The World According To Garp (75 page)

In sympathy, at the news of Garp’s shocking death, Mrs. Ralph was among the very first to write to Helen. “His was a seduction,” Mrs. Ralph wrote, “whose non-occurrence I have always regretted but respected.”

Helen came to rather like the woman, with whom she occasionally corresponded.

Roberta Muldoon also had occasion to correspond with Mrs. Ralph, whose application for a Fields Foundation fellowship was rejected. Roberta was quite surprised by the note sent the Fields Foundation by Mrs. Ralph.

Up yours,

the note said. Mrs. Ralph did not appreciate rejection.

Her own child, Ralph, would die before her; Ralph became quite a good newspaperman and, like William Percy, was killed in a war.

BAINBRIDGE
PERCY
, who was best known to Garp as Pooh, would live a long, long time. The last of a train of psychiatrists would claim to have rehabilitated her, but Pooh Percy may simply have emerged from analysis—and a number of institutions—too thoroughly
bored
with rehabilitation to be violent anymore.

However it was achieved, Pooh was, after a great while, peaceably reintroduced to social intercourse; she reentered public life, a functioning if not speaking member of society, more or less safe and (finally) useful. It was in her fifties that she became interested in children; she worked especially well and patiently with the retarded. In this capacity, she would frequently meet other Ellen Jamesians, who in their various ways were also rehabilitated—or, at least, vastly changed.

For almost twenty years Pooh would not mention her dead sister, Cushie, but her fondness for children eventually confused her. She got herself pregnant when she was fifty-four (no one could imagine how) and she was returned to institutional observation, convinced, as she was, that she would die in childbirth. When this didn’t occur, Pooh became a devoted mother; she also continued her work with the retarded. Pooh Percy’s own child, for whom her mother’s violent history would be a severe shock in her later life, was fortunately
not
retarded; in fact, she would have reminded Garp of Cushie.

Pooh Percy, some said, became a positive example for those who would forever put an end to capital punishment: her rehabilitation was so impressive. Only not to Helen, and to Duncan Garp, who would wish to their graves that Pooh Percy had died at that moment when she last cried “Ig!” in the Steering wrestling room.

One day Pooh
would
die, of course; she would succumb to a stroke in Florida, where she was visiting her daughter. It was a small consolation to Helen that Helen would outlive her.

The faithful Whitcomb would choose to describe Pooh Percy as Garp had once described her, following his escape from the first feminist funeral. “An androgynous twerp,” Garp said to Dean Bodger, “with a face like a ferret and a mind completely sodden by spending nearly fifteen years in diapers.”

That official biography of Garp, which Donald Whitcomb titled
Lunacy and Sorrow: The Life and Art of T. S. Garp
, would be published by the associates of
JOHN
WOLF
, who would not live to see the good book in print. John Wolf had contributed much effort to the book’s careful making, and he had worked in the capacity of an editor to Whitcomb—over most of the manuscript—before his untimely demise.

John Wolf died of lung cancer in New York at a relatively young age. He had been a careful, conscientious, attentive, even elegant man—most of his life—but his deep restlessness and unrelieved pessimism could only be numbed and disguised by smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day from the time he was eighteen. Like many busy men who maintain an otherwise calm and managed air about themselves, John Wolf smoked himself to death.

His service to Garp, and to Garp’s books, is inestimable. Although he may from time to time have held himself responsible for the fame which, in the end, provoked Garp’s own violent killing, Wolf was far too sophisticated a man to dwell on such a narrow view. Assassination, in Wolf’s opinion, was “an increasingly popular amateur sport of the times”; and “political true believers,” as he called nearly everybody, were always the sworn enemy of the artist—who insisted, however arrogantly, on the superiority of a
personal
vision. Besides, Wolf knew, it was not only that Pooh Percy had become an Ellen Jamesian, and had responded to Garp’s baiting; hers was a grievance as old as childhood, possibly aggravated by politics but basically as deep as her long need for diapers. Pooh had gotten it into her head that Garp’s and Cushie’s love for fucking each other had finally been lethal to Cushie. At least, it is true, it was lethal to Garp.

A professional in a world that too often worshiped the contemporaneity it had created, John Wolf insisted to his end that his proudest publication was the father and son edition of
The Pension Grillparzer
. He was proud of the early Garp novels, of course, and came to speak of
The World According to Bensenhaver
as “inevitable—when you consider the violence Garp was exposed to.” But it was “Grillparzer” that elevated Wolf—it and the unfinished manuscript of
My Father’s Illusions
, which John Wolf looked upon, lovingly and sadly, as “Garp’s road back to his right way to write.” For years Wolf edited the messy first draft of the unfinished novel; for years he consulted with Helen, and with Donald Whitcomb, about its merits and its faults.

“Only after I’m dead,” Helen insisted. “Garp would let nothing go if he didn’t think it was finished.” Wolf agreed, but he died before Helen. Whitcomb and Duncan would be left to publish
My Father’s Illusions
—considerably posthumously.

It was Duncan who spent the most time with John Wolf during Wolf’s torturous dying of lung cancer. Wolf lay in a private hospital in New York, sometimes smoking a cigarette through a plastic tube inserted in his throat.

“What would your father say to this?” Wolf asked Duncan. “Wouldn’t it suit one of
his
death scenes? Isn’t it properly grotesque? Did he ever tell you about the prostitute who died in Vienna, in the Rudolfinerhaus? What was her name?”

“Charlotte,” Duncan said. He was close to John Wolf. Wolf had even come to like the early drawings Duncan had done for
The Pension Grillparzer
. And Duncan had moved to New York; he told Wolf that his first sense of knowing he wanted to be a painter, as well as a photographer, was his view of Manhattan from John Wolf’s office—the day of the first feminist funeral in New York.

In a letter John Wolf dictated to Duncan from his deathbed, Wolf left word for his associates that Duncan Garp was to be allowed to come look at Manhattan from his office for as long as the publishing company occupied the building.

For many years after John Wolf died, Duncan took advantage of the offer. A new editor moved into Wolf’s office, but the name of Garp made all the editors in that publishing house scurry.

For years secretaries would come in and say, “Excuse me, it’s that young
Garp
. To look out the window again.”

Duncan and John Wolf spent the many hours it took John Wolf to die discussing how good a writer Garp was.

“He would have been very, very special,” John Wolf told Duncan.

“
Would
have been, maybe,” Duncan said. “But what else could you say to me?”

“No, no, I’m not lying; there’s no need,” Wolf said. “He had the vision, and he always had the language. But mainly vision; he was always personal. He just got sidetracked for a while, but he was back on the beam with that new book. He was back to the good impulses again. “The Pension Grillparzer” is his most charming, but it’s not his most original; he was still too young; there are other writers who could have written that story.
Procrastination
is an original idea, and a brilliant first novel—but it’s a first novel.
Second Wind of the Cuckold
is very funny, and his best title; it’s also very original, but it’s a novel of manners—and rather narrow. Of course,
The World According to Bensenhaver
is his most original, even if it
is
an X-rated soap opera—which it is. But it’s so harsh; it’s raw food—good food, but
very
raw. I mean, who wants it? Who needs to suffer such abuse?

“Your father was a difficult fellow; he never gave an inch—but that’s the point: he was always following his nose; wherever it took him, it was always his nose. And he was ambitious. He started out daring to write about the
world
—when he was just a
kid
, for Christ’s sake, he still took it on. Then, for a while—like a lot of writers—he could only write about himself; but he also wrote about the world—it just didn’t come through as cleanly. He was starting to get bored with writing about his life and he was beginning to write about the whole world again; he was just starting. And Jesus, Duncan, you must remember he was a
young
man! He was thirty-three.”

“And he had energy,” Duncan said.

“Oh, he would have written a lot, there’s no question,” John Wolf said. But he began to cough and had to stop talking.

“But he could never just relax,” Duncan said. “So what was the point? Wouldn’t he have just burned himself out, anyway?”

Shaking his head—but delicately, not to loosen the tube in his throat—John Wolf went on coughing. “Not him!” Wolf gasped.

“He could have just gone on and on?” Duncan asked. “You think so?”

The coughing Wolf nodded. He would die coughing.

Roberta and Helen would attend his funeral, of course. The rumor-mongers would be hissing, because it was often speculated in the small town of New York that John Wolf had looked after more than Garp’s
literary
estate. Knowing Helen, it seems unlikely that she would ever have had such a relationship with John Wolf. Whenever Helen heard how she was linked with someone, Helen would just laugh. Roberta Muldoon was more vehement.

“With John Wolf?” Roberta said. “Helen and Wolf? You’ve got to be kidding.”

Roberta’s confidence was well founded. On occasion, when she flung herself upon the city of New York, Roberta Muldoon had enjoyed a tryst or two with John Wolf.

“And to think I used to watch you play!” John Wolf told Roberta once.

“You can
still
watch me play,” Roberta said.

“I mean football,” John Wolf said.

“There are better things than football,” said Roberta.

“But you do so many things well,” John Wolf told her.

“Ha!”

“But you
do
, Roberta.”

“All men are liars,” said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

ROBERTA
MULDOON
, formerly Robert Muldoon, No. 90 of the Philadelphia Eagles, would outlive John Wolf—and most of her lovers. She would not outlive Helen, but Roberta lived long enough to grow at last comfortable with her sex reassignment. Approaching fifty, she would remark to Helen that she suffered the vanity of a middle-aged man
and
the anxieties of a middle-aged woman, “but,” Roberta added, “this perspective is not without advantages. Now I always know what men are going to say before they say it.”

“But
I
know, too, Roberta,” Helen said. Roberta laughed her frightening boomer of a laugh; she had a habit of bear-hugging her friends, which made Helen nervous. Roberta had once broken a pair of Helen’s glasses. Roberta had successfully dwarfed her enormous eccentricity by becoming responsible—chiefly to the Fields Foundation, which she ran so vigorously that Ellen James had given her a nickname.

Captain Energy.

“Ha!” Roberta said. “Garp was Captain Energy.”

Roberta was also greatly admired in the small community of Dog’s Head Harbor, for Jenny Fields’ estate had never been so respectable, in the old days, and Roberta was a far more outgoing participant in the affairs of the town than Jenny had ever been. She spent ten years as the chairperson of the local school board—although, of course, she could never have a child of her own. She organized, coached, and pitched on the Rockingham County Women’s Softball Team—for twelve years, the best team in the state of New Hampshire. Once upon a time, the same, stupid, swinish governor of New Hampshire suggested that Roberta be given a chromosome test before she be allowed to play in the title game; Roberta suggested that the governor should meet her, just before the start of the game—on the pitcher’s mound—”and see if he can fight like a man.” Nothing came of it, and—politics being what they are—the governor threw out the first ball. Roberta pitched a shutout, chromosomes and all.

And it is to the credit of the athletic director of the Steering School that Roberta was offered the position of offensive line coach for the Steering football team. But the former tight end politely refused the job. “All those young boys,” Roberta said sweetly. “I’d get in terrible trouble.”

Her favorite young boy, all her life, was Duncan Garp, whom she mothered and sistered and smothered with her perfume and her affection. Duncan loved her; he was one of the few male guests ever allowed at Dog’s Head Harbor, although Roberta was angry with him and stopped inviting him for a period of almost two years—following Duncan’s seduction of a young poet.

“His father’s son,” Helen said. “He’s charming.”

“The boy is
too
charming,” Roberta told Helen. “And that poet was not stable. She was also far too old for him.”

“You sound jealous, Roberta,” Helen said.

“It was a violation of
trust
,” Roberta said loudly. Helen agreed that it was. Duncan apologized. Even the poet apologized.

“
I
seduced
him
,” she told Roberta.

“No you didn’t,” Roberta said. “You
couldn’t
.”

All was forgiven one spring in New York when Roberta surprised Duncan with a dinner invitation. “I’m bringing this smashing girl, just for you—a friend,” Roberta told him, “so wash the paint off your hands, and wash your hair and look nice. I’ve told her you’re nice, and I know you
can
be. I think you’ll like her.”