John Irving - The World According to Garp

Garp smiled at her and went back to bed.

In the morning he told Helen about Ellen James and they talked about Ernie.

“It was good that he went in his sleep,” Helen said. “When I think of your mother.”

“Yes, yes,” Garp told her.

Duncan was introduced to Ellen James. One-eyed and no-tongued, thought Garp, my family will pull together.

When Roberta called to describe her arrest, Duncan—who was the least-tired talking human in the house—explained to her about Ernie's heart attack.

Helen found the turquoise jump suit and the huge, loaded bra in the kitchen wastebasket; it seemed to cheer her up. The cherry-colored vinyl boots actually fit her better than they had fit Garp, but she threw them out, anyway. Ellen James wanted the green scarf, and Helen took the girl shopping for some more clothes. Duncan asked for and received the wig, which—to Garp's irritation—he wore most of the morning.

Dean Bodger called, to ask to be of use.

A man who was the new director of Physical Facilities for the Steering School stopped at the house to talk confidentially with Garp. The Physical Facilities director explained that Ernie had lived in a school house, and as soon as it was convenient for Helen, Ernie's things should be moved out. Garp had understood that the original Steering family house, Midge Steering Percy's house, had been given back to the school some years ago—a gift of Midge and Fat Stew, for which a ceremony had been arranged. Garp told the Physical Facilities director that he hoped Helen had as much time to move out as Midge would be given.

“Oh, we'll sell that albatross,” the man confided to Garp. “It's a lemon, you know.”

The Steering family house, in Garp's memory, was no lemon.

“All that history,” Garp said. “I should think you'd want it—and it was a gift, after all.”

“The plumbing's terrible,” the man said. He implied that, in their advancing senility, Midge and Fat Stew had let the place fall into a wretched state. “It may be a lovely old house, and all that,” the young man said, “but the school has to look ahead. We've got enough history around here. We can't sink our housing funds into history. We need more buildings that the school can use . No matter what you do with that old mansion, it's just another family house.”

When Garp told Helen that the Steering Percy house was going to be sold, Helen broke down. Of course she was really crying for her father, and for everything, but the thought that the Steering School did not even want the grandest house of their childhood years depressed both Garp and Helen.

Then Garp, had to check with the organist at the Steering chapel so that the same music would not be played for Ernie that, in the morning, would be played for Fat Stew. This mattered to Helen; she was upset, so Garp didn't question the seeming meaninglessness, to him, of his errand.

The Steering chapel was a squat Tudor attempt at a building; the church was so wreathed in ivy that it appeared to have thrust itself up out of the ground and was struggling to break through the matted vines. The pantlegs of John Wolf's dark, pin-striped suit dragged under Garp's heels as he peered into the musty chapel—he had never delivered the suit to a proper tailor, but had attempted to take up the pants himself. The first wave of gray organ music drifted over Garp like smoke. He thought he had come early enough, but to his dread he saw that Fat Stew's funeral had already begun. The audience was old and hardly recognizable—those ancients of the Steering School community who would attend anyone's death, as if, in double sympathy, they were anticipating their own. This death, Garp thought, was chiefly attended because Midge was a Steering; Stewart Percy had made few friends. The pews were pockmarked with widows; their little black hats with veils were like dark cobwebs that had fallen on the heads of these old women.

“I'm glad you're here, Jack,” a man in black said to Garp. Garp had slipped almost unnoticed into a back pew; he was going to wait out the ordeal and then speak to the organist. “We're short some muscle for the casket,” the man said, and Garp recognized him—he was the hearse driver from the funeral home.

“I'm not a pallbearer,” Garp whispered.

“You've got to be,” the driver said, “or we'll never get him out of here. He's a big one.”

The hearse driver smelled of cigars, but Garp had only to glance about the sun-dappled pews of the Steering chapel to see that the man was right. White hair and baldness winked at him from the occasional male heads; there must have been thirteen or fourteen canes hooked on the pews. There were two wheelchairs.

Garp let the driver take his arm.

“They said there'd be more men ,” the driver complained, “but nobody healthy showed up.”

Garp was led to the pew up front, across from the family pew. To his horror an old man lay stretched out in the pew Garp was supposed to sit in and Garp was waved, instead, into the Percy pew, where he found himself seated next to Midge. Garp briefly wondered if the old man stretched out in the pew was another body waiting his turn.

“That's Uncle Harris Stanfull,” Midge whispered to Garp, nodding her head to the sleeper, who looked like a dead man across the aisle.

“Uncle Horace Salter , Mother,” said the man on Midge's other side. Garp recognized Stewie Two, red-faced with corpulence—the eldest Percy child and sole surviving son. He had something to do with aluminum in Pittsburgh. Stewie Two hadn't seen Garp since Garp was five; he showed no signs of knowing who Garp was. Neither did Midge indicate that she knew anybody , anymore. Wizened and white, with brown blotches on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her bob in her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

At a glance Garp saw that the pallbearing would be handled by Stewie Two, the hearse driver, and himself. He doubted that they could manage it. How awful to be this unloved! he thought, looking at the gray ship that was Stewart Percy's casket—fortunately closed.

“I'm sorry, young man,” Midge whispered to Garp; her gloved hand rested as lightly on his arm as one of the Percy family parakeets. “I don't recall your name ,” she said, gracious into senility.

“Uh,” Garp said. And somewhere between the names “Smith” and “Jones,” Garp stumbled on a word that escaped him. “Smoans,” he said, surprising both Midge and himself. Stewie Two did not appear to notice.

“Mr. Smoans?” Midge said.

“Yes, Smoans,” Garp said. “Smoans, class of '61. I had Mr. Percy in history.” My Part of the Pacific.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Smoans! How thoughtful of you to come,” Midge said.

“I was sorry to hear of it,” Mr. Smoans said.

“Yes, we all were,” Midge said, looking cautiously around the half-empty chapel. A convulsion of some kind made her whole face shake, and the loose skin on her cheeks made a soft slapping noise.

“Mother,” Stewie Two cautioned her.

“Yes, yes, Stewart,” she said. To Mr. Smoans, she said, “It's a pity not all of our children could be here.”

Garp, of course, knew that Dopey's strained heart had already quit him, that William was lost in a war, that Cushie was a victim of making babies. Garp guessed he knew, vaguely, where poor Pooh was. To his relief, Bainbridge Percy was not in the family pew.

It was there in the pew of remaining Percys that Garp remembered another day.

“Where do we go after we die?” Cushie Percy once asked her mother. Fat Stew belched and left the kitchen. All the Percy children were there: William, whom a war was waiting for; Dopey, whose heart was gathering fat; Cushie, who could not reproduce, whose vital tubes would tangle; Stewie Two, who turned into aluminum. And only God knows what happened to Pooh. Little Garp was there, too—in the sumptuous country kitchen of the vast, grand Steering family house.