The World According To Garp (76 page)

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.

Here lies the firstborn, lean and long,

with one arm handy and one arm gone,

with one eye lit and one gone out,

with family memories, clout by clout.

This mother’s son must keep intact

the remains of the house that Garp built.

__]

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.

I’LL
GET
OUT
NOW
.
NOW
THAT
R. IS
GONE
. IF
YOU
DON’T
FEEL
COMFORTABLE
ABOUT
MY
BEING
HERE
.
I’LL
GO. I
WONDER
.
COULD
I
HAVE
THAT
PICTURE
OF
HER
.
THE
ONE
OF R.
AND
YOU
. I
ASSUME
THAT’S
YOU
.
WITH
THE
FOOTBALL
.
YOU’RE
IN
THE
JERSEY
WITH
THE
90
THAT’S
TOO
BIG
FOR
YOU
.

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.