Page 173

Captain Energy was the only one who could talk to Duncan that way--now that Garp was gone. Helen could not criticize him. Helen was too happy just to have Duncan alive, and Jenny was ten years younger than Duncan; all she could do was look up to him, and love him, and be there while he took so long to heal. Ellen James, who loved Duncan fiercely and possessively, became so exasperated with him that she would throw her note pad and her pencil in the air; and then, of course, she had nothing to say.

"A one-eyed, one-armed painter," Duncan complained. "Oh boy."

"Be happy you've still got one head and one heart," Roberta told him. "Do you know many painters who hold the brush in both hands? You need two eyes to drive a motorcycle, dummy, but only one to paint."

Jenny Garp, who loved her brother as if he were her brother and her father--because she had been too young to know her father, really--wrote Duncan a poem while he recuperated in the hospital. It was the first and only poem young Jenny Garp ever wrote; she did not have the artistic inclination of her father and her brother. And only God knows what inclination Walt might have had.

Here lies the firstborn, lean and long,

with one arm handy and one arm gone,

with one eye lit and one gone out,

with family memories, clout by clout.

This mother's son must keep intact

the remains of the house that Garp built.

It was a lousy poem, of course, but Duncan loved it.

"I'll keep myself intact," he promised Jenny.

The young transsexual, whom Roberta had placed in Duncan's studio-apartment, sent Duncan get-well postcards from New York.

The plants are doing okay, but the big yellow painting by the fireplace was warping--I don't think it was stretched properly--so I took it down and leaned it with the others in the pantry, where it's colder. I love the blue painting, and the drawings--all the drawings! And the one Roberta tells me is a self-portrait, of you--I love that especially.

"Oh boy," Duncan groaned.

Jenny read him all of Joseph Conrad, who had been Garp's favorite writer when Garp was a boy.

It was good for Helen that she had her teaching duties to distract her from worrying about Duncan.

"That boy will straighten out," Roberta assured her.

"He's a young man, Roberta," Helen said. "He's not a boy anymore--although he certainly acts like one."

"They're all boys to me," Roberta said. "Garp was a boy. I was a boy, before I became a girl. Duncan will always be a boy, to me."

"Oh boy," Helen said.

"You ought to take up some sport," Roberta told Helen. "To relax you."

"Please, Roberta," Helen said.

"Try running," Roberta said.

"You run, I'll read," Helen said.

Roberta ran all the time. In her late fifties she was becoming forgetful of using her estrogen, which must be used for the whole of a transsexual's life to maintain a female body shape. The lapses in her estrogen, and her stepped-up running, made Roberta's large body change shape, and change back again, before Helen's eyes.

"I sometimes don't know what's happening to you, Roberta," Helen told her.

"It's sort of exciting," Roberta said. "I never know what I'm going to feel like; I never know what I'm going to look like, either."

Roberta ran in three marathon races after she was fifty, but she developed problems with bursting blood vessels and was advised, by her doctor, to run shorter distances. Twenty-six miles was too much for a former tight end in her fifties--"old Number Ninety," Duncan occasionally teased her. Roberta was a few years older than Garp and Helen, and had always looked it. She went back to running the old six-mile route she and Garp used to take, between Steering and the sea, and Helen never knew when Roberta might suddenly arrive at the Steering house, sweaty and gasping and wanting to use the shower. Roberta kept a large robe and several changes of clothes at Helen's house for these occasions, when Helen would look up from her book and see Roberta Muldoon in her running costume--her stopwatch held like her heart in her big pass-catching hands.

Roberta died that spring Duncan was hospitalized in Vermont. She had been doing wind sprints on the beach at Dog's Head Harbor, but she'd stopped running and had come up on the porch, complaining of "popping sounds" in the back of her head--or possibly in her temples; she couldn't exactly locate them, she said. She sat on the porch hammock and looked at the ocean and let Ellen James go get her a glass of ice tea. Ellen sent a note out to Roberta with one of the Fields Foundation fellows.