And whether they called him Paunch or Fat Stew, the boys who took Stewart Percy's “My Part of the Pacific” course were supposed to know already that Midge was not a Hawaiian native, though some of them really did have to be told. What the smarter boys knew, and what every member of the Steering community was nearly born knowing—and committed thereafter to silent scorn—was that Stewart Percy had married Midge Steering. She was the last Steering. The unclaimed princess of the Steering School—no headmaster had yet come her way. Stewart Percy married into so much money that he didn't have to be able to do anything, except stay married.
Jenny Fields' father, the footwear king, used to think of Midge Steering's money and shake in his shoes.
“Midge was such a dingbat,” Jenny Fields wrote in her autobiography, “that she went to Hawaii for a vacation during World War II. And she was such a total dingbat,” Jenny wrote, “that she actually fell in love with Stewart Percy, and she began to have his empty, Distinguished Silver children almost immediately—even before the war was over. And when the war was over, she brought him and her growing family back to the Steering School. And she told the school to give her Stewie a job.”
“When I was a boy,” Garp wrote, “there were already three or four little Percys, and more—seemingly always more—on the way.”
Of Midge Percy's many pregnancies, Jenny Fields made up a nasty rhyme.
What lies in Midge Percy's belly,
so round and exceedingly fair?
In fact, it is really nothing
but a ball of Distinguished Silver hair.
“My mother was a bad writer,” Garp wrote, referring to Jenny's autobiography. “But she was an even worse poet.” When Garp was five, however, he was too young to be told such poems. And what made Jenny Fields so unkind concerning Stewart and Midge?
Jenny knew that Fat Stew looked down on her. But Jenny said nothing, she was just wary of the situation. Garp was a playmate of the Percy children, who were not allowed to visit Garp in the infirmary annex. “Our house is really better for children,” Midge told Jenny once, on the phone. “I mean!"—she laughed—"I don't think there's anything they can catch.”
Except a little stupidity, Jenny thought, but all she said was, “I know who's contagious and who isn't. And nobody plays on the roof.”
To be fair: Jenny knew that the Percy house, which had been the Steering family house, was a comforting house to children. It was carpeted and spacious and full of generations of tasteful toys. It was rich. And because it was cared for by servants, it was also casual. Jenny resented the casualness that the Percy family could afford. Jenny thought that neither Midge nor Stewie had the brains to worry about their children as much as they should; they also had so many children. Maybe when you have a lot of children, Jenny pondered, you aren't so anxious about each of them?
Jenny was actually worried for her Garp when he was off playing with the Percy children. Jenny had grown up in an upper-class home, too, and she knew perfectly well that upper-class children were not magically protected from danger just because they were somehow born safer, with hardier metabolisms and charmed genes. Around the Steering School, however, there were many who seemed to believe this—because, superficially, it often looked true. There was something special about the aristocratic children of those families: their hair seemed to stay in place, their skin did not break out. Perhaps they did not appear to be under any stress because there was nothing they wanted, Jenny thought. But then she wondered how she'd escaped being like them.
Her concern for Garp was truly based on her specific observations of the Percys. The children ran free, as if their own mother believed them to be charmed. Almost albino-like, almost translucent-skinned, the Percy kids really did seem more magical, if not actually healthier, than other children. And despite the feeling most faculty families had toward Fat Stew, they felt that the Percy children, and even Midge, had obvious “class.” Strong, protective genes were at work, they thought.
“My mother,” Garp wrote, “was at war with people who took genes this seriously.”
And one day Jenny watched her small, dark Garp go running across the infirmary lawn, off toward the more elegant faculty houses, white and green-shuttered, where the Percy house sat like the oldest church in a town full of churches. Jenny watched this tribe of children running across the safe, charted footpaths of the school—Garp the fleetest. A string of clumsy, flopping Percys was in pursuit of him—and the other children who ran with this mob.
There was Clarence DuGard, whose father taught French and smelled as if he never washed; he never opened a window all winter. There was Talbot Mayer Jones, whose father knew more about all of America's history than Stewart Percy knew about his small part of the Pacific. There was Emily Hamilton, who had eight brothers and would graduate from an inferior all-girls' school just a year before Steering would vote to admit women; her mother would commit suicide, not necessarily as a result of this vote but simultaneously with its announcement (causing Stewart Percy to remark that this was what would come of admitting girls to Steering: more suicide). And there were the Grove brothers, Ira and Buddy, “from the town"; their father was with the maintenance department of the school, and it was a delicate case—whether the boys should even be encouraged to attend Steering, and how well it could be expected they would do.
Down through the quadrangles of bright green grass and fresh tar paths, boxed in by buildings of a brick so worn and soft it resembled pink marble, Jenny watched the children run. With them, she was sorry to note, ran the Percy family dog—to, Jenny's mind, a mindless oaf of an animal who for years would defy the town leash law the way the Percys would flaunt their casualness. The dog, a giant Newfoundland, had grown from a puppy who spilled garbage cans, and the witless thief of baseballs, to being mean.
One day when the kids had been playing, the dog had mangled a volleyball—not an act of viciousness, usually. A mere bumble. But when the boy who owned the deflated ball had tried to remove it from the great dog's mouth, the dog bit him—deep puncture wounds in the forearm: not the type of bite, a nurse knew, that was only an accident, a case of “Bonkers getting a little excited, because he loves playing with the children so much.” Or so said Midge Percy, who had named the dog Bonkers. She told Jenny that she'd gotten the dog shortly after the birth of her fourth child. The word bonkers meant “a little crazy,” she told Jenny, and that's how Midge said she still felt about Stewie after their first four children together. “I was just bonkers about him,” Midge said to Jenny, “so I named the poor dog Bonkers to prove my feelings for Stew.”
“Midge Percy was bonkers, all right,” wrote Jenny Fields. “That dog was a killer, protected by one of the many thin and senseless bits of logic that the upper classes in America are famous for: namely, that the children and pets of the aristocracy couldn't possibly be too free, or hurt anybody. That other people should not overpopulate the world, or be allowed to release their dogs, but that the dogs and children of rich people have a right to run free.”
“The curs of the upper class,” Garp would call them, always—both the dogs and the children.