The World According to Garp

Down through the quadrangles of bright green grass and fresh tar paths, boxed in by buildings of a brick so worn and soft it resembled pink marble, Jenny watched the children run. With them, she was sorry to note, ran the Percy family dog—to, Jenny's mind, a mindless oaf of an animal who for years would defy the town leash law the way the Percys would flaunt their casualness. The dog, a giant Newfoundland, had grown from a puppy who spilled garbage cans, and the witless thief of baseballs, to being mean.

One day when the kids had been playing, the dog had mangled a volleyball—not an act of viciousness, usually. A mere bumble. But when the boy who owned the deflated ball had tried to remove it from the great dog's mouth, the dog bit him—deep puncture wounds in the forearm: not the type of bite, a nurse knew, that was only an accident, a case of “Bonkers getting a little excited, because he loves playing with the children so much.” Or so said Midge Percy, who had named the dog Bonkers. She told Jenny that she'd gotten the dog shortly after the birth of her fourth child. The word bonkers meant “a little crazy,” she told Jenny, and that's how Midge said she still felt about Stewie after their first four children together. “I was just bonkers about him,” Midge said to Jenny, “so I named the poor dog Bonkers to prove my feelings for Stew.”

“Midge Percy was bonkers, all right,” wrote Jenny Fields. “That dog was a killer, protected by one of the many thin and senseless bits of logic that the upper classes in America are famous for: namely, that the children and pets of the aristocracy couldn't possibly be too free, or hurt anybody. That other people should not overpopulate the world, or be allowed to release their dogs, but that the dogs and children of rich people have a right to run free.”

“The curs of the upper class,” Garp would call them, always—both the dogs and the children.

He would have agreed with his mother that the Percys' dog, Bonkers, the Newfoundland retriever, was dangerous. A Newfoundland is a breed of oily-coated dog resembling an all-black Saint Bernard with webbed feet; they are generally slothful and friendly. But on the Percys' lawn, Bonkers broke up a touch football game by hurling his one hundred and seventy pounds on five-year-old Garp's back and biting off the child's left earlobe—and part of the rest of Garp's ear, as well. Bonkers would probably have taken all the ear, but he was a dog notably lacking concentration. The other children fled in all directions.

“Bonkie bit someone,” said a younger Percy, pulling Midge away from the phone. It was a Percy family habit to put a -y or an -ie at the end of almost every family member's name. Thus the children—Stewart (jr.), Randolph, William, Cushman (a girl), and Bainbridge (another girl)—were called, within the family, Stewie Two, Dopey, Shrill Willy, Cushie, and Pooh. Poor Bainbridge, whose name did not convert easily to a -y or an -ie ending, was also the last in the family to be in diapers; thus, in a cute attempt to be both descriptive and literary, she was Pooh.

It was Cushie at Midge's arm, telling her mother that “Bonkie bit someone.”

“Who'd he get this time?” said Fat Stew; he seized a squash racket, as if he were going to take charge of the matter, but he was completely undressed; it was Midge who drew her dressing gown together and prepared to be the first grownup to run outside to inspect the damage.

Stewart Percy was frequently undressed at home. No one knows why. Perhaps it was to relieve himself of the strain of how very dressed he was when he strolled the Steering campus with nothing to do, Distinguished Silver on display, and perhaps it was out of necessity for all the procreation he was responsible for, he must have been frequently undressed at home.

“Bonkie bit Garp,” said little Cushie Percy. Neither Stewart nor Midge noticed that Garp was there, in the doorway, the whole side of his head bloody and chewed.

“Mrs. Percy?” Garp whispered, not loud enough to be heard.

“So it was Garp?” Fat Stew said. Bending to return the squash racket to the closet, he farted. Midge looked at him. “So Bonkie bit Garp,” Stewart mused. “Well, at least the dog's got good taste, doesn't he?”

“Oh, Stewie,” Midge said; a laughter light as spit escaped her. “Garp's still just a little boy.” And there he was, in fact, near-to-fainting and bleeding on the costly hall carpet, which actually spread, without a tuck or a ripple, through four of the monstrous first-floor rooms.

Cushie Percy, whose young life would terminate in childbirth while she tried to deliver what would have been only her first child, saw Garp bleeding on the Steering family heirloom: the remarkable rug. “Oh, gross!” she cried, running out the door.

“Oh, I'll have to call your mother,” Midge told Garp, who felt dizzy with the great dog's growl and slobber still singing in his partial ear.

For years Garp would mistakenly interpret Cushie Percy's outcry of “Oh, gross!” He thought she was not referring to his gnawed and messy ear but to her father's great gray nakedness, which filled the hall. That was what was gross to Garp: the silver, barrel-bellied navy man approaching him in the nude from the well of the Percys' towering spiral staircase.

Stewart Percy knelt down in front of Garp and peered curiously into the boy's bloody face; Fat Stew did not appear to be directing his attention to the mauled ear, and Garp wondered if he should advise the enormous, naked man concerning the whereabouts of his injury. But Stewart Percy was not looking for where Garp was hurt. He was looking at Garp's shining brown eyes, at their color and at their shape, and he seemed to convince himself of something, because he nodded austerely and said to his foolish blond Midge, “Jap.”

It would be years before Garp would fully comprehend this, too. But Stewie Percy said to Midge, “I spent enough time in the Pacific to recognize Jap eyes when I see them. I told you it was a Jap.” The it Stewart Percy referred to was whoever he had decided was Garp's father. That was a frequent, speculative game around the Steering community: guessing who Garp's father was. And Stewart Percy, from his experience in his part of the Pacific, had decided that Garp's father was Japanese.

“At that moment,” Garp wrote, “I thought “Jap” was a word that meant my ear was all gone.”

“No sense in calling his mother,” Stewie said to Midge. “Just take him over to the infirmary. She's a nurse, isn't she? She'll know what to do.”

Jenny knew, all right. “Why not bring the dog over here?” she asked Midge, while she gingerly washed around what was left of Garp's little ear.

“Bonkers?” Midge asked.

“Bring him here,” Jenny said, “and I'll give him a shot.”

“An injection?” Midge asked. She laughed. “Do you mean there's actually a shot to make him so he won't bite any more people?”

“No,” Jenny said. “I mean you could save your money—instead of taking him to a vet. I mean there's a shot to make him dead. That kind of an injection. Then he won't bite any more people.”

“Thus,” Garp wrote, “was the Percy War begun. For my mother, I think, it was a class war, which she later said all wars were. For me, I just knew to watch out for Bonkers. And for the rest of the Percys.”

Stewart Percy sent Jenny Fields a memo on the stationery of the Secretary of the Steering School: “I cannot believe you actually want us to have Bonkers put to sleep,” Stewart wrote.

“You bet your fat ass I do,” Jenny said to him, on the phone. “Or at least tie him up, forever.”

“There's no point in having a dog if the dog can't run free,” Stewart said.

“Then kill him,” Jenny said.

“Bonkers has had all his shots, thank you just the same,” Stewart said. “He's a gentle dog, really. Only if he's provoked.”

“Obviously,” Garp wrote, “Fat Stew felt that Bonkers had been provoked by my Japness.”

“What's “good taste” mean?” little Garp asked Jenny. At the infirmary, Dr. Pell sewed up his ear; Jenny reminded the doctor that Garp had recently had a tetanus shot.

“Good taste?” Jenny asked. The odd-looking amputation of the ear forced Garp always to wear his hair long, a style he often complained about.

“Fat Stew said that Bonkers has got “good taste,'” Garp said.

“To bite you?” Jenny asked.

“I guess so,” Garp said. “What's it mean?”

Jenny knew, all right. But she said, “It means that Bonkers must have known you were the best-tasting kid in the whole pile of kids.”