John Irving - The World According to Garp

Randolph Percy was called Dopey until his dying day (of a heart attack, when he was only thirty-five; he was a procreator after his fat father's heart, himself the father of five). Dopey never managed to graduate from Steering, but successfully transferred to some other prep school and graduated after a while. Once Midge cried out in the Sunday dining room, “Our Dopey's dead!” His nickname sounded so awful in that context that the family, after his death, finally spoke of him as Randolph.

William Percy, Shrill Willy, was embarrassed by his stupid nickname, to his credit, and although he was three years older than Garp, he befriended Garp in a very decent fashion while he was an upperclassman at Steering and Garp was just starting out. Jenny always liked William, whom she called William. She treated him many times for bronchitis and was moved enough by the news of his death (in a war, immediately following his graduation from Yale) that she even wrote a long letter of commiseration to Midge and Fat Stew.

As for the Percy girls, Cushie would get hers (and Garp would even get to play a small part; they were near the same age). And poor Bainbridge, the youngest Percy, who was cursed to be called Pooh, would be spared her encounter with Garp until Garp was in his prime.

All these children, and her Garp, Jenny watched grow. While Jenny waited for Garp to get ready for Steering, the black beast Bonkers grew very old, and slower—but not toothless, Jenny noticed. And always Garp watched out for him, even after Bonkers stopped running with the crowd; when he lurked, hulking by the Percys' white front pillars—as matted and tangled and nasty as a thorn bush in the dark—Garp still kept his eye on him. An occasional younger child, or someone new in the neighborhood, would get too close and be chomped. Jenny kept track of the stitches and missing bits of flesh for which the great slathering dog was accountable, but Fat Stew endured all Jenny's criticisms and Bonkers lived.

“I believe my mother grew fond of that animal's presence, although she would never have admitted it,” Garp wrote. “Bonkers was the Percy Enemy come alive—made into muscle and fur and halitosis. It must have pleased my mother to watch the old dog slowing down while I was growing up.”

By the time Garp was ready for Steering, black Bonkers was fourteen years old. By the time Garp entered the Steering School, Jenny Fields had a few Distinguished Silver hairs of her own. By the time Garp started Steering, Jenny had taken all the courses that were worth taking and had listed them in order of universal value and entertainment. By the time Garp was a Steering student, Jenny Fields had been awarded the traditional gift for faculty and staff enduring fifteen years of service: the famous Steering dinner plates. The stern brick buildings of the school, including the infirmary annex, were baked into the big-eating surfaces of the plates, vividly rendered in the Steering School colors. Good old blood and blue.

In 1781 the widow and children of Everett Steering founded Steering Academy, as it was first called, because Everett Steering had announced to his family, while carving his last Christmas goose, that his only disappointment with his town was that he had not provided his boys with an academy capable of preparing them for a higher education. He did not mention his girls. He was a shipbuilder in a village whose life-link to the sea was a doomed river; Everett knew the river was doomed. He was a smart man, and not usually playful, but after Christmas dinner he indulged in a snowball fight with both his boys and his girls. He died of apoplexy before nightfall. Everett Steering was seventy-two; even his boys and his girls were too old for snowball fights, but he had a right to call the town of Steering his town.

It had been named after him in a glut of enthusiasm for the town's independence following the Revolutionary War. Everett Steering had organized the installation of mounted cannons at strategic points along the river shore; these cannons were meant to discourage an attack that never came—from the British, who were expected to sail up the river from the sea at Great Bay. The river was called Great River then, but after the war it was called the Steering River; and the town, which had no proper name—but had always been called The Meadows, because it lay in the salt- and fresh-water marshes only a few miles inland from Great Bay—was also called Steering.

Many families in Steering were dependent on shipbuilding, or on other business that came up the river from the sea; since it was first called The Meadows, the village had been a backup port to Great Bay. But along with his wishes to found a boys' academy, Everett Steering told his family that Steering would not be a port for very long. The river, he noticed, was choking with silt.

In all his life, Everett Steering was known to tell only one joke, and only to his family. The joke was that the only river to have been named after him was full of mud; and it was getting fuller by the minute. The land was all marsh and meadow, from Steering to the sea, and unless people decided that Steering was worth maintaining as a port, and gouged a deeper channel for the river, Everett knew that even a rowboat would eventually have trouble making it from Steering to Great Bay (unless there was a very high tide). Everett knew that the tide would one day fill in the riverbed from his home town to the Atlantic.

In the next century, the Steering family was wise to stake its life-support system on the textile mills they constructed to span the waterfall on the freshwater part of the Steering River. By the time of the Civil War the only business in the town of Steering, on the Steering River, was the Steering Mills. The family got out of boats and into textiles when the time was ripe.

Another shipbuilding family in Steering was not so lucky; this family's last ship made it only half the way from Steering to the sea. In a once-notorious part of the river, called The Gut, the last ship made in Steering settled into the mud forever, and for years it could be seen from the road, half out of the water at high tide and completely dry at low tide. Kids played in it until it listed to its side and crushed someone's dog. A pig farmer named Gilmore salvaged the ship's masts to raise his barn. And by the time young Garp attended Steering, the varsity crew could row their shells on the river only at high tide. At low tide the Steering River is one wet mudflat from Steering to the sea.

It was, therefore, due to Everett Steering's instincts about water that a boys' academy was founded in 1781. After a century or so, it flourished.

“Over all those years,” Garp wrote, “the shrewd Steering genes must have suffered some dilution; the family instincts regarding water went from good to very bad.” Garp enjoyed referring to Midge Steering Percy in this way. “A Steering whose water instincts had run their course,” he said. Garp thought it wonderfully ironic “that the Steering genes for water sense ran out of chromosomes when they got to Midge. Her sense of water was so perverse,” Garp wrote, “that it attracted her first to Hawaii and then to the United States Navy—in the form of Fat Stew.”

Midge Steering Percy was the end of the bloodline. The Steering School itself would become the last Steering after her, and perhaps old Everett foresaw that, too; many families have left less, or worse, behind. In Garp's day, at least, the Steering School was still relentless and definite in its purpose: “the preparing of young men for a higher education.” And in Garp's case, he had a mother who also took that purpose seriously. Garp himself took the school so seriously that even Everett Steering, with his one joke in a lifetime, would have been pleased.