The World According to Garp

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 jawline—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 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.