by John Irving
Stewart Percy was frequently undressed at home. No one knows why. Perhaps it was to relieve himself of the strain of how very dressed he was when he strolled the Steering campus with nothing to do, Distinguished Silver on display, and perhaps it was out of necessity--for all the procreation he was responsible for, he must have been frequently undressed at home.
"Bonkie bit Garp," said little Cushie Percy. Neither Stewart nor Midge noticed that Garp was there, in the doorway, the whole side of his head bloody and chewed.
"Mrs. Percy?" Garp whispered, not loud enough to be heard.
"So it was Garp?" Fat Stew said. Bending to return the squash racket to the closet, he farted. Midge looked at him. "So Bonkie bit Garp," Stewart mused. "Well, at least the dog's got good taste, doesn't he?"
"Oh, Stewie," Midge said; a laughter light as spit escaped her. "Garp's still just a little boy." And there he was, in fact, near-to-fainting and bleeding on the costly hall carpet, which actually spread, without a tuck or a ripple, through four of the monstrous first-floor rooms.
Cushie Percy, whose young life would terminate in childbirth while she tried to deliver what would have been only her first child, saw Garp bleeding on the Steering family heirloom: the remarkable rug. "Oh, gross!" she cried, running out the door.
"Oh, I'll have to call your mother," Midge told Garp, who felt dizzy with the great dog's growl and slobber still singing in his partial ear.
For years Garp would mistakenly interpret Cushie Percy's outcry of "Oh, gross!" He thought she was not referring to his gnawed and messy ear but to her father's great gray nakedness, which filled the hall. That was what was gross to Garp: the silver, barrel-bellied navy man approaching him in the nude from the well of the Percys' towering spiral staircase.
Stewart Percy knelt down in front of Garp and peered curiously into the boy's bloody face; Fat Stew did not appear to be directing his attention to the mauled ear, and Garp wondered if he should advise the enormous, naked man concerning the whereabouts of his injury. But Stewart Percy was not looking for where Garp was hurt. He was looking at Garp's shining brown eyes, at their color and at their shape, and he seemed to convince himself of something, because he nodded austerely and said to his foolish blond Midge, "Jap."
It would be years before Garp would fully comprehend this, too. But Stewie Percy said to Midge, "I spent enough time in the Pacific to recognize Jap eyes when I see them. I told you it was a Jap." The it Stewart Percy referred to was whoever he had decided was Garp's father. That was a frequent, speculative game around the Steering community: guessing who Garp's father was. And Stewart Percy, from his experience in his part of the Pacific, had decided that Garp's father was Japanese.
"At that moment," Garp wrote, "I thought 'Jap' was a word that meant my ear was all gone."
"No sense in calling his mother," Stewie said to Midge. "Just take him over to the infirmary. She's a nurse, isn't she? She'll know what to do."
Jenny knew, all right. "Why not bring the dog over here?" she asked Midge, while she gingerly washed around what was left of Garp's little ear.
"Bonkers?" Midge asked.
"Bring him here," Jenny said, "and I'll give him a shot."
"An injection?" Midge asked. She laughed. "Do you mean there's actually a shot to make him so he won't bite any more people?"
"No," Jenny said. "I mean you could save your money--instead of taking him to a vet. I mean there's a shot to make him dead. That kind of an injection. Then he won't bite any more people."
"Thus," Garp wrote, "was the Percy War begun. For my mother, I think, it was a class war, which she later said all wars were. For me, I just knew to watch out for Bonkers. And for the rest of the Percys."
Stewart Percy sent Jenny Fields a memo on the stationery of the Secretary of the Steering School: "I cannot believe you actually want us to have Bonkers put to sleep," Stewart wrote.
"You bet your fat ass I do," Jenny said to him, on the phone. "Or at least tie him up, forever."
"There's no point in having a dog if the dog can't run free," Stewart said.
"Then kill him," Jenny said.
"Bonkers has had all his shots, thank you just the same," Stewart said. "He's a gentle dog, really. Only if he's provoked."
"Obviously," Garp wrote, "Fat Stew felt that Bonkers had been provoked by my Japness."
* * *
--
"What's 'good taste' mean?" little Garp asked Jenny. At the infirmary, Dr. Pell sewed up his ear; Jenny reminded the doctor that Garp had recently had a tetanus shot.
"Good taste?" Jenny asked. The odd-looking amputation of the ear forced Garp always to wear his hair long, a style he often complained about.
"Fat Stew said that Bonkers has got 'good taste,'" Garp said.
"To bite you?" Jenny asked.
"I guess so," Garp said. "What's it mean?"
Jenny knew, all right. But she said, "It means that Bonkers must have known you were the best-tasting kid in the whole pile of kids."
"Am I?" Garp asked.
"Sure," Jenny said.
"How did Bonkers know?" Garp asked.
"I don't know," Jenny said.
"What's 'Jap' mean?" Garp asked.
"Did Fat Stew say that to you?" Jenny asked him.
"No," Garp said. "I think he said it about my ear."
"Oh yes, your ear," Jenny said. "It means you have special ears." But she was wondering whether to tell him what she felt about the Percys, now, or whether he was enough like her to profit at some later, more important time from the experience of anger. Perhaps, she thought, I should save this morsel for him, for a time when he could use it. In her mind, Jenny Fields saw always more and larger battles ahead.
"My mother seemed to need an enemy," Garp wrote. "Real or imagined, my mother's enemy helped her see the way she should behave, and how she should instruct me. She was no natural at motherhood; in fact, I think my mother doubted that anything happened naturally. She was self-conscious and deliberate to the end."
It was the world according to Fat Stew that became Jenny's enemy in those early years for Garp. That phase might be called "Getting Garp Ready for Steering."
She watched his hair grow and cover the missing parts of his ear. She was surprised at his handsomeness, because handsomeness had not been a factor in her relationship with Technical Sergeant Garp. If the sergeant had been handsome, Jenny Fields hadn't really noticed. But young Garp was handsome, she could see, though he remained small--as if he were born to fit in the ball turret installation.
The band of children (who coursed the Steering footpaths and grassy quadrangles and playing fields) grew more awkward and self-conscious as Jenny watched them grow. Clarence DuGard soon needed glasses, which he was always smashing; over the years Jenny would treat him many times for ear infections and once for a broken nose. Talbot Mayer-Jones developed a lisp; he had a bottle-shaped body, though a lovely disposition, and low-grade chronic sinusitis. Emily Hamilton grew so tall that her knees and elbows were forever raw and bleeding from all her stumbling falls, and the way her small breasts asserted themselves made Jenny wince--occasionally wishing she had a daughter. Ira and Buddy Grove, "from the town," were thick in the ankles and wrists and necks, their fingers smudged and mashed from messing around in their father's maintenance department. And up grew the Percy children, blond and metallically clean, their eyes the color of the dull ice on the brackish Steering River that seeped through the salt marshes to the nearby sea.
Stewart, Jr., who was called Stewie Two, graduated from Steering before Garp was even of age to enter the school; Jenny treated Stewie Two twice for a sprained ankle and once for gonorrhea. He later went through Harvard Business School, a staph infection, and a divorce.
Randolph Percy was called Dopey until his dying day (of a heart attack, when he was only thirty-five; he was a procreator after his fat father's heart, himself the father of five). Dopey never managed to graduate from Steering, but successfully transferred to some other prep school and
graduated after a while. Once Midge cried out in the Sunday dining room, "Our Dopey's dead!" His nickname sounded so awful in that context that the family, after his death, finally spoke of him as Randolph.
William Percy, Shrill Willy, was embarrassed by his stupid nickname, to his credit, and although he was three years older than Garp, he befriended Garp in a very decent fashion while he was an upperclassman at Steering and Garp was just starting out. Jenny always liked William, whom she called William. She treated him many times for bronchitis and was moved enough by the news of his death (in a war, immediately following his graduation from Yale) that she even wrote a long letter of commiseration to Midge and Fat Stew.
As for the Percy girls, Cushie would get hers (and Garp would even get to play a small part; they were near the same age). And poor Bainbridge, the youngest Percy, who was cursed to be called Pooh, would be spared her encounter with Garp until Garp was in his prime.
All these children, and her Garp, Jenny watched grow. While Jenny waited for Garp to get ready for Steering, the black beast Bonkers grew very old, and slower--but not toothless, Jenny noticed. And always Garp watched out for him, even after Bonkers stopped running with the crowd; when he lurked, hulking by the Percys' white front pillars--as matted and tangled and nasty as a thorn bush in the dark--Garp still kept his eye on him. An occasional younger child, or someone new in the neighborhood, would get too close and be chomped. Jenny kept track of the stitches and missing bits of flesh for which the great slathering dog was accountable, but Fat Stew endured all Jenny's criticisms and Bonkers lived.
"I believe my mother grew fond of that animal's presence, although she would never have admitted it," Garp wrote. "Bonkers was the Percy Enemy come alive--made into muscle and fur and halitosis. It must have pleased my mother to watch the old dog slowing down while I was growing up."
By the time Garp was ready for Steering, black Bonkers was fourteen years old. By the time Garp entered the Steering School, Jenny Fields had a few Distinguished Silver hairs of her own. By the time Garp started Steering, Jenny had taken all the courses that were worth taking and had listed them in order of universal value and entertainment. By the time Garp was a Steering student, Jenny Fields had been awarded the traditional gift for faculty and staff enduring fifteen years of service: the famous Steering dinner plates. The stern brick buildings of the school, including the infirmary annex, were baked into the big-eating surfaces of the plates, vividly rendered in the Steering School colors. Good old blood and blue.
3
WHAT HE WANTED TO BE WHEN HE GREW UP
In 1781 the widow and children of Everett Steering founded Steering Academy, as it was first called, because Everett Steering had announced to his family, while carving his last Christmas goose, that his only disappointment with his town was that he had not provided his boys with an academy capable of preparing them for a higher education. He did not mention his girls. He was a shipbuilder in a village whose life-link to the sea was a doomed river; Everett knew the river was doomed. He was a smart man, and not usually playful, but after Christmas dinner he indulged in a snowball fight with both his boys and his girls. He died of apoplexy before nightfall. Everett Steering was seventy-two; even his boys and his girls were too old for snowball fights, but he had a right to call the town of Steering his town.
It had been named after him in a glut of enthusiasm for the town's independence following the Revolutionary War. Everett Steering had organized the installation of mounted cannons at strategic points along the river shore; these cannons were meant to discourage an attack that never came--from the British, who were expected to sail up the river from the sea at Great Bay. The river was called Great River then, but after the war it was called the Steering River; and the town, which had no proper name--but had always been called The Meadows, because it lay in the salt-and freshwater marshes only a few miles inland from Great Bay--was also called Steering.
Many families in Steering were dependent on shipbuilding, or on other business that came up the river from the sea; since it was first called The Meadows, the village had been a backup port to Great Bay. But along with his wishes to found a boys' academy, Everett Steering told his family that Steering would not be a port for very long. The river, he noticed, was choking with silt.
In all his life, Everett Steering was known to tell only one joke, and only to his family. The joke was that the only river to have been named after him was full of mud; and it was getting fuller by the minute. The land was all marsh and meadow, from Steering to the sea, and unless people decided that Steering was worth maintaining as a port, and gouged a deeper channel for the river, Everett knew that even a rowboat would eventually have trouble making it from Steering to Great Bay (unless there was a very high tide). Everett knew that the tide would one day fill in the riverbed from his home town to the Atlantic.
In the next century, the Steering family was wise to stake its life-support system on the textile mills they constructed to span the waterfall on the freshwater part of the Steering River. By the time of the Civil War the only business in the town of Steering, on the Steering River, was the Steering Mills. The family got out of boats and into textiles when the time was ripe.
Another shipbuilding family in Steering was not so lucky; this family's last ship made it only half the way from Steering to the sea. In a once-notorious part of the river, called The Gut, the last ship made in Steering settled into the mud forever, and for years it could be seen from the road, half out of the water at high tide and completely dry at low tide. Kids played in it until it listed to its side and crushed someone's dog. A pig farmer named Gilmore salvaged the ship's masts to raise his barn. And by the time young Garp attended Steering, the varsity crew could row their shells on the river only at high tide. At low tide the Steering River is one wet mudflat from Steering to the sea.
It was, therefore, due to Everett Steering's instincts about water that a boys' academy was founded in 1781. After a century or so, it flourished.
"Over all those years," Garp wrote, "the shrewd Steering genes must have suffered some dilution; the family instincts regarding water went from good to very bad." Garp enjoyed referring to Midge Steering Percy in this way. "A Steering whose water instincts had run their course," he said. Garp thought it wonderfully ironic "that the Steering genes for water sense ran out of chromosomes when they got to Midge. Her sense of water was so perverse," Garp wrote, "that it attracted her first to Hawaii and then to the United States Navy--in the form of Fat Stew."
Midge Steering Percy was the end of the bloodline. The Steering School itself would become the last Steering after her, and perhaps old Everett foresaw that, too; many families have left less, or worse, behind. In Garp's day, at least, the Steering School was still relentless and definite in its purpose: "the preparing of young men for a higher education." And in Garp's case, he had a mother who also took that purpose seriously. Garp himself took the school so seriously that even Everett Steering, with his one joke in a lifetime, would have been pleased.
* * *
--
Garp knew what to take for courses and whom to have for teachers. That is often the difference between doing well or poorly in a school. He was not really a gifted student, but he had direction; many of his courses were still fresh in Jenny's mind, and she was a good drillmaster. Garp was probably no more of a natural at intellectual pursuits than his mother, but he had Jenny's powerful discipline; a nurse is a natural at establishing a routine, and Garp believed in his mother.
If Jenny was remiss in her advice, it was in only one area. She had never paid any attention to the sports at Steering; she could offer Garp no suggestions as to what games he might like to play. She could tell him that he would like East Asian Civilization with Mr. Merrill more than he would like Tudor England with Mr. Langdell. But, for example, Jenny did not know the differences in pleasure and pain between football and soccer. She had observed only that her son was small, strong, well balanced, quick, and solitary; she ass
umed he already knew what games he liked to play. He did not.
Crew, he thought, was stupid. Rowing a boat in unison, a galley slave dipping your oar in foul water--and the Steering River was indeed foul. The river was afloat with factory scum and human turds--and always the after-tide, saltwater slime was on the mudflats (a muck the texture of refrigerated bacon fat). Everett Steering's river was full of more than mud, but even if it had been sparkling clean, Garp was no oarsman. And no tennis player, either. In one of his earliest essays--his freshman year at Steering--Garp wrote: "I do not care for balls. The ball stands between the athlete and his exercise. So do hockey pucks and badminton birdies--and skates, like skis, intrude between the body and the ground. And when one further removes one's body from the contest by an extension device--such as a racket, a bat, or a stick--all purity of movement, strength, and focus is lost." Even at fifteen, one could sense his instinct for a personal aesthetic.
Since he was too small for football, and soccer certainly involved a ball, he ran long distance, which was called cross-country, but he stepped in too many puddles and suffered all fall from a perpetual cold.
When the winter sports season opened, Jenny was distressed at how much restlessness her son exhibited; she criticized him for making too much of a mere athletic decision--why didn't he know what form of exercise he might prefer? But sports did not feel like recreation to Garp. Nothing felt like recreation to Garp. From the beginning, he appeared to believe there was something strenuous to achieve. ("Writers do not read for fun," Garp would write, later, speaking for himself.) Even before young Garp knew he was going to be a writer, or knew what he wanted to be, it appears he did nothing "for fun."
Garp was confined to the infirmary on the day he was supposed to sign up for a winter sport. Jenny would not let him get out of bed. "You don't know what you want to sign up for, anyway," she told him. All Garp could do was cough.