“I'm sorry,” he whispered. If she was not an assassin, he guessed he knew who or what she was. “Why is my life so full of people with impaired speech?” he wrote once. “Or is it only because I'm a writer that I notice all the damaged voices around me?”
The nonviolent waif on the airplane beside him wrote hastily and handed him a note.
“Yes, yes,” he said, wearily. “You're an Ellen Jamesian.” But the girl bit her lip and fiercely shook her head. She pushed the note into his hand.
My name is Ellen James,
the note informed Garp.
I am not an Ellen Jamesian.
“You're the Ellen James?” he asked her, though it was unnecessary and he knew it—just looking at her, he should have known. She was the right age; not so long ago she would have been that eleven-year-old child, raped and untongued. The dirty-saucer eyes were, up close, not dirty; they were simply bloodshot, perhaps insomniac. Her lower lip was ragged; it looked like the pencil eraser—bitten down.
She scribbled more.
I came from Illinois. My parents were killed in an auto accident, recently. I came East to meet your mother. I wrote her a letter and she actually answered me! She wrote me a wonderful reply. She invited me to come stay with her. She also told me to read all your books.
Garp turned these tiny pages of notepaper; he kept nodding; he kept smiling.
But your mother was killed!
From the big purse Ellen James pulled a brown bandanna into which she blew her nose.
I went to stay with a women's group in New York. But I already knew too many Ellen Jamesians. They're all I know; I get hundreds of Christmas cards,
she wrote. She paused for Garp to read that line.
“Yes, yes, I'm sure you do,” he encouraged her.
I went to the funeral, of course. I went because I knew you'd be there. I knew you'd come,
she wrote; she stopped, now, to smile at him. Then she hid her face in her dirty brown bandanna.
“You wanted to see me?” Garp said.
She nodded, fiercely. She pulled from the big bag her mangled copy of The World According to Bensenhaver.
The best rape story I have ever read,
wrote Ellen James. Garp winced.
Do you know how many times I have read this book?
she wrote. He looked at her teary, admiring eyes. He shook his head, as mutely as an Ellen Jamesian. She touched his face; she had a childlike inability with her hands. She held up her fingers for him to count. All of one little hand and most of the other. She had read his awful book eight times.
“Eight times,” Garp murmured.
She nodded, and smiled at him. Now she settled back in the plane seat, as if her life were accomplished, now that she was sitting beside him, en route to Boston—if not with the woman she had admired all the way from Illinois, at least with the woman's only son, who would have to suffice.
“Have you been to college?” Garp asked her.
Ellen James held up one dirty finger; she made an unhappy face. “One year?” Garp translated. “But you didn't like it. It didn't work out?”
She nodded eagerly.
“And what do you want to be?” he asked her, barely keeping himself from adding: When you grow up.
She pointed to him and blushed. She actually touched his gross breasts.
“A writer?” Garp guessed. She relaxed and smiled; he understood her so easily, her face seemed to say. Garp felt his throat constricting. She struck him as one of those doomed children he had read about: the ones who have no antibodies—they have no natural immunities to disease. If they don't live their lives in plastic bags, they die of their first common cold. Here was Ellen James of Illinois, out of her sack.
“Both your parents were killed?” Garp asked. She nodded, and bit again her chewed lip. “And you have no other family?” he asked her. She shook her head.
He knew what his mother would have done. He knew Helen wouldn't mind; and of course Roberta would always be of help. And all those women who'd been wounded and were now healed, in their fashion.
“Well, you have a family now,” Garp told Ellen James; he held her hand and winced to hear himself make such an offer. He heard the echo of his mother's voice, her old soap-opera role: The Adventures of Good Nurse.
Ellen James shut her eyes as if she had fainted for joy. When the stewardess asked her to fasten her seat belt, Ellen James didn't hear; Garp fastened her belt for her. All the short flight to Boston the girl wrote her heart out.
I hate the Ellen Jamesians,
she wrote.
I would never do this to myself.
She opened her mouth and pointed to the wide absence in there. Garp cringed.
I want to talk; I want to say everything,
wrote Ellen James. Garp noticed that the gnarled thumb and index finger of her writing hand were easily twice the size of the unused instruments on her other hand; she had a writing muscle such as he'd never seen. No writer's cramp for Ellen James, he thought.
The words come and come,
she wrote. She waited for his approval, line by line. He would nod; she would go on. She wrote him her whole life. Her high school English teacher, the only one who mattered. Her mother's eczema. The Ford Mustang that her father drove too fast.
I have read everything,
she wrote. Garp told her that Helen was a big reader, too; he thought she would like Helen. The girl looked very hopeful.
Who was your favorite writer when you were a boy?
“Joseph Conrad,” Garp said. She sighed her approval.
Jane Austen was mine.
“That's fine,” Garp said to her.
At Logan Airport she was almost asleep on her feet; Garp steered her up the aisles and leaned her on the counters while he filled out the necessary forms for the rental car.
“T. S.?” the rental-car person asked. One of Garp's falsies was slipping sideways and the rental-car person appeared anxious that this entire turquoise body might self-destruct.
In the car north, on the dark road to Steering, Ellen James slept like a kitten curled in the back seat. In the rear-view mirror Garp noted that her knee was skinned, and that the girl sucked her thumb while she slept.
It had been a proper funeral for Jenny Fields, after all; some essential message had passed from mother to son. Here he was, playing nurse to someone. More essentially, Garp finally understood what his mother's talent had been; she had right instincts—Jenny Fields always did what was right. One day, Garp hoped, he would see the connection between this lesson and his own writing, but that was a personal goal—like others, it would take a little time. Importantly, it was in the car north to Steering, with the real Ellen James asleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields.
A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.
“Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.”