by John Irving
"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.
18
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: that 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 swimming 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, cautiously.
"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.