Free The World According To Garp by John Irving Page A

school dining-halls at least once every week: Fat Stew. Fat Stew was made from another of the weekly Steering dining-hall dishes: Mystery Meat. But Jenny Fields used to say that Stewart Percy was made entirely of Distinguished Silver hair.
    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