Stewart Percy

Stewart Percy is Midge Steering Percy’s husband, a former Navy officer, and the father of the Percy children. Known at Steering School as Paunch and Fat Stew, he is defined by the contrast between his prominent family position and the suspicion that he does little useful work. His marriage to the wealthy last member of the Steering family gives him security and influence, while his conflict with Jenny Fields makes him an enduring emblem of the class antagonism that shadows Garp’s childhood and family history.

Identity and Position at Steering School

Stewart holds the title of Secretary of Steering School, but his work is opaque: nobody sees him typing, and he has a secretary of his own whose duties are unclear. For a time he is associated with the Steering Alumni Association, whose wealthy graduates and nostalgia make it influential with the school’s administration. Yet the Director of Alumni Affairs considers him too unpopular with younger alumni to be useful. Students, who remember him from their own schooldays, likewise suspect that he does nothing. Jenny Fields shares that judgment, seeing the Percys as a family without a real occupation or practical contribution.

His appearance reinforces the comic disparity between status and substance. He is large and florid, with a chest that seems liable to collapse into his stomach and a tweed jacket bearing a regimental-striped tie in the school’s colors. Garp calls the colors “Blood and blue.” Stewart’s silver flat-top hair is said by students to resemble an aircraft carrier, a joke tied to his Navy service in World War II. Midge calls him Stewie; generations of boys call him Paunch, while the school dining hall’s weekly dishes give rise to Fat Stew. Jenny’s own comic description imagines him as made entirely of Distinguished Silver hair.

Stewart’s contribution to the curriculum is a course called “My Part of the Pacific,” which he teaches for fifteen years. It covers only the two naval battles in which he personally fought, with no texts beyond his lectures and a collection of blurred slides made from old black-and-white photographs. One sequence dwells on his shore leave in Hawaii, where he met and married Midge. He repeatedly clarifies to his students that Midge was visiting Hawaii, not native to it; the slides then linger over her gray-blond hair. Eventually, the History Department finds the nerve to bar him from teaching the course, which had become an embarrassment.

Marriage, Wealth, and Family

Stewart’s marriage to Midge is the basis of his secure position. Midge is the last Steering, a wealthy heiress whom the school community imagines as an unclaimed princess for whom no headmaster had appeared. By marrying her, Stewart enters a fortune large enough that, in the school’s jaundiced view, he need do nothing except remain married. Jenny’s father, a footwear magnate, is intimidated by Midge’s money. Jenny, by contrast, treats the match as evidence of the Percys’ uselessness: in her account, Midge fell in love with Stewart during a wartime vacation, began having his children before the war ended, and returned to Steering with her growing family to demand that the school give her husband a job.

The Percy children are blond like their mother and are imagined as destined to acquire their father’s silver hair. The family’s wealth and grand household do not translate into closeness or resilience. Much later, at Stewart’s funeral, Garp sees how few family members remain: one son has died of a strained heart, William was lost in war, Cushie is described as unable to reproduce, and Pooh is absent. Stewie Two, the surviving son present, has not seen Garp since Garp was five and does not seem to recognize him. Midge, by then elderly and confused, cannot recall Garp’s name. The funeral scene turns the family’s former abundance into a dwindling, disconnected remnant.

Conflict with Jenny Fields and Garp

The conflict between Stewart and Jenny becomes known as the “Percy War.” It begins after Bonkers attacks Garp. Jenny tells Midge that she means an injection to make the dog dead, rather than a veterinary treatment; Stewart responds with a formal memo protesting that she wants Bonkers put to sleep. Jenny answers him by phone, insisting that the dog be killed or at least tied up permanently. Garp later frames the quarrel as a class war from his mother’s perspective, while for himself it means watching out for Bonkers and the rest of the Percys. The dispute makes the family antagonism concrete: Jenny’s practical demand for safety collides with Stewart’s defense of his household and dog.

Stewart also participates in the community’s speculation about Garp’s unknown father. When he encounters the boy after the attack, he studies Garp’s eyes and concludes that they are Japanese. His judgment comes from his experience in the Pacific, where he believes he learned to recognize Japanese eyes; he tells Midge that Garp’s father must have been Japanese. Garp, still young and confused, misunderstands the word and thinks it refers to his injured ear. The episode joins the adults’ guessing game about Garp’s parentage to Stewart’s confidence in his own wartime authority, while showing how little the child understands of the speculation surrounding him.

Death, Funeral, and Legacy

Stewart dies after a long illness, identified by Dean Bodger as cancer. Bodger tells Garp that Stewart died the day before, after also remembering Jenny as a fighter and praising her in contrast to Stewart. The news places the deaths of Jenny, Ernie Holm, and Stewart close together in the family’s later history. Garp attends Stewart’s funeral, where he and Stewie Two are among the few available pallbearers. Looking at the closed gray casket, Garp thinks of how unloved Stewart seems to have been; the grandeur associated with the family has not secured a large or intimate final gathering.

The funeral also brings Garp back to an earlier conversation in the Percy family’s sumptuous country kitchen. Cushie had asked where people go after death, and Midge answered that they go to a big house, something like their own. In recollection, the children at the table already carry the fates that will scatter them: William faces the war, Dopey’s heart is failing, Cushie’s future is troubled, and the children’s later lives are unevenly known. The family’s comfortable house thus becomes a remembered image against the losses that follow. Stewart’s own funeral, with its closed casket and dwindling mourners, gives that old assurance an ironic afterlife.

Stewart’s death is later noted alongside Jenny’s murder and Ernie Holm’s funeral as the anniversary passes. The recollection matters less as a return to Stewart’s accomplishments than as part of the family’s accumulation of absences: Garp renews his creative energy, Helen returns to teaching, and the living resume their work amid the deaths. Stewart remains a comic and contentious presence in memory, but his legacy is also the material security and social standing inherited through Midge, the strained history with Jenny, and the family’s eventual dispersal. The silver-haired school official once surrounded by institutional prestige is finally remembered through a closed casket and a funeral that Garp doubts the family can adequately manage.