"Well, more than that," Garp admitted.
"What part of the story did you make up?" Helen asked him.
"All of it," he said.
They were in bed together and Helen lay quietly there, knowing that this was one of his trickier moments.
"Well, almost all of it," he added.
Garp never tired of playing this game, though Helen certainly tired of it. He would wait for her to ask: Which of it? Which of it is true, which of it is made up? Then he would say to her that it didn't matter; she should just tell him what she didn't believe. Then he would change that part. Every part she believed was true; every part she didn't believe needed work. If she believed the whole thing, then the whole thing was true. He was very ruthless as a storyteller, Helen knew. If the truth suited the story, he would reveal it without embarrassment; but if any truth was unsuccessful in a story, he would think nothing of changing it.
"When you're through playing around," she said, "I'd just be curious to know what really happened."
"Well, really," said Garp, "the dog was a beagle."
"A beagle!"
"Well, actually, a schnauzer. He was tied up in the alley all day, but not to an army truck."
"To a Volkswagen?" Helen guessed.
"To a garbage sled," Garp said. "The sled was used to pull the garbage cans out to the sidewalk in the winter, but the schnauzer, of course, was too small and weak to pull it--at any time of the year."
"And the cafe owner?" Helen asked. "He was not in the war?"
"She," Garp said. "She was a widow."
"Her husband had been killed in the war?" Helen guessed.
"She was a young widow," Garp said. "Her husband had been killed crossing the street. She was very attached to the dog, which her husband had given her for their first anniversary. But her new landlady would not allow dogs in her apartment, so the widow set the dog loose in the cafe each night.
"It was a spooky, empty space and the dog was nervous in there; in fact, he crapped all night long. People would stop and peer in the window and laugh at all the messes the dog made. This laughter made the dog more nervous, so he crapped more. In the morning the widow came early--to air out the place and clean up the messes--and she spanked the dog with a newspaper and dragged him cowering out into the alley, where he was tied up to the garbage sled all day."
"And there was no cat?" Helen asked.
"Oh, there were lots of cats," Garp said. "They came into the alley because of the garbage cans for the cafe. The dog would never touch the garbage, because he was afraid of the widow, and the dog was terrified of cats; whenever there was a cat in the alley, raiding the garbage cans, the dog crawled under the garbage sled and hid there until the cat was gone."
"My God," said Helen. "So there was no teasing, either?"
"There is always teasing," Garp said, solemnly. "There was a little girl who would come to the end of the alley and call the dog out to the sidewalk, excpet that the dog's chain wouldn't reach the sidewalk and the dog would yap! and yap! and yap! at the little girl, who stood on the sidewalk and called, 'Come on, come on,' until someone rolled down a window and yelled at her to leave the poor mutt alone."
"You were there?" Helen said.
"We were there," Garp said. "Every day my mother wrote in a room, the only window of which faced that alley. That dog's yapping drove her nuts."
"So Jenny moved the garbage sled," Helen said, "and the dog ate the little girl, whose parents complained to the police, who had the dog put to sleep. And you, of course, were a great comfort to the grieving widow, who was perhaps in her early forties."
"Her late thirties," Garp said. "But that's not how it happened."
"What happened?" Helen asked.
"One night, in the cafe," Garp said, "the dog had a stroke. A number of people claimed to have been responsible for scaring the dog so badly that they caused his stroke. There was a kind of competition in regard to this in the neighborhood. They were always doing things like creeping up to the cafe and hurling themselves against the
windows and doors, shrieking like huge cats--creating a frenzy of bowel movements by the frightened dog."
"The stroke killed the dog, I hope," Helen said.
"Not quite," Garp said. "The stroke paralyzed the dog's hindquarters, so that he could only move his front end and wag his head. The widow, however, clung to the life of this wretched dog as she clung to the memory of her late husband, and she had a carpenter, with whom she was sleeping, build a little cart for the dog's rear end. The cart had wheels on it, so the dog just walked on his front legs and towed his dead hindquarters around on the little cart."