The World According to Garp

LIFE AFTER GARP

HE loved epilogues, as he showed us in “The Pension Grillparzer.”

“An epilogue,” Garp wrote, “is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future.”

That February day, Helen heard him telling jokes to Ellen James and Duncan at breakfast; he certainly sounded as if he felt good about the future. Helen gave little Jenny Garp a bath, and powdered her and oiled her scalp and clipped her tiny fingernails and zipped her into a yellow playsuit that Walt once wore. Helen could smell the coffee Garp had made, and she could hear Garp hurrying Duncan off to school.

“Not that hat, Duncan, for Christ's sake,” Garp said. “That hat couldn't keep a bird warm. It's twelve below.”

“It's twelve above, Dad,” Duncan said.

“That's academic,” Garp said. “It's very cold, that's what it is.” Ellen James must have come in through the garage door then, and written out a note, because Helen heard Garp say that he'd help her in a minute; obviously, Ellen couldn't start the car.

Then it was quiet in the great house for a while; as if from far away, Helen heard only the squeak of boots in the snow and the slow cranking of the car's cold engine. “Have a good day!” she heard Garp call to Duncan, who must have been walking down the long driveway—off to school.

“Yup!” Duncan called. “You, too!”

The car started; Ellen James would be driving off to the university. “Drive carefully!” Garp called after her.

Helen had her coffee alone. Occasionally, the inarticulateness with which baby Jenny talked to herself reminded Helen of the Ellen Jamesians—or of Ellen, when she was upset—but not this morning. The baby was playing quietly with some plastic things. Helen could hear Garp's typewriter—that was all.

He wrote for three hours. The typewriter would burst for three or four pages, then be silent for such a long time that Helen imagined Garp had stopped breathing; then, when she had forgotten about it and was lost in her reading, or in some task with Jenny, the typewriter would burst out again.

At eleven-thirty in the morning Helen heard him call Roberta Muldoon. Garp wanted a squash game before wrestling practice, if Roberta could get away from her “girls,” as Garp called the Fields Foundation fellows.

“How are the girls today, Roberta?” Garp said.

But Roberta couldn't play. Helen heard the disappointment in Garp's voice.

Later, poor Roberta would repeat and repeat how she should have played; if only she had played, she went on saying, maybe—she would have spotted it coming—maybe she would have been around, alert and edgy, recognizing the spoor of the real world, the paw prints Garp had always overlooked or ignored. But Roberta Muldoon could not play squash.

Garp wrote for another half hour. Helen knew he was writing a letter; somehow she could tell the difference in the sound of the typing. He wrote to John Wolf about My Father's Illusions; he was pleased with how the book was coming along. He complained that Roberta took her job too seriously and was letting herself get out of shape; no administrative job was worth as much time as Roberta gave to the Fields Foundation. Garp said that the low sales figures on The Pension Grillparzer were about what he expected; the main thing was that it was “a lovely book"—he liked looking at it, and giving it to people, and its rebirth had been a rebirth for him. He said he expected a better wrestling season than last year, although he had lost his starting heavyweight to a knee operation and his one New England champion had graduated. He said that living with someone who read as much as Helen was both irritating and inspiring; he wanted to give her something to read that would make her close her other books.

At noon he came and kissed Helen, and fondled her breasts, and kissed baby Jenny, over and over again, while he dressed her in a snowsuit that had also been worn by Walt—and before Walt, even Duncan had gotten some wear out of it. Garp drove Jenny to the day-care center as soon as Ellen James came back with the car. Then Garp showed up at Buster's Snack and Grill for his customwy cup of tea with honey, his one tangerine, and his one banana. That was all the lunch he ran or wrestled on; he explained why to a new teacher in the English Department—a young man fresh out of graduate school who adored Garp's work. His name was Donald Whitcomb, and his nervous stutter reminded Garp, affectionately, of the departed Mr. Tinch and the race in his pulse he still felt for Alice Fletcher.

This particular day, Garp was eager to talk about writing to anyone, and young Whitcomb was eager to listen. Don Whitcomb would remember that Garp told him what the act of starting a novel felt like. “It's like trying to make the dead come alive,” he said. “No, no, that's not right—it's more like trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive.” Finally, Garp said it in a way that seemed to please him. “A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases,” Garp said. Young Whitcomb was so awed that he wrote this down.

It would be Whitcomb's biography, years later, that the would-be biographers of Garp would all envy and despise. Whitcomb reflected that this Bloom Period in Garp's writing (as Whitcomb called it) was really due to Garp's sense of mortality. The attempt on Garp's life by the Ellen Jamesian in the dirty-white Saab, Whitcomb claimed, had given Garp the urgency necessary to make him write again. Helen would endorse that thesis.

It was not a bad idea, although Garp would surely have laughed at it. He really had forgotten the Ellen Jamesians, and he was not on the lookout for more of them. But unconsciously, perhaps, he might have been feeling that urgency young Whitcomb expressed.

In Buster's Snack and Grill, Garp held Whitcomb enthralled until it was time for wrestling practice. On his way out (leaving Whitcomb to pay, the young man later recalled, good-naturedly), Garp ran into Dean Bodger, who had just spent three days hospitalized with some heart complaint.

“They found nothing wrong,” Bodger complained.

“But did they find your heart?” Garp asked him.

The dean, young Whitcomb, and Garp all laughed. Bodger said he'd brought only The Pension Grillparzer with him to the hospital, and since it was so short a book, he'd been able to read it completely three times. It was a gloomy story to read in a hospital, Bodger said, though he was glad to report that he had not yet had the grandmother's dream; thus he knew he would live awhile longer. Bodger said he had loved the story.

Whitcomb would remember that Garp then grew embarrassed, though he was obviously pleased by Bodger's praise. Whitcomb and Bodger waved good-bye to him. Garp forgot his skier's knit hat, but Bodger told Whitcomb he would bring it to Garp—at the gym. Dean Bodger said to Whitcomb that he liked dropping in on Garp in the wrestling room, occasionally. “He is so in his element there,” Bodger said.

Donald Whitcomb was no wrestling fan but he talked enthusiastically about Garp's writing. The young and the old man agreed: Garp was a man with remarkable energy.

Whitcomb recalled that he returned to his small apartment in one of the dormitories and tried to write down everything that had impressed him about Garp; he had to stop, unfinished, in time for supper. When Whitcomb went to the dining hall, he was one of the few people at the Steering School who'd heard nothing about what had happened. It was Dean Bodger—his eyes red-rimmed, his face suddenly years older—who stopped young Whitcomb going into the dining hall. The dean, who had left his gloves at the gym, clutched Garp's ski hat in his cold hands. When Whitcomb saw that the dean still had Garp's hat, he knew—even before looking in Bodger's eyes—that something was wrong.

Garp missed his hat as soon as he trotted out on the snowy footpath that led from Buster's Snack and Grill to the Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House. But rather than go back for it, he stepped up his usual pace and ran to the gym. His head was cold when he got there, in less than three minutes; his toes were cold, too, and he warmed his feet in the steamy trainer's room before putting on his wrestling shoes. He talked briefly with his 145-pounder in the trainer's room. The boy was getting his little finger taped to his ring finger so that he would give some support to what the trainer said was only a sprain. Garp asked if there'd been an X ray; there had been, and it was negative. Garp tapped his 145-pounder on the shoulder, asked him what he weighed in at, frowned at the answer—which was probably a lie, and still about five pounds too heavy—and went to suit up.

He stopped again in the trainer's room before going to practice. “Just to put some Vaseline on one ear,” the trainer recalled. Garp had a cauliflower ear in progress, and the Vaseline made his ear slippery; he thought this protected it. Garp did not like wrestling in a headgear; those ear guards had not been part of the required uniform when he'd been a wrestler, and he saw no reason to wear one now.

He jogged a mile around the indoor track with his 152-pounder before opening the wrestling room. Garp challenged the boy to a sprint in the last lap, but the 152-pounder had more left than Garp and beat him by six feet at the end. Garp then “played” with the 152-pounder—in lieu of warming up—in the wrestling room. He took the kid down easily, about five or six times, then rode him around the mat for about five minutes—or until the boy showed signs of tiring. Then Garp allowed the boy to reverse him; Garp let the 152-pounder try to pin him while he defended himself on the bottom. But there was a muscle in Garp's back that was tight, that would not stretch enough to suit him, so Garp told the 152-pounder to go play with someone else. Garp sat by himself against the padded wall, sweating happily and watching the room fill up with his team.

He let them warm up on their own—he hated organized calisthenics—before demonstrating the first of the drills he wanted them to practice. “Get a partner, get a partner,” he said, by rote. And he added, “Eric? Get a harder partner, Eric, or you'll work with me.”

Eric, his 133-pounder, had a habit of coasting through workouts with the second-string 115-pounder, who was Eric's roommate and best friend.

When Helen came in the wrestling room, the temperature was up to 85є or so, and climbing. The coupled boys upon the mat were already breathing hard. Garp was intently watching a time clock. “One minute left!” Garp yelled. When Helen walked by him, he had a whistle in his mouth—so she did not kiss him.

She would remember that whistle, and not kissing him, for as long as she would live—which would be a long time.

Helen went to her usual corner of the wrestling room, where she could not easily be fallen on. She opened her book. Her glasses fogged up; she wiped them off. She had her glasses on when the nurse entered the wrestling room, at the farthest end of the room from Helen. But Helen never looked up from her book unless there was a loud body slam upon the mat or an unusually loud cry of pain. The nurse closed the wrestling-room door behind her and moved quickly past the grappling bodies toward Garp, with his time clock in his hands and his whistle in his mouth. Garp took the whistle out and hollered, “Fifteen seconds!” That was all the time he had left, too. Garp put the whistle back in his mouth and got ready to blow. When he saw the nurse, he mistook her for the kindly nurse named Dotty who had helped him escape from the first feminist funeral. Garp was simply judging her by her hair, which was iron-gray and in a braid, coiled like a rope around her head—it was a wig, of course. The nurse smiled at him. There was probably no one Garp felt as comfortable with as a nurse; he smiled back at her, then glanced at the time clock: ten seconds.

When Garp looked up at the nurse again, he saw the gun. He had just been thinking about his mother, Jenny Fields, and how she must have looked when she walked into the wrestling room, not quite twenty years ago. Jenny was younger than this nurse, he was thinking. If Helen had looked up and seen this nurse, Helen might have been fooled again into thinking that her missing mother had finally decided to come out of hiding.

When Garp saw the gun, he also noticed that it wasn't a real nurse's uniform; it was a Jenny Fields Original with the characteristic red heart sewn over the breast. It was then that Garp saw the nurse's breasts—they were small but they were too firm and youthfully erect for a woman with iron-gray hair; and her hips were too slim, her legs too girlish. When Garp looked again at her face, he saw the family resemblance: the square jawline that Midge Steering had given to all her children, the sloping forehead that had been the contribution of Fat Stew. The combination gave all the Percys' heads the shape of violent navy vessels.

The first shot forced the whistle out of Garp's mouth with a sharp tweet! and caused the time clock to fly from his hands. He sat down. The mat was warm. The bullet had traveled through his stomach and had lodged in his spine. There were fewer than five seconds remaining on the time clock when Bainbridge Percy fired a second time; the bullet struck Garp's chest and drove him, still in a sitting position, back against the padded wall. The stunned wrestlers, who were only boys, seemed incapable of motion. It was Helen who tackled Pooh Percy to the mat and kept her from firing a third shot.

Helen's screams aroused the wrestlers. One of them, the second-string heavyweight, pinned Pooh Percy belly down to the mat and ripped her hand with the gun in it out from under her; his pumping elbow split Helen's lip, but Helen hardly felt it. The starting 145-pounder, with his little finger taped to his ring finger, wrenched the gun out of Pooh's hand by breaking her thumb.

At the moment her bone clicked, Pooh Percy screamed; even Garp saw what had become of her—the surgery must have been recent. In Pooh Percy's open, yelling mouth, anyone near her could see the black gathering of stitches, like ants clustered on the stump of what had been her tongue. The second-string heavyweight was so frightened of Pooh that he squeezed her too hard and cracked one of her ribs; Bainbridge Percy's recent madness—to become an Ellen Jamesian—was certainly painful to her.

“Igs!” she screamed. “Ucking igs!” An “ucking ig” was a “fucking pig,” but you had to be an Ellen Jamesian to understand Pooh Percy now.

The starting 145-pounder held the gun at arm's length, pointed down to the mat and into an empty corner of the wrestling room. “Ig!” Pooh gagged at him, but the trembling boy stared at his coach.

Helen held Garp steady; he was starting to slide against the wall. He could not talk, he knew; he could not feel, he could not touch. He had only a keen sense of smell, his brief eyesight, and his vivid memory.

Garp was glad, for once, that Duncan wasn't interested in wrestling. By virtue of his preference for swimming, Duncan had missed seeing this; Garp knew that Duncan would either just be getting out of school or already at the swimming pool.

Garp was sorry for Helen—that she was here—but he was happy to have her scent nearest him. He savored it, among those other intimate odors in the Steering wrestling room. If he could have talked, he would have told Helen not to be frightened of the Under Toad anymore. It surprised him to realize that the Under Toad was no stranger, was not even mysterious; the Under Toad was very familiar—as if he had always known it, as if he had grown up with it. It was yielding, like the warm wrestling mats; it smelled like the sweat of clean boys—and like Helen, the first and last woman Garp loved. The Under Toad, Garp knew now, could even look like a nurse: a person who is familiar with death and trained to make practical responses to pain.

When Dean Bodger opened the wrestling-room door with Garp's ski hat in his hands, Garp had no illusions that the dean had arrived, once again, to organize the rescue party—to catch the body falling from the infirmary annex, four floors above where the world was safe. The world was not safe. Dean Bodger, Garp knew, would do his best to be of service; Garp smiled gratefully to him, and to Helen—and to his wrestlers; some of them were weeping now. Garp looked fondly at his sobbing second-string heavyweight who lay crushing Pooh Percy to the mat; Garp knew what a difficult season the poor, fat boy was about to experience.

Garp looked at Helen; all he could move was his eyes. Helen, he saw, was trying to smile back at him. With his eyes, Garp tried to reassure her: don't worry—so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me. Even if there is only death after death (after death), be grateful for small favors—sometimes there is birth after sex, for example. And, if you are very fortunate, sometimes there is sex after birth! Oh yeth, as Alice Fletcher would have said. And if you have life, said Garp's eyes, there is hope you'll have energy. And never forget, there is memory, Helen, his eyes told her.

“In the world according to Garp,” young Donald Whitcomb would write, “we are obliged to remember everything.”

Garp died before they could move him from the wrestling room. He was thirty-three, the same age as Helen. Ellen James was just starting her twenties. Duncan was thirteen. Little Jenny Garp was going on three. Walt would have been eight.

The news of Garp's death promoted the immediate printing of a third and fourth edition of the father and son book, The Pension Grillparzer. Over a long weekend, John Wolf drank too much and contemplated leaving publishing; it sometimes nauseated him to see how a violent death was so good for business. But it comforted Wolf to realize how Garp would have taken the news. Even Garp could not have imagined that his own death would be better than a suicide at establishing his literary seriousness and his fame. Not bad for someone who, at thirty-three, had written one good short story and perhaps one and a half good novels out of three. Garp's rare manner of dying was, in fact, so perfect that John Wolf had to smile when he imagined how pleased Garp would have been with it. It was a death, Wolf thought, which in its random, stupid, and unnecessary qualities—comic and ugly and bizarre—underlined everything Garp had ever written about how the world works. It was a death scene, John Wolf told Jillsy Sloper, that only Garp could have written.

Helen would remark bitterly, but only once, that Garp's death was really a kind of suicide, after all. “In the sense that his whole life was a suicide,” she said, mysteriously. She would later explain that all she meant was, “He made people too angry.”

He had made Pooh Percy too angry; at least that was clear.

He made others pay him tribute, small and strange. The Steering School cemetery got the honor of his gravestone, if not his body; like his mother's, Garp's body went to medicine. The Steering School also chose to honor him by naming after him its one remaining building that was not named after anybody else. It was old Dean Bodger's idea. If there was a Jenny Fields Infirmary, the good dean argued, then there should be a Garp Infirmary Annex.

In later years the functions of these buildings would alter slightly, although they would remain, in name, the Fields Infirmary and the Garp Annex. The Fields Infirmary would one day become the old wing of the new Steering Health Clinic and Laboratories; the Garp Annex would become a building used chiefly for storage—a kind of warehouse for medical, kitchen and classroom supplies; it could also be used for epidemics. Of course, there weren't many epidemics anymore. Garp probably would have liked the idea: to have a storage building named after him. He wrote once that a novel was “only a place for storage—of all the meaningful thing's that a novelist isn't able to use in his life.”

He would have liked the idea of an epilogue, too—so here it is: an epilogue “warning us about the future,” as T. S. Garp might have imagined it.

ALICE and HARRISON FLETCHER would remain married, through thick and through thin—in part, their marriage lasted because of Alice's difficulty with finishing anything. Their only child, a daughter, would play the cello—that large and cumbersome and silken-voiced instrument—in a manner so graceful that the pure, deep sound of it aggravated Alice's speech defect for hours after each performance. Harrison, who would get and hold his tenure after a while, would outgrow his habits with his prettier students about the time his talented daughter began to assert herself as a serious musician.

Alice, who would never complete her second novel, or her third or fourth, would never have a second child, either. She remained smoothly fluent on the page, and agonizing in the flesh. Alice never again took to “other men” to the degree that she had taken to Garp; even in her memory, he was a passion that was strong enough to keep her from ever becoming close to Helen. And Harry's old fondness for Helen seemed to fade with each of his fast-fading affairs, until the Fletchers rarely kept track of the surviving Garps at all.

Once Duncan Garp met the Fletcher daughter in New York, after her maiden cello solo in that dangerous city; Duncan took her to dinner.

“Does he look like his mother?” Harrison asked the girl.

“I don't remember her very well,” the daughter said.

“Did he make a path at you?” Alice asked.

“I don't think so,” said her daughter, whose first-chosen and best-loved partner would always be that big-hipped cello.

The Fletchers, both Harry and Alice, would die in their ripe middle age, when their airplane—to Martinique—crashed during the Christmas holidays. One of Harrison's students had driven them to the airport.

“If you live in New England,” Alice confided to the student, “you owe yourthelf a holiday in the thun. Right, Harrithon?”

Helen had always thought that Alice was “a little loony.”

HELEN HOLM, who most of her life would be known as Helen Garp, would live a long, long time. A slim, dark woman with an arresting face and precise language, she would have her lovers but never remarry. Each lover suffered the presence of Garp—not only in Helen's relentless memory, but in the articles of fact that Helen surrounded herself with in the Steering mansion, which she rarely left: for example, Garp's books, and all of Duncan's photographs of him, and even Garp's wrestling trophies.

Helen maintained that she could never forgive Garp for dying so young and leaving her to live so much of her life alone—he had also spoiled her, she claimed, for ever considering seriously the possibility of living with another man.

Helen would become one of the most respected teachers the Steering School ever had, though she would never lose her sense of sarcasm about the place. She had some friends there, though they were few: old Dean Bodger, until he died, and the young scholar, Donald Whitcomb, who would become as enchanted with Helen as he was enchanted with the work of Garp. There was also a woman, a sculptor, who was an artist-in-residence—someone Roberta had introduced Helen to.

John Wolf was a lifelong friend whom Helen forgave in small pieces, but never completely, for his success at making Garp a success. Helen and Roberta remained close, too—Helen occasionally joining Roberta for Roberta's famous flings upon the city of New York. The two of them, growing older and more eccentric, were guilty of lording it over the Fields Foundation for years. In fact, the wit of their running commentary on the outside world became almost a tourist attraction at Dog's Head Harbor; from time to time, when Helen was lonely or bored at Steering—when her children were grown up and pursuing their own lives, elsewhere—she went to stay with Roberta at Jenny Fields' old estate. It was always lively there. When Roberta died, Helen appeared to age twenty years.

Very late in her life—and only after she had complained to Duncan that she had survived all her favorite contemporaries—Helen Holm was stricken suddenly with an illness that affects the body's mucous membranes. She would die in her sleep.

She had successfully outlived many cutthroat biographers who were waiting for her to die so that they could swoop in on the remains of Garp. She had protected his letters, the unfinished manuscript of My Father's Illusions, most of his journals and jottings. She told all the would-be biographers, exactly as he would have, “Read the work. Forget the life.”

She herself wrote several articles, which were respected in her field. One was called “The Adventurer's Instinct in Narration.” It was a comparative study of the narrative technique of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.

Helen always considered herself as a widow left with three children—Duncan, baby Jenny, and Ellen James, who all survived Helen and wept copiously at her death. They had been too young and too astonished to weep as much for Garp.

DEAN BODGER, who wept almost as much as Helen at Garp's death, remained as loyal as a pit bull, and as tenacious. Long after his retirement, he still stormed the Steering campus by night, unable to sleep, fitfully capturing lurkers and lovers who slunk along the footpaths and hugged each other to the spongy ground—under the soft bushes, alongside the beautiful old buildings, and so forth.

Bodger remained active at Steering for as long as it took Duncan Garp to graduate. “I saw your father through, boy,” the dean told Duncan. “I'll see you through, too. And if they let me, I'll stay to see your sister through.” But they finally forced his retirement; they cited to themselves, among other problems, his habit of talking to himself during chapel, and his bizarre arrests, at midnight, of the boys and girls caught out after hours. They also mentioned the dean's recurring fantasy: that it had been the young Garp he caught in his arms—one night, years ago—and not a pigeon. Bodger refused to move from the campus, even when he was retired, and despite—or, perhaps, because of—his obstinacy, he became Steering's most honored emeritus. They would drag him out for all the school's ceremonies; they would totter him up to the stage, introduce him to people who didn't know who he was, and then they would lead him away. Perhaps because they could display him on these dignified occasions, they tolerated his odd behavior; long through his seventies, for example, Bodger would be convinced—sometimes for weeks at a time—that he was still the dean.

“You are the dean, really,” Helen liked to tease him.

“Of course I am!” Bodger roared.

They saw each other often, and as Bodger grew deafer, and deafer, he was more frequently seen on the arm of that nice Ellen James, who had her ways of talking to people who couldn't hear.

Dean Bodger remained loyal even to the Steering wrestling team, whose glory years soon faded from the memories of most. The wrestlers were never again to have a coach the equal of Ernie Holm, or even the equal of Garp. They became a losing team, yet Bodger always supported them, hollering through the last bout to the poor Steering boy flopping on his back, about to be pinned.

It was at a wrestling match that Bodger died. In the unlimited class an unusually close match—the Steering heavyweight lay floundering with his equally exhausted and out-of-shape opponent; like beached baby whales, they groveled for the upper hand and the winning points as the clock ran down. “Fifteen seconds!” the announcer boomed. The big boys struggled. Bodger rose to his feet, stamping and urging. “Gott!” he squawked, his German emerging at the end.

When the bout ended and the stands emptied, there was the retired dean—dead in his seat. It took much comforting from Helen for the sensitive young Whitcomb to gain control of his grief at Bodger's loss.

DONALD WHITCOMB would never sleep with Helen, despite rumors among the envious would-be biographers who longed to get their hands on Garp's property and Garp's widow. Whitcomb would be a monkish recluse all his life, which he spent in virtual hiding at the Steering School. It was his happy fortune to have discovered Garp there, moments before Garp's death, and his happy fortune, too, to find himself befriended and looked after by Helen. She trusted him to adore her husband perhaps even more uncritically than she did.

Poor Whitcomb would always be referred to as “the young Whitcomb,” even though he would not always be young. His face would never grow a beard, his cheeks would be forever pink—under his brown, his gray, his finally frost-white hair. His voice would remain a stuttering, eager yodel; his hands would wring themselves forever. But it would be Whitcomb whom Helen would trust with the family and literary record.

He would be Garp's biographer. Helen would read all but the last chapter, which Whitcomb waited for years to write; it was the chapter eulogizing her. Whitcomb was the Garp scholar, the final Garp authority. He had the proper meekness for a biographer, Duncan always joked. He was a good biographer from the Garp family's point of view; Whitcomb believed everything that Helen told him—he believed every note that Garp left—or every note that Helen told him Garp left.

“Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that's left is memory. But even a nihilist has a memory.”

Whitcomb even loved Garp at his most whimsical and at his most pretentious.

Among Garp's things, Helen found this note.

“No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: “I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit".”

Donald Whitcomb, who loved Garp uncritically—in the manner of dogs and children—said that those indeed were Garp's last words.

“If Whitcomb said so, then they were,” Duncan always said.

Jenny Garp and Ellen James—they agreed about this, too.

It was a family matter-keeping Garp from the biographers,

wrote Ellen James.

“And why not?” asked Jenny Garp. “What does he owe the public? He always said he was only grateful for other artists, and to the people who loved him.”

So who else deserves to have a piece of him, now?

wrote Ellen James.

Donald Whitcomb was even faithful to Helen's last wish. Although Helen was old, her final illness was sudden, and it had to be Whitcomb who defended her deathbed request. Helen did not want to be buried in the Steering School cemetery, alongside Garp and Jenny, her father and Fat Stew—and all the others. She said that the town cemetery would do her just fine. She did not want to be left to medicine, either; since she was so old, she was sure there was little left of her body that anyone could possibly use. She wanted to be cremated, she told Whitcomb, and her ashes were to remain the property of Duncan and Jenny Garp and Ellen James. After burying some of her ashes, they could do anything they chose with what ashes remained, but they could not scatter them anywhefe on the property of the Steering School. She would be damned, Helen told Whitcomb, if the Steering School, which did not admit women students when she had been of age, would get to have any part of her now.

The gravestone in the town cemetery, she told Whitcomb, should say simply that she was Helen Holm, daughter of the wrestling coach Ernie Holm, and that she had not been allowed to attend the Steering School because she was a girl; furthermore, she was the loving wife of the novelist T. S. Garp, whose gravestone could be seen in the Steering School cemetery, because he was a boy.

Whitcomb was faithful to this request, which amused Duncan especially.

“How Dad would have loved this!” Duncan kept saying. “Boy, I can just hear him.”

How Jenny Fields would have applauded Helen's decision was a point made most often by Jenny Garp and Ellen James.

ELLEN JAMES would grow up to be a writer. She was “the real thing,” as Garp had guessed. Her two mentors—Garp and the ghost of his mother, Jenny Fields—would somehow prove overbearing for Ellen, who because of them both would not ever write much nonfiction or fiction. She became a very good poet—though, of course, she was not much on the reading circuit.

Her wonderful first book of poems, Speeches Delivered to Plants and Animals, would have made Garp and Jenny Fields very proud of her; it did make Helen very proud of her—they were good friends, and they were also like mother and daughter.

Ellen James would outlive the Ellen Jamesians, of course. Garp's murder drove them deeper underground, and their occasional surfacing over the years would be largely disguised, even embarrassed.

Hi! I'm mute,

their notes finally said. Or:

I've had an accident—can't talk. But I write good, as you can see.

“You aren't one of those Ellen Somebodies, are you?” they were occasionally asked.

A what?

they learned to reply. And the more honest among them would write:

No. Not now.

Now they were just women who couldn't speak. Unostentatiously, most of them worked hard to discover what they could do. Most of them turned, constructively, to helping those who also couldn't do something. They were good at helping disadvantaged people, and also good at helping people who felt too sorry for themselves. More and more their labels left them, and one by one these speechless women appeared under names more of their own making.

Some of them even won Fields Foundation fellowships for the things they did.

Some of them, of course, went on trying to be Ellen Jamesians in a world that soon forgot what an Ellen Jamesian was. Some people thought that the Ellen Jamesians were a criminal gang who flourished, briefly, near mid-century. Others, ironically, confused them with the very people that the Ellen Jamesians had originally been protesting: rapists. One Ellen Jamesian wrote Ellen James that she stopped being an Ellen Jamesian when she asked a little girl if she knew what an Ellen Jamesian was.

“Someone who rapes little boys?” the little girl replied.

There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed Garp's murder by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King, and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader. And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.

One of his cruelly forced jokes, in Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian, was that he conceived of his narrator-heroine as a lesbian who doesn't realize until after she's cut off her tongue that she has made herself undesirable as a lover, too.

The popularity of this vulgar trash was enough to embarrass some Ellen Jamesians to death. There were, actually, suicides. “There are always suicides,” Garp wrote, “among people who are unable to say what they mean.”

But, in the end, Ellen James sought them out and befriended them. It was, she thought, what Jenny Fields would have done. Ellen took to giving poetry readings with Roberta Muldoon, who had a huge, booming voice. Roberta would read Ellen's poems while Ellen sat beside her, looking as if she were wishing very hard that she could say her own poems. This brought out of hiding a lot of Ellen Jamesians who had been wishing they could talk, too. A few of them became Ellen's friends.

Ellen James would never marry. She may have known an occasional man, but more because he was a fellow poet than because he was a man. She was a good poet and an ardent feminist who believed in living like Jenny Fields and believed in writing with the energy and the personal vision of T. S. Garp. In other words, she was stubborn enough to have personal opinions, and she was also kind to other people. Ellen would maintain a lifelong flirtation with Duncan Garp—her younger brother, really.

The death of Ellen James would cause Duncan much sorrowing. Ellen, at an advanced age, became a long-distance swimmer—about the time she succeeded Roberta as the director of the Fields Foundation. Ellen worked up to swimming several times across the wide neck of Dog's Head Harbor. Her last and best poems used swimming and “the ocean's pull” as metaphors. But Ellen James remained a girl from the Midwest who never thoroughly understood the undertow; one cold fall day, when she was too tired, it got her.

“When I swim,” she wrote to Duncan, “I am reminded of the strenuousness, but also the gracefulness, of arguing with your father. I can also feel the sea's eagerness to get at me—to get at my dry middle, my landlocked little heart. My landlocked little ass, your father would say, I'm sure. But we tease each other, the sea and I. I suppose you would say, you raunchy fellow, that this is my substitute for sex.”

FLORENCE COCHRAN BOWLSBY, who, was best known to Garp as Mrs. Ralph, would live a life of larkish turmoil, with no substitute for sex in sight—or, apparently, in need. She actually completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature and was eventually tenured by a large and confused English Department whose members were only unified by their terror of her. She had, at various times, seduced and scorned nine of the thirteen senior members—who were alternately admitted to and then ridiculed from her bed. She would be referred to by her students as “a dynamite teacher,” so that she at least demonstrated to other people, if not to herself, some confidence in an area other than sex.

She would hardly be referred to at all by her cringing lovers, whose tails between their legs were all remindful to Mrs. Ralph of the manner in which Garp had once left her house.

In sympathy, at the news of Garp's shocking death, Mrs. Ralph was among the very first to write to Helen. “His was a seduction,” Mrs. Ralph wrote, “whose non-occurrence I have always regretted but respected.”

Helen came to rather like the woman, with whom she occasionally corresponded.

Roberta Muldoon also had occasion to correspond with Mrs. Ralph, whose application for a Fields Foundation fellowship was rejected. Roberta was quite surprised by the note sent the Fields Foundation by Mrs. Ralph.

Up yours,

the note said. Mrs. Ralph did not appreciate rejection.

Her own child, Ralph, would die before her; Ralph became quite a good newspaperman and, like William Percy, was killed in a war.

BAINBRIDGE PERCY, who was best known to Garp as Pooh, would live a long, long time. The last of a train of psychiatrists would claim to have rehabilitated her, but Pooh Percy may simply have emerged from analysis—and a number of institutions—too thoroughly bored with rehabilitation to be violent anymore.

However it was achieved, Pooh was, after a great while, peaceably reintroduced to social intercourse; she reentered public life, a functioning if not speaking member of society, more or less safe and (finally) useful. It was in her fifties that she became interested in children; she worked especially well and patiently with the retarded. In this capacity, she would frequently meet other Ellen Jamesians, who in their various ways were also rehabilitated—or, at least, vastly changed.

For almost twenty years Pooh would not mention her dead sister, Cushie, but her fondness for children eventually confused her. She got herself pregnant when she was fifty-four (no one could imagine how) and she was returned to institutional observation, convinced, as she was, that she would die in childbirth. When this didn't occur, Pooh became a devoted mother; she also continued her work with the retarded. Pooh Percy's own child, for whom her mother's violent history would be a severe shock in her later life, was fortunately not retarded; in fact, she would have reminded Garp of Cushie.

Pooh Percy, some said, became a positive example for those who would forever put an end to capital punishment: her rehabilitation was so impressive. Only not to Helen, and to Duncan Garp, who would wish to their graves that Pooh Percy had died at that moment when she last cried “Ig!” in the Steering wrestling room.

One day Pooh would die, of course; she would succumb to a stroke in Florida, where she was visiting her daughter. It was a small consolation to Helen that Helen would outlive her.

The faithful Whitcomb would choose to describe Pooh Percy as Garp had once described her, following his escape from the first feminist funeral. “An androgynous twerp,” Garp said to Dean Bodger, “with a face like a ferret and a mind completely sodden by spending nearly fifteen years in diapers.”

That official biography of Garp, which Donald Whitcomb titled Lunacy and Sorrow: The Life and Art of T. S. Garp, would be published by the associates of JOHN WOLF, who would not live to see the good book in print. John Wolf had contributed much effort to the book's careful making, and he had worked in the capacity of an editor to Whitcomb—over most of the manuscript—before his untimely demise.

John Wolf died of lung cancer in New York at a relatively young age. He had been a careful, conscientious, attentive, even elegant man—most of his life—but his deep restlessness and unrelieved pessimism could only be numbed and disguised by smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day from the time he was eighteen. Like many busy men who maintain an otherwise calm and managed air about themselves, John Wolf smoked himself to death.

His service to Garp, and to Garp's books, is inestimable. Although he may from time to time have held himself responsible for the fame which, in the end, provoked Garp's own violent killing, Wolf was far too sophisticated a man to dwell on such a narrow view. Assassination, in Wolf's opinion, was “an increasingly popular amateur sport of the times"; and “political true believers,” as he called nearly everybody, were always the sworn enemy of the artist—who insisted, however arrogantly, on the superiority of a personal vision. Besides, Wolf knew, it was not only that Pooh Percy had become an Ellen Jamesian, and had responded to Garp's baiting; hers was a grievance as old as childhood, possibly aggravated by politics but basically as deep as her long need for diapers. Pooh had gotten it into her head that Garp's and Cushie's love for fucking each other had finally been lethal to Cushie. At least, it is true, it was lethal to Garp.

A professional in a world that too often worshiped the contemporaneity it had created, John Wolf insisted to his end that his proudest publication was the father and son edition of The Pension Grillparzer. He was proud of the early Garp novels, of course, and came to speak of The World According to Bensenhaver as “inevitable—when you consider the violence Garp was exposed to.” But it was “Grillparzer” that elevated Wolf—it and the unfinished manuscript of My Father's Illusions, which John Wolf looked upon, lovingly and sadly, as “Garp's road back to his right way to write.” For years Wolf edited the messy first draft of the unfinished novel; for years he consulted with Helen, and with Donald Whitcomb, about its merits and its faults.

“Only after I'm dead,” Helen insisted. “Garp would let nothing go if he didn't think it was finished.” Wolf agreed, but he died before Helen. Whitcomb and Duncan would be left to publish My Father's Illusions—considerably posthumously.

It was Duncan who spent the most time with John Wolf during Wolf's torturous dying of lung cancer. Wolf lay in a private hospital in New York, sometimes smoking a cigarette through a plastic tube inserted in his throat.

“What would your father say to this?” Wolf asked Duncan. “Wouldn't it suit one of his death scenes? Isn't it properly grotesque? Did he ever tell you about the prostitute who died in Vienna, in the Rudolfinerhaus? What was her name?”

“Charlotte,” Duncan said. He was close to John Wolf. Wolf had even come to like the early drawings Duncan had done for The Pension Grillparzer. And Duncan had moved to New York; he told Wolf that his first sense of knowing he wanted to be a painter, as well as a photographer, was his view of Manhattan from John Wolf's office—the day of the first feminist funeral in New York.

In a letter John Wolf dictated to Duncan from his deathbed, Wolf left word for his associates that Duncan Garp was to be allowed to come look at Manhattan from his office for as long as the publishing company occupied the building.

For many years after John Wolf died, Duncan took advantage of the offer. A new editor moved into Wolf's office, but the name of Garp made all the editors in that publishing house scurry.

For years secretaries would come in and say, “Excuse me, it's that young Garp. To look out the window again.”

Duncan and John Wolf spent the many hours it took John Wolf to die discussing how good a writer Garp was.

“He would have been very, very special,” John Wolf told Duncan.

“Would have been, maybe,” Duncan said. “But what else could you say to me?”

“No, no, I'm not lying; there's no need,” Wolf said. “He had the vision, and he always had the language. But mainly vision; he was always personal. He just got sidetracked for a while, but he was back on the beam with that new book. He was back to the good impulses again. “The Pension Grillparzer” is his most charming, but it's not his most original; he was still too young; there are other writers who could have written that story. Procrastination is an original idea, and a brilliant first novel—but it's a first novel. Second Wind of the Cuckold is very funny, and his best title; it's also very original, but it's a novel of manners—and rather narrow. Of course, The World According to Bensenhaver is his most original, even if it is an X-rated soap opera—which it is. But it's so harsh; it's raw food—good food, but very raw. I mean, who wants it? Who needs to suffer such abuse?

“Your father was a difficult fellow; he never gave an inch—but that's the point: he was always following his nose; wherever it took him, it was always his nose. And he was ambitious. He started out daring to write about the world—when he was just a kid, for Christ's sake, he still took it on. Then, for a while—like a lot of writers—he could only write about himself; but he also wrote about the world—it just didn't come through as cleanly. He was starting to get bored with writing about his life and he was beginning to write about the whole world again; he was just starting. And Jesus, Duncan, you must remember he was a young man! He was thirty-three.”

“And he had energy,” Duncan said.

“Oh, he would have written a lot, there's no question,” John Wolf said. But he began to cough and had to stop talking.

“But he could never just relax,” Duncan said. “So what was the point? Wouldn't he have just burned himself out, anyway?”

Shaking his head—but delicately, not to loosen the tube in his throat—John Wolf went on coughing. “Not him!” Wolf gasped.

“He could have just gone on and on?” Duncan asked. “You think so?”

The coughing Wolf nodded. He would die coughing.

Roberta and Helen would attend his funeral, of course. The rumor-mongers would be hissing, because it was often speculated in the small town of New York that John Wolf had looked after more than Garp's literary estate. Knowing Helen, it seems unlikely that she would ever have had such a relationship with John Wolf. Whenever Helen heard how she was linked with someone, Helen would just laugh. Roberta Muldoon was more vehement.

“With John Wolf?” Roberta said. “Helen and Wolf? You've got to be kidding.”

Roberta's confidence was well founded. On occasion, when she flung herself upon the city of New York, Roberta Muldoon had enjoyed a tryst or two with John Wolf.

“And to think I used to watch you play!” John Wolf told Roberta once.

“You can still watch me play,” Roberta said.

“I mean football,” John Wolf said.

“There are better things than football,” said Roberta.

“But you do so many things well,” John Wolf told her.

“Ha!”

“But you do, Roberta.”

“All men are liars,” said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

ROBERTA MULDOON, formerly Robert Muldoon, No. 90 of the Philadelphia Eagles, would outlive John Wolf—and most of her lovers. She would not outlive Helen, but Roberta lived long enough to grow at last comfortable with her sex reassignment. Approaching fifty, she would remark to Helen that she suffered the vanity of a middle-aged man and the anxieties of a middle-aged woman, “but,” Roberta added, “this perspective is not without advantages. Now I always know what men are going to say before they say it.”

“But I know, too, Roberta,” Helen said. Roberta laughed her frightening boomer of a laugh; she had a habit of bear-hugging her friends, which made Helen nervous. Roberta had once broken a pair of Helen's glasses. Roberta had successfully dwarfed her enormous eccentricity by becoming responsible—chiefly to the Fields Foundation, which she ran so vigorously that Ellen James had given her a nickname.

Captain Energy.

“Ha!” Roberta said. “Garp was Captain Energy.”

Roberta was also greatly admired in the small community of Dog's Head Harbor, for Jenny Fields' estate had never been so respectable, in the old days, and Roberta was a far more outgoing participant in the affairs of the town than Jenny had ever been. She spent ten years as the chairperson of the local school board—although, of course, she could never have a child of her own. She organized, coached, and pitched on the Rockingham County Women's Softball Team—for twelve years, the best team in the state of New Hampshire. Once upon a time, the same, stupid, swinish governor of New Hampshire suggested that Roberta be given a chromosome test before she be allowed to play in the title game; Roberta suggested that the governor should meet her, just before the start of the game—on the pitcher's mound—"and see if he can fight like a man.” Nothing came of it, and—politics being what they are—the governor threw out the first ball. Roberta pitched a shutout, chromosomes and all.

And it is to the credit of the athletic director of the Steering School that Roberta was offered the position of offensive line coach for the Steering football team. But the former tight end politely refused the job. “All those young boys,” Roberta said sweetly. “I'd get in terrible trouble.”

Her favorite young boy, all her life, was Duncan Garp, whom she mothered and sistered and smothered with her perfume and her affection. Duncan loved her; he was one of the few male guests ever allowed at Dog's Head Harbor, although Roberta was angry with him and stopped inviting him for a period of almost two years—following Duncan's seduction of a young poet.

“His father's son,” Helen said. “He's charming.”

“The boy is too charming,” Roberta told Helen. “And that poet was not stable. She was also far too old for him.”

“You sound jealous, Roberta,” Helen said.

“It was a violation of trust,” Roberta said loudly. Helen agreed that it was. Duncan apologized. Even the poet apologized.

“I seduced him,” she told Roberta.

“No you didn't,” Roberta said. “You couldn't.”

All was forgiven one spring in New York when Roberta surprised Duncan with a dinner invitation. “I'm bringing this smashing girl, just for you—a friend,” Roberta told him, “so wash the paint off your hands, and wash your hair and look nice. I've told her you're nice, and I know you can be. I think you'll like her.”

Thus having set Duncan up with a date, who was a woman of her choice, Roberta felt somehow better. Over a long period it came out that Roberta had hated the poet whom Duncan had slept with, and that was the worst of the problem.

When Duncan crashed his motorcycle within a mile of a Vermont hospital, Roberta was the first to get there; she had been skiing farther north; Helen had called her, and Roberta beat Helen to the hospital.

“Riding a motorcycle in the snow!” Roberta roared. “What would your father say?” Duncan could barely whisper. Every limb appeared in traction; there was a complication involving a kidney, and unknown to both Duncan and Roberta—at the time—one of his arms would have to come off.

Helen and Roberta and Duncan's sister, Jenny Garp, waited for three days until Duncan was out of danger. Ellen James was too shaken to come wait with them. Roberta railed the whole time.

“What should he be on a motorcycle for—with only one eye? What kind of peripheral vision is that?” Roberta asked. “One side is always blind.”

That had been what had happened, exactly. A drunk had run a stoplight and Duncan had seen the car too late; when he'd tried to outmaneuver the car, the snow had locked him in place and held him, an almost motionless target, for the drunken driver.

Everything had been broken.

“He is too much like his father,” Helen mourned. But, Captain Energy knew, in some ways Duncan was not like his father. Duncan lacked direction, in Roberta's opinion.

When Duncan was out of danger, Roberta broke down in front of him.

“If you get killed before I die, you little son of a bitch,” she cried, “it will kill me! And your mother, probably—and Ellen, possibly—but you can be sure about me. It will absolutely kill me, Duncan, you little bastard!” Roberta wept and wept, and Duncan wept, too, because he knew it was true: Roberta loved him and was terribly vulnerable, in that way, to whatever happened to him.

Jenny Garp, who was only a freshman at college, dropped out of school so that she could stay in Vermont with Duncan while Duncan got well. Jenny had graduated from the Steering School with the highest honors; she would have no trouble returning to college when Duncan recovered. She volunteered her help to the hospital as a nurse's aide, and she was a great source of optimism for Duncan, who had a long and painful convalescence ahead of him. Duncan, of course, had some experience with convalescence.

Helen came from Steering to see him every weekend; Roberta went to New York to look after the deplorable state of Duncan's live-in studio. Duncan was afraid that all his paintings and photographs, and his stereo, would be stolen.

When Roberta first went to Duncan's studio-apartment, she found a lank, willowy girl living there, wearing Duncan's clothes, all splattered with paint; the girl was not doing such a hot job with the dishes.

“Move out, honey,” Roberta said, letting herself in with Duncan's key. “Duncan's back in the bosom of his family.”

“Who are you?” the girl asked Roberta. “His mother?”

“His wife, sweetheart,” Roberta said. “I've always gone for younger men.”

“His wife?” the girl said, gawking at Roberta. “I didn't know he was married.”

“His kids are coming up in the elevator,” Roberta told the girl, “so you better use the stairs. His kids are practically as big as me.”

“His kids?” the girl said; she fled.

Roberta had the studio cleaned and invited a young woman she knew to move in and watch after the place; the woman had just undergone a sexual transformation and she needed to match her new identity with a new place to live. “It will be perfect for you,” Roberta told the new woman. “A luscious young man owns it, but he'll be away for months. You can take care of his things, and have dreams about him, and I'll let you know when you have to move out.”

In Vermont, Roberta told Duncan, “I hope you clean up your life. Stop the motorcycles and the mess—and stop the girls who don't know the first thing about you. My God: sleeping with strangers. You're not your father yet; you haven't gotten down to work. If you were really being an artist, Duncan, you wouldn't have time for all the other shit. All the self-destruction shit, particularly.”

Captain Energy was the only one who could talk to Duncan that way—now that Garp was gone. Helen could not criticize him. Helen was too happy just to have Duncan alive, and Jenny was ten years younger than Duncan; all she could do was look up to him, and love him, and be there while he took so long to heal. Ellen James, who loved Duncan fiercely and possessively, became so exasperated with him that she would throw her note pad and her pencil in the air; and then, of course, she had nothing to say.

“A one-eyed, one-armed painter,” Duncan complained. “Oh boy.”

“Be happy you've still got one head and one heart,” Roberta told him. “Do you know many painters who hold the brush in both hands? You need two eyes to drive a motorcycle, dummy, but only one to paint.”

Jenny Garp, who loved her brother as if he were her brother and her father—because she had been too young to know her father, really—wrote Duncan a poem while he recuperated in the hospital. It was the first and only poem young Jenny Garp ever wrote; she did not have the artistic inclination of her father and her brother. And only God knows what inclination Walt might have had.

It was a lousy poem, of course, but Duncan loved it.

“I'll keep myself intact,” he promised Jenny.

The young transsexual, whom Roberta had placed in Duncan's studio-apartment, sent Duncan get-well postcards from New York.

The plants are doing okay, but the big yellow painting by the fireplace was warping—I don't think it was stretched properly—so I took it down and leaned it with the others in the pantry, where it's colder. I love the blue painting, and the drawings—all the drawings! And the one Roberta tells me is a self-portrait, of you—I love that especially.

“Oh boy,” Duncan groaned.

Jenny read him all of Joseph Conrad, who had been Garp's favorite writer when Garp was a boy.

It was good for Helen that she had her teaching duties to distract her from worrying about Duncan.

“That boy will straighten out,” Roberta assured her.

“He's a young man, Roberta,” Helen said. “He's not a boy anymore—although he certainly acts like one.”

“They're all boys to me,” Roberta said. “Garp was a boy. I was a boy, before I became a girl. Duncan will always be a boy, to me.”

“Oh boy,” Helen said.

“You ought to take up some sport,” Roberta told Helen. “To relax you.”

“Please, Roberta,” Helen said.

“Try running,” Roberta said.

“You run, I'll read,” Helen said.

Roberta ran all the time. In her late fifties she was becoming forgetful of using her estrogen, which must be used for the whole of a transsexual's life to maintain a female body shape. The lapses in her estrogen, and her stepped-up running, made Roberta's large body change shape, and change back again, before Helen's eyes.

“I sometimes don't know what's happening to you, Roberta,” Helen told her.

“It's sort of exciting,” Roberta said. “I never know what I'm going to feel like; I never know what I'm going to look like, either.”

Roberta ran in three marathon races after she was fifty, but she developed problems with bursting blood vessels and was advised, by her doctor, to run shorter distances. Twenty-six miles was too much for a former tight end in her fifties—"old Number Ninety,” Duncan occasionally teased her. Roberta was a few years older than Garp and Helen, and had always looked it. She went back to running the old six-mile route she and Garp used to take, between Steering and the sea, and Helen never knew when Roberta might suddenly arrive at the Steering house, sweaty and gasping and wanting to use the shower. Roberta kept a large robe and several changes of clothes at Helen's house for these occasions, when Helen would look up from her book and see Roberta Muldoon in her running costume—her stopwatch held like her heart in her big pass-catching hands.

Roberta, died that spring Duncan was hospitalized in Vermont. She had been doing wind sprints on the beach at Dog's Head Harbor, but she'd stopped running and had come up on the porch, complaining of “popping sounds” in the back of her head—or possibly in her temples; she couldn't exactly locate them, she said. She sat on the porch hammock and looked at the ocean and let Ellen James go get her a glass of ice tea. Ellen sent a note out to Roberta with one of the Fields Foundation fellows.

Lemon?

“No, just sugar!” Roberta called.

When Ellen brought the ice tea, Roberta downed the whole glass in a few gulps.

“That's perfect, Ellen,” Roberta said. Ellen went to fix Roberta another glass. “Perfect,” Roberta repeated. “Give me another one just like that one!” Roberta called. “I want a whole life just like that one!”

When Ellen came back with the ice tea, Roberta Muldoon was dead in the hammock. Something had popped, something had burst.

If Roberta's death struck Helen and made her feel low, Helen had Duncan to worry about—for once, a grateful distraction. Ellen James, whom Roberta had supported so much, was spared an overdose of grief by her sudden responsibilities—she was busy taking over Roberta's job at the Fields Foundation; she had big shoes to fill, as they say. In fact, size 12. Young Jenny Garp had never been as close to Roberta as Duncan had been; it was Duncan, still in traction, who took it the hardest. Jenny stayed with him and gave him one pep talk after another, but Duncan could remember Roberta and all the times she had bailed out the Garps before—Duncan especially.

He cried and cried. He cried so much, they had to change a cast on his chest.

His transsexual tenant sent him a telegram from New York.

Duncan had never answered her cards, her reports on the welfare of his plants and the exact location of his paintings. It was in the spirit of old No. 90 that he answered her now, whoever she was—this poor confused boy-girl whom Roberta, Duncan knew, would have been kind to.

Please stay as long as you want to [he wrote to her]. But I like that photograph, too. When I get back on my feet, I'll make a copy just for you.

Roberta had told him to pull his life together and Duncan regretted he would not be able to show her that he could. He felt a responsibility now, and wondered at his father, being a writer when he was so young—having children, having Duncan, when he was so young. Duncan made lots of resolutions in the hospital in Vermont; he would keep most of them, too.

He wrote Ellen James, who was still too upset at his accident to come see him all plastered and full of pins.

Time we both got to work, though I have some catching up to do—to catch up to you. With 90 gone, we're a smaller family. Let's work at not losing anybody else.

He would have written to his mother that he intended to make her proud of him, but he would have felt silly saying it and he knew how tough his mother was—how little she ever needed pep talks. It was to young Jenny that Duncan turned his new enthusiasm.

“Goddamnit, we've got to have energy,” Duncan told his sister, who had plenty of energy. “That's what you missed—by not knowing the old man. Energy! You've got to get it on your own.”

“I've got energy,” Jenny said. “Jesus, what do you think I've been doing—just taking care of you?”

It was a Sunday afternoon; Duncan and Jenny always watched the pro football on Duncan's hospital TV. It was a further good omen, Duncan thought, that the Vermont station carried the game, that Sunday, from Philadelphia. The Eagles were about to get creamed by the Cowboys. The game, however, didn't matter; it was the before-the-game ceremony that Duncan appreciated. The flag was at half-mast for the former tight end Robert Muldoon. The scoreboard flashed 90! 90! 90! Duncan noted how the times had changed; for example, there were feminist funerals everywhere now; he had just read about a big one in Nebraska. And in Philadelphia the sports announcer managed to say, without snickering, that the flag flew at half-mast for Roberta Muldoon.

“She was a fine athlete,” the announcer mumbled. “A great pair of hands.”

“An extraordinary person,” agreed the co-announcer. The first man spoke again. “Yeah,” he said, “she didda lot for...” and he struggled, while Duncan waited to hear for whom—for freaks, for weirdos, for sexual disasters, for his father and his mother and himself and Ellen James. “She didda lot for people wid complicated lives,” the sports announcer said, surprising himself and Duncan Garp—but with dignity.

The band played. The Dallas Cowboys kicked off to the Philadelphia Eagles; it would be the first of many kickoffs that the Eagles would receive. And Duncan Garp could imagine his father, appreciating the announcer's struggle to be tactful and kind. Duncan actually imagined Garp whooping it up with Roberta; somehow, Duncan felt that Roberta would be there—privy to her own eulogy. She and Garp would be hilarious at the awkwardness of the news.

Garp would mimic the announcer: “She didda lot for refashioning da vagina!”

“Ha!” Roberta would roar.

“Oh boy!” Garp would holler. “Oh boy.”

When Garp had been killed, Duncan remembered, Roberta Muldoon had threatened to have her sexual reversal reversed. “I'd rather be a lousy man again,” she wailed, “than think there are women in this world who are actually gloating over this filthy murder by that filthy cunt!”

Stop it! Stop it! Don't ever say that word!

scribbled Ellen James.

There are only those of us who loved him, and those of us who didn't know him—men and women,

wrote Ellen James.

Then Roberta Muldoon had picked them all up, one by one; she gave to them—formally, seriously, and generously—her famous bear hug.

When Roberta died, some talking person among the Fields Foundation fellows at Dog's Head Harbor called Helen on the phone. Helen, gathering herself—once again—would be the one to call Duncan in Vermont. Helen would advise young Jenny how to break the news to Duncan. Jenny Garp had inherited a fine bedside manner from her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields.

“Bad news, Duncan,” young Jenny whispered, kissing her brother on the lips. “Old Number Ninety has dropped the ball.”

DUNCAN GARP, who survived both the accident that cost him an eye and the accident that cost him an arm, became a good and serious painter; he was something of a pioneer in the artistically suspect field of color photography, which he developed with his painter's eye for color and his father's habit of an insistent, personal vision. He did not make nonsense images, you can be sure, and he brought to his painting an eerie, sensual, almost narrative realism; it was easy, knowing who he was, to say that this was more of a writer's craft than it was a craft that belonged in a picture—and to criticize him, as he was criticized, for being too “literal.”

“Whatever that means,” Duncan always said. “What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist—and the son of Garp? No flaws?”

He had his father's sense of humor, after all, and Helen was very proud of him.

He must have made a hundred paintings in a series called Family Album—the period of his work he was best known for. They were paintings modeled from the photographs he had taken as a child, after his eye accident. They were of Roberta, and his grandmother, Jenny Fields; his mother swimming at Dog's Head Harbor; his father running, with his healed jaw, along the beach. There was one series of a dozen small paintings of a dirty-white Saab; the series was called The Colors of the World. because, Duncan said, all the colors of the world are visible in the twelve versions of the dirty-white Saab.

There were baby pictures of Jenny Garp, too; and in the large, group portraits—largely imagined, not from any photograph—the critics said that the blank face, or the repeated figure (very small) with its back to the camera, was always Walt.

Duncan did not want children of his own. “Too vulnerable,” he told his mother. “I couldn't stand watching them grow up.” What he meant was, he couldn't stand watching them not grow up.

Since he felt that way, Duncan was fortunate not to have children be an issue in his life—they weren't even a worry. He came home from his four months of hospitalization in Vermont and found an extremely lonely transsexual living in his New York studio-apartment. She had made the place look as if a real artist already lived there, and by a curious process—it was almost a kind of osmosis of his things—she already seemed to know a great deal about him. She was in love with him, too—just from pictures. Another gift to Duncan's life from Roberta Muldoon! And there were some who said—Jenny Garp, for example—that she was even beautiful.

They were married, because if ever there was a boy with no discrimination in his heart about transsexuals, that boy was Duncan Garp.

“It's a marriage made in Heaven,” Jenny Garp told her mother. She meant Roberta, of course; Roberta was in Heaven. But Helen was a natural at worrying about Duncan; since Garp had died, she'd had to take over much of the worrying. And since Roberta had died, Helen felt she'd had to take over all the worrying.

“I don't know, I don't know,” Helen said. Duncan's marriage made her anxious. “That damn Roberta,” Helen said. “She always got her way!”

But this way there's no chance of unwanied pregnancy,

wrote Ellen James.

“Oh, stop it!” Helen said. “I sort of wanted granddhildren, you know. One or two, anyway.”

“I'll give them to you,” Jenny promised.

“Oh boy,” Helen said. “If I'm still alive, kid.”

Sadly, she wouldn't be, although she would get to see Jenny pregnant and be able to imagine she was a grandmother.

“Imagining something is better than remembering something,” Garp wrote.

And Helen certainly had to be happy with how Duncan's life straightened out, as Roberta had promised.

After Helen's death, Duncan worked very hard with the meek Mr. Whitcomb; they made a respectable presentation out of Garp's unfinished novel, My Father's Illusions. Like the father and son edition of The Pension Grillparzer, Duncan illustrated what there was of My Father's Illusions—a portrait of a father who plots ambitiously and impossibly for a world where his children will be safe and happy. The illustrations Duncan contributed were largely portraits of Garp.

Sometime after the book's publication, Duncan was visited by an old, old man whose name Duncan could not remember. The man claimed to be at work on “a critical biography” of Garp, but Duncan found his questions irritating. The man asked over and over again about the events leading up to the terrible accident where Walt was killed. Duncan wouldn't tell him anything (Duncan didn't know anything), and the man went away empty-handed—biographically speaking. The man was Michael Milton, of course. It had appeared to Duncan that the man was missing something, though Duncan couldn't have known that Michael Milton was missing his penis.

The book he supposedly was writing was never seen, and no one knows what happened to him.

If the world of the reviewer seemed content, after the publication of My Father's Illusions, to call Garp merely an “eccentric writer,” a “good but not a great writer,” Duncan didn't mind. In Duncan's own words, Garp was “original” and “the real thing.” Garp had been the type, after all, to compel blind loyalty.

“One-eyed loyalty,” Duncan called it.

He had a long-standing code with his sister, Jenny, and with Ellen James; the three of them were as thick as thieves.

“Here's to Captain Energy!” they would say, when they were drinking together.

“There's no sex like transsex!” they would shout, when they were drunk, which occasionally embarrassed Duncan's wife—although she certainly agreed.

“How's the energy?” they would write and phone and telegraph each other, when they wanted to know what was up. And when they had plenty of energy, they would describe each other as “full of Garp.”

Although Duncan would live a long, long time, he would die unnecessarily and, ironically, because of his good sense of humor. He would die laughing at one of his own jokes, which was surely a Garp-family thing to do. It was at a kind of coming-out party for a new transsexual, a friend of his wife's. Duncan aspirated an olive and choked to death in just a few seconds of violent laughter. That is a horrible and stupid way to die, but everyone who knew him said that Duncan would not have objected—either to that form of death, or to the life he'd had. Duncan Garp always said that his father suffered the death of Walt more than anyone in the family suffered anything else. And among the chosen forms of death, death finally was the same. “Between men and women,” as Jenny Fields once said, “only death is shared equally.”

Jenny Garp, who in the field of death had much more specific training than her famous grandmother, would not have agreed. Young Jenny knew that, between men and women, not even death gets shared equally. Men get to die more, too.

JENNY GARP would outlive them all. If she had been at the party where her brother choked to death, she probably could have saved him. At least she would have known exactly what to do. She was a doctor. She always said it was her time in the Vermont hospital, looking after Duncan, that had made up her mind to turn to medicine—not her famous grandmother's history of nursing, because Jenny Garp know that only secondhand.

Young Jenny was a brilliant student; like her mother, she absorbed everything—and everything she learned she could redeliver. Like Jenny Fields, she got her feeling for people as a roamer of hospitals—inching what kindness was possible, and recognizing what wasn't.

While she was an intern, she married another young doctor. Jenny Garp would not give up her name, however; she stayed a Garp, and, in a frightful war with her husband, she saw that her three children would all be Garps, too. She would divorce, eventually—and remarry, but in no hurry. That second time would suit her. He was a painter, much older than herself, and if any of her family had been alive to nag her, they would have no doubt warned her that she was imagining something of Duncan in the man.

“So what?” she would have said. Like her mother, she had her own mind; like Jenny Fields, she kept her own name.

And her father? In what way was Jenny Garp even slightly like him—whom she never really knew? She was only a baby, after all, when he died.

Well, she was eccentric. She made a point of going into every bookstore and asking for her father's books. If the store was out of stock, she would order. She had a writer's sense of immortality: if you're in print and on the shelves, you're alive. Jenny Garp left fake names and addresses all over America; the books she ordered would be sold to someone, she reasoned. T. S. Garp would not go out of print—at least not in his daughter's lifetime.

She was also avid in her support of the famous feminist, her grandmother, Jenny Fields; but like her father, Jenny Garp did not put much stock in the writing of Jenny Fields. She did not bother bookstores about keeping A Sexual Suspect on the shelves.

Most of all, she resembled her father in the kind of doctor she became. Jenny Garp would turn her medical mind to research. She would not have a private practice. She would go to hospitals only when she was sick. Instead, Jenny spent a number of years working closely with the Connecticut Tumor Registry; she would eventually direct a branch of the National Cancer Institute. Like a good writer, who must love and worry each detail, Jenny Garp would spend hours noticing the habits of a single human cell. Like a good writer, she was ambitious; she hoped she would get to the bottom of cancer. In a sense, she would. She would die of it.

Like other doctors, Jenny Garp took that sacred oath of Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, wherein she agreed to devote herself to something like the life Garp once described to young Whitcomb—although Garp was concerned with a writer's ambitions ("...trying everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive”). Thus, cancer research did not depress Jenny Garp, who liked to describe herself as her father had described a novelist.

“A doctor who sees only terminal cases.”

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.