Thus Garp, with his defenses down and his sense of the Under Toad fled from him—at least, since his arrival in Boston—walked into the house of Ernie Holm, his father-in-law, carrying the sleeping Ellen James in his arms. She might have been nineteen, but she was easier to carry than Duncan.
Garp was not prepared for the grizzled face of Dean Bodger, alone in Ernie's dim living room, watching TV. The old dean, who would soon retire, seemed to accept that Garp was dressed as a whore, but he stared with horror at the sleeping Ellen James.
“Is she...”
“She's asleep,” Garp said. “Where's everyone?” And with the voicing of his question, Garp heard the cold hop of the Under Toad thudding across the cold floors of the silent house.
“I tried to reach you,” Dean Bodger told him. “It's Ernie.”
“His heart,” Garp guessed.
“Yes,” Bodger said. “They gave Helen something to help her sleep. She's upstairs. And I thought I'd stay until you got here—you know: so that if the children woke up and needed anything, they wouldn't disturb her. I'm sorry, Garp. These things sometimes come all at once, or they seem to.”
Garp knew how Bodger had liked his mother, too. He put the sleeping Ellen James on the living-room couch and turned off the sickly TV, which was turning the girl's face bluish.
“In his sleep?” Garp asked Bodger, pulling off his wig. “Did you find Ernie here?”
Now the poor dean looked nervous. “He was on the bed upstairs,” Bodger said. “I called up the stairs, but I knew I'd have to go up and find him. I fixed him up a little before I called anyone.”
“Fixed him up?” Garp said. He unzipped the terrible turquoise jump suit and ripped off his breasts. The old dean perhaps thought this was a common traveling disguise of the now-famous writer.
“Please don't ever tell Helen,” Bodger said.
“Tell her what?” Garp asked.
Bodger brought out the magazine—out from under his bulging vest. It was the issue of Crotch Shots where the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver had been published. The magazine looked very worn and used.
“Ernie had been looking at it, you know,” Bodger said. “When his heart stopped.”
Garp took the magazine from Bodger and imagined the death scene. Ernie Holm had been masturbating to the split-beaver pictures when his heart quit. There was a joke during Garp's days at Steering that this was the preferred way to “go.” So Ernie had gone that way, and the kindly Bodger had pulled up the coach's pants and hidden the magazine from the coach's daughter.
“I had to tell the medical examiner, you know,” Bodger said.
A nasty metaphor from his mother's past came up to Garp in a wave, like nausea, but he did not express it to the old dean. Lust lays another good man low! Ernie's lonely life depressed Garp.
“And your mom,” sighed Bodger, shaking his head under the cold porch light that glowed into the black Steering campus. “Your mom was someone special,” the old man mused. “She was a real fighter,” the scrappy Bodger said, with pride. “I still have copies of the notes she wrote to Stewart Percy.”
“You were always nice to her,” Garp reminded him.
“She was worth a hundred Stewart Percys, you know, Garp,” Bodger said.
“She sure was,” Garp said.
“You know he's gone, too?” Bodger said.
“Fat Stew?” said Garp.
“Yesterday,” Bodger said. “After a long illness—you know what that usually means, don't you?”
“No,” Garp said. He hadn't ever thought about it.
“Cancer, usually,” Bodger said, gravely. “He had it for a long time.”
“Well, I'm sorry,” Garp said. He was thinking of Pooh, and of course of Cushie. And his old challenger, Bonkers, whose ear in his dreams he could still taste.
“There's going to be some confusion about the Steering chapel,” Bodger explained. “Helen can tell you, she understands. Stewart has a service in the morning; Ernie, has his later in the day. And, of course, you know the bit about Jenny?”
“What bit?” Garp asked.
“The memorial?”
“God, no,” Garp said. “A memorial here?”
“There are girls here now, you know,” Bodger said. “I should say women,” he added, shaking his head. “I don't know; they're awfully young. They're girls to me.”
“Students?” Garp said.
“Yes, students,” Bodger said. “The girl students voted to name the infirmary after her.”
“The infirmary?” Garp said.
“Well, it's never had a name, you know,” Bodger said. “Most of our buildings have names.”
“The Jenny Fields Infirmary,” Garp said, numbly.
“Sort of nice, isn't it?” Bodger asked; he wasn't too sure if Garp would think so, but Garp didn't care.
In the long night, baby Jenny woke up once; by the time Garp had moved himself away from Helen's warm and deeply sleeping body, he saw that Ellen James had already found the crying baby and was warming a bottle. Odd cooing and grunting sounds, appropriate to babies, came softly out of the tongueless mouth of Ellen James. She had worked in a day-care center in Illinois, she had written Garp on the plane. She knew all about babies, and could even make noises like them.
Garp smiled at her and went back to bed.
In the morning he told Helen about Ellen James and they talked about Ernie.
“It was good that he went in his sleep,” Helen said. “When I think of your mother.”
“Yes, yes,” Garp told her.
Duncan was introduced to Ellen James. One-eyed and no-tongued, thought Garp, my family will pull together.
When Roberta called to describe her arrest, Duncan—who was the least-tired talking human in the house—explained to her about Ernie's heart attack.
Helen found the turquoise jump suit and the huge, loaded bra in the kitchen wastebasket; it seemed to cheer her up. The cherry-colored vinyl boots actually fit her better than they had fit Garp, but she threw them out, anyway. Ellen James wanted the green scarf, and Helen took the girl shopping for some more clothes. Duncan asked for and received the wig, which—to Garp's irritation—he wore most of the morning.
Dean Bodger called, to ask to be of use.
A man who was the new director of Physical Facilities for the Steering School stopped at the house to talk confidentially with Garp. The Physical Facilities director explained that Ernie had lived in a school house, and as soon as it was convenient for Helen, Ernie's things should be moved out. Garp had understood that the original Steering family house, Midge Steering Percy's house, had been given back to the school some years ago—a gift of Midge and Fat Stew, for which a ceremony had been arranged. Garp told the Physical Facilities director that he hoped Helen had as much time to move out as Midge would be given.
“Oh, we'll sell that albatross,” the man confided to Garp. “It's a lemon, you know.”
The Steering family house, in Garp's memory, was no lemon.
“All that history,” Garp said. “I should think you'd want it—and it was a gift, after all.”
“The plumbing's terrible,” the man said. He implied that, in their advancing senility, Midge and Fat Stew had let the place fall into a wretched state. “It may be a lovely old house, and all that,” the young man said, “but the school has to look ahead. We've got enough history around here. We can't sink our housing funds into history. We need more buildings that the school can use. No matter what you do with that old mansion, it's just another family house.”
When Garp told Helen that the Steering Percy house was going to be sold, Helen broke down. Of course she was really crying for her father, and for everything, but the thought that the Steering School did not even want the grandest house of their childhood years depressed both Garp and Helen.