The World According to Garp

nothing.”

Jenny Fields was not entirely alone in her belief. Stewart Percy, although he did have a title, did not have a real job. He was called the Secretary of Steering School, but no one ever saw him typing. In fact, he had his own secretary, and no one was very sure what she could have to type. For a while Stewart Percy appeared to have some connection with the Steering Alumni Association, a body of Steering graduates so powerful with wealth and sentimental with nostalgia that they were highly esteemed by the administration of the school. But the Director of Alumni Affairs claimed that Stewart Percy was too unpopular with the young alumni to be of use. The young alumni remembered Percy from the days when they had been students.

Stewart Percy was not popular with students, who themselves suspected Percy of doing nothing.

He was a large, florid man with the kind of false barrel chest that at any moment can reveal itself to be merely a stomach—the kind of bravely upheld chest that can drop suddenly and forcefully burst open the tweed jacket containing it, lifting the regimental striped tie with the Steering School colors. “Blood and blue,” Garp always called them.

Stewart Percy, whom his wife called Stewie—although a generation of Steering schoolboys called him Paunch—had a flat-top head of hair the color of Distinguished Silver. The boys said that Stewart's flat-top was meant to resemble an aircraft carrier, because Stewart had been in the Navy in World War II. His contribution to the curriculum at Steering was a single course he taught for fifteen years—which was as long as it took the History Department to develop the nerve and necessary disrespect to forbid him to teach it. For fifteen years it was an embarrassment to them all. Only the most unsuspecting freshmen at Steering were ever suckered into taking it. The course was called “My Part of the Pacific,” and it concerned only those naval battles of World War II which Stewart Percy had personally fought in. There had been two. There were no texts for the course; there were only Stewart's lectures and Stewart's personal slide collection. The slides had been created from old black and white photographs—an interestingly blurred process. At least one memorable class week of slides concerned Stewart's shore leave in Hawaii, where he met and married his wife, Midge.

“Mind you, boys, she was not a native,” he would faithfully tell his class (although, in the gray slide, it was hard to tell what she was). “She was just visiting there, she didn't come from there,” Stewart would say. And there would follow an endless number of slides of Midge's gray-blond hair.

All the Percy children were blond, too, and one suspected they would one day become Distinguished Silver, like Stewie, whom the Steering students of Garp's day named after a dish served them in the school dining-halls at least once every week: Fat Stew. Fat Stew was made from another of the weekly Steering dining-hall dishes: Mystery Meat. But Jenny Fields used to say that Stewart Percy was made entirely of Distinguished Silver hair.

And whether they called him Paunch or Fat Stew, the boys who took Stewart Percy's “My Part of the Pacific” course were supposed to know already that Midge was not a Hawaiian native, though some of them really did have to be told. What the smarter boys knew, and what every member of the Steering community was nearly born knowing—and committed thereafter to silent scorn—was that Stewart Percy had married Midge Steering. She was the last Steering. The unclaimed princess of the Steering School—no headmaster had yet come her way. Stewart Percy married into so much money that he didn't have to be able to do anything, except stay married.

Jenny Fields' father, the footwear king, used to think of Midge Steering's money and shake in his shoes.

“Midge was such a dingbat,” Jenny Fields wrote in her autobiography, “that she went to Hawaii for a vacation during World War II. And she was such a total dingbat,” Jenny wrote, “that she actually fell in love with Stewart Percy, and she began to have his empty, Distinguished Silver children almost immediately—even before the war was over. And when the war was over, she brought him and her growing family back to the Steering School. And she told the school to give her Stewie a job.”

“When I was a boy,” Garp wrote, “there were already three or four little Percys, and more—seemingly always more—on the way.”

Of Midge Percy's many pregnancies, Jenny Fields made up a nasty rhyme.

     What lies in Midge Percy's belly,

     so round and exceedingly fair?

     In fact, it is really nothing

     but a ball of Distinguished Silver hair.

“My mother was a bad writer,” Garp wrote, referring to Jenny's autobiography. “But she was an even worse poet.” When Garp was five, however, he was too young to be told such poems. And what made Jenny Fields so unkind concerning Stewart and Midge?

Jenny knew that Fat Stew looked down on her. But Jenny said nothing, she was just wary of the situation. Garp was a playmate of the Percy children, who were not allowed to visit Garp in the infirmary annex. “Our house is really better for children,” Midge told Jenny once, on the phone. “I mean!'—she laughed—'I don't think there's anything they can catch.”

Except a little stupidity, Jenny thought, but all she said was, “I know who's contagious and who isn't. And nobody plays on the roof.”

To be fair: Jenny knew that the Percy house, which had been the Steering family house, was a comforting house to children. It was carpeted and spacious and full of generations of tasteful toys. It was rich. And because it was cared for by servants, it was also casual. Jenny resented the casualness that the Percy family could afford. Jenny thought that neither Midge nor Stewie had the brains to worry about their children as much as they should; they also had so many children. Maybe when you have a lot of children, Jenny pondered, you aren't so anxious about each of them?

Jenny was actually worried for her Garp when he was off playing with the Percy children. Jenny had grown up in an upper-class home, too, and she knew perfectly well that upper-class children were not magically protected from danger just because they were somehow born safer, with hardier metabolisms and charmed genes. Around the Steering School, however, there were many who seemed to believe this—because, superficially, it often looked true. There was something special about the aristocratic children of those families: their hair seemed to stay in place, their skin did not break out. Perhaps they did not appear to be under any stress because there was nothing they wanted, Jenny thought. But then she wondered how she'd escaped being like them.

Her concern for Garp was truly based on her specific observations of the Percys. The children ran free, as if their own mother believed them to be charmed. Almost albino-like, almost translucent-skinned, the Percy kids really did seem more magical, if not actually healthier, than other children. And despite the feeling most faculty families had toward Fat Stew, they felt that the Percy children, and even Midge, had obvious “class.” Strong, protective genes were at work, they thought.

“My mother,” Garp wrote, “was at war with people who took genes this seriously.”

And one day Jenny watched her small, dark Garp go running across the infirmary lawn, off toward the more elegant faculty houses, white and green-shuttered, where the Percy house sat like the oldest church in a town full of churches. Jenny watched this tribe of children running across the safe, charted footpaths of the school—Garp the fleetest. A string of clumsy, flopping Percys was in pursuit of him—and the other children who ran with this mob.

There was Clarence DuGard, whose father taught French and smelled as if he never washed; he never opened a window all winter. There was Talbot Mayer Jones, whose father knew more about all of America's history than Stewart Percy knew about his small part of the Pacific. There was Emily Hamilton, who had eight brothers and would graduate from an inferior all-girls' school just a year before Steering would vote to admit women; her mother would commit suicide, not necessarily as a result of this vote but simultaneously with its announcement (causing Stewart Percy to remark that this was what would come of admitting girls to Steering: more suicide). And there were the Grove brothers, Ira and Buddy, “from the town'; their father was with the maintenance department of the school, and it was a delicate case—whether the boys should even be encouraged to attend Steering, and how well it could be expected they would do.