The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  Garp hit the bottom of his driveway at about forty miles per hour. He came off the downhill road in third gear and accelerated just as he exited; he glimpsed how the driveway was glazed with frozen slush, and he worried momentarily that the Volvo might slip on the short uphill curve. He held the car in gear until he felt what grip he had of the road; it was good enough, and he popped the sharp stick shift into neutral—a second before he killed the engine and flicked out the headlights.

  They coasted up, into the black rain. It was like that moment when you feel an airplane lift off the runway; the children both cried out in excitement. Garp could feel the children at his elbow, crowding each other for the one favored position in the gap between the bucket seats.

  “How can you see now?” Duncan asked.

  “He doesn't have to see,” Walt said. There was a high thrill in Walt's voice, which suggested to Garp that Walt wished to reassure himself.

  “I know this by heart,” Garp assured them.

  “It's like being underwater!” cried Duncan; he held his breath.

  “It's like a dream!” said Walt; he reached for his brother's hand.

  14. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MARCUS AURELIUS

  THAT was how Jenny Fields became a kind of nurse again; after all her years in her white uniform, nursing the women's movement, Jenny was appropriately dressed for her role. It was at Jenny's suggestion that the Garp family moved into the Fields estate at Dog's Head Harbor. There were many rooms for Jenny to take care of them in, and there was the healing sound of the sea, rushing in and out, rinsing everything clean.

  All his life, Duncan Garp would associate the sound of the sea with his convalescence. His grandmother would remove the bandage; there was a kind of tidal irrigation of the hole where Duncan's right eye had been. His father and mother could not stand the sight of that empty hole, but Jenny was an old hand at staring down wounds until they went away. It was with his grandmother, Jenny Fields, that Duncan would see his first glass eye. “See?” Jenny said. “It's big and brown; it's not quite as pretty as your left one, but you just make sure the girls see your left one first.” It was not a very feminist thing to say, she supposed, but Jenny always said that she was, first and foremost, a nurse.

  Duncan's eye was gouged out when he was flung forward between the bucket seats; the uncovered tip of the stick-shift shaft was the first thing to break his fall. Garp's right arm, reaching into the gap between the seats, was too late; Duncan passed under it, putting out his right eye and breaking three fingers of his right hand, which was jammed into the seat-belt release mechanism.

  By no one's estimate could the Volvo have been moving faster than twenty-five—at the most, thirty-five—miles per hour, but the collision was astonishing. The three-ton Buick did not yield quite an inch to Garp's coasting car. Inside the Volvo the children were like eggs out of the egg box—loose inside the shopping bag—at the moment of impact. Even inside the Buick, the jolt had surprising ferocity.

  Helen's head was flung forward, narrowly missing the steering column, which caught her at the back of her neck. Many wrestlers' children have hardy necks, because Helen's did not break—though she wore a brace for almost six weeks, and her back would bother her the rest of her life. Her right collarbone was broken, perhaps by the rising slam of Michael Milton's knee, and her nose was gashed across the bridge—requiring nine stitches—by what must have been Michael Milton's belt buckle. Helen's mouth was snapped shut with such force that she broke two teeth and required two neat stitches in her tongue.

  At first she thought she had bitten her tongue off, because she could feel it swimming in her mouth, which was full of blood; but her head ached so severely that she didn't dare open her mouth, until she had to breathe, and she couldn't move her right arm. She spat what she thought was her tongue into the palm of her left hand. It wasn't her tongue, of course. It was what amounted to three quarters of Michael Milton's penis.

  The warm wash of blood over her face felt, to Helen, like gasoline; she began to scream—not for her own safety, but for Garp's and the children's. She knew what had hit the Buick. She struggled to get out of Michael Milton's lap because she had to see what had happened to her family. She dropped what she thought was her tongue on the floor of the Buick and with her good left arm she punched Michael Milton, whose lap pinned her against the steering column. It was only then that she heard other screams above her own. Michael Milton was screaming, of course, but Helen heard beyond him—to the Volvo. That was Duncan who was screaming, she was sure, and Helen fought her left arm across Michael Milton's bleeding lap to the door handle. When the door opened, she pushed Michael out of the Buick; she felt incredibly strong. Michael never once corrected his bent-double, sitting-up position; he lay on his side in the freezing slush as if he were still in the driver's seat, though he bellowed and bled like a steer.

  When the door light came on in the huge Buick, Garp could dimly see the gore in the Volvo—Duncan's streaming face, split with his gaping wail. Garp began to bellow, too, but his bellow issued forth no louder than a whimper; his own, odd sound scared him so much that he tried to talk softly to Duncan. It was then Garp realized he couldn't talk.

  When Garp had flung out his arm to break Duncan's fall, he had turned almost sideways in the driver's seat and his face had struck the steering wheel hard enough to break his jaw and mangle his tongue (twelve stitches). In the long weeks of Garp's recovery, at Dog's Head Harbor, it is fortunate for Jenny that she'd had much experience with Ellen Jamesians, because Garp's mouth was wired shut and his messages to his mother were written ones. He sometimes wrote pages and pages, on the typewriter, which Jenny would then read aloud to Duncan—because, although Duncan could read, he was instructed not to strain his remaining eye more than was necessary. In time, the eye would compensate for the other eye's loss, but Garp had much to say that was immediate—and no “way to say it. When he sensed that his mother was editing his remarks—to Duncan, and to Helen (to whom he also wrote pages and pages)—Garp would grunt his protest through his wires, holding his sore tongue very still. And Jenny Fields, like the good nurse she was, would wisely move him to a private room.

  “This is the Dog's Head Harbor Hospital,” Helen said to Jenny once. Although Helen could talk, she said little; she did not have pages and pages to say. She spent most of her convalescence in Duncan's room, reading to the boy, because Helen was a much better reader than Jenny, and there were only two stitches in Helen's tongue. In this period of recovery, Jenny Fields could deal with Garp better than Helen could deal with him.

  Helen and Duncan often sat side by side in Duncan's room. Duncan had a fine, one-eyed view of the sea, which he watched all day as if he were a camera. Getting used to having one eye is something like getting used to the world through a camera, there are similarities in depth of field, and in the problems of focus. When Duncan seemed ready to discover this, Helen bought him a camera—a single-lens reflex camera; for Duncan, that kind made the most sense.

  It was in this period of time, Duncan Garp would recall, that the thought of being an artist, a painter and a photographer, first occurred to him; he was almost eleven. Although he had been athletic, his one eye would make him (like his father) forever leery of sports involving balls. Even running, he said, he was bothered by the lack of peripheral vision. Duncan claimed it made him clumsy. It was eventually added to Garp's sadness that Duncan did not care for wrestling, either. Duncan spoke in terms of the camera, and he told his father that one of his problems with depth of field included not knowing how far away the mat was. “When I wrestle,” he told Garp, “I feel like I'm going downstairs in the dark; I don't know when I get to the bottom until I feel it.” Garp concluded, of course, that the accident had made Duncan insecure about sports, but Helen pointed out to him that Duncan had always had a certain timidity, a reserve—even though he was good at games, and clearly well coordinated, he'd always had a tendency not to participate. Not as energetically, certainly, as Walt—who was in
trepid, who flung his body into every new circumstance with faith and grace and with temerity. Walt, Helen said, was the real athlete between them. After a while, Garp supposed she was right.

  “Helen is often right, you know,” Jenny told Garp one night at Dog's Head Harbor. The context of this remark could have been anything, but it was sometime soon after the accident, because Duncan had his own room, and Helen had her own room, and Garp had his own room, and so forth.

  Helen is often right, his mother had told him, but Garp looked angry and wrote Jenny a note.

  Not this time, Mom,

  said the note, meaning—perhaps—Michael Milton. Meaning: the whole thing.

  It was not expressly because of Michael Milton that Helen resigned. The availability of Jenny's big hospital on the ocean, as both Garp and Helen would come to think of it, was a way to leave the unwanted familiarity of their house, and of that driveway.

  And in the faculty code of ethics, “moral turpitude” is listed as one ground for revoking tenure—though this never came to debate; sleeping with students was not generally treated too harshly. It might be a hidden reason why a faculty member wasn't given tenure; it would rarely be a reason for revoking someone's tenure. Helen may have supposed that biting off three quarters of a student's penis was fairly high on the scale of conceivable abuse to students. Sleeping with them simply happened, though it was not encouraged; there were many worse ways of evaluating students and categorizing them for life. But amputation of their genitalia was certainly severe, even for bad students, and Helen must have felt inclined to punish herself. So she denied herself the pleasure of continuing at the task she had prepared for, so well, and she removed herself from the arousement that books and their discussion had always meant to her. In her later life, Helen would spare herself considerable unhappiness by refusing to feel guilty; in her later life, the whole business with Michael Milton would more often make her angry than it would make her sad—because she was strong enough to believe that she was a good woman, which she was, who'd been made to suffer disproportionately for a trivial indiscretion.

  But at least for a time, Helen would heal herself and her family. Never having had a mother, and having had little chance to use Jenny Fields in that way, Helen submitted to this period of hospitalization at Dog's Head Harbor. She calmed herself by nursing Duncan, and she hoped that Jenny could nurse Garp.

  This aura of the hospital was not new to Garp, whose earliest experiences—with fear, with dreams, with sex—had all occurred in the infirmary atmosphere of the old Steering School. He adapted. It helped him that he had to write out what he wanted to say, because this made him careful; it made him reconsider many of the things he might have thought he wanted to say. When he saw them written down—these raw thoughts—he realized that he couldn't or shouldn't say them; when he went to revise them, he knew better and threw them away. There was one for Helen, which read:

  Three quarters is not enough.

  He threw it away.

  Then he wrote one for Helen that he did give to her.

  I don't blame you.

  Later, he wrote another one.

  I don't blame me, either,

  the note said.

  Only in this way can we be whole again,

  Garp wrote to his mother.

  And Jenny Fields padded whitely through the salt-damp house, room to room with her nursing ways and Garp's notes. It was all the writing he could manage.

  Of course, the house at Dog's Head Harbor was used to recoveries. Jenny's wounded women had gotten hold of themselves there; these sea-smelling rooms had histories of sadnesses outlived. Among them, the sadness of Roberta Muldoon, who had lived there with Jenny through the most difficult periods of her sex reassignment. In fact, Roberta had failed at living alone—and at living with a number of men—and she was back living at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny again when the Garps moved in.

  As the spring warmed up, and the hole that had been Duncan's right eye slowly healed and was less vulnerable to sticking bits of sand, Roberta took Duncan to the beach. It was on the beach that Duncan discovered his depth-of-field problem as it was related to a thrown ball, because Roberta Muldoon tried playing catch with Duncan and very soon hit him in the face with the football. They gave up the ball, and Roberta contented Duncan with diagraming, in the sand, all the plays she once ran at the tight end position for the Philadelphia Eagles; she focused on the part of the Eagles offense that concerned her, when she was Robert Muldoon, No. 90, and she relived for Duncan her occasional touch down passes, her dropped balls, her offside penalties, her most vicious hits. “It was against the Cowboys,” she told Duncan. “We were playing in Dallas, when that snake in the grass—Eight Ball, everyone called him—came up on my blind side...” And Roberta would regard the quiet child, who had a blind side for life, and she would deftly change the subject.

  To Garp, Roberta's subject was the ticklish detail of sex reassignment, because Garp seemed interested and Roberta knew that Garp probably liked hearing about a problem so thoroughly removed from his own.

  “I always knew I should have been a girl,” she told Garp. “I dreamed about having love made to me, by a man, but in the dreams I was always a woman; I was never a man having love made to me by another man.” There was more than a hint of distaste in Roberta's references to homosexuals, and Garp thought it strange that people in the process of making a decision that will plant them firmly in a minority, forever, are possibly less tolerant of other minorities than we might imagine. There was even a bitchiness about Roberta, when she complained of the other troubled women who came to get well at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny Fields. “That damn lesbian crowd,” Roberta said to Garp. “They're trying to make your mother into something she isn't.”

  “I sometimes think that's what Mom is for,” Garp teased Roberta. “She makes people happy by letting them think she is something she isn't.”

  “Well, they tried to confuse me,” Roberta said. “When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. “Be gay,” they said. “If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,” they told me. They were all cowards,” Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.

  Roberta's vehemence was not unique; Garp pondered how these other women in his mother's house, and in her care, had all been victims of intolerance—yet most of them he'd met seemed especially intolerant of each other. It was a kind of infighting that made no sense to Garp and he marveled at his mother sorting them all out, keeping them happy and out of each other's hair. Robert Muldoon, Garp knew, had spent several months in drag before his actual operation. He'd go off in the morning dressed as Robert Muldoon; he went out shopping for women's clothes, and almost no one knew that he paid for his sex change with the banquet fees he collected for the speeches he gave to boys' clubs and men's clubs. In the evenings, at Dog's Head Harbor, Robert Muldoon would model his new clothes for Jenny and the critical women who shared her house. When the estrogen hormones began to enlarge his breasts and shift the former tight end's shape around, Robert gave up the banquet circuit and marched forth from the Dog's Head Harbor house in mannish women's suits and rather conservative wigs; he tried being Roberta long before he had the surgery. Clinically, now, Roberta had the same genitalia and urological equipment as most other women.

  “But of course I can't conceive,” she told Garp. “I don't ovulate and I don't menstruate.” Neither do millions of other women, Jenny Fields had reassured her. “When I came home from the hospital,” Roberta said to Garp, “do you know what else your mother told me?”

  Garp shook his head; “home” to Roberta, Garp knew, was Dog's Head Harbor.

  “She told me I was less sexually ambiguous than most people she knew,” Roberta said. “I really needed that,” she said, “because I had to use this horrible dilator all the time so that my vagina wouldn't close; I felt like a machine.”r />
  Good old mom,

  Garp scribbled.

  “There's such sympathy for people, in what you write,” Roberta told him, suddenly. “But I don't see that much sympathy in you, in your real life,” she said. It was the same thing Jenny had always accused him of.

  But now, he felt, he had more. With his jaw wired shut, with his wife with her arm in a sling all day—and Duncan with only half his pretty face intact—Garp felt more generous toward the other wretches who wandered into Dog's Head Harbor.

  It was a summer town. Out of season, the bleached shingled house with its porches and garrets was the only occupied mansion along the gray-green dunes and the white beach at the end of Ocean Lane. An occasional dog sniffed through the bone-colored driftwood, and retired people, living some miles inland, in their former summer houses, occasionally strolled the shore, scrutinizing the shells. In summer there were lots of dogs and children and mothers' helpers all over the beach, and always a bright boat or two in the harbor. But when the Garps moved in with Jenny, the shoreline seemed abandoned. The beach, littered with the debris washed in with the high tides of winter, was deserted. The Atlantic Ocean, through April and through May, was the livid color of a bruise—was the color of the bridge of Helen's nose.

  Visitors to the town, in the off-season, were quickly spotted as lost women in search of the famous nurse, Jenny Fields. In summer, these women often spent a whole day in Dog's Head Harbor trying to find someone who knew where Jenny lived. But the permanent residents of Dog's Head Harbor all knew: “The last house at the end of Ocean Lane,” they told the damaged girls and women who asked for directions. “It's as big as a hotel, honey. You can't miss it.”