The World According To Garp (72 page)

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers—or to anyone who believes in
pure
good, or in pure evil. The Ellen Jamesians who responded, in print, all said that Garp was obviously afraid for his own life; they said he obviously feared an endless line of hit men (or “hit persons”) whom the Ellen Jamesians would send after him until they got him. They said that along with being a male swine, and a bully of women, T. S. Garp was clearly “a yellow chickenshit coward with no balls.”

If Garp saw these responses, he appeared not to care; it is likely that he never read them. He wrote to apologize, mainly, because of his
writing
; it was an act meant to clear his desk, not his conscience; he meant to rid his mind of the garden-tending, bookshelf-making trivia that had occupied his time while he was waiting to write seriously again. He thought he would make peace with the Ellen Jamesians and then forget them, although Helen could
not
forget them. Ellen James certainly could not forget them, either, and even Roberta was alert and edgy whenever she was out with Garp.

About a mile beyond the bull farm, one fine day when they were running toward the sea, Roberta felt suddenly convinced that the approaching Volkswagen housed another would-be assassin; she threw a magnificent cross-body block on Garp and belted him off the soft shoulder and down a twelve-foot embankment into a muddy ditch. Garp sprained an ankle and sat howling at Roberta from the stream bed. Roberta seized a rock, with which she threatened the Volkswagen, which was full of frightened teen-agers returning from a beach party; Roberta talked them into making room for Garp, whom they drove to the Jenny Fields Infirmary.

“You are a
menace!
” Garp told Roberta, but Helen was especially happy for Roberta’s presence—her tight end’s instinct for blind-side hits and cheap shots.

Garp’s sprained ankle kept him off the road for two weeks and stepped up his writing. He was working on what he called his “father book,” or “the book of fathers”; it was the first of the three projects he had jauntily described to John Wolf the night before he left for Europe—this one was the novel to be called
My Father’s Illusions
. Because he was inventing a father, Garp felt more in touch with the spirit of pure imagination that he felt had kindled “The Pension Grillparzer.” A long way from which he had been falsely led. He had been too impressed by what he now called the “mere accidents and casualties of daily life, and the understandable trauma resulting therefrom.” He felt cocky again, as if he could make up anything.

“My father wanted us all to have a better life,” Garp began, “but better than
what
—he was not so sure. I do not think that he knew what life was; only that he wanted it
better
.”

As he did in “The Pension Grillparzer,” he made up a family; he gave himself brothers and sisters and aunts—both an eccentric and an evil uncle—and he felt he was a novelist again. A plot, to his delight, thickened.

In the evenings Garp read aloud to Ellen James and Helen; sometimes Duncan stayed up and listened, and sometimes Roberta stayed for supper, and he would read to her, too. He became suddenly generous in all matters concerning the Fields Foundation. In fact, the other board members were exasperated with him: Garp wanted to give
every
applicant something. “She sounds sincere,” he kept saying. “Look, she’s had a hard life,” he told them. “Isn’t there enough money?”

“Not if we spend it this way,” Marcia Fox said.

“If we don’t discriminate between these applicants more than you suggest,” said Hilma Bloch, “we are lost.”

“Lost?” Garp said. “How could
we
get lost?” Overnight, it seemed to them all (except Roberta), Garp had become the weakest sort of liberal: he would evaluate no one. But he was full of imagining the whole, sad histories of his fictional family; thus full of sympathy, he was a soft touch in the real world.

The anniversary of Jenny’s murder, and of the sudden funerals for Ernie Holm and Stewart Percy, passed quickly for Garp in the midst of his renewed creative energy. Then the wrestling season was again upon him; Helen had never seen him so taken up, so completely focused and relentless. He became again the determined young Garp who had made her fall in love, and she felt so drawn to him that she often cried when she was alone—without knowing why. She was alone too much; now that Garp was busy again, Helen realized she had kept herself inactive too long. She agreed to let the Steering School employ her, so that she could teach and use her mind for her own ideas again.

She also taught Ellen James to drive a car and Ellen drove twice a week to the state university, where she took a creative writing course. “This family isn’t big enough for two writers, Ellen,” Garp teased her. How they all cherished the good mood he was in! And now that Helen was working again, she was much less anxious.

In the world according to Garp, an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous.

Later, they would often remark (Roberta, too) how good it was that Garp got to see the first edition of
The Pension Grillparzer
—illustrated by Duncan Garp, and out in time for Christmas—before he saw the Under Toad.

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.