The World According to Garp

16. THE FIRST ASSASSIN

WHAT do you mean, “This is Chapter One"?” Garp's editor, John Wolf, wrote him. “How can there be any more of this? There is entirely too much as it stands! How can you possibly go on?”

“It goes on,” Garp wrote back. “You'll see.”

“I don't want to see,” John Wolf told Garp on the phone. “Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don't you take a trip? It would be good for you—and for Helen, I'm sure. And Duncan can travel now, can't he?”

But Garp not only insisted that The World According to Bensenhaver was going to be a novel; he insisted that John Wolf try to sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent; John Wolf was the first man to deal with Garp's writing, and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields.

“Sell it?” John Wolf said.

“Yes, sell it,” Garp said. “Advance publicity for the novel.”

This had happened with Garp's first two books; excerpts had been sold to magazines. But John Wolf tried to tell Garp that this chapter was (1) unpublishable and (2) the worst possible publicity—should anyone be fool enough to publish it. He said that Garp had a “small but serious” reputation as a writer, that his first two novels had been decently reviewed—had won him respected supporters and a “small but serious” audience. Garp said he hated the reputation of “small but serious,” though he could see that this appealed to John Wolf.

“I would rather be rich and wholly outside caring about what the idiots call “serious,"” he told John Wolf. But who is ever outside caring about that?

Garp actually felt that he could buy a sort of isolation from the real and terrible world. He imagined a kind of fort where he and Duncan and Helen (and a new baby) could live unmolested, even untouched by what he called “the rest of life.”

“What are you talking about?” John Wolf asked him.

Helen asked him, too. And so did Jenny. But Jenny Fields liked the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver. She thought it had all its priorities in order—that it knew whom to heroize in such a situation, that it expressed the necessary outrage, that it made properly grotesque the vileness of lust. Actually, Jenny's fondness for the first chapter was more troubling to Garp than John Wolf's criticism. Garp suspected his mother's literary judgment above all things.

“My God, look at her book,” he kept saying to Helen, but Helen, as she promised, would not allow herself to be drawn in; she would not read Garp's new novel, not one word of it.

“Why does he suddenly want to be rich?” John Wolf asked Helen. “What's all this about?”

“I don't know,” Helen said. “I think he believes it will protect him, and all of us.”

“From what?” John Wolf said. “From whom?”

“You'll have to wait until you read the whole book,” Garp said to his editor. “Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don't care if you like it; I want you to sell it.”

“I am not a vulgar publisher,” John Wolf said. “And you are not a vulgar writer, either. I'm sorry I have to remind you.” John Wolf's feelings were hurt, and he was angry at Garp for presuming to talk about a business that John Wolf understood far better than Garp. But he knew Garp had been through a bad time, he knew Garp was a good writer who would write more and (he thought) better books, and he wanted to continue publishing him.

“Every business is a shitty business,” Garp repeated. “If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have no trouble selling it.”

“That's not the only way it works,” Wolf said, sadly. “No one knows what makes books sell.”

“I've heard that before,” Garp said.

“You have no call to speak to me like this,” John Wolf said. “I'm your friend.” Garp knew that was true, so he hung up the telephone and answered no mail and finished The World According to Bensenhaver two weeks before Helen delivered, with only Jenny's help, their third child—a daughter, who spared Helen and Garp the problem of having to agree upon a boy's name that in no way resembled the name of Walt. The daughter was named Jenny Garp, which was the name Jenny Fields would have had if she had gone about the business of having Garp in a more conventional way.

Jenny was delighted to have someone at least partially named after her. “But there's going to be some confusion,” she warned, “with two of us around.”

“I've always called you “Mom,"” Garp reminded her. He did not remind his mother that a fashion designer had already named a dress after her. It was popular in New York for about a year: a white nurse's uniform with a bright red heart sewn over the left breast. A JENNY FIELDS ORIGINAL, the heart said.

When Jenny Garp was born, Helen said nothing. Helen was grateful; she felt for the first time since the accident that she was delivered from the insanity of grief that had crushed her with the loss of Walt.

The World According to Bensenhaver, which was Garp's deliverance from the same insanity, resided in New York, where John Wolf read it over and over again. He had arranged to have the first chapter published in a porno magazine of such loathsome crudity that he felt sure even Garp would be convinced of the book's doom. The magazine was called Crotch Shots, and it was full of exactly that—those wet, split beavers of Garp's childhood, between the pages of his story of violent rape and obvious revenge. At first Garp accused John Wolf of deliberately placing the chapter there, of not even trying the better magazines. But Wolf assured Garp that he had tried them all; that this was the bottom line of the list—this was exactly how Garp's story was interpreted. Lurid, sensational violence and sex of no redeeming value whatsoever.

“That's not what it's about,” Garp said “You'll see.”

But Garp often wondered about the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver, which had been published in Crotch Shots. If it had been read at all. If anyone who bought those magazines ever looked at the words.

“Perhaps they read some of the stories after they masturbate to the pictures,” Garp wrote to John Wolf. He wondered if that was a good mood to be read in: after masturbation, the reader was at least relaxed, possibly lonely ("a good state in which to read,” Garp told John Wolf). But maybe the reader felt guilty, too, and humiliated, and overwhelmingly responsible (that was not such a good condition in which to read, Garp thought). In fact, he knew, it was not a good condition in which to write.

The World According to Bensenhaver is about the impossible desire of the husband, Dorsey Standish, to protect his wife and child from the brutal world; thus Arden Bensenhaver (who is forced to retire from the police, for repeated unorthodoxy in his methods of arrest) is hired to live like an armed uncle in the house with the Standish family—he becomes the lovable family bodyguard, whom Hope must finally reject. Though the worst of the real world has been visited upon Hope, it is her husband who fears the world most. After Hope insists that Bensenhaver not live with them, Standish continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel. Bensenhaver is paid to tail the child, Nicky, but Bensenhaver is an aloof and curious kind of watchdog, subject to fits of his own awful memories; he gradually seems more of a menace to the Standishes than he seems a protector. He is described as “a lurker at the last edge of light—a retired enforcer, barely alive on the rim of darkness.”

Hope counters her husband's anxiety by insisting they have a second child. The child is born, but Standish seems destined to create one monster of paranoia after another; now more relaxed about possible assaults upon his wife and children, he begins to suspect that Hope is having an affair. Slowly, he realizes that this would wound him more than if she were raped (again). Thus he doubts his love for her, and doubts himself; guiltily, he begs Bensenhaver to spy on Hope and determine if she is faithful. But Arden Bensenhaver will no longer do Dorsey's worry work for him. The old policeman argues that he was hired to protect Standish's family from the outside world—not to restrict the free choices of the family to live as it wants. Without Bensenhaver's support, Dorsey Standish panics. One night he leaves the house (and the children) unprotected while he goes out to spy on his wife. While Dorsey is gone, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky's chewing gum.

Guilt abounds. In Garp's work, guilt always abounds. With Hope, too—because she was seeing someone (although who could blame her). Bensenhaver, morbid with responsibility, has a stroke. Partially paralyzed, he moves back in with the Standishes; Dorsey feels responsible for him. Hope insists they have another child, but the events have made Standish determinedly sterile.

He agrees that Hope should encourage her lover—but merely to “impregnate” herself, as he puts it. (Ironically, this was the only part of the book that Jenny Fields called “farfetched.")

Once again, Dorsey Standish seeks “a control situation—more like a laboratory experiment at life than life itself,” Garp wrote. Hope cannot adjust to such a clinical arrangement; emotionally, either she has a lover or she doesn't. Insisting that the lovers meet for the sole purpose of “impregnating” Hope, Dorsey tries to control the whereabouts, the number and length of their meetings. Suspecting that Hope is meeting her lover clandestinely, as well as according to plan, Standish alerts the senile Bensenhaver to the existence of a prowler, a potential kidnapper and rapist, whose presence in the neighborhood has already been detected.

Still not satisfied, Dorsey Standish takes to sudden, unannounced visits at his own house (at times when he's least expected home); he never catches Hope at anything, but Bensenhaver, armed and deadly with senility, catches Dorsey. A cunning invalid, Arden Bensenhaver is surprisingly mobile and silent in his wheelchair; he is also still unorthodox in his methods of arrest. In fact, Bensenhaver shoots Dorsey Standish with a twelve-gauge shotgun from a distance of less than six feet. Dorsey had been hiding in the upstairs cedar closet, stumbling among his wife's shoes, waiting for her to make a phone call from the bedroom, which—from the closet—he could overhear. He deserves to be shot, of course.

The wound is fatal. Arden Bensenhaver, thoroughly mad, is taken away. Hope is pregnant with her lover's child. When the child is born, Nicky—now twelve—feels unburdened by the relaxing tension in the family. The terrible anxiety of Dorsey Standish, which has been so crippling to all their lives, is at last lifted from them. Hope and her children live on, even cheerfully dealing with the wild rantings of old Bensenhaver, too tough to die, who goes on and on with his versions of the nightmarish world from his wheelchair in an old-age home for the criminally insane. He is seen, finally, as belonging where he is. Hope and her children visit him often, not merely out of kindness—for they are kind—but also to remind themselves of their own precious sanity. Hope's endurance, and the survival of her two children, make the old man's ravings tolerable, finally even comic to her.

That peculiar old-age home for the criminally insane, by the way, bears an astonishing resemblance to Jenny Fields' hospital for wounded women at Dog's Head Harbor.

It is not so much that “The World According to Bensenhaver” is wrong, or even misperceived, as it is out of proportion to the world's need for sensual pleasure, and the world's need and capacity for warmth. Dorsey Standish “is not true to the world,” either; he is too vulnerable to how delicately he loves his wife and children; he is seen, together with Bensenhaver, as “not well suited for life on this planet.” Where immunity counts.

Hope—and, the reader hopes, her children—may have better chances. Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man's world.

John Wolf sat in New York, hoping that the visceral reality of Garp's language, and the intensity of Garp's characters, somehow rescued the book from sheer soap opera. But, Wolf thought, one might as well call the thing Anxiousness of Life; it would make a fantastic series for daytime television, he thought—if suitably edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. John Wolf concluded that The World According to Bensenhaver, despite the “visceral reality of Garp's language,” and so forth, was an X-rated soap opera.

Much later, of course, even Garp would agree; it was his worst work. “But the fucking world never gave me credit for the first two,” he wrote to John Wolf. “Thus I was owed.” That, Garp felt, was the way it worked most of the time.

John Wolf was more basically concerned: that is, he wondered if he could justify the book's publication. With books he did not absolutely take to, John Wolf had a system that rarely failed him. At his publishing house, he was envied for his record of being right about those books destined to be popular. When he said a book was going to be popular—distinct from being good or likable or not—he was almost always right. There were many books that were popular without his saying so, of course, but no book he'd ever claimed would be popular was ever unpopular.

Nobody knew how he did it.

He did it first for Jenny Fields—and for certain, surprising books, every year or two, he had been doing it ever since.

There was a woman who worked in the publishing house who once told John Wolf that she never read a book that didn't make her want to close it and go to sleep. She was a challenge to John Wolf, who loved books, and he spent many years giving this woman good books and bad books to read; the books were alike in that they put this woman to sleep. She just didn't like to read, she told John Wolf; but he would not give up on her. No one else in the publishing house ever asked this woman to read anything at all; in fact, they never asked this woman's opinion of anything. The woman moved through the books lying all around the publishing house as if these books were ashtrays and she was a nonsmoker. She was a cleaning woman. Every day she emptied the wastebaskets; she cleaned everyone's office when they went home at night. She vacuumed the rugs in the corridors every Monday, she dusted the display cases every Tuesday, and the secretaries' desks on Wednesdays; she scrubbed the bathrooms on Thursdays and sprayed air freshener on everything on Fridays—so that, she told John Wolf, the entire publishing house had the whole weekend to gather up a good smell for the next week. John Wolf had watched her for years and he'd never seen her so much as glance at a book.

When he asked her about books and she told him how unlikable they were to her, he kept using her to test books he wasn't sure of—and the books he thought he was very sure of, too. She was consistent in her dislike of books and John Wolf had almost given up on her when he gave her the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.

The cleaning woman read it overnight and asked John Wolf if she could have a copy of her very own to read—over and over again—when the book was published.

After that, John Wolf sought her opinion scrupulously. She did not disappoint him. She did not like most things, but when she liked something, it meant to John Wolf that nearly everybody else was at least sure to be able to read it.

It was almost by rote that John Wolf gave the cleaning woman The World According to Bensenhaver. Then he went home for the weekend and thought about it; he tried to call her and tell her not even to try to read it. He remembered the first chapter and he didn't want to offend the woman, who was somebody's grandmother, and (of course) somebody's mother, too—and, after all, she never knew she was paid to read all the stuff John Wolf gave her to read. That she had a rather whopping salary for a cleaning lady was known only to John Wolf. The woman thought all good cleaning ladies were well paid, and should be.

Her name was Jillsy Sloper, and John Wolf marveled to note that there was not one Sloper with even the first initial of J. in the New York phone directory. Apparently Jillsy didn't like phone calls any more than she liked books. John Wolf made a note to apologize to Jillsy the first thing Monday morning. He spent the rest of a miserable weekend trying to phrase to himself exactly how he would tell T. S. Garp that he believed it was in his own best interests, and certainly in the best interests of the publishing house, NOT to publish The World According to Bensenhaver.

It was a hard weekend for him, because John Wolf liked Garp and he believed in Garp, and he also knew that Garp had no friends who could advise him against embarrassing himself—which is one of the valuable things friends are for. There was only Alice Fletcher, who so loved Garp that she would love, indiscriminately, everything he uttered—or else she would be silent. And there was Roberta Muldoon, whose literary judgment, John Wolf suspected, was even more newfound and awkward (if existent at all) than her adopted sex. And Helen wouldn't read it. And Jenny Fields, John Wolf knew, was not biased toward her son in the way a mother is usually biased; she had demonstrated the dubious taste to dislike some of the better things her son had written. The problem with Jenny, John Wolf knew, was one of subject matter. A book about an important subject was, to Jenny Fields, an important book. And Jenny Fields thought that Garp's new book was all about the stupid male anxieties that women are asked to suffer and endure. How a book was written never mattered to Jenny.

That was one thread that interested John Wolf in publishing the book. If Jenny Fields liked The World According to Bensenhaver, it was at least a potentially controversial book. But John Wolf, like Garp, knew that Jenny's status as a political figure was due largely to a general, hazy misunderstanding of Jenny.

Wolf thought and thought about it, all weekend, and he completely forgot to apologize to Jillsy Sloper the first thing Monday morning. Suddenly there was Jillsy, red-eyed and twitching like a squirrel, the ratted manuscript pages of The World According to Bensenhaver held fast in her rough brown hands.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. She rolled her eyes; she shook the manuscript in her hands.

“Oh, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I'm sorry.”

“Lawd!” Jillsy crowed. “I never had a worse weekend. I got no sleep, I got no food, I got no trips to the cemetery to see my family and my friends.”

The pattern of Jillsy Sloper's weekend seemed strange to John Wolf but he said nothing; he just listened to her, as he had listened to her for more than a dozen years.

“This man's crazy,” Jillsy said. “Nobody sane ever wrote a book like this.”

“I shouldn't have given it to you, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I should have remembered that first chapter.”

“First chapter ain't so bad,” Jillsy said. “That first chapter ain't nothin'. It's that nineteenth chapter that got me,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd!” she crowed.

“You read nineteen chapters?” John Wolf asked.

“You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters,” Jillsy said. “Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do it keep goin' on?”

“No, no,” John Wolf said. “That's the end of it. That's all there is.”

“I should hope so,” Jillsy said. “Ain't nothin' left to go on with. Got that crazy old cop where he belongs—at long last—and that crazy husband with his head blowed off. That's the only proper state for that husband's head, if you ask me: blowed off.”

“You read it?” John Wolf said.

“Lawd!” Jills screamed. “You'd think it was him who got raped, the way he went on and on. If you ask me,” Jillsy said, “that's just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin' over who you're givin' it to—of your own free will! It's not their damn business, either way, is it?” Jillsy asked.

“I'm not sure,” said John Wolf, who sat bewildered at his desk. “You didn't like the book.”

“Like it?” Jillsy cawed. “There's nothin' to like about it,” she said.

“But you read it,” John Wolf said. “Why'd you read it?”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, as if she were sorry for John Wolf—that he was so hopelessly stupid. “I sometimes wonder if you know the first thing about all these books you're makin',” she said; she shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why you're the one who's makin' the books and I'm the one who's cleanin' the bathrooms. Except I'd rather clean the bathrooms than read most of them,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd.”

“If you hated it, why'd you read it, Jillsy?” John Wolf asked her.

“Same reason I read anythin' for,” Jillsy said. “To find out what happens.”

John Wolf stared at her.

“Most books you know nothin's gonna happen,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, you know that. Other books,” she said, “you know just what's gonna happen, so you don't have to read them, either. But this book,” Jillsy said, “this book's so sick you know somethin's gonna happen, but you can't imagine what. You got to be sick yourself to imagine what happens in this book,” Jillsy said.

“So you read it to find out?” John Wolf said.

“There surely ain't no other reason to read a book, is there?” Jillsy Sloper said. She put the manuscript heavily (for it was large) on John Wolf's desk and hitched up the long extension cord (for the vacuum cleaner) which Jillsy wore on Mondays like a belt around her broad middle. “When it's a book,” she said, pointing to the manuscript, “I'd be happy if I could have a copy of my own. If it's okay,” she added.

“You want a copy?” John Wolf asked.

“If it's no trouble,” Jillsy said.

“Now that you know what happens,” John Wolf said, “what would you want to read it again for?”

“Well,” Jillsy said. She looked confused; John Wolf had never seen Jillsy Sloper look confused before—only sleepy. “Well, I might lend it,” she said. “There might be someone I know who needs to be reminded what men in this world is like,” she said.

“Would you ever read it again yourself?” John Wolf asked.

“Well,” Jillsy said. “Not all of it, I imagine. At least not all at once, or not right away.” Again, she looked confused. “Well,” she said, sheepishly, “I guess I mean there's parts of it I wouldn't mind readin' again.”

“Why?” John Wolf asked.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, tiredly, as if she were finally impatient with him. “It feels so true,” she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night.

“It feels so true,” John Wolf repeated.

“Lawd, don't you know it is?” Jillsy asked him. “If you don't know when a book's true,” Jillsy sang to him, “we really ought to trade jobs.” She laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug for the vacuum-cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. “I do wonder, Mr. Wolf,” she said, sweetly, “if you'd know when a bathroom was clean.” She went over and peered in his wastebasket. “Or when a wastebasket was empty,” she said. “A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book's true when you can say, “Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.” Then you know it's true,” Jillsy said.

Leaning over the wastebasket, she seized the one scrap of paper lying alone on the bottom of the basket; she stuffed it into her cleaning apron. It was the crumpled-up first page of the letter John Wolf had tried to compose to Garp.

Months later, when The World According to Bensenhaver was going to the printers, Garp complained to John Wolf that there was no one to dedicate the book to. He would not have it in memory of Walt, because Garp hated that kind of thing: “that cheap capitalizing,” as he called it, “on one's autobiographical accidents—to try to hook the reader into thinking you're a more serious writer than you are.” And he would not dedicate a book to his mother, because he hated, as he called it, “the free ride everyone else gets on the name of Jenny Fields.” Helen, of course, was out of the question, and Garp felt, with some shame, that he couldn't dedicate a book to Duncan if it was a book he would not allow Duncan to read. The child wasn't old enough. He felt some distaste, as a father, for writing something he would forbid his own children to read.

The Fletchers, he knew, would be uncomfortable with a book dedicated to them, as a couple; and to dedicate a book to Alice, alone, might be insulting to Harry.

“Not to me,” John Wolf said. “Not this one.”

“I wasn't thinking of you,” Garp lied.

“How about Roberta Muldoon?” John Wolf said.

“The book has absolutely nothing to do with Roberta,” Garp said. Though Garp knew that Roberta, at least, wouldn't object to the dedication. How funny to write a book really no one would like to have dedicated to them!

“Maybe I'll dedicate it to the Ellen Jamesians,” Garp said, bitterly.

“Don't make trouble for yourself,” John Wolf said. “That's just plain stupid.”

Garp sulked.

For Mrs. Ralph?

he thought. But he still didn't know her real name. There was Helen's father—his good old wrestling coach, Ernie Holm—but Ernie wouldn't understand the gesture; it would hardly be a book Ernie would like. Garp hoped, in fact, that Ernie wouldn't read it. How funny to write a book you hope someone doesn't read!

To Fat Stew

he thought.

For Michael Milton

In Memory of Bonkers

He bogged down. He could think of no one.

“I know someone,” John Wolf said. “I could ask her if she'd mind.”

“Very funny,” Garp said.

But John Wolf was thinking of Jillsy Sloper, the person, he knew, who was responsible for getting this book of Garp's published at all.

“She's a very special woman who loved the book,” John Wolf told Garp. “She said it was so “true.”

Garp was interested in the idea.

“I gave her the manuscript for one weekend,” John Wolf said, “and she couldn't put it down.”

“Why'd you give her the manuscript?” Garp asked.

“She just seemed right for it,” John Wolf said. A good editor will not share all his secrets with anyone.

“Well, okay,” Garp said. “It seems naked, having no one. Tell her I'd appreciate it. She's a close friend of yours?” Garp asked. Garp's editor winked at him and Garp nodded.

“What's it all mean, anyway?” Jillsy Sloper asked John Wolf, suspiciously. “What's it mean, he wants to “dedicate” that terrible book to me?”

“It means, that your response was valuable to him,” John Wolf said. “He thinks the book was written almost with you in mind.”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. “With me in mind? What's that mean?”

“I told him how you responded to his book,” John Wolf said, “and he thinks you're the perfect audience, I guess.”

“The perfect audience?” Jillsy said. “Lawd, he is crazy, isn't he?”

“He's got no one else to dedicate it to,” John Wolf admitted.

“Kind of like needin' a witness for a weddin'?” Jillsy Sloper asked.

“Kind of,” John Wolf guessed.

“It don't mean I approve of the book?” Jillsy asked.

“Lord, no,” John Wolf said.

“Lawd, no, huh?” Jillsy said.

“No one's going to blame you for anything in the book, if that's what you mean,” John Wolf said.

“Well,” said Jillsy.

John Wolf showed Jillsy where the dedication would be; he showed her other dedications in other books. They all looked nice to Jillsy Sloper and she nodded her head, gradually pleased by the idea.

“One thing,” she said. “I won't have to meet him, or anythin', will I?”

“Lord, no,” said John Wolf, so Jillsy agreed.

There remained only one more stroke of genius to launch The World According to Bensenhaver into that uncanny half-light where occasional “serious” books glow, for a time, as also “popular” books. John Wolf was a smart and cynical man. He knew about all the shitty autobiographical associations that make those rabid readers of gossip warm to an occasional fiction.

Years later, Helen would remark that the success of The World According to Bensenhaver lay entirely in the book jacket. John Wolf was in the habit of letting Garp write his own jacket flaps, but Garp's description of his own book was so ponderous and glum that John Wolf took matters into his own hands; he went straight to the dubious heart of the matter.

“The World According to Bensenhaver,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.

“T. S. Garp,” the jacket flap went on, “is the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields.” John Wolf shivered slightly when he saw this in print, because although he had written it, and although he knew very well why he had written it, he also knew that it was information Garp never wanted mentioned in connection with his own work. “T. S. Garp is also a father,” the jacket flap said. And John Wolf shook his head in shame to see the garbage he had written there. “He is a father who has recently suffered the tragic loss of a five-year-old son. Out of the anguish that a father endures in the aftermath of an accident, this tortured novel emerges...” And so forth.

It was, in Garp's opinion, the cheapest reason to read of all. Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was “true"—how much of it was based on “personal experience.” True—not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in “real life.” Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly—was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories—"all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives"—were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. “Fiction has to be better made than life,” Garp wrote. And he consistently detested what he called “the phony mileage of personal hardship"—writers whose books were “important” because something important had happened in their lives. He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened. “Everything has really happened, sometime!” he fumed. “The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it's the perfect thing to have happen at that time.

“Tell me anything that's ever happened to you,” Garp told an interviewer once, “and I can improve upon the story; I can make the details better than they were.” The interviewer, a divorced woman with four young children, one of whom was dying of cancer, had her face firmly fixed in disbelief. Garp saw her determined unhappiness, and its terrible importance to her, and he said to her, gently, “If it's sad—even if it's very sad—I can make up a story that's sadder.” But he saw in her face that she would never believe him; she wasn't even writing it down. It wouldn't even be a part of her interview.

And John Wolf knew this: one of the first things most readers want to know is everything they can about a writer's life. John Wolf wrote Garp: “For most people, with limited imaginations, the idea of improving on reality is pure bunk.” On the book jacket flap of The World According to Bensenhaver, John Wolf created a bogus sense of Garp's importance ("the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields") and a sentimental sympathy for Garp's personal experience ("the tragic loss of a five-year-old son"). That both pieces of information were essentially irrelevant to the art of Garp's novel did not deeply concern John Wolf. Garp had made John Wolf sore with all his talk about preferring riches to seriousness.

“It's not your best book,” John Wolf wrote Garp, when he sent the galleys for Garp to proofread. “One day you'll know that, too. But it is going to be your biggest book; just wait and see. You can't imagine, yet, how you're going to hate many of the reasons for your success, so I advise you to leave the country for a few months. I advise you to read only the reviews I send to you. And when it blows over—because everything blows over—you can come back home and pick up your considerable surprise at the bank. And you can hope that Bensenhaver's popularity is big enough to make people go back and read the first two novels—for which you deserve to be better known.

“Tell Helen I am sorry, Garp, but I think you must know: I have always had your own interests at heart. If you want to sell this book, we'll sell it. “Every business is a shitty business,” Garp. I am quoting you.”

Garp was very puzzled by the letter; John Wolf, of course, had not shown him the jacket flaps.

“Why are you sorry?” Garp wrote back. “Don't weep; just sell it.”

“Every business is a shitty business,” Wolf repeated.

“I know, I know,” Garp said.

“Take my advice,” Wolf said.

“I like reading the reviews,” Garp protested.

“Not these, you won't,” John Wolf said. “Take a trip. Please.” Then John Wolf sent the jacket flap copy to Jenny Fields. He asked her for her confidence, and her help in getting Garp to leave the country.

“Leave the country,” Jenny said to her son. “It's the best thing you can do for yourself and your family.” Helen was actually keen on the idea; she'd never been abroad. Duncan had read his father's first story, “The Pension Grillparzer,” and he wanted to go to Vienna.

“Vienna's not really like that,” Garp told Duncan, but it touched Garp very much that the boy liked the old story. Garp liked it, too. In fact, he was beginning to wish that he liked everything else he had written half as much.

“With a new baby, why go to Europe?” Garp complained. “I don't know. It's complicated. The passports—and the baby will need lots of shots, or something.”

“You need some shots yourself,” said Jenny Fields. “The baby will be perfectly safe.”

“Don't you want to see Vienna again?” Helen asked Garp.

“Ah, just imagine, the scene of your old crimes!” John Wolf said heartily.

“Old, crimes?” Garp mumbled. “I don't know.”

“Please, Dad,” Duncan said. Garp was a sucker to what Duncan wanted; he agreed.

Helen cheered up and even took a glance at the galleys of The World According to Bensenhaver, though it was a quick, nervous glance, and she had no intention of doing any real reading therein. The first thing she saw was the dedication.

For Jillsy Sloper

“Who in God's name is Jillsy Sloper?” she asked Garp.

“I don't know, really,” Garp said; Helen frowned at him. “No, really,” he said. “It's some girl friend of John's; he said she loved the book—couldn't put it down. Wolf took it as a kind of omen, I guess; it was his suggestion, anyway,” Garp said. “And I thought it was nice.”

“Hm,” said Helen; she put the galleys aside.

They both imagined John Wolf's girl friend in silence. John Wolf had been divorced before they met him; though the Garps had gotten to meet some of Wolf's grown-up children, they had never met his first and only wife. There had been a conservative number of girl friends, all smart and sleekly attractive women—all younger than John Wolf. Some working girls, in the publishing business, but mostly young women with divorces of their own, and money—always money, or always the look of money. Garp remembered most of them by how nicely they smelled, and how their lipstick tasted—and the high-gloss, touchable quality of their clothes.

Neither Garp nor Helen could ever have imagined Jillsy Sloper, the offspring of a white person and a quadroon—which made Jillsy an octoroon, or one eighth Negro. Her skin was a sallow brown, like a lightly stained pine board. Her hair was straight and short and waxy-black, beginning to gray at her bangs, which were coarsely chopped above her shining, wrinkled forehead. She was short, with long arms, and her ring finger was missing from her left hand. By the deep scar on her right cheek, one could imagine that the ring finger had been cut off in the same battle, by the same weapon—perhaps during a bad marriage, for she had certainly had a bad marriage. Which she never spoke of.

She was about forty-five and looked sixty. She had the trunk of a Labrador retriever about to have puppies, and she shuffled whenever and wherever she walked because her feet killed her. In a few years she would so long ignore the lump she could feel in her own breast, which no one else ever felt, that she would die needlessly of cancer.

She had an unlisted phone number (as John discovered) only because her former husband threatened to kill her every few months, and she tired of hearing from him; the reason she had a phone at all was that her children needed a place to call collect so that they could ask her to send them money.

But Helen and Garp, when they imagined Jillsy Sloper, did not for a moment see anyone approximating this sad, hard-working octoroon. “John Wolf seems to be doing everything for this book except writing it,” Helen said.

“I wish he had written it,” Garp suddenly said. Garp had reread the book, and he felt full of doubt. In “The Pension Grillparzer,” Garp thought, there was a certainty concerning how the world behaved. In The World According to Bensenhaver, Garp had felt less certain—an indication he was getting older, of course; but artists, he knew, should also get better.

With baby Jenny and one-eyed Duncan, Garp and Helen left for Europe out of a cool New England August; most transatlantic travelers were headed the other way.

“Why not wait until after Thanksgiving?” Ernie Holm asked them. But The World According to Bensenhaver would be published in October. John Wolf had received various responses to the uncorrected proofs he circulated through the summer; they had all been enthusiastic responses—enthusiastically praising the book, or enthusiastically condemning it.

He'd had difficulty keeping Garp from seeing the advance copies of the actual book—the book jacket, for example. But Garp's own enthusiasm for the book was so sporadic, and generally low, that John Wolf had been able to stall him.

Garp was now excited about the trip, and he was talking about other books he was going to write. ("A good sign,” John Wolf told Helen.)

Jenny and Roberta drove the Garps to Boston, where they took a plane to New York. “Don't worry about the airplane,” Jenny said. “It won't fall.”

“Jesus, Mom,” Garp said. “What do you know about airplanes? They fall all the time.”

“Keep your arms in constant motion, like wings,” Roberta told Duncan.

“Don't scare him, Roberta,” Helen said.

“I'm not scared,” Duncan said.

“If your father keeps talking, you can't fall,” Jenny said.

“If he keeps talking,” Helen said, “we'll never land.” They could see that Garp was all wound up.

“I'll fart all the way, if you don't leave me alone,” Garp said, “and we'll go in a great explosion.”

“You better write often,” Jenny said.

Remembering dear old Tinch, and his last trip to Europe, Garp told his mother, “This time I'm just going to ab-ab-absorb a lot, Mom. I'm not going to write a w-w-word.” They both laughed at this, and Jenny Fields even cried a little, although only Garp noticed; he kissed his mother good-bye. Roberta, whose sex reassignment had made her a dynamite kisser, kissed everyone several times.

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said.

“I'll look after the old girl while you're gone,” Roberta said, her giant arm dwarfing Jenny, who looked so small and suddenly very gray beside her.

“I don't need any looking after,” Jenny Fields said.

“It's Mom who looks after everyone else,” Garp said.

Helen hugged Jenny, because she knew how true that was. From the airplane, Garp and Duncan could see Jenny and Roberta waving from the observation deck. There had been some seat changes because Duncan had wanted a window seat on the left-hand side of the plane. “The right-hand side is just as nice,” a stewardess said.

“Not if you don't have a right eye,” Duncan told her, pleasantly, and Garp admired how the boy was feeling so bold about himself.

Helen and the baby sat across the aisle from them. “Can you see Grandma?” Helen asked Duncan.

“Yes,” Duncan said.

Although the observation deck was suddenly overrun with people wanting to see the takeoff, Jenny Fields—as always—stood out in her white uniform, even though she was short. “Why does Nana look so tall?” Duncan asked Garp, and it was true: Jenny Fields towered head and shoulders above the crowd. Garp, realized that Roberta was lifting his mother up as if his mother were a child. “Oh, Roberta's got her!” Duncan cried. Garp looked at his mother hefted up in the air to wave goodbye to him, safe in the arms of the old tight end; Jenny's shy, confident smile touched him, and he waved out the window to her, although Garp knew that Jenny couldn't see inside the plane. For the first time, his mother looked old to him; he looked away—across the aisle, at Helen with their new child.

“Here we go,” Helen said. Helen and Garp held hands across the aisle when the plane lifted off, because, Garp knew, Helen was terrified of flying.

In New York, John Wolf put them up in his apartment; he gave Garp and Helen and baby Jenny his own bedroom and graciously offered to share the guest room with Duncan.

The grownups had a late dinner and too much cognac. Garp told John Wolf about the next three novels he was going to write.

“The first one is called My Father's Illusions,” Garp said. “It's about an idealistic father who has many children. He keeps establishing little utopias for his kids to grow up in, and after his kids grow up he becomes a founder of small colleges. But all of them go broke—the colleges and the kids. The father keeps trying to give a speech at the U.N., but they keep throwing him out; it's the same speech—he keeps revising and revising it. Then he tries to run a free hospital; it's a disaster. Then he tries to institute a nationwide free-transportation system. Meanwhile, his wife divorces him and his children keep growing older, and turning out unhappy, or fucked-up—or just perfectly normal, you know. The only thing the children have in common are these dreadful memories of the utopias their father tried to have them grow up in. Finally, the father becomes the governor of Vermont.”

“Vermont?” John Wolf asked.

“Yes, Vermont,” Garp said. “He becomes governor of Vermont, but he really thinks of himself as a king. More utopias, you see.”

“The King of Vermont!” John Wolf said. “That's a better title.”

“No, no,” Garp said. “That's another book. No relation. The second book, after My Father's Illusions, will be called The Death of Vermont.”

“Same cast of characters?” Helen asked.

“No, no,” Garp said. “Another story. It's about the death of Vermont.”

“Well, I like something that is what it says it is,” John Wolf said. “One year spring doesn't come,” Garp said.

“Spring never does come to Vermont, anyway,” Helen said.

“No, no,” Garp said, frowning. “This year summer doesn't come, either. Winter never stops. It warms up one day and all the buds appear. Maybe in May. One day in May there are buds on the trees, the next day there are leaves, and the next day the leaves have all turned. It's fall already. The leaves fall off the trees.”

“A short foliage season,” Helen said.

“Very funny,” Garp said. “But that's what happens. It's winter again; it will be winter forever.”

“The people die?” John Wolf asked.

“I'm not sure about the people,” Garp said. “Some leave Vermont, of course.”

“Not a bad idea,” Helen said.

“Some stay, some die. Maybe they all die,” Garp said.

“What's it mean?” John Wolf asked.

“I'll know when I get there,” Garp said. Helen laughed.

“And there's a third novel, after that?” John Wolf asked.

“It's called The Plot against the Giant,” Garp said.

“That's a poem by Wallace Stevens,” Helen said.

“Yes, of course,” Garp said, and he recited the poem for them.

The Plot against the Giant

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,

Whetting his hacker,

I shall run before him,

Difusing the civilest odors

Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.

It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,

Arching cloths besprinkled with colors

As small as fish-eggs.

The threads

Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la... le pauvre!

I shall run before him,

With a curious puffing.

He will bend his ear then.

I shall whisper

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

It will undo him.

“What a nice poem,” Helen said.

“The novel is in three parts,” Garp said.

“Girl One, Girl Two, Girl Three?” John Wolf asked.

“And is the giant undone?” Helen asked.

“Is he ever,” Garp said.

“Is he a real giant, in the novel?” John Wolf asked.

“I don't know, yet,” Garp said.

“Is he you?” Helen asked.

“I hope not,” Garp said.

“I hope not, too,” said Helen.

“Write that one first,” John Wolf said.

“No, write it last,” Helen said.

“The Death of Vermont seems the logical one to write last,” John Wolf said.

“No, I see The Plot against the Giant as last,” Garp said.

“Wait and write it after I'm dead,” Helen said.

Everyone laughed.

“But there are only three,” John Wolf said. “What then? What happens after the three?”

“I die,” Garp said. “That will make six novels altogether, and that's enough.”

Everyone laughed again.

“And do you also know how you die?” John Wolf asked him.

“Let's stop this,” Helen said. And to Garp she said, “If you say, “In an airplane,” I will not forgive you.” Behind the lightly drunk humor in her voice, John detected a seriousness; it made him stretch his legs. “You two better go to bed,” he said. “And get rested for your trip.”

“Don't you want to know how I die?” Garp asked them.

They didn't say anything.

“I kill myself,” Garp said, pleasantly. “In order to become fully established, that seems almost necessary. I mean it, really,” Garp said. “In the present fashion, you'll agree this is one way of recognizing a writer's seriousness? Since the art of the writing doesn't always make the writer's seriousness apparent, it's sometimes necessary to reveal the depth of one's personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all. “It's true,” Garp said, but his sarcasm was unpleasant and Helen sighed; John Wolf stretched again. “And thereafter,” Garp said, “much seriousness is suddenly revealed in the work—where it had escaped notice before.”

Garp had often remarked, irritably, that this would be his final duty as a father and provider—and he was fond of citing examples of the middling writers who were now adored and read with great avidity because of their suicides. Of those writer-suicides whom he, too—in some cases—truly admired, Garp, only hoped that, at the moment the act was accomplished, at least some of them had known about this lucky aspect of their unhappy decision. He knew perfectly well that people who really killed themselves did not romanticize suicide in the least; they did not respect the “seriousness” that the act supposedly lent to their work—a nauseating habit in the book world, Garp thought. Among readers and reviewers.

Garp also knew he was no suicide; he knew it somewhat less surely after the accident to Walt, but he knew it. He was as distant from suicide as he was from rape; he could not imagine actually doing it. But he liked to imagine the suicidal writer grinning at his successful mischief, while once more he read and revised the last message he would leave—a note aching with despair, and appropriately humorless. Garp liked to imagine that moment, bitterly: when the suicide note was perfect, the writer took the gun, the poison, the plunge—laughing hideously, and full of the knowledge that he had at last got the better of the readers and reviewers. One note he imagined was: “I have been misunderstood by you idiots for the last time.”

“What a sick idea,” Helen said.

“The perfect writer's death,” said Garp.

“It's late,” John Wolf said. “Remember your flight.”

In the guest room, where John Wolf wanted to fall asleep, he found Duncan Garp still wide-awake.

“Excited by the trip, Duncan?” Wolf asked the boy.

“My father's been to Europe before,” Duncan said. “But I haven't.”

“I know,” John Wolf said.

“Is my father going to make a lot of money?” Duncan asked.

“I hope so,” John Wolf said.

“We don't really need it, because my grandmother has so much,” Duncan said.

“But it's nice to have your own,” John Wolf said.

“Why?” Duncan asked.

“Well, it's nice to be famous,” John Wolf said.

“Do you think my father's going to be famous?” Duncan asked.

“I think so,” John Wolf said.

“My grandmother's already famous,” Duncan said.

“I know,” John Wolf said.

“I don't think she likes it,” Duncan said.

“Why?” John Wolf asked.

“Too many strangers around,” Duncan said. “That's what Nana says; I've heard her. “Too many strangers in the house.”

“Well, your dad probably won't be famous in quite the same way that your grandmother is,” John Wolf said.

“How many different ways are there to be famous?” Duncan asked. John Wolf expelled a long, restrained breath. Then he began to tell Duncan Garp about the differences between very popular books and just successful ones. He talked about political books, and controversial books, and works of fiction. He told Duncan the finer points of book publishing; in fact, he gave Duncan the benefit of more of his personal opinions about publishing than he had ever given Garp. Garp wasn't really interested. Duncan wasn't, either. Duncan would not remember one of the finer points; he fell asleep rather quickly after John Wolf started explaining.

It was simply John Wolf's tone of voice that Duncan loved. The long story, the slow explanation. It was the voice of Roberta Muldoon—of Jenny Fields, of his mother, of Garp—telling him stories at night in the house at Dog's Head Harbor, putting him to sleep so soundly that he wouldn't have any nightmares. Duncan had gotten used to that tone of voice, and he had been unable to fall asleep in New York without it.

In the morning, Garp and Helen were amused by John Wolf's closet. There was a pretty nightgown belonging, no doubt, to one of John Wolf's recent, sleek women—someone who had not been asked to spend last night. There were about thirty dark suits, all with pinstripes, all quite elegant, and all failing to fit Garp by about three extra inches in the pantlegs. Garp wore one he liked to breakfast, with the pants rolled up.

“Jesus, you have a lot of suits,” he said to John Wolf.

“Take one,” John Wolf said. “Take two or three. Take the one you're wearing.”

“It's too long,” Garp said, holding up a foot.

“Have it shortened,” John Wolf said.

“You don't have any suits,” Helen told Garp.

Garp decided he liked the suit so well that he wanted to wear it to the airport, with the pantlegs pinned up.

“Jesus,” Helen said.

“I'm slightly embarrassed to be seen with you,” John Wolf confessed, but he drove them to the airport. He was making absolutely certain that the Garps got out of the country.

“Oh, your book,” he said to Garp, in the car. “I keep forgetting to get you a copy.”

“I noticed,” Garp said.

“I'll send you one,” John Wolf said.

“I never even saw what went on the jacket,” Garp said. “A photograph of you, on the back,” John Wolf said. “It's an old one—it's one you've seen, I'm sure.”

“What's on the front?” Garp said.

“Well, the title,” John Wolf said.

“Oh, really?” Garp said. “I thought maybe you decided to leave the title off.”

“Just the title,” John Wolf said, “over a kind of photograph.”

“"A kind of photograph",” Garp said. “What kind of photograph?”

“Maybe I have one in my briefcase,” Wolf said. “I'll look, at the airport.”

Wolf was being careful; he had already let it slip that he thought The World According to Bensenhaver was an “X-rated soap opera.” Garp hadn't seemed bothered. “Mind you, it's awfully well written,” Wolf had said, “but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much, somehow.” Garp, had sighed. “Life,” Garp had said, “is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John,” Garp had said.

In John Wolf's briefcase was a snip-out of the front cover of The World According to Bensenhaver, missing the back-jacket photograph of Garp and, of course, the jacket flaps. John Wolf planned to hand this snip-out to Garp just moments before they said good-bye. This snipout of the front cover was sealed in an envelope; the envelope was sealed in another envelope. John Wolf felt pretty certain that Garp would not be able to undo the thing and look at it until he was safely seated in the plane.

When Garp got to Europe, John Wolf would send him the rest of the book jacket for The World According to Bensenhaver. Wolf felt certain that it would not make Garp quite angry enough to fly home.

“This is bigger than the other plane,” Duncan said, at the window on the left-hand side, a little in front of the wing.

“It has to be bigger because it's going all the way across the ocean,” Garp said.

“Please don't mention that again,” Helen said. Across the aisle from Duncan and Garp, a stewardess was fashioning an intriguing sling for baby Jenny, who hung on the back of the seat in front of Helen like someone else's baby or a papoose.

“John Wolf said you were going to be rich and famous,” Duncan told his father.

“Hm,” Garp said. He was involved in the tedious process of opening the envelopes John Wolf had given him; he was having a hell of a time with them.

“Are you?” Duncan asked.

“I hope so,” Garp said. At last he looked at the cover of The World According to Bensenhaver. He could not tell if it was the sudden, apparent weightlessness of the great airplane, leaving the ground, that gave him such a chill—or if it was the photograph.

Blown up in black and white, with grains as fat as flakes of snow, was a picture of an ambulance unloading at a hospital. The glum futility on the gray faces of the attendants expressed the fact that there was no need to hurry. The body under the sheet was small and completely covered. The photograph had the quick, fearful quality of the entrance marked EMERGENCY at any hospital. It was any hospital, and any ambulance—and any small body arriving too late.

A kind of wet finish glazed the photograph, which—with its grainy aspect, and the fact that this accident appeared to have happened on a rainy night—made it a picture out of any cheap newspaper; it was any catastrophe. It was any small death, anywhere, anytime. But of course it only reminded Garp of the gray despairing on all their faces when they were struck by the sight of Walt lying broken.

The cover of The World According to Bensenhaver, an X-rated soap opera, shouted a grim warning: this was a disaster story. The cover called for your cheap but immediate attention; it got it. The cover promised you a sudden, sickening sadness; Garp knew that the book would deliver it. If he could have read the jacket-flap description of his novel and his life, at that time, he might very well have taken the next plane back to New York as soon as he landed in Europe. But he would have time to resign himself to this kind of advertising—just as John Wolf had planned. By the time Garp read the jacket flaps, he'd already have absorbed that horrible front-cover photograph.

Helen would never absorb it, and she never forgave John Wolf for it, either. Nor would she ever forgive him for the back-cover photograph of Garp. It was a picture, taken several years before the accident, of Garp with Duncan and Walt. Helen had taken the picture, and Garp had sent it to John Wolf instead of a Christmas card. Garp was on a dock in Maine. He was wearing nothing but a bathing suit and he looked in terrific physical shape. He was. Duncan stood behind him, his lean arm rested on his father's shoulder. Duncan also wore a bathing suit, he was very tan, with a white sailor's cap cocked jauntily on his head. He grinned into the camera, staring it down with his beautiful eyes.

Walt sat on Garp's lap. Walt was so fresh out of the water that he was as slick as a seal puppy, Garp was trying to wrap him warmly in a towel, and Walt was squirming. Wildly happy, his clownish, round face beamed at the camera—at his mother taking the picture.

When Garp looked at that picture, he could feel Walt's cold, wet body growing warm and dry against him.

Beneath the photograph, the caption cashed in on one of the least noble instincts of human beings.

T. S. GARP WITH HIS CHILDREN (before THE ACCIDENT)

The implication was that if you read the book, you would find out what accident. Of course, you wouldn't. The World According to Bensenhaver would tell you nothing about that accident, really—although it is fair to say that accidents play an enormous part in the novel. The only thing you would really learn about the accident referred to under the photograph was contained in the garbage that John Wolf wrote on the jacket flap. But, even so, that photograph—of a father with his doomed children—had a way of hooking you.

People bought the book by the sad son of Jenny Fields in droves.

On the airplane to Europe, Garp had only the picture of the ambulance to use his imagination on. Even at that altitude, he could imagine people buying the book in droves. He sat feeling disgusted at the people he imagined buying the book; he also felt disgusted that he had written the kind of book that could attract people in droves.

“Droves” of anything, but especially of people, were not comforting to T. S. Garp. He sat in the airplane wishing for more isolation and privacy—for himself and for his family—than he would ever know again.

“What will we do with all the money?” Duncan asked him suddenly.

“All the money?” Garp said.

“When you're rich and famous,” Duncan said. “What will we do?”

“We'll have lots of fun,” Garp told him, but his handsome son's one eye pierced him with doubt.

“We'll be flying at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet,” the pilot said.

“Wow,” said Duncan. And Garp reached for his wife's hand across the aisle. A fat man was making his unsure way down the aisle to the lavatory; Garp and Helen could only look at each other and convey a kind of hand-in-hand contact with their eyes.

In his mind's eye, Garp saw his mother, Jenny Fields, all in white, held up in the sky by the towering Roberta Muldoon. He did not know what it meant, but his vision of Jenny Fields raised above a crowd chilled him in the same way that the ambulance on the cover of The World According to Bensenhaver had chilled him. He began talking to Duncan, about anything at all.

Duncan began talking about Walt and the undertow—a famous family story. For as far back as Duncan could remember, the Garps had gone every summer to Dog's Head Harbor, New Hampshire, where the miles of beach in front of Jenny Fields' estate were ravaged by a fearful undertow. When Walt was old enough to venture near the water, Duncan said to him—as Helen and Garp had, for years, said to Duncan—"Watch out for the undertow.” Walt retreated, respectfully. And for three summers Walt was warned about the undertow. Duncan recalled all the phrases.

“The undertow is bad today.”

“The undertow is strong today.”

“The undertow is wicked today.” Wicked was a big word in New Hampshire—not just for the undertow.

And for years Walt watched out for it. From the first, when he asked what it could do to you, he had only been told that it could pull you out to sea. It could suck you under and drown you and drag you away.

It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water's edge to have a word with him.

“What are you doing, Walt?” Helen asked.

“What are you looking for, dummy?” Duncan asked him.

“I'm trying to see the Under Toad,” Walt said.

“The what?” said Garp.

“The Under Toad,” Walt said. “I'm trying to see it. How big is it?”

And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ("Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!” Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy—when depression had moved in overnight—they said to each other, “The Under Toad is strong today.”

“Remember,” Duncan asked on the plane, “how Walt asked if it was green or brown?”

Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

In Vienna, Garp felt, the Under Toad was strong. Helen did not seem to feel it, and Duncan, like an eleven-year-old, passed from one feeling to the next. The return to the city, for Garp, was like returning to the Steering School. The streets, the buildings, even the paintings in the museums, were like his old teachers, grown older; he barely recognized them, and they did not know him at all. Helen and Duncan saw everything. Garp was content to walk with baby Jenny; he strolled her through the long, warm fall in a carriage as baroque as the city itself—he smiled and nodded to all the tongue-clucking elderly who peered into the carriage and approved of his new baby. The Viennese appeared well fed and comfortable with luxuries that looked new to Garp; the city was years away from the Russian occupation, the memory of the war, the reminders of ruins. If Vienna had been dying, or already dead, in his time there with his mother, Garp felt that something new but common had grown in the old city's place.

At the same time, Garp liked showing Duncan and Helen around. He enjoyed his personal history tour, mixed with the guidebook history of Vienna. “And this is where Hitler stood when he first addressed the city. And this is where I used to shop on Saturday mornings.

“This is the fourth district, a Russian zone of occupation; the famous Karlskirche is here, and the Lower and Upper Belvedere. And between the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, on your left, and the Argentinierstrasse is the little street where Mom and I...”

They rented some rooms in a nice pension in the fourth district. They discussed enrolling Duncan in an English-speaking school, but it was a long drive, or a long Strassenbahn ride every morning, and they didn't really plan on staying even half the year. Vaguely, they imagined Christmas at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny and Roberta and Ernie Holm.

John Wolf finally sent the book, complete book jacket and all, and Garp's sense of the Under Toad grew unbearably for a few days, then kicked deeper, beneath the surface. It appeared to be gone. Garp managed a restrained letter to his editor; he expressed his sense of personal hurt, his understanding that this had been done with the best intentions, businesswise. But...and so forth. How angry could he really be—at Wolf? Garp had provided the package; Wolf had only promoted it.

Garp heard from his mother that the first reviews were “not nice,” but Jenny—on John Wolf's advice—did not enclose any reviews with her letter. John Wolf clipped the first rave from among the important New York reviews: “The women's movement has at last exhibited a significant influence on a significant male writer,” wrote the reviewer, who was an associate professor of women's studies somewhere. She went on to say that The World According to Bensenhaver was “the first in-depth study, by a man, of the peculiarly male neurotic pressure many women are made to suffer.” And so forth.

“Christ,” Garp said, “it sounds as if I wrote a thesis. It's a fucking novel, it's a story, and I made it up!”

“Well, it sounds as if she liked it,” Helen said.

“It's not it she liked,” Garp said. “She liked something else.”

But the review helped to establish the rumor that The World According to Bensenhaver was “a feminist novel.”

“Like me,” Jenny Fields wrote her son, “it appears you are going to be the beneficiary of one of the many popular misunderstandings of our time.”

Other reviews called the book “paranoid, crazed, and crammed with gratuitous violence and sex.” Garp was not shown most of those reviews, but they probably didn't hurt the sales, either.

One reviewer admitted that Garp was a serious writer whose “tendencies toward baroque exaggeration have run amuck.” John Wolf couldn't resist sending Garp that review—probably because John Wolf agreed with it.

Jenny wrote that she was becoming “involved with” New Hampshire politics.

“The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time,” Roberta Muldoon wrote.

“How could anyone give all her time to a New Hampshire governor?” Garp wrote back.

There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy. The governor truly was a crowing, reactionary moron. Among other things, he appeared to believe that poor people should not be helped by the state or federal government, largely because the condition of the poor seemed to the governor of New Hampshire to be a deserved punishment—the just and moral judgment of a Superior Being. The incumbent governor was obnoxious and clever; for example, the sense of fear that he successfully evoked: that New Hampshire was in danger of being victimized by teams of New York divorcees.

The divorced women from New York allegedly were moving into New Hampshire in droves. Their intentions were to turn New Hampshire women into lesbians, or at the very least to encourage them to be unfaithful to their New Hampshire husbands; their intentions also included the seduction of New Hampshire husbands, and New Hampshire high school boys. The New York divorcees apparently represented widespread promiscuity, socialism, alimony, and something ominously referred to, in the New Hampshire press, as “Group Female Living.”

One of the centers for this alleged Group Female Living was Dog's Head Harbor, of course, “the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields.”

There had also been a widespread increase, the governor said, of venereal disease—"a known problem among these Liberationists.” He was a terrific liar. The candidate running for governor against this well-liked fool was, apparently, a woman. Jenny and Roberta and (Jenny wrote) “teams of New York divorcees” were running her campaign.

Somehow, in the sole New Hampshire newspaper of statewide distribution, Garp's “degenerate” novel was referred to as “the new feminist Bible.”

“A violent hymn to the moral depravity and sexual danger of our time,” wrote one West Coast reviewer.

“A pained protest against the violence and sexual combat of our groping age,” said another newspaper, somewhere else.

Whether it was liked or disliked, the novel was largely looked upon as news. One way for novels to be successful is for the fiction to resemble somebody's version of the news. That is what happened to The World According to Bensenhaver; like the stupid governor of New Hampshire, Garp's book became news.

“New Hampshire is a backwoods state with base politics,” Garp wrote his mother. “For God's sake, don't get involved.”

“That's what you always say,” Jenny wrote. “When you come home, you're going to be famous. Then let me see you try not to get involved.”

“Just watch me,” Garp wrote her. “Nothing could be easier.”

His involvement with the transatlantic mail had momentarily distracted Garp from his sense of the awesome and lethal Under Toad, but now Helen told him that she detected the presence of the beast, too. “Let's go home,” she said. “We've had a nice time.”

They got a telegram from John Wolf. “Stay where you are,” it said. “People are buying your book in droves.”

Roberta sent Garp a T-shirt.

NEW YORK DIVORCEES ARE GOOD

FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE

the T-shirt said.

“My God,” Garp said to Helen. “If we're going home, let's at least wait until after this mindless election.”

Thus he missed, thankfully, the “dissenting feminist opinion” of The World According to Bensenhaver, published in a giddy, popular magazine. The novel, the reviewer said, “steadfastly upholds the sexist notion that women are chiefly an assemblage of orifices and the acceptable prey of predatory males.... T. S. Garp continues the infuriating male mythology: the good man is the bodyguard of his family, the good woman never willingly lets another man enter her literal or figurative door.”

Even Jenny Fields was cajoled into “reviewing” her son's novel, and it is fortunate that Garp never saw this, either. Jenny said that although it was her son's best novel—because it was his most serious subject—it was a novel “marred by repeated male obsessions, which could become tedious to women readers.” However, Jenny said, her son was a good writer who was still young and would only get better. “His heart,” she added, “is in the right place.”

If Garp had read that, he might have stayed in Vienna a lot longer. But they made their plans to leave. As usual, anxiousness quickened the Garps' plans. One night Duncan was not home from the park before dark and Garp, running out to look for him, called back to Helen that this was the final sign; they would leave as soon as possible. City life, in general, made Garp too fearful for Duncan.

Garp ran along the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse toward the Russian War Memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. There was a pastry shop near there, and Duncan liked pastry, although Garp had repeatedly warned the child that it would ruin his supper. “Duncan!” he ran calling, and his voice against the stolid stone buildings bounced back to him like the froggy belching of the Under Toad, the foul and warty beast whose sticky nearness he felt like breath.

But Duncan was munching happily on a Grillparzertorte in the pastry shop.

“It gets dark earlier and earlier,” he complained. “I'm not that late.”

Garp had to admit it. They walked home together. The Under Toad disappeared up a small, dark street—or else it's not interested in Duncan, Garp thought. He imagined he felt the tug of the tide at his own ankles, but it was a passing feeling.

The telephone, that old cry of alarm—a warrior stabbed on guard duty, screaming his shock—startled the pension where they lived and brought the trembling landlady like a ghost to their rooms.

“Bitte, bitte,” she came pleading. She conveyed, with little shakes of excitement, that the call was from the United States.

It was about two in the morning, the heat was off, and Garp shivered after the old woman, down the corridor of the pension. “The hall rug was thin,” he recalled, “the color of a shadow.” He had written that, years ago. And he looked for the rest of his cast: the Hungarian singer, the man who could only walk on his hands, the doomed bear, and all the members of the sad circus of death he had imagined.

But they were gone; only the old woman's lean, erect body guided him—her erectness unnaturally formal, as if she were overcorrecting a stoop. There were no photographs of speed-skating teams on the walls, there was no unicycle parked by the door to the W.C. Down a staircase and into a room with a harsh overhead light, like a hasty operating room set up in a city under siege, Garp felt he followed the Angel of Death—midwife to the Under Toad whose swampy smell he sniffed at the mouthpiece of the phone.

“Yes?” he whispered.

And for a moment was relieved to hear Roberta Muldoon—another sexual rejection; perhaps that was all. Or perhaps an update on the New Hampshire gubernatorial race. Garp looked up at the old, inquiring face of the landlady and realized that she had not taken the time to put in her teeth; her cheeks were sucked into her mouth, the loose flesh drooped below her jawline—her whole face was as slack as a skeleton's. The room reeked of toad.

“I didn't want you to see it on the news,” Roberta was saying. “If it would be on TV over there—I couldn't know for sure. Or even the newspapers. I just didn't want you to find out that way.”

“Who won?” Garp asked, lightly, though he knew that this call had little to do with the new or old governor of New Hampshire.

“She's been shot—your mother,” Roberta said. “They've killed her, Garp. A bastard shot her with a deer rifle.”

“Who?” Garp whispered.

“A man!” Roberta wailed. It was the worst word she could use: a man. “A man who hated women,” Roberta said. “He was a hunter,” Roberta sobbed. “It was hunting season, or it was almost hunting season, and no one thought there was anything wrong about a man with a rifle. He shot her.”

“Dead?” Garp said.

“I caught her before she fell,” Roberta cried. “She never struck the ground, Garp. She never said a word. She never knew what happened, Garp. I'm sure.”

“Did they get the man?” Garp asked.

“Someone shot him, or he shot himself,” Roberta said.

“Dead?” Garp asked.

“Yes, the bastard,” Roberta said. “He's dead, too.”

“Are you alone, Roberta?” Garp asked her.

“No,” Roberta wept. “There are a lot of us here. We're at your place.” And Garp could imagine them all, the wailing women at Dog's Head Harbor—their leader murdered.

“She wanted her body to go to a med school,” Garp said. “Roberta?”

“I hear you,” Roberta said. “That's just so awful.”

“That's what she wanted,” Garp said.

“I know,” Roberta said. “You've got to come home.”

“Right away,” Garp said.

“We don't know what to do,” Roberta said.

“What is there to do?” Garp asked. “There's nothing to do.”

“There should be something,” Roberta said, “but she said she never wanted a funeral.”

“Certainly not,” Garp said. “She wanted her body to go to a med school. You get that accomplished, Roberta: that's what Mom would have wanted.”

“But there ought to be something,” Roberta protested. “Maybe not a religious service, but something.”

“Don't you get involved in anything until I get there,” Garp told her.

“There's a lot of talk,” Roberta said. “People want a rally, or something.”

“I'm her only family, Roberta,” Garp said. “You tell them that.”

“She meant a lot to a lot of us, you know,” Roberta said, sharply.

Yes, and it got her killed! Garp thought, but he said nothing.

“I tried to look after her!” Roberta cried. “I told her not to go in that parking lot!”

“Nobody's to blame, Roberta,” Garp said, softly.

“You think somebody's to blame, Garp,” Roberta said. “You always do.”

“Please, Roberta,” Garp said. “You're my best friend.”

“I'll tell you who's to blame,” Roberta said. “It's men, Garp. It's your filthy murderous sex! If you can't fuck us the way you want to, you kill us in a hundred ways!”

“Not me, Roberta, please,” Garp said.

“Yes, you too,” Roberta whispered. “No man is a woman's friend.”

“I'm your friend, Roberta,” Garp said, and Roberta cried for a while—a sound as acceptable to Garp as rain falling on a deep lake.

“I'm so sorry,” Roberta whispered. “If I'd seen the man with the gun—just a second sooner—I could have blocked the shot. I would have, you know.”

“I know you would have, Roberta,” Garp said; he wondered if he would have. He felt love for his mother, of course; and now an aching loss. But did he ever feel such devotion to Jenny Fields as the followers among her own sex?

He apologized to the landlady for the lateness of the phone call. When he told her that his mother was dead, the old woman crossed herself—her sunken cheeks and her empty gums were mute but clear indications of the family deaths she had herself outlived.

Helen cried for the longest time; she would not let Jenny's namesake, little Jenny Garp, out of her arms. Duncan and Garp searched the newspapers, but the news would be a day getting to Austria—except for the marvel of television.

Garp watched his mother's murder on his landlady's TV.

There was some election nonsense at a shopping plaza in New Hampshire. The landscape had a vaguely seacoast appearance, and Garp recognized the place as being a few miles from Dog's Head Harbor.

The incumbent governor was in favor of all the same, swinish, stupid things. The woman running against him seemed educated and idealistic and kind; she also seemed to barely restrain her anger at the same, swinish, stupid things the governor represented.

The parking lot at the shopping plaza was circled by pickup trucks. The pickups were full of men in hunting coats and caps; apparently they represented local New Hampshire interests—as opposed to the interest in New Hampshire taken by the New York divorcees.

The nice woman running against the governor was also a kind of New York divorcee. That she had lived fifteen years in New Hampshire, and her children had gone to school there, was a fact more or less ignored by the incumbent governor, and by his supporters who circled the parking lot in their pickup trucks.

There were lots of signs; there was a steady jeering.

There was also a high school football team, in uniform—their cleats clacking on the cement of the parking lot. One of the woman candidate's children was on the team and he had assembled the football players in the parking lot in hopes of demonstrating to New Hampshire that it was perfectly manly to vote for his mother.

The hunters in their pickup trucks were of the opinion that to vote for this woman was to vote for faggotry—and lesbianism, and socialism, and alimony, and New York. And so forth. Garp had the feeling, watching the telecast, that those things were not tolerated in New Hampshire.

Garp and Helen and Duncan, and baby Jenny, sat in the Viennese pension about to watch the murder of Jenny Fields. Their bewildered old landlady served them coffee and little cakes; only Duncan ate anything.

Then Jenny Fields had her turn to speak to the assembled people in the parking lot. She spoke from the back of a pickup truck; Roberta Muldoon lifted her up to the tailgate and adjusted the microphone for her. Garp's mother looked very small in the pickup truck, especially beside Roberta, but Jenny's uniform was so white that she stood out, bright and clear.

“I am Jenny Fields,” she said—to some cheers and some whistles and some hoots. There was a blaring of horns from the pickup trucks circling the parking lot. The police were telling the pickup trucks to move on; they moved on, and came back, and moved on again. “Most of you know who I am,” Jenny Fields said. There were more hoots, more cheers, more blowing of horns—and a single sharp gunshot as conclusive as a wave breaking on the beach.

No one saw where it came from. Roberta Muldoon held Garp's mother under her arms. Jenny's white uniform seemed struck by a small dark splash. Then Roberta dropped down from the tailgate with Jenny in her arms and knifed through the breaking crowd like an old tight end carrying the ball for a hard first down. The crowd parted; Jenny's white uniform was almost concealed in Roberta's arms. There was a police car moving to intercept Roberta; when they neared each other, Roberta held out the body of Jenny Fields toward the squad car. For a moment Garp saw his mother's unmoving white uniform lifted above the crowd and into the arms of a policeman, who helped her and Roberta into the car.

The car, as they say, sped away. The camera was distracted by an apparent shoot-out taking place among the circling pickup trucks and several more police cars. Later, there was the still body of a man in a hunting coat lying in a dark puddle of what looked like oil. Later still, there was a closeup of what the newsmen would only identify as “a deer rifle.”

It was pointed out that the deer season had not officially opened.

Except for the fact that there had been no nudity in the telecast, the event was an X-rated soap opera from start to finish.

Garp thanked the landlady for allowing them to watch the news. Within two hours they were in Frankfurt, where they changed planes for New York. The Under Toad was not on the plane with them—not even for Helen, who was so afraid of planes. For a while, they knew, the Under Toad was elsewhere.

All Garp could think, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, was that his mother had delivered some adequate “last words.” Jenny Fields had ended her life saying, “Most of you know who I am.” On the airplane, Garp tried out the line.

“Most of you know who I am,” he whispered. Duncan was asleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand.

Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.