Then Jenny Fields had her turn to speak to the assembled people in the parking lot. She spoke from the back of a pickup truck; Roberta Muldoon lifted her up to the tailgate and adjusted the microphone for her. Garp's mother looked very small in the pickup truck, especially beside Roberta, but Jenny's uniform was so white that she stood out, bright and clear.
“I am Jenny Fields,” she said—to some cheers and some whistles and some hoots. There was a blaring of horns from the pickup trucks circling the parking lot. The police were telling the pickup trucks to move on; they moved on, and came back, and moved on again. “Most of you know who I am,” Jenny Fields said. There were more hoots, more cheers, more blowing of horns—and a single sharp gunshot as conclusive as a wave breaking on the beach.
No one saw where it came from. Roberta Muldoon held Garp's mother under her arms. Jenny's white uniform seemed struck by a small dark splash. Then Roberta dropped down from the tailgate with Jenny in her arms and knifed through the breaking crowd like an old tight end carrying the ball for a hard first down. The crowd parted; Jenny's white uniform was almost concealed in Roberta's arms. There was a police car moving to intercept Roberta; when they neared each other, Roberta held out the body of Jenny Fields toward the squad car. For a moment Garp saw his mother's unmoving white uniform lifted above the crowd and into the arms of a policeman, who helped her and Roberta into the car.
The car, as they say, sped away. The camera was distracted by an apparent shoot-out taking place among the circling pickup trucks and several more police cars. Later, there was the still body of a man in a hunting coat lying in a dark puddle of what looked like oil. Later still, there was a closeup of what the newsmen would only identify as “a deer rifle.”
It was pointed out that the deer season had not officially opened.
Except for the fact that there had been no nudity in the telecast, the event was an X-rated soap opera from start to finish.
Garp thanked the landlady for allowing them to watch the news. Within two hours they were in Frankfurt, where they changed planes for New York. The Under Toad was not on the plane with them—not even for Helen, who was so afraid of planes. For a while, they knew, the Under Toad was elsewhere.
All Garp could think, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, was that his mother had delivered some adequate “last words.” Jenny Fields had ended her life saying, “Most of you know who I am.” On the airplane, Garp tried out the line.
“Most of you know who I am,” he whispered. Duncan was asleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand.
Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.
17. THE FIRST FEMINIST FUNERAL, AND OTHER FUNERALS
EVER since Walt died,” wrote T. S. Garp, “my life has felt like an epilogue.”
When Jenny Fields died, Garp must have felt his bewilderment increase—that sense of time passing with a plan. But what was the plan?
Garp sat in John Wolf's New York office, trying to comprehend the plethora of plans surrounding his mother's death.
“I didn't authorize a funeral,” Garp said. “How can there be a funeral? Where is the body, Roberta?”
Roberta Muldoon said patiently that the body was where Jenny wanted her body to go. It was not her body that mattered, Roberta said. There was simply going to be a kind of memorial service; it was better not to think of it as a “funeral.”
The newspapers had said it was to be the first feminist funeral in New York.
The police had said that violence was expected.
“The first feminist funeral?” Garp said.
“She meant so much to so many women,” Roberta said. “Don't be angry. You didn't own her, you know.”
John Wolf rolled his eyes.
Duncan Garp looked out the window of John Wolf's office, forty floors above Manhattan. It probably felt to Duncan a little like being on the plane he had just got off.
Helen was making a phone call in another office. She was trying to reach her father in the good old town of Steering; she wanted Ernie to meet their plane out of New York when it landed in Boston.
“All right,” Garp said, slowly; he held the baby, little Jenny Garp, on his knee. “All right. You know I don't approve of this, Roberta, but I'll go.”
“You'll go?” John Wolf said.
“No!” Roberta said. “I mean, you don't have to,” she said.
“I know,” Garp said. “But yo're right. She probably would have liked such a thing, so I'll go. What's going to happen at it?”
“There's going to be a lot of speeches,” Roberta said. “You don't want to go.”
“And they're going to read from her book,” John Wolf said. “We've donated some copies.”
“But you don't want to go, Garp,” Roberta said, nervously. “Please don't go.”
“I want to go,” Garp said. “I promise you I won't hiss or boo—no matter what the assholes say about her. I have something of hers I might read myself, if anyone's interested,” he said. “Did you ever see that thing she wrote about being called a feminist?” Roberta and John Wolf looked at each other; they looked stricken and gray. “She said, “I hate being called one, because it's a label I didn't choose to describe my feelings about men or the way I write."”
“I don't want to argue with you, Garp,” Roberta said. “Not now. You know perfectly well she said other things, too. She was a feminist, whether she liked the label or not. She was simply one for pointing out all the injustices to women; she was simply for allowing women to live their own lives and make their own choices.”
“Oh?” said Garp. “And did she believe that everything that happened to women happened to them because they were women?”
“You have to be stupid to believe that, Garp,” Roberta said. “You make us all sound like Ellen Jamesians.”
“Please stop it, both of you,” John Wolf said.
Jenny Garp squawked briefly and slapped Garp's knee; he looked at her, surprised—as if he'd forgotten she was a live thing there in his lap.
“What is it?” he asked her. But the baby was quiet again, watching some pattern in the landscape of John Wolf's office that was invisible to the rest of them.
“What time is this wingding?” Garp asked Roberta.
“Five o'clock in the afternoon,” Roberta said.
“I believe it was chosen,” John Wolf said, “so that half the secretaries in New York could walk off their jobs an hour early.”
“Not all the working women in New York are secretaries,” Roberta said.
“The secretaries,” said John Wolf, “are the only ones who'll be missed between four and five.”
“Oh boy,” Garp said.
Helen came in and announced that she could not reach her father on the phone.
“He's at wrestling practice,” Garp said.
“The wrestling season hasn't begun yet,” Helen said. Garp looked at the calendar on his watch, which was several hours out of sync with the United States; he had last set it in Vienna. But Garp knew that wrestling at Steering did not officially begin until after Thanksgiving. Helen was right.
“When I called his office at the gym, they said he was at home,” Helen told Garp. “And when I called home, there was no answer.”
“We'll rent a car at the airport,” Garp said. “And anyway, we can't leave until tonight. I have to go to this damn funeral.”