

Another person with a limp, thought Duncan Garp, but he could see that his father did not want to hear about his body count.

At the first feminist funeral held in the city of New York, the mourners appeared unsure how to behave. This was perhaps the result of the gathering's being not in a church but in one of these enigmatic buildings of the city university system—an auditorium, old with the echo of speeches no one had listened to. The giant space was slightly seedy with the sense of past cheering—for rock bands, and for the occasional, well-known poet. But the space was also serious with the certain knowledge that large lectures had taken place there; it was a room in which hundreds of people had taken notes.

The name of the space was School of Nursing Hall—thus it was oddly appropriate as a place of tribute to Jenny Fields. It was hard to tell the difference between the mourners wearing their Jenny Fields Originals, with the little red hearts stitched over the breast, and the real nurses, forever white and unfashionable, who had other reasons to be in the environs of the nursing school but had paused to peek in on the ceremonies—either curious or genuinely sympathetic, or both.

There were many white uniforms among the enormous, milling, softly mumbling audience, and Garp immediately cursed Roberta. “I told you I could have dressed as a nurse,” Garp hissed. “I could have been a little less conspicuous.”

“I thought you'd be conspicuous as a nurse,” Roberta said. “I didn't know there'd be so many.”

“It's going to be a fucking national trend,” Garp muttered. “Just wait and see,” he said, but he said no more; he huddled small and garish beside Roberta, feeling that everyone was looking at him and somehow sensing his maleness—or at least, as Roberta had warned him, his hostility.

They sat dead-center in the massive auditorium, only three rows back from the stage and the speakers' platform; a sea of women had moved in and sat behind them—rows and rows of them—and farther back, at the wide-open rear of the hall (where there were no seats), the women who were less interested in seating themselves for the entire ritual, but who'd wanted to come pay their respects, filed slowly in one door and slowly out another. It was as if the larger, seated audience were the open casket of Jenny Fields that the slow-walking women had come to observe.

Garp, of course, felt that he was an open casket, and all the women were observing him—his pallor, his hue, his preposterous disguise.

Roberta had done this to him, perhaps to get even, with him for his bullying her into letting him come at all—or for his cruel crack concerning her chromosomes. Roberta had dressed Garp in a cheap turquoise jump suit, the color of Oren Rath's pickup truck. The jump suit had a gold zipper that ran from Garp's crotch to Garp's throat. Garp did not adequately fill the hips of the suit, but his breasts—or, rather, the falsies Roberta had fashioned for him—strained against the snap-flap pockets and twisted the vulnerable zipper askew.

“What a set you have!” Roberta had told him.

“You animal, Roberta,” Garp had hissed to her.

The shoulder straps of the huge, hideous bra dug into his shoulders. But whenever Garp felt that a woman was staring at him, perhaps doubting his sex, he would simply turn himself sideways to her and show off. Thus eliminating any possible doubt, or so he hoped.

He was less sure of the wig. A tousled whore's head of honey-blond hair, under which his own scalp itched.

A pretty green silk scarf was at his throat.

His dark face was powdered a sickly gray, but this concealed, Roberta said, his stubble of beard. His rather thin lips were cherry-colored, but he kept licking them and had smeared the lipstick at one corner of his mouth.

“You look like you've just been kissed,” Roberta reassured him.

Though Garp was cold, Roberta had not allowed him to wear his ski parka—it made his shoulders look too thick. And on Garp's feet was a towering pair of knee-high boots—a kind of cherry vinyl that matched, Roberta said, his lipstick. Garp had seen himself reflected in a storefront window and he'd told Roberta that he thought he looked like a teen-age prostitute.

“An aging teen-age prostitute,” Roberta had corrected him.

“A faggot parachutist,” Garp had said.

“No, you look like a woman, Garp,” Roberta had assured him. “Not a woman with especially good taste, but a woman.”

So Garp sat squirming in School of Nursing Hall. He twisted the itchy rope braids of his ridiculous purse, a scraggily hemp thing with an oriental design, barely big enough to hold his wallet. In her large, bursting shoulder bag, Roberta Muldoon had hidden Garp's real clothes—his other identity.

“This is Manda Horton-Jones,” Roberta whispered, indicating a thin, hawk-nosed woman speaking nasally and with her rodential head pointed down; she read a stiff, prepared speech.

Garp didn't know who Manda Horton-Jones was; he shrugged, enduring her. The speeches had ranged from strident, political calls for unity to disturbed, painful, personal reminiscences of Jenny Fields. The audience did not know whether to applaud or to pray—whether to voice approval or to nod grimly. The atmosphere was both one of mourning and one of urgent togetherness—with a strong sense of marching forth. Thinking about it, Garp supposed this was natural and fitting, both to his mother and to his dim perception of what the women's movement was.

“This is Sally Devlin,” Roberta whispered. The woman now climbing to the speakers' platform looked pleasant and wise and vaguely familiar. Garp felt immediately the need to defend himself from her. He didn't mean it, but solely to goad Roberta, Garp whispered, “She has nice legs.”

“Nicer than yours,” Roberta said, pinching his thigh painfully between her strong thumb and her long, pass-catching index finger—one of the fingers, Garp supposed, that had been broken so many times during Roberta's fling as a Philadelphia Eagle.

Sally Devlin looked down on them with her soft, sad eyes as if she were silently scolding a classroom of children who were not paying attention—not even sitting still.

“That senseless murder does not really merit all this,” she said, quietly. “But Jenny Fields simply helped so many individuals , she simply was so patient and generous with women who were having a bad time. Anyone who's ever been helped by someone else should feel terrible about what's happened to her.”

Garp felt truly terrible, at that moment; he heard a combined sigh and sob of hundreds of women. Beside him, Roberta's broad shoulders shook against him. He felt a hand, perhaps of the woman sitting directly behind him, grip his own shoulder, cramped in the terrible turquoise jump suit. He wondered if he was about to be slapped for his offensive, inappropriate attire, but the hand just held on to his shoulder. Perhaps the woman needed support. At this moment, Garp knew, they all felt like sisters, didn't they?

He looked up to see what Sally Devlin was saying, but his own eyes were teary and he could not see Ms. Devlin clearly. He could hear her, though: she was sobbing. Great heartfelt and heaving cries! She was trying to get back to her speech but her eyes couldn't find her place on the page; the page rattled against the microphone. Some very powerful-looking woman, whom Garp thought he had seen before—one of those bodyguard types he had often seen with his mother—tried to help Sally Devlin off the platform, but Ms. Devlin didn't want to leave.

“I wasn't going to do this,” she said, still crying—meaning her sobs, her loss of control. “I had more to say,” she protested, but she could not get hold of her voice. “Damn it,” she said, with a dignity that moved Garp.

The big tough-looking woman found herself alone at the microphone. The audience waited quietly. Garp felt a tremble, or maybe a tug, from the hand on his shoulder. Looking at Roberta's large hands, folded in her lap, Garp knew that the hand on his shoulder must be very small. The big tough-looking woman wanted to say something, and the audience waited. But they would wait forever to hear a word from her. Roberta knew her. Roberta stood up beside Garp and began to applaud the big, hard-looking woman's silence—her exasperating quiet in front of the microphone. Other people joined Roberta's applause—even Garp, though he had no idea why he was clapping.

“She's an Ellen Jamesian,” Roberta whispered to him. “She can't say anything.” Yet the woman melted the audience with her pained, sorry face. She opened her mouth as if she were singing, but no sound came out. Garp imagined he could see the severed stump of her tongue. He remembered how his mother supported them—these crazies; Jenny was wonderful to every single one of them who came to her. But Jenny had finally admitted her disapproval of what they had done—perhaps only to Garp. “They're making victims of themselves,” Jenny had said, “and yet that's the same thing they're angry at men for doing to them. Why don't they just take a vow of silence, or never speak in a man's presence?” Jenny said. “It's not logical: to maim yourself to make a point.”

But Garp, now touched by the mad woman in front of him, felt the whole history of the world's self-mutilation—though violent and illogical, it expressed, perhaps like nothing else, a terrible hurt . “I am really hurt,” said the woman's huge face, dissolving before him in his own swimmy tears.

Then the little hand on his shoulder hurt him ; he remembered himself—a man at a ritual for women—and he turned around to see the rather tired-looking young woman behind him. Her face was familiar, but he didn't recognize her.

“I know you,” the young woman whispered to him. She did not sound happy that she knew him, either.

Roberta had warned him not to open his mouth to anyone, not even to try to speak. He was prepared for handling that problem. He shook his head. He took a pad of paper out of the flap pocket, which was crushed against his mammoth, false bosom, and he snatched a pencil out of his absurd purse. The sharp, clawlike fingers of the woman bit into his shoulder, as if she were keeping him from running away.

Hi! I'm an Ellen Jamesian,

Garp scribbled on the pad; he tore the slip off and handed it to the young woman. She didn't take it.

“Like hell you are,” she said. “You're T. S. Garp.”

The word Garp bounced like the burp of an unknown animal into the silence of the suffering auditorium, still conducted by the quiet Ellen Jamesian on stage. Roberta Muldoon turned around and looked panic-stricken; she had never seen this particular young woman in her life.

“I don't know who your big playmate is,” the young woman told Garp, “but you're T. S. Garp. I don't know where you got that dumb wig or those big tits, but I'd know you anywhere. You haven't changed a bit since you were fucking my sister—fucking her to death ,” the young woman said. And Garp knew who his enemy was: the last and youngest of the Percy Family Horde. Bainbridge! Little Pooh Percy, who was wearing diapers as a preteen, and, for all Garp knew, might be wearing them still.

Garp looked at her; Garp had bigger tits than she did. Pooh was asexually attired, her haircut was similar to a popular and unisexual style, her features were neither delicate nor coarse. Pooh wore a U.S. Army shirt with sergeant stripes and a campaign button for the woman who'd hoped to be the new governor of the State of New Hampshire. With a shock, Garp realized that the woman running for governor was Sally Devlin. He wondered if she'd won!

“Hello, Pooh,” Garp said, and saw her wince—a hated nickname, obviously, and one she was never called anymore. “Bainbridge,” Garp muttered, but it was too late to make friends. It was years too late. It was too late from the night Garp had bitten off Bonkers' ear, had violated Cushie in the Steering School infirmary, had not ever really loved her—had not come to her wedding, and not to her funeral.

Whatever grudge against Garp this was, or whatever loathing for men in general, Pooh Percy had her enemy at her mercy—at last.

Roberta's big warm hand was at the small of Garp's back and her heavy voice urged him, “Get out of here, move fast, don't say a word.”

“There's a man here!” Bainbridge Percy shouted to the grieving silence of School of Nursing Hall. That even brought a small sound—perhaps a grunt—from the troubled Ellen Jamesian on stage. “There's a man here!” Pooh screamed. “And he's T. S. Garp. Garp is here!” she cried.

Roberta tried to lead him to the aisle. A tight end is chiefly a good blocker, secondarily a pass—receiver, but even the former Robert Muldoon could not quite move all these women.

“Please,” Roberta said. “Excuse us, please. She was his mother —you must know that. Her only child.”

My only mother! Garp thought, plowing against Roberta's back; he felt Pooh Percy's needlelike claws rake his face. She snatched his wig off; he snatched it back and clutched it to his big bosom, as if it mattered to him.

“He fucked my sister to death! ” Pooh Percy wailed. How this perception of Garp had convinced her, Garp would never know—but convinced of it Pooh clearly was. She climbed over the seat he had abandoned and moved in behind him and Roberta—who finally broke through, into the aisle.

“She was my mother,” Garp said to a woman he was passing, a woman who looked like a potential mother herself. She was pregnant. In the woman's scornful face Garp saw reason and kindness; he also saw restraint and contempt.

“Let him pass,” the pregnant woman murmured, but without much feeling.

Others seemed more sympathetic. Someone cried out that he had a right to be there—but there were other things shouted, rather lacking sympathy of any kind.

Farther up the aisle he felt his falsies punched; he put his hand out for Roberta and realized Roberta had (as they say in football) been taken out of the play. She was down. Several young women wearing navy pea coats appeared to be sitting on her. It occurred to Garp that they might think Roberta was also a man in drag; their discovery that Roberta was real could be painful.

“Take off, Garp!” Roberta cried.

“Yes, run , you little fucker!” one woman in a pea coat hissed.

He ran.

He was almost up to the milling women at the rear of the hall when someone's blow landed where it was aimed. He had not been hit in the balls since a wrestling practice at Steering—so many years ago, he realized he had forgotten the total incapacity that resulted. He covered himself and lay curled on one hip. They kept trying to rip his wig out of his hands. And his tiny purse. He held on as if this were some mugging. He felt a few shoes, a few slaps, and then the minty breath of an elderly woman breathing in his face.

“Try to get up,” she said, gently. He saw she was a nurse. A real nurse. There was no fashionable heart sewn above her breast; there was just the little brass-and-blue nameplate—she was R. N. So-and-So.

“My name is Dotty,” the nurse told him; she was at least sixty.

“Hello,” Garp said. “Thank you, Dotty.”

She took his arm and led him at a fast pace through the remaining mob. No one appeared to want to hurt him when he was with her. They let him go.

“Do you have money for a cab?” the nurse named Dotty asked him when they were outside School of Nursing Hall.

“Yes, I think so,” Garp said. He checked his horrid purse; his wallet was safely there. And his wig—tousled still further—was under his arm. Roberta had Garp's real clothes and Garp looked in vain for any sign of Roberta emerging from the first feminist funeral.

“Put that wig on,” Dotty advised him, “or you'll be mistaken for one of those transvestites.” He struggled to put it on; she helped him. “People are really rough on transvestites,” Dotty added. She took several bobby pins from her own gray head of hair and fastened Garp's wig more decently in place.

The scratch on his cheek, she told him, would stop bleeding very soon.

On the steps of School of Nursing Hall, a tall black woman who looked like an even match for Roberta shook her fist at Garp but said not a word. Perhaps she was another Ellen Jamesian. A few other women were gathering there and Garp feared they might be thinking over the advisability of an open attack. Oddly at the fringe of their group, but seeming to have no connection with them, was a wraithlike girl, or barely grown-up child; she was a dirty blond-headed girl with piercing eyes the color of coffee-stained saucers—like a drug-user's eyes, or someone long involved in hard tears. Garp felt frozen by her stare, and frightened of her—as if she were really crazy, a kind of teen-age hit man for the women's movement, with a gun in her oversized purse. He clutched his own ratty bag, recalling that his wallet was at least full of credit cards; he had enough cash for a cab to the airport and the credit cards could get him a flight to Boston and the bosom, so to speak, of his remaining family. He wished he could relieve himself of his ostentatious tits, but there they were, as if he'd been born with them—and born, too, in this alternately tight and baggy jump suit. It was all he had and it would have to do. From the din escaping from School of Nursing Hall, Garp knew that Roberta was deep in the throes of debate—if not combat. Someone who had fainted, or had been mauled, was carried out; more police went in.

“Your mother was a first-rate nurse and a woman who made every woman proud,” the nurse named Dotty told him. “I'll bet she was a good mother, too.”

“She sure was,” Garp said.

The nurse got him a cab; the last he saw of her, she was walking away from the curb, back toward School of Nursing Hall. The other women who'd seemed so threatening, on the steps outside the building, appeared to be not interested in molesting her. More police were arriving; to Garp looked for the strange saucer-eyed girl, but she was not among the other women.

He asked the cabby who the new governor of New Hampshire was. Garp tried to conceal the depth of his voice, but the cabby, familiar with the eccentricities of his job, seemed unsurprised at both Garp's voice and Garp's appearance.

“I was out of the country,” Garp said.

“You didn't miss nothin', sweetie,” the cabby told him. “That broad broke down.”

“Sally Devlin?” said Garp.

“She cracked up, right on the TV,” the cabby said. “She was so flipped out over the assassination, she couldn't control herself. She was givin' this speech but she couldn't get through it, you know7

“She looked like a real idiot to me,” the cabby said. “She couldn't be no governor if she couldn't control herself no better than that.”

And Garp saw the pattern of the woman's loss emerging. Perhaps the foul incumbent governor had remarked that Ms. Devlin's inability to control her emotions was “just like a woman.” Disgraced by her demonstration of her feelings for Jenny Fields, Sally Devlin was judged not competent enough for whatever dubious work being a governor entailed.

Garp felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of other people. “In my opinion,” the cabby said, “it took something like that shooting to show the people that the woman couldn't handle the job, you know?”

“Shut up and drive,” Garp said.

“Look, honey,” the cabby. said. “I don't have to put up with no abuse .”

“You're an asshole and a moron,” Garp told him, “and if you don't drive me to the airport with your mouth shut, I'll tell a cop you tried to paw me all over.”

The cabby floored the accelerator and drove for a while in furious silence, hoping the speed and recklessness of his driving would scare his passenger.

“If you don't slow down,” Garp said, “I'll tell a cop you tried to rape me.”

“Fucking weirdo,” the cabby said, but he slowed down and drove to the airport without another word. Garp put the money for the tip on the taxi's hood and one of the coins rolled into the crack between the hood and fender. “Fucking women ,” the cabby said.

“Fucking men ,” said Garp, feeling—with mixed feelings—that he had done his duty to ensure that the sex war went on.

At the airport they questioned Garp's American Express card and asked for further identification. Inevitably, they asked him about the initials T. S. The airline ticket-maker was clearly not in touch with the literary world—not to know who T. S. Garp was.

He told the ticket-maker that T. was for Tillie, S. was for Sarah. “Tillie Sarah Garp?” the ticket-maker said. She was a young woman, and she clearly disapproved of Garp's oddly fetching but whorish appearance. “Nothing to check, and no carry-on luggage?” Garp was asked.

“No, nothing,” he said.

“You have a coat?” the stewardess asked him, also giving him a condescending appraisal.

“No coat,” Garp said. The stewardess gave a start at the deepness of his voice. “No bags and nothing to hang up,” he said, smiling. He felt that all he had was breasts —the terrific knockers Roberta had made for him—and he walked slouched and stoop-shouldered to try to hold them back. There was no holding them back, though.

As soon as he chose a seat, some man chose to sit beside him. Garp looked out the window. Passengers were still hurrying to his plane. Among them, he saw a wraithlike, dirty blond-haired girl. She had no coat and no carry-on luggage, either. Just that oversized pursebig enough for a bomb. Thickly, Garp sensed the Under Toad—a wriggle at his hip. He looked toward the aisle, so that he would notice where the girl chose to sit, but he looked into the leering face of the man who'd taken the aisle seat beside him.

“Perhaps, when we're in the air,” the man said, knowingly, “I could buy you a little drink?” His small, close-together eyes were riveted on the twisted zipper of Garp's straining turquoise jump suit.

Garp felt a peculiar kind of unfairness overwhelm him. He had not asked to have such an anatomy. He wished he could have spent a quiet time, just talking, with that wise and pleasant-looking woman, Sally Devlin, the failed gubernatorial candidate from New Hampshire. He would have told her that she was too good for the rotten job.

“That's some suit you got,” said Garp's leering seat partner.

“Go stick it in your ear,” Garp said. He was, after all, the son of a woman who'd slashed a masher at a movie in Boston—years ago, long ago. The man struggled to get up, but he couldn't; his seat belt would not release him. He looked helplessly at Garp. Garp leaned over the man's trapped lap; Garp gagged on his own dose of perfume, which he remembered Roberta slathering over him. He got the seat-belt clasp to operate properly and released the man with a sharp snap. Then Garp growled a menacing whisper in the man's very red ear. “When we're in the air, cutie,” he whispered to the frightened fellow, “go blow yourself in the bathroom.”

But when the man deserted Garp's company, the aisle seat was vacant, inviting someone else. Garp glared challengingly at the empty seat, daring the next man on the make to sit there. The person who approached Garp shook his momentary confidence. She was very thin, her girlish hands bony and clutching her oversized purse. She didn't ask first; she just sat down. The Under Toad is a very young girl today, Garp thought. When she reached into her purse, Garp caught her wrist and pulled her hand out of the bag and into her lap. She was not strong, and in her hand there was no gun; there was not even a knife. Garp saw only a pad of paper and a pencil with the eraser bitten down to a nub.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. If she was not an assassin, he guessed he knew who or what she was. “Why is my life so full of people with impaired speech?” he wrote once. “Or is it only because I'm a writer that I notice all the damaged voices around me?”

The nonviolent waif on the airplane beside him wrote hastily and handed him a note.

“Yes, yes,” he said, wearily. “You're an Ellen Jamesian.” But the girl bit her lip and fiercely shook her head. She pushed the note into his hand.

My name is Ellen James,

the note informed Garp.

I am not an Ellen Jamesian.

“You're the Ellen James?” he asked her, though it was unnecessary and he knew it—just looking at her, he should have known. She was the right age; not so long ago she would have been that eleven-year-old child, raped and untongued. The dirty-saucer eyes were, up close, not dirty; they were simply bloodshot, perhaps insomniac. Her lower lip was ragged; it looked like the pencil eraser—bitten down.

She scribbled more.

I came from Illinois. My parents were killed in an auto accident, recently. I came East to meet your mother. I wrote her a letter and she actually answered me! She wrote me a wonderful reply. She invited me to come stay with her. She also told me to read all your books.

Garp turned these tiny pages of notepaper; he kept nodding; he kept smiling.

But your mother was killed!

From the big purse Ellen James pulled a brown bandanna into which she blew her nose.

I went to stay with a women's group in New York. But I already knew too many Ellen Jamesians. They're all I know; I get hundreds of Christmas cards,

she wrote. She paused for Garp to read that line.

“Yes, yes, I'm sure you do,” he encouraged her.

I went to the funeral, of course. I went because I knew you'd be there. I knew you'd come,

she wrote; she stopped, now, to smile at him. Then she hid her face in her dirty brown bandanna.

“You wanted to see me ?” Garp said.

She nodded, fiercely. She pulled from the big bag her mangled copy of The World According to Bensenhaver .

The best rape story I have ever read,

wrote Ellen James. Garp winced.

Do you know how many times I have read this book?

she wrote. He looked at her teary, admiring eyes. He shook his head, as mutely as an Ellen Jamesian. She touched his face; she had a childlike inability with her hands. She held up her fingers for him to count. All of one little hand and most of the other. She had read his awful book eight times.

“Eight times,” Garp murmured.

She nodded, and smiled at him. Now she settled back in the plane seat, as if her life were accomplished, now that she was sitting beside him, en route to Boston—if not with the woman she had admired all the way from Illinois, at least with the woman's only son, who would have to suffice.

“Have you been to college?” Garp asked her.

Ellen James held up one dirty finger; she made an unhappy face. “One year?” Garp translated. “But you didn't like it. It didn't work out?”

She nodded eagerly.

“And what do you want to be?” he asked her, barely keeping himself from adding: When you grow up .

She pointed to him and blushed. She actually touched his gross breasts.

“A writer?” Garp guessed. She relaxed and smiled; he understood her so easily, her face seemed to say. Garp felt his throat constricting. She struck him as one of those doomed children he had read about: the ones who have no antibodies—they have no natural immunities to disease. If they don't live their lives in plastic bags, they die of their first common cold. Here was Ellen James of Illinois, out of her sack.

Both your parents were killed?” Garp asked. She nodded, and bit again her chewed lip. “And you have no other family?” he asked her. She shook her head.

He knew what his mother would have done. He knew Helen wouldn't mind; and of course Roberta would always be of help. And all those women who'd been wounded and were now healed, in their fashion.

“Well, you have a family now ,” Garp told Ellen James; he held her hand and winced to hear himself make such an offer. He heard the echo of his mother's voice, her old soap-opera role: The Adventures of Good Nurse.

Ellen James shut her eyes as if she had fainted for joy. When the stewardess asked her to fasten her seat belt, Ellen James didn't hear; Garp fastened her belt for her. All the short flight to Boston the girl wrote her heart out.

I hate the Ellen Jamesians,

she wrote.

I would never do this to myself.

She opened her mouth and pointed to the wide absence in there. Garp cringed.

I want to talk; I want to say everything,

wrote Ellen James. Garp noticed that the gnarled thumb and index finger of her writing hand were easily twice the size of the unused instruments on her other hand; she had a writing muscle such as he'd never seen. No writer's cramp for Ellen James, he thought.

The words come and come,

she wrote. She waited for his approval, line by line. He would nod; she would go on. She wrote him her whole life. Her high school English teacher, the only one who mattered. Her mother's eczema. The Ford Mustang that her father drove too fast.

I have read everything,

she wrote. Garp told her that Helen was a big reader, too; he thought she would like Helen. The girl looked very hopeful.

Who was your favorite writer when you were a boy?

“Joseph Conrad,” Garp said. She sighed her approval.

Jane Austen was mine.

“That's fine,” Garp said to her.

At Logan Airport she was almost asleep on her feet; Garp steered her up the aisles and leaned her on the counters while he filled out the necessary forms for the rental car.

“T. S.?” the rental-car person asked. One of Garp's falsies was slipping sideways and the rental-car person appeared anxious that this entire turquoise body might self-destruct.

In the car north, on the dark road to Steering, Ellen James slept like a kitten curled in the back seat. In the rear-view mirror Garp noted that her knee was skinned, and that the girl sucked her thumb while she slept.

It had been a proper funeral for Jenny Fields, after all; some essential message had passed from mother to son. Here he was, playing nurse to someone. More essentially, Garp finally understood what his mother's talent had been; she had right instincts—Jenny Fields always did what was right . One day, Garp hoped, he would see the connection between this lesson and his own writing, but that was a personal goal—like others, it would take a little time. Importantly, it was in the car north to Steering, with the real Ellen James asleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields.

A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

“Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.”

Thus Garp, with his defenses down and his sense of the Under Toad fled from him—at least, since his arrival in Boston—walked into the house of Ernie Holm, his father-in-law, carrying the sleeping Ellen James in his arms. She might have been nineteen, but she was easier to carry than Duncan.

Garp was not prepared for the grizzled face of Dean Bodger, alone in Ernie's dim living room, watching TV. The old dean, who would soon retire, seemed to accept that Garp was dressed as a whore, but he stared with horror at the sleeping Ellen James.

“Is she...”

“She's asleep,” Garp said. “Where's everyone?” And with the voicing of his question, Garp heard the cold hop of the Under Toad thudding across the cold floors of the silent house.

“I tried to reach you,” Dean Bodger told him. “It's Ernie.”

“His heart,” Garp guessed.

“Yes,” Bodger said. “They gave Helen something to help her sleep. She's upstairs. And I thought I'd stay until you got here—you know: so that if the children woke up and needed anything, they wouldn't disturb her. I'm sorry, Garp. These things sometimes come all at once, or they seem to.”

Garp knew how Bodger had liked his mother, too. He put the sleeping Ellen James on the living-room couch and turned off the sickly TV, which was turning the girl's face bluish.

“In his sleep?” Garp asked Bodger, pulling off his wig. “Did you find Ernie here?”

Now the poor dean looked nervous. “He was on the bed upstairs,” Bodger said. “I called up the stairs, but I knew I'd have to go up and find him. I fixed him up a little before I called anyone.”

“Fixed him up?” Garp said. He unzipped the terrible turquoise jump suit and ripped off his breasts. The old dean perhaps thought this was a common traveling disguise of the now-famous writer.

“Please don't ever tell Helen,” Bodger said.

“Tell her what?” Garp asked.

Bodger brought out the magazine—out from under his bulging vest. It was the issue of Crotch Shots where the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver had been published. The magazine looked very worn and used.

“Ernie had been looking at it, you know,” Bodger said. “When his heart stopped.”

Garp took the magazine from Bodger and imagined the death scene. Ernie Holm had been masturbating to the split-beaver pictures when his heart quit. There was a joke during Garp's days at Steering that this was the preferred way to “go.” So Ernie had gone that way, and the kindly Bodger had pulled up the coach's pants and hidden the magazine from the coach's daughter.

“I had to tell the medical examiner, you know,” Bodger said.

A nasty metaphor from his mother's past came up to Garp in a wave, like nausea, but he did not express it to the old dean. Lust lays another good man low! Ernie's lonely life depressed Garp.

“And your mom,” sighed Bodger, shaking his head under the cold porch light that glowed into the black Steering campus. “Your mom was someone special,” the old man mused. “She was a real fighter,” the scrappy Bodger said, with pride. “I still have copies of the notes she wrote to Stewart Percy.”

“You were always nice to her,” Garp reminded him.

“She was worth a hundred Stewart Percys, you know, Garp,” Bodger said.

“She sure was,” Garp said.

“You know he's gone, too?” Bodger said.

“Fat Stew?” said Garp.

“Yesterday,” Bodger said. “After a long illness—you know what that usually means, don't you?”

“No,” Garp said. He hadn't ever thought about it.

“Cancer, usually,” Bodger said, gravely. “He had it for a long time.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” Garp said. He was thinking of Pooh, and of course of Cushie. And his old challenger, Bonkers, whose ear in his dreams he could still taste.

“There's going to be some confusion about the Steering chapel,” Bodger explained. “Helen can tell you, she understands. Stewart has a service in the morning; Ernie, has his later in the day. And, of course, you know the bit about Jenny?”

“What bit?” Garp asked.

“The memorial?”

“God, no,” Garp said. “A memorial here?

“There are girls here now, you know,” Bodger said. “I should say women ,” he added, shaking his head. “I don't know; they're awfully young. They're girls to me.”

“Students?” Garp said.

“Yes, students,” Bodger said. “The girl students voted to name the infirmary after her.”

“The infirmary?” Garp said.

“Well, it's never had a name, you know,” Bodger said. “Most of our buildings have names.”

“The Jenny Fields Infirmary,” Garp said, numbly.

“Sort of nice, isn't it?” Bodger asked; he wasn't too sure if Garp would think so, but Garp didn't care.

In the long night, baby Jenny woke up once; by the time Garp had moved himself away from Helen's warm and deeply sleeping body, he saw that Ellen James had already found the crying baby and was warming a bottle. Odd cooing and grunting sounds, appropriate to babies, came softly out of the tongueless mouth of Ellen James. She had worked in a day-care center in Illinois, she had written Garp on the plane. She knew all about babies, and could even make noises like them.

Garp smiled at her and went back to bed.

In the morning he told Helen about Ellen James and they talked about Ernie.

“It was good that he went in his sleep,” Helen said. “When I think of your mother.”

“Yes, yes,” Garp told her.

Duncan was introduced to Ellen James. One-eyed and no-tongued, thought Garp, my family will pull together.

When Roberta called to describe her arrest, Duncan—who was the least-tired talking human in the house—explained to her about Ernie's heart attack.

Helen found the turquoise jump suit and the huge, loaded bra in the kitchen wastebasket; it seemed to cheer her up. The cherry-colored vinyl boots actually fit her better than they had fit Garp, but she threw them out, anyway. Ellen James wanted the green scarf, and Helen took the girl shopping for some more clothes. Duncan asked for and received the wig, which—to Garp's irritation—he wore most of the morning.

Dean Bodger called, to ask to be of use.

A man who was the new director of Physical Facilities for the Steering School stopped at the house to talk confidentially with Garp. The Physical Facilities director explained that Ernie had lived in a school house, and as soon as it was convenient for Helen, Ernie's things should be moved out. Garp had understood that the original Steering family house, Midge Steering Percy's house, had been given back to the school some years ago—a gift of Midge and Fat Stew, for which a ceremony had been arranged. Garp told the Physical Facilities director that he hoped Helen had as much time to move out as Midge would be given.

“Oh, we'll sell that albatross,” the man confided to Garp. “It's a lemon, you know.”

The Steering family house, in Garp's memory, was no lemon.

“All that history,” Garp said. “I should think you'd want it—and it was a gift, after all.”

“The plumbing's terrible,” the man said. He implied that, in their advancing senility, Midge and Fat Stew had let the place fall into a wretched state. “It may be a lovely old house, and all that,” the young man said, “but the school has to look ahead. We've got enough history around here. We can't sink our housing funds into history. We need more buildings that the school can use . No matter what you do with that old mansion, it's just another family house.”

When Garp told Helen that the Steering Percy house was going to be sold, Helen broke down. Of course she was really crying for her father, and for everything, but the thought that the Steering School did not even want the grandest house of their childhood years depressed both Garp and Helen.

Then Garp, had to check with the organist at the Steering chapel so that the same music would not be played for Ernie that, in the morning, would be played for Fat Stew. This mattered to Helen; she was upset, so Garp didn't question the seeming meaninglessness, to him, of his errand.

The Steering chapel was a squat Tudor attempt at a building; the church was so wreathed in ivy that it appeared to have thrust itself up out of the ground and was struggling to break through the matted vines. The pantlegs of John Wolf's dark, pin-striped suit dragged under Garp's heels as he peered into the musty chapel—he had never delivered the suit to a proper tailor, but had attempted to take up the pants himself. The first wave of gray organ music drifted over Garp like smoke. He thought he had come early enough, but to his dread he saw that Fat Stew's funeral had already begun. The audience was old and hardly recognizable—those ancients of the Steering School community who would attend anyone's death, as if, in double sympathy, they were anticipating their own. This death, Garp thought, was chiefly attended because Midge was a Steering; Stewart Percy had made few friends. The pews were pockmarked with widows; their little black hats with veils were like dark cobwebs that had fallen on the heads of these old women.

“I'm glad you're here, Jack,” a man in black said to Garp. Garp had slipped almost unnoticed into a back pew; he was going to wait out the ordeal and then speak to the organist. “We're short some muscle for the casket,” the man said, and Garp recognized him—he was the hearse driver from the funeral home.

“I'm not a pallbearer,” Garp whispered.

“You've got to be,” the driver said, “or we'll never get him out of here. He's a big one.”

The hearse driver smelled of cigars, but Garp had only to glance about the sun-dappled pews of the Steering chapel to see that the man was right. White hair and baldness winked at him from the occasional male heads; there must have been thirteen or fourteen canes hooked on the pews. There were two wheelchairs.

Garp let the driver take his arm.

“They said there'd be more men ,” the driver complained, “but nobody healthy showed up.”

Garp was led to the pew up front, across from the family pew. To his horror an old man lay stretched out in the pew Garp was supposed to sit in and Garp was waved, instead, into the Percy pew, where he found himself seated next to Midge. Garp briefly wondered if the old man stretched out in the pew was another body waiting his turn.

“That's Uncle Harris Stanfull,” Midge whispered to Garp, nodding her head to the sleeper, who looked like a dead man across the aisle.

“Uncle Horace Salter , Mother,” said the man on Midge's other side. Garp recognized Stewie Two, red-faced with corpulence—the eldest Percy child and sole surviving son. He had something to do with aluminum in Pittsburgh. Stewie Two hadn't seen Garp since Garp was five; he showed no signs of knowing who Garp was. Neither did Midge indicate that she knew anybody , anymore. Wizened and white, with brown blotches on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her bob in her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

At a glance Garp saw that the pallbearing would be handled by Stewie Two, the hearse driver, and himself. He doubted that they could manage it. How awful to be this unloved! he thought, looking at the gray ship that was Stewart Percy's casket—fortunately closed.

“I'm sorry, young man,” Midge whispered to Garp; her gloved hand rested as lightly on his arm as one of the Percy family parakeets. “I don't recall your name ,” she said, gracious into senility.

“Uh,” Garp said. And somewhere between the names “Smith” and “Jones,” Garp stumbled on a word that escaped him. “Smoans,” he said, surprising both Midge and himself. Stewie Two did not appear to notice.

“Mr. Smoans?” Midge said.

“Yes, Smoans,” Garp said. “Smoans, class of '61. I had Mr. Percy in history.” My Part of the Pacific.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Smoans! How thoughtful of you to come,” Midge said.

“I was sorry to hear of it,” Mr. Smoans said.

“Yes, we all were,” Midge said, looking cautiously around the half-empty chapel. A convulsion of some kind made her whole face shake, and the loose skin on her cheeks made a soft slapping noise.

“Mother,” Stewie Two cautioned her.

“Yes, yes, Stewart,” she said. To Mr. Smoans, she said, “It's a pity not all of our children could be here.”

Garp, of course, knew that Dopey's strained heart had already quit him, that William was lost in a war, that Cushie was a victim of making babies. Garp guessed he knew, vaguely, where poor Pooh was. To his relief, Bainbridge Percy was not in the family pew.

It was there in the pew of remaining Percys that Garp remembered another day.

“Where do we go after we die?” Cushie Percy once asked her mother. Fat Stew belched and left the kitchen. All the Percy children were there: William, whom a war was waiting for; Dopey, whose heart was gathering fat; Cushie, who could not reproduce, whose vital tubes would tangle; Stewie Two, who turned into aluminum. And only God knows what happened to Pooh. Little Garp was there, too—in the sumptuous country kitchen of the vast, grand Steering family house.

“Well, after death,” Midge Steering Percy told the children—little Garp, too—"we all go to a big house , sort of like this one.”

“But bigger ,” Stewie Two said, seriously.

“I hope so,” said William, worriedly.

Dopey didn't get what was meant. Pooh was not old enough to talk. Cushie said she didn't believe it—only God knows where she went.

Garp thought of the vast, grand Steering family house—now for sale. He realized that he wanted to buy it.

“Mr. Smoans?” Midge nudged him.

“Uh,” Garp said.

“The coffin, Jack,” whispered the hearse driver. Stewie Two, bulging beside him, looked seriously toward the enormous casket that now housed the debris of his father.

“We need four,” the driver said. “At least four.”

“No, I can take one side myself,” Garp said.

“Mr. Smoans looks very strong,” Midge said. “Not very large , but strong.”

“Mother,” Stewie Two said.

“Yes, yes, Stewart,” she said.

“We need four. That's all there is to it,” the driver said.

Garp didn't believe it. He could lift it.

“You two on the other side,” he said, “and up she goes.”

A frail mutter reached Garp from the mourners at Fat Stew's funeral, aghast at the apparently unmovable casket. But Garp believed in himself. It was just death in there; of course it would be heavy—the weight of his mother, Jenny Fields, the weight of Ernie Holm, and of little Walt (who was the heaviest of all). God knows what they all weighed together, but Garp planted himself on one side of Fat Stew's gray gunboat of a coffin. He was ready.

It was Dean Bodger who volunteered to be the necessary fourth.

“I never thought you'd be here,” Bodger whispered to Garp.

“Do you know Mr. Smoans?” Midge asked the dean.

“Smoans, ’61,” Garp said.

“Oh yes, Smoans , of course,” Bodger said. And the catcher of pigeons, the bandy-legged sheriff of the Steering School, lifted his share of the coffin with Garp and the others. Thus they launched Fat Stew into another life. Or into another house, hopefully bigger.

Bodger and Garp trailed behind the stragglers limping and tottering to the cars that would transport them to the Steering cemetery. When the aged audience was no more around them, Bodger took Garp to Buster's Snack and Grill, where they sat over coffee. Bodger apparently accepted that it was Garp's habit to disguise his sex in the evening and change his name during the day.

“Ah, Smoans,” Bodger said. “Perhaps now your life will settle down and you'll be happy and prosperous.”

“At least prosperous,” Garp said.

Garp had completely forgotten to ask the organist not to repeat Fat Stew's music for Ernie Holm. Garp hadn't noticed the music, anyway; he wouldn't recognize it if it were repeated. And Helen hadn't been there; she wouldn't know the difference. Neither, Garp knew, would Ernie.

“Why don't you stay with us awhile?” Bodger asked Garp; with his strong, pudgy hand, sweeping the bleary windows in Buster's Snack and Grill, the dean indicated the campus of the Steering School. “We're not a bad place, really,” he said.

“You're the only place I know,” Garp said, neutrally.

Garp knew that his mother had chosen Steering once, at least for a place to bring up children. And Jenny Fields, Garp knew, had right instincts. He drank his coffee and shook Dean Bodger's hand affectionately. Garp had one more funeral to get through. Then, with Helen, he would consider the future.

 

HABITS OF THE UNDER TOAD

 

ALTHOUGH she received a most cordial invitation from the Department of English, Helen was not sure about teaching at the Steering School.

“I thought you wanted to teach again,” Garp said, but Helen would wait awhile before accepting a job at the school where girls were not admitted when she was a girl.

“Perhaps, when Jenny's old enough to go,” Helen said. “Meanwhile, I'm happy to read, just read.” As a writer, Garp was both envious and mistrustful of people who read as much as Helen.

And they were both developing a fearfulness that worried them; here they were, thinking so cautiously about their lives, as if they were truly old people. Of course Garp had always had this obsession about protecting his children; now, at last, he saw that Jenny Fields' old notion of wanting to continue living with her son was not so abnormal after all.

The Garps would stay at Steering. They had all the money they would ever need; Helen didn't have to do anything, if she didn't want to. But Garp needed something to do.

“You're going to write,” Helen said, tiredly.

“Not for a while,” Garp said. “Maybe never again. At least not for a while.”

This really did strike Helen as a sign of rather premature senility, but she had come to share his anxiousness—his desire to keep what he had, including sanity—and she knew that he shared with her the vulnerability of conjugal love.

She did not say anything to him when he went to the Steering Athletic Department and offered himself as Ernie Holm's replacement. “You don't have to pay me,” he told them. “Money doesn't matter to me; I just want to be the wrestling coach.” Of course they had to admit he would do a decent job. What had been a strong program would begin to slump without a replacement for Ernie.

“You don't want any money?” the chairman of the Athletic Department asked him.

“I don't need any money,” Garp told him. “What I need is something to do —something that's not writing.” Except for Helen, no one knew that there were only two things in this world that T. S. Garp ever learned to do: he could write and he could wrestle.

Helen was perhaps the only one who knew why he couldn't (at the moment) write. Her theory would later be expressed by the critic A. J. Harms, who claimed that Garp's work was progressively weakened by its closer and closer parallels to his personal history. “As he became more autobiographical, his writing grew narrower; also, he became less comfortable about doing it. It was as if he knew that not only was the work more personally painful to him—this memory dredging—but the work was slimmer and less imaginative in every way,” Harms wrote. Garp had lost the freedom of imagining life truly, which he had so early promised himself, and us all, with the brilliance of “The Pension Grillparzer.” According to Harms, Garp could now be truthful only by remembering , and that method—as distinct from imagining—was not only psychologically harmful to him but far less fruitful.

But the hindsight of Harms is easy; Helen knew this was Garp's problem the day he accepted the job as wrestling coach at the Steering School. He would be nowhere near as good as Ernie, they both knew, but he would run a respectable program and Garp's wrestlers would always win more than they would lose.

“Try fairy tales,” Helen suggested; she thought of his writing more often than he did. “Try making something up, the whole thing—completely made up.” She never said, “Like “The Pension Grillparzer""; she never mentioned it, although she knew that he now agreed with her: it was the best he had done. Sadly, it had been the first.

Whenever Garp would try to write, he would see only the dull, undeveloped facts of his personal life: the gray parking lot in New Hampshire, the stillness of Walt's small body, the hunters' glossy coats and their red caps—and the sexless, self-righteous fanaticism of Pooh Percy. Those images went nowhere. He spent a great deal of time fussing with his new house.

Midge Steering Percy never knew who bought her family's mansion, and her gift to the Steering School. If Stewie Two ever found it out, he was at least smart enough never to tell his mother, whose memory of Garp was clouded by her fresher memory of the nice Mr. Smoans. Midge Steering Percy died in a nursing home in Pittsburgh; because of what Stewie Two had to do with aluminum, he had moved his mother into a nursing home not far from where all that metal was made.

God knows what happened to Pooh.

Helen and Garp fixed up the old Steering mansion, as it was called by many in the school community. The name Percy faded fast; in most memories, now, Midge was always referred to as Midge Steering. Garp's new home was the classiest place on or near the Steering campus, and when the Steering students gave guided tours of the campus to parents, and to prospective Steering students, they rarely said, “And this is where T. S. Garp, the writer, lives. It was the original Steering family house, circa 1781.” The students were more playful than that; what they usually said was, “And this is where our wrestling coach lives.” And the parents would look at one another politely, and the prospective student would ask, “Is wrestling a big sport at Steering?”

Very soon, Garp thought, Duncan would be a Steering student; it was an unembarrassed pleasure that Garp looked forward to. He missed Duncan's presence in the wrestling room, but he was happy that the boy had found his place: the swimmin pool—where either his nature or his eyesight, or both, felt completely comfortable. Duncan sometimes visited the wrestling room, swaddled in towels and shivering from the pool; he sat on the soft mats under one of the blow heaters, getting warm.

“How you doing?” Garp would ask him. “You're not wet, are you? Don't drip on the mat, okay?”

“No, I won't,” Duncan would say. “I'm just fine.”

More frequently, Helen visited the wrestling room. She was reading everything again, and she would come to the wrestling room to read—"like reading in a sauna,” she often said—occasionally looking up from what she was reading when there was an unusually loud slam or a cry of pain. The only thing that had ever been hard for Helen, about reading in a wrestling room, was that her glasses kept fogging up.

“Are we already middle-aged?” Helen asked Garp one night in their beautiful house, from the front parlor of which, on a clear night, they could see the window squares of light in the Jenny Fields Infirmary; and look over the green-black lawn to the solitary night light above the door of the infirmary annex—far away—where Garp had lived as a child.

“Jesus,” Garp said. “Middle-aged? We are already retired —that's what we are. We skipped middle age altogether and moved directly into the world of the elderly .”

“Does that depress you?” Helen asked him, cautious.

“Not yet,” Garp said. “When it starts to depress me, I'll do something else. Or I'll do something , anyway. I figure, Helen, that we got a head start on everyone else. We can afford to take a long time-out.”

Helen grew tired of Garp's wrestling terminology, but she had grown up with it, after all; it was water off a duck, for Helen Holm. And although Garp wasn't writing, he seemed, to Helen, to be happy. Helen read in the evenings, and Garp watched TV.

Garp's work had developed a curious reputation, not altogether unlike what he would have wanted for himself, and even stranger than John Wolf had imagined. Although it embarrassed Garp and John Wolf to see how politically The World According to Bensenhaver was both admired and despised, the book's reputation had caused readers, even if for the wrong reasons, to return to Garp's earlier work. Garp politely refused invitations to speak at colleges, where he was wanted to represent one side or another of so-called women's issues; also, to speak on his relationship to his mother and her work, and the “sex roles” he ascribed to various characters in his books. “The destruction of art by sociology and psychoanalysis,” he called it. But there were an almost equal number of invitations for him simply to read from his own fiction; an occasional one or two of these—especially if it was somewhere Helen wanted to go—he accepted.

Garp was happy with Helen. He wasn't unfaithful to her, anymore; that thought seldom occurred to him. It was perhaps his contact with Ellen James that finally cured him of ever looking at young girls in that way. As for other women—Helen's age, and older—Garp exercised a willpower that was not especially difficult for him. Enough of his life had been influenced by lust.

Ellen James, who was eleven when she was raped and untongued, was nineteen when she moved in with the Garps. She was immediately an older sister to Duncan, and a fellow member of the maimed society to which Duncan shyly belonged. They were so close. She helped Duncan with his homework, because Ellen James was very good at reading and writing. Duncan interested Ellen in swimming, and in photography. Garp built them a darkroom in the Steering mansion, and they spent hours in the dark, developing and developing—Duncan's ceaseless babble, concerning lens openings and light, and the wordless oooh's and aaah's of Ellen James.

Helen bought them a movie camera, and Ellen and Duncan wrote a screenplay together and acted in their own movie—the story of a blind prince whose vision is partially restored by kissing a young cleaning woman. Only one of the prince's eyes is restored to sight because the cleaning woman allows the prince only to kiss her on the cheek. She is embarrassed to let anyone kiss her on the lips because she has lost her tongue. Despite their handicaps, and their compromises, the young couple marries. The involved story is told through pantomime and subtitles, which Ellen wrote. The best thing about the film, Duncan would say later, is that it's only seven minutes long.

Ellen James was also a great help to Helen with baby Jenny. Ellen and Duncan were expert baby-sitters with the girl, whom Garp took to the wrestling room on Sunday afternoons; there, he claimed, she would learn to walk and run and fall without hurting herself, although Helen claimed that the mat would give the child the misconception that the world underfoot felt like a barely firm sponge.

“But that is what the world does feel like,” Garp said.

Since he had stopped writing, the only ongoing friction in Garp's life concerned his relationship with his best friend, Roberta Muldoon. But Roberta was not the source of the friction. When Jenny Fields was dead and gone, Garp discovered that her estate was tremendous, and that Jenny, as if to plague her son, had designated him to be the executor of her last wishes for her fabulous loot and the mansion for wounded women at Dog's Head Harbor.

“Why me? ” Garp had howled. “Why not you? ” Garp yelled at Roberta. But Roberta Muldoon was rather hurt that it hadn't been her.

“I can't imagine. Why you, indeed?” Roberta admitted. “Of all people.”

“Mom was out to get me,” Garp decided.

“Or she was out to make you think ,” Roberta suggested. “What a good mother she was!”

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

For weeks he puzzled over the single sentence that stated Jenny's intentions for the spending of her money and the use of her enormous seacoast house.

I want to leave a place where worthy women can go to collect themselves and just be themselves, by themselves.

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

“A kind of foundation?” Roberta guessed.

“The Fields Foundation,” Garp suggested.

“That's terrific!” Roberta said. “Yes, grants for women—and a place to go.”

“To go do what? ” Garp said. “And grants for what?”

“To go get well, if they have to, or to go be by themselves, if that's what they need,” Roberta said. “And to write, if that's what they do—or paint.”

“Or a home for unwed mothers?” Garp said. “A grant for “getting well"? Oh boy.”

“Be serious,” Roberta said. “This is important. Don't you see? She wanted you to understand the need, she wanted you to have to deal with the problems.”

“And who decides if a woman is “worthy"?” Garp asked. “Oh boy, Mom!” he cried out. “I could wring your neck for this shit!”

You decide,” Roberta said. “That's what will make you think.”

“How about you? ” Garp asked. “This is your kind of thing, Roberta.”

Roberta was clearly torn. She shared with Jenny Fields the desire to educate Garp and other men concerning the legitimacy and complexity of women's needs. She also thought Garp would be rather terrible at this, and she knew she would do it very well.

“We'll do it together,” Roberta said. “That is, you're in charge, but I'll advise you. I'll tell you when I think you're making a mistake.”

“Roberta,” Garp said, “you're always telling me I'm making a mistake.”

Roberta, at her most flirtatious, kissed him on the lips and clubbed him on the shoulder—in both cases, so hard that he winced.

“Jesus,” Garp said.

“The Fields Foundation!” Roberta cried. “It's going to be wonderful.”

Thus was friction kept in the life of T. S. Garp, who without friction of some kind would probably have lost his senses and his grip upon the world. It was friction that kept Garp alive, when he wasn't writing; Roberta Muldoon and the Fields Foundation would provide him with friction, at the very least.

Roberta became the in-residence administrator of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor; the house became, all at once, a writers' colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic—and the few well-lit garret rooms provided light and solitude for painters. Once women knew that there was a Fields Foundation, there were many women who wondered who was eligible for aid. Garp wondered, too. All applicants wrote Roberta, who assembled a small staff of women who alternately liked and disliked Garp—but always argued with him. Together, twice a month, Roberta and her Board of Trustees would assemble in Garp's grouchy presence and choose among the applicants.

In good weather they sat in the balmy side-porch room of the Dog's Head Harbor estate, although Garp increasingly refused to go there. “All the weirdos-in-residence,” Garp told Roberta. “They remind me of other times.” So then they met at Steering, in the Steering family mansion, the wrestling coach's home, where Garp felt slightly more comfortable in the company of these fierce women.

He would have felt more comfortable, no doubt, to have met them all in the wrestling room. Though even there, Garp knew perfectly well, the former Robert Muldoon would have made Garp struggle for his every point.

Applicant No. 1,048 was named Charlie Pulaski.

“I thought they had to be women ,” Garp said. “I thought there was at least one firm criterion.”

“Charlie Pulaski is a woman,” Roberta told Garp. “She's just always been called Charlie.”

“I should say that was enough to disqualify her,” someone said. It was Marcia Fox—a lean, spare poet with whom Garp frequently crossed swords, although he admired her poems. He could never be that economical.

“What does Charlie Pulaski want? ” Garp asked, by rote. Some of the applicants only wanted money; some of them wanted to live at Dog's Head Harbor for a while. Some of them wanted lots of money and a room at Dog's Head Harbor, forever.

“She just wants money,” Roberta said.

“To change her name?” asked Marcia Fox.

“She wants to quit her job and write a book,” Roberta said.

“Oh boy,” said Garp.

“Advise her to keep her job,” said Marcia Fox; she was one of those writers who resented other writers, and would-be writers.

“Marcia even resents dead writers,” Garp told Roberta.

But Marcia and Garp both read a manuscript submitted by Ms. Charlie Pulaski, and they agreed that she should hold on to whatever job she could get.

Applicant No. 1,073, an associate professor of microbiology, wanted time off from her job to write a book, too.

“A novel?” Garp asked.

“Studies in molecular virology,” said Dr. Joan Axe; she was on leave from the Duke University Medical Center to do some research of her own. When Garp asked her what it was, she had told him, mysteriously, that she was interested in “the unseen diseases of the bloodstream.”

Applicant No. 1,081 had an uninsured husband who was killed in a plane crash. She had three children under the age of five and she needed fifteen more semester hours to complete her M.A. degree, in French. She wanted to go back to school, get the degree, and find a decent job; she wanted money for this—and rooms enough for her children, and for a baby-sitter, at Dog's Head Harbor.

The Board of Trustees unanimously decided to award the woman sufficient money to complete her degree and to pay a live-in baby-sitter; but the children, the babysitter, and the woman would all have to live wherever the woman chose to complete her degree. Dog's Head Harbor was not for children and baby-sitters. There were women there who would go crazy upon the sight or sound of a single child. There were women there whose lives had been made miserable by baby-sitters.

That was an easy one to decide.

No. 1,088 caused some problems. She was the divorced wife of the man who had killed Jenny Fields. She had three children, one of whom was in a reform school for preteens, and her child-support payments had stopped when her husband, Jenny Fields' assassin, was shot by a barrage from the New Hampshire State Police and some other hunters with guns who had been cruising the parking lot.

The deceased, Kenny Truckenmiller, had been divorced less than a year. He'd told friends that the child support was breaking his ass; he said that women's lib had screwed up his wife so much that she divorced him. The lawyer who got the job done, in favor of Mrs. Truckenmiller, was a New York divorcee. Kenny Truckenmiller had beaten his wife at least twice weekly for almost thirteen years, and he had physically and mentally abused each of his three children on several occasions. But Mrs. Truckenmiller had not known enough about herself, or what rights she might possibly have, until she read A Sexual Suspect , the autobiography of Jenny Fields. That started her thinking that perhaps the suffering of her weekly beatings, and the abuse of her children, was actually Kenny Truckenmiller's fault; for thirteen years she had thought it was her problem, and her “lot in life.”

Kenny Truckenmiller had blamed the women's movement for the self-education of his wife. Mrs. Truckenmiller had always been self-employed, a “hair stylist” in the town of North Mountain, New Hampshire. She went right on being a hair stylist when Kenny was forced, by the court, to move out of her house. But now that Kenny was no longer driving a truck for the town, Mrs Truckenmiller found the support of her family difficult by hair styling alone. She wrote in her nearly illegible application that she had been forced to compromise herself “to make ends meet,” and that she did not care to repeat the act of compromising herself in the future.

Mrs. Truckenmiller, who never once referred to herself as having a first name, realized that the loathing for her husband was so great as to prejudice the board against her. She would understand, she wrote, if they chose to ignore her.

John Wolf, who was (against his will) an honorary member of the board—and valued for his shrewd financial head—said immediately that nothing could be better or wider publicity for the Fields Foundation than awarding “this unfortunate relation of Jenny's killer” what she asked for. It would be instant news; it would pay for itself, John Wolf decided, in that it would surely gain the foundation untold sums in gift donations.

“We're already doing pretty well on gift donations,” Garp hedged.

“Suppose she's just a whore?” Roberta suggested of the unfortunate Mrs. Truckenmiller; they all stared at her. Roberta had an advantage among them: of being able to think like a woman and like a Philadelphia Eagle. “Just think a minute,” Roberta said. “Suppose she's just a floozy, someone who compromises herself all the time, and always has—and thinks nothing of it. Then, suddenly, we're a joke ; then we've been had.”

“So we need a character reference,” said Marcia Fox.

“Someone's got to see the woman, talk with her,” Garp suggested. “Find out if she's honorable, if she's really trying to live independently.”

They all stared at him.

“Well,” Roberta said, “I'm not about to discover whether she's a whore or not.”

“Oh no,” Garp said. “Not me .”

“Where's North Mountain, New Hampshire?” asked Marcia Fox.

“Not me ,” John Wolf said. “I'm out of New York too much of the time as it is.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said. “Suppose she recognizes me? People do , you know.”

“I doubt she will,” said Hilma Bloch, a psychiatric social worker whom Garp detested. “Those people most motivated to read autobiographies, such as your mother's, are rarely attracted to fiction—or only tangentially. That is, if she read The World According to Bensenhaver she would have done so only because of who you are. And that would not have been sufficient reason to cause her to finish the book; in all probability—and given the fact that she's a hair stylist, after all—she would have bogged down and not read it. And not remembered your picture on the cover, either—only your face, and only vaguely (you were a face in the news, of course, but really only around the time of Jenny's murder). Surely, at that time, Jenny's face was the face to recall. A woman like this watches a lot of television; she's not a book-world person. I strongly doubt that a woman like this would even have a picture of you in her mind.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes away from I-Elma Bloch. Even Roberta rolled her eyes.

“Thank you, Hilma,” said Garp, quietly. It was decided that Garp, would visit Mrs. Truckenmiller “to determine something more concrete about her character.”

“At least find out her first name,” said Marcia Fox.

“I'll bet it's Charlie,” Roberta said.

They passed on to the reports: who was living, presently, at Dog's Head Harbor; whose tenancy was expiring; who was about to move in. And what were the problems there, if any?

There were two painters—one in the south garret, one in the north. The south-garret painter coveted the north-garret painter's light , and for two weeks they didn't get along; not a word to each other at breakfast, and accusations concerning lost mail. And so forth. Then, it appeared, they became lovers. Now only the north-garret painter was painting at all—studies of the south-garret painter, who modeled all day in the good light. Her nakedness, about the upstairs of the house, bothered at least one of the writers, an outspoken anti-lesbian playwright from Cleveland who had trouble sleeping, she said, because of the sound of the waves. It was probably the lovemaking of the painters that bothered her; she was described as “overextended,” anyway, but her complaints ceased once the other writer-in-residence suggested that all the Dog's Head Harbor guests read aloud the parts of the dramatist's play in progress. This was done, successfully for all, and the upper floors of the house were now happy.

The “other writer,” a good short-story writer whom Garp had enthusiastically recommended a year ago, was about to move out, however; her term of residency was expiring. Who would go in her room?

The woman whose mother-in-law had just won custody of her children, following the suicide of her husband?

“I told you not to accept her,” Garp said.

The two Ellen Jamesians who just, one day, showed up?

“Now wait a minute,” Garp said. “What's this? Ellen Jamesians? Showing up? That's not allowed.”

“Jenny always took them in,” Roberta said.

“This is now , Roberta,” Garp said.

The other members of the board were more or less in agreement with him; Ellen Jamesians were not much admired—they never had been, and their radicalism (now) seemed growingly obsolete and pathetic.

“It's almost a tradition, though,” Roberta said. She described two “old” Ellen Jamesians, who'd been back from a bad time in California. Years ago they had stayed at Dog's Head Harbor; returning there, Roberta argued, was a kind of sentimental recovery for them.

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said. “Get rid of them.”

“They were people your mother always took care of,” Roberta said.

“At least they'll be quiet ,” said Marcia Fox, whose economy of tongue Garp did admire. But only Garp laughed.

“I think you should get them to leave, Roberta,” Dr. Joan Axe said.

“They really resent the entire society ,” Hilma Bloch said. “That could be infectious. On the other hand, they are almost the essence of the spirit of the place.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes.

“There is the doctor researching cancer-related abortions,” Joan Axe said. “What about her?”

“Yes, put her on the second floor,” Garp said. “I've met her. She'll scare the shit out of anyone who tries to come upstairs.” Roberta frowned.

The downstairs of the Dog's Head Harbor mansion was the largest part, containing two kitchens and four complete baths; as many as twelve could sleep, very privately, downstairs, and there were still the various conference rooms, as Roberta now called them—they were parlors and giant dens in the days of Jenny Fields. And a vast dining room where food, mail, and whoever wanted company collected all during the day and night.

It was the most social floor of Dog's Head Harbor, usually not suited for the writers and painters. It was the best floor for the potential suicides, Garp had told the board, “because they'll be forced to drown themselves in the ocean rather than jump out the windows.”

But Roberta ran the place in a strong, motherly, tight-end fashion; she could talk almost anyone out of anything, and if she couldn't, she could overpower anybody. She had been much more successful at making the local police her allies than Jenny ever had been. Occasional unhappies were picked up by the police, far down the beach, or wailing on the boardwalks of the village; they were always gently returned to Roberta. The Dog's Head Harbor Police were all football fans, full of respect for the savage line play and the vicious downfield blocking of the former Robert Muldoon.

“I would like to make a motion that no Ellen Jamesian be eligible for aid and comfort from the Fields Foundation,” Garp said.

“Second,” said Marcia Fox.

“This is open to discussion,” Roberta told them all. “I don't see the necessity of having such a rule. We are not in the business of supporting what we largely would agree is a stupid form of political expression, but that doesn't mean that one of these women without a tongue couldn't be genuinely in need of help—I'd say, in fact, they have already demonstrated a definite need to locate themselves, and we can expect to go on hearing from them. They are truly needful people.”

“They are insane,” Garp said.

“This is too general,” said Hilma Bloch.

“There are productive women,” Marcia Fox said, “who have not given up their voices—in fact, they are fighting to use their voices—and I am not in favor of rewarding stupidity and self-imposed silence.”

“There are virtues in silence,” Roberta argued.

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said. And then he saw a light in this dark subject. For some reason, the Ellen Jamesians made him angrier than his image, even, of the Kenny Truckenmillers of this world; and although he saw that the Ellen Jamesians were fading from fashion, they could not fade fast enough to suit Garp. He wanted them gone; he wanted them more than gone—he wanted them disgraced. Helen had already told him that his hatred of them was inappropriate to what they were.

“It's just madness, and simple-minded—what they've done,” Helen said. “Why can't you ignore them, and leave them alone?”

But Garp said, “Let's ask Ellen James. That's fair, isn't it? Let's ask Ellen James for her opinion of the Ellen Jamesians. Jesus, I'd like to publish her opinion of them. Do you know how they've made her feel?”

“This is too personal a matter,” Hilma Bloch said. They had all met Ellen; they all knew that Ellen James hated being tongueless and hated the Ellen Jamesians.

“Let's back off this, for now,” John Wolf said. “I move we table the motion.”

“Damn,” Garp said.

“All right, Garp,” Roberta said. “Let's vote it, right now.” They all knew they would vote it down. That would get rid of it.

“I withdraw the motion,” Garp said, nastily. “Long live the Ellen Jamesians.”

But he did not withdraw.

It was madness that had killed Jenny Fields, his mother. It was extremism. It was self-righteous, fanatical, and monstrous self-pity. Kenny Truckenmiller was only a special kind of moron: a true believer who was also a thug. He was a man who pitied himself so blindly that he could make absolute enemies out of people who contributed only the ideas to his undoing.

And how was an Ellen Jamesian any different? Was not her gesture as desperate, and as empty of an understanding of human complexity?

“Come on ,” John Wolf said. “They haven't murdered anyone.”

“Not yet,” Garp said. “They have the equipment. They are capable of making mindless decisions, and they believe they are so right .”

“There's more to killing someone than that,” Roberta said. They let Garp seethe. What else could they do? It was not one of Garp's better points: tolerance of the intolerant. Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving in to madness—in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

“Tolerance of the intolerant is a difficult task that the times asks of us,” Helen said. Although Garp knew Helen was intelligent, and often more far-seeing than he was, he was rather blind about the Ellen Jamesians.

They, of course, were rather blind about him.

The most radical criticism of Garp—concerning his relationship to his mother and his own works—had come from various Ellen Jamesians. Baited by them, he baited them back. It was hard to see why it should have started, or if it should have, but Garp had become a case of controversy among feminists largely through the goading of Ellen Jamesians—and Garp goading them in return. For the very same reasons, Garp was liked by many feminists and disliked by as many.

As for the Ellen Jamesians, they were no more complicated in their feelings for Garp than they were complicated in their symbology: their tongues hacked off for the hacked-off tongue of Ellen James.

Ironically, it would be Ellen James who escalated this long-time cold war.

She was in the habit, constantly, of showing Garp her writing—her many stories, her remembrances of her parents, of Illinois; her poems; her painful analogies to speechlessness; her appreciations of the visual arts, and swimming

“She's the real thing,” Garp kept telling Helen. “She's got the ability, but she's also got the passion. And I believe she'll have the stamina.”

The aforementioned “stamina” was a word Helen let slide away, because she feared for Garp that he had given up his. He certainly had the ability, and the passion; but she felt he'd also taken a narrow path—he'd been misdirected—and only stamina would let him grow back in all the other ways.

It saddened her. For the time being, Helen kept thinking, she would content herself with whatever Garp got passionate about—the wrestling, even the Ellen Jamesians. Because, Helen believed, energy begets energy—and sooner or later, she thought, he would write again.

So Helen did not interfere too vehemently when Garp got excited about the essay Ellen James showed him. The essay was: “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” by Ellen James. It was powerful and touching and it moved Garp to tears. It recounted her rape, her difficulty with it, her parents' difficulty with it; it made what the Ellen Jamesians did seem like a shallow, wholly political imitation of a very private trauma. Ellen James said that the Ellen Jamesians had only prolonged her anguish; they had made her into a very public casualty. Of course, Garp was susceptible to being moved by public casualties.

And of course, to be fair, the better of the Ellen Jamesians had meant to publicize the general dread that so brutally menaced women and girls. For many of the Ellen Jamesians, the imitation of the horrible untonguing had not been “wholly political.” It had been a most personal identification. In some cases, of course, Ellen Jamesians were women who had also been raped; what they meant was that they felt as if their tongues were gone. In a world of men, they felt as if they had been shut up forever.

That the organization was full of crazies, no one would deny. Not even some Ellen Jamesians would have denied that. It was generally true that they were an inflammatory political group of feminist extremists who often detracted from the extreme seriousness of other women, and other feminists, around them. But Ellen James' attack on them was as inconsiderate of the occasional individuals among the Ellen Jamesians as the action of the group had been inconsiderate of Ellen James—not really thinking how an eleven-year-old girl would have preferred to get over her horror more privately.

Everyone in America knew how Ellen James had lost her tongue, except the younger generation, just now growing up, who often confused Ellen with the Ellen Jamesians; this was a most painful confusion for Ellen, because it meant that she was suspected of having done it to herself.

“It was a necessary rage for her to have,” Helen said to Garp, about Ellen's essay. “I'm sure she needed to write it, and it's done her a world of good to say all this. I've told her that.”

I've told her she should publish it,” Garp said.

“No,” Helen said. “I really don't think so. What good does it do?”

“What good? ” Garp asked. “Well, it's the truth . And it will be good for Ellen.”

“And for you? ” Helen asked, knowing that he wanted a kind of public humiliation of the Ellen Jamesians.

“Okay,” he said, “okay, okay. But she's right , goddamnit. Those nuts ought to hear it from the original source.”

“But why?” said Helen. “For whose good?”

“Good, good,” Garp muttered, though in his heart he must have known that Helen was right. He told Ellen she should file her essay. Ellen wouldn't communicate with either Garp or Helen for a week.

It was not until John Wolf called Garp that either Garp or Helen realized Ellen had sent the essay to John Wolf.

“What am I suppose to do with it?” he asked.

“God, send it back,” Helen said.

“No, damn it,” Garp said. “Ask Ellen what she wants you to do with it.”

“Old Pontius Pilate, washing his hands,” Helen said to Garp.

“What do you want to do with it?” Garp asked John Wolf.

Me? ” John Wolf said. “It means nothing to me. But I'm sure it's publishable. I mean, it's very well written.”

“That's not why it's publishable,” Garp said, “and you know it.”

“Well, no,” John Wolf said. “But its also nice that it's well said.”

Ellen told John Wolf she wanted it published. Helen tried to talk her out of it. Garp refused to get involved.

“You are involved,” Helen told him, “and by saying nothing, you know you'll get what you want: that painful attack published. That's what you want.”

So Garp spoke to Ellen James. He tried to be enthusiastic in his reasoning to her—why she shouldn't publicly say all those things. These women were sick, sad, confused, tortured, abused by others, and now self-abused—but what point was there in criticizing them? Everyone would forget them in another five years. They'll hand out their notes and people will say, “What's an Ellen Jamesian? You mean you can't talk? You got no tongue?”

Ellen looked sullen and determined.

I won't forget them!

she wrote Garp.

Not in 5 years, not in 50 years will I ever forget them; I will remember them the way I remember my tongue.

Garp admired how the girl liked to use the good old semicolon. He said softly, “I think it's better not to publish this, Ellen.”

Will you be angry with me if I do?

she asked.

He admitted he would not be angry.

And Helen?

“Helen will only be angry with me ,” Garp said.

“You make people too angry,” Helen told him, in bed. “You get them all wound up. You inflame . You should lay off. You should do your own work, Garp. Just your own work. You used to say politics were stupid, and they meant nothing to you. You were right. They are stupid, they do mean nothing. You're doing this because it's easier than sitting down and making something up, from scratch. And you know it. You're building bookshelves all over the house, and finishing floors, and fucking around in the garden , for Christ's sake.

“Did I marry a handyman? Did I ever expect you to be a crusader?

“You should be writing the books and letting other people make the shelves. And you know I'm right, Garp.

“You're right,” he said.

He tried to remember what had enabled him to imagine that first sentence of “The Pension Grillparzer.”

“My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau.”

Where had it come from? He tried to think of sentences like it. What he got was a sentence like this: “The boy was five years old; he had a cough that seemed deeper than his small, bony chest.” What he got was memory, and that made muck. He had no pure imagination anymore.

In the wrestling room, he worked out three straight days with the heavyweight. To punish himself?

“More fucking around in the garden, so to speak,” said Helen.

Then he announced he had a mission, a trip to make for the Fields Foundation. To North Mountain, New Hampshire. To determine if a Fields Foundation Fellowship would be wasted on a woman named Truckenmiller.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen said. “More bookshelves. More politics. More crusades. That's the kind of thing people do who can't  write.”

But he was gone; he was out of the house when John Wolf called to say that a very well read and much seen magazine was going to publish “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” by Ellen James.

John Wolf's voice over the phone had the cold, unseen, quick flick of the tongue of old You-Know-Who—the Under Toad, that's who, Helen thought. But she didn't know why; not yet.

She told Ellen James the news. Helen forgave Ellen, immediately, and even allowed herself to be excited with her. They took a drive to the shore with Duncan and little Jenny. They bought lobsters—Ellen's favorite—and enough scallops for Garp, who was not crazy about lobster.

Champagne!

Ellen wrote in the car.

Does champagne go with lobster and scallops?

“Of course,” Helen said. “It can .” They bought champagne. They stopped at Dog's Head Harbor and invited Roberta to dinner. “When will Dad be back?” Duncan asked.

“I don't know where North Mountain, New Hampshire, is ,” Helen said, “but he said he'd be back in time to eat with us.”

That's what he told me, too, said Ellen James.

NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON in North Mountain, New Hampshire, was really the kitchen of Mrs. Kenny Truckenmiller, whose first name was Harriet.

“Are you Nanette?” Garp asked her timidly, from the outside steps, frosted with salt and crunchy with melting slush.

“There ain't no Nanette,” she told him. “I'm Harriet Truckenmiller.” Behind her, in the dark kitchen, a large dog strained and snarled; Mrs. Truckenmiller kept the dog from getting to Garp by thrusting her long hip back against the lunging beast. Her pale, scarred ankle wedged open the kitchen door. Her slippers were blue; in her long robe, her figure was lost, but Garp could see she was tall—and that she had been taking a bath.

“Uh, do you do men's hair?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“But would you?” Garp asked her. “I don't trust barbers.”

Harriet Truckenmiller looked suspiciously at Garp's black knit ski hat, which was pulled down over his ears and concealed all his hair but the thick tufts that touched his shoulders from the back of his short neck.

“I can't see your hair,” she said. He took the stocking hat off, his hair wild with static electricity and tangled in the cold wind.

“I don't want just a haircut,” Garp said, neutrally, eyeing the woman's sad, drawn face and the soft wrinkles beside her gray eyes. Her own hair, a washed-out blond, was in curlers.

“You don't have no appointment,” Harriet Truckenmiller said.

The woman was no whore, he could plainly see. She was tired and frightened of him.

“What exactly do you want done to your hair, anyway?” she asked him.

“Just a trim,” Garp mumbled, “but I like a slight curl in it.”

“A curl?” said Harriet Truckenmiller, trying to imagine this from Garp's crown of very straight hair. “Like a permanent, you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, running his hand sheepishly through the snarls. “Whatever you can do with it, you know?”

Harriet Truckemniller shrugged. “I have to get dressed,” she said. The dog, devious and strong, thrust most of his stout body between her legs and jammed his broad, grimacing face into the opening between the storm and the main door. Garp tensed for the attack, but Harriet Truckenmiller brought her big knee up sharply and staggered the animal with a blow to its muzzle. She twisted her hand into the loose skin of its neck; the dog moaned and melted into the kitchen behind her.

The frozen yard, Garp saw, was a mosaic of the dog's huge turds captured in ice. There were also three cars in the yard; Garp, doubted if any of them ran. There was a woodpile, but no one had stacked it. There was a TV antenna, which at one time might have been on the roof; now it leaned against the beige aluminum siding of the house, its wires running like a spider web out a cracked window.

Mrs. Truckenmiller stepped back and opened the door for Garp. In the kitchen he felt his eyes dry from the heat of the wood stove; the room smelled of baking cookies and hair rinse—in fact, the kitchen seemed divided between the functions of a kitchen and the paraphernalia of Harriet's business. A pink sink with a shampoo hose; cans of stewed tomatoes; a three-way mirror framed with stage lights; a wooden rack with spices and meat tenderizer; the rows of ointments, lotions, and goo. And a steel stool over which a hair dryer hung suspended from a steel rod—like an original invention of an electric chair.

The dog was gone, and so was Harriet Truckenmiller; she had slipped away to dress herself, and her surly companion appeared to have gone with her. Garp combed his hair; he looked in the mirror as if he were trying to remember himself. He was about to be altered and rendered unrecognizable to all, he imagined.

Then the door to the outside opened and a big man in a hunting coat with a hunter's red cap walked in; he had an enormous armload of wood, which he carried to the wood box by the stove. The dog, who all along had been crouched under the sink—inches away from Garp's trembling knees—moved quickly to intercept the man. The dog slunk quietly, not even growling; the man was known here.

“Go lie down, you damn fool,” he said, and the dog did as it was told. “Is that you, Dickie?” called Harriet Truckenmiller, from somewhere in another part of the house.

“Who else was you expectin'?” he shouted; then he turned and saw Garp in front of the mirror.

“Hello,” Garp said. The big man called Dickie stared. He was perhaps fifty; his huge red face looked scraped by ice, and Garp recognized immediately, from his familiarity with Duncan's expressions, that the man had a glass eye.

“'Lo,” Dickie said.

“I got a customer!” Harriet called.

“I see you do,” said Dickie. Garp nervously touched his hair, as if he could suggest to Dickie how important his hair was to him—to have come all the way to North Mountain, New Hampshire, and NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON, for what must have appeared to Dickie to be the simple need of a haircut.

“He wants a curl! ” called Harriet. Dickie kept his red cap on, though Garp could plainly see that the man was bald.

“I don't know what you really want, fella,” Dickie whispered to Garp, “but a curl is all you get. You hear?”

“I don't trust barbers,” Garp said.

“I don't trust you ,” Dickie said.

“Dickie, he hasn't done anything,” Harriet Truckenmiller said. She was dressed in rather tight turquoise slacks, which reminded Garp of his discarded jump suit, and a print blouse full of flowers that never grow in New Hampshire. Her hair was tied back with a scarf of unmatching plants, and she had done her face, but not overdone it; she looked “nice,” like somebody's mother who bothered to keep herself up. She was, Garp guessed, a few years younger than Dickie, but just a few.

“He don't want no curl , Harriet,” Dickie said. “What's he want to have his hair played with for, huh?”

“He don't trust barbers,” Harriet Truckenmiller said. For a brief moment Garp wondered if Dickie were a barber; he didn't think so.

“I really don't mean any disrespect,” Garp said. He had seen all he needed to see; he wanted to go tell the Fields Foundation to give Harriet Truckermiller all the money she needed. “If this makes anyone uncomfortable,” Garp said, “I'll just forget it.” He reached for his parka, which he'd put on an empty chair, but the big dog had the parka pinned down on the floor.

“Please, you can stay,” Mrs. Truckenmiller said. “Dickie's just lookin” after me.” Dickie looked ashamed of himself; he stood with one mighty boot on top of the other.

“I brung you some dry wood,” he said to Harriet. “I guess I shoulda knocked .” He pouted by the stove.

Don't , Dickie,” Harriet said to him, and she kissed him fondly on his big pink cheek.

He left the kitchen with one last glare for Garp. “Hope you get a good haircut,” Dickie said.

“Thank you,” said Garp. When he spoke, the dog shook his parka.

“Here, stop that,” Harriet told the dog; she put Garp's parka back on the chair. “You can go if you want to,” Harriet said, “but Dickie won't bother you. He's just lookin' after me.”

“Your husband?” Garp asked, though he doubted it. “My husband was Kenny Truckenmiller,” Harriet said. “Everybody knows that, and no matter who you are, you know who he was.”

“Yes,” Garp said.

“Dickie's my brother. He just worries about me,” Harriet said. “Some guys have been messin' around, since Kenny's gone.” She sat at the bright counter of mirrors, beside Garp, and leaned her long, veiny hands on her turquoise thighs. She sighed. She did not look at Garp when she spoke. “I don't know what you heard, and I don't care,” she said. “I do hairjust hair. If you really want somethin' done to your hair, I'll do it. But that's all I do,” Harriet said. “No matter what anybody told you, I don't mess around. Just hair.”

“Just hair,” Garp said. “I just want my hair done, that's all.”

“That's good,” she said, still not looking at him.

There were little photographs stuck under the molding and framed against the mirrors. One was a wedding picture of young Harriet Truckenmiller and her grinning husband, Kenny. They were awkwardly maiming a cake.

Another photograph was of a pregnant Harriet Truckenmiller holding a young baby; there was another child, maybe Walt's age, leaning his cheek against her hip. Harriet looked tired but not daunted. And there was a photograph of Dickie; he was standing next to Kenny Truckenmiller, and they were both standing next to a gutted deer, hung upside-down from the branch of a tree. The tree was in the front yard of NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON. Garp recognized that photograph quickly; he had seen it in a national magazine after Jenny's assassination. The photograph apparently demonstrated to the simple-minded that Kenny Truckemniller was a born-and-raised killer: besides shooting Jenny Fields, he had at one time shot a deer.

“Why Nanette? ” Garp asked Harriet later, when he dared look only at her patient fingers and not at her unhappy face—and not at his hair.

“I thought it sounded sort of French,” Harriet said, but she knew he was from somewhere in the outside world—outside North Mountain, New Hampshire—and she laughed at herself.

“Well, it does ,” Garp said, laughing with her. “Sort of,” he added, and they both laughed in a friendly way.

When he was ready to go, she wiped the slobber of the dog off his parka with a sponge. “Aren't you even going to look at it?” she asked him. She meant the hairdo; he took a breath and confronted himself in the three-way mirror. His hair, he thought, was beautiful! It was his same old hair, the same color, even the same length, but it seemed to fit his head for the first time in his life. His hair clung to his skull, yet it was still light and fluffy; a slight wave in it made his broken nose and his squat neck appear less severe. Garp seemed to himself to fit his own face in a way he had never thought possible. This was the first beauty salon he had ever been to, of course. In fact, Jenny had cut his hair until he married Helen, and Helen had cut his hair after that; he had never even been to a barber.

“It's lovely,” he said; his missing ear remained artfully hidden. “Oh, go on,” Harriet said, giving him a pleasant little shove—but, he would tell the Fields Foundation, not a suggestive shove; not at all. He wanted to tell her then that he was Jenny Fields' son, but he knew that his motive for doing so would have been wholly selfish—to have been personally responsible for moving someone.

“It is unfair to take advantage of anyone's emotional vulnerability,” wrote the polemical Jenny Fields. Thus Garp's new creed: capitalize not on the emotions of others. “Thank you and good-bye,” he said to Mrs. Truckenmiller.

Outside, Dickie wielded a splitting ax in the woodpile. He did it very well. He stopped splitting when Garp appeared. “Good-bye,” Garp called to him, but Dickie walked over to Garp—with the ax.

“Let's get a look at the hairdo,” Dickie said.

Garp stood still while Dickie examined him.

“You were a friend of Kenny Truckenmiller's?” Garp asked.

“Yup,” Dickie said. “I was his only friend. I introduced him to Harriet,” Dickie said. Garp nodded. Dickie eyed the new hairdo.

“It's tragic,” Garp said; he meant everything that had happened.

“It ain't bad,” Dickie said; he meant Garp's hair.

“Jenny Fields was my mother,” Garp said, because he wanted someone to know, and he felt certain he was taking no emotional advantage of Dickie.

“You didn't tell her that, did you?” Dickie said, pointing toward the house, and Harriet, with his long ax.

“No, no,” Garp said.

“That's good,” Dickie said. “She don't want to hear nothin'like that.”

“I didn't think so,” Garp said, and Dickie nodded approvingly.

“Your sister is a very nice woman,” Garp added.

“She is , she is,” Dickie said, nodding fiercely.

“Well, so long,” Garp said. But Dickie touched him lightly with the handle of the ax.

“I was one of them who shot him,” Dickie said. “You know that?”

“You shot Kenny?” Garp said.

“I was one of them who did,” Dickie said. “Kenny was crazy. Somebody had to shoot him.”

“I'm very sorry,” Garp said. Dickie shrugged.

“I liked the guy,” Dickie said. “But he got crazy at Harriet, and he got crazy at your mother. He wouldn't ever have got well, you know,” Dickie said. “He just got sick about women. He got sick for good. You could tell he wasn't ever going to get over it.”

“A terrible thing,” said Garp.

“So long,” Dickie said; he turned back to his woodpile. Garp turned toward his car, across the frozen turds that dotted the yard. “Your hair looks good!” Dickie called to him. The remark seemed sincere. Dickie was splitting logs again when Garp waved to him from the driver's seat of his car. In the window of NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON Harriet Truckenmiller waved to Garp: it was not a wave meant to encourage him, or anything, he was quite sure. He drove back through the village of North Mountain—he drank a cup of coffee in the one diner, he got gas at the one gas station. Everyone looked at his pretty hair. In every mirror, Garp looked at his pretty hair! Then he drove home, arriving in time for the celebration: Ellen's first publication.

If it made him as uneasy as the news had made Helen, he did not admit it. He sat through the lobster, the scallops, and the champagne, waiting for Helen or Duncan to comment on his hair. It was only when he was doing the dishes that Ellen James handed him a soggy note.

You had your hair done?

He nodded, irritably.

“I don't like it,” Helen told him, in bed.

“I think it's terrific,” Garp said.

“It's not like you,” Helen said; she was doing her best to muss it up. “It looks like the hair on a corpse,” she said in the darkness.

“A corpse!” Garp said. “Jesus.”

“A body prepared by an undertaker,” said Helen, almost frantically running her hands through his hair. “Every little hair in place,” she said. “It's too perfect. You don't look alive!” she said. Then she cried and cried and Garp held her and whispered to her—trying to find out what the matter was.

Garp did not share her sense of the Under Toad—not this time—and he talked and talked to her, and made love to her. Finally, she fell asleep.

The essay by Ellen James, “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” appeared to engender no immediate fuss. It takes a while for most Letters to the Editor to be printed.

There were the expectable personal letters to Ellen James: condolences from idiots, propositions from sick men—the ugly, antifeminist tyrants and baiters of women who, as Garp had warned Ellen, would see themselves as being on her side.

“People will always make sides,” Garp said, “—of everything.”

There was not a written word from a single Ellen Jamesian.

Garp's first Steering wrestling team produced an 8-2 season as it approached its final dual meet with its arch rival, the bad boys from Bath. Of course, the team's strength rested on some very well coached wrestlers whom Ernie Holm had brought along for the last two or three years, but Garp had kept everyone sharp. He was trying to estimate the wins and losses, weight class by weight class, in the upcoming match with Bath—sitting at the kitchen table in the vast house now in memory of Steering's first family—when Ellen James burst upon him, in tears, with the new issue of the magazine that had published her a month ago.

Garp felt he should have warned Ellen about magazines, too. They had, of course, published a long, epistolary essay written by a score of Ellen Jamesians, in response to Ellen's bold announcement that she felt used by them and she disliked them. It was just the kind of controversy magazines love. Ellen felt especially betrayed by the magazine's editor, who had obviously revealed to the Jamesians that Ellen James now lived with the notorious T. S. Garp.

Thus the Ellen Jamesians had that to get their teeth into: Ellen James, poor child, had been brainwashed into her antifeminist stance by the male villain, Garp. The betrayer of his mother! The smirking capitalizer on women's-movement politics! In the various letters, Garp's relationship with Ellen James was referred to as “seductive,” “slimy,” and “underhanded.”

I'm sorry!

Ellen wrote.

“It's okay, it's okay. Nothing's your fault,” Garp assured her.

I'm not an antifeminist!

“Of course you're not,” Garp told her.

They make everything so black and white.

“Of course they do,” said Garp.

That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them—or else you're their enemy.

“Yes, yes,” Garp said.

I wish I could talk.

And then she dissolved, crying on Garp's shoulder, her wordless, angry blubber rousing Helen from the far-off reading room of the great house, driving Duncan from the darkroom, and waking baby Jenny from her nap.

So, foolishly, Garp decided to take them on, these grown-up crazies, these devout fanatics who—even when their chosen symbol rejected them—insisted they knew more about Ellen James than Ellen James knew about herself.

“Ellen James is not a symbol,” Garp wrote. “She is a rape victim who was raped and dismembered before she was old enough to make up her own mind about sex and men.” Thus he began; he went on and on. And, of course, they published it—liking any fuel to any fire. It was also the first published piece of anything by T. S. Garp since the famous novel, The World According to Bensenhaver .

Actually, it was the second. In a little magazine, shortly after Jenny's death, Garp published his first and only poem. It was a strange poem; it was about condoms.

Garp felt his life was marred by condoms—man's device to spare himself and others the consequences of his lust. Our lifetime, Garp felt, was stalked by condoms—condoms in the parking lots in the early mornings, condoms discovered by children in the playing sand of the beaches, condoms used for messages (one to his mother, on the door knob of their tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex). Condoms unflushed down the dormitory toilets of the Steering School. Condoms lying slick and cocky in public urinals. Once a condom delivered with the Sunday paper. Once a condom in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. And once a condom on the stick-shift shaft of the old Volvo; someone had used the car overnight, but not for driving.

Condoms found Garp the way ants found sugar. He traveled miles, he changed continents, and there—in the bidet of the otherwise spotless but unfamiliar hotel room...there—in the back seat of the taxi, like the removed eye of a large fish ...there—eyeing him, from the bottom of his shoe, where he picked it up, somewhere. From everywhere condoms came to him and vilely surprised him.

Condoms and Garp went way back. They were somehow joined at the beginning. How often he recalled his first condom shock, the condoms in the cannon's mouth!

It was a fair poem, but almost no one read it because it was gross. Many more people read his essay on Ellen James vs. the Ellen Jamesians. That was news; that was a contemporary event. Sadly, Garp knew, that is more interesting than art.

Helen begged him not to be baited, not to get involved. Even Ellen James told him that it was her fight; she did not ask for his support.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen warned. “More bookshelves.”

But he wrote angrily and well; he said more firmly what Ellen James had meant. He spoke with eloquence for those serious women who suffered, by association, “the radical self-damage” of the Ellen Jamesians—"the kind of shit that gives feminism a bad name.” He could not resist putting them down, and though he did it well, Helen rightly asked, “For whom? Who is serious who doesn't already know the Ellen Jamesians are crazy? No, Garp, you've done this for them —not for Ellen, either. You've done it for the fucking Ellen Jamesians! You've done it to get to them. And why? Jesus, in another year no one would have remembered them—or why they did what they did. They were a fashion , a stupid fashion, but you couldn't just let them pass by. Why?

But he was sullen about it, with the predictable attitude of someone who has been right —at all costs. And, therefore, wonders if he was wrong. It was a feeling that isolated him from everyone—even from Ellen. She was ready to be quits with it, she was sorry she had started it.

“But they started it,” Garp insisted.

Not really. The first man who raped someone, and tried to hurt her so she couldn't tell—he started it,

said Ellen James.

“Okay,” Garp said. “Okay, okay.” The girl's sad truth hurt him. Hadn't he only wanted to defend her?

The Steering wrestling team whipped Bath Academy in the season's final dual meet and finished 9-2, with a second-place team trophy in the New England tournament and one individual champion, a 167-pounder whom Garp had personally done the most work with. But the season was over; Garp, the retired writer, once more had too much time on his hands.

He saw a lot of Roberta. They played endless games of squash; between them, they broke four rackets in three months and the little finger on Garp's left hand. Garp had an unmindful backswing that accounted for nine stitches across the bridge of Roberta's nose; Roberta hadn't had any stitches since her Eagle days and she complained about them bitterly. On a cross-court charge, Roberta's long knee gave Garp a groin injury that had him hobbling for a week.

“Honestly, you two,” Helen told them. “Why don't you just go off and have a torrid affair. It would be safer .”

But they were the best of friends, and if ever such urges occurred—for either Garp or Roberta—they were quickly made into a joke. Also, Roberta's love life was at last coolly organized; like a born woman, she valued her privacy. And she enjoyed the directorship of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta reserved her sexual self for not infrequent but never excessive flings upon the city of New York, where she kept a calm number of lovers on edge for her sudden visits and trysts. “It's the only way I can manage it,” she told Garp.

“It's a good enough way, Roberta,” Garp said. “Not everyone is so fortunate—to have this separation of power.”

And so they played more squash, and when the weather warmed, they ran on the curvy roads that stretched from Steering to the sea. On one road, Dog's Head Harbor was a flat six miles from Steering; they often ran from one mansion to the other. When Roberta did her business in New York, Garp ran alone.

He was alone, nearing the halfway point to Dog's Head Harbor—where he would turn around and run back to Steering—when the dirty-white Saab passed him, appeared to slow down, then sped ahead of him and out of sight. That was the only thing strange about it. Garp ran on the left-hand side of the road so that he could see the cars approaching closest to him; the Saab had passed him on the right, in its proper lane—nothing funny about it.

Garp was thinking about a reading he had promised to give at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta had talked him into reading to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their invited guests; he was, after all, the chief trustee—and Roberta frequently organized small concerts and poetry readings, and so forth—but Garp was leery of it. He disliked readings—and especially now, to women; his put-down of the Ellen Jamesians had left so many women feeling raw. Most serious women, of course, agreed with him, but most of them were also intelligent enough to recognize a kind of personal vindictiveness in his criticisms of the Ellen Jamesians, which was stronger than logic. They sensed a kind of killer instinct in him—basically male and basically intolerant. He was, as Helen said, too intolerant of the intolerant. Most women surely thought Garp had written the truth about the Ellen Jamesians, but was it necessary to have been so rough? In his own wrestling terminology, perhaps Garp was guilty of unnecessary roughness. It was his roughness many women suspected, and when he read now, even to mixed audiences—at colleges, mainly, where roughness seemed presently unfashionable—he was aware of a silent dislike. He was a man who had publicly lost his temper; he had demonstrated that he could be cruel.

And Roberta had advised him not to read a sex scene; not that the Fields Foundation fellows were essentially hostile, but they were wary, Roberta said. “You have lots of other scenes to read,” Roberta said, “besides sex.” Neither of them mentioned the possibility that he might have anything new to read. And it was mainly for this reason—that he had nothing new to read—that Garp had grown increasingly unhappy about giving readings, anywhere.

Garp topped the slight hill by a farm for black Angus cattle—the only hill between Steering and the sea—and passed the two-mile mark on his run. He saw the blue-black noses of the beasts pointed at him, like double-barreled guns over a low stone wall. Garp always spoke to the cattle; he mooed at them.

The dirty-white Saab was now approaching him, and Garp moved into the dust of the soft shoulder. One of the black Angus mooed back at Garp; two shied away from the stone wall. Garp had his eyes on them. The Saab was not going very fast—did not appear reckless. There seemed no reason to keep an eye on it.

It was only his memory that saved him. Writers have very selective memories, and fortunately, for Garp, he had chosen to remember how the dirty-white Saab had slowed—when it first passed him, going the other way—and how the driver's head appeared to be lining him up in the rear-view mirror.

Garp looked away from the Angus and saw the silent Saab, engine cut, coasting straight at him in the soft shoulder, a trail of dust spurning behind its quiet white shape and over the intent, hunched head of the driver. The driver, aiming the Saab at Garp, was the closest visual image Garp would ever have of what a ball turret gunner who was at work looked like.

Garp took two bounds to the stone wall and vaulted it, not seeing the single line of electric fencing above the wall. He felt the tingle in his thigh as he grazed the wire, but he cleared the fence, and the wall, and landed in the wet green stubble of the field, chewed and pockmarked by the herd of Angus.

He lay hugging the wet ground, he heard the croak of the vile-tasting Under Toad in his dry throat—he heard the explosion of hooves as the Angus thundered away from him. He heard the rock-and-metal meeting of the dirty-white Saab with the stone wall. Two boulders, the size of his head, bounced lazily beside him. One wild-eyed Angus bull stood his ground, but the Saab's horn was stuck; perhaps the steady blare kept the bull from charging.

Garp knew he was alive; the blood in his mouth was only because he had bitten his lip. He moved along the wall to the point of impact, where the bashed Saab was imbedded. Its driver had lost more than her tongue.

She was in her forties. The Saab's engine had driven her knees up around the mangled steering column. She had no rings on her hands, which were short-fingered and reddened by the rough winter, or winters, she had known. The Saab's door post on the driver's side, or else the windshield's frame, had struck her face and dented one temple and one cheek. This left her face a little lopsided. Her brown, blood-matted hair was ruffled by the warm summer wind, which blew through the hole where the windshield had been.

Garp knew she was dead because he looked in her eyes. He knew she was an Ellen Jamesian because he looked in her mouth. He also looked in her purse. There was only the predictable note pad and pencil. There were lots of used and new notes, too. One of them said:

Hi! My name is...

and so forth. Another one said:

You asked for this.

Garp imagined that this was the note she had intended to stick under the bloody waistband of his running shorts when she left him dead and mangled by the side of the road.

Another note was almost lyrical; it was the one the newspapers would love to use, and reuse.

I have never been raped, and I have never wanted to be. I have never been with a man, and I have never wanted to be, either. My whole life's meaning has been to share the suffering of Ellen James.

Oh boy, Garp thought, but he left that note to be discovered with her other things. He was not the sort of writer, or the sort of man, who concealed important messages—even if the messages were insane.

He had aggravated his old groin injury by vaulting the stone wall and the electric fence, but he was able to jog back toward town until a yogurt truck picked him up; Garp and the yogurt driver went to tell the police together.

By the time the yogurt driver passed the scene of the accident, on his way to discover Garp, the black Angus had escaped through the rent in the stone wall and were milling around the dirty-white Saab like large, beastly mourners surrounding this fragile angel killed in a foreign car.

Maybe that was the Under Toad I felt, Helen thought, lying awake beside the soundly sleeping Garp. She hugged his warm body; she nestled in the smell of her own rich sex all over him. Maybe that dead Ellen Jamesian was the Under Toad, and now she's gone, thought Helen; she squeezed Garp so hard that he woke up.

“What is it?” he asked. But, wordless as Ellen James, Helen hugged his hips; her teeth chattered against his chest and he hugged her until she stopped shivering.

A “spokesperson” for the Ellen Jamesians remarked that this was an isolated act of violence, not sanctioned by the society of Ellen Jamesians but obviously provoked by the “typically male, aggressive, rapist personality of T. S. Garp.” They were not taking responsibility for this “isolated act,” the Jamesians declared, but they were not surprised or especially sorry about it, either.

Roberta told Garp that, under the circumstances, if he didn't feel like reading to a group of women, she would understand. But Garp read to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their assorted guests at Dog's Head Harbor—a crowd of less than one hundred people, cozily comfortable in the sun room of Jenny's estate. He read them “The Pension Grillparzer,” which he introduced by saying, “This is the first and best thing I ever wrote, and I don't even know how I thought it up. I think it is about death, which I didn't even know very much about when I wrote it. I know more about death now, and I'm not writing a word. There are eleven major characters in this story and seven of them die; one of them goes mad; one of them runs away with another woman. I'm not going to give away what happens to the other two characters, but you can see that the odds for surviving this story aren't great.”

Then he read to them. Some of them laughed; four of them cried; there were lots of sneezes and coughs, perhaps because of the ocean dampness; nobody left and everyone applauded. An older woman in the back, by the piano, slept soundly through the entire story, but even she applauded at the end; she woke up to the applause and joined in it, happily.

The event seemed to charge Garp. Duncan had attended the reading—it was his favorite among his father's works (actually one of the few things his father had written that Duncan had been allowed to read). Duncan was a talented young artist and he had more than fifty drawings of the characters and situations in his father's story, which he revealed to Garp after Garp drove them both home. Some of the drawings were fresh and unpretentious; all of them were thrilling to Garp. The old bear's withered flanks engulfing the absurd unicycle; the grandmother's matchstick ankles appearing frail and exposed under the W.C. door. The evil mischief in the dream man's excited eyes! The floozy beauty of Herr Theobald's sister ("...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"). And the brave optimism of the man who could only walk on his hands.

“How long have you been doing this?” Garp asked Duncan; he could have wept, he felt so proud.

It charged him, very much. He proposed to John Wolf a special edition, a book of “The Pension Grillparzer,” illustrated by Duncan. “The story's good enough to be a book all by itself,” Garp wrote John Wolf. “And I'm certainly well known enough for it to sell. Except for a little magazine, and an anthology or two, it's really never been published before. Besides, the drawings are lovely! And the story really holds up.

“I hate it when a writer starts cashing in on a reputation—publishing all the shit in his drawers, and republishing all the old shit that deserved to be missed. But this isn't a case of that, John; you know it isn't.”

John Wolf knew. He thought Duncan's drawings were fresh and unpretentious, but also not really very good; the boy was not yet thirteen—no matter how talented he was. But John Wolf also knew a good idea for publishing when he saw it. To be sure, of course, he gave the book the Secret Jillsy Sloper Test; Garp's story, and especially Duncan's drawings, passed Jillsy's scrutiny with the highest praise. Her only reservations concerned Garp's using too many words she didn't know.

A father and son book, John Wolf thought, would be nice for Christmas. And the sad gentleness of the story, its full pity and its mild violence, would perhaps ease the tension of Garp's war with the Ellen Jamesians.

The groin healed, and Garp ran the road from Steering to the sea all summer, nodding his recognition to the brooding Angus every day; they now had the safety of that fortunate stone wall in common, and Garp felt forever identified with these large, lucky animals. Happily grazed, and happily bred. And slaughtered, one day, quickly. Garp did not think of their slaughter. Or his own. He watched out for cars, but not nervously.

“An isolated act,” he told Helen and Roberta and Ellen James. They nodded, but Roberta ran with him whenever she could. Helen thought she would feel more at ease when the weather got cold again and Garp ran on the indoor track in the Miles Seabrook Field House. Or when he started wrestling again, and rarely went out at all. Those warm mats and that padded room were a safety symbol to Helen Holm, who had grown up in such an incubator.

Garp, too, looked forward to another wrestling season. And to the father and son publication of The Pension Grillparzer —a tale by T. S. Garp, illustrated by Duncan Garp. At last, a Garp book for children and for grownups! It was also, of course, like starting over. Going back to the beginning and getting a fresh start. What a world of illusions blossoms with the idea of “starting over.”

Suddenly, Garp started writing again.

He started by writing a letter to the magazine that had published his attack on the Ellen Jamesians. In the letter he apologized for the vehemence and self-righteousness of his remarks. “Although I believe Ellen James was used by these women, who had little concern for the real-life Ellen James, I can see that the need to use Ellen James in some way was genuine and great. I feel, of course, at least partially responsible for the death of that very needful and violent woman who felt provoked enough to try to kill me. I am sorry.”

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers—or to anyone who believes in pure good, or in pure evil. The Ellen Jamesians who responded, in print, all said that Garp was obviously afraid for his own life; they said he obviously feared an endless line of hit men (or “hit persons") whom the Ellen Jamesians would send after him until they got him. They said that along with being a male swine, and a bully of women, T. S. Garp was clearly “a yellow chickenshit coward with no balls.”

If Garp saw these responses, he appeared not to care; it is likely that he never read them. He wrote to apologize, mainly, because of his writing ; it was an act meant to clear his desk, not his conscience; he meant to rid his mind of the garden-tending, bookshelf-making trivia that had occupied his time while he was waiting to write seriously again. He thought he would make peace with the Ellen Jamesians and then forget them, although Helen could not forget them. Ellen James certainly could not forget them, either, and even Roberta was alert and edgy whenever she was out with Garp.

About a mile beyond the bull farm, one fine day when they were running toward the sea, Roberta felt suddenly convinced that the approaching Volkswagen housed another would-be assassin; she threw a magnificent cross-body block on Garp and belted him off the soft shoulder and down a twelve-foot embankment into a muddy ditch. Garp sprained an ankle and sat howling at Roberta from the stream bed. Roberta seized a rock, with which she threatened the Volkswagen, which was full of frightened teen-agers returning from a beach party; Roberta talked them into making room for Garp, whom they drove to the Jenny Fields Infirmary.

“You are a menace! ” Garp told Roberta, but Helen was especially happy for Roberta's presence—her tight end's instinct for blind-side hits and cheap shots.

Garp's sprained ankle kept him off the road for two weeks and stepped up his writing. He was working on what he called his “father book,” or “the book of fathers"; it was the first of the three projects he had jauntily described to John Wolf the night before he left for Europe—this one was the novel to be called My Father's Illusions . Because he was inventing a father, Garp felt more in touch with the spirit of pure imagination that he felt had kindled “The Pension Grillparzer.” A long way from which he had been falsely led. He had been too impressed by what he now called the “mere accidents and casualties of daily life, and the understandable trauma resulting therefrom.” He felt cocky again, as if he could make up anything.

“My father wanted us all to have a better life,” Garp began, “but better than what —he was not so sure. I do not think that he knew what life was; only that he wanted it better .”

As he did in “The Pension Grillparzer,” he made up a family; he gave himself brothers and sisters and aunts—both an eccentric and an evil uncle—and he felt he was a novelist again. A plot, to his delight, thickened.

In the evenings Garp read aloud to Ellen James and Helen; sometimes Duncan stayed up and listened, and sometimes Roberta stayed for supper, and he would read to her, too. He became suddenly generous in all matters concerning the Fields Foundation. In fact, the other board members were exasperated with him: Garp wanted to give every applicant something. “She sounds sincere,” he kept saying. “Look, she's had a hard life,” he told them. “Isn't there enough money?”

“Not if we spend it this way,” Marcia Fox said.

“If we don't discriminate between these applicants more than you suggest,” said Hilma Bloch, “we are lost.”

“Lost?” Garp said. “How could we get lost?” Overnight, it seemed to them all (except Roberta), Garp had become the weakest sort of liberal: he would evaluate no one. But he was full of imagining the whole, sad histories of his fictional family; thus full of sympathy, he was a soft touch in the real world.

The anniversary of Jenny's murder, and of the sudden funerals for Ernie Holm and Stewart Percy, passed quickly for Garp in the midst of his renewed creative energy. Then the wrestling season was again upon him; Helen had never seen him so taken up, so completely focused and relentless. He became again the determined young Garp who had made her fall in love, and she felt so drawn to him that she often cried when she was alone—without knowing why. She was alone too much; now that Garp was busy again, Helen realized she had kept herself inactive too long. She agreed to let the Steering School employ her, so that she could teach and use her mind for her own ideas again.

She also taught Ellen James to drive a car and Ellen drove twice a week to the state university, where she took a creative writing course. “This family isn't big enough for two writers, Ellen,” Garp teased her. How they all cherished the good mood he was in! And now that Helen was working again, she was much less anxious.

In the world according to Garp, an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous.

Later, they would often remark (Roberta, too) how good it was that Garp got to see the first edition of The Pension Grillparzer —illustrated by Duncan Garp, and out in time for Christmas—before he saw the Under Toad.

 

LIFE AFTER GARP

 

HE loved epilogues, as he showed us in “The Pension Grillparzer.”

“An epilogue,” Garp wrote, “is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future.”

That February day, Helen heard him telling jokes to Ellen James and Duncan at breakfast; he certainly sounded as if he felt good about the future. Helen gave little Jenny Garp a bath, and powdered her and oiled her scalp and clipped her tiny fingernails and zipped her into a yellow playsuit that Walt once wore. Helen could smell the coffee Garp had made, and she could hear Garp hurrying Duncan off to school.

“Not that hat, Duncan, for Christ's sake,” Garp said. “That hat couldn't keep a bird warm. It's twelve below.”

“It's twelve above , Dad,” Duncan said.

“That's academic,” Garp said. “It's very cold, that's what it is.” Ellen James must have come in through the garage door then, and written out a note, because Helen heard Garp say that he'd help her in a minute; obviously, Ellen couldn't start the car.

Then it was quiet in the great house for a while; as if from far away, Helen heard only the squeak of boots in the snow and the slow cranking of the car's cold engine. “Have a good day!” she heard Garp call to Duncan, who must have been walking down the long driveway—off to school.

“Yup!” Duncan called. “You, too!”

The car started; Ellen James would be driving off to the university. “Drive carefully!” Garp called after her.

Helen had her coffee alone. Occasionally, the inarticulateness with which baby Jenny talked to herself reminded Helen of the Ellen Jamesians—or of Ellen, when she was upset—but not this morning. The baby was playing quietly with some plastic things. Helen could hear Garp's typewriter—that was all.

He wrote for three hours. The typewriter would burst for three or four pages, then be silent for such a long time that Helen imagined Garp had stopped breathing; then, when she had forgotten about it and was lost in her reading, or in some task with Jenny, the typewriter would burst out again.

At eleven-thirty in the morning Helen heard him call Roberta Muldoon. Garp wanted a squash game before wrestling practice, if Roberta could get away from her “girls,” as Garp called the Fields Foundation fellows.

“How are the girls today, Roberta?” Garp said.

But Roberta couldn't play. Helen heard the disappointment in Garp's voice.

Later, poor Roberta would repeat and repeat how she should have played; if only she had played, she went on saying, maybe—she would have spotted it coming—maybe she would have been around, alert and edgy, recognizing the spoor of the real world, the paw prints Garp had always overlooked or ignored. But Roberta Muldoon could not play squash.

Garp wrote for another half hour. Helen knew he was writing a letter; somehow she could tell the difference in the sound of the typing. He wrote to John Wolf about My Father's Illusions ; he was pleased with how the book was coming along. He complained that Roberta took her job too seriously and was letting herself get out of shape; no administrative job was worth as much time as Roberta gave to the Fields Foundation. Garp said that the low sales figures on The Pension Grillparzer were about what he expected; the main thing was that it was “a lovely book"—he liked looking at it, and giving it to people, and its rebirth had been a rebirth for him. He said he expected a better wrestling season than last year, although he had lost his starting heavyweight to a knee operation and his one New England champion had graduated. He said that living with someone who read as much as Helen was both irritating and inspiring; he wanted to give her something to read that would make her close her other books.

At noon he came and kissed Helen, and fondled her breasts, and kissed baby Jenny, over and over again, while he dressed her in a snowsuit that had also been worn by Walt—and before Walt, even Duncan had gotten some wear out of it. Garp drove Jenny to the day-care center as soon as Ellen James came back with the car. Then Garp showed up at Buster's Snack and Grill for his customwy cup of tea with honey, his one tangerine, and his one banana. That was all the lunch he ran or wrestled on; he explained why to a new teacher in the English Department—a young man fresh out of graduate school who adored Garp's work. His name was Donald Whitcomb, and his nervous stutter reminded Garp, affectionately, of the departed Mr. Tinch and the race in his pulse he still felt for Alice Fletcher.

This particular day, Garp was eager to talk about writing to anyone, and young Whitcomb was eager to listen. Don Whitcomb would remember that Garp told him what the act of starting a novel felt like. “It's like trying to make the dead come alive,” he said. “No, no, that's not right—it's more like trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive.” Finally, Garp said it in a way that seemed to please him. “A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases,” Garp said. Young Whitcomb was so awed that he wrote this down.

It would be Whitcomb's biography, years later, that the would-be biographers of Garp would all envy and despise. Whitcomb reflected that this Bloom Period in Garp's writing (as Whitcomb called it) was really due to Garp's sense of mortality. The attempt on Garp's life by the Ellen Jamesian in the dirty-white Saab, Whitcomb claimed, had given Garp the urgency necessary to make him write again. Helen would endorse that thesis.

It was not a bad idea, although Garp would surely have laughed at it. He really had forgotten the Ellen Jamesians, and he was not on the lookout for more of them. But unconsciously, perhaps, he might have been feeling that urgency young Whitcomb expressed.

In Buster's Snack and Grill, Garp held Whitcomb enthralled until it was time for wrestling practice. On his way out (leaving Whitcomb to pay, the young man later recalled, good-naturedly), Garp ran into Dean Bodger, who had just spent three days hospitalized with some heart complaint.

“They found nothing wrong,” Bodger complained.

“But did they find your heart?” Garp asked him.

The dean, young Whitcomb, and Garp all laughed. Bodger said he'd brought only The Pension Grillparzer with him to the hospital, and since it was so short a book, he'd been able to read it completely three times. It was a gloomy story to read in a hospital, Bodger said, though he was glad to report that he had not yet had the grandmother's dream; thus he knew he would live awhile longer. Bodger said he had loved the story.

Whitcomb would remember that Garp then grew embarrassed, though he was obviously pleased by Bodger's praise. Whitcomb and Bodger waved good-bye to him. Garp forgot his skier's knit hat, but Bodger told Whitcomb he would bring it to Garp—at the gym. Dean Bodger said to Whitcomb that he liked dropping in on Garp in the wrestling room, occasionally. “He is so in his element there,” Bodger said.

Donald Whitcomb was no wrestling fan but he talked enthusiastically about Garp's writing. The young and the old man agreed: Garp was a man with remarkable energy.

Whitcomb recalled that he returned to his small apartment in one of the dormitories and tried to write down everything that had impressed him about Garp; he had to stop, unfinished, in time for supper. When Whitcomb went to the dining hall, he was one of the few people at the Steering School who'd heard nothing about what had happened. It was Dean Bodger—his eyes red-rimmed, his face suddenly years older—who stopped young Whitcomb going into the dining hall. The dean, who had left his gloves at the gym, clutched Garp's ski hat in his cold hands. When Whitcomb saw that the dean still had Garp's hat, he knew—even before looking in Bodger's eyes—that something was wrong.

Garp missed his hat as soon as he trotted out on the snowy footpath that led from Buster's Snack and Grill to the Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House. But rather than go back for it, he stepped up his usual pace and ran to the gym. His head was cold when he got there, in less than three minutes; his toes were cold, too, and he warmed his feet in the steamy trainer's room before putting on his wrestling shoes. He talked briefly with his 145-pounder in the trainer's room. The boy was getting his little finger taped to his ring finger so that he would give some support to what the trainer said was only a sprain. Garp asked if there'd been an X ray; there had been, and it was negative. Garp tapped his 145-pounder on the shoulder, asked him what he weighed in at, frowned at the answer—which was probably a lie, and still about five pounds too heavy—and went to suit up.

He stopped again in the trainer's room before going to practice. “Just to put some Vaseline on one ear,” the trainer recalled. Garp had a cauliflower ear in progress, and the Vaseline made his ear slippery; he thought this protected it. Garp did not like wrestling in a headgear; those ear guards had not been part of the required uniform when he'd been a wrestler, and he saw no reason to wear one now.

He jogged a mile around the indoor track with his 152-pounder before opening the wrestling room. Garp challenged the boy to a sprint in the last lap, but the 152-pounder had more left than Garp and beat him by six feet at the end. Garp then “played” with the 152-pounder—in lieu of warming up—in the wrestling room. He took the kid down easily, about five or six times, then rode him around the mat for about five minutes—or until the boy showed signs of tiring. Then Garp allowed the boy to reverse him; Garp let the 152-pounder try to pin him while he defended himself on the bottom. But there was a muscle in Garp's back that was tight, that would not stretch enough to suit him, so Garp told the 152-pounder to go play with someone else. Garp sat by himself against the padded wall, sweating happily and watching the room fill up with his team.

He let them warm up on their own—he hated organized calisthenics—before demonstrating the first of the drills he wanted them to practice. “Get a partner, get a partner,” he said, by rote. And he added, “Eric? Get a harder partner, Eric, or you'll work with me.”

Eric, his 133-pounder, had a habit of coasting through workouts with the second-string 115-pounder, who was Eric's roommate and best friend.

When Helen came in the wrestling room, the temperature was up to 85є or so, and climbing. The coupled boys upon the mat were already breathing hard. Garp was intently watching a time clock. “One minute left!” Garp yelled. When Helen walked by him, he had a whistle in his mouth—so she did not kiss him.

She would remember that whistle, and not kissing him, for as long as she would live—which would be a long time.

Helen went to her usual corner of the wrestling room, where she could not easily be fallen on. She opened her book. Her glasses fogged up; she wiped them off. She had her glasses on when the nurse entered the wrestling room, at the farthest end of the room from Helen. But Helen never looked up from her book unless there was a loud body slam upon the mat or an unusually loud cry of pain. The nurse closed the wrestling-room door behind her and moved quickly past the grappling bodies toward Garp, with his time clock in his hands and his whistle in his mouth. Garp took the whistle out and hollered, “Fifteen seconds!” That was all the time he had left, too. Garp put the whistle back in his mouth and got ready to blow. When he saw the nurse, he mistook her for the kindly nurse named Dotty who had helped him escape from the first feminist funeral. Garp was simply judging her by her hair, which was iron-gray and in a braid, coiled like a rope around her head—it was a wig, of course. The nurse smiled at him. There was probably no one Garp felt as comfortable with as a nurse; he smiled back at her, then glanced at the time clock: ten seconds.

When Garp looked up at the nurse again, he saw the gun. He had just been thinking about his mother, Jenny Fields, and how she must have looked when she walked into the wrestling room, not quite twenty years ago. Jenny was younger than this nurse, he was thinking. If Helen had looked up and seen this nurse, Helen might have been fooled again into thinking that her missing mother had finally decided to come out of hiding.

When Garp saw the gun, he also noticed that it wasn't a real nurse's uniform; it was a Jenny Fields Original with the characteristic red heart sewn over the breast. It was then that Garp saw the nurse's breasts—they were small but they were too firm and youthfully erect for a woman with iron-gray hair; and her hips were too slim, her legs too girlish. When Garp looked again at her face, he saw the family resemblance: the square jawline that Midge Steering had given to all her children, the sloping forehead that had been the contribution of Fat Stew. The combination gave all the Percys' heads the shape of violent navy vessels.

The first shot forced the whistle out of Garp's mouth with a sharp tweet! and caused the time clock to fly from his hands. He sat down. The mat was warm. The bullet had traveled through his stomach and had lodged in his spine. There were fewer than five seconds remaining on the time clock when Bainbridge Percy fired a second time; the bullet struck Garp's chest and drove him, still in a sitting position, back against the padded wall. The stunned wrestlers, who were only boys, seemed incapable of motion. It was Helen who tackled Pooh Percy to the mat and kept her from firing a third shot.

Helen's screams aroused the wrestlers. One of them, the second-string heavyweight, pinned Pooh Percy belly down to the mat and ripped her hand with the gun in it out from under her; his pumping elbow split Helen's lip, but Helen hardly felt it. The starting 145-pounder, with his little finger taped to his ring finger, wrenched the gun out of Pooh's hand by breaking her thumb.

At the moment her bone clicked , Pooh Percy screamed; even Garp saw what had become of her—the surgery must have been recent. In Pooh Percy's open, yelling mouth, anyone near her could see the black gathering of stitches, like ants clustered on the stump of what had been her tongue. The second-string heavyweight was so frightened of Pooh that he squeezed her too hard and cracked one of her ribs; Bainbridge Percy's recent madness—to become an Ellen Jamesian—was certainly painful to her.

“Igs!” she screamed. “Ucking igs!” An “ucking ig” was a “fucking pig,” but you had to be an Ellen Jamesian to understand Pooh Percy now.

The starting 145-pounder held the gun at arm's length, pointed down to the mat and into an empty corner of the wrestling room. “Ig!” Pooh gagged at him, but the trembling boy stared at his coach.

Helen held Garp steady; he was starting to slide against the wall. He could not talk, he knew; he could not feel, he could not touch. He had only a keen sense of smell, his brief eyesight, and his vivid memory.

Garp was glad, for once, that Duncan wasn't interested in wrestling. By virtue of his preference for swimming, Duncan had missed seeing this; Garp knew that Duncan would either just be getting out of school or already at the swimming pool.

Garp was sorry for Helen—that she was here—but he was happy to have her scent nearest him. He savored it, among those other intimate odors in the Steering wrestling room. If he could have talked, he would have told Helen not to be frightened of the Under Toad anymore. It surprised him to realize that the Under Toad was no stranger, was not even mysterious; the Under Toad was very familiar—as if he had always known it, as if he had grown up with it. It was yielding, like the warm wrestling mats; it smelled like the sweat of clean boys—and like Helen, the first and last woman Garp loved. The Under Toad, Garp knew now, could even look like a nurse: a person who is familiar with death and trained to make practical responses to pain.

When Dean Bodger opened the wrestling-room door with Garp's ski hat in his hands, Garp had no illusions that the dean had arrived, once again, to organize the rescue party—to catch the body falling from the infirmary annex, four floors above where the world was safe. The world was not safe. Dean Bodger, Garp knew, would do his best to be of service; Garp smiled gratefully to him, and to Helen—and to his wrestlers; some of them were weeping now. Garp looked fondly at his sobbing second-string heavyweight who lay crushing Pooh Percy to the mat; Garp knew what a difficult season the poor, fat boy was about to experience.

Garp looked at Helen; all he could move was his eyes. Helen, he saw, was trying to smile back at him. With his eyes, Garp tried to reassure her: don't worry—so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me. Even if there is only death after death (after death), be grateful for small favors—sometimes there is birth after sex, for example. And, if you are very fortunate, sometimes there is sex after birth! Oh yeth, as Alice Fletcher would have said. And if you have life, said Garp's eyes, there is hope you'll have energy. And never forget, there is memory, Helen, his eyes told her.

“In the world according to Garp,” young Donald Whitcomb would write, “we are obliged to remember everything.”

Garp died before they could move him from the wrestling room. He was thirty-three, the same age as Helen. Ellen James was just starting her twenties. Duncan was thirteen. Little Jenny Garp was going on three. Walt would have been eight.

The news of Garp's death promoted the immediate printing of a third and fourth edition of the father and son book, The Pension Grillparzer . Over a long weekend, John Wolf drank too much and contemplated leaving publishing; it sometimes nauseated him to see how a violent death was so good for business. But it comforted Wolf to realize how Garp would have taken the news. Even Garp could not have imagined that his own death would be better than a suicide at establishing his literary seriousness and his fame. Not bad for someone who, at thirty-three, had written one good short story and perhaps one and a half good novels out of three. Garp's rare manner of dying was, in fact, so perfect that John Wolf had to smile when he imagined how pleased Garp would have been with it. It was a death, Wolf thought, which in its random, stupid, and unnecessary qualities—comic and ugly and bizarre—underlined everything Garp had ever written about how the world works. It was a death scene, John Wolf told Jillsy Sloper, that only Garp could have written.

Helen would remark bitterly, but only once, that Garp's death was really a kind of suicide, after all. “In the sense that his whole life was a suicide,” she said, mysteriously. She would later explain that all she meant was, “He made people too angry.”

He had made Pooh Percy too angry; at least that was clear.

He made others pay him tribute, small and strange. The Steering School cemetery got the honor of his gravestone, if not his body; like his mother's, Garp's body went to medicine. The Steering School also chose to honor him by naming after him its one remaining building that was not named after anybody else. It was old Dean Bodger's idea. If there was a Jenny Fields Infirmary, the good dean argued, then there should be a Garp Infirmary Annex.

In later years the functions of these buildings would alter slightly, although they would remain, in name, the Fields Infirmary and the Garp Annex. The Fields Infirmary would one day become the old wing of the new Steering Health Clinic and Laboratories; the Garp Annex would become a building used chiefly for storage—a kind of warehouse for medical, kitchen and classroom supplies; it could also be used for epidemics. Of course, there weren't many epidemics anymore. Garp probably would have liked the idea: to have a storage building named after him. He wrote once that a novel was “only a place for storage—of all the meaningful thing's that a novelist isn't able to use in his life.”

He would have liked the idea of an epilogue, too—so here it is: an epilogue “warning us about the future,” as T. S. Garp might have imagined it.

ALICE and HARRISON FLETCHER would remain married, through thick and through thin—in part, their marriage lasted because of Alice's difficulty with finishing anything. Their only child, a daughter, would play the cello—that large and cumbersome and silken-voiced instrument—in a manner so graceful that the pure, deep sound of it aggravated Alice's speech defect for hours after each performance. Harrison, who would get and hold his tenure after a while, would outgrow his habits with his prettier students about the time his talented daughter began to assert herself as a serious musician.

Alice, who would never complete her second novel, or her third or fourth, would never have a second child, either. She remained smoothly fluent on the page, and agonizing in the flesh. Alice never again took to “other men” to the degree that she had taken to Garp; even in her memory, he was a passion that was strong enough to keep her from ever becoming close to Helen. And Harry's old fondness for Helen seemed to fade with each of his fast-fading affairs, until the Fletchers rarely kept track of the surviving Garps at all.

Once Duncan Garp met the Fletcher daughter in New York, after her maiden cello solo in that dangerous city; Duncan took her to dinner.

“Does he look like his mother?” Harrison asked the girl.

“I don't remember her very well,” the daughter said.

“Did he make a path at you?” Alice asked.

“I don't think so,” said her daughter, whose first-chosen and best-loved partner would always be that big-hipped cello.

The Fletchers, both Harry and Alice, would die in their ripe middle age, when their airplane—to Martinique—crashed during the Christmas holidays. One of Harrison's students had driven them to the airport.

“If you live in New England,” Alice confided to the student, “you owe yourthelf a holiday in the thun . Right, Harrithon?”

Helen had always thought that Alice was “a little loony.”

HELEN HOLM, who most of her life would be known as Helen Garp, would live a long, long time. A slim, dark woman with an arresting face and precise language, she would have her lovers but never remarry. Each lover suffered the presence of Garp—not only in Helen's relentless memory, but in the articles of fact that Helen surrounded herself with in the Steering mansion, which she rarely left: for example, Garp's books, and all of Duncan's photographs of him, and even Garp's wrestling trophies.

Helen maintained that she could never forgive Garp for dying so young and leaving her to live so much of her life alone—he had also spoiled her, she claimed, for ever considering seriously the possibility of living with another man.

Helen would become one of the most respected teachers the Steering School ever had, though she would never lose her sense of sarcasm about the place. She had some friends there, though they were few: old Dean Bodger, until he died, and the young scholar, Donald Whitcomb, who would become as enchanted with Helen as he was enchanted with the work of Garp. There was also a woman, a sculptor, who was an artist-in-residence—someone Roberta had introduced Helen to.

John Wolf was a lifelong friend whom Helen forgave in small pieces, but never completely, for his success at making Garp a success. Helen and Roberta remained close, too—Helen occasionally joining Roberta for Roberta's famous flings upon the city of New York. The two of them, growing older and more eccentric, were guilty of lording it over the Fields Foundation for years. In fact, the wit of their running commentary on the outside world became almost a tourist attraction at Dog's Head Harbor; from time to time, when Helen was lonely or bored at Steering—when her children were grown up and pursuing their own lives, elsewhere—she went to stay with Roberta at Jenny Fields' old estate. It was always lively there. When Roberta died, Helen appeared to age twenty years.

Very late in her life—and only after she had complained to Duncan that she had survived all her favorite contemporaries—Helen Holm was stricken suddenly with an illness that affects the body's mucous membranes. She would die in her sleep.

She had successfully outlived many cutthroat biographers who were waiting for her to die so that they could swoop in on the remains of Garp. She had protected his letters, the unfinished manuscript of My Father's Illusions , most of his journals and jottings. She told all the would-be biographers, exactly as he would have, “Read the work. Forget the life.”

She herself wrote several articles, which were respected in her field. One was called “The Adventurer's Instinct in Narration.” It was a comparative study of the narrative technique of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.

Helen always considered herself as a widow left with three children—Duncan, baby Jenny, and Ellen James, who all survived Helen and wept copiously at her death. They had been too young and too astonished to weep as much for Garp.

DEAN BODGER, who wept almost as much as Helen at Garp's death, remained as loyal as a pit bull, and as tenacious. Long after his retirement, he still stormed the Steering campus by night, unable to sleep, fitfully capturing lurkers and lovers who slunk along the footpaths and hugged each other to the spongy ground—under the soft bushes, alongside the beautiful old buildings, and so forth.

Bodger remained active at Steering for as long as it took Duncan Garp to graduate. “I saw your father through, boy,” the dean told Duncan. “I'll see you through, too. And if they let me, I'll stay to see your sister through.” But they finally forced his retirement; they cited to themselves, among other problems, his habit of talking to himself during chapel, and his bizarre arrests, at midnight, of the boys and girls caught out after hours. They also mentioned the dean's recurring fantasy: that it had been the young Garp he caught in his arms—one night, years ago—and not a pigeon. Bodger refused to move from the campus, even when he was retired, and despite—or, perhaps, because of—his obstinacy, he became Steering's most honored emeritus. They would drag him out for all the school's ceremonies; they would totter him up to the stage, introduce him to people who didn't know who he was, and then they would lead him away. Perhaps because they could display him on these dignified occasions, they tolerated his odd behavior; long through his seventies, for example, Bodger would be convinced—sometimes for weeks at a time—that he was still the dean.

“You are the dean, really,” Helen liked to tease him.

“Of course I am!” Bodger roared.

They saw each other often, and as Bodger grew deafer, and deafer, he was more frequently seen on the arm of that nice Ellen James, who had her ways of talking to people who couldn't hear.

Dean Bodger remained loyal even to the Steering wrestling team, whose glory years soon faded from the memories of most. The wrestlers were never again to have a coach the equal of Ernie Holm, or even the equal of Garp. They became a losing team, yet Bodger always supported them, hollering through the last bout to the poor Steering boy flopping on his back, about to be pinned.

It was at a wrestling match that Bodger died. In the unlimited class an unusually close match—the Steering heavyweight lay floundering with his equally exhausted and out-of-shape opponent; like beached baby whales, they groveled for the upper hand and the winning points as the clock ran down. “Fifteen seconds!” the announcer boomed. The big boys struggled. Bodger rose to his feet, stamping and urging. “Gott! ” he squawked, his German emerging at the end.

When the bout ended and the stands emptied, there was the retired dean—dead in his seat. It took much comforting from Helen for the sensitive young Whitcomb to gain control of his grief at Bodger's loss.

DONALD WHITCOMB would never sleep with Helen, despite rumors among the envious would-be biographers who longed to get their hands on Garp's property and Garp's widow. Whitcomb would be a monkish recluse all his life, which he spent in virtual hiding at the Steering School. It was his happy fortune to have discovered Garp there, moments before Garp's death, and his happy fortune, too, to find himself befriended and looked after by Helen. She trusted him to adore her husband perhaps even more uncritically than she did.

Poor Whitcomb would always be referred to as “the young Whitcomb,” even though he would not always be young. His face would never grow a beard, his cheeks would be forever pink—under his brown, his gray, his finally frost-white hair. His voice would remain a stuttering, eager yodel; his hands would wring themselves forever. But it would be Whitcomb whom Helen would trust with the family and literary record.

He would be Garp's biographer. Helen would read all but the last chapter, which Whitcomb waited for years to write; it was the chapter eulogizing her. Whitcomb was the Garp scholar, the final Garp authority. He had the proper meekness for a biographer, Duncan always joked. He was a good biographer from the Garp family's point of view; Whitcomb believed everything that Helen told him—he believed every note that Garp left—or every note that Helen told him Garp left.

“Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that's left is memory. But even a nihilist has a memory.”

Whitcomb even loved Garp at his most whimsical and at his most pretentious.

Among Garp's things, Helen found this note.

“No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: “I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit".”

Donald Whitcomb, who loved Garp uncritically—in the manner of dogs and children—said that those indeed were Garp's last words.

“If Whitcomb said so, then they were,” Duncan always said.

Jenny Garp and Ellen James—they agreed about this, too.

It was a family matter-keeping Garp from the biographers,

wrote Ellen James.

“And why not?” asked Jenny Garp. “What does he owe the public? He always said he was only grateful for other artists, and to the people who loved him.”

So who else deserves to have a piece of him, now?

wrote Ellen James.

Donald Whitcomb was even faithful to Helen's last wish. Although Helen was old, her final illness was sudden, and it had to be Whitcomb who defended her deathbed request. Helen did not want to be buried in the Steering School cemetery, alongside Garp and Jenny, her father and Fat Stew—and all the others. She said that the town cemetery would do her just fine. She did not want to be left to medicine, either; since she was so old, she was sure there was little left of her body that anyone could possibly use. She wanted to be cremated, she told Whitcomb, and her ashes were to remain the property of Duncan and Jenny Garp and Ellen James. After burying some of her ashes, they could do anything they chose with what ashes remained, but they could not scatter them anywhefe on the property of the Steering School. She would be damned, Helen told Whitcomb, if the Steering School, which did not admit women students when she had been of age, would get to have any part of her now.

The gravestone in the town cemetery, she told Whitcomb, should say simply that she was Helen Holm, daughter of the wrestling coach Ernie Holm, and that she had not been allowed to attend the Steering School because she was a girl; furthermore, she was the loving wife of the novelist T. S. Garp, whose gravestone could be seen in the Steering School cemetery, because he was a boy.

Whitcomb was faithful to this request, which amused Duncan especially.

“How Dad would have loved this! ” Duncan kept saying. “Boy, I can just hear him.”

How Jenny Fields would have applauded Helen's decision was a point made most often by Jenny Garp and Ellen James.

ELLEN JAMES would grow up to be a writer. She was “the real thing,” as Garp had guessed. Her two mentors—Garp and the ghost of his mother, Jenny Fields—would somehow prove overbearing for Ellen, who because of them both would not ever write much nonfiction or fiction. She became a very good poet—though, of course, she was not much on the reading circuit.

Her wonderful first book of poems, Speeches Delivered to Plants and Animals , would have made Garp and Jenny Fields very proud of her; it did make Helen very proud of her—they were good friends, and they were also like mother and daughter.

Ellen James would outlive the Ellen Jamesians, of course. Garp's murder drove them deeper underground, and their occasional surfacing over the years would be largely disguised, even embarrassed.

Hi! I'm mute,

their notes finally said. Or:

I've had an accident—can't talk. But I write good, as you can see.

“You aren't one of those Ellen Somebodies, are you?” they were occasionally asked.

A what?

they learned to reply. And the more honest among them would write:

No. Not now.

Now they were just women who couldn't speak. Unostentatiously, most of them worked hard to discover what they could do. Most of them turned, constructively, to helping those who also couldn't do something. They were good at helping disadvantaged people, and also good at helping people who felt too sorry for themselves. More and more their labels left them, and one by one these speechless women appeared under names more of their own making.

Some of them even won Fields Foundation fellowships for the things they did.

Some of them, of course, went on trying to be Ellen Jamesians in a world that soon forgot what an Ellen Jamesian was. Some people thought that the Ellen Jamesians were a criminal gang who flourished, briefly, near mid-century. Others, ironically, confused them with the very people that the Ellen Jamesians had originally been protesting: rapists. One Ellen Jamesian wrote Ellen James that she stopped being an Ellen Jamesian when she asked a little girl if she knew what an Ellen Jamesian was.

“Someone who rapes little boys?” the little girl replied.

There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed Garp's murder by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King , and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader . And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.

One of his cruelly forced jokes, in Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian , was that he conceived of his narrator-heroine as a lesbian who doesn't realize until after she's cut off her tongue that she has made herself undesirable as a lover , too.

The popularity of this vulgar trash was enough to embarrass some Ellen Jamesians to death. There were, actually, suicides. “There are always suicides,” Garp wrote, “among people who are unable to say what they mean.”

But, in the end, Ellen James sought them out and befriended them. It was, she thought, what Jenny Fields would have done. Ellen took to giving poetry readings with Roberta Muldoon, who had a huge, booming voice. Roberta would read Ellen's poems while Ellen sat beside her, looking as if she were wishing very hard that she could say her own poems. This brought out of hiding a lot of Ellen Jamesians who had been wishing they could talk, too. A few of them became Ellen's friends.

Ellen James would never marry. She may have known an occasional man, but more because he was a fellow poet than because he was a man. She was a good poet and an ardent feminist who believed in living like Jenny Fields and believed in writing with the energy and the personal vision of T. S. Garp. In other words, she was stubborn enough to have personal opinions, and she was also kind to other people. Ellen would maintain a lifelong flirtation with Duncan Garp—her younger brother, really.

The death of Ellen James would cause Duncan much sorrowing. Ellen, at an advanced age, became a long-distance swimmer—about the time she succeeded Roberta as the director of the Fields Foundation. Ellen worked up to swimming several times across the wide neck of Dog's Head Harbor. Her last and best poems used swimming and “the ocean's pull” as metaphors. But Ellen James remained a girl from the Midwest who never thoroughly understood the undertow; one cold fall day, when she was too tired, it got her.

“When I swim,” she wrote to Duncan, “I am reminded of the strenuousness, but also the gracefulness, of arguing with your father. I can also feel the sea's eagerness to get at me—to get at my dry middle, my landlocked little heart. My landlocked little ass, your father would say, I'm sure. But we tease each other, the sea and I. I suppose you would say, you raunchy fellow, that this is my substitute for sex.”

FLORENCE COCHRAN BOWLSBY, who, was best known to Garp as Mrs. Ralph, would live a life of larkish turmoil, with no substitute for sex in sight—or, apparently, in need. She actually completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature and was eventually tenured by a large and confused English Department whose members were only unified by their terror of her. She had, at various times, seduced and scorned nine of the thirteen senior members—who were alternately admitted to and then ridiculed from her bed. She would be referred to by her students as “a dynamite teacher,” so that she at least demonstrated to other people, if not to herself, some confidence in an area other than sex.

She would hardly be referred to at all by her cringing lovers, whose tails between their legs were all remindful to Mrs. Ralph of the manner in which Garp had once left her house.

In sympathy, at the news of Garp's shocking death, Mrs. Ralph was among the very first to write to Helen. “His was a seduction,” Mrs. Ralph wrote, “whose non-occurrence I have always regretted but respected.”

Helen came to rather like the woman, with whom she occasionally corresponded.

Roberta Muldoon also had occasion to correspond with Mrs. Ralph, whose application for a Fields Foundation fellowship was rejected. Roberta was quite surprised by the note sent the Fields Foundation by Mrs. Ralph.

Up yours,

the note said. Mrs. Ralph did not appreciate rejection.

Her own child, Ralph, would die before her; Ralph became quite a good newspaperman and, like William Percy, was killed in a war.

BAINBRIDGE PERCY, who was best known to Garp as Pooh, would live a long, long time. The last of a train of psychiatrists would claim to have rehabilitated her, but Pooh Percy may simply have emerged from analysis—and a number of institutions—too thoroughly bored with rehabilitation to be violent anymore.

However it was achieved, Pooh was, after a great while, peaceably reintroduced to social intercourse; she reentered public life, a functioning if not speaking member of society, more or less safe and (finally) useful. It was in her fifties that she became interested in children; she worked especially well and patiently with the retarded. In this capacity, she would frequently meet other Ellen Jamesians, who in their various ways were also rehabilitated—or, at least, vastly changed.

For almost twenty years Pooh would not mention her dead sister, Cushie, but her fondness for children eventually confused her. She got herself pregnant when she was fifty-four (no one could imagine how) and she was returned to institutional observation, convinced, as she was, that she would die in childbirth. When this didn't occur, Pooh became a devoted mother; she also continued her work with the retarded. Pooh Percy's own child, for whom her mother's violent history would be a severe shock in her later life, was fortunately not retarded; in fact, she would have reminded Garp of Cushie.

Pooh Percy, some said, became a positive example for those who would forever put an end to capital punishment: her rehabilitation was so impressive. Only not to Helen, and to Duncan Garp, who would wish to their graves that Pooh Percy had died at that moment when she last cried “Ig!” in the Steering wrestling room.

One day Pooh would die, of course; she would succumb to a stroke in Florida, where she was visiting her daughter. It was a small consolation to Helen that Helen would outlive her.

The faithful Whitcomb would choose to describe Pooh Percy as Garp had once described her, following his escape from the first feminist funeral. “An androgynous twerp,” Garp said to Dean Bodger, “with a face like a ferret and a mind completely sodden by spending nearly fifteen years in diapers.”

That official biography of Garp, which Donald Whitcomb titled Lunacy and Sorrow: The Life and Art of T. S. Garp , would be published by the associates of JOHN WOLF, who would not live to see the good book in print. John Wolf had contributed much effort to the book's careful making, and he had worked in the capacity of an editor to Whitcomb—over most of the manuscript—before his untimely demise.

John Wolf died of lung cancer in New York at a relatively young age. He had been a careful, conscientious, attentive, even elegant man—most of his life—but his deep restlessness and unrelieved pessimism could only be numbed and disguised by smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day from the time he was eighteen. Like many busy men who maintain an otherwise calm and managed air about themselves, John Wolf smoked himself to death.

His service to Garp, and to Garp's books, is inestimable. Although he may from time to time have held himself responsible for the fame which, in the end, provoked Garp's own violent killing, Wolf was far too sophisticated a man to dwell on such a narrow view. Assassination, in Wolf's opinion, was “an increasingly popular amateur sport of the times"; and “political true believers,” as he called nearly everybody, were always the sworn enemy of the artist—who insisted, however arrogantly, on the superiority of a personal vision. Besides, Wolf knew, it was not only that Pooh Percy had become an Ellen Jamesian, and had responded to Garp's baiting; hers was a grievance as old as childhood, possibly aggravated by politics but basically as deep as her long need for diapers. Pooh had gotten it into her head that Garp's and Cushie's love for fucking each other had finally been lethal to Cushie. At least, it is true, it was lethal to Garp.

A professional in a world that too often worshiped the contemporaneity it had created, John Wolf insisted to his end that his proudest publication was the father and son edition of The Pension Grillparzer . He was proud of the early Garp novels, of course, and came to speak of The World According to Bensenhaver as “inevitable—when you consider the violence Garp was exposed to.” But it was “Grillparzer” that elevated Wolf—it and the unfinished manuscript of My Father's Illusions , which John Wolf looked upon, lovingly and sadly, as “Garp's road back to his right way to write.” For years Wolf edited the messy first draft of the unfinished novel; for years he consulted with Helen, and with Donald Whitcomb, about its merits and its faults.

“Only after I'm dead,” Helen insisted. “Garp would let nothing go if he didn't think it was finished.” Wolf agreed, but he died before Helen. Whitcomb and Duncan would be left to publish My Father's Illusions —considerably posthumously.

It was Duncan who spent the most time with John Wolf during Wolf's torturous dying of lung cancer. Wolf lay in a private hospital in New York, sometimes smoking a cigarette through a plastic tube inserted in his throat.

“What would your father say to this?” Wolf asked Duncan. “Wouldn't it suit one of his death scenes? Isn't it properly grotesque? Did he ever tell you about the prostitute who died in Vienna, in the Rudolfinerhaus? What was her name?”

“Charlotte,” Duncan said. He was close to John Wolf. Wolf had even come to like the early drawings Duncan had done for The Pension Grillparzer . And Duncan had moved to New York; he told Wolf that his first sense of knowing he wanted to be a painter, as well as a photographer, was his view of Manhattan from John Wolf's office—the day of the first feminist funeral in New York.

In a letter John Wolf dictated to Duncan from his deathbed, Wolf left word for his associates that Duncan Garp was to be allowed to come look at Manhattan from his office for as long as the publishing company occupied the building.

For many years after John Wolf died, Duncan took advantage of the offer. A new editor moved into Wolf's office, but the name of Garp made all the editors in that publishing house scurry.

For years secretaries would come in and say, “Excuse me, it's that young Garp . To look out the window again.”

Duncan and John Wolf spent the many hours it took John Wolf to die discussing how good a writer Garp was.

“He would have been very, very special,” John Wolf told Duncan.

Would have been, maybe,” Duncan said. “But what else could you say to me?”

“No, no, I'm not lying; there's no need,” Wolf said. “He had the vision, and he always had the language. But mainly vision; he was always personal. He just got sidetracked for a while, but he was back on the beam with that new book. He was back to the good impulses again. “The Pension Grillparzer” is his most charming, but it's not his most original; he was still too young; there are other writers who could have written that story. Procrastination is an original idea, and a brilliant first novel—but it's a first novel. Second Wind of the Cuckold is very funny, and his best title; it's also very original, but it's a novel of manners—and rather narrow. Of course, The World According to Bensenhaver is his most original, even if it is an X-rated soap opera—which it is. But it's so harsh; it's raw food—good food, but very raw. I mean, who wants it? Who needs to suffer such abuse?

“Your father was a difficult fellow; he never gave an inch—but that's the point: he was always following his nose; wherever it took him, it was always his nose. And he was ambitious. He started out daring to write about the world —when he was just a kid , for Christ's sake, he still took it on. Then, for a while—like a lot of writers—he could only write about himself; but he also wrote about the world—it just didn't come through as cleanly. He was starting to get bored with writing about his life and he was beginning to write about the whole world again; he was just starting. And Jesus, Duncan, you must remember he was a young man! He was thirty-three.”

“And he had energy,” Duncan said.

“Oh, he would have written a lot, there's no question,” John Wolf said. But he began to cough and had to stop talking.

“But he could never just relax,” Duncan said. “So what was the point? Wouldn't he have just burned himself out, anyway?”

Shaking his head—but delicately, not to loosen the tube in his throat—John Wolf went on coughing. “Not him!” Wolf gasped.

“He could have just gone on and on?” Duncan asked. “You think so?”

The coughing Wolf nodded. He would die coughing.

Roberta and Helen would attend his funeral, of course. The rumor-mongers would be hissing, because it was often speculated in the small town of New York that John Wolf had looked after more than Garp's literary estate. Knowing Helen, it seems unlikely that she would ever have had such a relationship with John Wolf. Whenever Helen heard how she was linked with someone, Helen would just laugh. Roberta Muldoon was more vehement.

“With John Wolf?” Roberta said. “Helen and Wolf? You've got to be kidding.”

Roberta's confidence was well founded. On occasion, when she flung herself upon the city of New York, Roberta Muldoon had enjoyed a tryst or two with John Wolf.

“And to think I used to watch you play!” John Wolf told Roberta once.

“You can still watch me play,” Roberta said.

“I mean football,” John Wolf said.

“There are better things than football,” said Roberta.

“But you do so many things well,” John Wolf told her.

“Ha!”

“But you do , Roberta.”

“All men are liars,” said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

ROBERTA MULDOON, formerly Robert Muldoon, No. 90 of the Philadelphia Eagles, would outlive John Wolf—and most of her lovers. She would not outlive Helen, but Roberta lived long enough to grow at last comfortable with her sex reassignment. Approaching fifty, she would remark to Helen that she suffered the vanity of a middle-aged man and the anxieties of a middle-aged woman, “but,” Roberta added, “this perspective is not without advantages. Now I always know what men are going to say before they say it.”

“But I know, too, Roberta,” Helen said. Roberta laughed her frightening boomer of a laugh; she had a habit of bear-hugging her friends, which made Helen nervous. Roberta had once broken a pair of Helen's glasses. Roberta had successfully dwarfed her enormous eccentricity by becoming responsible—chiefly to the Fields Foundation, which she ran so vigorously that Ellen James had given her a nickname.

Captain Energy.

“Ha!” Roberta said. “Garp was Captain Energy.”

Roberta was also greatly admired in the small community of Dog's Head Harbor, for Jenny Fields' estate had never been so respectable, in the old days, and Roberta was a far more outgoing participant in the affairs of the town than Jenny had ever been. She spent ten years as the chairperson of the local school board—although, of course, she could never have a child of her own. She organized, coached, and pitched on the Rockingham County Women's Softball Team—for twelve years, the best team in the state of New Hampshire. Once upon a time, the same, stupid, swinish governor of New Hampshire suggested that Roberta be given a chromosome test before she be allowed to play in the title game; Roberta suggested that the governor should meet her, just before the start of the game—on the pitcher's mound—"and see if he can fight like a man.” Nothing came of it, and—politics being what they are—the governor threw out the first ball. Roberta pitched a shutout, chromosomes and all.

And it is to the credit of the athletic director of the Steering School that Roberta was offered the position of offensive line coach for the Steering football team. But the former tight end politely refused the job. “All those young boys,” Roberta said sweetly. “I'd get in terrible trouble.”

Her favorite young boy, all her life, was Duncan Garp, whom she mothered and sistered and smothered with her perfume and her affection. Duncan loved her; he was one of the few male guests ever allowed at Dog's Head Harbor, although Roberta was angry with him and stopped inviting him for a period of almost two years—following Duncan's seduction of a young poet.

“His father's son,” Helen said. “He's charming.”

“The boy is too charming,” Roberta told Helen. “And that poet was not stable. She was also far too old for him.”

“You sound jealous, Roberta,” Helen said.

“It was a violation of trust ,” Roberta said loudly. Helen agreed that it was. Duncan apologized. Even the poet apologized.

I seduced him ,” she told Roberta.

“No you didn't,” Roberta said. “You couldn't .”

All was forgiven one spring in New York when Roberta surprised Duncan with a dinner invitation. “I'm bringing this smashing girl, just for you—a friend,” Roberta told him, “so wash the paint off your hands, and wash your hair and look nice. I've told her you're nice, and I know you can be. I think you'll like her.”

Thus having set Duncan up with a date, who was a woman of her choice, Roberta felt somehow better. Over a long period it came out that Roberta had hated the poet whom Duncan had slept with, and that was the worst of the problem.

When Duncan crashed his motorcycle within a mile of a Vermont hospital, Roberta was the first to get there; she had been skiing farther north; Helen had called her, and Roberta beat Helen to the hospital.

“Riding a motorcycle in the snow!” Roberta roared. “What would your father say?” Duncan could barely whisper. Every limb appeared in traction; there was a complication involving a kidney, and unknown to both Duncan and Roberta—at the time—one of his arms would have to come off.

Helen and Roberta and Duncan's sister, Jenny Garp, waited for three days until Duncan was out of danger. Ellen James was too shaken to come wait with them. Roberta railed the whole time.

“What should he be on a motorcycle for—with only one eye? What kind of peripheral vision is that? ” Roberta asked. “One side is always blind.”

That had been what had happened, exactly. A drunk had run a stoplight and Duncan had seen the car too late; when he'd tried to outmaneuver the car, the snow had locked him in place and held him, an almost motionless target, for the drunken driver.

Everything had been broken.

“He is too much like his father,” Helen mourned. But, Captain Energy knew, in some ways Duncan was not like his father. Duncan lacked direction , in Roberta's opinion.

When Duncan was out of danger, Roberta broke down in front of him.

“If you get killed before I die, you little son of a bitch,” she cried, “it will kill me! And your mother, probably—and Ellen, possibly—but you can be sure about me. It will absolutely kill me, Duncan, you little bastard!” Roberta wept and wept, and Duncan wept, too, because he knew it was true: Roberta loved him and was terribly vulnerable, in that way, to whatever happened to him.

Jenny Garp, who was only a freshman at college, dropped out of school so that she could stay in Vermont with Duncan while Duncan got well. Jenny had graduated from the Steering School with the highest honors; she would have no trouble returning to college when Duncan recovered. She volunteered her help to the hospital as a nurse's aide, and she was a great source of optimism for Duncan, who had a long and painful convalescence ahead of him. Duncan, of course, had some experience with convalescence.

Helen came from Steering to see him every weekend; Roberta went to New York to look after the deplorable state of Duncan's live-in studio. Duncan was afraid that all his paintings and photographs, and his stereo, would be stolen.

When Roberta first went to Duncan's studio-apartment, she found a lank, willowy girl living there, wearing Duncan's clothes, all splattered with paint; the girl was not doing such a hot job with the dishes.

“Move out, honey,” Roberta said, letting herself in with Duncan's key. “Duncan's back in the bosom of his family.”

“Who are you?” the girl asked Roberta. “His mother?”

“His wife , sweetheart,” Roberta said. “I've always gone for younger men.”

“His wife? ” the girl said, gawking at Roberta. “I didn't know he was married.”

“His kids are coming up in the elevator,” Roberta told the girl, “so you better use the stairs. His kids are practically as big as me.”

“His kids? ” the girl said; she fled.

Roberta had the studio cleaned and invited a young woman she knew to move in and watch after the place; the woman had just undergone a sexual transformation and she needed to match her new identity with a new place to live. “It will be perfect for you,” Roberta told the new woman. “A luscious young man owns it, but he'll be away for months. You can take care of his things, and have dreams about him, and I'll let you know when you have to move out.”

In Vermont, Roberta told Duncan, “I hope you clean up your life. Stop the motorcycles and the mess—and stop the girls who don't know the first thing about you. My God: sleeping with strangers. You're not your father yet; you haven't gotten down to work . If you were really being an artist, Duncan, you wouldn't have time for all the other shit. All the self-destruction shit, particularly.”

Captain Energy was the only one who could talk to Duncan that way—now that Garp was gone. Helen could not criticize him. Helen was too happy just to have Duncan alive, and Jenny was ten years younger than Duncan; all she could do was look up to him, and love him, and be there while he took so long to heal. Ellen James, who loved Duncan fiercely and possessively, became so exasperated with him that she would throw her note pad and her pencil in the air; and then, of course, she had nothing to say.

“A one-eyed, one-armed painter,” Duncan complained. “Oh boy.”

“Be happy you've still got one head and one heart,” Roberta told him. “Do you know many painters who hold the brush in both hands? You need two eyes to drive a motorcycle, dummy, but only one to paint.”

Jenny Garp, who loved her brother as if he were her brother and her father—because she had been too young to know her father, really—wrote Duncan a poem while he recuperated in the hospital. It was the first and only poem young Jenny Garp ever wrote; she did not have the artistic inclination of her father and her brother. And only God knows what inclination Walt might have had.

 

Here lies the firstborn, lean and long,

with one arm handy and one arm gone,

with one eye lit and one gone out,

with family memories, clout by clout.

This mother's son must keep intact

the remains of the house that Garp built.

 

It was a lousy poem, of course, but Duncan loved it.

“I'll keep myself intact,” he promised Jenny.

The young transsexual, whom Roberta had placed in Duncan's studio-apartment, sent Duncan get-well postcards from New York.

The plants are doing okay, but the big yellow painting by the fireplace was warping—I don't think it was stretched properly—so I took it down and leaned it with the others in the pantry, where it's colder. I love the blue painting, and the drawings—all the drawings! And the one Roberta tells me is a self-portrait, of you—I love that especially.

“Oh boy,” Duncan groaned.

Jenny read him all of Joseph Conrad, who had been Garp's favorite writer when Garp was a boy.

It was good for Helen that she had her teaching duties to distract her from worrying about Duncan.

“That boy will straighten out,” Roberta assured her.

“He's a young man , Roberta,” Helen said. “He's not a boy anymore—although he certainly acts like one.”

“They're all boys to me,” Roberta said. “Garp was a boy. I was a boy, before I became a girl. Duncan will always be a boy, to me.”

“Oh boy,” Helen said.

“You ought to take up some sport,” Roberta told Helen. “To relax you.”

“Please, Roberta,” Helen said.

“Try running ,” Roberta said.

You run, I'll read,” Helen said.

Roberta ran all the time. In her late fifties she was becoming forgetful of using her estrogen, which must be used for the whole of a transsexual's life to maintain a female body shape. The lapses in her estrogen, and her stepped-up running, made Roberta's large body change shape, and change back again, before Helen's eyes.

“I sometimes don't know what's happening to you, Roberta,” Helen told her.

“It's sort of exciting,” Roberta said. “I never know what I'm going to feel like; I never know what I'm going to look like, either.”

Roberta ran in three marathon races after she was fifty, but she developed problems with bursting blood vessels and was advised, by her doctor, to run shorter distances. Twenty-six miles was too much for a former tight end in her fifties—"old Number Ninety,” Duncan occasionally teased her. Roberta was a few years older than Garp and Helen, and had always looked it. She went back to running the old six-mile route she and Garp used to take, between Steering and the sea, and Helen never knew when Roberta might suddenly arrive at the Steering house, sweaty and gasping and wanting to use the shower. Roberta kept a large robe and several changes of clothes at Helen's house for these occasions, when Helen would look up from her book and see Roberta Muldoon in her running costume—her stopwatch held like her heart in her big pass-catching hands.

Roberta, died that spring Duncan was hospitalized in Vermont. She had been doing wind sprints on the beach at Dog's Head Harbor, but she'd stopped running and had come up on the porch, complaining of “popping sounds” in the back of her head—or possibly in her temples; she couldn't exactly locate them, she said. She sat on the porch hammock and looked at the ocean and let Ellen James go get her a glass of ice tea. Ellen sent a note out to Roberta with one of the Fields Foundation fellows.

Lemon?

“No, just sugar!” Roberta called.

When Ellen brought the ice tea, Roberta downed the whole glass in a few gulps.

“That's perfect, Ellen,” Roberta said. Ellen went to fix Roberta another glass. “Perfect,” Roberta repeated. “Give me another one just like that one!” Roberta called. “I want a whole life just like that one!”

When Ellen came back with the ice tea, Roberta Muldoon was dead in the hammock. Something had popped, something had burst.

If Roberta's death struck Helen and made her feel low, Helen had Duncan to worry about—for once, a grateful distraction. Ellen James, whom Roberta had supported so much, was spared an overdose of grief by her sudden responsibilities—she was busy taking over Roberta's job at the Fields Foundation; she had big shoes to fill, as they say. In fact, size 12. Young Jenny Garp had never been as close to Roberta as Duncan had been; it was Duncan, still in traction, who took it the hardest. Jenny stayed with him and gave him one pep talk after another, but Duncan could remember Roberta and all the times she had bailed out the Garps before—Duncan especially.

He cried and cried. He cried so much, they had to change a cast on his chest.

His transsexual tenant sent him a telegram from New York.

 

I'LL GET OUT NOW. NOW THAT R. IS GONE. IF YOU DON'T FEEL COMFORTABLE ABOUT MY BEING HERE. I'LL GO. I WONDER. COULD I HAVE THAT PICTURE OF HER. THE ONE OF R. AND YOU. I ASSUME THAT'S YOU. WITH THE FOOTBALL. YOU'RE IN THE JERSEY WITH THE 90 THAT'S TOO BIG FOR YOU.

 

Duncan had never answered her cards, her reports on the welfare of his plants and the exact location of his paintings. It was in the spirit of old No. 90 that he answered her now, whoever she was—this poor confused boy-girl whom Roberta, Duncan knew, would have been kind to.

Please stay as long as you want to [he wrote to her]. But I like that photograph, too. When I get back on my feet, I'll make a copy just for you.

Roberta had told him to pull his life together and Duncan regretted he would not be able to show her that he could. He felt a responsibility now, and wondered at his father, being a writer when he was so young—having children, having Duncan, when he was so young. Duncan made lots of resolutions in the hospital in Vermont; he would keep most of them, too.

He wrote Ellen James, who was still too upset at his accident to come see him all plastered and full of pins.

Time we both got to work, though I have some catching up to do—to catch up to you. With 90 gone, we're a smaller family. Let's work at not losing anybody else.

He would have written to his mother that he intended to make her proud of him, but he would have felt silly saying it and he knew how tough his mother was—how little she ever needed pep talks. It was to young Jenny that Duncan turned his new enthusiasm.

“Goddamnit, we've got to have energy,” Duncan told his sister, who had plenty of energy. “That's what you missed—by not knowing the old man. Energy! You've got to get it on your own.”

I've got energy,” Jenny said. “Jesus, what do you think I've been doing—just taking care of you?

It was a Sunday afternoon; Duncan and Jenny always watched the pro football on Duncan's hospital TV. It was a further good omen, Duncan thought, that the Vermont station carried the game, that Sunday, from Philadelphia. The Eagles were about to get creamed by the Cowboys. The game, however, didn't matter; it was the before-the-game ceremony that Duncan appreciated. The flag was at half-mast for the former tight end Robert Muldoon. The scoreboard flashed 90! 90! 90! Duncan noted how the times had changed; for example, there were feminist funerals everywhere now; he had just read about a big one in Nebraska. And in Philadelphia the sports announcer managed to say, without snickering, that the flag flew at half-mast for Roberta Muldoon.

She was a fine athlete,” the announcer mumbled. “A great pair of hands.”

“An extraordinary person,” agreed the co-announcer. The first man spoke again. “Yeah,” he said, “she didda lot for...” and he struggled, while Duncan waited to hear for whom —for freaks, for weirdos, for sexual disasters, for his father and his mother and himself and Ellen James. “She didda lot for people wid complicated lives,” the sports announcer said, surprising himself and Duncan Garp—but with dignity.

The band played. The Dallas Cowboys kicked off to the Philadelphia Eagles; it would be the first of many kickoffs that the Eagles would receive. And Duncan Garp could imagine his father, appreciating the announcer's struggle to be tactful and kind. Duncan actually imagined Garp whooping it up with Roberta; somehow, Duncan felt that Roberta would be there—privy to her own eulogy. She and Garp would be hilarious at the awkwardness of the news.

Garp would mimic the announcer: “She didda lot for refashioning da vagina!”

“Ha!” Roberta would roar.

“Oh boy!” Garp would holler. “Oh boy.”

When Garp had been killed, Duncan remembered, Roberta Muldoon had threatened to have her sexual reversal reversed . “I'd rather be a lousy man again,” she wailed, “than think there are women in this world who are actually gloating over this filthy murder by that filthy cunt!

Stop it! Stop it! Don't ever say that word!

scribbled Ellen James.

There are only those of us who loved him, and those of us who didn't know him—men and women,

wrote Ellen James.

Then Roberta Muldoon had picked them all up, one by one; she gave to them—formally, seriously, and generously—her famous bear hug.

When Roberta died, some talking person among the Fields Foundation fellows at Dog's Head Harbor called Helen on the phone. Helen, gathering herself—once again—would be the one to call Duncan in Vermont. Helen would advise young Jenny how to break the news to Duncan. Jenny Garp had inherited a fine bedside manner from her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields.

“Bad news, Duncan,” young Jenny whispered, kissing her brother on the lips. “Old Number Ninety has dropped the ball.”

 

DUNCAN GARP, who survived both the accident that cost him an eye and the accident that cost him an arm, became a good and serious painter; he was something of a pioneer in the artistically suspect field of color photography, which he developed with his painter's eye for color and his father's habit of an insistent, personal vision. He did not make nonsense images, you can be sure, and he brought to his painting an eerie, sensual, almost narrative realism; it was easy, knowing who he was, to say that this was more of a writer's craft than it was a craft that belonged in a picture—and to criticize him, as he was criticized, for being too “literal.”

“Whatever that means,” Duncan always said. “What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist—and the son of Garp? No flaws?”

He had his father's sense of humor, after all, and Helen was very proud of him.

He must have made a hundred paintings in a series called Family Album —the period of his work he was best known for. They were paintings modeled from the photographs he had taken as a child, after his eye accident. They were of Roberta, and his grandmother, Jenny Fields; his mother swimming at Dog's Head Harbor; his father running, with his healed jaw, along the beach. There was one series of a dozen small paintings of a dirty-white Saab; the series was called The Colors of the World . because, Duncan said, all the colors of the world are visible in the twelve versions of the dirty-white Saab.

There were baby pictures of Jenny Garp, too; and in the large, group portraits—largely imagined, not from any photograph—the critics said that the blank face, or the repeated figure (very small) with its back to the camera, was always Walt.

Duncan did not want children of his own. “Too vulnerable,” he told his mother. “I couldn't stand watching them grow up.” What he meant was, he couldn't stand watching them not grow up.

Since he felt that way, Duncan was fortunate not to have children be an issue in his life—they weren't even a worry. He came home from his four months of hospitalization in Vermont and found an extremely lonely transsexual living in his New York studio-apartment. She had made the place look as if a real artist already lived there, and by a curious process—it was almost a kind of osmosis of his things—she already seemed to know a great deal about him. She was in love with him, too—just from pictures. Another gift to Duncan's life from Roberta Muldoon! And there were some who said—Jenny Garp, for example—that she was even beautiful.

They were married, because if ever there was a boy with no discrimination in his heart about transsexuals, that boy was Duncan Garp.

“It's a marriage made in Heaven,” Jenny Garp told her mother. She meant Roberta, of course; Roberta was in Heaven. But Helen was a natural at worrying about Duncan; since Garp had died, she'd had to take over much of the worrying. And since Roberta had died, Helen felt she'd had to take over all the worrying.

“I don't know, I don't know,” Helen said. Duncan's marriage made her anxious. “That damn Roberta,” Helen said. “She always got her way!”

But this way there's no chance of unwanied pregnancy,

wrote Ellen James.

“Oh, stop it!” Helen said. “I sort of wanted granddhildren, you know. One or two, anyway.”

I'll give them to you,” Jenny promised.

“Oh boy,” Helen said. “If I'm still alive, kid.”

Sadly, she wouldn't be, although she would get to see Jenny pregnant and be able to imagine she was a grandmother.

“Imagining something is better than remembering something,” Garp wrote.

And Helen certainly had to be happy with how Duncan's life straightened out, as Roberta had promised.

After Helen's death, Duncan worked very hard with the meek Mr. Whitcomb; they made a respectable presentation out of Garp's unfinished novel, My Father's Illusions . Like the father and son edition of The Pension Grillparzer , Duncan illustrated what there was of My Father's Illusions —a portrait of a father who plots ambitiously and impossibly for a world where his children will be safe and happy. The illustrations Duncan contributed were largely portraits of Garp.

Sometime after the book's publication, Duncan was visited by an old, old man whose name Duncan could not remember. The man claimed to be at work on “a critical biography” of Garp, but Duncan found his questions irritating. The man asked over and over again about the events leading up to the terrible accident where Walt was killed. Duncan wouldn't tell him anything (Duncan didn't know anything), and the man went away empty-handed—biographically speaking. The man was Michael Milton, of course. It had appeared to Duncan that the man was missing something, though Duncan couldn't have known that Michael Milton was missing his penis.

The book he supposedly was writing was never seen, and no one knows what happened to him.

If the world of the reviewer seemed content, after the publication of My Father's Illusions , to call Garp merely an “eccentric writer,” a “good but not a great writer,” Duncan didn't mind. In Duncan's own words, Garp was “original” and “the real thing.” Garp had been the type, after all, to compel blind loyalty.

One-eyed loyalty,” Duncan called it.

He had a long-standing code with his sister, Jenny, and with Ellen James; the three of them were as thick as thieves.

“Here's to Captain Energy!” they would say, when they were drinking together.

“There's no sex like transsex!” they would shout, when they were drunk, which occasionally embarrassed Duncan's wife—although she certainly agreed.

“How's the energy?” they would write and phone and telegraph each other, when they wanted to know what was up. And when they had plenty of energy, they would describe each other as “full of Garp.”

Although Duncan would live a long, long time, he would die unnecessarily and, ironically, because of his good sense of humor. He would die laughing at one of his own jokes, which was surely a Garp-family thing to do. It was at a kind of coming-out party for a new transsexual, a friend of his wife's. Duncan aspirated an olive and choked to death in just a few seconds of violent laughter. That is a horrible and stupid way to die, but everyone who knew him said that Duncan would not have objected—either to that form of death, or to the life he'd had. Duncan Garp always said that his father suffered the death of Walt more than anyone in the family suffered anything else. And among the chosen forms of death, death finally was the same. “Between men and women,” as Jenny Fields once said, “only death is shared equally.”

Jenny Garp, who in the field of death had much more specific training than her famous grandmother, would not have agreed. Young Jenny knew that, between men and women, not even death gets shared equally. Men get to die more, too.

 

JENNY GARP would outlive them all. If she had been at the party where her brother choked to death, she probably could have saved him. At least she would have known exactly what to do. She was a doctor. She always said it was her time in the Vermont hospital, looking after Duncan, that had made up her mind to turn to medicine—not her famous grandmother's history of nursing, because Jenny Garp know that only secondhand.

Young Jenny was a brilliant student; like her mother, she absorbed everything—and everything she learned she could redeliver. Like Jenny Fields, she got her feeling for people as a roamer of hospitals—inching what kindness was possible, and recognizing what wasn't.

While she was an intern, she married another young doctor. Jenny Garp would not give up her name, however; she stayed a Garp, and, in a frightful war with her husband, she saw that her three children would all be Garps, too. She would divorce, eventually—and remarry, but in no hurry. That second time would suit her. He was a painter, much older than herself, and if any of her family had been alive to nag her, they would have no doubt warned her that she was imagining something of Duncan in the man.

“So what?” she would have said. Like her mother, she had her own mind; like Jenny Fields, she kept her own name.

And her father? In what way was Jenny Garp even slightly like him—whom she never really knew? She was only a baby, after all, when he died.

Well, she was eccentric. She made a point of going into every bookstore and asking for her father's books. If the store was out of stock, she would order. She had a writer's sense of immortality: if you're in print and on the shelves, you're alive. Jenny Garp left fake names and addresses all over America; the books she ordered would be sold to someone , she reasoned. T. S. Garp would not go out of print—at least not in his daughter's lifetime.

She was also avid in her support of the famous feminist, her grandmother, Jenny Fields; but like her father, Jenny Garp did not put much stock in the writing of Jenny Fields. She did not bother bookstores about keeping A Sexual Suspect on the shelves.

Most of all, she resembled her father in the kind of doctor she became. Jenny Garp would turn her medical mind to research. She would not have a private practice. She would go to hospitals only when she was sick. Instead, Jenny spent a number of years working closely with the Connecticut Tumor Registry; she would eventually direct a branch of the National Cancer Institute. Like a good writer, who must love and worry each detail, Jenny Garp would spend hours noticing the habits of a single human cell. Like a good writer, she was ambitious; she hoped she would get to the bottom of cancer. In a sense, she would. She would die of it.

Like other doctors, Jenny Garp took that sacred oath of Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, wherein she agreed to devote herself to something like the life Garp once described to young Whitcomb—although Garp was concerned with a writer's ambitions ("...trying everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive”). Thus, cancer research did not depress Jenny Garp, who liked to describe herself as her father had described a novelist.

“A doctor who sees only terminal cases.”

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

 

-END-

Also by John Irving

 

SETTING FREE THE BEARS

THE WATER-METHOD MAN

THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE

 

Copyright

 

A Henry Robbins Book

E.P.Dutton, New York

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “The Plot against the Giant.” Copyright 1923, 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens , by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Portions of this book have appeared in different form in the following magazines: Antaeus, Esquire, Gallery, Penthouse, Playboy, Ploughshares , and Swank .

Copyright @ 1976, 1977, 1978 by John Irving

All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Irving, John, 1942-

The World According to Garp.

"A Henri Robbins book.”

I. Title.

PZ4.I714Wo 1978 [PS3559.R68] 813'.5'4 77-15564

ISBN: 0-525-23770-4

Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver

Designed by Herb Johnson

Produced by Stuart Horowitz

 


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