The World According To Garp (6 page)

It was a foggy night in the early spring; some boys went outside and called through the damp forsythia and the parking lot. Others poked through the dark, empty nooks and the forbidden equipment rooms. Jenny indulged her first fears first. She checked the laundry chute, a slick cylinder that for four floors dropped straight down to the basement (Garp was not allowed even to put laundry down the chute). But beneath where the chute shot through the ceiling, and spewed its contents on the basement floor, there was only laundry on the cold cement. She checked the boiler room and the scalding, huge, hot-water furnace, but Garp had not been cooked there. She checked the stairwells, but Garp was instructed not to play on the stairs and he wasn’t lying broken at the bottom of any of the four story wells. Then she started in on her unexpressed fears that little Garp would fall victim to a secret sex violator among the Steering School boys. But in the early spring there were too many boys in the infirmary for Jenny to keep track of them all—much less know them well enough to suspect their sexual tastes. There were the fools who went swimming on that first sunny day, even before the snow was off the ground. There were the last victims of drag-on winter colds, their various resistances worn down. There were the culminating winter-sports injuries and the first to be injured in spring-sports practice.

One such person was Hathaway, who, Jenny heard, was buzzing her now from his room on the fourth floor of the annex. Hathaway was a lacrosse player who had done ligament damage to his knee; two days after they put him in a cast and turned him loose on crutches, Hathaway had gone out in the rain and his crutch tips had slipped at the top of the long marble stairs of Hyle Hall. In the fall, he had broken his other leg. Now Hathaway, with both his long legs in casts, sprawled in his bed on the fourth floor of the infirmary annex, a lacrosse stick held fondly in his large-knuckled hands. He had been put out of the way, almost all by himself on the fourth floor of the annex, because of his irritating habit of flinging a lacrosse ball across his room and letting it carom off the wall. Then he snared the hard, bouncy ball in the looping basket on the end of his lacrosse stick and flicked it back against the wall. Jenny could have put a stop to this, but she had a son of her own, after all, and she recognized the need in boys to devote themselves, mindlessly, to a repetitious physical act. It seemed to relax them, Jenny had noticed—whether they were five, like Garp, or seventeen, like Hathaway.

But it made her furious that Hathaway was so clumsy with his lacrosse stick that he was always losing his ball! She had gone out of her way to put him where other patients would not complain about the thumping, but whenever Hathaway lost his ball, he buzzed for someone to fetch it for him; although there was an elevator, the fourth floor of the annex was out of everyone’s way. When Jenny saw the elevator was in use, she went up the four flights of stairs too quickly, and was out of breath, as well as angry, when she got to Hathaway’s room.

“I
know
how much your game means to you, Hathaway,” Jenny said, “but right now Garp is lost and I don’t really have time to retrieve your ball.”

Hathaway was an ever-pleasant, slow-thinking boy with a slack, hairless face and a forward-falling flop of reddish-blond hair, which partially hid one of his pale eyes. He had a habit of tipping his head back, perhaps so that he could see out from under his hair, and for this reason, and the fact that he was tall, everyone who looked at Hathaway looked up his wide nostrils.

“Miss Fields?” he said. Jenny noticed he was not holding his lacrosse stick.

“What
is
it, Hathaway?” Jenny asked. “I’m sorry I’m in a rush, but Garp is lost. I’m looking for
Garp
.”

“Oh,” Hathaway said. He looked around his room perhaps for Garp—as if someone had just asked him for an ashtray. “I’m sorry,” Hathaway said. “I wish I could help you look for him.” He stared helplessly at both his casts.

Jenny rapped lightly on one of his plastered knees, as if she were knocking on a door behind which someone might be asleep, “Don’t worry, please,” she said; she waited for him to tell her what he wanted, but Hathaway seemed to have forgotten that he’d buzzed her. “Hathaway?” she asked, again knocking on his leg to see if anyone was home. “What did you
want
? Did you lose your ball?”

“No,” Hathaway said. “I’ve lost my
stick
.” Mechanically, they both took a moment to look around Hathaway’s room for the missing lacrosse stick. “I was asleep,” he explained, “and when I woke up, it was gone.”

Jenny first thought of Meckler, the menace of the second-floor annex. Meckler was a sarcastically brilliant boy who was in the infirmary at least four days out of every month. He was a chain smoker at sixteen, he edited most of the school’s student publications, and he had twice won the annual Classics Cup. Meckler scorned dining-hall food and lived on coffee and fried-egg sandwiches from Buster’s Snack and Grill, where he actually wrote most of his long and long-overdue, but brilliant, term papers. Collapsing in the infirmary each month to recover from his physical self-abuse, and his brilliance, Meckler’s mind turned to hideous pranks that Jenny could never quite prove him guilty of. Once there were boiled polliwogs in the teapot sent down to the lab technicians, who complained of the fishiness of the tea; once, Jenny was sure, Meckler had filled a prophylactic with egg whites and slipped its snug neck over the doorknob to her apartment. She knew the filling had been egg whites only because she later found the shells in her purse. And it had been Meckler, Jenny was sure, who had organized the third floor of the infirmary during the chicken pox epidemic of a few years ago: the boys were beating off, in turn, and rushing with their hot spunk in their hands to the microscopes in the infirmary lab—to see if they were sterile.

But Meckler’s style, Jenny thought, would have been to cut a hole in the netting of the lacrosse stick—and to have left the useless stick in the sleeping Hathaway’s hands.

“I’ll bet Garp has it,” Jenny told Hathaway. “When we find Garp, we’ll find your stick.” She resisted, for the hundredth time, the impulse to take her hand and brush back the flop of hair that nearly hid one of Hathaway’s eyes; instead, she gently squeezed Hathaway’s big toes where they thrust out of his casts.

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it’s dark; he’d lose the ball. And the only place he might not have heard the intercom was in the underground tunnel between the annex and the infirmary—a perfect place for flinging that ball, Jenny knew. It had been done before; once Jenny had broken up an after-midnight scrimmage. She took the elevator directly to the basement. Hathaway is a sweet boy, she was thinking; Garp could do worse than grow up to be like that. But he could do better, too.

However slowly, Hathaway was thinking. He hoped little Garp was all right; he sincerely wished he could get up to help find the child. Garp was a frequent visitor to Hathaway’s room. A crippled athlete with two casts was better than average. Hathaway had allowed Garp to draw all over his plastered legs; over and through the signatures of friends were the looping, crayoned faces and monsters of Garp’s imagination. Hathaway now looked at the child’s drawings on his casts and worried about Garp. That was why he saw the lacrosse ball, between his thighs; he had not felt it, through the plaster. It lay there as if it were Hathaway’s own egg, keeping warm. How could Garp play lacrosse without a ball?

When he heard the pigeons, Hathaway knew Garp wasn’t playing lacrosse. The pigeons! he remembered. He had complained about them to the boy. The pigeons kept Hathaway awake at night with their damn cooing, their cluckish fussing under the eaves and in the rain gutter beneath the steep slate roof. That was a problem with the sleeping conditions on the fourth and topmost floor; that was a problem for every top-floor sleeper at the Steering School—
pigeons
seemed to rule the campus. The maintenance men had caged off most of the eaves and perches with chicken wire, but the pigeons roosted in the rain gutters, in dry weather, and found niches under the roofs, and perches on the old gnarled ivy. There was no way to keep them off the buildings. And how they could coo! Hathaway hated them. He’d told Garp that if he had even
one
good leg, he would get them.

“How?” Garp asked.

“They don’t like to fly at night,” Hathaway told the boy. It was in Bio. II that Hathaway had learned about the habits of pigeons; Jenny Fields had taken the same course. “I could get up on the roof,” Hathaway told Garp, “at night—when it wasn’t raining—and trap them in the rain gutter. That’s all they do, just sit in the rain gutter and coo and crap all night.”

“But
how
would you trap them?” Garp asked.

And Hathaway twirled his lacrosse stick, cradling the ball. He rolled the ball between his legs, he dropped the net of the stick gently over Garp’s little head. “Like that,” he said. “With this, I’d get them easy—with my lacrosse stick. One by one, until I got them all.”

Hathaway remembered how Garp had smiled at him—this big friendly boy with his two heroic casts. Hathaway looked out the window, saw that it was indeed dark and not raining. Hathaway rang his buzzer. “Garp!” he cried out. “Oh, God.” He held his thumb on the buzzer button and did not let up.

When Jenny Fields saw it was the fourth-floor light that was flashing, she could only think that Garp had brought Hathaway’s lacrosse equipment back to him. What a good boy, she thought, and rode the elevator, up again, to the fourth floor. She ran squeakily on her good nurse’s shoes to Hathaway’s room. She saw the lacrosse ball in Hathaway’s hand. His one eye, which was clearly in view, looked frightened.

“He’s on the roof,” Hathaway told her.

“On the roof!” Jenny said.

“He’s trying to capture pigeons with my lacrosse stick,” Hathaway said.

A full-grown man, if he stood on the fourth-floor fire escape landing, could reach over the rim of the rain gutter with his hands. When the Steering School cleaned its rain gutters, only after all the leaves were fallen and before the heavy spring rains, only
tall
men were sent to do the job because the shorter men complained of reaching into the rain gutters and touching things they couldn’t see—dead pigeons and well-rotted squirrels and unidentifiable glop. Only the tall men could stand on the fire-escape landings and peek into the rain gutters before they reached. The gutters were as wide and nearly as deep as pig troughs, but they were not as strong and they were old. In those days,
everything
at the Steering School was old.

When Jenny Fields went out the fourth-floor fire door and stood on the fire escape, she could barely reach the rain gutter with her fingertips; she could not see over the rain gutter to the steep slate roof—and in the darkness and fog, she could not even see the underside of the rain gutter as far down as either corner of the building. She could not see Garp at all.

“Garp?” she whispered. Four stories below, among the shrubbery and the occasional glint from the hood or roof of a parked car, she could hear some of the boys calling him, too. “Garp?” she whispered, a little louder.

“Mom?” he asked, startling her—although his whisper was softer than hers. His voice came from somewhere close, almost within her reach, she thought, but she couldn’t see him. Then she saw the netted basket end of the lacrosse stick silhouetted against the foggy moon like the strange, webbed paw of some unknown, nocturnal animal; it jutted out from the rain gutter, almost directly above her. Now, when she reached up, she was frightened to feel Garp’s leg, broken through the corroded gutter, which had torn his pants and cut him, wedging him there, one leg through the gutter up to his hip, the other leg sprawled out in the gutter behind him, along the edge of the steep slate roof. Garp lay on his belly in the creaky rain gutter.

When he had broken through the gutter, he’d been too scared to cry out; he could feel that the whole flimsy trough was rotted through and ready to tear apart. His
voice
, he thought, could make the roof fall down. He lay with his cheek in the gutter, and through a tiny rusted hole be watched the boys in the parking lot and bushes, four stories below him, looking for him. The lacrosse stick, which had indeed held a surprised pigeon, had swung out over the edge of the gutter, releasing the bird.

The pigeon, despite being captured and freed, had not moved. It squatted in the gutter, making its small, stupid sounds. Jenny realized that Garp could never have reached the rain gutter from the fire escape, and she shuddered to think of him climbing up the ivy to the roof with the lacrosse stick in one hand. She held his leg very tightly; his bare, warm calf was slightly sticky with blood, but he had not cut himself badly on the rusty gutter. A tetanus shot, she was thinking; the blood was almost dry and Jenny did not think he would need stitches—though, in the darkness, she could not clearly make out the wound. She was trying to think how she could get him down. Below her, the forsythia bushes winked in the light from the downstairs windows; from so far away, the yellow flowers looked (to her) like the tips of small gas flames.

“Mom?” Garp asked.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’ve got you.”

“Don’t let go,” he said.

“Okay,” she told him. As if triggered by her voice, a little more of the gutter gave way.

“Mom!” Garp said.

“It’s okay,” Jenny said. She wondered if the best way would be to yank him down, hard, and hope that she could pull him right through the rotten gutter. But then the whole gutter could possibly rip free of the roof—and
then
what? she thought. She saw them both swept off the fire escape and falling. But she knew no one could actually go up
on
the rain gutter and pull the child out of the hole, and then lower him to her over the edge. The gutter could barely support a five-year-old; it certainly couldn’t support a grownup. And Jenny knew that she would not let go of Garp’s leg long enough to let someone try.

It was the new nurse, Miss Creen, who saw them from the ground and ran inside to call Dean Bodger. Nurse Creen was thinking of Dean Bodger’s spotlight, fastened to the dean’s dark car (which cruised the campus each night in search of boys out after curfew). Despite the complaints of the grounds’ crew, Bodger drove down the footpaths and over the soft lawns, flashing his spotlight into the deep shrubs alongside the buildings, making the campus an unsafe place for lurkers—or for lovers, with no indoor place to go.