by John Irving
"Of course I am!" Bodger roared.
They saw each other often, and as Bodger grew deafer, and deafer, he was more frequently seen on the arm of that nice Ellen James, who had her ways of talking to people who couldn't hear.
Dean Bodger remained loyal even to the Steering wrestling team, whose glory years soon faded from the memories of most. The wrestlers were never again to have a coach the equal of Ernie Holm, or even the equal of Garp. They became a losing team, yet Bodger always supported them, hollering through the last bout to the poor Steering boy flopping on his back, about to be pinned.
It was at a wrestling match that Bodger died. In the unlimited class--an unusually close match--the Steering heavyweight lay floundering with his equally exhausted and out-of-shape opponent; like beached baby whales, they groveled for the upper hand and the winning points as the clock ran down. "Fifteen seconds!" the announcer boomed. The big boys struggled. Bodger rose to his feet, stamping and urging. "Gott!" he squawked, his German emerging at the end.
When the bout ended and the stands emptied, there was the retired dean--dead in his seat. It took much comforting from Helen for the sensitive young Whitcomb to gain control of his grief at Bodger's loss.
* * *
--
DONALD WHITCOMB would never sleep with Helen, despite rumors among the envious would-be biographers who longed to get their hands on Garp's property and Garp's widow. Whitcomb would be a monkish recluse all his life, which he spent in virtual hiding at the Steering School. It was his happy fortune to have discovered Garp there, moments before Garp's death, and his happy fortune, too, to find himself befriended and looked after by Helen. She trusted him to adore her husband perhaps even more uncritically than she did.
Poor Whitcomb would always be referred to as "the young Whitcomb," even though he would not always be young. His face would never grow a beard, his cheeks would be forever pink--under his brown, his gray, his finally frost-white hair. His voice would remain a stuttering, eager yodel; his hands would wring themselves forever. But it would be Whitcomb whom Helen would trust with the family and literary record.
He would be Garp's biographer. Helen would read all but the last chapter, which Whitcomb waited for years to write; it was the chapter eulogizing her. Whitcomb was the Garp scholar, the final Garp authority. He had the proper meekness for a biographer, Duncan always joked. He was a good biographer from the Garp family's point of view; Whitcomb believed everything that Helen told him--he believed every note that Garp left--or every note that Helen told him Garp left.
"Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that's left is memory. But even a nihilist has a memory."
Whitcomb even loved Garp at his most whimsical and at his most pretentious.
Among Garp's things, Helen found this note.
"No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: 'I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.'"
Donald Whitcomb, who loved Garp uncritically--in the manner of dogs and children--said that those indeed were Garp's last words.
"If Whitcomb said so, then they were," Duncan always said.
Jenny Garp and Ellen James--they agreed about this, too.
It was a family matter--keeping Garp from the biographers,
wrote Ellen James.
"And why not?" asked Jenny Garp. "What does he owe the public? He always said he was only grateful for other artists, and to the people who loved him."
So who else deserves to have a piece of him, now?
wrote Ellen James.
Donald Whitcomb was even faithful to Helen's last wish. Although Helen was old, her final illness was sudden, and it had to be Whitcomb who defended her deathbed request. Helen did not want to be buried in the Steering School cemetery, alongside Garp and Jenny, her father and Fat Stew--and all the others. She said that the town cemetery would do her just fine. She did not want to be left to medicine, either; since she was so old, she was sure there was little left of her body that anyone could possibly use. She wanted to be cremated, she told Whitcomb, and her ashes were to remain the property of Duncan and Jenny Garp and Ellen James. After burying some of her ashes, they could do anything they chose with what ashes remained, but they could not scatter them anywhere on the property of the Steering School. She would be damned, Helen told Whitcomb, if the Steering School, which did not admit women students when she had been of age, would get to have any part of her now.
The gravestone in the town cemetery, she told Whitcomb, should say simply that she was Helen Holm, daughter of the wrestling coach Ernie Holm, and that she had not been allowed to attend the Steering School because she was a girl; furthermore, she was the loving wife of the novelist T. S. Garp, whose gravestone could be seen in the Steering School cemetery, because he was a boy.
Whitcomb was faithful to this request, which amused Duncan especially.
"How Dad would have loved this!" Duncan kept saying. "Boy, I can just hear him."
How Jenny Fields would have applauded Helen's decision was a point made most often by Jenny Garp and Ellen James.
* * *
--
ELLEN JAMES would grow up to be a writer. She was "the real thing," as Garp had guessed. Her two mentors--Garp and the ghost of his mother, Jenny Fields--would somehow prove overbearing for Ellen, who because of them both would not ever write much nonfiction or fiction. She became a very good poet--though, of course, she was not much on the reading circuit.
Her wonderful first book of poems, Speeches Delivered to Plants and Animals, would have made Garp and Jenny Fields very proud of her; it did make Helen very proud of her--they were good friends, and they were also like mother and daughter.
Ellen James would outlive the Ellen Jamesians, of course. Garp's murder drove them deeper underground, and their occasional surfacing over the years would be largely disguised, even embarrassed.
Hi! I'm mute,
their notes finally said. Or:
I've had an accident--can't talk. But I write good, as you can see.
"You aren't one of those Ellen Somebodies, are you?" they were occasionally asked.
A what?
they learned to reply. And the more honest among them would write:
No. Not now.
Now they were just women who couldn't speak. Unostentatiously, most of them worked hard to discover what they could do. Most of them turned, constructively, to helping those who also couldn't do something. They were good at helping disadvantaged people, and also good at helping people who felt too sorry for themselves. More and more their labels left them, and one by one these speechless women appeared under names more of their own making.
Some of them even won Fields Foundation fellowships for the things they did.
Some of them, of course, went on trying to be Ellen Jamesians in a world that soon forgot what an Ellen Jamesian was. Some people thought that the Ellen Jamesians were a criminal gang who flourished, briefly, near mid-century. Others, ironically, confused them with the very people that the Ellen Jamesians had originally been protesting: rapists. One Ellen Jamesian wrote Ellen James that she stopped being an Ellen Jamesian when she asked a little girl if she knew what an Ellen Jamesian was.
"Someone who rapes little boys?" the little girl replied.
There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed Garp's murder by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King, and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader. And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.
One of his cruelly forced jokes, in Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian, was that he conceived of h
is narrator-heroine as a lesbian who doesn't realize until after she's cut off her tongue that she has made herself undesirable as a lover, too.
The popularity of this vulgar trash was enough to embarrass some Ellen Jamesians to death. There were, actually, suicides. "There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean."
But, in the end, Ellen James sought them out and befriended them. It was, she thought, what Jenny Fields would have done. Ellen took to giving poetry readings with Roberta Muldoon, who had a huge, booming voice. Roberta would read Ellen's poems while Ellen sat beside her, looking as if she were wishing very hard that she could say her own poems. This brought out of hiding a lot of Ellen Jamesians who had been wishing they could talk, too. A few of them became Ellen's friends.
Ellen James would never marry. She may have known an occasional man, but more because he was a fellow poet than because he was a man. She was a good poet and an ardent feminist who believed in living like Jenny Fields and believed in writing with the energy and the personal vision of T. S. Garp. In other words, she was stubborn enough to have personal opinions, and she was also kind to other people. Ellen would maintain a lifelong flirtation with Duncan Garp--her younger brother, really.
The death of Ellen James would cause Duncan much sorrowing. Ellen, at an advanced age, became a long-distance swimmer--about the time she succeeded Roberta as the director of the Fields Foundation. Ellen worked up to swimming several times across the wide neck of Dog's Head Harbor. Her last and best poems used swimming and "the ocean's pull" as metaphors. But Ellen James remained a girl from the Midwest who never thoroughly understood the undertow; one cold fall day, when she was too tired, it got her.
"When I swim," she wrote to Duncan, "I am reminded of the strenuousness, but also the gracefulness, of arguing with your father. I can also feel the sea's eagerness to get at me--to get at my dry middle, my landlocked little heart. My landlocked little ass, your father would say, I'm sure. But we tease each other, the sea and I. I suppose you would say, you raunchy fellow, that this is my substitute for sex."
* * *
--
FLORENCE COCHRAN BOWLSBY, who was best known to Garp as Mrs. Ralph, would live a life of larkish turmoil, with no substitute for sex in sight--or, apparently, in need. She actually completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature and was eventually tenured by a large and confused English Department whose members were only unified by their terror of her. She had, at various times, seduced and scorned nine of the thirteen senior members--who were alternately admitted to and then ridiculed from her bed. She would be referred to by her students as "a dynamite teacher," so that she at least demonstrated to other people, if not to herself, some confidence in an area other than sex.
She would hardly be referred to at all by her cringing lovers, whose tails between their legs were all remindful to Mrs. Ralph of the manner in which Garp had once left her house.
In sympathy, at the news of Garp's shocking death, Mrs. Ralph was among the very first to write to Helen. "His was a seduction," Mrs. Ralph wrote, "whose non-occurrence I have always regretted but respected."
Helen came to rather like the woman, with whom she occasionally corresponded.
Roberta Muldoon also had occasion to correspond with Mrs. Ralph, whose application for a Fields Foundation fellowship was rejected. Roberta was quite surprised by the note sent the Fields Foundation by Mrs. Ralph.
Up yours,
the note said. Mrs. Ralph did not appreciate rejection.
Her own child, Ralph, would die before her; Ralph became quite a good newspaperman and, like William Percy, was killed in a war.
* * *
--
BAINBRIDGE PERCY, who was best known to Garp as Pooh, would live a long, long time. The last of a train of psychiatrists would claim to have rehabilitated her, but Pooh Percy may simply have emerged from analysis--and a number of institutions--too thoroughly bored with rehabilitation to be violent anymore.
However it was achieved, Pooh was, after a great while, peaceably reintroduced to social intercourse; she reentered public life, a functioning if not speaking member of society, more or less safe and (finally) useful. It was in her fifties that she became interested in children; she worked especially well and patiently with the retarded. In this capacity, she would frequently meet other Ellen Jamesians, who in their various ways were also rehabilitated--or, at least, vastly changed.
For almost twenty years Pooh would not mention her dead sister, Cushie, but her fondness for children eventually confused her. She got herself pregnant when she was fifty-four (no one could imagine how) and she was returned to institutional observation, convinced, as she was, that she would die in childbirth. When this didn't occur, Pooh became a devoted mother; she also continued her work with the retarded. Pooh Percy's own child, for whom her mother's violent history would be a severe shock in her later life, was fortunately not retarded; in fact, she would have reminded Garp of Cushie.
Pooh Percy, some said, became a positive example for those who would forever put an end to capital punishment: her rehabilitation was so impressive. Only not to Helen, and to Duncan Garp, who would wish to their graves that Pooh Percy had died at that moment when she last cried "Ig!" in the Steering wrestling room.
One day Pooh would die, of course; she would succumb to a stroke in Florida, where she was visiting her daughter. It was a small consolation to Helen that Helen would outlive her.
The faithful Whitcomb would choose to describe Pooh Percy as Garp had once described her, following his escape from the first feminist funeral. "An androgynous twerp," Garp said to Dean Bodger, "with a face like a ferret and a mind completely sodden by spending nearly fifteen years in diapers."
* * *
--
That official biography of Garp, which Donald Whitcomb titled Lunacy and Sorrow: The Life and Art of T. S. Garp, would be published by the associates of John Wolf, who would not live to see the good book in print. John Wolf had contributed much effort to the book's careful making, and he had worked in the capacity of an editor to Whitcomb--over most of the manuscript--before his untimely demise.
John Wolf died of lung cancer in New York at a relatively young age. He had been a careful, conscientious, attentive, even elegant man--most of his life--but his deep restlessness and unrelieved pessimism could only be numbed and disguised by smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day from the time he was eighteen. Like many busy men who maintain an otherwise calm and managed air about themselves, John Wolf smoked himself to death.
His service to Garp, and to Garp's books, is inestimable. Although he may from time to time have held himself responsible for the fame which, in the end, provoked Garp's own violent killing, Wolf was far too sophisticated a man to dwell on such a narrow view. Assassination, in Wolf's opinion, was "an increasingly popular amateur sport of the times"; and "political true believers," as he called nearly everybody, were always the sworn enemy of the artist--who insisted, however arrogantly, on the superiority of a personal vision. Besides, Wolf knew, it was not only that Pooh Percy had become an Ellen Jamesian, and had responded to Garp's baiting; hers was a grievance as old as childhood, possibly aggravated by politics but basically as deep as her long need for diapers. Pooh had gotten it into her head that Garp's and Cushie's love for fucking each other had finally been lethal to Cushie. At least, it is true, it was lethal to Garp.
A professional in a world that too often worshiped the contemporaneity it had created, John Wolf insisted to his end that his proudest publication was the father and son edition of The Pension Grillparzer. He was proud of the early Garp novels, of course, and came to speak of The World According to Bensenhaver as "inevitable--when you consider the violence Garp was exposed to." But it was "Grillparzer" that elevated Wolf--it and the unfinished manuscript of My Father's Illusions, which John Wolf looked upon, lovingly and sadly, as "Garp's road back to his right way to write." For years Wolf edited the messy first draft of the u
nfinished novel; for years he consulted with Helen, and with Donald Whitcomb, about its merits and its faults.
"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?