The World According To Garp (66 page)

“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.

ALTHOUGH
she received a most cordial invitation from the Department of English, Helen was not sure about teaching at the Steering School.

“I thought you wanted to teach again,” Garp said, but Helen would wait awhile before accepting a job at the school where girls were not admitted when she was a girl.

“Perhaps, when Jenny’s old enough to go,” Helen said. “Meanwhile, I’m happy to read, just read.” As a writer, Garp was both envious and mistrustful of people who read as much as Helen.

And they were both developing a fearfulness that worried them; here they were, thinking so cautiously about their lives, as if they were truly old people. Of course Garp had always had this obsession about protecting his children; now, at last, he saw that Jenny Fields’ old notion of wanting to continue living with her son was not so abnormal after all.

The Garps would stay at Steering. They had all the money they would ever need; Helen didn’t have to do anything, if she didn’t want to. But Garp needed something to do.

“You’re going to write,” Helen said, tiredly.

“Not for a while,” Garp said. “Maybe never again. At least not for a while.”

This really did strike Helen as a sign of rather premature senility, but she had come to share his anxiousness—his desire to keep what he had, including sanity—and she knew that he shared with her the vulnerability of conjugal love.

She did not say anything to him when he went to the Steering Athletic Department and offered himself as Ernie Holm’s replacement. “You don’t have to pay me,” he told them. “Money doesn’t matter to me; I just want to be the wrestling coach.” Of course they had to admit he would do a decent job. What had been a strong program would begin to slump without a replacement for Ernie.

“You don’t want any money?” the chairman of the Athletic Department asked him.

“I don’t
need
any money,” Garp told him. “What I need is something to
do
—something that’s
not
writing.” Except for Helen, no one knew that there were only two things in this world that T. S. Garp ever learned to do: he could write and he could wrestle.

Helen was perhaps the only one who knew why he couldn’t (at the moment) write. Her theory would later be expressed by the critic A. J. Harms, who claimed that Garp’s work was progressively weakened by its closer and closer parallels to his personal history. “As he became more autobiographical, his writing grew narrower; also, he became less comfortable about doing it. It was as if he knew that not only was the work more
personally
painful to him—this memory dredging—but the work was slimmer and less imaginative in every way,” Harms wrote. Garp had lost the freedom of
imagining
life truly, which he had so early promised himself, and us all, with the brilliance of “The Pension Grillparzer.” According to Harms, Garp could now be truthful only by
remembering
, and that method—as distinct from imagining—was not only psychologically harmful to him but far less fruitful.

But the hindsight of Harms is easy; Helen knew this was Garp’s problem the day he accepted the job as wrestling coach at the Steering School. He would be nowhere near as good as Ernie, they both knew, but he would run a respectable program and Garp’s wrestlers would always win more than they would lose.

“Try fairy tales,” Helen suggested; she thought of his writing more often than
he
did. “Try making something up, the whole thing—completely made up.” She never said, “Like “The Pension Grillparzer””; she never mentioned it, although she knew that he now agreed with her: it was the best he had done. Sadly, it had been the first.

Whenever Garp would try to write, he would see only the dull, undeveloped facts of his personal life: the gray parking lot in New Hampshire, the stillness of Walt’s small body, the hunters’ glossy coats and their red caps—and the sexless, self-righteous fanaticism of Pooh Percy. Those images went nowhere. He spent a great deal of time fussing with his new house.

Midge Steering Percy never knew who bought her family’s mansion, and her gift to the Steering School. If Stewie Two ever found it out, he was at least smart enough never to tell his mother, whose memory of Garp was clouded by her fresher memory of the nice Mr. Smoans. Midge Steering Percy died in a nursing home in Pittsburgh; because of what Stewie Two had to do with aluminum, he had moved his mother into a nursing home not far from where all that metal was made.