Free The World According To Garp by John Irving Page B

for Garp was truly based on her specific observations of the Percys. The children ran free, as if their own mother believed them to be charmed. Almost albino-like, almost translucent-skinned, the Percy kids really
did
seem more magical, if not actually healthier, than other children. And despite the feeling most faculty families had toward Fat Stew, they felt that the Percy children, and even Midge, had obvious “class.” Strong, protective genes were at work, they thought.
    “My mother,” Garp wrote, “was at
war
with people who took genes this seriously.”
    And one day Jenny watched her small, dark Garp go running across the infirmary lawn, off toward the more elegant faculty houses, white and green-shuttered, where the Percy house sat like the oldest church in a town full of churches. Jenny watched this tribe of children running across the safe, charted footpaths of the school—Garp the fleetest. A string of clumsy, flopping Percys was in pursuit of him—and the other children who ran with this mob.
    There was Clarence DuGard, whose father taught French and smelled as if he never washed; he never opened a window all winter. There was Talbot Mayer Jones, whose father knew more about all of America’s history than Stewart Percy knew about his small part of the Pacific. There was Emily Hamilton, who had eight brothers and would graduate from an inferior all-girls’ school just a year before Steering would vote to admit women; her mother would commit suicide, not necessarily as a result of this vote but simultaneously with its announcement (causing Stewart Percy to remark that
this
was what would come of admitting girls to Steering: more suicide). And there were the Grove brothers, Ira and Buddy, “from the town”; their father was with the maintenance department of the school, and it was a delicate case—whether the boys should even be encouraged to attend Steering, and how well it could be expected they would do.
    Down through the quadrangles of bright green grass and fresh tar paths, boxed in by buildings of a brick so worn and soft it resembled pink marble, Jenny watched the children run. With them, she was sorry to note, ran the Percy family dog—to, Jenny’s mind, a mindless oaf of an animal who for years would defy the town leash law the way the Percys would flaunt their casualness. The dog, a giant Newfoundland, had grown from a puppy who spilled garbage cans, and the witless thief of baseballs, to being
mean
.
    One day when the kids had been playing, the dog had mangled a volleyball—not an act of viciousness, usually. A mere bumble. But when the boy who owned the deflated ball had tried to remove it from the great dog’s mouth, the dog bit him—deep puncture wounds in the forearm: not the type of bite, a nurse knew, that was only an accident, a case of “Bonkers getting a little excited, because he loves playing with the children so much.” Or so said Midge Percy, who had named the dog Bonkers. She told Jenny that she’d gotten the dog shortly after the birth of her fourth child. The word
bonkers
meant “a little crazy,” she told Jenny, and that’s how Midge said she still felt about Stewie after their first four children together. “I was just
bonkers
about him,” Midge said to Jenny, “so I named the poor dog Bonkers to prove my feelings for Stew.”
    “Midge Percy was bonkers, all right,” wrote Jenny Fields. “That dog was a killer, protected by one of the many thin and senseless bits of logic that the upper classes in America are famous for: namely, that the children and pets of the aristocracy couldn’t possibly be
too
free, or hurt anybody. That
other
people should not overpopulate the world, or be allowed to release
their
dogs, but that the dogs and children of rich people have a right to run free.”
    “The curs of the upper class,” Garp would call them, always—both the dogs and the children.
    He would have agreed with his mother that the Percys’ dog, Bonkers, the