The World According to Garp

by John Irving

  "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 rumormongers 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."

  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.