John Irving - The World According to Garp

“Bonkie bit Garp,” said little Cushie Percy. Neither Stewart nor Midge noticed that Garp was there, in the doorway, the whole side of his head bloody and chewed.

“Mrs. Percy?” Garp whispered, not loud enough to be heard.

“So it was Garp?” Fat Stew said. Bending to return the squash racket to the closet, he farted. Midge looked at him. “So Bonkie bit Garp,” Stewart mused. “Well, at least the dog's got good taste, doesn't he?”

“Oh, Stewie,” Midge said; a laughter light as spit escaped her. “Garp's still just a little boy.” And there he was, in fact, near-to-fainting and bleeding on the costly hall carpet, which actually spread, without a tuck or a ripple, through four of the monstrous first-floor rooms.

Cushie Percy, whose young life would terminate in childbirth while she tried to deliver what would have been only her first child, saw Garp bleeding on the Steering family heirloom: the remarkable rug. “Oh, gross!” she cried, running out the door.

“Oh, I'll have to call your mother,” Midge told Garp, who felt dizzy with the great dog's growl and slobber still singing in his partial ear.

For years Garp would mistakenly interpret Cushie Percy's outcry of “Oh, gross!” He thought she was not referring to his gnawed and messy ear but to her father's great gray nakedness, which filled the hall. That was what was gross to Garp: the silver, barrel-bellied navy man approaching him in the nude from the well of the Percys' towering spiral staircase.

Stewart Percy knelt down in front of Garp and peered curiously into the boy's bloody face; Fat Stew did not appear to be directing his attention to the mauled ear, and Garp wondered if he should advise the enormous, naked man concerning the whereabouts of his injury. But Stewart Percy was not looking for where Garp was hurt. He was looking at Garp's shining brown eyes, at their color and at their shape, and he seemed to convince himself of something, because he nodded austerely and said to his foolish blond Midge, “Jap.”

It would be years before Garp would fully comprehend this, too. But Stewie Percy said to Midge, “I spent enough time in the Pacific to recognize Jap eyes when I see them. I told you it was a Jap.” The it Stewart Percy referred to was whoever he had decided was Garp's father. That was a frequent, speculative game around the Steering community: guessing who Garp's father was. And Stewart Percy, from his experience in his part of the Pacific, had decided that Garp's father was Japanese.

“At that moment,” Garp wrote, “I thought “Jap” was a word that meant my ear was all gone.”

“No sense in calling his mother,” Stewie said to Midge. “Just take him over to the infirmary. She's a nurse, isn't she? She'll know what to do.”

Jenny knew, all right. “Why not bring the dog over here?” she asked Midge, while she gingerly washed around what was left of Garp's little ear.

“Bonkers?” Midge asked.

“Bring him here,” Jenny said, “and I'll give him a shot.”

“An injection?” Midge asked. She laughed. “Do you mean there's actually a shot to make him so he won't bite any more people?”

“No,” Jenny said. “I mean you could save your money—instead of taking him to a vet. I mean there's a shot to make him dead . That kind of an injection. Then he won't bite any more people.”

“Thus,” Garp wrote, “was the Percy War begun. For my mother, I think, it was a class war, which she later said all wars were. For me, I just knew to watch out for Bonkers. And for the rest of the Percys.”

Stewart Percy sent Jenny Fields a memo on the stationery of the Secretary of the Steering School: “I cannot believe you actually want us to have Bonkers put to sleep,” Stewart wrote.

“You bet your fat ass I do,” Jenny said to him, on the phone. “Or at least tie him up, forever.”

“There's no point in having a dog if the dog can't run free,” Stewart said.

“Then kill him,” Jenny said.

“Bonkers has had all his shots, thank you just the same,” Stewart said. “He's a gentle dog, really. Only if he's provoked.”

“Obviously,” Garp wrote, “Fat Stew felt that Bonkers had been provoked by my Jap ness.”

“What's “good taste” mean?” little Garp asked Jenny. At the infirmary, Dr. Pell sewed up his ear; Jenny reminded the doctor that Garp had recently had a tetanus shot.

“Good taste?” Jenny asked. The odd-looking amputation of the ear forced Garp always to wear his hair long, a style he often complained about.

“Fat Stew said that Bonkers has got “good taste,"” Garp said.

“To bite you?” Jenny asked.

“I guess so,” Garp said. “What's it mean?”

Jenny knew, all right. But she said, “It means that Bonkers must have known you were the best-tasting kid in the whole pile of kids.”

“Am I?” Garp, asked.

“Sure,” Jenny said.

“How did Bonkers know?” Garp asked.

“ I don't know,” Jenny said.

“What's “Jap” mean?” Garp asked.

“Did Fat Stew say that to you?” Jenny asked him.

“No,” Garp said. “I think he said it about my ear.”

“Oh yes, your ear,” Jenny said. “It means you have special ears.” But she was wondering whether to tell him what she felt about the Percys, now , or whether he was enough like her to profit at some later, more important time from the experience of anger. Perhaps, she thought, I should save this morsel for him, for a time when he could use it. In her mind, Jenny Fields saw always more and larger battles ahead.

“My mother seemed to need an enemy,” Garp wrote. “Real or imagined, my mother's enemy helped her see the way she should behave, and how she should instruct me. She was no natural at motherhood; in fact, I think my mother doubted that anything happened naturally. She was self-conscious and deliberate to the end.”

It was the world according to Fat Stew that became Jenny's enemy in those early years for Garp. That phase might be called “Getting Garp Ready for Steering.”

She watched his hair grow and cover the missing parts of his ear. She was surprised at his handsomeness, because handsomeness had not been a factor in her relationship with Technical Sergeant Garp. If the sergeant had been handsome, Jenny Fields hadn't really noticed. But young Garp was handsome, she could see, though he remained small—as if he were born to fit in the ball turret installation.

The band of children (who coursed the Steering footpaths and grassy quadrangles and playing fields) grew more awkward and self-conscious as Jenny watched them grow. Clarence DuGard soon needed glasses, which he was always smashing; over the years Jenny would treat him many times for ear infections and once for a broken nose. Talbot Mayer-Jones developed a lisp; he had a bottle-shaped body, though a lovely disposition, and low-grade chronic sinusitis. Emily Hamilton grew so tall that her knees and elbows were forever raw and bleeding from all her stumbling falls, and the way her small breasts asserted themselves made Jenny wince—occasionally wishing she had a daughter. Ira and Buddy Grove, “from the town,” were thick in the ankles and wrists and necks, their fingers smudged and mashed from messing around in their father's maintenance department. And up grew the Percy children, blond and metallically clean, their eyes the color of the dull ice on the brackish Steering River that seeped through the salt marshes to the nearby sea.

Stewart, Jr., who was called Stewie Two, graduated from Steering before Garp was even of age to enter the school; Jenny treated Stewie Two twice for a sprained ankle and once for gonorrhea. He later went through Harvard Business School, a staph infection, and a divorce.