When Garp looked at that picture, he could feel Walt's cold, wet body growing warm and dry against him.
Beneath the photograph, the caption cashed in on one of the least noble instincts of human beings.
T. S. GARP WITH HIS CHILDREN (BEFORE THE ACCIDENT)
The implication was that if you read the book, you wo
uld find out what accident. Of course, you wouldn't. The World According to Bensenhaver would tell you nothing about that accident, really--although it is fair to say that accidents play an enormous part in the novel. The only thing you would really learn about the accident referred to under the photograph was contained in the garbage that John Wolf wrote on the jacket flap. But, even so, that photograph--of a father with his doomed children--had a way of hooking you.
People bought the book by the sad son of Jenny Fields in droves.
On the airplane to Europe, Garp had only the picture of the ambulance to use his imagination on. Even at that altitude, he could imagine people buying the book in droves. He sat feeling disgusted at the people he imagined buying the book; he also felt disgusted that he had written the kind of book that could attract people in droves.
"Droves" of anything, but especially of people, were not comforting to T. S. Garp. He sat in the airplane wishing for more isolation and privacy--for himself and for his family--than he would ever know again.
"What will we do with all the money?" Duncan asked him suddenly.
"All the money?" Garp said.
"When you're rich and famous," Duncan said. "What will we do?"
"We'll have lots of fun," Garp told him, but his handsome son's one eye pierced him with doubt.
"We'll be flying at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet," the pilot said.
"Wow," said Duncan. And Garp reached for his wife's hand across the aisle. A fat man was making his unsure way down the aisle to the lavatory; Garp and Helen could only look at each other and convey a kind of hand-in-hand contact with their eyes.
In his mind's eye, Garp saw his mother, Jenny Fields, all in white, held up in the sky by the towering Roberta Muldoon. He did not know what it meant, but his vision of Jenny Fields raised above a crowd chilled him in the same way that the ambulance on the cover of The World According to Bensenhaver had chilled him. He began talking to Duncan, about anything at all.
Duncan began talking about Walt and the undertow--a famous family story. For as far back as Duncan could remember, the Garps had gone every summer to Dog's Head Harbor, New Hampshire, where the miles of beach in front of Jenny Fields' estate were ravaged by a fearful undertow. When Walt was old enough to venture near the water, Duncan said to him--as Helen and Garp had, for years, said to Duncan--"Watch out for the undertow." Walt retreated, respectfully. And for three summers Walt was warned about the undertow. Duncan recalled all the phrases.
"The undertow is bad today."
"The undertow is strong today."
"The undertow is wicked today." Wicked was a big word in New Hampshire--not just for the undertow.
And for years Walt watched out for it. From the first, when he asked what it could do to you, he had only been told that it could pull you out to sea. It could suck you under and drown you and drag you away.
It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water's edge to have a word with him.
"What are you doing, Walt?" Helen asked.
"What are you looking for, dummy?" Duncan asked him.
"I'm trying to see the Under Toad," Walt said.
"The what?" said Garp.
"The Under Toad," Walt said. "I'm trying to see it. How big is it?"
And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.
Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.
Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ("Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!" Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy--when depression had moved in overnight--they said to each other, "The Under Toad is strong today."
"Remember," Duncan asked on the plane, "how Walt asked if it was green or brown?"