by John Irving
* * *
--
Garp missed his hat as soon as he trotted out on the snowy footpath that led from Buster's Snack and Grill to the Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House. But rather than go back for it, he stepped up his usual pace and ran to the gym. His head was cold when he got there, in less than three minutes; his toes were cold, too, and he warmed his feet in the steamy trainer's room before putting on his wrestling shoes.
He talked briefly with his 145-pounder in the trainer's room. The boy was getting his little finger taped to his ring finger so that he would give some support to what the trainer said was only a sprain. Garp asked if there'd been an X ray; there had been, and it was negative. Garp tapped his 145-pounder on the shoulder, asked him what he weighed in at, frowned at the answer--which was probably a lie, and still about five pounds too heavy--and went to suit up.
He stopped again in the trainer's room before going to practice. "Just to put some Vaseline on one ear," the trainer recalled. Garp had a cauliflower ear in progress, and the Vaseline made his ear slippery; he thought this protected it. Garp did not like wrestling in a headgear; those ear guards had not been part of the required uniform when he'd been a wrestler, and he saw no reason to wear one now.
He jogged a mile around the indoor track with his 152-pounder before opening the wrestling room. Garp challenged the boy to a sprint in the last lap, but the 152-pounder had more left than Garp and beat him by six feet at the end. Garp then "played" with the 152-pounder--in lieu of warming up--in the wrestling room. He took the kid down easily, about five or six times, then rode him around the mat for about five minutes--or until the boy showed signs of tiring. Then Garp allowed the boy to reverse him; Garp let the 152-pounder try to pin him while he defended himself on the bottom. But there was a muscle in Garp's back that was tight, that would not stretch enough to suit him, so Garp told the 152-pounder to go play with someone else. Garp sat by himself against the padded wall, sweating happily and watching the room fill up with his team.
He let them warm up on their own--he hated organized calisthenics--before demonstrating the first of the drills he wanted them to practice. "Get a partner, get a partner," he said, by rote. And he added, "Eric? Get a harder partner, Eric, or you'll work with me."
Eric, his 133-pounder, had a habit of coasting through workouts with the second-string 115-pounder, who was Eric's roommate and best friend.
When Helen came in the wrestling room, the temperature was up to 85deg or so, and climbing. The coupled boys upon the mat were already breathing hard. Garp was intently watching a time clock. "One minute left!" Garp yelled. When Helen walked by him, he had a whistle in his mouth--so she did not kiss him.
She would remember that whistle, and not kissing him, for as long as she would live--which would be a long time.
Helen went to her usual corner of the wrestling room, where she could not easily be fallen on. She opened her book. Her glasses fogged up; she wiped them off. She had her glasses on when the nurse entered the wrestling room, at the farthest end of the room from Helen. But Helen never looked up from her book unless there was a loud body slam upon the mat or an unusually loud cry of pain. The nurse closed the wrestling-room door behind her and moved quickly past the grappling bodies toward Garp, with his time clock in his hands and his whistle in his mouth. Garp took the whistle out and hollered, "Fifteen seconds!" That was all the time he had left, too. Garp put the whistle back in his mouth and got ready to blow.
When he saw the nurse, he mistook her for the kindly nurse named Dotty who had helped him escape from the first feminist funeral. Garp was simply judging her by her hair, which was iron-gray and in a braid, coiled like a rope around her head--it was a wig, of course. The nurse smiled at him. There was probably no one Garp felt as comfortable with as a nurse; he smiled back at her, then glanced at the time clock: ten seconds.
When Garp looked up at the nurse again, he saw the gun. He had just been thinking about his mother, Jenny Fields, and how she must have looked when she walked into the wrestling room, not quite twenty years ago. Jenny was younger than this nurse, he was thinking. If Helen had looked up and seen this nurse, Helen might have been fooled again into thinking that her missing mother had finally decided to come out of hiding.
When Garp saw the gun, he also noticed that it wasn't a real nurse's uniform; it was a Jenny Fields Original with the characteristic red heart sewn over the breast. It was then that Garp saw the nurse's breasts--they were small but they were too firm and youthfully erect for a woman with iron-gray hair; and her hips were too slim, her legs too girlish. When Garp looked again at her face, he saw the family resemblance: the square jawline that Midge Steering had given to all her children, the sloping forehead that had been the contribution of Fat Stew. The combination gave all the Percy's heads the shape of violent navy vessels.
The first shot forced the whistle out of Garp's mouth with a sharp tweet! and caused the time clock to fly from his hands. He sat down. The mat was warm. The bullet had traveled through his stomach and had lodged in his spine. There were fewer than five seconds remaining on the time clock when Bainbridge Percy fired a second time; the bullet struck Garp's chest and drove him, still in a sitting position, back against the padded wall. The stunned wrestlers, who were only boys, seemed incapable of motion. It was Helen who tackled Pooh Percy to the mat and kept her from firing a third shot.
Helen's screams aroused the wrestlers. One of them, the second-string heavyweight, pinned Pooh Percy belly down to the mat and ripped her hand with the gun in it out from under her; his pumping elbow split Helen's lip, but Helen hardly felt it. The starting 145-pounder, with his little finger taped to his ring finger, wrenched the gun out of Pooh's hand by breaking her thumb.
At the moment her bone clicked, Pooh Percy screamed; even Garp saw what had become of her--the surgery must have been recent. In Pooh Percy's open, yelling mouth, anyone near her could see the black gathering of stitches, like ants clustered on the stump of what had been her tongue. The second-string heavyweight was so frightened of Pooh that he squeezed her too hard and cracked one of her ribs; Bainbridge Percy's recent madness--to become an Ellen Jamesian--was certainly painful to her.
"Igs!" she screamed. "Ucking igs!" An "ucking ig" was a "fucking pig," but you had to be an Ellen Jamesian to understand Pooh Percy now.
The starting 145-pounder held the gun at arm's length, pointed down to the mat and into an empty corner of the wrestling room. "Ig!" Pooh gagged at him, but the trembling boy stared at his coach.
Helen held Garp steady; he was starting to slide against the wall. He could not talk, he knew; he could not feel, he could not touch. He had only a keen sense of smell, his brief eyesight, and his vivid memory.
Garp was glad, for once, that Duncan wasn't interested in wrestling. By virtue of his preference for swimming, Duncan had missed seeing this; Garp knew that Duncan would either just be getting out of school or already at the swimming pool.
Garp was sorry for Helen--that she was here--but he was happy to have her scent nearest him. He savored it, among those other intimate odors in the Steering wrestling room. If he could have talked, he would have told Helen not to be frightened of the Under Toad anymore. It surprised him to realize that the Under Toad was no stranger, was not even mysterious; the Under Toad was very familiar--as if he had always known it, as if he had grown up with it. It was yielding, like the warm wrestling mats; it smelled like the sweat of clean boys--and like Helen, the first and last woman Garp loved. The Under Toad, Garp knew now, could even look like a nurse: a person who is familiar with death and trained to make practical responses to pain.
When Dean Bodger opened the wrestling-room door with Garp's ski hat in his hands, Garp had no illusions that the dean had arrived, once again, to organize the rescue party--to catch the body falling from the infirmary annex, four floors above where the world was safe. The world was not safe. Dean Bodger, Garp knew, would do his best to be of service; Garp smiled gratefully to him, and to
Helen--and to his wrestlers; some of them were weeping now. Garp looked fondly at his sobbing second-string heavyweight who lay crushing Pooh Percy to the mat; Garp knew what a difficult season the poor, fat boy was about to experience.
Garp looked at Helen; all he could move was his eyes. Helen, he saw, was trying to smile back at him. With his eyes, Garp tried to reassure her: don't worry--so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me. Even if there is only death after death (after death), be grateful for small favors--sometimes there is birth after sex, for example. And, if you are very fortunate, sometimes there is sex after birth! Oh yeth, as Alice Fletcher would have said. And if you have life, said Garp's eyes, there is hope you'll have energy. And never forget, there is memory, Helen, his eyes told her.
"In the world according to Garp," young Donald Whitcomb would write, "we are obliged to remember everything."
Garp died before they could move him from the wrestling room. He was thirty-three, the same age as Helen. Ellen James was just starting her twenties. Duncan was thirteen. Little Jenny Garp was going on three. Walt would have been eight.
* * *
--
The news of Garp's death promoted the immediate printing of a third and fourth edition of the father and son book, The Pension Grillparzer. Over a long weekend, John Wolf drank too much and contemplated leaving publishing; it sometimes nauseated him to see how a violent death was so good for business. But it comforted Wolf to realize how Garp would have taken the news. Even Garp could not have imagined that his own death would be better than a suicide at establishing his literary seriousness and his fame. Not bad for someone who, at thirty-three, had written one good short story and perhaps one and a half good novels out of three. Garp's rare manner of dying was, in fact, so perfect that John Wolf had to smile when he imagined how pleased Garp would have been with it. It was a death, Wolf thought, which in its random, stupid, and unnecessary qualities--comic and ugly and bizarre--underlined everything Garp had ever written about how the world works. It was a death scene, John Wolf told Jillsy Sloper, that only Garp could have written.
Helen would remark bitterly, but only once, that Garp's death was really a kind of suicide, after all. "In the sense that his whole life was a suicide," she said, mysteriously. She would later explain that all she meant was, "He made people too angry."
He had made Pooh Percy too angry; at least that was clear.
He made others pay him tribute, small and strange. The Steering School cemetery got the honor of his gravestone, if not his body; like his mother's, Garp's body went to medicine. The Steering School also chose to honor him by naming after him its one remaining building that was not named after anybody else. It was old Dean Bodger's idea. If there was a Jenny Fields Infirmary, the good dean argued, then there should be a Garp Infirmary Annex.
In later years the functions of these buildings would alter slightly, although they would remain, in name, the Fields Infirmary and the Garp Annex. The Fields Infirmary would one day become the old wing of the new Steering Health Clinic and Laboratories; the Garp Annex would become a building used chiefly for storage--a kind of warehouse for medical, kitchen, and classroom supplies; it could also be used for epidemics. Of course, there weren't many epidemics anymore. Garp probably would have liked the idea: to have a storage building named after him. He wrote once that a novel was "only a place for storage--of all the meaningful things that a novelist isn't able to use in his life."
He would have liked the idea of an epilogue, too--so here it is: an epilogue "warning us about the future," as T. S. Garp might have imagined it.
* * *
--
ALICE AND HARRISON FLETCHER would remain married, through thick and through thin--in part, their marriage lasted because of Alice's difficulty with finishing anything. Their only child, a daughter, would play the cello--that large and cumbersome and silken-voiced instrument--in a manner so graceful that the pure, deep sound of it aggravated Alice's speech defect for hours after each performance. Harrison, who would get and hold his tenure after a while, would outgrow his habits with his prettier students about the time his talented daughter began to assert herself as a serious musician.
Alice, who would never complete her second novel, or her third or fourth, would never have a second child, either. She remained smoothly fluent on the page, and agonizing in the flesh. Alice never again took to "other men" to the degree that she had taken to Garp; even in her memory, he was a passion that was strong enough to keep her from ever becoming close to Helen. And Harry's old fondness for Helen seemed to fade with each of his fast-fading affairs, until the Fletchers rarely kept track of the surviving Garps at all.
Once Duncan Garp met the Fletcher daughter in New York, after her maiden cello solo in that dangerous city; Duncan took her to dinner.
"Does he look like his mother?" Harrison asked the girl.
"I don't remember her very well," the daughter said.
"Did he make a path at you?" Alice asked.
"I don't think so," said her daughter, whose first-chosen and best-loved partner would always be that big-hipped cello.
The Fletchers, both Harry and Alice, would die in their ripe middle age, when their airplane--to Martinique--crashed during the Christmas holidays. One of Harrison's students had driven them to the airport.
"If you live in New England," Alice confided to the student, "you owe yourthelf a holiday in the thun. Right, Harrithon?"
Helen had always thought that Alice was "a little loony."
* * *
--
HELEN HOLM, who most of her life would be known as Helen Garp, would live a long, long time. A slim, dark woman with an arresting face and precise language, she would have her lovers but never remarry. Each lover suffered the presence of Garp--not only in Helen's relentless memory, but in the articles of fact that Helen surrounded herself with in the Steering mansion, which she rarely left: for example, Garp's books, and all of Duncan's photographs of him, and even Garp's wrestling trophies.
Helen maintained that she could never forgive Garp for dying so young and leaving her to live so much of her life alone--he had also spoiled her, she claimed, for ever considering seriously the possibility of living with another man.
Helen would become one of the most respected teachers the Steering School ever had, though she would never lose her sense of sarcasm about the place. She had some friends there, though they were few: old Dean Bodger, until he died, and the young scholar, Donald Whitcomb, who would become as enchanted with Helen as he was enchanted with the work of Garp. There was also a woman, a sculptor, who was an artist-in-residence--someone Roberta had introduced Helen to.
John Wolf was a lifelong friend whom Helen forgave in small pieces, but never completely, for his success at making Garp a success. Helen and Roberta remained close, too--Helen occasionally joining Roberta for Roberta's famous flings upon the city of New York. The two of them, growing older and more eccentric, were guilty of lording it over the Fields Foundation for years. In fact, the wit of their running commentary on the outside world became almost a tourist attraction at Dog's Head Harbor; from time to time, when Helen was lonely or bored at Steering--when her children were grown up and pursuing their own lives, elsewhere--she went to stay with Roberta at Jenny Fields' old estate. It was always lively there. When Roberta died, Helen appeared to age twenty years.
Very late in her life--and only after she had complained to Duncan that she had survived all her favorite contemporaries--Helen Holm was stricken suddenly with an illness that affects the body's mucous membranes. She would die in her sleep.
She had successfully outlived many cutthroat biographers who were waiting for her to die so that they could swoop in on the remains of Garp. She had protected his letters, the unfinished manuscript of My Father's Illusions, most of his journals and jottings. She told all the would-be biographers, exactly as he would have, "Read the work. Forget the life."
She herself wrote several a
rticles, which were respected in her field. One was called "The Adventurer's Instinct in Narration." It was a comparative study of the narrative technique of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.
Helen always considered herself as a widow left with three children--Duncan, baby Jenny, and Ellen James, who all survived Helen and wept copiously at her death. They had been too young and too astonished to weep as much for Garp.
* * *
--
DEAN BODGER, who wept almost as much as Helen at Garp's death, remained as loyal as a pit bull, and as tenacious. Long after his retirement, he still stormed the Steering campus by night, unable to sleep, fitfully capturing lurkers and lovers who slunk along the footpaths and hugged each other to the spongy ground--under the soft bushes, alongside the beautiful old buildings, and so forth.
Bodger remained active at Steering for as long as it took Duncan Garp to graduate. "I saw your father through, boy," the dean told Duncan. "I'll see you through, too. And if they let me, I'll stay to see your sister through." But they finally forced his retirement; they cited to themselves, among other problems, his habit of talking to himself during chapel, and his bizarre arrests, at midnight, of the boys and girls caught out after hours. They also mentioned the dean's recurring fantasy: that it had been the young Garp he caught in his arms--one night, years ago--and not a pigeon. Bodger refused to move from the campus, even when he was retired, and despite--or, perhaps, because of--his obstinacy, he became Steering's most honored emeritus. They would drag him out for all the school's ceremonies; they would totter him up to the stage, introduce him to people who didn't know who he was, and then they would lead him away. Perhaps because they could display him on these dignified occasions, they tolerated his odd behavior; long through his seventies, for example, Bodger would be convinced--sometimes for weeks at a time--that he was still the dean.
"You are the dean, really," Helen liked to tease him.