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"I'm so sorry," Roberta whispered. "If I'd seen the man with the gun--just a second sooner--I could have blocked the shot. I would have, you know."
"I know you would have, Roberta," Garp said; he wondered if he would have. He felt love for his mother, of course; and now an aching loss. But did he ever feel such devotion to Jenny Fields as the followers among her own sex?
He apologized to the landlady for the lateness of the phone call. When he told her that his mother was dead, the old woman crossed herself--her sunken cheeks and her empty gums were mute but clear indications of the family deaths she had herself outlived.
Helen cried for the longest time; she would not let Jenny's namesake, little Jenny Garp, out of her arms. Duncan and Garp searched the newspapers, but the news would be a day getting to Austria--except for the marvel of television.
Garp watched his mother's murder on his landlady's TV.
There was some election nonsense at a shopping plaza in New Hampshire. The landscape had a vaguely seacoast appearance, and Garp recognized the place as being a few miles from Dog's Head Harbor.
The incumbent governor was in favor of all the same, swinish, stupid things. The woman running against him seemed educated and idealistic and kind; she also seemed to barely restrain her anger at the same, swinish, stupid things the governor represented.
The parking lot at the shopping plaza was circled by pickup trucks. The pickups were full of men in hunting coats and caps; apparently they represented local New Hampshire interests--as opposed to the interest in New Hampshire taken by the New York divorcees.
The nice woman running against the governor was also a kind of New York divorcee. That she had lived fifteen years in New Hampshire, and her children had gone to school there, was a fact more or less ignored by the incumbent governor, and by his supporters who circled the parking lot in their pickup trucks.
There were lots of signs; there was a steady jeering.
There was also a high school football team, in uniform--their cleats clacking on the cement of the parking lot. One of the woman candidate's children was on the team and he had assembled the football players in the parking lot in hopes of demonstrating to New Hampshire that it was perfectly manly to vote for his mother.
The hunters in their pickup trucks were of the opinion that to vote for this woman was to vote for faggotry--and lesbianism, and socialism, and alimony, and New York. And so forth. Garp had the feeling, watching the tele-cast, that those things were not tolerated in New Hampshire.
Garp and Helen and Duncan, and baby Jenny, sat in the Viennese pension about to watch the murder of Jenny Fields. Their bewildered old landlady served them coffee and little cakes; only Duncan ate anything.
Then Jenny Fields had her turn to speak to the assembled people in the parking lot. She spoke from the back of a pickup truck; Roberta Muldoon lifted her up to the tailgate and adjusted the microphone for her. Garp's mother looked very small in the pickup truck, especially beside Roberta, but Jenny's uniform was so white that she stood out, bright and clear.
"I am Jenny Fields," she said--to some cheers and some whistles and some hoots. There was a blaring of horns from the pickup trucks circling the parking lot. The police were telling the pickup trucks to move on; they moved on, and came back, and moved on again. "Most of you know who I am," Jenny Fields said. There were more hoots, more cheers, more blowing of horns--and a single sharp gunshot as conclusive as a wave breaking on the beach.
No one saw where it came from. Roberta Muldoon held Garp's mother under her arms. Jenny's white uniform seemed struck by a small dark splash. Then Roberta dropped down from the tailgate with Jenny in her arms and knifed through the breaking crowd like an old tight end carrying the ball for a hard first down. The crowd parted; Jenny's white uniform was almost concealed in Roberta's arms. There was a police car moving to intercept Roberta; when they neared each other, Roberta held out the body of Jenny Fields toward the squad car. For a moment Garp saw his mother's unmoving white uniform lifted above the crowd and into the arms of a policeman, who helped her and Roberta into the car.
The car, as they say, sped away. The camera was distracted by an apparent shoot-out taking place among the circling pickup trucks and several more police cars. Later, there was the still body of a man in a hunting coat lying in a dark puddle of what looked like oil. Later still, there was a closeup of what the newsmen would only identify as "a deer rifle."
It was pointed out that the deer season had not officially opened.
Except for the fact that there had been no nudity in the tele-cast, the event was an X-rated soap opera from start to finish.
Garp thanked the landlady for allowing them to watch the news. Within two hours they were in Frankfurt, where they changed planes for New York. The Under Toad was not on the plane with them--not even for Helen, who was so afraid of planes. For a while, they knew, the Under Toad was elsewhere.
All Garp could think, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, was that his mother had delivered some adequate "last words." Jenny Fields had ended her life saying, "Most of you know who I am." On the airplane, Garp tried out the line.
"Most of you know who I am," he whispered. Duncan was asleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand.
Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.
17
THE FIRST FEMINIST FUNERAL, AND OTHER FUNERALS
Ever since Walt died," wrote T. S. Garp, "my life has felt like an epilogue."
When Jenny Fields died, Garp must have felt his bewilderment increase--that sense of time passing with a plan. But what was the plan?
Garp sat in John Wolf's New York office, trying to comprehend the plethora of plans surrounding his mother's death.
"I didn't authorize a funeral," Garp said. "How can there be a funeral? Where is the body, Roberta?"
Roberta Muldoon said patiently that the body was where Jenny wanted her body to go. It was not her body that mattered, Roberta said. There was simply going to be a kind of memorial service; it was better not to think of it as a "funeral."
