by John Irving
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 Hele
n; 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.