The World According to Garp

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: the 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 swimmin 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, cautious.

“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.

“We'll do it together,” Roberta said. “That is, you're in charge, but I'll advise you. I'll tell you when I think you're making a mistake.”

“Roberta,” Garp said, “you're always telling me I'm making a mistake.”

Roberta, at her most flirtatious, kissed him on the lips and clubbed him on the shoulder—in both cases, so hard that he winced.

“Jesus,” Garp said.

“The Fields Foundation!” Roberta cried. “It's going to be wonderful.”

Thus was friction kept in the life of T. S. Garp, who without friction of some kind would probably have lost his senses and his grip upon the world. It was friction that kept Garp alive, when he wasn't writing; Roberta Muldoon and the Fields Foundation would provide him with friction, at the very least.

Roberta became the in-residence administrator of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor; the house became, all at once, a writers' colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic—and the few well-lit garret rooms provided light and solitude for painters. Once women knew that there was a Fields Foundation, there were many women who wondered who was eligible for aid. Garp wondered, too. All applicants wrote Roberta, who assembled a small staff of women who alternately liked and disliked Garp—but always argued with him. Together, twice a month, Roberta and her Board of Trustees would assemble in Garp's grouchy presence and choose among the applicants.

In good weather they sat in the balmy side-porch room of the Dog's Head Harbor estate, although Garp increasingly refused to go there. “All the weirdos-in-residence,” Garp told Roberta. “They remind me of other times.” So then they met at Steering, in the Steering family mansion, the wrestling coach's home, where Garp felt slightly more comfortable in the company of these fierce women.

He would have felt more comfortable, no doubt, to have met them all in the wrestling room. Though even there, Garp knew perfectly well, the former Robert Muldoon would have made Garp struggle for his every point.

Applicant No. 1,048 was named Charlie Pulaski.

“I thought they had to be women,” Garp said. “I thought there was at least one firm criterion.”

“Charlie Pulaski is a woman,” Roberta told Garp. “She's just always been called Charlie.”

“I should say that was enough to disqualify her,” someone said. It was Marcia Fox—a lean, spare poet with whom Garp frequently crossed swords, although he admired her poems. He could never be that economical.

“What does Charlie Pulaski want?” Garp asked, by rote. Some of the applicants only wanted money; some of them wanted to live at Dog's Head Harbor for a while. Some of them wanted lots of money and a room at Dog's Head Harbor, forever.

“She just wants money,” Roberta said.

“To change her name?” asked Marcia Fox.

“She wants to quit her job and write a book,” Roberta said.

“Oh boy,” said Garp.

“Advise her to keep her job,” said Marcia Fox; she was one of those writers who resented other writers, and would-be writers.

“Marcia even resents dead writers,” Garp told Roberta.

But Marcia and Garp both read a manuscript submitted by Ms. Charlie Pulaski, and they agreed that she should hold on to whatever job she could get.

Applicant No. 1,073, an associate professor of microbiology, wanted time off from her job to write a book, too.

“A novel?” Garp asked.

“Studies in molecular virology,” said Dr. Joan Axe; she was on leave from the Duke University Medical Center to do some research of her own. When Garp asked her what it was, she had told him, mysteriously, that she was interested in “the unseen diseases of the bloodstream.”

Applicant No. 1,081 had an uninsured husband who was killed in a plane crash. She had three children under the age of five and she needed fifteen more semester hours to complete her M.A. degree, in French. She wanted to go back to school, get the degree, and find a decent job; she wanted money for this—and rooms enough for her children, and for a baby-sitter, at Dog's Head Harbor.

The Board of Trustees unanimously decided to award the woman sufficient money to complete her degree and to pay a live-in baby-sitter; but the children, the babysitter, and the woman would all have to live wherever the woman chose to complete her degree. Dog's Head Harbor was not for children and baby-sitters. There were women there who would go crazy upon the sight or sound of a single child. There were women there whose lives had been made miserable by baby-sitters.

That was an easy one to decide.

No. 1,088 caused some problems. She was the divorced wife of the man who had killed Jenny Fields. She had three children, one of whom was in a reform school for preteens, and her child-support payments had stopped when her husband, Jenny Fields' assassin, was shot by a barrage from the New Hampshire State Police and some other hunters with guns who had been cruising the parking lot.

The deceased, Kenny Truckenmiller, had been divorced less than a year. He'd told friends that the child support was breaking his ass; he said that women's lib had screwed up his wife so much that she divorced him. The lawyer who got the job done, in favor of Mrs. Truckenmiller, was a New York divorcee. Kenny Truckenmiller had beaten his wife at least twice weekly for almost thirteen years, and he had physically and mentally abused each of his three children on several occasions. But Mrs. Truckenmiller had not known enough about herself, or what rights she might possibly have, until she read A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. That started her thinking that perhaps the suffering of her weekly beatings, and the abuse of her children, was actually Kenny Truckenmiller's fault; for thirteen years she had thought it was her problem, and her “lot in life.”

Kenny Truckenmiller had blamed the women's movement for the self-education of his wife. Mrs. Truckenmiller had always been self-employed, a “hair stylist” in the town of North Mountain, New Hampshire. She went right on being a hair stylist when Kenny was forced, by the court, to move out of her house. But now that Kenny was no longer driving a truck for the town, Mrs Truckenmiller found the support of her family difficult by hair styling alone. She wrote in her nearly illegible application that she had been forced to compromise herself “to make ends meet,” and that she did not care to repeat the act of compromising herself in the future.

Mrs. Truckenmiller, who never once referred to herself as having a first name, realized that the loathing for her husband was so great as to prejudice the board against her. She would understand, she wrote, if they chose to ignore her.

John Wolf, who was (against his will) an honorary member of the board—and valued for his shrewd financial head—said immediately that nothing could be better or wider publicity for the Fields Foundation than awarding “this unfortunate relation of Jenny's killer” what she asked for. It would be instant news; it would pay for itself, John Wolf decided, in that it would surely gain the foundation untold sums in gift donations.

“We're already doing pretty well on gift donations,” Garp hedged.

“Suppose she's just a whore?” Roberta suggested of the unfortunate Mrs. Truckenmiller; they all stared at her. Roberta had an advantage among them: of being able to think like a woman and like a Philadelphia Eagle. “Just think a minute,” Roberta said. “Suppose she's just a floozy, someone who compromises herself all the time, and always has—and thinks nothing of it. Then, suddenly, we're a joke; then we've been had.”

“So we need a character reference,” said Marcia Fox.

“Someone's got to see the woman, talk with her,” Garp suggested. “Find out if she's honorable, if she's really trying to live independently.”

They all stared at him.

“Well,” Roberta said, “I'm not about to discover whether she's a whore or not.”

“Oh no,” Garp said. “Not me.”

“Where's North Mountain, New Hampshire?” asked Marcia Fox.

“Not me,” John Wolf said. “I'm out of New York too much of the time as it is.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said. “Suppose she recognizes me? People do, you know.”

“I doubt she will,” said Hilma Bloch, a psychiatric social worker whom Garp detested. “Those people most motivated to read autobiographies, such as your mother's, are rarely attracted to fiction—or only tangentially. That is, if she read The World According to Bensenhaver she would have done so only because of who you are. And that would not have been sufficient reason to cause her to finish the book; in all probability—and given the fact that she's a hair stylist, after all—she would have bogged down and not read it. And not remembered your picture on the cover, either—only your face, and only vaguely (you were a face in the news, of course, but really only around the time of Jenny's murder). Surely, at that time, Jenny's face was the face to recall. A woman like this watches a lot of television; she's not a book-world person. I strongly doubt that a woman like this would even have a picture of you in her mind.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes away from I-Elma Bloch. Even Roberta rolled her eyes.

“Thank you, Hilma,” said Garp, quietly. It was decided that Garp, would visit Mrs. Truckenmiller “to determine something more concrete about her character.”

“At least find out her first name,” said Marcia Fox.

“I'll bet it's Charlie,” Roberta said.

They passed on to the reports: who was living, presently, at Dog's Head Harbor; whose tenancy was expiring; who was about to move in. And what were the problems there, if any?

There were two painters—one in the south garret, one in the north. The south-garret painter coveted the north-garret painter's light, and for two weeks they didn't get along; not a word to each other at breakfast, and accusations concerning lost mail. And so forth. Then, it appeared, they became lovers. Now only the north-garret painter was painting at all—studies of the south-garret painter, who modeled all day in the good light. Her nakedness, about the upstairs of the house, bothered at least one of the writers, an outspoken anti-lesbian playwright from Cleveland who had trouble sleeping, she said, because of the sound of the waves. It was probably the lovemaking of the painters that bothered her; she was described as “overextended,” anyway, but her complaints ceased once the other writer-in-residence suggested that all the Dog's Head Harbor guests read aloud the parts of the dramatist's play in progress. This was done, successfully for all, and the upper floors of the house were now happy.

The “other writer,” a good short-story writer whom Garp had enthusiastically recommended a year ago, was about to move out, however; her term of residency was expiring. Who would go in her room?

The woman whose mother-in-law had just won custody of her children, following the suicide of her husband?

“I told you not to accept her,” Garp said.

The two Ellen Jamesians who just, one day, showed up?

“Now wait a minute,” Garp said. “What's this? Ellen Jamesians? Showing up? That's not allowed.”

“Jenny always took them in,” Roberta said.

“This is now, Roberta,” Garp said.

The other members of the board were more or less in agreement with him; Ellen Jamesians were not much admired—they never had been, and their radicalism (now) seemed growingly obsolete and pathetic.

“It's almost a tradition, though,” Roberta said. She described two “old” Ellen Jamesians, who'd been back from a bad time in California. Years ago they had stayed at Dog's Head Harbor; returning there, Roberta argued, was a kind of sentimental recovery for them.

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said. “Get rid of them.”

“They were people your mother always took care of,” Roberta said.

“At least they'll be quiet,” said Marcia Fox, whose economy of tongue Garp did admire. But only Garp laughed.

“I think you should get them to leave, Roberta,” Dr. Joan Axe said.

“They really resent the entire society,” Hilma Bloch said. “That could be infectious. On the other hand, they are almost the essence of the spirit of the place.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes.

“There is the doctor researching cancer-related abortions,” Joan Axe said. “What about her?”

“Yes, put her on the second floor,” Garp said. “I've met her. She'll scare the shit out of anyone who tries to come upstairs.” Roberta frowned.

The downstairs of the Dog's Head Harbor mansion was the largest part, containing two kitchens and four complete baths; as many as twelve could sleep, very privately, downstairs, and there were still the various conference rooms, as Roberta now called them—they were parlors and giant dens in the days of Jenny Fields. And a vast dining room where food, mail, and whoever wanted company collected all during the day and night.

It was the most social floor of Dog's Head Harbor, usually not suited for the writers and painters. It was the best floor for the potential suicides, Garp had told the board, “because they'll be forced to drown themselves in the ocean rather than jump out the windows.”

But Roberta ran the place in a strong, motherly, tight-end fashion; she could talk almost anyone out of anything, and if she couldn't, she could overpower anybody. She had been much more successful at making the local police her allies than Jenny ever had been. Occasional unhappies were picked up by the police, far down the beach, or wailing on the boardwalks of the village; they were always gently returned to Roberta. The Dog's Head Harbor Police were all football fans, full of respect for the savage line play and the vicious downfield blocking of the former Robert Muldoon.

“I would like to make a motion that no Ellen Jamesian be eligible for aid and comfort from the Fields Foundation,” Garp said.

“Second,” said Marcia Fox.

“This is open to discussion,” Roberta told them all. “I don't see the necessity of having such a rule. We are not in the business of supporting what we largely would agree is a stupid form of political expression, but that doesn't mean that one of these women without a tongue couldn't be genuinely in need of help—I'd say, in fact, they have already demonstrated a definite need to locate themselves, and we can expect to go on hearing from them. They are truly needful people.”

“They are insane,” Garp said.

“This is too general,” said Hilma Bloch.

“There are productive women,” Marcia Fox said, “who have not given up their voices—in fact, they are fighting to use their voices—and I am not in favor of rewarding stupidity and self-imposed silence.”

“There are virtues in silence,” Roberta argued.

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said. And then he saw a light in this dark subject. For some reason, the Ellen Jamesians made him angrier than his image, even, of the Kenny Truckenmillers of this world; and although he saw that the Ellen Jamesians were fading from fashion, they could not fade fast enough to suit Garp. He wanted them gone; he wanted them more than gone—he wanted them disgraced. Helen had already told him that his hatred of them was inappropriate to what they were.

“It's just madness, and simple-minded—what they've done,” Helen said. “Why can't you ignore them, and leave them alone?”

But Garp said, “Let's ask Ellen James. That's fair, isn't it? Let's ask Ellen James for her opinion of the Ellen Jamesians. Jesus, I'd like to publish her opinion of them. Do you know how they've made her feel?”

“This is too personal a matter,” Hilma Bloch said. They had all met Ellen; they all knew that Ellen James hated being tongueless and hated the Ellen Jamesians.

“Let's back off this, for now,” John Wolf said. “I move we table the motion.”

“Damn,” Garp said.

“All right, Garp,” Roberta said. “Let's vote it, right now.” They all knew they would vote it down. That would get rid of it.

“I withdraw the motion,” Garp said, nastily. “Long live the Ellen Jamesians.”

But he did not withdraw.

It was madness that had killed Jenny Fields, his mother. It was extremism. It was self-righteous, fanatical, and monstrous self-pity. Kenny Truckenmiller was only a special kind of moron: a true believer who was also a thug. He was a man who pitied himself so blindly that he could make absolute enemies out of people who contributed only the ideas to his undoing.

And how was an Ellen Jamesian any different? Was not her gesture as desperate, and as empty of an understanding of human complexity?

“Come on,” John Wolf said. “They haven't murdered anyone.”

“Not yet,” Garp said. “They have the equipment. They are capable of making mindless decisions, and they believe they are so right.”

“There's more to killing someone than that,” Roberta said. They let Garp seethe. What else could they do? It was not one of Garp's better points: tolerance of the intolerant. Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving in to madness—in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

“Tolerance of the intolerant is a difficult task that the times asks of us,” Helen said. Although Garp knew Helen was intelligent, and often more far-seeing than he was, he was rather blind about the Ellen Jamesians.

They, of course, were rather blind about him.

The most radical criticism of Garp—concerning his relationship to his mother and his own works—had come from various Ellen Jamesians. Baited by them, he baited them back. It was hard to see why it should have started, or if it should have, but Garp had become a case of controversy among feminists largely through the goading of Ellen Jamesians—and Garp goading them in return. For the very same reasons, Garp was liked by many feminists and disliked by as many.

As for the Ellen Jamesians, they were no more complicated in their feelings for Garp than they were complicated in their symbology: their tongues hacked off for the hacked-off tongue of Ellen James.

Ironically, it would be Ellen James who escalated this long-time cold war.

She was in the habit, constantly, of showing Garp her writing—her many stories, her remembrances of her parents, of Illinois; her poems; her painful analogies to speechlessness; her appreciations of the visual arts, and swimming

“She's the real thing,” Garp kept telling Helen. “She's got the ability, but she's also got the passion. And I believe she'll have the stamina.”

The aforementioned “stamina” was a word Helen let slide away, because she feared for Garp that he had given up his. He certainly had the ability, and the passion; but she felt he'd also taken a narrow path—he'd been misdirected—and only stamina would let him grow back in all the other ways.

It saddened her. For the time being, Helen kept thinking, she would content herself with whatever Garp got passionate about—the wrestling, even the Ellen Jamesians. Because, Helen believed, energy begets energy—and sooner or later, she thought, he would write again.

So Helen did not interfere too vehemently when Garp got excited about the essay Ellen James showed him. The essay was: “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” by Ellen James. It was powerful and touching and it moved Garp to tears. It recounted her rape, her difficulty with it, her parents' difficulty with it; it made what the Ellen Jamesians did seem like a shallow, wholly political imitation of a very private trauma. Ellen James said that the Ellen Jamesians had only prolonged her anguish; they had made her into a very public casualty. Of course, Garp was susceptible to being moved by public casualties.

And of course, to be fair, the better of the Ellen Jamesians had meant to publicize the general dread that so brutally menaced women and girls. For many of the Ellen Jamesians, the imitation of the horrible untonguing had not been “wholly political.” It had been a most personal identification. In some cases, of course, Ellen Jamesians were women who had also been raped; what they meant was that they felt as if their tongues were gone. In a world of men, they felt as if they had been shut up forever.

That the organization was full of crazies, no one would deny. Not even some Ellen Jamesians would have denied that. It was generally true that they were an inflammatory political group of feminist extremists who often detracted from the extreme seriousness of other women, and other feminists, around them. But Ellen James' attack on them was as inconsiderate of the occasional individuals among the Ellen Jamesians as the action of the group had been inconsiderate of Ellen James—not really thinking how an eleven-year-old girl would have preferred to get over her horror more privately.

Everyone in America knew how Ellen James had lost her tongue, except the younger generation, just now growing up, who often confused Ellen with the Ellen Jamesians; this was a most painful confusion for Ellen, because it meant that she was suspected of having done it to herself.

“It was a necessary rage for her to have,” Helen said to Garp, about Ellen's essay. “I'm sure she needed to write it, and it's done her a world of good to say all this. I've told her that.”

“I've told her she should publish it,” Garp said.

“No,” Helen said. “I really don't think so. What good does it do?”

“What good?” Garp asked. “Well, it's the truth. And it will be good for Ellen.”

“And for you?” Helen asked, knowing that he wanted a kind of public humiliation of the Ellen Jamesians.

“Okay,” he said, “okay, okay. But she's right, goddamnit. Those nuts ought to hear it from the original source.”

“But why?” said Helen. “For whose good?”

“Good, good,” Garp muttered, though in his heart he must have known that Helen was right. He told Ellen she should file her essay. Ellen wouldn't communicate with either Garp or Helen for a week.

It was not until John Wolf called Garp that either Garp or Helen realized Ellen had sent the essay to John Wolf.

“What am I suppose to do with it?” he asked.

“God, send it back,” Helen said.

“No, damn it,” Garp said. “Ask Ellen what she wants you to do with it.”

“Old Pontius Pilate, washing his hands,” Helen said to Garp.

“What do you want to do with it?” Garp asked John Wolf.

“Me?” John Wolf said. “It means nothing to me. But I'm sure it's publishable. I mean, it's very well written.”

“That's not why it's publishable,” Garp said, “and you know it.”

“Well, no,” John Wolf said. “But its also nice that it's well said.”

Ellen told John Wolf she wanted it published. Helen tried to talk her out of it. Garp refused to get involved.

“You are involved,” Helen told him, “and by saying nothing, you know you'll get what you want: that painful attack published. That's what you want.”

So Garp spoke to Ellen James. He tried to be enthusiastic in his reasoning to her—why she shouldn't publicly say all those things. These women were sick, sad, confused, tortured, abused by others, and now self-abused—but what point was there in criticizing them? Everyone would forget them in another five years. They'll hand out their notes and people will say, “What's an Ellen Jamesian? You mean you can't talk? You got no tongue?”

Ellen looked sullen and determined.

I won't forget them!

she wrote Garp.

Not in 5 years, not in 50 years will I ever forget them; I will remember them the way I remember my tongue.

Garp admired how the girl liked to use the good old semicolon. He said softly, “I think it's better not to publish this, Ellen.”

Will you be angry with me if I do?

she asked.

He admitted he would not be angry.

And Helen?

“Helen will only be angry with me,” Garp said.

“You make people too angry,” Helen told him, in bed. “You get them all wound up. You inflame. You should lay off. You should do your own work, Garp. Just your own work. You used to say politics were stupid, and they meant nothing to you. You were right. They are stupid, they do mean nothing. You're doing this because it's easier than sitting down and making something up, from scratch. And you know it. You're building bookshelves all over the house, and finishing floors, and fucking around in the garden, for Christ's sake.

“Did I marry a handyman? Did I ever expect you to be a crusader?

“You should be writing the books and letting other people make the shelves. And you know I'm right, Garp.

“You're right,” he said.

He tried to remember what had enabled him to imagine that first sentence of “The Pension Grillparzer.”

“My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau.”

Where had it come from? He tried to think of sentences like it. What he got was a sentence like this: “The boy was five years old; he had a cough that seemed deeper than his small, bony chest.” What he got was memory, and that made muck. He had no pure imagination anymore.

In the wrestling room, he worked out three straight days with the heavyweight. To punish himself?

“More fucking around in the garden, so to speak,” said Helen.

Then he announced he had a mission, a trip to make for the Fields Foundation. To North Mountain, New Hampshire. To determine if a Fields Foundation Fellowship would be wasted on a woman named Truckenmiller.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen said. “More bookshelves. More politics. More crusades. That's the kind of thing people do who can't write.”

But he was gone; he was out of the house when John Wolf called to say that a very well read and much seen magazine was going to publish “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” by Ellen James.

John Wolf's voice over the phone had the cold, unseen, quick flick of the tongue of old You-Know-Who—the Under Toad, that's who, Helen thought. But she didn't know why; not yet.

She told Ellen James the news. Helen forgave Ellen, immediately, and even allowed herself to be excited with her. They took a drive to the shore with Duncan and little Jenny. They bought lobsters—Ellen's favorite—and enough scallops for Garp, who was not crazy about lobster.

Champagne!

Ellen wrote in the car.

Does champagne go with lobster and scallops?

“Of course,” Helen said. “It can.” They bought champagne. They stopped at Dog's Head Harbor and invited Roberta to dinner. “When will Dad be back?” Duncan asked.

“I don't know where North Mountain, New Hampshire, is,” Helen said, “but he said he'd be back in time to eat with us.”

That's what he told me, too, said Ellen James.

NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON in North Mountain, New Hampshire, was really the kitchen of Mrs. Kenny Truckenmiller, whose first name was Harriet.

“Are you Nanette?” Garp asked her timidly, from the outside steps, frosted with salt and crunchy with melting slush.

“There ain't no Nanette,” she told him. “I'm Harriet Truckenmiller.” Behind her, in the dark kitchen, a large dog strained and snarled; Mrs. Truckenmiller kept the dog from getting to Garp by thrusting her long hip back against the lunging beast. Her pale, scarred ankle wedged open the kitchen door. Her slippers were blue; in her long robe, her figure was lost, but Garp could see she was tall—and that she had been taking a bath.

“Uh, do you do men's hair?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“But would you?” Garp asked her. “I don't trust barbers.”

Harriet Truckenmiller looked suspiciously at Garp's black knit ski hat, which was pulled down over his ears and concealed all his hair but the thick tufts that touched his shoulders from the back of his short neck.

“I can't see your hair,” she said. He took the stocking hat off, his hair wild with static electricity and tangled in the cold wind.

“I don't want just a haircut,” Garp said, neutrally, eyeing the woman's sad, drawn face and the soft wrinkles beside her gray eyes. Her own hair, a washed-out blond, was in curlers.

“You don't have no appointment,” Harriet Truckenmiller said.

The woman was no whore, he could plainly see. She was tired and frightened of him.

“What exactly do you want done to your hair, anyway?” she asked him.

“Just a trim,” Garp mumbled, “but I like a slight curl in it.”

“A curl?” said Harriet Truckenmiller, trying to imagine this from Garp's crown of very straight hair. “Like a permanent, you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, running his hand sheepishly through the snarls. “Whatever you can do with it, you know?”

Harriet Truckemniller shrugged. “I have to get dressed,” she said. The dog, devious and strong, thrust most of his stout body between her legs and jammed his broad, grimacing face into the opening between the storm and the main door. Garp tensed for the attack, but Harriet Truckenmiller brought her big knee up sharply and staggered the animal with a blow to its muzzle. She twisted her hand into the loose skin of its neck; the dog moaned and melted into the kitchen behind her.

The frozen yard, Garp saw, was a mosaic of the dog's huge turds captured in ice. There were also three cars in the yard; Garp, doubted if any of them ran. There was a woodpile, but no one had stacked it. There was a TV antenna, which at one time might have been on the roof; now it leaned against the beige aluminum siding of the house, its wires running like a spider web out a cracked window.

Mrs. Truckenmiller stepped back and opened the door for Garp. In the kitchen he felt his eyes dry from the heat of the wood stove; the room smelled of baking cookies and hair rinse—in fact, the kitchen seemed divided between the functions of a kitchen and the paraphernalia of Harriet's business. A pink sink with a shampoo hose; cans of stewed tomatoes; a three-way mirror framed with stage lights; a wooden rack with spices and meat tenderizer; the rows of ointments, lotions, and goo. And a steel stool over which a hair dryer hung suspended from a steel rod—like an original invention of an electric chair.

The dog was gone, and so was Harriet Truckenmiller; she had slipped away to dress herself, and her surly companion appeared to have gone with her. Garp combed his hair; he looked in the mirror as if he were trying to remember himself. He was about to be altered and rendered unrecognizable to all, he imagined.

Then the door to the outside opened and a big man in a hunting coat with a hunter's red cap walked in; he had an enormous armload of wood, which he carried to the wood box by the stove. The dog, who all along had been crouched under the sink—inches away from Garp's trembling knees—moved quickly to intercept the man. The dog slunk quietly, not even growling; the man was known here.

“Go lie down, you damn fool,” he said, and the dog did as it was told. “Is that you, Dickie?” called Harriet Truckenmiller, from somewhere in another part of the house.

“Who else was you expectin'?” he shouted; then he turned and saw Garp in front of the mirror.

“Hello,” Garp said. The big man called Dickie stared. He was perhaps fifty; his huge red face looked scraped by ice, and Garp recognized immediately, from his familiarity with Duncan's expressions, that the man had a glass eye.

“'Lo,” Dickie said.

“I got a customer!” Harriet called.

“I see you do,” said Dickie. Garp nervously touched his hair, as if he could suggest to Dickie how important his hair was to him—to have come all the way to North Mountain, New Hampshire, and NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON, for what must have appeared to Dickie to be the simple need of a haircut.

“He wants a curl!” called Harriet. Dickie kept his red cap on, though Garp could plainly see that the man was bald.

“I don't know what you really want, fella,” Dickie whispered to Garp, “but a curl is all you get. You hear?”

“I don't trust barbers,” Garp said.

“I don't trust you,” Dickie said.

“Dickie, he hasn't done anything,” Harriet Truckenmiller said. She was dressed in rather tight turquoise slacks, which reminded Garp of his discarded jump suit, and a print blouse full of flowers that never grow in New Hampshire. Her hair was tied back with a scarf of unmatching plants, and she had done her face, but not overdone it; she looked “nice,” like somebody's mother who bothered to keep herself up. She was, Garp guessed, a few years younger than Dickie, but just a few.

“He don't want no curl, Harriet,” Dickie said. “What's he want to have his hair played with for, huh?”

“He don't trust barbers,” Harriet Truckenmiller said. For a brief moment Garp wondered if Dickie were a barber; he didn't think so.

“I really don't mean any disrespect,” Garp said. He had seen all he needed to see; he wanted to go tell the Fields Foundation to give Harriet Truckermiller all the money she needed. “If this makes anyone uncomfortable,” Garp said, “I'll just forget it.” He reached for his parka, which he'd put on an empty chair, but the big dog had the parka pinned down on the floor.

“Please, you can stay,” Mrs. Truckenmiller said. “Dickie's just lookin” after me.” Dickie looked ashamed of himself; he stood with one mighty boot on top of the other.

“I brung you some dry wood,” he said to Harriet. “I guess I shoulda knocked.” He pouted by the stove.

“Don't, Dickie,” Harriet said to him, and she kissed him fondly on his big pink cheek.

He left the kitchen with one last glare for Garp. “Hope you get a good haircut,” Dickie said.

“Thank you,” said Garp. When he spoke, the dog shook his parka.

“Here, stop that,” Harriet told the dog; she put Garp's parka back on the chair. “You can go if you want to,” Harriet said, “but Dickie won't bother you. He's just lookin' after me.”

“Your husband?” Garp asked, though he doubted it. “My husband was Kenny Truckenmiller,” Harriet said. “Everybody knows that, and no matter who you are, you know who he was.”

“Yes,” Garp said.

“Dickie's my brother. He just worries about me,” Harriet said. “Some guys have been messin' around, since Kenny's gone.” She sat at the bright counter of mirrors, beside Garp, and leaned her long, veiny hands on her turquoise thighs. She sighed. She did not look at Garp when she spoke. “I don't know what you heard, and I don't care,” she said. “I do hair—just hair. If you really want somethin' done to your hair, I'll do it. But that's all I do,” Harriet said. “No matter what anybody told you, I don't mess around. Just hair.”

“Just hair,” Garp said. “I just want my hair done, that's all.”

“That's good,” she said, still not looking at him.

There were little photographs stuck under the molding and framed against the mirrors. One was a wedding picture of young Harriet Truckenmiller and her grinning husband, Kenny. They were awkwardly maiming a cake.

Another photograph was of a pregnant Harriet Truckenmiller holding a young baby; there was another child, maybe Walt's age, leaning his cheek against her hip. Harriet looked tired but not daunted. And there was a photograph of Dickie; he was standing next to Kenny Truckenmiller, and they were both standing next to a gutted deer, hung upside-down from the branch of a tree. The tree was in the front yard of NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON. Garp recognized that photograph quickly; he had seen it in a national magazine after Jenny's assassination. The photograph apparently demonstrated to the simple-minded that Kenny Truckemniller was a born-and-raised killer: besides shooting Jenny Fields, he had at one time shot a deer.

“Why Nanette?” Garp asked Harriet later, when he dared look only at her patient fingers and not at her unhappy face—and not at his hair.

“I thought it sounded sort of French,” Harriet said, but she knew he was from somewhere in the outside world—outside North Mountain, New Hampshire—and she laughed at herself.

“Well, it does,” Garp said, laughing with her. “Sort of,” he added, and they both laughed in a friendly way.

When he was ready to go, she wiped the slobber of the dog off his parka with a sponge. “Aren't you even going to look at it?” she asked him. She meant the hairdo; he took a breath and confronted himself in the three-way mirror. His hair, he thought, was beautiful! It was his same old hair, the same color, even the same length, but it seemed to fit his head for the first time in his life. His hair clung to his skull, yet it was still light and fluffy; a slight wave in it made his broken nose and his squat neck appear less severe. Garp seemed to himself to fit his own face in a way he had never thought possible. This was the first beauty salon he had ever been to, of course. In fact, Jenny had cut his hair until he married Helen, and Helen had cut his hair after that; he had never even been to a barber.

“It's lovely,” he said; his missing ear remained artfully hidden. “Oh, go on,” Harriet said, giving him a pleasant little shove—but, he would tell the Fields Foundation, not a suggestive shove; not at all. He wanted to tell her then that he was Jenny Fields' son, but he knew that his motive for doing so would have been wholly selfish—to have been personally responsible for moving someone.

“It is unfair to take advantage of anyone's emotional vulnerability,” wrote the polemical Jenny Fields. Thus Garp's new creed: capitalize not on the emotions of others. “Thank you and good-bye,” he said to Mrs. Truckenmiller.

Outside, Dickie wielded a splitting ax in the woodpile. He did it very well. He stopped splitting when Garp appeared. “Good-bye,” Garp called to him, but Dickie walked over to Garp—with the ax.

“Let's get a look at the hairdo,” Dickie said.

Garp stood still while Dickie examined him.

“You were a friend of Kenny Truckenmiller's?” Garp asked.

“Yup,” Dickie said. “I was his only friend. I introduced him to Harriet,” Dickie said. Garp nodded. Dickie eyed the new hairdo.

“It's tragic,” Garp said; he meant everything that had happened.

“It ain't bad,” Dickie said; he meant Garp's hair.

“Jenny Fields was my mother,” Garp said, because he wanted someone to know, and he felt certain he was taking no emotional advantage of Dickie.

“You didn't tell her that, did you?” Dickie said, pointing toward the house, and Harriet, with his long ax.

“No, no,” Garp said.

“That's good,” Dickie said. “She don't want to hear nothin'like that.”

“I didn't think so,” Garp said, and Dickie nodded approvingly.

“Your sister is a very nice woman,” Garp added.

“She is, she is,” Dickie said, nodding fiercely.

“Well, so long,” Garp said. But Dickie touched him lightly with the handle of the ax.

“I was one of them who shot him,” Dickie said. “You know that?”

“You shot Kenny?” Garp said.

“I was one of them who did,” Dickie said. “Kenny was crazy. Somebody had to shoot him.”

“I'm very sorry,” Garp said. Dickie shrugged.

“I liked the guy,” Dickie said. “But he got crazy at Harriet, and he got crazy at your mother. He wouldn't ever have got well, you know,” Dickie said. “He just got sick about women. He got sick for good. You could tell he wasn't ever going to get over it.”

“A terrible thing,” said Garp.

“So long,” Dickie said; he turned back to his woodpile. Garp turned toward his car, across the frozen turds that dotted the yard. “Your hair looks good!” Dickie called to him. The remark seemed sincere. Dickie was splitting logs again when Garp waved to him from the driver's seat of his car. In the window of NANETTE'S BEAUTY SALON Harriet Truckenmiller waved to Garp: it was not a wave meant to encourage him, or anything, he was quite sure. He drove back through the village of North Mountain—he drank a cup of coffee in the one diner, he got gas at the one gas station. Everyone looked at his pretty hair. In every mirror, Garp looked at his pretty hair! Then he drove home, arriving in time for the celebration: Ellen's first publication.

If it made him as uneasy as the news had made Helen, he did not admit it. He sat through the lobster, the scallops, and the champagne, waiting for Helen or Duncan to comment on his hair. It was only when he was doing the dishes that Ellen James handed him a soggy note.

You had your hair done?

He nodded, irritably.

“I don't like it,” Helen told him, in bed.

“I think it's terrific,” Garp said.

“It's not like you,” Helen said; she was doing her best to muss it up. “It looks like the hair on a corpse,” she said in the darkness.

“A corpse!” Garp said. “Jesus.”

“A body prepared by an undertaker,” said Helen, almost frantically running her hands through his hair. “Every little hair in place,” she said. “It's too perfect. You don't look alive!” she said. Then she cried and cried and Garp held her and whispered to her—trying to find out what the matter was.

Garp did not share her sense of the Under Toad—not this time—and he talked and talked to her, and made love to her. Finally, she fell asleep.

The essay by Ellen James, “Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian,” appeared to engender no immediate fuss. It takes a while for most Letters to the Editor to be printed.

There were the expectable personal letters to Ellen James: condolences from idiots, propositions from sick men—the ugly, antifeminist tyrants and baiters of women who, as Garp had warned Ellen, would see themselves as being on her side.

“People will always make sides,” Garp said, “—of everything.”

There was not a written word from a single Ellen Jamesian.

Garp's first Steering wrestling team produced an 8-2 season as it approached its final dual meet with its arch rival, the bad boys from Bath. Of course, the team's strength rested on some very well coached wrestlers whom Ernie Holm had brought along for the last two or three years, but Garp had kept everyone sharp. He was trying to estimate the wins and losses, weight class by weight class, in the upcoming match with Bath—sitting at the kitchen table in the vast house now in memory of Steering's first family—when Ellen James burst upon him, in tears, with the new issue of the magazine that had published her a month ago.

Garp felt he should have warned Ellen about magazines, too. They had, of course, published a long, epistolary essay written by a score of Ellen Jamesians, in response to Ellen's bold announcement that she felt used by them and she disliked them. It was just the kind of controversy magazines love. Ellen felt especially betrayed by the magazine's editor, who had obviously revealed to the Jamesians that Ellen James now lived with the notorious T. S. Garp.

Thus the Ellen Jamesians had that to get their teeth into: Ellen James, poor child, had been brainwashed into her antifeminist stance by the male villain, Garp. The betrayer of his mother! The smirking capitalizer on women's-movement politics! In the various letters, Garp's relationship with Ellen James was referred to as “seductive,” “slimy,” and “underhanded.”

I'm sorry!

Ellen wrote.

“It's okay, it's okay. Nothing's your fault,” Garp assured her.

I'm not an antifeminist!

“Of course you're not,” Garp told her.

They make everything so black and white.

“Of course they do,” said Garp.

That's why I hate them. They force you to be like them—or else you're their enemy.

“Yes, yes,” Garp said.

I wish I could talk.

And then she dissolved, crying on Garp's shoulder, her wordless, angry blubber rousing Helen from the far-off reading room of the great house, driving Duncan from the darkroom, and waking baby Jenny from her nap.

So, foolishly, Garp decided to take them on, these grown-up crazies, these devout fanatics who—even when their chosen symbol rejected them—insisted they knew more about Ellen James than Ellen James knew about herself.

“Ellen James is not a symbol,” Garp wrote. “She is a rape victim who was raped and dismembered before she was old enough to make up her own mind about sex and men.” Thus he began; he went on and on. And, of course, they published it—liking any fuel to any fire. It was also the first published piece of anything by T. S. Garp since the famous novel, The World According to Bensenhaver.

Actually, it was the second. In a little magazine, shortly after Jenny's death, Garp published his first and only poem. It was a strange poem; it was about condoms.

Garp felt his life was marred by condoms—man's device to spare himself and others the consequences of his lust. Our lifetime, Garp felt, was stalked by condoms—condoms in the parking lots in the early mornings, condoms discovered by children in the playing sand of the beaches, condoms used for messages (one to his mother, on the door knob of their tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex). Condoms unflushed down the dormitory toilets of the Steering School. Condoms lying slick and cocky in public urinals. Once a condom delivered with the Sunday paper. Once a condom in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. And once a condom on the stick-shift shaft of the old Volvo; someone had used the car overnight, but not for driving.

Condoms found Garp the way ants found sugar. He traveled miles, he changed continents, and there—in the bidet of the otherwise spotless but unfamiliar hotel room...there—in the back seat of the taxi, like the removed eye of a large fish ...there—eyeing him, from the bottom of his shoe, where he picked it up, somewhere. From everywhere condoms came to him and vilely surprised him.

Condoms and Garp went way back. They were somehow joined at the beginning. How often he recalled his first condom shock, the condoms in the cannon's mouth!

It was a fair poem, but almost no one read it because it was gross. Many more people read his essay on Ellen James vs. the Ellen Jamesians. That was news; that was a contemporary event. Sadly, Garp knew, that is more interesting than art.

Helen begged him not to be baited, not to get involved. Even Ellen James told him that it was her fight; she did not ask for his support.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen warned. “More bookshelves.”

But he wrote angrily and well; he said more firmly what Ellen James had meant. He spoke with eloquence for those serious women who suffered, by association, “the radical self-damage” of the Ellen Jamesians—"the kind of shit that gives feminism a bad name.” He could not resist putting them down, and though he did it well, Helen rightly asked, “For whom? Who is serious who doesn't already know the Ellen Jamesians are crazy? No, Garp, you've done this for them—not for Ellen, either. You've done it for the fucking Ellen Jamesians! You've done it to get to them. And why? Jesus, in another year no one would have remembered them—or why they did what they did. They were a fashion, a stupid fashion, but you couldn't just let them pass by. Why?”

But he was sullen about it, with the predictable attitude of someone who has been right—at all costs. And, therefore, wonders if he was wrong. It was a feeling that isolated him from everyone—even from Ellen. She was ready to be quits with it, she was sorry she had started it.

“But they started it,” Garp insisted.

Not really. The first man who raped someone, and tried to hurt her so she couldn't tell—he started it,

said Ellen James.

“Okay,” Garp said. “Okay, okay.” The girl's sad truth hurt him. Hadn't he only wanted to defend her?

The Steering wrestling team whipped Bath Academy in the season's final dual meet and finished 9-2, with a second-place team trophy in the New England tournament and one individual champion, a 167-pounder whom Garp had personally done the most work with. But the season was over; Garp, the retired writer, once more had too much time on his hands.

He saw a lot of Roberta. They played endless games of squash; between them, they broke four rackets in three months and the little finger on Garp's left hand. Garp had an unmindful backswing that accounted for nine stitches across the bridge of Roberta's nose; Roberta hadn't had any stitches since her Eagle days and she complained about them bitterly. On a cross-court charge, Roberta's long knee gave Garp a groin injury that had him hobbling for a week.

“Honestly, you two,” Helen told them. “Why don't you just go off and have a torrid affair. It would be safer.”

But they were the best of friends, and if ever such urges occurred—for either Garp or Roberta—they were quickly made into a joke. Also, Roberta's love life was at last coolly organized; like a born woman, she valued her privacy. And she enjoyed the directorship of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta reserved her sexual self for not infrequent but never excessive flings upon the city of New York, where she kept a calm number of lovers on edge for her sudden visits and trysts. “It's the only way I can manage it,” she told Garp.

“It's a good enough way, Roberta,” Garp said. “Not everyone is so fortunate—to have this separation of power.”

And so they played more squash, and when the weather warmed, they ran on the curvy roads that stretched from Steering to the sea. On one road, Dog's Head Harbor was a flat six miles from Steering; they often ran from one mansion to the other. When Roberta did her business in New York, Garp ran alone.

He was alone, nearing the halfway point to Dog's Head Harbor—where he would turn around and run back to Steering—when the dirty-white Saab passed him, appeared to slow down, then sped ahead of him and out of sight. That was the only thing strange about it. Garp ran on the left-hand side of the road so that he could see the cars approaching closest to him; the Saab had passed him on the right, in its proper lane—nothing funny about it.

Garp was thinking about a reading he had promised to give at Dog's Head Harbor. Roberta had talked him into reading to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their invited guests; he was, after all, the chief trustee—and Roberta frequently organized small concerts and poetry readings, and so forth—but Garp was leery of it. He disliked readings—and especially now, to women; his put-down of the Ellen Jamesians had left so many women feeling raw. Most serious women, of course, agreed with him, but most of them were also intelligent enough to recognize a kind of personal vindictiveness in his criticisms of the Ellen Jamesians, which was stronger than logic. They sensed a kind of killer instinct in him—basically male and basically intolerant. He was, as Helen said, too intolerant of the intolerant. Most women surely thought Garp had written the truth about the Ellen Jamesians, but was it necessary to have been so rough? In his own wrestling terminology, perhaps Garp was guilty of unnecessary roughness. It was his roughness many women suspected, and when he read now, even to mixed audiences—at colleges, mainly, where roughness seemed presently unfashionable—he was aware of a silent dislike. He was a man who had publicly lost his temper; he had demonstrated that he could be cruel.

And Roberta had advised him not to read a sex scene; not that the Fields Foundation fellows were essentially hostile, but they were wary, Roberta said. “You have lots of other scenes to read,” Roberta said, “besides sex.” Neither of them mentioned the possibility that he might have anything new to read. And it was mainly for this reason—that he had nothing new to read—that Garp had grown increasingly unhappy about giving readings, anywhere.

Garp topped the slight hill by a farm for black Angus cattle—the only hill between Steering and the sea—and passed the two-mile mark on his run. He saw the blue-black noses of the beasts pointed at him, like double-barreled guns over a low stone wall. Garp always spoke to the cattle; he mooed at them.

The dirty-white Saab was now approaching him, and Garp moved into the dust of the soft shoulder. One of the black Angus mooed back at Garp; two shied away from the stone wall. Garp had his eyes on them. The Saab was not going very fast—did not appear reckless. There seemed no reason to keep an eye on it.

It was only his memory that saved him. Writers have very selective memories, and fortunately, for Garp, he had chosen to remember how the dirty-white Saab had slowed—when it first passed him, going the other way—and how the driver's head appeared to be lining him up in the rear-view mirror.

Garp looked away from the Angus and saw the silent Saab, engine cut, coasting straight at him in the soft shoulder, a trail of dust spurning behind its quiet white shape and over the intent, hunched head of the driver. The driver, aiming the Saab at Garp, was the closest visual image Garp would ever have of what a ball turret gunner who was at work looked like.

Garp took two bounds to the stone wall and vaulted it, not seeing the single line of electric fencing above the wall. He felt the tingle in his thigh as he grazed the wire, but he cleared the fence, and the wall, and landed in the wet green stubble of the field, chewed and pockmarked by the herd of Angus.

He lay hugging the wet ground, he heard the croak of the vile-tasting Under Toad in his dry throat—he heard the explosion of hooves as the Angus thundered away from him. He heard the rock-and-metal meeting of the dirty-white Saab with the stone wall. Two boulders, the size of his head, bounced lazily beside him. One wild-eyed Angus bull stood his ground, but the Saab's horn was stuck; perhaps the steady blare kept the bull from charging.

Garp knew he was alive; the blood in his mouth was only because he had bitten his lip. He moved along the wall to the point of impact, where the bashed Saab was imbedded. Its driver had lost more than her tongue.

She was in her forties. The Saab's engine had driven her knees up around the mangled steering column. She had no rings on her hands, which were short-fingered and reddened by the rough winter, or winters, she had known. The Saab's door post on the driver's side, or else the windshield's frame, had struck her face and dented one temple and one cheek. This left her face a little lopsided. Her brown, blood-matted hair was ruffled by the warm summer wind, which blew through the hole where the windshield had been.

Garp knew she was dead because he looked in her eyes. He knew she was an Ellen Jamesian because he looked in her mouth. He also looked in her purse. There was only the predictable note pad and pencil. There were lots of used and new notes, too. One of them said:

Hi! My name is...

and so forth. Another one said:

You asked for this.

Garp imagined that this was the note she had intended to stick under the bloody waistband of his running shorts when she left him dead and mangled by the side of the road.

Another note was almost lyrical; it was the one the newspapers would love to use, and reuse.

I have never been raped, and I have never wanted to be. I have never been with a man, and I have never wanted to be, either. My whole life's meaning has been to share the suffering of Ellen James.

Oh boy, Garp thought, but he left that note to be discovered with her other things. He was not the sort of writer, or the sort of man, who concealed important messages—even if the messages were insane.

He had aggravated his old groin injury by vaulting the stone wall and the electric fence, but he was able to jog back toward town until a yogurt truck picked him up; Garp and the yogurt driver went to tell the police together.

By the time the yogurt driver passed the scene of the accident, on his way to discover Garp, the black Angus had escaped through the rent in the stone wall and were milling around the dirty-white Saab like large, beastly mourners surrounding this fragile angel killed in a foreign car.

Maybe that was the Under Toad I felt, Helen thought, lying awake beside the soundly sleeping Garp. She hugged his warm body; she nestled in the smell of her own rich sex all over him. Maybe that dead Ellen Jamesian was the Under Toad, and now she's gone, thought Helen; she squeezed Garp so hard that he woke up.

“What is it?” he asked. But, wordless as Ellen James, Helen hugged his hips; her teeth chattered against his chest and he hugged her until she stopped shivering.

A “spokesperson” for the Ellen Jamesians remarked that this was an isolated act of violence, not sanctioned by the society of Ellen Jamesians but obviously provoked by the “typically male, aggressive, rapist personality of T. S. Garp.” They were not taking responsibility for this “isolated act,” the Jamesians declared, but they were not surprised or especially sorry about it, either.

Roberta told Garp that, under the circumstances, if he didn't feel like reading to a group of women, she would understand. But Garp read to the assembled Fields Foundation fellows and their assorted guests at Dog's Head Harbor—a crowd of less than one hundred people, cozily comfortable in the sun room of Jenny's estate. He read them “The Pension Grillparzer,” which he introduced by saying, “This is the first and best thing I ever wrote, and I don't even know how I thought it up. I think it is about death, which I didn't even know very much about when I wrote it. I know more about death now, and I'm not writing a word. There are eleven major characters in this story and seven of them die; one of them goes mad; one of them runs away with another woman. I'm not going to give away what happens to the other two characters, but you can see that the odds for surviving this story aren't great.”

Then he read to them. Some of them laughed; four of them cried; there were lots of sneezes and coughs, perhaps because of the ocean dampness; nobody left and everyone applauded. An older woman in the back, by the piano, slept soundly through the entire story, but even she applauded at the end; she woke up to the applause and joined in it, happily.

The event seemed to charge Garp. Duncan had attended the reading—it was his favorite among his father's works (actually one of the few things his father had written that Duncan had been allowed to read). Duncan was a talented young artist and he had more than fifty drawings of the characters and situations in his father's story, which he revealed to Garp after Garp drove them both home. Some of the drawings were fresh and unpretentious; all of them were thrilling to Garp. The old bear's withered flanks engulfing the absurd unicycle; the grandmother's matchstick ankles appearing frail and exposed under the W.C. door. The evil mischief in the dream man's excited eyes! The floozy beauty of Herr Theobald's sister ("...as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her—as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification"). And the brave optimism of the man who could only walk on his hands.

“How long have you been doing this?” Garp asked Duncan; he could have wept, he felt so proud.

It charged him, very much. He proposed to John Wolf a special edition, a book of “The Pension Grillparzer,” illustrated by Duncan. “The story's good enough to be a book all by itself,” Garp wrote John Wolf. “And I'm certainly well known enough for it to sell. Except for a little magazine, and an anthology or two, it's really never been published before. Besides, the drawings are lovely! And the story really holds up.

“I hate it when a writer starts cashing in on a reputation—publishing all the shit in his drawers, and republishing all the old shit that deserved to be missed. But this isn't a case of that, John; you know it isn't.”

John Wolf knew. He thought Duncan's drawings were fresh and unpretentious, but also not really very good; the boy was not yet thirteen—no matter how talented he was. But John Wolf also knew a good idea for publishing when he saw it. To be sure, of course, he gave the book the Secret Jillsy Sloper Test; Garp's story, and especially Duncan's drawings, passed Jillsy's scrutiny with the highest praise. Her only reservations concerned Garp's using too many words she didn't know.

A father and son book, John Wolf thought, would be nice for Christmas. And the sad gentleness of the story, its full pity and its mild violence, would perhaps ease the tension of Garp's war with the Ellen Jamesians.

The groin healed, and Garp ran the road from Steering to the sea all summer, nodding his recognition to the brooding Angus every day; they now had the safety of that fortunate stone wall in common, and Garp felt forever identified with these large, lucky animals. Happily grazed, and happily bred. And slaughtered, one day, quickly. Garp did not think of their slaughter. Or his own. He watched out for cars, but not nervously.

“An isolated act,” he told Helen and Roberta and Ellen James. They nodded, but Roberta ran with him whenever she could. Helen thought she would feel more at ease when the weather got cold again and Garp ran on the indoor track in the Miles Seabrook Field House. Or when he started wrestling again, and rarely went out at all. Those warm mats and that padded room were a safety symbol to Helen Holm, who had grown up in such an incubator.

Garp, too, looked forward to another wrestling season. And to the father and son publication of The Pension Grillparzer—a tale by T. S. Garp, illustrated by Duncan Garp. At last, a Garp book for children and for grownups! It was also, of course, like starting over. Going back to the beginning and getting a fresh start. What a world of illusions blossoms with the idea of “starting over.”

Suddenly, Garp started writing again.

He started by writing a letter to the magazine that had published his attack on the Ellen Jamesians. In the letter he apologized for the vehemence and self-righteousness of his remarks. “Although I believe Ellen James was used by these women, who had little concern for the real-life Ellen James, I can see that the need to use Ellen James in some way was genuine and great. I feel, of course, at least partially responsible for the death of that very needful and violent woman who felt provoked enough to try to kill me. I am sorry.”

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers—or to anyone who believes in pure good, or in pure evil. The Ellen Jamesians who responded, in print, all said that Garp was obviously afraid for his own life; they said he obviously feared an endless line of hit men (or “hit persons") whom the Ellen Jamesians would send after him until they got him. They said that along with being a male swine, and a bully of women, T. S. Garp was clearly “a yellow chickenshit coward with no balls.”

If Garp saw these responses, he appeared not to care; it is likely that he never read them. He wrote to apologize, mainly, because of his writing; it was an act meant to clear his desk, not his conscience; he meant to rid his mind of the garden-tending, bookshelf-making trivia that had occupied his time while he was waiting to write seriously again. He thought he would make peace with the Ellen Jamesians and then forget them, although Helen could not forget them. Ellen James certainly could not forget them, either, and even Roberta was alert and edgy whenever she was out with Garp.

About a mile beyond the bull farm, one fine day when they were running toward the sea, Roberta felt suddenly convinced that the approaching Volkswagen housed another would-be assassin; she threw a magnificent cross-body block on Garp and belted him off the soft shoulder and down a twelve-foot embankment into a muddy ditch. Garp sprained an ankle and sat howling at Roberta from the stream bed. Roberta seized a rock, with which she threatened the Volkswagen, which was full of frightened teen-agers returning from a beach party; Roberta talked them into making room for Garp, whom they drove to the Jenny Fields Infirmary.

“You are a menace!” Garp told Roberta, but Helen was especially happy for Roberta's presence—her tight end's instinct for blind-side hits and cheap shots.

Garp's sprained ankle kept him off the road for two weeks and stepped up his writing. He was working on what he called his “father book,” or “the book of fathers"; it was the first of the three projects he had jauntily described to John Wolf the night before he left for Europe—this one was the novel to be called My Father's Illusions. Because he was inventing a father, Garp felt more in touch with the spirit of pure imagination that he felt had kindled “The Pension Grillparzer.” A long way from which he had been falsely led. He had been too impressed by what he now called the “mere accidents and casualties of daily life, and the understandable trauma resulting therefrom.” He felt cocky again, as if he could make up anything.

“My father wanted us all to have a better life,” Garp began, “but better than what—he was not so sure. I do not think that he knew what life was; only that he wanted it better.”

As he did in “The Pension Grillparzer,” he made up a family; he gave himself brothers and sisters and aunts—both an eccentric and an evil uncle—and he felt he was a novelist again. A plot, to his delight, thickened.

In the evenings Garp read aloud to Ellen James and Helen; sometimes Duncan stayed up and listened, and sometimes Roberta stayed for supper, and he would read to her, too. He became suddenly generous in all matters concerning the Fields Foundation. In fact, the other board members were exasperated with him: Garp wanted to give every applicant something. “She sounds sincere,” he kept saying. “Look, she's had a hard life,” he told them. “Isn't there enough money?”

“Not if we spend it this way,” Marcia Fox said.

“If we don't discriminate between these applicants more than you suggest,” said Hilma Bloch, “we are lost.”

“Lost?” Garp said. “How could we get lost?” Overnight, it seemed to them all (except Roberta), Garp had become the weakest sort of liberal: he would evaluate no one. But he was full of imagining the whole, sad histories of his fictional family; thus full of sympathy, he was a soft touch in the real world.

The anniversary of Jenny's murder, and of the sudden funerals for Ernie Holm and Stewart Percy, passed quickly for Garp in the midst of his renewed creative energy. Then the wrestling season was again upon him; Helen had never seen him so taken up, so completely focused and relentless. He became again the determined young Garp who had made her fall in love, and she felt so drawn to him that she often cried when she was alone—without knowing why. She was alone too much; now that Garp was busy again, Helen realized she had kept herself inactive too long. She agreed to let the Steering School employ her, so that she could teach and use her mind for her own ideas again.

She also taught Ellen James to drive a car and Ellen drove twice a week to the state university, where she took a creative writing course. “This family isn't big enough for two writers, Ellen,” Garp teased her. How they all cherished the good mood he was in! And now that Helen was working again, she was much less anxious.

In the world according to Garp, an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous.

Later, they would often remark (Roberta, too) how good it was that Garp got to see the first edition of The Pension Grillparzer—illustrated by Duncan Garp, and out in time for Christmas—before he saw the Under Toad.