The World According to Garp

streaming face, split with his gaping wail. Garp began to bellow, too, but his bellow issued forth no louder than a whimper; his own, odd sound scared him so much that he tried to talk softly to Duncan. It was then Garp realized he couldn't talk.

When Garp had flung out his arm to break Duncan's fall, he had turned almost sideways in the driver's seat and his face had struck the steering wheel hard enough to break his jaw and mangle his tongue (twelve stitches). In the long weeks of Garp's recovery, at Dog's Head Harbor, it is fortunate for Jenny that she'd had much experience with Ellen Jamesians, because Garp's mouth was wired shut and his messages to his mother were written ones. He sometimes wrote pages and pages, on the typewriter, which Jenny would then read aloud to Duncan—because, although Duncan could read, he was instructed not to strain his remaining eye more than was necessary. In time, the eye would compensate for the other eye's loss, but Garp had much to say that was immediate—and no “way to say it. When he sensed that his mother was editing his remarks—to Duncan, and to Helen (to whom he also wrote pages and pages)—Garp would grunt his protest through his wires, holding his sore tongue very still. And Jenny Fields, like the good nurse she was, would wisely move him to a private room.

“This is the Dog's Head Harbor Hospital,” Helen said to Jenny once. Although Helen could talk, she said little; she did not have pages and pages to say. She spent most of her convalescence in Duncan's room, reading to the boy, because Helen was a much better reader than Jenny, and there were only two stitches in Helen's tongue. In this period of recovery, Jenny Fields could deal with Garp better than Helen could deal with him.

Helen and Duncan often sat side by side in Duncan's room. Duncan had a fine, one-eyed view of the sea, which he watched all day as if he were a camera. Getting used to having one eye is something like getting used to the world through a camera, there are similarities in depth of field, and in the problems of focus. When Duncan seemed ready to discover this, Helen bought him a camera—a single-lens reflex camera; for Duncan, that kind made the most sense.

It was in this period of time, Duncan Garp would recall, that the thought of being an artist, a painter and a photographer, first occurred to him; he was almost eleven. Although he had been athletic, his one eye would make him (like his father) forever leery of sports involving balls. Even running, he said, he was bothered by the lack of peripheral vision. Duncan claimed it made him clumsy. It was eventually added to Garp's sadness that Duncan did not care for wrestling, either. Duncan spoke in terms of the camera, and he told his father that one of his problems with depth of field included not knowing how far away the mat was. “When I wrestle,” he told Garp, “I feel like I'm going downstairs in the dark; I don't know when I get to the bottom until I feel it.” Garp concluded, of course, that the accident had made Duncan insecure about sports, but Helen pointed out to him that Duncan had always had a certain timidity, a reserve—even though he was good at games, and clearly well coordinated, he'd always had a tendency not to participate. Not as energetically, certainly, as Walt—who was intrepid, who flung his body into every new circumstance with faith and grace and with temerity. Walt, Helen said, was the real athlete between them. After a while, Garp supposed she was right.

“Helen is often right, you know,” Jenny told Garp one night at Dog's Head Harbor. The context of this remark could have been anything, but it was sometime soon after the accident, because Duncan had his own room, and Helen had her own room, and Garp had his own room, and so forth.

Helen is often right, his mother had told him, but Garp looked angry and wrote Jenny a note.

Not this time, Mom,

said the note, meaning—perhaps—Michael Milton. Meaning: the whole thing.

It was not expressly because of Michael Milton that Helen resigned. The availability of Jenny's big hospital on the ocean, as both Garp and Helen would come to think of it, was a way to leave the unwanted familiarity of their house, and of that driveway.

And in the faculty code of ethics, “moral turpitude” is listed as one ground for revoking tenure—though this never came to debate; sleeping with students was not generally treated too harshly. It might be a hidden reason why a faculty member wasn't given tenure; it would rarely be a reason for revoking someone's tenure. Helen may have supposed that biting off three quarters of a student's penis was fairly high on the scale of conceivable abuse to students. Sleeping with them simply happened, though it was not encouraged; there were many worse ways of evaluating students and categorizing them for life. But amputation of their genitalia was certainly severe, even for bad students, and Helen must have felt inclined to punish herself. So she denied herself the pleasure of continuing at the task she had prepared for, so well, and she removed herself from the arousement that books and their discussion had always meant to her. In her later life, Helen would spare herself considerable unhappiness by refusing to feel guilty; in her later life, the whole business with Michael Milton would more often make her angry than it would make her sad—because she was strong enough to believe that she was a good woman, which she was, who'd been made to suffer disproportionately for a trivial indiscretion.

But at least for a time, Helen would heal herself and her family. Never having had a mother, and having had little chance to use Jenny Fields in that way, Helen submitted to this period of hospitalization at Dog's Head Harbor. She calmed herself by nursing Duncan, and she hoped that Jenny could nurse Garp.

This aura of the hospital was not new to Garp, whose earliest experiences—with fear, with dreams, with sex—had all occurred in the infirmary atmosphere of the old Steering School. He adapted. It helped him that he had to write out what he wanted to say, because this made him careful; it made him reconsider many of the things he might have thought he wanted to say. When he saw them written down—these raw thoughts—he realized that he couldn't or shouldn't say them; when he went to revise them, he knew better and threw them away. There was one for Helen, which read:

Three quarters is not enough.

He threw it away.

Then he wrote one for Helen that he did give to her.

I don't blame you.

Later, he wrote another one.

I don't blame me, either,

the note said.

Only in this way can we be whole again,

Garp wrote to his mother.

And Jenny Fields padded whitely through the salt-damp house, room to room with her nursing ways and Garp's notes. It was all the writing he could manage.

Of course, the house at Dog's Head Harbor was used to recoveries. Jenny's wounded women had gotten hold of themselves there; these sea-smelling rooms had histories of sadnesses outlived. Among them, the sadness of Roberta Muldoon, who had lived there with Jenny through the most difficult periods of her sex reassignment. In fact, Roberta had failed at living alone—and at living with a number of men—and she was back living at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny again when the Garps moved in.

As the spring warmed up, and the hole that had been Duncan's right eye slowly healed and was less vulnerable to sticking bits of sand, Roberta took Duncan to the beach. It was on the beach that Duncan discovered his depth-of-field problem as it was related to a thrown ball, because Roberta Muldoon tried playing catch with Duncan and very soon hit him in the face with the football. They gave up the ball, and Roberta contented Duncan with diagraming, in the sand, all the plays she once ran at the tight end position for the Philadelphia Eagles; she focused on the part of the Eagles offense that concerned her, when she was Robert Muldoon, No. 90, and she relived for Duncan her occasional touch down passes, her dropped balls, her offside penalties, her most vicious hits. “It was against the Cowboys,” she told Duncan. “We were playing in Dallas, when that snake in the grass—Eight Ball, everyone called him—came up on my blind side...” And Roberta would regard the quiet child, who had a blind side for life, and she would deftly change the subject.

To Garp, Roberta's subject was the ticklish detail of sex reassignment, because Garp seemed interested and Roberta knew that Garp probably liked hearing about a problem so thoroughly removed from his own.

“I always knew I should have been a girl,” she told Garp. “I dreamed about having love made to me, by a man, but in the dreams I was always a woman; I was never a man having love made to me by another man.” There was more than a hint of distaste in Roberta's references to homosexuals, and Garp thought it strange that people in the process of making a decision that will plant them firmly in a minority, forever, are possibly less tolerant of other minorities than we might imagine. There was even a bitchiness about Roberta, when she complained of the other troubled women who came to get well at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny Fields.