Helen always considered herself as a widow left with three children--Duncan, baby Jenny, and Ellen James, who all survived Helen and wept copiously at her death. They had been too young and too astonished to weep as much for Garp.

* * *

--

DEAN BODGER, who wept almost as much as Helen at Garp's death, remained as loyal as a pit bull, and as tenacious. Long after his retirement, he still stormed the Steering campus by night, unable to sleep, fitfully capturing lurkers and lovers who slunk along the footpaths and hugged each other to the spongy ground--under the soft bushes, alongside the beautiful old buildings, and so forth.

Bodger remained active at Steering for as long as it took Duncan Garp to graduate. "I saw your father through, boy," the dean told Duncan. "I'll see you through, too. And if they let me, I'll stay to see your sister through." But they finally forced his retirement; they cited to themselves, among other problems, his habit of talking to himself during chapel, and his bizarre arrests, at midnight, of the boys and girls caught out after hours. They also mentioned the dean's recurring fantasy: that it had been the young Garp he caught in his arms--one night, years ago--and not a pigeon. Bodger refused to move from the campus, even when he was retired, and despite--or, perhaps, because of--his obstinacy, he became Steering's most honored emeritus. They would drag him out for all the school's ceremonies; they would totter him up to the stage, introduce him to people who didn't know who he was, and then they would lead him away. Perhaps because they could display him on these dignified occasions, they tolerated his odd behavior; long through his seventies, for example, Bodger would be convinced--sometimes for weeks at a time--that he was still the dean.

"You are the dean, really," Helen liked to tease him.

"Of course I am!" Bodger roared.

They saw each other often, and as Bodger grew deafer, and deafer, he was more frequently seen on the arm of that nice Ellen James, who had her ways of talking to people who couldn't hear.

Dean Bodger remained loyal even to the Steering wrestling team, whose glory years soon faded from the memories of most. The wrestlers were never again to have a coach the equal of Ernie Holm, or even the equal of Garp. They became a losing team, yet Bodger always supported them, hollering through the last bout to the poor Steering boy flopping on his back, about to be pinned.

It was at a wrestling match that Bodger died. In the unlimited class--an unusually close match--the Steering heavyweight lay floundering with his equally exhausted and out-of-shape opponent; like beached baby whales, they groveled for the upper hand and the winning points as the clock ran down. "Fifteen seconds!" the announcer boomed. The big boys struggled. Bodger rose to his feet, stamping and urging. "Gott!" he squawked, his German emerging at the end.

When the bout ended and the stands emptied, there was the retired dean--dead in his seat. It took much comforting from Helen for the sensitive young Whitcomb to gain control of his grief at Bodger's loss.

* * *

--

DONALD WHITCOMB would never sleep with Helen, despite rumors among the envious would-be biographers who longed to get their hands on Garp's property and Garp's widow. Whitcomb would be a monkish recluse all his life, which he spent in virtual hiding at the Steering School. It was his happy fortune to have discovered Garp there, moments before Garp's death, and his happy fortune, too, to find himself befriended and looked after by Helen. She trusted him to adore her husband perhaps even more uncritically than she did.

Poor Whitcomb would always be referred to as "the young Whitcomb," even though he would not always be young. His face would never grow a beard, his cheeks would be forever pink--under his brown, his gray, his finally frost-white hair. His voice would remain a stuttering, eager yodel; his hands would wring themselves forever. But it would be Whitcomb whom Helen would trust with the family and literary record.

He would be Garp's biographer. Helen would read all but the last chapter, which Whitcomb waited for years to write; it was the chapter eulogizing her. Whitcomb was the Garp scholar, the final Garp authority. He had the proper meekness for a biographer, Duncan always joked. He was a good biographer from the Garp family's point of view; Whitcomb believed everything that Helen told him--he believed every note that Garp left--or every note that Helen told him Garp left.

"Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that's left is memory. But even a nihilist has a memory."

Whitcomb even loved Garp at his most whimsical and at his most pretentious.

Among Garp's things, Helen found this note.

"No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: 'I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.'"

Donald Whitcomb, who loved Garp uncritically--in the manner of dogs and children--said that those indeed were Garp's last words.

"If Whitcomb said so, then they were," Duncan always said.

Jenny Garp and Ellen James--they agreed about this, too.

It was a family matter--keeping Garp from the biographers,

wrote Ellen James.

"And why not?" asked Jenny Garp. "What does he owe the public? He always said he was only grateful for other artists, and to the people who loved him."

So who else deserves to have a piece of him, now?

wrote Ellen James.

Donald Whitcomb was even faithful to Helen's last wish. Although Helen was old, her final illness was sudden, and it had to be Whitcomb who defended her deathbed request. Helen did not want to be buried in the Steering School cemetery, alongside Garp and Jenny, her father and Fat Stew--and all the others. She said that the town cemetery would do her just fine. She did not want to be left to medicine, either; since she was so old, she was sure there was little left of her body that anyone could possibly use. She wanted to be cremated, she told Whitcomb, and her ashes were to remain the property of Duncan and Jenny Garp and Ellen James. After burying some of her ashes, they could do anything they chose with what ashes remained, but they could not scatter them anywhere on the property of the Steering School. She would be damned, Helen told Whitcomb, if the Steering School, which did not admit women students when she had been of age, would get to have any part of her now.

The gravestone in the town cemetery, she told Whitcomb, should say simply that she was Helen Holm, daughter of the wrestling coach Ernie Holm, and that she had not been allowed to attend the Steering School because she was a girl; furthermore, she was the loving wife of the novelist T. S. Garp, whose gravestone could be seen in the Steering School cemetery, because he was a boy.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net