Cushie Percy

Cushie Percy is a member of the Percy family and a girl of nearly the same age as T. S. Garp. Her youthful relationship with Garp becomes a source of both later intimacy and lasting sorrow: Cushie dies in childbirth, and Garp learns of her death only after it has happened. Though her role in the immediate action is brief, her absence shapes his memories and becomes part of the grievance that her youngest sister, Bainbridge Percy, eventually directs at him.

Identity and Family Background

Cushie was born Cushman Percy, one of five Percy children named Stewart (Jr.), Randolph, William, Cushman, and Bainbridge. The family habitually altered its members’ names with affectionate diminutive endings. Cushman became Cushie; Bainbridge, whose name resisted the pattern, was called Pooh. The playful nicknames sit alongside a family portrait that also looks forward to loss: the children are described through their later fates, with Cushie’s life ending in childbirth.

Her family setting is the grand Steering family house, where the Percy children gather in the country kitchen. In a remembered scene, Cushie asks her mother where people go after death. The question falls among a family whose future is already shadowed by deaths, illness, and other forms of misfortune. The narrative’s retrospective knowledge turns an ordinary domestic gathering into a scene marked by what will happen to its children, including Cushie.

Early Encounters with Garp

As a girl, Cushie appears in episodes that place her within the Percy family’s close-knit household and its encounters with Garp. When Bonkers bites someone, Cushie tells her mother, Midge Percy, and pulls her away from the phone. The incident gives her a small but concrete place in the household’s lively family routine, where even the dog’s name receives the family’s characteristic diminutive treatment.

Another early encounter comes when Cushie sees Garp bleeding on a remarkable heirloom rug belonging to the Steering family. She exclaims in disgust and runs out of the room. The moment is brief, but it fixes her as a young girl encountering Garp amid the accidents and commotion of his childhood. The narrator later says that Cushie and Garp were nearly the same age and that Garp would play a small part in her life.

Jenny Fields notices Cushie as a teenager and judges her as too saucy in speech and too casual about her appearance. Jenny is also struck by how physically developed Cushie seems for a fifteen-year-old, then reproaches herself for thinking in terms of breeding. The passage conveys Jenny’s watchful, sometimes judgmental view of young women, rather than establishing Cushie’s own ambitions or account of herself.

Relationship with Garp and Death

Cushie and Garp have a youthful romantic relationship. Later, Garp refers to his former passion for her, and he and Helen Holm sometimes joke about it. His recollections place Cushie among the women and experiences that return to his mind as he considers his attachments and conduct. The novel does not make their relationship a continuing adult partnership; instead, it survives in his memory and in the consequences associated with it.

Cushie dies while giving birth to what would have been her first child. The narrative presents this as the end of her young life, and later describes her as a victim of childbirth. It does not provide a fuller medical account. Her death is therefore both a defining fact about her fate and a loss Garp does not learn about at the time it occurs.

When Jenny eventually mentions the death during a visit, Garp is stunned. He had occasionally spoken jokingly with Helen about his old passion for Cushie, but the news that she was dead nearly cripples him. The contrast between their light teasing and the gravity of the revelation makes the delayed knowledge consequential: Garp had not understood that his former partner was gone, and he had no opportunity to respond when the death was recent.

Garp’s Belated Response

After hearing the news, Garp contacts the Percy family to offer condolences. He thinks he is responding to a fresh tragedy because Jenny has neglected to tell him that Cushie died months earlier. In speaking with Cushie’s father, he begins to express how fond he had been of her, but falters when the timing becomes clear. His attempt to acknowledge his affection thus arrives too late to serve as immediate comfort to the family.

That delay gives the loss a second consequence. Garp’s grief is not only for Cushie’s death but also for his own separation from the event: he had remained unaware while the family was living with it. His memory of her as an unusually lively young woman makes the news feel impossible to reconcile with the person he remembers. The episode also places her death beside other losses that Garp anticipates or fears, while keeping Cushie’s fate distinct from those of the people still around him.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

Cushie’s death becomes central to Bainbridge Percy’s later hostility toward Garp. When Bainbridge confronts him years afterward, she identifies herself as Cushie’s sister and accuses him of having been involved with Cushie before her death. Garp recognizes the youngest Percy child, whom he had once known by the family nickname Pooh. He understands that reconciliation is impossible: he had not attended Cushie’s wedding or funeral, and his earlier relationship with her is bound up in Bainbridge’s sense of what happened to her sister.

The later account of Bainbridge’s life makes that grievance explicit. Bainbridge comes to believe that Garp’s and Cushie’s relationship contributed to Cushie’s death. This is presented as Bainbridge’s belief, not as an established account of the medical cause. The distinction matters: Cushie’s death in childbirth is stated, while the meaning Bainbridge assigns to Garp’s past with her belongs to the younger sister’s long-held grievance.

Cushie also remains present in the novel through the contrast between the sisters’ fates. Bainbridge lives for many years, undergoes psychiatric treatment and institutional observation, and eventually becomes a mother herself after fearing she would die in childbirth. Her daughter reminds Garp of Cushie. Through this later echo, Cushie’s memory is carried forward not as a recovered life story but as a reference point in the lives of her sister, Garp, and the next generation. Her brief presence thus joins the novel’s family comedy and domestic scenes to its persistent account of grief, belated knowledge, and consequences that continue after a person’s death.