The World According To Garp (74 page)

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.