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Whitcomb was faithful to this request, which amused Duncan especially.
"How Dad would have loved this!" Duncan kept saying. "Boy, I can just hear him."
How Jenny Fields would have applauded Helen's decision was a point made most often by Jenny Garp and Ellen James.
* * *
--
ELLEN JAMES would grow up to be a writer. She was "the real thing," as Garp had guessed. Her two mentors--Garp and the ghost of his mother, Jenny Fields--would somehow prove overbearing for Ellen, who because of them both would not ever write much nonfiction or fiction. She became a very good poet--though, of course, she was not much on the reading circuit.
Her wonderful first book of poems, Speeches Delivered to Plants and Animals, would have made Garp and Jenny Fields very proud of her; it did make Helen very proud of her--they were good friends, and they were also like mother and daughter.
Ellen James would outlive the Ellen Jamesians, of course. Garp's murder drove them deeper underground, and their occasional surfacing over the years would be largely disguised, even embarrassed.
Hi! I'm mute,
their notes finally said. Or:
I've had an accident--can't talk. But I write good, as you can see.
"You aren't one of those Ellen Somebodies, are you?" they were occasionally asked.
A what?
they learned to reply. And the more honest among them would write:
No. Not now.
Now they were just women who couldn't speak. Unostentatiously, most of them worked hard to discover what they could do. Most of them turned, constructively, to helping those who also couldn't do something. They were good at helping disadvantaged people, and also good at helping people who felt too sorry for themselves. More and more their labels left them, and one by one these speechless women appeared under names more of their own making.
Some of them even won Fields Foundation fellowships for the things they did.
Some of them, of course, went on trying to be Ellen Jamesians in a world that soon forgot what an Ellen Jamesian was. Some people thought that the Ellen Jamesians were a criminal gang who flourished, briefly, near mid-century. Others, ironically, confused them with the very people that the Ellen Jamesians had originally been protesting: rapists. One Ellen Jamesian wrote Ellen James that she stopped being an Ellen Jamesian when she asked a little girl if she knew what an Ellen Jamesian was.
"Someone who rapes little boys?" the little girl replied.
There was also a bad but very popular novel that followed Garp's murder by about two months. It took three weeks to write and five weeks to publish. It was called Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian and it did much to drive the Ellen Jamesians even wackier or simply away. The novel was written by a man, of course. His previous novel had been called Confessions of a Porn King, and the one before that had been called Confessions of a Child Slave Trader. And so forth. He was a sly, evil man who became something different about every six months.
One of his cruelly forced jokes, in Confessions of an Ellen Jamesian, was that he conceived of h
is narrator-heroine as a lesbian who doesn't realize until after she's cut off her tongue that she has made herself undesirable as a lover, too.
The popularity of this vulgar trash was enough to embarrass some Ellen Jamesians to death. There were, actually, suicides. "There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean."
But, in the end, Ellen James sought them out and befriended them. It was, she thought, what Jenny Fields would have done. Ellen took to giving poetry readings with Roberta Muldoon, who had a huge, booming voice. Roberta would read Ellen's poems while Ellen sat beside her, looking as if she were wishing very hard that she could say her own poems. This brought out of hiding a lot of Ellen Jamesians who had been wishing they could talk, too. A few of them became Ellen's friends.
Ellen James would never marry. She may have known an occasional man, but more because he was a fellow poet than because he was a man. She was a good poet and an ardent feminist who believed in living like Jenny Fields and believed in writing with the energy and the personal vision of T. S. Garp. In other words, she was stubborn enough to have personal opinions, and she was also kind to other people. Ellen would maintain a lifelong flirtation with Duncan Garp--her younger brother, really.
The death of Ellen James would cause Duncan much sorrowing. Ellen, at an advanced age, became a long-distance swimmer--about the time she succeeded Roberta as the director of the Fields Foundation. Ellen worked up to swimming several times across the wide neck of Dog's Head Harbor. Her last and best poems used swimming and "the ocean's pull" as metaphors. But Ellen James remained a girl from the Midwest who never thoroughly understood the undertow; one cold fall day, when she was too tired, it got her.
"When I swim," she wrote to Duncan, "I am reminded of the strenuousness, but also the gracefulness, of arguing with your father. I can also feel the sea's eagerness to get at me--to get at my dry middle, my landlocked little heart. My landlocked little ass, your father would say, I'm sure. But we tease each other, the sea and I. I suppose you would say, you raunchy fellow, that this is my substitute for sex."
* * *
--
FLORENCE COCHRAN BOWLSBY, who was best known to Garp as Mrs. Ralph, would live a life of larkish turmoil, with no substitute for sex in sight--or, apparently, in need. She actually completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature and was eventually tenured by a large and confused English Department whose members were only unified by their terror of her. She had, at various times, seduced and scorned nine of the thirteen senior members--who were alternately admitted to and then ridiculed from her bed. She would be referred to by her students as "a dynamite teacher," so that she at least demonstrated to other people, if not to herself, some confidence in an area other than sex.
