The World According To Garp (5 page)

“What’s his
first
name?” Jenny’s father asked crossly.

“I never knew,” Jenny mumbled. This is true; she never did.

“She never knew his first name!” her father roared.

“Please, dear,” her mother said. “He
must
have a first name.”

“Technical Sergeant Garp,” said Jenny Fields.

“A goddamn soldier, I knew it!” her father said.

“Technical Sergeant?” Jenny’s mother asked her.

“T. S.,” Jenny Fields said. “T. S. Garp. That’s my baby’s name.” She fell asleep.

Her father was furious. “T. S. Garp!” he hollered. “What kind of a name for a baby is
that
?”

“All his own,” Jenny told him, later. “It’s his
own
goddamn name, all his own.”

“It was great fun going to school with a name like that,” Garp has written. “The teachers would ask you what the initials stood for. First I used to say that they were
just
initials, but they never believed me. So I’d have to say, “Call my mom. She’ll tell you.” And they would. And old Jenny would give them a piece of her mind.”

Thus was the world given T. S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner—his last shot.

T.S.
GARP
always suspected he would die young. “Like my father,” Garp wrote, “I believe I have a knack for brevity. I’m a one-shot man.”

Garp narrowly escaped growing up on the grounds of an all-girls’ school, where his mother was offered the position of school nurse. But Jenny Fields saw the possibly harrowing future that would have been involved in this decision: her little Garp surrounded by women (Jenny and Garp were offered an apartment in one of the dorms). She imagined her son’s first sexual experience: a fantasy inspired by the sight and feel of the all-girls’ laundry room, where, as a game, the girls would bury the child in soft mountains of young women’s underwear. Jenny would have liked the job, but it was for Garp’s sake that she turned down the offer. She was hired instead by the vast and famous Steering School, where she would be simply one more school nurse among many, and where the apartment offered her and Garp was in the cold, prison-windowed wing of the school’s infirmary annex.

“Never mind,” her father told her. He was irritated with her that she chose to work at all; there was money enough, and he’d have been happier if she’d gone into hiding at the family estate in Dog’s Head Harbor until her bastard son had grown up and moved away. “If the child has any native intelligence,” Jenny’s father told her, “he should eventually
attend
Steering, but in the meantime, I suppose, there’s no better atmosphere for a boy to be raised in.”

“Native intelligence” was one of the ways her father had of referring to Garp’s dubious genetic background. The Steering School, where Jenny’s father and brothers had gone, was at that time an all-boys’ school. Jenny believed that if she could endure her confinement there—through young Garp’s prep school years—she would be doing her best for her son. “To make up for denying him a father,” as her father put it to her.

“It’s odd,” Garp wrote, “that my mother, who perceived herself well enough to know that she wanted nothing to do with living with a man, ended up living with eight hundred boys.”

So young Garp grew up with his mother in the infirmary annex of the Steering School. He was not exactly treated as a “faculty brat”—the students’ term for all the underage children of the faculty and staff. A school nurse was not considered in quite the same class or category as a faculty member. Moreover, Jenny made no attempt to invent a mythology for Garp’s father—to make up a marriage story for herself, to legitimize her son. She was a Fields, she made a point of telling you her name. Her son was a Garp. She made a point of telling you
his
name. “It’s his own name,” she said.

Everyone got the picture. Not only were certain kinds of arrogance tolerated by the society of the Steering School, certain kinds were encouraged; but acceptable arrogance was a matter of taste and style.
What
you were arrogant about had to appear worthy—of higher purpose—and the manner in which you were arrogant was supposed to be charming. Wit did not come naturally to Jenny Fields. Garp wrote that his mother “never chose to be arrogant but was only arrogant under duress.” Pride was well loved in the community of the Steering School, but Jenny Fields appeared to be proud of an illegitimate child. Nothing to hang her head about, perhaps; however, she might show a
little
humility.

But Jenny was not only proud of Garp, she was especially pleased with the manner in which she had gotten him. The world did not know that manner, yet; Jenny had not brought out her autobiography—she hadn’t begun to write it, in fact. She was waiting for Garp to be old enough to appreciate the story.

The story Garp knew was all that Jenny would tell anyone who was bold enough to ask. Jenny’s story was a sober three sentences long.

1. The father of Garp was a soldier.

2. The war killed him.

3. Who took the time for weddings when there was a war?

Both the precision and mystery of this story might have been interpreted romantically. After all, given the mere facts, the father might have been a war hero. A doomed love affair could be imagined. Nurse Fields might have been a field nurse. She might have fallen in love “at the front.” And the father of Garp might have felt he owed one last mission “to the men.” But Jenny Fields did not inspire the imagination of such a melodrama. For one thing, she seemed too pleased with her aloneness; she didn’t appear in the least misty about the past. She was never distracted, she was simply all for little Garp—and for being a good nurse.

Of course, the Fields name was known at the Steering School. The famous footwear king of New England was a generous alumnus, and whether or not it was suspected at the time, he would even become a trustee. His was not the oldest but not the newest of New England money, and his wife, Jenny’s mother—a former Boston Weeks—was perhaps still better known at Steering. Among the older faculty there were those who could remember years and years, without interruption, when there had always been a graduating Weeks. Yet, to the Steering School, Jenny Fields didn’t seem to have inherited all the credentials. She was handsome, they would admit, but she was plain; she wore her nurse’s uniform when she could have dressed in something smarter. In fact, this whole business of being a nurse—of which she also appeared too proud—was curious. Considering her family. Nursing was not enough of a profession for a Fields or a Weeks.

Socially, Jenny had that kind of graceless seriousness which makes more frivolous people uncomfortable. She read a lot and was a great ransacker of the Steering library; the book someone wanted was always discovered to be checked out to Nurse Fields. Phone calls were politely answered; Jenny frequently offered to deliver the book directly to the party who wanted it, as soon as she finished it. She finished such books promptly, but she had nothing to say about them. In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

That she attended classes in her off-duty hours was stranger still. It was written in the constitution of the Steering School that faculty and staff and/or their spouses could attend, free of charge, any course offered at Steering, simply by securing the permission of the instructor. Who would turn away a nurse?—from the Elizabethans, from the Victorian Novel, from the History of Russia until 1917, from an Introduction to Genetics, from Western Civilization I and II. Over the years Jenny Fields would march from Caesar to Eisenhower—past Luther and Lenin, Erasmus and mitosis, osmosis and Freud, Rembrandt and chromosomes and van Gogh—from the Styx to the names, from Homer to Virginia Woolf. From Athens to Auschwitz, she never said a word. She was the only woman in the classes. In her white uniform she listened so quietly that the boys and finally the teacher forgot her and relaxed: they went on with the learning process while she sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything—maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

Jenny Fields was getting the education she had waited for; now the time seemed ripe. But her motives were not wholly selfish; she was screening the Steering School for her son. When Garp was old enough to attend, she’d be able to give him lots of advice—she’d know the deadweights in every department, those courses that meandered and those that sang.

Her books spilled out of the tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex. She spent ten years at the Steering School before discovering that the bookstore offered a 10 percent discount to the faculty and staff (which the bookstore had never offered her). This made her angry. She was generous with her books, too—eventually shelving them in every room of the bleak infirmary annex. But they outgrew the shelf space and slid into the main infirmary, into the waiting room, and into X-ray, first covering and then replacing the newspapers and the magazines. Slowly, the sick of the Steering School learned what a serious place Steering was—not your ordinary hospital, crammed with light reading and the media trash. While you waited to see the doctor, you could browse through
The Waning of the Middle Ages
; waiting for your lab results, you could ask the nurse to bring you that invaluable genetics manual,
The Fruit Fly Handbook
. If you were seriously ill, or might be visiting the infirmary for a long time, there was sure to be a copy of
The Magic Mountain
. For the boy with the broken leg, and all the athletically wounded, there were the good heroes and their meaty adventures—there were Conrad and Melville instead of
Sports Illustrated
; instead of
Time
and
Newsweek
, there were Dickens and Hemingway and Twain. What a wet dream for the lovers of literature, to lie sick at Steering! At last, a hospital with something good to read.

When Jenny Fields had spent twelve years at Steering, it was a habit among the school librarians, upon recognizing that they didn’t have a book which someone sought, to say, “Perhaps the infirmary has it.”

And at the bookstore, when something was out of stock or out of print, they might recommend that you “find Nurse Fields over at the infirmary;
she
might have it.”

And Jenny would frown upon hearing the request, and say, “I believe that’s in twenty-six, at the annex, but McCarty is reading it. He has the flu. Perhaps when he’s through, he’ll be glad to let you have it.” Or she might respond, “I last saw that one down at the whirlpool bath. It might be a little wet, in the beginning.”

It is impossible to judge Jenny’s influence on the quality of education at Steering, but she never got over her anger at being cheated out of the 10 percent discount for ten years. “My mother supported that bookstore,” Garp wrote. “By comparison, nobody else at Steering ever read anything.”

When Garp was two, the Steering School offered Jenny a three-year contract; she was a good nurse, everyone agreed, and the slight distaste that everyone felt toward her had not increased in those first two years. The baby, after all, was like
any
baby; perhaps a little darker-skinned in summer than most, and a little sallow-skinned in winter—and a little fat. There was something rounded about him, like a bundled Eskimo, even when he wasn’t actually bundled. And those younger faculty who had just gotten over the last war remarked that the shape of the child was as blunt as a bomb. But illegitimate children are still children, after all. The irritation at Jenny’s oddness was acceptably mild.

She accepted the three-year contract. She was learning, improving herself but also preparing the way through Steering for her Garp. “A superior education” is what the Steering School could offer, her father had said. Jenny thought she’d better make sure.

When Garp was five, Jenny Fields was made head nurse. It was hard to find young, active nurses who could tolerate the freshness and wild behavior of the boys; it was hard to find anyone willing to live in, and Jenny seemed quite content to stay in her wing of the infirmary annex. In this sense she became a mother to many: up in the night when one of the boys threw up, or buzzed her, or smashed his water glass. Or when the occasionally bad boys fooled around in the dark aisles, raced their hospital beds, engaged in gladiatorial combat in wheelchairs, stole conversations with girls from the town through the iron-grate windows, attempted to climb down, or up, the thick rungs of ivy that laced the old brick buildings of the infirmary and its annex.

The infirmary was connected to the annex by an underground tunnel, wide enough for a bed-on-wheels with a slim nurse on either side of it. The bad boys occasionally
bowled
in the tunnel, the sound reaching Jenny and Garp in their faraway wing—as if the test rats and rabbits in the basement laboratory had overnight grown terribly large and were rolling the rubbish barrels deeper underground with their powerful snouts.

But when Garp was five—when his mother was made head nurse—the Steering School community noticed something strange about him. What could be exactly different about a five-year-old boy is not clear, but there was a certain sleek, dark, wet look to his head (like the head of a seal), and the exaggerated compactness of his body brought back the old speculations about his genes. Temperamentally, the child appeared to resemble his mother: determined, possibly dull, aloof but eternally watchful. Although he was small for his age, he seemed unnaturally mature in other ways; he had a discomforting calmness. Close to the ground, like a well-balanced animal, he seemed unusually well coordinated. Other mothers noted, with occasional alarm, that the child could
climb
anything. Look at jungle gyms, swing sets, high slides, bleacher seats, the most dangerous trees: Garp would be at the top of them.

One night after supper, Jenny could not find him. Garp was free to wander through the infirmary and the annex, talking to the boys, and Jenny normally paged him on the intercom when she wanted him back in the apartment. “
GARP
HOME
,” she’d say. He had his instructions: which rooms he was not to visit, the contagious cases, the boys who felt really rotten and would prefer to be left alone. Garp liked the athletic injuries best; he liked looking at casts and slings and big bandages, and he liked listening to the cause of the injury, over and over again. Like his mother, perhaps a nurse at heart, he was happy to run errands for the patients, deliver messages, sneak food. But one night, when he was five, Garp did not respond to the
GARP
HOME
call. The intercom was broadcast through every room of the infirmary and the annex, even those rooms Garp was under strict orders not to be in—the lab, surgery, and X-ray. If Garp couldn’t hear the
GARP
HOME
message, Jenny knew that he was either in trouble or not in the buildings. She quickly organized a search party among the healthier and more mobile patients.