The World According To Garp (63 page)

“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.”