The World According to Garp

by John Irving

  "She was a fine athlete," the announcer mumbled. "A great pair of hands."

  "An extraordinary person," agreed the co-announcer.

  The first man spoke again. "Yeah," he said, "she didda lot for..." and he struggled, while Duncan waited to hear for whom--for freaks, for weirdos, for sexual disasters, for his father and his mother and himself and Ellen James. "She didda lot for people wid complicated lives," the sports announcer said, surprising himself and Duncan Garp--but with dignity.

  The band played. The Dallas Cowboys kicked off to the Philadelphia Eagles; it would be the first of many kickoffs that the Eagles would receive. And Duncan Garp could imagine his father, appreciating the announcer's struggle to be tactful and kind. Duncan actually imagined Garp whooping it up with Roberta; somehow, Duncan felt that Roberta would be there--privy to her own eulogy. She and Garp would be hilarious at the awkwardness of the news.

  Garp would mimic the announcer: "She didda lot for refashioning da vagina!"

  "Ha!" Roberta would roar.

  "Oh boy!" Garp would holler. "Oh boy."

  When Garp had been killed, Duncan remembered, Roberta Muldoon had threatened to have her sexual reversal reversed. "I'd rather be a lousy man again," she wailed, "than think there are woman in this world who are actually gloating over this filthy murder by that filthy cunt!"

  Stop it! Stop it! Don't ever say that word!

  scribbled Ellen James.

  There are only those of us who loved him, and those of us who didn't know him--men and women,

  wrote Ellen James.

  Then Roberta Muldoon had picked them all up, one by one; she gave to them--formally, seriously, and generously--her famous bear hug.

  When Roberta died, some talking person among the Fields Foundation fellows at Dog's Head Harbor called Helen on the phone. Helen, gathering herself--once again--would be the one to call Duncan in Vermont. Helen would advise young Jenny how to break the news to Duncan. Jenny Garp had inherited a fine bedside manner from her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields.

  "Bad news, Duncan," young Jenny whispered, kissing her brother on the lips. "Old Number Ninety has dropped the ball."

  * * *

  --

  DUNCAN GARP, who survived both the accident that cost him an eye and the accident that cost him an arm, became a good and serious painter; he was something of a pioneer in the artistically suspect field of color photography, which he developed with his painter's eye for color and his father's habit of an insistent, personal vision. He did not make nonsense images, you can be sure, and he brought to his painting an eerie, sensual, almost narrative realism; it was easy, knowing who he was, to say that this was more of a writer's craft than it was a craft that belonged in a picture--and to criticize him, as he was criticized, for being too "literal."

  "Whatever that means," Duncan always said. "What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist--and the son of Garp? No flaws?"

  He had his father's sense of humor, after all, and Helen was very proud of him.

  He must have made a hundred paintings in a series called Family Album--the period of his work he was best known for. They were paintings modeled from the photographs he had taken as a child, after his eye accident. They were of Roberta, and his grandmother, Jenny Fields; his mother swimming at Dog's Head Harbor; his father running, with his healed jaw, along the beach. There was one series of a dozen small paintings of a dirty-white Saab; the series was called The Colors of the World, because, Duncan said, all the colors of the world are visible in the twelve versions of the dirty-white Saab.

  There were baby pictures of Jenny Garp, too; and in the large, group portraits--largely imagined, not from any photograph--the critics said that the blank face, or the repeated figure (very small) with its back to the camera, was always Walt.

  Duncan did not want children of his own. "Too vulnerable," he told his mother. "I couldn't stand watching them grow up." What he meant was, he couldn't stand watching them not grow up.

  Since he felt that way, Duncan was fortunate not to have children be an issue in his life--they weren't even a worry. He came home from his four months of hospitalization in Vermont and found an extremely lonely transsexual living in his New York studio-apartment. She had made the place look as if a real artist already lived there, and by a curious process--it was almost a kind of osmosis of his things--she already seemed to know a great deal about him. She was in love with him, too--just from pictures. Another gift to Duncan's life from Roberta Muldoon! And there were some who said--Jenny Garp, for example--that she was even beautiful.

  They were married, because if ever there was a boy with no discrimination in his heart about transsexuals, that boy was Duncan Garp.

  "It's a marriage made in Heaven," Jenny Garp told her mother. She meant Roberta, of course; Roberta was in Heaven. But Helen was a natural at worrying about Duncan; since Garp had died, she'd had to take over much of the worrying. And since Roberta had died, Helen felt she'd had to take over all the worrying.

  "I don't know, I don't know," Helen said. Duncan's marriage made her anxious. "That damn Roberta," Helen said. "She always got her way!"

  But this way there's no chance of unwanted pregnancy,

  wrote Ellen James.

  "Oh, stop it!" Helen said. "I sort of wanted grandchildren, you know. One or two, anyway."

  "I'll give them to you," Jenny promised.

  "Oh boy," Helen said. "If I'm still alive, kid."

  Sadly, she wouldn't be, although she would get to see Jenny pregnant and be able to imagine she was a grandmother.

  "Imagining something is better than remembering something," Garp wrote.

  And Helen certainly had to be happy with how Duncan's life straightened out, as Roberta had promised.

  After Helen's death, Duncan worked very hard with the meek Mr. Whitcomb; they made a respectable presentation out of Garp's unfinished novel, My Father's Illusions. Like the father and son edition of The Pension Grillparzer, Duncan illustrated what there was of My Father's Illusions--a portrait of a father who plots ambitiously and impossibly for a world where his children will be safe and happy. The illustrations Duncan contributed were largely portraits of Garp.

  Sometime after the book's publication, Duncan was visited by an old, old man whose name Duncan could not remember. The man claimed to be at work on "a critical biography" of Garp, but Duncan found his questions irritating. The man asked over and over again about the events leading up to the terrible accident where Walt was killed. Duncan wouldn't tell him anything (Duncan didn't know anything), and the man went away empty-handed--biographically speaking. The man was Michael Milton, of course. It had appeared to Duncan that the man was missing something, though Duncan couldn't have known that Michael Milton was missing his penis.

  The book he supposedly was writing was never seen, and no one knows what happened to him.

  If the world of the reviewer seemed content, after the publication of My Father's Illusions, to call Garp merely an "eccentric writer," a "good but not a great writer," Duncan didn't mind. In Duncan's own words, Garp was "original" and "the real thing." Garp had been the type, after all, to compel blind loyalty.

  "One-eyed loyalty," Duncan called it.

  He had a long-standing code with his sister, Jenny, and with Ellen James; the three of them were as thick as thieves.

  "Here's to Captain Energy!" they would say, when they were drinking together.

  "There's no sex like transsex!" they would shout, when they were drunk, which occasionally embarrassed Duncan's wife--although she certainly agreed.

  "How's the energy?" they would write and phone and telegraph each other, when they wanted to know what was up. And when they had plenty of energy, they would describe each other as "full of Garp."

  Although Duncan would live a long, long time, he would die unnecessarily and, ironically, because of his good sense of humor. He would die laughing at one of his own jokes, which was surely a Garp-family thing to do. It was at a kind of coming
-out party for a new transsexual, a friend of his wife's. Duncan aspirated an olive and choked to death in just a few seconds of violent laughter. That is a horrible and stupid way to die, but everyone who knew him said that Duncan would not have objected--either to that form of death, or to the life he'd had. Duncan Garp always said that his father suffered the death of Walt more than anyone in the family suffered anything else. And among the chosen forms of death, death finally was the same. "Between men and women," as Jenny Fields once said, "only death is shared equally."

  Jenny Garp, who in the field of death had much more specific training than her famous grandmother, would not have agreed. Young Jenny knew that, between men and women, not even death gets shared equally. Men get to die more, too.

  * * *

  --

  JENNY GARP would outlive them all. If she had been at the party where her brother choked to death, she probably could have saved him. At least she would have known exactly what to do. She was a doctor. She always said it was her time in the Vermont hospital, looking after Duncan, that had made up her mind to turn to medicine--not her famous grandmother's history of nursing, because Jenny Garp knew that only secondhand.

  Young Jenny was a brilliant student; like her mother, she absorbed everything--and everything she learned she could redeliver. Like Jenny Fields, she got her feeling for people as a roamer of hospitals--inching what kindness was possible, and recognizing what wasn't.

  While she was an intern, she married another young doctor. Jenny Garp would not give up her name, however; she stayed a Garp, and, in a frightful war with her husband, she saw that her three children would all be Garps, too. She would divorce, eventually--and remarry, but in no hurry. That second time would suit her. He was a painter, much older than herself, and if any of her family had been alive to nag her, they would have no doubt warned her that she was imagining something of Duncan in the man.

  "So what?" she would have said. Like her mother, she had her own mind; like Jenny Fields, she kept her own name.

  And her father? In what way was Jenny Garp even slightly like him--whom she never really knew? She was only a baby, after all, when he died.

  Well, she was eccentric. She made a point of going into every bookstore and asking for her father's books. If the store was out of stock, she would order. She had a writer's sense of immortality: if you're in print and on the shelves, you're alive. Jenny Garp left fake names and addresses all over America; the books she ordered would be sold to someone, she reasoned. T. S. Garp would not go out of print--at least not in his daughter's lifetime.

  She was also avid in her support of the famous feminist, her grandmother, Jenny Fields; but like her father, Jenny Garp did not put much stock in the writing of Jenny Fields. She did not bother bookstores about keeping A Sexual Suspect on the shelves.

  Most of all, she resembled her father in the kind of doctor she became. Jenny Garp would turn her medical mind to research. She would not have a private practice. She would go to hospitals only when she was sick. Instead, Jenny spent a number of years working closely with the Connecticut Tumor Registry; she would eventually direct a branch of the National Cancer Institute. Like a good writer, who must love and worry each detail, Jenny Garp would spend hours noticing the habits of a single human cell. Like a good writer, she was ambitious; she hoped she would get to the bottom of cancer. In a sense, she would. She would die of it.

  Like other doctors, Jenny Garp took that sacred oath of Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, wherein she agreed to devote herself to something like the life Garth once described to young Whitcomb--although Garp was concerned with a writer's ambitions ("...trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive"). Thus, cancer research did not depress Jenny Garp, who liked to describe herself as her father had described a novelist.

  "A doctor who sees only terminal cases."

  In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

  JOHN IRVING published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Oscar.

  In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Toronto and Vermont.