The World According to Garp

me?”

“No, no, I'm not lying; there's no need,” Wolf said. “He had the vision, and he always had the language. But mainly vision; he was always personal. He just got sidetracked for a while, but he was back on the beam with that new book. He was back to the good impulses again. “The Pension Grillparzer” is his most charming, but it's not his most original; he was still too young; there are other writers who could have written that story. Procrastination is an original idea, and a brilliant first novel—but it's a first novel. Second Wind of the Cuckold is very funny, and his best title; it's also very original, but it's a novel of manners—and rather narrow. Of course, The World According to Bensenhaver is his most original, even if it is an X-rated soap opera—which it is. But it's so harsh; it's raw food—good food, but very raw. I mean, who wants it? Who needs to suffer such abuse?

“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 rumor-mongers 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