The World According to Garp

by John Irving

  "The undertow is bad today."

  "The undertow is strong today."

  "The undertow is wicked today." Wicked was a big word in New Hampshire--not just for the undertow.

  And for years Walt watched out for it. From the first, when he asked what it could do to you, he had only been told that it could pull you out to sea. It could suck you under and drown you and drag you away.

  It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water's edge to have a word with him.

  "What are you doing, Walt?" Helen asked.

  "What are you looking for, dummy?" Duncan asked him.

  "I'm trying to see the Under Toad," Walt said.

  "The what?" said Garp.

  "The Under Toad," Walt said. "I'm trying to see it. How big is it?"

  And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

  Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

  Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ("Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!" Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy--when depression had moved in overnight--they said to each other, "The Under Toad is strong today."

  "Remember," Duncan asked on the plane, "how Walt asked if it was green or brown?"

  Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

  * * *

  --

  In Vienna, Garp felt, the Under Toad was strong. Helen did not seem to feel it, and Duncan, like an eleven-year-old, passed from one feeling to the next. The return to the city, for Garp, was like returning to the Steering School. The streets, the buildings, even the paintings in the museums, were like his old teachers, grown older; he barely recognized them, and they did not know him at all. Helen and Duncan saw everything. Garp was content to walk with baby Jenny; he strolled her through the long, warm fall in a carriage as baroque as the city itself--he smiled and nodded to all the tongue-clucking elderly who peered into the carriage and approved of his new baby. The Viennese appeared well fed and comfortable with luxuries that looked new to Garp; the city was years away from the Russian occupation, the memory of the war, the reminders of ruins. If Vienna had been dying, or already dead, in his time there with his mother, Garp felt that something new but common had grown in the old city's place.

  At the same time, Garp liked showing Duncan and Helen around. He enjoyed his personal history tour, mixed with the guidebook history of Vienna. "And this is where Hitler stood when he first addressed the city. And this is where I used to shop on Saturday mornings.

  "This is the fourth district, a Russian zone of occupation; the famous Karlskirche is here, and the Lower and Upper Belvedere. And between the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, on your left, and the Argentinierstrasse is the little street where Mom and I..."

  They rented some rooms in a nice pension in the fourth district. They discussed enrolling Duncan in an English-speaking school, but it was a long drive, or a long Strassenbahn ride every morning, and they didn't really plan on staying even half the year. Vaguely, they imagined Christmas at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny and Roberta and Ernie Holm.

  John Wolf finally sent the book, complete book jacket and all, and Garp's sense of the Under Toad grew unbearably for a few days, then kicked deeper, beneath the surface. It appeared to be gone. Garp managed a restrained letter to his editor; he expressed his sense of personal hurt, his understanding that this had been done with the best intentions, businesswise. But...and so forth. How angry could he really be--at Wolf? Garp had provided the package; Wolf had only promoted it.

  Garp heard from his mother that the first reviews were "not nice," but Jenny--on John Wolf's advice--did not enclose any reviews with her letter. John Wolf clipped the first rave from among the important New York reviews: "The women's movement has at last exhibited a significant influence on a significant male writer," wrote the reviewer, who was an associate professor of women's studies somewhere. She went on to say that The World According to Bensenhaver was "the first in-depth study, by a man, of the peculiarly male neurotic pressure many women are made to suffer." And so forth.

  "Christ," Garp said, "it sounds as if I wrote a thesis. It's a fucking novel, it's a story, and I made it up!"

  "Well, it sounds as if she liked it," Helen said.

  "It's not it she liked," Garp said. "She liked something else."

  But the review helped to establish the rumor that The World According to Bensenhaver was "a feminist novel."

  "Like me," Jenny Fields wrote her son, "it appears you are going to be the beneficiary of one of the many popular misunderstandings of our time."

  Other reviews called the book "paranoid, crazed, and crammed with gratuitous violence and sex." Garp was not shown most of those reviews, but they probably didn't hurt the sales, either.

  One reviewer admitted that Garp was a serious writer whose "tendencies toward baroque exaggeration have run amuck." John Wolf couldn't resist sending Garp that review--probably because John Wolf agreed with it.

  Jenny wrote that she was becoming "involved with" New Hampshire politics.

  "The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time," Roberta Muldoon wrote.

  "How could anyone give all her time to a New Hampshire governor?" Garp wrote back.

  There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy. The governor truly was a crowing, reactionary moron. Among other things, he appeared to believe that poor people should not be helped by the state or federal government, largely because the condition of the poor seemed to the governor of New Hampshire to be a deserved punishment--the just and moral judgment of a Superior Being. The incumbent governor was obnoxious and clever; for example, the sense of fear that he successfully evoked: that New Hampshire was in danger of being victimized by teams of New York divorcees.

  The divorced women from New York allegedly were moving into New Hampshire in droves. Their intentions were to turn New Hampshire women into lesbians, or at the very least to encourage them to be unfaithful to their New Hampshire husbands; their intentions also included the seduction of New Hampshire husbands, and New Hampshire high school boys. The New York divorcees apparently represented widespread promiscuity, socialism, alimony, and something ominously referred to, in the New Hampshire press, as "Group Female Living."

  One of the centers for this alleged Group Female Living was Dog's Head Harbor, of course, "the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields."

  There had also been a widespread increase, the governor said, of venereal disease--"a known problem among these Liberationists." He was a terrific liar. The candidate running for governor against this well-liked fool was, apparently, a woman. Jenny and Roberta and (Jenny wrote) "teams of New York divorcees" were running her campaign.

  Somehow, in the sole New Hampshire newspaper of statewide distribution, Garp's "degenerate" novel was referred to as "the new feminist Bible."

  "A violent hymn to the moral depravity and sexual danger of our time," wrote one West Coast reviewer.

  "A pained protest against the violence and sexual combat of our groping age," said another newspaper, some
where else.

  Whether it was liked or disliked, the novel was largely looked upon as news. One way for novels to be successful is for the fiction to resemble somebody's version of the news. That is what happened to The World According to Bensenhaver; like the stupid governor of New Hampshire, Garp's book became news.

  "New Hampshire is a backwoods state with base politics," Garp wrote his mother. "For God's sake, don't get involved."

  "That's what you always say," Jenny wrote. "When you come home, you're going to be famous. Then let me see you try not to get involved."

  "Just watch me," Garp wrote her. "Nothing could be easier."

  His involvement with the transatlantic mail had momentarily distracted Garp from his sense of the awesome and lethal Under Toad, but now Helen told him that she detected the presence of the beast, too.

  "Let's go home," she said. "We've had a nice time."

  They got a telegram from John Wolf. "Stay where you are," it said. "People are buying your book in droves."

  Roberta sent Garp a T-shirt.

  NEW YORK DIVORCEES ARE GOOD FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE

  the T-shirt said.

  "My God," Garp said to Helen. "If we're going home, let's at least wait until after this mindless election."

  Thus he missed, thankfully, the "dissenting feminist opinion" of The World According to Bensenhaver, published in a giddy, popular magazine. The novel, the reviewer said, "steadfastly upholds the sexist notion that women are chiefly an assemblage of orifices and the acceptable prey of predatory males....T. S. Garp continues the infuriating male mythology: the good man is the bodyguard of his family, the good woman never willingly lets another man enter her literal or figurative door."

  Even Jenny Fields was cajoled into "reviewing" her son's novel, and it is fortunate that Garp never saw this, either. Jenny said that although it was her son's best novel--because it was his most serious subject--it was a novel "marred by repeated male obsessions, which could become tedious to women readers." However, Jenny said, her son was a good writer who was still young and would only get better. "His heart," she added, "is in the right place."

  If Garp had read that, he might have stayed in Vienna a lot longer. But they made their plans to leave. As usual, anxiousness quickened the Garps' plans. One night Duncan was not home from the park before dark and Garp, running out to look for him, called back to Helen that this was the final sign; they would leave as soon as possible. City life, in general, made Garp too fearful for Duncan.

  Garp ran along the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse toward the Russian War Memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. There was a pastry shop near there, and Duncan liked pastry, although Garp had repeatedly warned the child that it would ruin his supper. "Duncan!" he ran calling, and his voice against the stolid stone buildings bounced back to him like the froggy belching of the Under Toad, the foul and warty beast whose sticky nearness he felt like breath.

  But Duncan was munching happily on a Grillparzertorte in the pastry shop.

  "It gets dark earlier and earlier," he complained. "I'm not that late."

  Garp had to admit it. They walked home together. The Under Toad disappeared up a small, dark street--or else it's not interested in Duncan, Garp thought. He imagined he felt the tug of the tide at his own ankles, but it was a passing feeling.

  * * *

  --

  The telephone, that old cry of alarm--a warrior stabbed on guard duty, screaming his shock--startled the pension where they lived and brought the trembling landlady like a ghost to their rooms.

  "Bitte, bitte," she came pleading. She conveyed, with little shakes of excitement, that the call was from the United States.

  It was about two in the morning, the heat was off, and Garp shivered after the old woman, down the corridor of the pension. "The hall rug was thin," he recalled, "the color of a shadow." He had written that, years ago. And he looked for the rest of his cast: the Hungarian singer, the man who could only walk on his hands, the doomed bear, and all the members of the sad circus of death he had imagined.

  But they were gone; only the old woman's lean, erect body guided him--her erectness unnaturally formal, as if she were overcorrecting a stoop. There were no photographs of speed-skating teams on the walls, there was no unicycle parked by the door to the W.C. Down a staircase and into a room with a harsh overhead light, like a hasty operating room set up in a city under siege, Garp felt he followed the Angel of Death--midwife to the Under Toad whose swampy smell he sniffed at the mouthpiece of the phone.

  "Yes?" he whispered.

  And for a moment was relieved to hear Roberta Muldoon--another sexual rejection; perhaps that was all. Or perhaps an update on the New Hampshire gubernatorial race. Garp looked up at the old, inquiring face of the landlady and realized that she had not taken the time to put in her teeth; her cheeks were sucked into her mouth, the loose flesh drooped below her jaw-line--her whole face was as slack as a skeleton's. The room reeked of toad.

  "I didn't want you to see it on the news," Roberta was saying. "If it would be on TV over there--I couldn't know for sure. Or even the newspapers. I just didn't want you to find out that way."

  "Who won?" Garp asked, lightly, though he knew that this call had little to do with the new or old governor of New Hampshire.

  "She's been shot--your mother," Roberta said. "They've killed her, Garp. A bastard shot her with a deer rifle."

  "Who?" Garp whispered.

  "A man!" Roberta wailed. It was the worst word she could use: a man. "A man who hated women," Roberta said. "He was a hunter," Roberta sobbed. "It was hunting season, or it was almost hunting season, and no one thought there was anything wrong about a man with a rifle. He shot her."

  "Dead?" Garp said.

  "I caught her before she fell," Roberta cried. "She never struck the ground, Garp. She never said a word. She never knew what happened, Garp. I'm sure."

  "Did they get the man?" Garp asked.

  "Someone shot him, or he shot himself," Roberta said.

  "Dead?" Garp asked.

  "Yes, the bastard," Roberta said. "He's dead, too."

  "Are you alone, Roberta?" Garp asked her.

  "No," Roberta wept. "There are a lot of us here. We're at your place." And Garp could imagine them all, the wailing women at Dog's Head Harbor--their leader murdered.

  "She wanted her body to go to a med school," Garp said. "Roberta?"

  "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 some thing," 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 some thing," 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.