“She's an Ellen Jamesian,” Roberta whispered to him. “She can't say anything.” Yet the woman melted the audience with her pained, sorry face. She opened her mouth as if she were singing, but no sound came out. Garp imagined he could see the severed stump of her tongue. He remembered how his mother supported them—these crazies; Jenny was wonderful to every single one of them who came to her. But Jenny had finally admitted her disapproval of what they had done—perhaps only to Garp. “They're making victims of themselves,” Jenny had said, “and yet that's the same thing they're angry at men for doing to them. Why don't they just take a vow of silence, or never speak in a man's presence?” Jenny said. “It's not logicaclass="underline" to maim yourself to make a point.”
But Garp, now touched by the mad woman in front of him, felt the whole history of the world's self-mutilation—though violent and illogical, it expressed, perhaps like nothing else, a terrible hurt. “I am really hurt,” said the woman's huge face, dissolving before him in his own swimmy tears.
Then the little hand on his shoulder hurt him; he remembered himself—a man at a ritual for women—and he turned around to see the rather tired-looking young woman behind him. Her face was familiar, but he didn't recognize her.
“I know you,” the young woman whispered to him. She did not sound happy that she knew him, either.
Roberta had warned him not to open his mouth to anyone, not even to try to speak. He was prepared for handling that problem. He shook his head. He took a pad of paper out of the flap pocket, which was crushed against his mammoth, false bosom, and he snatched a pencil out of his absurd purse. The sharp, clawlike fingers of the woman bit into his shoulder, as if she were keeping him from running away.
Hi! I'm an Ellen Jamesian,
Garp scribbled on the pad; he tore the slip off and handed it to the young woman. She didn't take it.
“Like hell you are,” she said. “You're T. S. Garp.”
The word Garp bounced like the burp of an unknown animal into the silence of the suffering auditorium, still conducted by the quiet Ellen Jamesian on stage. Roberta Muldoon turned around and looked panic-stricken; she had never seen this particular young woman in her life.
“I don't know who your big playmate is,” the young woman told Garp, “but you're T. S. Garp. I don't know where you got that dumb wig or those big tits, but I'd know you anywhere. You haven't changed a bit since you were fucking my sister—fucking her to death,” the young woman said. And Garp knew who his enemy was: the last and youngest of the Percy Family Horde. Bainbridge! Little Pooh Percy, who was wearing diapers as a preteen, and, for all Garp knew, might be wearing them still.
Garp looked at her; Garp had bigger tits than she did. Pooh was asexually attired, her haircut was similar to a popular and unisexual style, her features were neither delicate nor coarse. Pooh wore a U.S. Army shirt with sergeant stripes and a campaign button for the woman who'd hoped to be the new governor of the State of New Hampshire. With a shock, Garp realized that the woman running for governor was Sally Devlin. He wondered if she'd won!
“Hello, Pooh,” Garp said, and saw her wince—a hated nickname, obviously, and one she was never called anymore. “Bainbridge,” Garp muttered, but it was too late to make friends. It was years too late. It was too late from the night Garp had bitten off Bonkers' ear, had violated Cushie in the Steering School infirmary, had not ever really loved her—had not come to her wedding, and not to her funeral.
Whatever grudge against Garp this was, or whatever loathing for men in general, Pooh Percy had her enemy at her mercy—at last.
Roberta's big warm hand was at the small of Garp's back and her heavy voice urged him, “Get out of here, move fast, don't say a word.”
“There's a man here!” Bainbridge Percy shouted to the grieving silence of School of Nursing Hall. That even brought a small sound—perhaps a grunt—from the troubled Ellen Jamesian on stage. “There's a man here!” Pooh screamed. “And he's T. S. Garp. Garp is here!” she cried.
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.