John Irving - The World According to Garp

Roberta tried to lead him to the aisle. A tight end is chiefly a good blocker, secondarily a pass—receiver, but even the former Robert Muldoon could not quite move all these women.

“Please,” Roberta said. “Excuse us, please. She was his mother —you must know that. Her only child.”

My only mother! Garp thought, plowing against Roberta's back; he felt Pooh Percy's needlelike claws rake his face. She snatched his wig off; he snatched it back and clutched it to his big bosom, as if it mattered to him.

“He fucked my sister to death! ” Pooh Percy wailed. How this perception of Garp had convinced her, Garp would never know—but convinced of it Pooh clearly was. She climbed over the seat he had abandoned and moved in behind him and Roberta—who finally broke through, into the aisle.

“She was my mother,” Garp said to a woman he was passing, a woman who looked like a potential mother herself. She was pregnant. In the woman's scornful face Garp saw reason and kindness; he also saw restraint and contempt.

“Let him pass,” the pregnant woman murmured, but without much feeling.

Others seemed more sympathetic. Someone cried out that he had a right to be there—but there were other things shouted, rather lacking sympathy of any kind.

Farther up the aisle he felt his falsies punched; he put his hand out for Roberta and realized Roberta had (as they say in football) been taken out of the play. She was down. Several young women wearing navy pea coats appeared to be sitting on her. It occurred to Garp that they might think Roberta was also a man in drag; their discovery that Roberta was real could be painful.

“Take off, Garp!” Roberta cried.

“Yes, run , you little fucker!” one woman in a pea coat hissed.

He ran.

He was almost up to the milling women at the rear of the hall when someone's blow landed where it was aimed. He had not been hit in the balls since a wrestling practice at Steering—so many years ago, he realized he had forgotten the total incapacity that resulted. He covered himself and lay curled on one hip. They kept trying to rip his wig out of his hands. And his tiny purse. He held on as if this were some mugging. He felt a few shoes, a few slaps, and then the minty breath of an elderly woman breathing in his face.

“Try to get up,” she said, gently. He saw she was a nurse. A real nurse. There was no fashionable heart sewn above her breast; there was just the little brass-and-blue nameplate—she was R. N. So-and-So.

“My name is Dotty,” the nurse told him; she was at least sixty.

“Hello,” Garp said. “Thank you, Dotty.”

She took his arm and led him at a fast pace through the remaining mob. No one appeared to want to hurt him when he was with her. They let him go.

“Do you have money for a cab?” the nurse named Dotty asked him when they were outside School of Nursing Hall.

“Yes, I think so,” Garp said. He checked his horrid purse; his wallet was safely there. And his wig—tousled still further—was under his arm. Roberta had Garp's real clothes and Garp looked in vain for any sign of Roberta emerging from the first feminist funeral.

“Put that wig on,” Dotty advised him, “or you'll be mistaken for one of those transvestites.” He struggled to put it on; she helped him. “People are really rough on transvestites,” Dotty added. She took several bobby pins from her own gray head of hair and fastened Garp's wig more decently in place.

The scratch on his cheek, she told him, would stop bleeding very soon.

On the steps of School of Nursing Hall, a tall black woman who looked like an even match for Roberta shook her fist at Garp but said not a word. Perhaps she was another Ellen Jamesian. A few other women were gathering there and Garp feared they might be thinking over the advisability of an open attack. Oddly at the fringe of their group, but seeming to have no connection with them, was a wraithlike girl, or barely grown-up child; she was a dirty blond-headed girl with piercing eyes the color of coffee-stained saucers—like a drug-user's eyes, or someone long involved in hard tears. Garp felt frozen by her stare, and frightened of her—as if she were really crazy, a kind of teen-age hit man for the women's movement, with a gun in her oversized purse. He clutched his own ratty bag, recalling that his wallet was at least full of credit cards; he had enough cash for a cab to the airport and the credit cards could get him a flight to Boston and the bosom, so to speak, of his remaining family. He wished he could relieve himself of his ostentatious tits, but there they were, as if he'd been born with them—and born, too, in this alternately tight and baggy jump suit. It was all he had and it would have to do. From the din escaping from School of Nursing Hall, Garp knew that Roberta was deep in the throes of debate—if not combat. Someone who had fainted, or had been mauled, was carried out; more police went in.

“Your mother was a first-rate nurse and a woman who made every woman proud,” the nurse named Dotty told him. “I'll bet she was a good mother, too.”

“She sure was,” Garp said.

The nurse got him a cab; the last he saw of her, she was walking away from the curb, back toward School of Nursing Hall. The other women who'd seemed so threatening, on the steps outside the building, appeared to be not interested in molesting her. More police were arriving; to Garp looked for the strange saucer-eyed girl, but she was not among the other women.

He asked the cabby who the new governor of New Hampshire was. Garp tried to conceal the depth of his voice, but the cabby, familiar with the eccentricities of his job, seemed unsurprised at both Garp's voice and Garp's appearance.

“I was out of the country,” Garp said.

“You didn't miss nothin', sweetie,” the cabby told him. “That broad broke down.”

“Sally Devlin?” said Garp.

“She cracked up, right on the TV,” the cabby said. “She was so flipped out over the assassination, she couldn't control herself. She was givin' this speech but she couldn't get through it, you know7

“She looked like a real idiot to me,” the cabby said. “She couldn't be no governor if she couldn't control herself no better than that.”

And Garp saw the pattern of the woman's loss emerging. Perhaps the foul incumbent governor had remarked that Ms. Devlin's inability to control her emotions was “just like a woman.” Disgraced by her demonstration of her feelings for Jenny Fields, Sally Devlin was judged not competent enough for whatever dubious work being a governor entailed.

Garp felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of other people. “In my opinion,” the cabby said, “it took something like that shooting to show the people that the woman couldn't handle the job, you know?”

“Shut up and drive,” Garp said.

“Look, honey,” the cabby. said. “I don't have to put up with no abuse .”

“You're an asshole and a moron,” Garp told him, “and if you don't drive me to the airport with your mouth shut, I'll tell a cop you tried to paw me all over.”

The cabby floored the accelerator and drove for a while in furious silence, hoping the speed and recklessness of his driving would scare his passenger.

“If you don't slow down,” Garp said, “I'll tell a cop you tried to rape me.”

“Fucking weirdo,” the cabby said, but he slowed down and drove to the airport without another word. Garp put the money for the tip on the taxi's hood and one of the coins rolled into the crack between the hood and fender. “Fucking women ,” the cabby said.

“Fucking men ,” said Garp, feeling—with mixed feelings—that he had done his duty to ensure that the sex war went on.