The World According to Garp

17. THE FIRST FEMINIST FUNERAL, AND OTHER FUNERALS

EVER since Walt died,” wrote T. S. Garp, “my life has felt like an epilogue.”

When Jenny Fields died, Garp must have felt his bewilderment increase—that sense of time passing with a plan. But what was the plan?

Garp sat in John Wolf's New York office, trying to comprehend the plethora of plans surrounding his mother's death.

“I didn't authorize a funeral,” Garp said. “How can there be a funeral? Where is the body, Roberta?”

Roberta Muldoon said patiently that the body was where Jenny wanted her body to go. It was not her body that mattered, Roberta said. There was simply going to be a kind of memorial service; it was better not to think of it as a “funeral.”

The newspapers had said it was to be the first feminist funeral in New York.

The police had said that violence was expected.

“The first feminist funeral?” Garp said.

“She meant so much to so many women,” Roberta said. “Don't be angry. You didn't own her, you know.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes.

Duncan Garp looked out the window of John Wolf's office, forty floors above Manhattan. It probably felt to Duncan a little like being on the plane he had just got off.

Helen was making a phone call in another office. She was trying to reach her father in the good old town of Steering; she wanted Ernie to meet their plane out of New York when it landed in Boston.

“All right,” Garp said, slowly; he held the baby, little Jenny Garp, on his knee. “All right. You know I don't approve of this, Roberta, but I'll go.”

“You'll go?” John Wolf said.

“No!” Roberta said. “I mean, you don't have to,” she said.

“I know,” Garp said. “But yo're right. She probably would have liked such a thing, so I'll go. What's going to happen at it?”

“There's going to be a lot of speeches,” Roberta said. “You don't want to go.”

“And they're going to read from her book,” John Wolf said. “We've donated some copies.”

“But you don't want to go, Garp,” Roberta said, nervously. “Please don't go.”

“I want to go,” Garp said. “I promise you I won't hiss or boo—no matter what the assholes say about her. I have something of hers I might read myself, if anyone's interested,” he said. “Did you ever see that thing she wrote about being called a feminist?” Roberta and John Wolf looked at each other; they looked stricken and gray. “She said, “I hate being called one, because it's a label I didn't choose to describe my feelings about men or the way I write."”

“I don't want to argue with you, Garp,” Roberta said. “Not now. You know perfectly well she said other things, too. She was a feminist, whether she liked the label or not. She was simply one for pointing out all the injustices to women; she was simply for allowing women to live their own lives and make their own choices.”

“Oh?” said Garp. “And did she believe that everything that happened to women happened to them because they were women?”

“You have to be stupid to believe that, Garp,” Roberta said. “You make us all sound like Ellen Jamesians.”

“Please stop it, both of you,” John Wolf said.

Jenny Garp squawked briefly and slapped Garp's knee; he looked at her, surprised—as if he'd forgotten she was a live thing there in his lap.

“What is it?” he asked her. But the baby was quiet again, watching some pattern in the landscape of John Wolf's office that was invisible to the rest of them.

“What time is this wingding?” Garp asked Roberta.

“Five o'clock in the afternoon,” Roberta said.

“I believe it was chosen,” John Wolf said, “so that half the secretaries in New York could walk off their jobs an hour early.”

“Not all the working women in New York are secretaries,” Roberta said.

“The secretaries,” said John Wolf, “are the only ones who'll be missed between four and five.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

Helen came in and announced that she could not reach her father on the phone.

“He's at wrestling practice,” Garp said.

“The wrestling season hasn't begun yet,” Helen said. Garp looked at the calendar on his watch, which was several hours out of sync with the United States; he had last set it in Vienna. But Garp knew that wrestling at Steering did not officially begin until after Thanksgiving. Helen was right.

“When I called his office at the gym, they said he was at home,” Helen told Garp. “And when I called home, there was no answer.”

“We'll rent a car at the airport,” Garp said. “And anyway, we can't leave until tonight. I have to go to this damn funeral.”

“No, you don't have to,” Roberta insisted.

“In fact,” Helen said, “you can't.”

Roberta and John Wolf again looked stricken and gray; Garp simply looked uninformed.

“What do you mean, I can't?” he asked.

“It's a feminist funeral,” Helen said. “Did you read the paper, or did you stop at the headlines?”

Garp looked accusingly at Roberta Muldoon, but she looked at Duncan looking out the window. Duncan had his telescope out, spying on Manhattan.

“You can't go, Garp,” Roberta admitted. “It's true. I didn't tell you because I thought it would really piss you off. I didn't think you'd want to go, anyway.”

“I'm not allowed?” Garp said.

“It's a funeral for women,” Roberta said. “Women loved her, women will mourn her. That's how we wanted it.”

Garp glared at Roberta Muldoon. “I loved her,” he said. “I'm her only child. Do you mean I can't go to this wingding because I'm a man?”

“I wish you wouldn't call it a wingding,” Roberta said.

“What's a wingding?” Duncan asked.

Jenny Garp squawked again, but Garp didn't listen to her. Helen took her from him.

“Do you mean no men are allowed at my mother's funeral?” Garp asked Roberta.

“It's not exactly a funeral, as I told you,” Roberta said. “It's more like a rally—it's a kind of reverent demonstration.”

“I'm going, Roberta,” Garp said. “I don't care what you call it.”

“Oh boy,” Helen said. She walked out of the office with baby Jenny. “I'm going to try to get my father again,” she said.

“I see a man with one arm,” Duncan said.

“Please don't go, Garp,” Roberta said softly.

“She's right,” John Wolf said. “I wanted to go, too. I was her editor, after all. But let them have it their way, Garp. I think Jenny would have liked the idea.”

“I don't care what she would have liked,” Garp said.

“That's probably true,” Roberta said. “That's another reason you shouldn't be there.”

“You don't know, Garp, how some of the women's movement people have reacted to your book,” John Wolf advised him.

Roberta Muldoon rolled her eyes. The accusation that Garp was cashing in on his mother's reputation, and the women's movement, had been made before. Roberta had seen the advertisement for The World According to Bensenhaver, which John Wolf had instantly authorized upon Jenny's assassination. Garp's book appeared to cash in on that tragedy, too—the ad conveyed a sick sense of a poor author who's lost a son “and now a mother, too.”

It is fortunate Garp never saw that ad; even John Wolf regretted it.

The World According to Bensenhaver sold and sold and sold. For years it would be controversial; it would be taught in colleges. Fortunately, Garp's other books would be taught in colleges, sporadically, too. One course taught Jenny's autobiography together with Garp's three novels and Stewart Percy's A History of Everett Steering's Academy. The purpose of that course, apparently, was to figure out everything about Garp's life by hunting through the books for those things that appeared to be true.

It is fortunate Garp never knew anything about that course, either.

“I see a man with one leg,” announced Duncan Garp, searching the streets and windows of Manhattan for all the crippled and misarranged—a task that could take years.

“Please stop it, Duncan,” Garp said to him.

“If you really want to go, Garp,” Roberta Muldoon whispered to him, “you'll have to go in drag.”

“If it's all that tough for a man to get in,” Garp snapped at Roberta, “you better hope they don't have a chromosome check at the door.” He felt instantly sorry he'd said that; he saw Roberta wince as if he'd slapped her and he took both her big hands in his and held them until he felt her squeeze him back. “Sorry,” he whispered. “If I've got to go in drag, it's a good thing you're here to help me dress up. I mean, you're an old hand at that, right?”

“Right,” Roberta said.

“This is ridiculous,” John Wolf said.

“If some of those women recognize you,” Roberta told Garp, “they'll tear you limb from limb. At the very least, they won't let you in the door.”

Helen came back in the office, with Jenny Garp squawking on her hip.

“I've called Dean Bodger,” she told Garp. “I asked him to try to reach Daddy. It's just not like him, to be nowhere.”

Garp shook his head.

“We should just go to the airport now,” Helen told him. “Rent a car in Boston, drive to Steering. Let the children rest,” she said. “Then if you want to run back to New York on some crusade, you can do it.”

“You go,” Garp said. “I'll take a plane and rent my own car later.”

“That's silly,” Helen said.

“And needlessly expensive,” Roberta said.

“I have a lot of money now,” Garp said; his wry smile to John Wolf was not returned.

John Wolf volunteered to take Helen and the kids to the airport.

“One man with one arm, one man with one leg, two people who limped,” said Duncan, “and someone without any nose.”

“You should wait awhile and get a look at your father,” Roberta Muldoon said.

Garp thought of himself: a grieving ex-wrestler, in drag for his mother's memorial service. He kissed Helen and the children, and even John Wolf. “Don't worry about your dad,” Garp told Helen.

“And don't worry about Garp,” Roberta told Helen. “I'm going to disguise him so that everyone will leave him alone.”

“I wish you'd try to leave everyone alone,” Helen told Garp.

There was suddenly another woman in John Wolf's crowded office; no one had noticed her, but she had been trying to get John Wolf's attention. When she spoke, she spoke out in a single, clear moment of silence and everyone looked at her.

“Mr. Wolf?” the woman said. She was old and brown-black-gray, and her feet appeared to be killing her; she wore an electrical extension cord, wrapped twice around her thick waist.

“Yes, Jillsy?” John Wolf said, and Garp stared at the woman. It was Jillsy Sloper, of course; John Wolf should have known that writers remember names.

“I was wonderin',” Jillsy said, “if I could get off early this afternoon—if you'd say a word for me, because I want to go to that funeral.” She spoke with her chin down, a stiff mutter of bitten words—as few as possible. She did not like to open her mouth around strangers; also, she recognized Garp and she didn't want to be introduced to him—not ever.

“Yes, of course you can,” John Wolf said, quickly. He didn't want to introduce Jillsy Sloper to Garp any more than she wanted it.

“Just a minute,” Garp said. Jillsy Sloper and John Wolf froze. “Are you Jillsy Sloper?” Garp asked her.

“No!” John Wolf blurted. Garp glared at him.

“How do you do?” Jillsy said to Garp; she would not look at him.

“How do you do?” Garp said. He could see at a glance that this sorrowful woman had not, as John Wolf said, “loved” his book.

“I'm sorry about your mom,” Jillsy said.

“Thank you very much,” Garp said, but he could see—they all could see—that Jillsy Sloper was seething about something.

“She was worth two or three of you!” Jillsy suddenly cried to Garp. There were tears in her muddy-yellow eyes. “She was worth four or five of your terrible books!” she crooned. “Lawd,” she muttered, leaving them all in John Wolf's office. “Lawd, Lawd!”

Another person with a limp, thought Duncan Garp, but he could see that his father did not want to hear about his body count.

At the first feminist funeral held in the city of New York, the mourners appeared unsure how to behave. This was perhaps the result of the gathering's being not in a church but in one of these enigmatic buildings of the city university system—an auditorium, old with the echo of speeches no one had listened to. The giant space was slightly seedy with the sense of past cheering—for rock bands, and for the occasional, well-known poet. But the space was also serious with the certain knowledge that large lectures had taken place there; it was a room in which hundreds of people had taken notes.

The name of the space was School of Nursing Hall—thus it was oddly appropriate as a place of tribute to Jenny Fields. It was hard to tell the difference between the mourners wearing their Jenny Fields Originals, with the little red hearts stitched over the breast, and the real nurses, forever white and unfashionable, who had other reasons to be in the environs of the nursing school but had paused to peek in on the ceremonies—either curious or genuinely sympathetic, or both.

There were many white uniforms among the enormous, milling, softly mumbling audience, and Garp immediately cursed Roberta. “I told you I could have dressed as a nurse,” Garp hissed. “I could have been a little less conspicuous.”

“I thought you'd be conspicuous as a nurse,” Roberta said. “I didn't know there'd be so many.”

“It's going to be a fucking national trend,” Garp muttered. “Just wait and see,” he said, but he said no more; he huddled small and garish beside Roberta, feeling that everyone was looking at him and somehow sensing his maleness—or at least, as Roberta had warned him, his hostility.

They sat dead-center in the massive auditorium, only three rows back from the stage and the speakers' platform; a sea of women had moved in and sat behind them—rows and rows of them—and farther back, at the wide-open rear of the hall (where there were no seats), the women who were less interested in seating themselves for the entire ritual, but who'd wanted to come pay their respects, filed slowly in one door and slowly out another. It was as if the larger, seated audience were the open casket of Jenny Fields that the slow-walking women had come to observe.

Garp, of course, felt that he was an open casket, and all the women were observing him—his pallor, his hue, his preposterous disguise.

Roberta had done this to him, perhaps to get even, with him for his bullying her into letting him come at all—or for his cruel crack concerning her chromosomes. Roberta had dressed Garp in a cheap turquoise jump suit, the color of Oren Rath's pickup truck. The jump suit had a gold zipper that ran from Garp's crotch to Garp's throat. Garp did not adequately fill the hips of the suit, but his breasts—or, rather, the falsies Roberta had fashioned for him—strained against the snap-flap pockets and twisted the vulnerable zipper askew.

“What a set you have!” Roberta had told him.

“You animal, Roberta,” Garp had hissed to her.

The shoulder straps of the huge, hideous bra dug into his shoulders. But whenever Garp felt that a woman was staring at him, perhaps doubting his sex, he would simply turn himself sideways to her and show off. Thus eliminating any possible doubt, or so he hoped.

He was less sure of the wig. A tousled whore's head of honey-blond hair, under which his own scalp itched.

A pretty green silk scarf was at his throat.

His dark face was powdered a sickly gray, but this concealed, Roberta said, his stubble of beard. His rather thin lips were cherry-colored, but he kept licking them and had smeared the lipstick at one corner of his mouth.

“You look like you've just been kissed,” Roberta reassured him.

Though Garp was cold, Roberta had not allowed him to wear his ski parka—it made his shoulders look too thick. And on Garp's feet was a towering pair of knee-high boots—a kind of cherry vinyl that matched, Roberta said, his lipstick. Garp had seen himself reflected in a storefront window and he'd told Roberta that he thought he looked like a teen-age prostitute.

“An aging teen-age prostitute,” Roberta had corrected him.

“A faggot parachutist,” Garp had said.

“No, you look like a woman, Garp,” Roberta had assured him. “Not a woman with especially good taste, but a woman.”

So Garp sat squirming in School of Nursing Hall. He twisted the itchy rope braids of his ridiculous purse, a scraggily hemp thing with an oriental design, barely big enough to hold his wallet. In her large, bursting shoulder bag, Roberta Muldoon had hidden Garp's real clothes—his other identity.

“This is Manda Horton-Jones,” Roberta whispered, indicating a thin, hawk-nosed woman speaking nasally and with her rodential head pointed down; she read a stiff, prepared speech.

Garp didn't know who Manda Horton-Jones was; he shrugged, enduring her. The speeches had ranged from strident, political calls for unity to disturbed, painful, personal reminiscences of Jenny Fields. The audience did not know whether to applaud or to pray—whether to voice approval or to nod grimly. The atmosphere was both one of mourning and one of urgent togetherness—with a strong sense of marching forth. Thinking about it, Garp supposed this was natural and fitting, both to his mother and to his dim perception of what the women's movement was.

“This is Sally Devlin,” Roberta whispered. The woman now climbing to the speakers' platform looked pleasant and wise and vaguely familiar. Garp felt immediately the need to defend himself from her. He didn't mean it, but solely to goad Roberta, Garp whispered, “She has nice legs.”

“Nicer than yours,” Roberta said, pinching his thigh painfully between her strong thumb and her long, pass-catching index finger—one of the fingers, Garp supposed, that had been broken so many times during Roberta's fling as a Philadelphia Eagle.

Sally Devlin looked down on them with her soft, sad eyes as if she were silently scolding a classroom of children who were not paying attention—not even sitting still.

“That senseless murder does not really merit all this,” she said, quietly. “But Jenny Fields simply helped so many individuals, she simply was so patient and generous with women who were having a bad time. Anyone who's ever been helped by someone else should feel terrible about what's happened to her.”

Garp felt truly terrible, at that moment; he heard a combined sigh and sob of hundreds of women. Beside him, Roberta's broad shoulders shook against him. He felt a hand, perhaps of the woman sitting directly behind him, grip his own shoulder, cramped in the terrible turquoise jump suit. He wondered if he was about to be slapped for his offensive, inappropriate attire, but the hand just held on to his shoulder. Perhaps the woman needed support. At this moment, Garp knew, they all felt like sisters, didn't they?

He looked up to see what Sally Devlin was saying, but his own eyes were teary and he could not see Ms. Devlin clearly. He could hear her, though: she was sobbing. Great heartfelt and heaving cries! She was trying to get back to her speech but her eyes couldn't find her place on the page; the page rattled against the microphone. Some very powerful-looking woman, whom Garp thought he had seen before—one of those bodyguard types he had often seen with his mother—tried to help Sally Devlin off the platform, but Ms. Devlin didn't want to leave.

“I wasn't going to do this,” she said, still crying—meaning her sobs, her loss of control. “I had more to say,” she protested, but she could not get hold of her voice. “Damn it,” she said, with a dignity that moved Garp.

The big tough-looking woman found herself alone at the microphone. The audience waited quietly. Garp felt a tremble, or maybe a tug, from the hand on his shoulder. Looking at Roberta's large hands, folded in her lap, Garp knew that the hand on his shoulder must be very small. The big tough-looking woman wanted to say something, and the audience waited. But they would wait forever to hear a word from her. Roberta knew her. Roberta stood up beside Garp and began to applaud the big, hard-looking woman's silence—her exasperating quiet in front of the microphone. Other people joined Roberta's applause—even Garp, though he had no idea why he was clapping.

“She's an Ellen Jamesian,” Roberta whispered to him. “She can't say anything.” Yet the woman melted the audience with her pained, sorry face. She opened her mouth as if she were singing, but no sound came out. Garp imagined he could see the severed stump of her tongue. He remembered how his mother supported them—these crazies; Jenny was wonderful to every single one of them who came to her. But Jenny had finally admitted her disapproval of what they had done—perhaps only to Garp. “They're making victims of themselves,” Jenny had said, “and yet that's the same thing they're angry at men for doing to them. Why don't they just take a vow of silence, or never speak in a man's presence?” Jenny said. “It's not logical: to maim yourself to make a point.”

But Garp, now touched by the mad woman in front of him, felt the whole history of the world's self-mutilation—though violent and illogical, it expressed, perhaps like nothing else, a terrible hurt. “I am really hurt,” said the woman's huge face, dissolving before him in his own swimmy tears.

Then the little hand on his shoulder hurt him; he remembered himself—a man at a ritual for women—and he turned around to see the rather tired-looking young woman behind him. Her face was familiar, but he didn't recognize her.

“I know you,” the young woman whispered to him. She did not sound happy that she knew him, either.

Roberta had warned him not to open his mouth to anyone, not even to try to speak. He was prepared for handling that problem. He shook his head. He took a pad of paper out of the flap pocket, which was crushed against his mammoth, false bosom, and he snatched a pencil out of his absurd purse. The sharp, clawlike fingers of the woman bit into his shoulder, as if she were keeping him from running away.

Hi! I'm an Ellen Jamesian,

Garp scribbled on the pad; he tore the slip off and handed it to the young woman. She didn't take it.

“Like hell you are,” she said. “You're T. S. Garp.”

The word Garp bounced like the burp of an unknown animal into the silence of the suffering auditorium, still conducted by the quiet Ellen Jamesian on stage. Roberta Muldoon turned around and looked panic-stricken; she had never seen this particular young woman in her life.

“I don't know who your big playmate is,” the young woman told Garp, “but you're T. S. Garp. I don't know where you got that dumb wig or those big tits, but I'd know you anywhere. You haven't changed a bit since you were fucking my sister—fucking her to death,” the young woman said. And Garp knew who his enemy was: the last and youngest of the Percy Family Horde. Bainbridge! Little Pooh Percy, who was wearing diapers as a preteen, and, for all Garp knew, might be wearing them still.

Garp looked at her; Garp had bigger tits than she did. Pooh was asexually attired, her haircut was similar to a popular and unisexual style, her features were neither delicate nor coarse. Pooh wore a U.S. Army shirt with sergeant stripes and a campaign button for the woman who'd hoped to be the new governor of the State of New Hampshire. With a shock, Garp realized that the woman running for governor was Sally Devlin. He wondered if she'd won!

“Hello, Pooh,” Garp said, and saw her wince—a hated nickname, obviously, and one she was never called anymore. “Bainbridge,” Garp muttered, but it was too late to make friends. It was years too late. It was too late from the night Garp had bitten off Bonkers' ear, had violated Cushie in the Steering School infirmary, had not ever really loved her—had not come to her wedding, and not to her funeral.

Whatever grudge against Garp this was, or whatever loathing for men in general, Pooh Percy had her enemy at her mercy—at last.

Roberta's big warm hand was at the small of Garp's back and her heavy voice urged him, “Get out of here, move fast, don't say a word.”

“There's a man here!” Bainbridge Percy shouted to the grieving silence of School of Nursing Hall. That even brought a small sound—perhaps a grunt—from the troubled Ellen Jamesian on stage. “There's a man here!” Pooh screamed. “And he's T. S. Garp. Garp is here!” she cried.

Roberta tried to lead him to the aisle. A tight end is chiefly a good blocker, secondarily a pass—receiver, but even the former Robert Muldoon could not quite move all these women.

“Please,” Roberta said. “Excuse us, please. She was his mother—you must know that. Her only child.”

My only mother! Garp thought, plowing against Roberta's back; he felt Pooh Percy's needlelike claws rake his face. She snatched his wig off; he snatched it back and clutched it to his big bosom, as if it mattered to him.

“He fucked my sister to death!” Pooh Percy wailed. How this perception of Garp had convinced her, Garp would never know—but convinced of it Pooh clearly was. She climbed over the seat he had abandoned and moved in behind him and Roberta—who finally broke through, into the aisle.

“She was my mother,” Garp said to a woman he was passing, a woman who looked like a potential mother herself. She was pregnant. In the woman's scornful face Garp saw reason and kindness; he also saw restraint and contempt.

“Let him pass,” the pregnant woman murmured, but without much feeling.

Others seemed more sympathetic. Someone cried out that he had a right to be there—but there were other things shouted, rather lacking sympathy of any kind.

Farther up the aisle he felt his falsies punched; he put his hand out for Roberta and realized Roberta had (as they say in football) been taken out of the play. She was down. Several young women wearing navy pea coats appeared to be sitting on her. It occurred to Garp that they might think Roberta was also a man in drag; their discovery that Roberta was real could be painful.

“Take off, Garp!” Roberta cried.

“Yes, run, you little fucker!” one woman in a pea coat hissed.

He ran.

He was almost up to the milling women at the rear of the hall when someone's blow landed where it was aimed. He had not been hit in the balls since a wrestling practice at Steering—so many years ago, he realized he had forgotten the total incapacity that resulted. He covered himself and lay curled on one hip. They kept trying to rip his wig out of his hands. And his tiny purse. He held on as if this were some mugging. He felt a few shoes, a few slaps, and then the minty breath of an elderly woman breathing in his face.

“Try to get up,” she said, gently. He saw she was a nurse. A real nurse. There was no fashionable heart sewn above her breast; there was just the little brass-and-blue nameplate—she was R. N. So-and-So.

“My name is Dotty,” the nurse told him; she was at least sixty.

“Hello,” Garp said. “Thank you, Dotty.”

She took his arm and led him at a fast pace through the remaining mob. No one appeared to want to hurt him when he was with her. They let him go.

“Do you have money for a cab?” the nurse named Dotty asked him when they were outside School of Nursing Hall.

“Yes, I think so,” Garp said. He checked his horrid purse; his wallet was safely there. And his wig—tousled still further—was under his arm. Roberta had Garp's real clothes and Garp looked in vain for any sign of Roberta emerging from the first feminist funeral.

“Put that wig on,” Dotty advised him, “or you'll be mistaken for one of those transvestites.” He struggled to put it on; she helped him. “People are really rough on transvestites,” Dotty added. She took several bobby pins from her own gray head of hair and fastened Garp's wig more decently in place.

The scratch on his cheek, she told him, would stop bleeding very soon.

On the steps of School of Nursing Hall, a tall black woman who looked like an even match for Roberta shook her fist at Garp but said not a word. Perhaps she was another Ellen Jamesian. A few other women were gathering there and Garp feared they might be thinking over the advisability of an open attack. Oddly at the fringe of their group, but seeming to have no connection with them, was a wraithlike girl, or barely grown-up child; she was a dirty blond-headed girl with piercing eyes the color of coffee-stained saucers—like a drug-user's eyes, or someone long involved in hard tears. Garp felt frozen by her stare, and frightened of her—as if she were really crazy, a kind of teen-age hit man for the women's movement, with a gun in her oversized purse. He clutched his own ratty bag, recalling that his wallet was at least full of credit cards; he had enough cash for a cab to the airport and the credit cards could get him a flight to Boston and the bosom, so to speak, of his remaining family. He wished he could relieve himself of his ostentatious tits, but there they were, as if he'd been born with them—and born, too, in this alternately tight and baggy jump suit. It was all he had and it would have to do. From the din escaping from School of Nursing Hall, Garp knew that Roberta was deep in the throes of debate—if not combat. Someone who had fainted, or had been mauled, was carried out; more police went in.

“Your mother was a first-rate nurse and a woman who made every woman proud,” the nurse named Dotty told him. “I'll bet she was a good mother, too.”

“She sure was,” Garp said.

The nurse got him a cab; the last he saw of her, she was walking away from the curb, back toward School of Nursing Hall. The other women who'd seemed so threatening, on the steps outside the building, appeared to be not interested in molesting her. More police were arriving; to Garp looked for the strange saucer-eyed girl, but she was not among the other women.

He asked the cabby who the new governor of New Hampshire was. Garp tried to conceal the depth of his voice, but the cabby, familiar with the eccentricities of his job, seemed unsurprised at both Garp's voice and Garp's appearance.

“I was out of the country,” Garp said.

“You didn't miss nothin', sweetie,” the cabby told him. “That broad broke down.”

“Sally Devlin?” said Garp.

“She cracked up, right on the TV,” the cabby said. “She was so flipped out over the assassination, she couldn't control herself. She was givin' this speech but she couldn't get through it, you know7

“She looked like a real idiot to me,” the cabby said. “She couldn't be no governor if she couldn't control herself no better than that.”

And Garp saw the pattern of the woman's loss emerging. Perhaps the foul incumbent governor had remarked that Ms. Devlin's inability to control her emotions was “just like a woman.” Disgraced by her demonstration of her feelings for Jenny Fields, Sally Devlin was judged not competent enough for whatever dubious work being a governor entailed.

Garp felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of other people. “In my opinion,” the cabby said, “it took something like that shooting to show the people that the woman couldn't handle the job, you know?”

“Shut up and drive,” Garp said.

“Look, honey,” the cabby. said. “I don't have to put up with no abuse.”

“You're an asshole and a moron,” Garp told him, “and if you don't drive me to the airport with your mouth shut, I'll tell a cop you tried to paw me all over.”

The cabby floored the accelerator and drove for a while in furious silence, hoping the speed and recklessness of his driving would scare his passenger.

“If you don't slow down,” Garp said, “I'll tell a cop you tried to rape me.”

“Fucking weirdo,” the cabby said, but he slowed down and drove to the airport without another word. Garp put the money for the tip on the taxi's hood and one of the coins rolled into the crack between the hood and fender. “Fucking women,” the cabby said.

“Fucking men,” said Garp, feeling—with mixed feelings—that he had done his duty to ensure that the sex war went on.

At the airport they questioned Garp's American Express card and asked for further identification. Inevitably, they asked him about the initials T. S. The airline ticket-maker was clearly not in touch with the literary world—not to know who T. S. Garp was.

He told the ticket-maker that T. was for Tillie, S. was for Sarah. “Tillie Sarah Garp?” the ticket-maker said. She was a young woman, and she clearly disapproved of Garp's oddly fetching but whorish appearance. “Nothing to check, and no carry-on luggage?” Garp was asked.

“No, nothing,” he said.

“You have a coat?” the stewardess asked him, also giving him a condescending appraisal.

“No coat,” Garp said. The stewardess gave a start at the deepness of his voice. “No bags and nothing to hang up,” he said, smiling. He felt that all he had was breasts—the terrific knockers Roberta had made for him—and he walked slouched and stoop-shouldered to try to hold them back. There was no holding them back, though.

As soon as he chose a seat, some man chose to sit beside him. Garp looked out the window. Passengers were still hurrying to his plane. Among them, he saw a wraithlike, dirty blond-haired girl. She had no coat and no carry-on luggage, either. Just that oversized pursebig enough for a bomb. Thickly, Garp sensed the Under Toad—a wriggle at his hip. He looked toward the aisle, so that he would notice where the girl chose to sit, but he looked into the leering face of the man who'd taken the aisle seat beside him.

“Perhaps, when we're in the air,” the man said, knowingly, “I could buy you a little drink?” His small, close-together eyes were riveted on the twisted zipper of Garp's straining turquoise jump suit.

Garp felt a peculiar kind of unfairness overwhelm him. He had not asked to have such an anatomy. He wished he could have spent a quiet time, just talking, with that wise and pleasant-looking woman, Sally Devlin, the failed gubernatorial candidate from New Hampshire. He would have told her that she was too good for the rotten job.

“That's some suit you got,” said Garp's leering seat partner.

“Go stick it in your ear,” Garp said. He was, after all, the son of a woman who'd slashed a masher at a movie in Boston—years ago, long ago. The man struggled to get up, but he couldn't; his seat belt would not release him. He looked helplessly at Garp. Garp leaned over the man's trapped lap; Garp gagged on his own dose of perfume, which he remembered Roberta slathering over him. He got the seat-belt clasp to operate properly and released the man with a sharp snap. Then Garp growled a menacing whisper in the man's very red ear. “When we're in the air, cutie,” he whispered to the frightened fellow, “go blow yourself in the bathroom.”

But when the man deserted Garp's company, the aisle seat was vacant, inviting someone else. Garp glared challengingly at the empty seat, daring the next man on the make to sit there. The person who approached Garp shook his momentary confidence. She was very thin, her girlish hands bony and clutching her oversized purse. She didn't ask first; she just sat down. The Under Toad is a very young girl today, Garp thought. When she reached into her purse, Garp caught her wrist and pulled her hand out of the bag and into her lap. She was not strong, and in her hand there was no gun; there was not even a knife. Garp saw only a pad of paper and a pencil with the eraser bitten down to a nub.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. If she was not an assassin, he guessed he knew who or what she was. “Why is my life so full of people with impaired speech?” he wrote once. “Or is it only because I'm a writer that I notice all the damaged voices around me?”

The nonviolent waif on the airplane beside him wrote hastily and handed him a note.

“Yes, yes,” he said, wearily. “You're an Ellen Jamesian.” But the girl bit her lip and fiercely shook her head. She pushed the note into his hand.

My name is Ellen James,

the note informed Garp.

I am not an Ellen Jamesian.

“You're the Ellen James?” he asked her, though it was unnecessary and he knew it—just looking at her, he should have known. She was the right age; not so long ago she would have been that eleven-year-old child, raped and untongued. The dirty-saucer eyes were, up close, not dirty; they were simply bloodshot, perhaps insomniac. Her lower lip was ragged; it looked like the pencil eraser—bitten down.

She scribbled more.

I came from Illinois. My parents were killed in an auto accident, recently. I came East to meet your mother. I wrote her a letter and she actually answered me! She wrote me a wonderful reply. She invited me to come stay with her. She also told me to read all your books.

Garp turned these tiny pages of notepaper; he kept nodding; he kept smiling.

But your mother was killed!

From the big purse Ellen James pulled a brown bandanna into which she blew her nose.

I went to stay with a women's group in New York. But I already knew too many Ellen Jamesians. They're all I know; I get hundreds of Christmas cards,

she wrote. She paused for Garp to read that line.

“Yes, yes, I'm sure you do,” he encouraged her.

I went to the funeral, of course. I went because I knew you'd be there. I knew you'd come,

she wrote; she stopped, now, to smile at him. Then she hid her face in her dirty brown bandanna.

“You wanted to see me?” Garp said.

She nodded, fiercely. She pulled from the big bag her mangled copy of The World According to Bensenhaver.

The best rape story I have ever read,

wrote Ellen James. Garp winced.

Do you know how many times I have read this book?

she wrote. He looked at her teary, admiring eyes. He shook his head, as mutely as an Ellen Jamesian. She touched his face; she had a childlike inability with her hands. She held up her fingers for him to count. All of one little hand and most of the other. She had read his awful book eight times.

“Eight times,” Garp murmured.

She nodded, and smiled at him. Now she settled back in the plane seat, as if her life were accomplished, now that she was sitting beside him, en route to Boston—if not with the woman she had admired all the way from Illinois, at least with the woman's only son, who would have to suffice.

“Have you been to college?” Garp asked her.

Ellen James held up one dirty finger; she made an unhappy face. “One year?” Garp translated. “But you didn't like it. It didn't work out?”

She nodded eagerly.

“And what do you want to be?” he asked her, barely keeping himself from adding: When you grow up.

She pointed to him and blushed. She actually touched his gross breasts.

“A writer?” Garp guessed. She relaxed and smiled; he understood her so easily, her face seemed to say. Garp felt his throat constricting. She struck him as one of those doomed children he had read about: the ones who have no antibodies—they have no natural immunities to disease. If they don't live their lives in plastic bags, they die of their first common cold. Here was Ellen James of Illinois, out of her sack.

“Both your parents were killed?” Garp asked. She nodded, and bit again her chewed lip. “And you have no other family?” he asked her. She shook her head.

He knew what his mother would have done. He knew Helen wouldn't mind; and of course Roberta would always be of help. And all those women who'd been wounded and were now healed, in their fashion.

“Well, you have a family now,” Garp told Ellen James; he held her hand and winced to hear himself make such an offer. He heard the echo of his mother's voice, her old soap-opera role: The Adventures of Good Nurse.

Ellen James shut her eyes as if she had fainted for joy. When the stewardess asked her to fasten her seat belt, Ellen James didn't hear; Garp fastened her belt for her. All the short flight to Boston the girl wrote her heart out.

I hate the Ellen Jamesians,

she wrote.

I would never do this to myself.

She opened her mouth and pointed to the wide absence in there. Garp cringed.

I want to talk; I want to say everything,

wrote Ellen James. Garp noticed that the gnarled thumb and index finger of her writing hand were easily twice the size of the unused instruments on her other hand; she had a writing muscle such as he'd never seen. No writer's cramp for Ellen James, he thought.

The words come and come,

she wrote. She waited for his approval, line by line. He would nod; she would go on. She wrote him her whole life. Her high school English teacher, the only one who mattered. Her mother's eczema. The Ford Mustang that her father drove too fast.

I have read everything,

she wrote. Garp told her that Helen was a big reader, too; he thought she would like Helen. The girl looked very hopeful.

Who was your favorite writer when you were a boy?

“Joseph Conrad,” Garp said. She sighed her approval.

Jane Austen was mine.

“That's fine,” Garp said to her.

At Logan Airport she was almost asleep on her feet; Garp steered her up the aisles and leaned her on the counters while he filled out the necessary forms for the rental car.

“T. S.?” the rental-car person asked. One of Garp's falsies was slipping sideways and the rental-car person appeared anxious that this entire turquoise body might self-destruct.

In the car north, on the dark road to Steering, Ellen James slept like a kitten curled in the back seat. In the rear-view mirror Garp noted that her knee was skinned, and that the girl sucked her thumb while she slept.

It had been a proper funeral for Jenny Fields, after all; some essential message had passed from mother to son. Here he was, playing nurse to someone. More essentially, Garp finally understood what his mother's talent had been; she had right instincts—Jenny Fields always did what was right. One day, Garp hoped, he would see the connection between this lesson and his own writing, but that was a personal goal—like others, it would take a little time. Importantly, it was in the car north to Steering, with the real Ellen James asleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields.

A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

“Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.”

Thus Garp, with his defenses down and his sense of the Under Toad fled from him—at least, since his arrival in Boston—walked into the house of Ernie Holm, his father-in-law, carrying the sleeping Ellen James in his arms. She might have been nineteen, but she was easier to carry than Duncan.

Garp was not prepared for the grizzled face of Dean Bodger, alone in Ernie's dim living room, watching TV. The old dean, who would soon retire, seemed to accept that Garp was dressed as a whore, but he stared with horror at the sleeping Ellen James.

“Is she...”

“She's asleep,” Garp said. “Where's everyone?” And with the voicing of his question, Garp heard the cold hop of the Under Toad thudding across the cold floors of the silent house.

“I tried to reach you,” Dean Bodger told him. “It's Ernie.”

“His heart,” Garp guessed.

“Yes,” Bodger said. “They gave Helen something to help her sleep. She's upstairs. And I thought I'd stay until you got here—you know: so that if the children woke up and needed anything, they wouldn't disturb her. I'm sorry, Garp. These things sometimes come all at once, or they seem to.”

Garp knew how Bodger had liked his mother, too. He put the sleeping Ellen James on the living-room couch and turned off the sickly TV, which was turning the girl's face bluish.

“In his sleep?” Garp asked Bodger, pulling off his wig. “Did you find Ernie here?”

Now the poor dean looked nervous. “He was on the bed upstairs,” Bodger said. “I called up the stairs, but I knew I'd have to go up and find him. I fixed him up a little before I called anyone.”

“Fixed him up?” Garp said. He unzipped the terrible turquoise jump suit and ripped off his breasts. The old dean perhaps thought this was a common traveling disguise of the now-famous writer.

“Please don't ever tell Helen,” Bodger said.

“Tell her what?” Garp asked.

Bodger brought out the magazine—out from under his bulging vest. It was the issue of Crotch Shots where the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver had been published. The magazine looked very worn and used.

“Ernie had been looking at it, you know,” Bodger said. “When his heart stopped.”

Garp took the magazine from Bodger and imagined the death scene. Ernie Holm had been masturbating to the split-beaver pictures when his heart quit. There was a joke during Garp's days at Steering that this was the preferred way to “go.” So Ernie had gone that way, and the kindly Bodger had pulled up the coach's pants and hidden the magazine from the coach's daughter.

“I had to tell the medical examiner, you know,” Bodger said.

A nasty metaphor from his mother's past came up to Garp in a wave, like nausea, but he did not express it to the old dean. Lust lays another good man low! Ernie's lonely life depressed Garp.

“And your mom,” sighed Bodger, shaking his head under the cold porch light that glowed into the black Steering campus. “Your mom was someone special,” the old man mused. “She was a real fighter,” the scrappy Bodger said, with pride. “I still have copies of the notes she wrote to Stewart Percy.”

“You were always nice to her,” Garp reminded him.

“She was worth a hundred Stewart Percys, you know, Garp,” Bodger said.

“She sure was,” Garp said.

“You know he's gone, too?” Bodger said.

“Fat Stew?” said Garp.

“Yesterday,” Bodger said. “After a long illness—you know what that usually means, don't you?”

“No,” Garp said. He hadn't ever thought about it.

“Cancer, usually,” Bodger said, gravely. “He had it for a long time.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” Garp said. He was thinking of Pooh, and of course of Cushie. And his old challenger, Bonkers, whose ear in his dreams he could still taste.

“There's going to be some confusion about the Steering chapel,” Bodger explained. “Helen can tell you, she understands. Stewart has a service in the morning; Ernie, has his later in the day. And, of course, you know the bit about Jenny?”

“What bit?” Garp asked.

“The memorial?”

“God, no,” Garp said. “A memorial here?”

“There are girls here now, you know,” Bodger said. “I should say women,” he added, shaking his head. “I don't know; they're awfully young. They're girls to me.”

“Students?” Garp said.

“Yes, students,” Bodger said. “The girl students voted to name the infirmary after her.”

“The infirmary?” Garp said.

“Well, it's never had a name, you know,” Bodger said. “Most of our buildings have names.”

“The Jenny Fields Infirmary,” Garp said, numbly.

“Sort of nice, isn't it?” Bodger asked; he wasn't too sure if Garp would think so, but Garp didn't care.

In the long night, baby Jenny woke up once; by the time Garp had moved himself away from Helen's warm and deeply sleeping body, he saw that Ellen James had already found the crying baby and was warming a bottle. Odd cooing and grunting sounds, appropriate to babies, came softly out of the tongueless mouth of Ellen James. She had worked in a day-care center in Illinois, she had written Garp on the plane. She knew all about babies, and could even make noises like them.

Garp smiled at her and went back to bed.

In the morning he told Helen about Ellen James and they talked about Ernie.

“It was good that he went in his sleep,” Helen said. “When I think of your mother.”

“Yes, yes,” Garp told her.

Duncan was introduced to Ellen James. One-eyed and no-tongued, thought Garp, my family will pull together.

When Roberta called to describe her arrest, Duncan—who was the least-tired talking human in the house—explained to her about Ernie's heart attack.

Helen found the turquoise jump suit and the huge, loaded bra in the kitchen wastebasket; it seemed to cheer her up. The cherry-colored vinyl boots actually fit her better than they had fit Garp, but she threw them out, anyway. Ellen James wanted the green scarf, and Helen took the girl shopping for some more clothes. Duncan asked for and received the wig, which—to Garp's irritation—he wore most of the morning.

Dean Bodger called, to ask to be of use.

A man who was the new director of Physical Facilities for the Steering School stopped at the house to talk confidentially with Garp. The Physical Facilities director explained that Ernie had lived in a school house, and as soon as it was convenient for Helen, Ernie's things should be moved out. Garp had understood that the original Steering family house, Midge Steering Percy's house, had been given back to the school some years ago—a gift of Midge and Fat Stew, for which a ceremony had been arranged. Garp told the Physical Facilities director that he hoped Helen had as much time to move out as Midge would be given.

“Oh, we'll sell that albatross,” the man confided to Garp. “It's a lemon, you know.”

The Steering family house, in Garp's memory, was no lemon.

“All that history,” Garp said. “I should think you'd want it—and it was a gift, after all.”

“The plumbing's terrible,” the man said. He implied that, in their advancing senility, Midge and Fat Stew had let the place fall into a wretched state. “It may be a lovely old house, and all that,” the young man said, “but the school has to look ahead. We've got enough history around here. We can't sink our housing funds into history. We need more buildings that the school can use. No matter what you do with that old mansion, it's just another family house.”

When Garp told Helen that the Steering Percy house was going to be sold, Helen broke down. Of course she was really crying for her father, and for everything, but the thought that the Steering School did not even want the grandest house of their childhood years depressed both Garp and Helen.

Then Garp, had to check with the organist at the Steering chapel so that the same music would not be played for Ernie that, in the morning, would be played for Fat Stew. This mattered to Helen; she was upset, so Garp didn't question the seeming meaninglessness, to him, of his errand.

The Steering chapel was a squat Tudor attempt at a building; the church was so wreathed in ivy that it appeared to have thrust itself up out of the ground and was struggling to break through the matted vines. The pantlegs of John Wolf's dark, pin-striped suit dragged under Garp's heels as he peered into the musty chapel—he had never delivered the suit to a proper tailor, but had attempted to take up the pants himself. The first wave of gray organ music drifted over Garp like smoke. He thought he had come early enough, but to his dread he saw that Fat Stew's funeral had already begun. The audience was old and hardly recognizable—those ancients of the Steering School community who would attend anyone's death, as if, in double sympathy, they were anticipating their own. This death, Garp thought, was chiefly attended because Midge was a Steering; Stewart Percy had made few friends. The pews were pockmarked with widows; their little black hats with veils were like dark cobwebs that had fallen on the heads of these old women.

“I'm glad you're here, Jack,” a man in black said to Garp. Garp had slipped almost unnoticed into a back pew; he was going to wait out the ordeal and then speak to the organist. “We're short some muscle for the casket,” the man said, and Garp recognized him—he was the hearse driver from the funeral home.

“I'm not a pallbearer,” Garp whispered.

“You've got to be,” the driver said, “or we'll never get him out of here. He's a big one.”

The hearse driver smelled of cigars, but Garp had only to glance about the sun-dappled pews of the Steering chapel to see that the man was right. White hair and baldness winked at him from the occasional male heads; there must have been thirteen or fourteen canes hooked on the pews. There were two wheelchairs.

Garp let the driver take his arm.

“They said there'd be more men,” the driver complained, “but nobody healthy showed up.”

Garp was led to the pew up front, across from the family pew. To his horror an old man lay stretched out in the pew Garp was supposed to sit in and Garp was waved, instead, into the Percy pew, where he found himself seated next to Midge. Garp briefly wondered if the old man stretched out in the pew was another body waiting his turn.

“That's Uncle Harris Stanfull,” Midge whispered to Garp, nodding her head to the sleeper, who looked like a dead man across the aisle.

“Uncle Horace Salter, Mother,” said the man on Midge's other side. Garp recognized Stewie Two, red-faced with corpulence—the eldest Percy child and sole surviving son. He had something to do with aluminum in Pittsburgh. Stewie Two hadn't seen Garp since Garp was five; he showed no signs of knowing who Garp was. Neither did Midge indicate that she knew anybody, anymore. Wizened and white, with brown blotches on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her bob in her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

At a glance Garp saw that the pallbearing would be handled by Stewie Two, the hearse driver, and himself. He doubted that they could manage it. How awful to be this unloved! he thought, looking at the gray ship that was Stewart Percy's casket—fortunately closed.

“I'm sorry, young man,” Midge whispered to Garp; her gloved hand rested as lightly on his arm as one of the Percy family parakeets. “I don't recall your name,” she said, gracious into senility.

“Uh,” Garp said. And somewhere between the names “Smith” and “Jones,” Garp stumbled on a word that escaped him. “Smoans,” he said, surprising both Midge and himself. Stewie Two did not appear to notice.

“Mr. Smoans?” Midge said.

“Yes, Smoans,” Garp said. “Smoans, class of '61. I had Mr. Percy in history.” My Part of the Pacific.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Smoans! How thoughtful of you to come,” Midge said.

“I was sorry to hear of it,” Mr. Smoans said.

“Yes, we all were,” Midge said, looking cautiously around the half-empty chapel. A convulsion of some kind made her whole face shake, and the loose skin on her cheeks made a soft slapping noise.

“Mother,” Stewie Two cautioned her.

“Yes, yes, Stewart,” she said. To Mr. Smoans, she said, “It's a pity not all of our children could be here.”

Garp, of course, knew that Dopey's strained heart had already quit him, that William was lost in a war, that Cushie was a victim of making babies. Garp guessed he knew, vaguely, where poor Pooh was. To his relief, Bainbridge Percy was not in the family pew.

It was there in the pew of remaining Percys that Garp remembered another day.

“Where do we go after we die?” Cushie Percy once asked her mother. Fat Stew belched and left the kitchen. All the Percy children were there: William, whom a war was waiting for; Dopey, whose heart was gathering fat; Cushie, who could not reproduce, whose vital tubes would tangle; Stewie Two, who turned into aluminum. And only God knows what happened to Pooh. Little Garp was there, too—in the sumptuous country kitchen of the vast, grand Steering family house.

“Well, after death,” Midge Steering Percy told the children—little Garp, too—"we all go to a big house, sort of like this one.”

“But bigger,” Stewie Two said, seriously.

“I hope so,” said William, worriedly.

Dopey didn't get what was meant. Pooh was not old enough to talk. Cushie said she didn't believe it—only God knows where she went.

Garp thought of the vast, grand Steering family house—now for sale. He realized that he wanted to buy it.

“Mr. Smoans?” Midge nudged him.

“Uh,” Garp said.

“The coffin, Jack,” whispered the hearse driver. Stewie Two, bulging beside him, looked seriously toward the enormous casket that now housed the debris of his father.

“We need four,” the driver said. “At least four.”

“No, I can take one side myself,” Garp said.

“Mr. Smoans looks very strong,” Midge said. “Not very large, but strong.”

“Mother,” Stewie Two said.

“Yes, yes, Stewart,” she said.

“We need four. That's all there is to it,” the driver said.

Garp didn't believe it. He could lift it.

“You two on the other side,” he said, “and up she goes.”

A frail mutter reached Garp from the mourners at Fat Stew's funeral, aghast at the apparently unmovable casket. But Garp believed in himself. It was just death in there; of course it would be heavy—the weight of his mother, Jenny Fields, the weight of Ernie Holm, and of little Walt (who was the heaviest of all). God knows what they all weighed together, but Garp planted himself on one side of Fat Stew's gray gunboat of a coffin. He was ready.

It was Dean Bodger who volunteered to be the necessary fourth.

“I never thought you'd be here,” Bodger whispered to Garp.

“Do you know Mr. Smoans?” Midge asked the dean.

“Smoans, ’61,” Garp said.

“Oh yes, Smoans, of course,” Bodger said. And the catcher of pigeons, the bandy-legged sheriff of the Steering School, lifted his share of the coffin with Garp and the others. Thus they launched Fat Stew into another life. Or into another house, hopefully bigger.

Bodger and Garp trailed behind the stragglers limping and tottering to the cars that would transport them to the Steering cemetery. When the aged audience was no more around them, Bodger took Garp to Buster's Snack and Grill, where they sat over coffee. Bodger apparently accepted that it was Garp's habit to disguise his sex in the evening and change his name during the day.

“Ah, Smoans,” Bodger said. “Perhaps now your life will settle down and you'll be happy and prosperous.”

“At least prosperous,” Garp said.

Garp had completely forgotten to ask the organist not to repeat Fat Stew's music for Ernie Holm. Garp hadn't noticed the music, anyway; he wouldn't recognize it if it were repeated. And Helen hadn't been there; she wouldn't know the difference. Neither, Garp knew, would Ernie.

“Why don't you stay with us awhile?” Bodger asked Garp; with his strong, pudgy hand, sweeping the bleary windows in Buster's Snack and Grill, the dean indicated the campus of the Steering School. “We're not a bad place, really,” he said.

“You're the only place I know,” Garp said, neutrally.

Garp knew that his mother had chosen Steering once, at least for a place to bring up children. And Jenny Fields, Garp knew, had right instincts. He drank his coffee and shook Dean Bodger's hand affectionately. Garp had one more funeral to get through. Then, with Helen, he would consider the future.