The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  “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.