The World According to Garp

“I saw the bear,” I whispered to Robo, back in our room, but Robo had crept into Grandmother's bed and had fallen asleep beside her. Old Johanna was awake, however.

“I saw fewer and fewer soldiers,” she said. “The last time they came there were only nine of them. Everyone looked so hungry; they must have eaten the extra horses. It was so cold. Of course I wanted to help them! But we weren't alive at the same time; how could I help them if I wasn't even born? Of course I knew they would die! But it took such a long time.

“The last time they came, the fountain was frozen. They used their swords and their long pikes to break the ice into chunks. They built a fire and melted the ice in a pot. They took bones from their saddlebags—bones of all kinds—and threw them in the soup. It must have been a very thin broth because the bones had long ago been gnawed clean. I don't know what bones they were. Rabbits, I suppose, and maybe a deer or a wild boar. Maybe the extra horses. I do not choose to think,” said Grandmother, “that they were the bones of the missing soldiers.”

“Go to sleep, Grandmother,” I said.

“Don't worry about the bear,” she said.

And then what? Garp wondered. What can happen next? He wasn't altogether sure what had happened, or why. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all—everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world? Garp knew he did not know enough, not yet. He trusted his instincts; they had brought him this far with “The Pension Grillparzer'; now he had to trust the instinct that told him not to go any further until he knew much more.

What made Garp older and wiser than his nineteen years, had nothing to do with his experience or with what he had learned. He had some instincts, some determination, better than average patience; he loved to work hard. Altogether, with the grammar Tinch had taught him, that was all. Only two facts impressed Garp: that his mother actually believed she could write a book and that the most meaningful relationship in his present life was with a whore. These facts contributed greatly to the young man's developing sense of humor.

He put “The Pension Grillparzer'—as they say—aside. It will come, Garp thought. He knew he had to know more; all he could do was look at Vienna and learn. It was holding still for him. Life seemed to be holding still for him. He made a great many observations of Charlotte, too, and he noticed everything his mother did, but he was being too young. What I need is vision, he knew. An overall scheme of things, a vision all his own. It will come, he repeated to himself, as if he were training for another wrestling season—jumping rope, running laps on a smail track, lifting weights, something almost that mindless but that necessary.

Even Charlotte has a vision, he thought, he certainly knew that his mother had one. Garp had no parallel wisdom for the absolute clarity of the world according to Jenny Fields. But he knew it would take only time to imagine a world of his own—with a little help from the real world. The real world would soon cooperate.

6. THE PENSION GRILLPARZER

WHEN spring came to Vienna, Garp had still not finished “The Pension Grillparzer'; he had not, of course, even written to Helen about his life with Charlotte and her colleagues, Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a hiqher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her since that night she discussed lust with Garp and Charlotte: it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly began the book that would make her famous.

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny wrote, “you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.” The sentence set a tone for the book, which the book had been lacking; Jenny was discovering that when she began with that sentence, an aura was cast over her autobiography that bound the disharmonious parts of her life's story together—the way fog shrouds an uneven landscape, the way heat reaches through a rambling house into every room. That sentence inspired others like it, and Jenny wove them as she might have woven a bright and binding thread of brilliant color through a sprawling tapestry of no apparent design.

“I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone,” she wrote. “That made me A Sexual Suspect.” And that gave her a title, too. A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. It would go through eight hard-cover printings and be translated into six languages even before the paperback sale that could keep Jenny, and a regiment of nurses, in new uniform, for a century.

“Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one,” Jenny wrote. “That made me A Sexual Suspect, too.” Thus Jenny had found the string with which to sew her messy book together.

But when spring came to Vienna, Garp felt like a trip; maybe Italy; possibly, they could rent a car.

“Do you know how to drive?” Jenny asked him. She knew perfectly well that he hadn't ever learned; there had never been a need. “Well, I don't know how, either,” she told him. “And besides, I'm working; I can't stop now. If you want to take a trip, take a trip by yourself.”

It was in the American Express office, where Garp and Jenny got their mail, that Garp met his first traveling young Americans. Two girls who had formerly gone to Dibbs, and a boy named Boo who had gone to Bath. “Hey, how about us?” one of the girls said to Garp, when they had all met. “We're all prep school stuff.”

Her name was Flossie and it appeared to Garp that she had a relationship with Boo. The other girl was called Vivian, and under the tiny cafй table on the Schwarzenbergplatz, Vivian squeezed Garp's knee between her own and drooled while sipping her wine. “I just went to a denthisht,” she explained to him. “Got so much Novocain in my goddamn mouth I don't know whether it's open or shut.”

“Sort of half and half,” Garp said to her. But he thought, “Oh, what the hell'. He missed Cushie Percy, and his relationships with prostitutes were beginning to make him feel like A Sexual Suspect. Charlotte, it was now clear, was interested in mothering him—though he tried to imagine her on another level, he knew, sadly, that this level would never carry beyond the professional.

Flossie and Vivian and Boo were all going to Greece but they let Garp show them Vienna for three days. In that time Garp slept twice with Vivian, whose Novocain finally wore off; he also slept once with Flossie, while Boo was out cashing travelers' checks and changing the oil in the car. There was no love lost between Steering and Bath boys, Garp knew; but Boo had the last laugh.

It is impossible to know whether Garp got gonorrhea from Vivian or from Flossie, but Garp was convinced that the source of the dose was Boo. It was, in Garp's opinion, “Bath clap.” By the time of the first symptoms, of course, the threesome had left for Greece and Garp faced the dripping and the burning alone. There could be no worse a case of clap to catch in all of Europe, he thought. “I caught a dose of Boo's goo,” he wrote, but much later; it was not funny when it happened, and he didn't dare seek his mother's professional advice. He knew she would refuse to believe that he hadn't caught it from a whore. He got up the nerve to ask Charlotte to recommend a doctor who was familiar with the matter; he thought she would know. He thought later that Jenny would possibly have been less angry with him.

“You'd think Americans would know a little simple hygiene!” Charlotte said furiously. “You should think of your mother! I'd expect you to have better taste. People who give it away for free to someone they hardly know— well, they should make you suspicious, shouldn't they?” Once again, Garp had been caught without a condom.

Thus Garp winced his way to Charlotte's personal physician, a hearty man named Thalhammer who was missing his left thumb. “And I was once left-handed,” Herr Doktor Thalhammer told Garp. “But everything is surmountable if we have energy. We can learn anything we can set our minds to!” he said, with firm good cheer; he demonstrated for Garp how he could write the prescription, with an enviable penmanship, with his right hand. It was a simple and painless cure. In Jenny's day, at good old Boston Mercy, they would have given Garp the Valentine treatment and he'd have learned, more emphatically, how not all rich kids are clean kids.

He didn't write Helen about this, either.

His spirits slumped; spring wore on, the city opened in many small ways—like buds. But Garp felt he had walked Vienna out. He could barely get his mother to stop writing long enough to eat dinner with him. When he sought out Charlotte, her colleague told him she was sick; she hadn't worked for weeks. For three Saturdays, Garp did not see her at the Naschmarkt. When he stopped her colleagues one May evening on the Kдrntnerstrasse, he