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In the world according to Garp, an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous.
Later, they would often remark (Roberta, too) how good it was that Garp got to see the first edition of The Pension Grillparzer--illustrated by Duncan Garp, and out in time for Christmas--before he saw the Under Toad.
19
LIFE AFTER GARP
He loved epilogues, as he showed us in "The Pension Grillparzer."
"An epilogue," Garp wrote, "is more than a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the past, is really a way of warning us about the future."
That February day, Helen heard him telling jokes to Ellen James and Duncan at breakfast; he certainly sounded as if he felt good about the future. Helen gave little Jenny Garp a bath, and powdered her and oiled her scalp and clipped her tiny fingernails and zipped her into a yellow playsuit that Walt once wore. Helen could smell the coffee Garp had made, and she could hear Garp hurrying Duncan off to school.
"Not that hat, Duncan, for Christ's sake," Garp said. "That hat couldn't keep a bird warm. It's twelve below."
"It's twelve above, Dad," Duncan said.
"That's academic," Garp said. "It's very cold, that's what it is."
Ellen James must have come in through the garage door then, and written out a note, because Helen heard Garp say that he'd help her in a minute; obviously, Ellen couldn't start the car.
Then it was quiet in the great house for a while; as if from far away, Helen heard only the squeak of boots in the snow and the slow cranking of the car's cold engine. "Have a good day!" she heard Garp call to Duncan, who must have been walking down the long driveway--off to school.
"Yup!" Duncan called. "You, too!"
The car started; Ellen James would be driving off to the university. "Drive carefully!" Garp called after her.
Helen had her coffee alone. Occasionally, the inarticulateness with which baby Jenny talked to herself reminded Helen of the Ellen Jamesians--or of Ellen, when she was upset--but not this morning. The baby was playing quietly with some plastic things. Helen could hear Garp's typewriter--that was all.
He wrote for three hours. The typewriter would burst for three or four pages, then be silent for such a long time that Helen imagined Garp had stopped breathing; then, when she had forgotten about it and was lost in her reading, or in some task with Jenny, the typewriter would burst out again.
At eleven-thirty in the morning Helen heard him call Roberta Muldoon. Garp wanted a squash game before wrestling practice, if Roberta could get away from her "girls," as Garp called the Fields Foundation fellows.
"How are the girls today, Roberta?" Garp said.
But Roberta couldn't play. Helen heard the disappointment in Garp's voice.
Later, poor Roberta would repeat and repeat how she should have played; if only she had played, she went on saying, maybe she would have spotted it coming--maybe she would have been around, alert and edgy, recognizing the spoor of the real world, the paw prints Garp had always overlooked or ignored. But Roberta Muldoon could not play squash.
Garp wrote for another half hour. Helen knew he was writing a letter; somehow she could tell the difference in the sound of the typing. He wrote to John Wolf about My Father's Illusions; he was pleased with how the book was coming along. He complained that Roberta took her job too seriously and was letting herself get out of shape; no administrative job was worth as much time as Roberta gave to the Fields Foundation. Garp said that the low sales figures on The Pension Grillparzer were about what he expected; the main thing was that it was "a lovely book"--he liked looking at it, and giving it to people, and its rebirth had been a rebirth for him. He said he expected a better wrestling season than last year, although he had lost his starting heavyweight to a knee operation and his one New England champion had graduated. He said that living with someone who read as much as Helen was both irritating and inspiring; he wanted to give her something to read that would make her close her other books.
At noon he came and kissed Helen, and fondled her breasts, and kissed baby Jenny, over and over again, while he dressed her in a snowsuit that had also been worn by Walt--and before Walt, even Duncan had gotten some wear out of it. Garp drove Jenny to the day-care center as soon as Ellen James came back with the car. Then Garp showed up at Buster's Snack and Grill for his customary cup of tea with honey, his one tangerine, and his one banana. That was all the lunch he ran or wrestled on; he explained why to a new teacher in the English Department--a young man fresh out of graduate school who adored Garp's work. His name was Donald Whitcomb, and his nervous stutter reminded Garp, affectionately, of the departed Mr. Tinch and the race in his pulse he still felt for Alice Fletcher.
This particular day, Garp was eager to talk about writing to anyone, and young Whitcomb was eager to listen. Don Whitcomb would remember that Garp told him what the act of starting a novel felt like. "It's like trying to make the dead come alive," he said. "No, no, that's not right--it's more like trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They're the most important to keep alive." Finally, Garp said it in a way that seemed to please him. "A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases," Garp said. Young Whitcomb was so awed that he wrote this down.
It would be Whitcomb's biography, years later, that the would-be biographers of Garp would all envy and despise. Whitcomb reflected that this Bloom Period in Garp's writing (as Whitcomb called it) was really due to Garp's sense of mortality. The attempt on Garp's life by the Ellen Jamesian in the dirty-white Saab, Whitcomb claimed, had given Garp the urgency necessary to make him write again. Helen would endorse that thesis.
It was not a bad idea, although Garp would surely have laughed at it. He really had forgotten the El
len Jamesians, and he was not on the lookout for more of them. But unconsciously, perhaps, he might have been feeling that urgency young Whitcomb expressed.
In Buster's Snack and Grill, Garp held Whitcomb enthralled until it was time for wrestling practice. On his way out (leaving Whitcomb to pay, the young man later recalled, good-naturedly), Garp ran into Dean Bodger, who had just spent three days hospitalized with some heart complaint.
"They found nothing wrong," Bodger complained.
"But did they find your heart?" Garp asked him.
The dean, young Whitcomb, and Garp all laughed. Bodger said he'd brought only The Pension Grillparzer with him to the hospital, and since it was so short a book, he'd been able to read it completely three times. It was a gloomy story to read in a hospital, Bodger said, though he was glad to report that he had not yet had the grandmother's dream; thus he knew he would live awhile longer. Bodger said he had loved the story.
