The World According To Garp (8 page)

“Mind you, boys, she was not a
native
,” he would faithfully tell his class (although, in the gray slide, it was hard to tell
what
she was). “She was just
visiting
there, she didn’t
come
from there,” Stewart would say. And there would follow an endless number of slides of Midge’s gray-blond hair.

All the Percy children were blond, too, and one suspected they would one day become Distinguished Silver, like Stewie, whom the Steering students of Garp’s day named after a dish served them in the school dining-halls at least once every week: Fat Stew. Fat Stew was made from another of the weekly Steering dining-hall dishes: Mystery Meat. But Jenny Fields used to say that Stewart Percy was made entirely of Distinguished Silver hair.

And whether they called him Paunch or Fat Stew, the boys who took Stewart Percy’s “My Part of the Pacific” course were supposed to know already that Midge was not a Hawaiian native, though some of them really did have to be told. What the smarter boys knew, and what every member of the Steering community was nearly born knowing—and committed thereafter to silent scorn—was that Stewart Percy had married Midge
Steering
. She was the last Steering. The unclaimed princess of the Steering School—no headmaster had yet come her way. Stewart Percy married into so much money that he didn’t
have
to be able to do anything, except stay married.

Jenny Fields’ father, the footwear king, used to think of Midge Steering’s money and shake in his shoes.

“Midge was such a dingbat,” Jenny Fields wrote in her autobiography, “that she went to Hawaii for a
vacation
during World War II. And she was such a
total
dingbat,” Jenny wrote, “that she actually fell in love with Stewart Percy, and she began to have his empty, Distinguished Silver children almost immediately—even before the war was over. And when the war was over, she brought him and her growing family back to the Steering School. And she told the school to give her Stewie a job.”

“When I was a boy,” Garp wrote, “there were already three or four little Percys, and more—seemingly always more—on the way.”

Of Midge Percy’s many pregnancies, Jenny Fields made up a nasty rhyme.

What lies in Midge Percy’s belly,

so round and exceedingly fair?

In fact, it is really nothing

but a ball of Distinguished Silver hair.

__]

“My mother was a bad writer,” Garp wrote, referring to Jenny’s autobiography. “But she was an even worse poet.” When Garp was five, however, he was too young to be told such poems. And what made Jenny Fields so unkind concerning Stewart and Midge?

Jenny knew that Fat Stew looked down on her. But Jenny said nothing, she was just wary of the situation. Garp was a playmate of the Percy children, who were not allowed to visit Garp in the infirmary annex. “Our house is really better for children,” Midge told Jenny once, on the phone. “I mean!”—she laughed—”I don’t think there’s anything they can
catch
.”

Except a little stupidity, Jenny thought, but all she said was, “I know who’s contagious and who isn’t. And nobody plays on the roof.”

To be fair: Jenny knew that the Percy house, which had been the Steering family house, was a comforting house to children. It was carpeted and spacious and full of generations of tasteful toys. It was rich. And because it was cared for by servants, it was also casual. Jenny resented the casualness that the Percy family could afford. Jenny thought that neither Midge nor Stewie had the brains to worry about their children as much as they should; they also had so
many
children. Maybe when you have a
lot
of children, Jenny pondered, you aren’t so anxious about each of them?

Jenny was actually worried for her Garp when he was off playing with the Percy children. Jenny had grown up in an upper-class home, too, and she knew perfectly well that upper-class children were not magically protected from danger just because they were somehow born safer, with hardier metabolisms and charmed genes. Around the Steering School, however, there were many who seemed to believe this—because, superficially, it often
looked
true. There
was
something special about the aristocratic children of those families: their hair seemed to stay in place, their skin did not break out. Perhaps they did not appear to be under any stress because there was nothing they wanted, Jenny thought. But then she wondered how she’d escaped being like them.

Her concern for Garp was truly based on her specific observations of the Percys. The children ran free, as if their own mother believed them to be charmed. Almost albino-like, almost translucent-skinned, the Percy kids really
did
seem more magical, if not actually healthier, than other children. And despite the feeling most faculty families had toward Fat Stew, they felt that the Percy children, and even Midge, had obvious “class.” Strong, protective genes were at work, they thought.

“My mother,” Garp wrote, “was at
war
with people who took genes this seriously.”

And one day Jenny watched her small, dark Garp go running across the infirmary lawn, off toward the more elegant faculty houses, white and green-shuttered, where the Percy house sat like the oldest church in a town full of churches. Jenny watched this tribe of children running across the safe, charted footpaths of the school—Garp the fleetest. A string of clumsy, flopping Percys was in pursuit of him—and the other children who ran with this mob.

There was Clarence DuGard, whose father taught French and smelled as if he never washed; he never opened a window all winter. There was Talbot Mayer Jones, whose father knew more about all of America’s history than Stewart Percy knew about his small part of the Pacific. There was Emily Hamilton, who had eight brothers and would graduate from an inferior all-girls’ school just a year before Steering would vote to admit women; her mother would commit suicide, not necessarily as a result of this vote but simultaneously with its announcement (causing Stewart Percy to remark that
this
was what would come of admitting girls to Steering: more suicide). And there were the Grove brothers, Ira and Buddy, “from the town”; their father was with the maintenance department of the school, and it was a delicate case—whether the boys should even be encouraged to attend Steering, and how well it could be expected they would do.

Down through the quadrangles of bright green grass and fresh tar paths, boxed in by buildings of a brick so worn and soft it resembled pink marble, Jenny watched the children run. With them, she was sorry to note, ran the Percy family dog—to, Jenny’s mind, a mindless oaf of an animal who for years would defy the town leash law the way the Percys would flaunt their casualness. The dog, a giant Newfoundland, had grown from a puppy who spilled garbage cans, and the witless thief of baseballs, to being
mean
.

One day when the kids had been playing, the dog had mangled a volleyball—not an act of viciousness, usually. A mere bumble. But when the boy who owned the deflated ball had tried to remove it from the great dog’s mouth, the dog bit him—deep puncture wounds in the forearm: not the type of bite, a nurse knew, that was only an accident, a case of “Bonkers getting a little excited, because he loves playing with the children so much.” Or so said Midge Percy, who had named the dog Bonkers. She told Jenny that she’d gotten the dog shortly after the birth of her fourth child. The word
bonkers
meant “a little crazy,” she told Jenny, and that’s how Midge said she still felt about Stewie after their first four children together. “I was just
bonkers
about him,” Midge said to Jenny, “so I named the poor dog Bonkers to prove my feelings for Stew.”

“Midge Percy was bonkers, all right,” wrote Jenny Fields. “That dog was a killer, protected by one of the many thin and senseless bits of logic that the upper classes in America are famous for: namely, that the children and pets of the aristocracy couldn’t possibly be
too
free, or hurt anybody. That
other
people should not overpopulate the world, or be allowed to release
their
dogs, but that the dogs and children of rich people have a right to run free.”

“The curs of the upper class,” Garp would call them, always—both the dogs and the children.

He would have agreed with his mother that the Percys’ dog, Bonkers, the Newfoundland retriever, was dangerous. A Newfoundland is a breed of oily-coated dog resembling an all-black Saint Bernard with webbed feet; they are generally slothful and friendly. But on the Percys’ lawn, Bonkers broke up a touch football game by hurling his one hundred and seventy pounds on five-year-old Garp’s back and biting off the child’s left earlobe—and part of the rest of Garp’s ear, as well. Bonkers would probably have taken
all
the ear, but he was a dog notably lacking concentration. The other children fled in all directions.

“Bonkie bit someone,” said a younger Percy, pulling Midge away from the phone. It was a Percy family habit to put a -y or an -ie at the end of almost every family member’s name. Thus the children—Stewart (jr.), Randolph, William, Cushman (a girl), and Bainbridge (another girl)—were called, within the family, Stewie Two, Dopey, Shrill Willy, Cushie, and Pooh. Poor Bainbridge, whose name did not convert easily to a -y or an -ie ending, was also the last in the family to be in diapers; thus, in a cute attempt to be both descriptive and literary,
she
was Pooh.

It was Cushie at Midge’s arm, telling her mother that “Bonkie bit someone.”

“Who’d he get this time?” said Fat Stew; he seized a squash racket, as if he were going to take charge of the matter, but he was completely undressed; it was Midge who drew her dressing gown together and prepared to be the first grownup to run outside to inspect the damage.

Stewart Percy was frequently undressed at home. No one knows why. Perhaps it was to relieve himself of the strain of how
very
dressed he was when he strolled the Steering campus with nothing to do, Distinguished Silver on display, and perhaps it was out of necessity for all the procreation he was responsible for, he
must
have been frequently undressed at home.

“Bonkie bit Garp,” said little Cushie Percy. Neither Stewart nor Midge noticed that Garp was there, in the doorway, the whole side of his head bloody and chewed.

“Mrs. Percy?” Garp whispered, not loud enough to be heard.

“So it was Garp?” Fat Stew said. Bending to return the squash racket to the closet, he farted. Midge looked at him. “So Bonkie bit Garp,” Stewart mused. “Well, at least the dog’s got good taste, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, Stewie,” Midge said; a laughter light as spit escaped her. “Garp’s still just a little boy.” And there he was, in fact, near-to-fainting and bleeding on the costly hall carpet, which actually spread, without a tuck or a ripple, through four of the monstrous first-floor rooms.

Cushie Percy, whose young life would terminate in childbirth while she tried to deliver what would have been only her first child, saw Garp bleeding on the Steering family heirloom: the remarkable rug. “Oh, gross!” she cried, running out the door.

“Oh, I’ll have to call your mother,” Midge told Garp, who felt dizzy with the great dog’s growl and slobber still singing in his partial ear.

For years Garp would mistakenly interpret Cushie Percy’s outcry of “Oh, gross!” He thought she was
not
referring to his gnawed and messy ear but to her father’s great gray nakedness, which filled the hall.
That
was what was gross to Garp: the silver, barrel-bellied navy man approaching him in the nude from the well of the Percys’ towering spiral staircase.

Stewart Percy knelt down in front of Garp and peered curiously into the boy’s bloody face; Fat Stew did not appear to be directing his attention to the mauled ear, and Garp wondered if he should advise the enormous, naked man concerning the whereabouts of his injury. But Stewart Percy was not looking for where Garp was hurt. He was looking at Garp’s shining brown eyes, at their color and at their shape, and he seemed to convince himself of something, because he nodded austerely and said to his foolish blond Midge, “Jap.”

It would be years before Garp would fully comprehend this, too. But Stewie Percy said to Midge, “I spent enough time in the Pacific to recognize Jap eyes when I see them. I
told
you it was a Jap.” The
it
Stewart Percy referred to was whoever he had decided was Garp’s father. That was a frequent, speculative game around the Steering community: guessing who Garp’s father was. And Stewart Percy, from his experience in his part of the Pacific, had decided that Garp’s father was Japanese.

“At that moment,” Garp wrote, “I thought “Jap” was a word that meant my ear was all gone.”

“No sense in calling his mother,” Stewie said to Midge. “Just take him over to the infirmary. She’s a nurse, isn’t she?
She’ll
know what to do.”

Jenny knew, all right. “Why not bring the dog over here?” she asked Midge, while she gingerly washed around what was left of Garp’s little ear.

“Bonkers?” Midge asked.

“Bring him here,” Jenny said, “and I’ll give him a shot.”

“An injection?” Midge asked. She laughed. “Do you mean there’s actually a
shot
to make him so he won’t bite any more people?”

“No,” Jenny said. “I mean you could save your money—instead of taking him to a vet. I mean there’s a shot to make him
dead
.
That
kind of an injection.
Then
he won’t bite any more people.”

“Thus,” Garp wrote, “was the Percy War begun. For my mother, I think, it was a class war, which she later said all wars were. For me, I just knew to watch out for Bonkers. And for the rest of the Percys.”

Stewart Percy sent Jenny Fields a memo on the stationery of the Secretary of the Steering School: “I cannot believe you actually want us to have Bonkers put to sleep,” Stewart wrote.

“You bet your fat ass I do,” Jenny said to him, on the phone. “Or at least tie him up, forever.”