The World According to Garp

Lemon?

“No, just sugar!” Roberta called.

When Ellen brought the ice tea, Roberta downed the whole glass in a few gulps.

“That's perfect, Ellen,” Roberta said. Ellen went to fix Roberta another glass. “Perfect,” Roberta repeated. “Give me another one just like that one!” Roberta called. “I want a whole life just like that one!”

When Ellen came back with the ice tea, Roberta Muldoon was dead in the hammock. Something had popped, something had burst.

If Roberta's death struck Helen and made her feel low, Helen had Duncan to worry about—for once, a grateful distraction. Ellen James, whom Roberta had supported so much, was spared an overdose of grief by her sudden responsibilities—she was busy taking over Roberta's job at the Fields Foundation; she had big shoes to fill, as they say. In fact, size 12. Young Jenny Garp had never been as close to Roberta as Duncan had been; it was Duncan, still in traction, who took it the hardest. Jenny stayed with him and gave him one pep talk after another, but Duncan could remember Roberta and all the times she had bailed out the Garps before—Duncan especially.

He cried and cried. He cried so much, they had to change a cast on his chest.

His transsexual tenant sent him a telegram from New York.

I'LL GET OUT NOW. NOW THAT R. IS GONE. IF YOU DON'T FEEL COMFORTABLE ABOUT MY BEING HERE. I'LL GO. I WONDER. COULD I HAVE THAT PICTURE OF HER. THE ONE OF R. AND YOU. I ASSUME THAT'S YOU. WITH THE FOOTBALL. YOU'RE IN THE JERSEY WITH THE 90 THAT'S TOO BIG FOR YOU.

Duncan had never answered her cards, her reports on the welfare of his plants and the exact location of his paintings. It was in the spirit of old No. 90 that he answered her now, whoever she was—this poor confused boy-girl whom Roberta, Duncan knew, would have been kind to.

Please stay as long as you want to [he wrote to her]. But I like that photograph, too. When I get back on my feet, I'll make a copy just for you.

Roberta had told him to pull his life together and Duncan regretted he would not be able to show her that he could. He felt a responsibility now, and wondered at his father, being a writer when he was so young—having children, having Duncan, when he was so young. Duncan made lots of resolutions in the hospital in Vermont; he would keep most of them, too.

He wrote Ellen James, who was still too upset at his accident to come see him all plastered and full of pins.

Time we both got to work, though I have some catching up to do—to catch up to you. With 90 gone, we're a smaller family. Let's work at not losing anybody else.

He would have written to his mother that he intended to make her proud of him, but he would have felt silly saying it and he knew how tough his mother was—how little she ever needed pep talks. It was to young Jenny that Duncan turned his new enthusiasm.

“Goddamnit, we've got to have energy,” Duncan told his sister, who had plenty of energy. “That's what you missed—by not knowing the old man. Energy! You've got to get it on your own.”

“I've got energy,” Jenny said. “Jesus, what do you think I've been doing—just taking care of you?”

It was a Sunday afternoon; Duncan and Jenny always watched the pro football on Duncan's hospital TV. It was a further good omen, Duncan thought, that the Vermont station carried the game, that Sunday, from Philadelphia. The Eagles were about to get creamed by the Cowboys. The game, however, didn't matter; it was the before-the-game ceremony that Duncan appreciated. The flag was at half-mast for the former tight end Robert Muldoon. The scoreboard flashed 90! 90! 90! Duncan noted how the times had changed; for example, there were feminist funerals everywhere now; he had just read about a big one in Nebraska. And in Philadelphia the sports announcer managed to say, without snickering, that the flag flew at half-mast for Roberta Muldoon.

“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 women 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