The World According To Garp (62 page)

“I hear you,” Roberta said. “That’s just so awful.”

“That’s what she wanted,” Garp said.

“I know,” Roberta said. “You’ve got to come home.”

“Right away,” Garp said.

“We don’t know what to
do
,” Roberta said.

“What
is
there to do?” Garp asked. “There’s nothing to do.”

“There should be
something
,” Roberta said, “but she said she never wanted a funeral.”

“Certainly not,” Garp said. “She wanted her body to go to a med school. You get that accomplished, Roberta: that’s what Mom would have wanted.”

“But there ought to be
something
,” Roberta protested. “Maybe not a
religious
service, but something.”

“Don’t you get involved in anything until I get there,” Garp told her.

“There’s a lot of talk,” Roberta said. “People want a rally, or something.”

“I’m her only family, Roberta,” Garp said. “You tell them that.”

“She meant a lot to a lot of us, you know,” Roberta said, sharply.

Yes, and it got her killed! Garp thought, but he said nothing.

“I tried to look after her!” Roberta cried. “I told her not to go in that parking lot!”

“Nobody’s to blame, Roberta,” Garp said, softly.

“
You
think somebody’s to blame, Garp,” Roberta said. “You always do.”

“Please, Roberta,” Garp said. “You’re my best friend.”

“
I’ll
tell you who’s to blame,” Roberta said. “It’s
men
, Garp. It’s your filthy murderous sex! If you can’t
fuck
us the way you want to, you kill us in a hundred ways!”

“Not
me
, Roberta, please,” Garp said.

“Yes, you too,” Roberta whispered. “No man is a woman’s friend.”

“I’m
your
friend, Roberta,” Garp said, and Roberta cried for a while—a sound as acceptable to Garp as rain falling on a deep lake.

“I’m so sorry,” Roberta whispered. “If I’d seen the man with the gun—just a second sooner—I could have blocked the shot. I
would
have, you know.”

“I know you would have, Roberta,” Garp said; he wondered if
he
would have. He felt love for his mother, of course; and now an aching loss. But did he ever feel such
devotion
to Jenny Fields as the followers among her own sex?

He apologized to the landlady for the lateness of the phone call. When he told her that his mother was dead, the old woman crossed herself—her sunken cheeks and her empty gums were mute but clear indications of the family deaths she had herself outlived.

Helen cried for the longest time; she would not let Jenny’s namesake, little Jenny Garp, out of her arms. Duncan and Garp searched the newspapers, but the news would be a day getting to Austria—except for the marvel of television.

Garp watched his mother’s murder on his landlady’s TV.

There was some election nonsense at a shopping plaza in New Hampshire. The landscape had a vaguely seacoast appearance, and Garp recognized the place as being a few miles from Dog’s Head Harbor.

The incumbent governor was in favor of all the same, swinish, stupid things. The woman running against him seemed educated and idealistic and kind; she also seemed to barely restrain her anger at the same, swinish, stupid things the governor represented.

The parking lot at the shopping plaza was circled by pickup trucks. The pickups were full of men in hunting coats and caps; apparently they represented local New Hampshire interests—as opposed to the interest in New Hampshire taken by the New York divorcees.

The nice woman running against the governor was also a kind of New York divorcee. That she had lived fifteen years in New Hampshire, and her children had gone to school there, was a fact more or less ignored by the incumbent governor, and by his supporters who circled the parking lot in their pickup trucks.

There were lots of signs; there was a steady jeering.

There was also a high school football team, in uniform—their cleats clacking on the cement of the parking lot. One of the woman candidate’s children was on the team and he had assembled the football players in the parking lot in hopes of demonstrating to New Hampshire that it was perfectly manly to vote for his mother.

The hunters in their pickup trucks were of the opinion that to vote for this woman was to vote for faggotry—and lesbianism, and socialism, and alimony, and New York. And so forth. Garp had the feeling, watching the telecast, that those things were not tolerated in New Hampshire.

Garp and Helen and Duncan, and baby Jenny, sat in the Viennese pension about to watch the murder of Jenny Fields. Their bewildered old landlady served them coffee and little cakes; only Duncan ate anything.

Then Jenny Fields had her turn to speak to the assembled people in the parking lot. She spoke from the back of a pickup truck; Roberta Muldoon lifted her up to the tailgate and adjusted the microphone for her. Garp’s mother looked very small in the pickup truck, especially beside Roberta, but Jenny’s uniform was so white that she stood out, bright and clear.

“I am Jenny Fields,” she said—to some cheers and some whistles and some hoots. There was a blaring of horns from the pickup trucks circling the parking lot. The police were telling the pickup trucks to move on; they moved on, and came back, and moved on again. “Most of you know who I am,” Jenny Fields said. There were more hoots, more cheers, more blowing of horns—and a single sharp gunshot as conclusive as a wave breaking on the beach.

No one saw where it came from. Roberta Muldoon held Garp’s mother under her arms. Jenny’s white uniform seemed struck by a small dark splash. Then Roberta dropped down from the tailgate with Jenny in her arms and knifed through the breaking crowd like an old tight end carrying the ball for a hard first down. The crowd parted; Jenny’s white uniform was almost concealed in Roberta’s arms. There was a police car moving to intercept Roberta; when they neared each other, Roberta held out the body of Jenny Fields toward the squad car. For a moment Garp saw his mother’s unmoving white uniform lifted above the crowd and into the arms of a policeman, who helped her and Roberta into the car.

The car, as they say, sped away. The camera was distracted by an apparent shoot-out taking place among the circling pickup trucks and several more police cars. Later, there was the still body of a man in a hunting coat lying in a dark puddle of what looked like oil. Later still, there was a closeup of what the newsmen would only identify as “a deer rifle.”

It was pointed out that the deer season had not officially opened.

Except for the fact that there had been no nudity in the telecast, the event was an X-rated soap opera from start to finish.

Garp thanked the landlady for allowing them to watch the news. Within two hours they were in Frankfurt, where they changed planes for New York. The Under Toad was not on the plane with them—not even for Helen, who was so afraid of planes. For a while, they knew, the Under Toad was elsewhere.

All Garp could think, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, was that his mother had delivered some adequate “last words.” Jenny Fields had ended her life saying, “Most of you know who I am.” On the airplane, Garp tried out the line.

“Most of you know who I am,” he whispered. Duncan was asleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp’s hand.

Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.

EVER
since Walt died,” wrote T. S. Garp, “my life has felt like an epilogue.”

When Jenny Fields died, Garp must have felt his bewilderment increase—that sense of time passing with a plan. But what was the plan?

Garp sat in John Wolf’s New York office, trying to comprehend the plethora of plans surrounding his mother’s death.

“I didn’t authorize a funeral,” Garp said. “How can there be a funeral? Where is the body, Roberta?”

Roberta Muldoon said patiently that the body was where Jenny wanted her body to go. It was not her body that mattered, Roberta said. There was simply going to be a kind of memorial service; it was better not to think of it as a “funeral.”

The newspapers had said it was to be the first feminist funeral in New York.

The police had said that violence was expected.

“The first feminist funeral?” Garp said.

“She meant so much to so many women,” Roberta said. “Don’t be angry. You didn’t
own
her, you know.”

John Wolf rolled his eyes.

Duncan Garp looked out the window of John Wolf’s office, forty floors above Manhattan. It probably felt to Duncan a little like being on the plane he had just got off.

Helen was making a phone call in another office. She was trying to reach her father in the good old town of Steering; she wanted Ernie to meet their plane out of New York when it landed in Boston.

“All right,” Garp said, slowly; he held the baby, little Jenny Garp, on his knee. “All right. You know I don’t approve of this, Roberta, but I’ll go.”

“You’ll
go
?” John Wolf said.

“No!” Roberta said. “I mean, you don’t
have
to,” she said.

“I know,” Garp said. “But you’re right. She probably would have liked such a thing, so I’ll go. What’s going to happen at it?”

“There’s going to be a lot of speeches,” Roberta said. “You don’t want to go.”

“And they’re going to read from her book,” John Wolf said. “We’ve donated some copies.”

“But you don’t want to go, Garp,” Roberta said, nervously. “Please don’t go.”

“I want to go,” Garp said. “I promise you I won’t hiss or boo—no matter what the assholes say about her. I have something of hers I might read myself, if anyone’s interested,” he said. “Did you ever see that thing she wrote about being called a feminist?” Roberta and John Wolf looked at each other; they looked stricken and gray. “She said, “I hate being called one, because it’s a label I didn’t choose to describe my feelings about men or the way I write.””

“I don’t want to argue with you, Garp,” Roberta said. “Not now. You know perfectly well she said other things, too. She
was
a feminist, whether she liked the label or not. She was simply one for pointing out all the injustices to women; she was simply for allowing women to live their own lives and make their own choices.”

“Oh?” said Garp. “And did she believe that
everything
that happened to women happened to them
because
they were women?”

“You have to be stupid to believe that, Garp,” Roberta said. “You make us all sound like Ellen Jamesians.”

“Please stop it, both of you,” John Wolf said.

Jenny Garp squawked briefly and slapped Garp’s knee; he looked at her, surprised—as if he’d forgotten she was a live thing there in his lap.

“What is it?” he asked her. But the baby was quiet again, watching some pattern in the landscape of John Wolf’s office that was invisible to the rest of them.

“What time is this wingding?” Garp asked Roberta.

“Five o’clock in the afternoon,” Roberta said.

“I believe it was chosen,” John Wolf said, “so that half the secretaries in New York could walk off their jobs an hour early.”

“Not all the working women in New York are secretaries,” Roberta said.

“The secretaries,” said John Wolf, “are the only ones who’ll be
missed
between four and five.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

Helen came in and announced that she could not reach her father on the phone.

“He’s at wrestling practice,” Garp said.

“The wrestling season hasn’t begun yet,” Helen said. Garp looked at the calendar on his watch, which was several hours out of sync with the United States; he had last set it in Vienna. But Garp knew that wrestling at Steering did not officially begin until after Thanksgiving. Helen was right.

“When I called his office at the gym, they said he was at home,” Helen told Garp. “And when I called home, there was no answer.”

“We’ll rent a car at the airport,” Garp said. “And anyway, we can’t leave until tonight. I have to go to this damn funeral.”

“No, you
don’t
have to,” Roberta insisted.

“In fact,” Helen said, “you
can’t
.”

Roberta and John Wolf again looked stricken and gray; Garp simply looked uninformed.

“What do you mean, I can’t?” he asked.

“It’s a feminist funeral,” Helen said. “Did you
read
the paper, or did you stop at the headlines?”

Garp looked accusingly at Roberta Muldoon, but she looked at Duncan looking out the window. Duncan had his telescope out, spying on Manhattan.

“You can’t go, Garp,” Roberta admitted. “It’s true. I didn’t tell you because I thought it would really piss you off. I didn’t think you’d want to go, anyway.”

“I’m not
allowed
?” Garp said.

“It’s a funeral for
women
,” Roberta said. “
Women
loved her, women will mourn her. That’s how we wanted it.”

Garp glared at Roberta Muldoon. “I loved her,” he said. “I’m her only child. Do you mean I can’t go to this wingding because I’m a man?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it a wingding,” Roberta said.

“What’s a wingding?” Duncan asked.

Jenny Garp squawked again, but Garp didn’t listen to her. Helen took her from him.

“Do you mean no men are allowed at my mother’s funeral?” Garp asked Roberta.

“It’s not exactly a funeral, as I told you,” Roberta said. “It’s more like a rally—it’s a kind of reverent demonstration.”

“I’m going, Roberta,” Garp said. “I don’t care what you
call
it.”

“Oh boy,” Helen said. She walked out of the office with baby Jenny. “I’m going to try to get my father again,” she said.

“I see a man with one arm,” Duncan said.

“Please don’t go, Garp,” Roberta said softly.

“She’s right,” John Wolf said. “I wanted to go, too. I was her editor, after all. But let them have it their way, Garp. I think Jenny would have liked the idea.”