The World According to Garp

2. BLOOD AND BLUE

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.

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.

Nurse Creen also called Dr. Pell, because her mind, in a crisis, always ran to people who were supposed to take charge. She did not think of the fire department, a thought that was crossing Jenny's mind; but Jenny feared they would take too long and the gutter would collapse before they arrived; worse, she imagined, they would insist she let them handle everything and make her let go of Garp's leg.

Surprised, Jenny looked up at Garp's small, soggy sneaker, which now dangled in the sudden and ghastly glare of Dean Bodger's spotlight. The light was disturbing and confusing the pigeons, whose perception of dawn was probably not the best and who appeared almost ready to come to some decision in the rain gutter; their cooing and the scrabbling sounds of their claws grew more frantic.

Down on the lawn, running around Dean Bodger's car, the boys in their white hospital smocks appeared to have been bedlamized by the experience—or by Dean Bodger's sharp orders to run here or run there, fetch this or fetch that. Bodger called all the boys “men.” As in “Let's have a line of mattresses under the fire escape, men! Double-quick!” he barked. Bodger had taught German for twenty years at Steering before being appointed dean; his commands sounded like the rapid-fire conjugating of German verbs.

The “men” piled mattresses and oogled through the skeletal fire escape at Jenny's marvelous white uniform in the spotlight. One of the boys stood flush to the building, well under the fire escape, and his view up Jenny's skirt and her spotlit legs must have dazzled him because be appeared to forget the crisis and he just stood there. “Schwarz!” Dean Bodger yelled at him, but his name was Warner and he did not respond. Dean Bodger had to shove him to make him stop staring. “More mattresses, Schmidt!” Bodger told him.

A piece of the gutter, or a particle of leaf, stuck in Jenny's eye and she had to spread her legs wider apart, for balance. When the gutter gave way, the pigeon Garp had caught was launched out of the broken end of the trough and forced into brief and frenzied flight. Jenny gagged at her first thought: that the pigeon blurring past her vision was the falling body of her son; but she reassured herself with her grip on Garp's leg. She was first knocked into a deep squat, and then thrown to one hip on the fire-escape landing, by the weight of a substantial chunk of the rain gutter that still contained Garp. Only when she realized that they were both safe on the landing, and sitting down, did Jenny let go of Garp's leg. An elaborate bruise, in the near-perfect form of her fingerprints, would be on his calf for a week.

From the ground, the scene was confusing. Dean Bodger saw a sudden movement of bodies above him, he heard the sound of the rain gutter ripping, he saw Nurse Fields fall. He saw a three-foot hunk of the rain gutter drop into the darkness, but he never saw the child. He saw what looked like a pigeon dart into and through the beam of his spotlight, but he did not follow the flight of the bird—blinded by the light, then lost in the night. The pigeon struck the iron edge of the fire escape and broke its neck. The pigeon wrapped its wings around itself and spiraled straight down, like a slightly soft football falling well out of the line of mattresses Bodger had ordered for the ultimate emergency. Bodger saw the bird falling and mistook its small, fast-moving body for the child.

Dean Bodger was a basically brave and tenacious man, the father of four rigorously raised children. His devotion to campus police work was not so much motivated by his desire to prevent people from having fun as stemming from his conviction that almost every accident was unnecessary and could, with cunning and industry, be avoided. Thus Bodger believed he could catch the falling child, because in his ever-anxious heart he was prepared for just such a situation as plucking a plummeting body out of the dark sky. The dean was as short-haired and muscular and curiously proportioned as a pit bull, and shared with that breed of dog a similar smallness of the eyes, which were always inflamed, as red-lidded and squinty as a pig's. Like a pit bull, too, Bodger was good at digging in and lunging forward, which he now did, his fierce arms outstretched, his piggy eyes never leaving the descending pigeon. “I've got you, son!” Bodger cried, which terrified the boys in their hospital smocks. They were unprepared for anything like this.

Dean Bodger, on the run, dove for the bird, which struck his chest with an impact even Bodger was not wholly prepared for. The pigeon sent the dean reeling, rolled him over on his back, where he felt the wind socked out of him and he lay gasping. The battered bird was hugged in his arms; its beak poked Bodger's bristly chin. One of the frightened boys cranked the spotlight down from the fourth floor and shone the beam directly on the dean. When Bodger saw that he clutched a pigeon to his breast, he threw the dead bird over the heads of the gaping boys and into the parking lot.

There was much fussing in the admittance room of the infirmary. Dr. Pell had arrived and he treated little Garp's leg—it was a ragged but superficial wound that needed a lot of trimming and cleaning, but no stitches. Nurse Creen gave the boy a tetanus shot while Dr. Pell removed a small, rusty particle from Jenny's eye; Jenny had strained her back supporting the weight of Garp and the rain gutter, but was otherwise fine. The aura of the admittance room was hearty and jocular, except when Jenny was able to catch her son's eye; in public, Garp was a kind of heroic survivor, but he must have been anxious about how Jenny would deal with him back in their apartment.

Dean Bodger became one of the few people at the Steering School to endear himself to Jenny. He beckoned her aside and confided to her that, if she thought it useful, he would be glad to reprimand the boy—if Jenny thought that, coming from Bodger, it would make a more lasting impression than any reprimand she could deliver. Jenny was grateful for the offer, and she and Bodger agreed upon a threat that would impress the boy. Bodger then brushed the feathers off his chest and tucked in his shirt, which was escaping, like a cream filling, from under his tight vest. He announced rather suddenly to the chattering admittance room that he would appreciate a moment alone with young Garp. There was a hush. Garp tried to leave with Jenny, who said, “No. The dean would like to speak to you.” Then they were alone. Garp didn't know what a dean was.

“Your mother runs a tight ship over here, doesn't she, boy?” Bodger asked. Garp didn't understand, but he nodded. “She runs things very well, if you ask me,” Dean Bodger said. “She should have a son whom she can trust. Do you know what trust means, boy?”

“No,” Garp said.

“It means: Can she believe you'll be where you say you'll be? Can she believe you'll never do what you're not supposed to do? That's trust, boy,” Bodger said. “Do you believe your mother can trust you?”

“Yes,” Garp, said.

“Do you like living here?” Bodger asked him. He knew perfectly well that the boy loved it; Jenny had suggested that this be the point Bodger touch.

“Yes,” Garp said.

“What do you hear the boys call me?” the dean asked.

“Mad Dog"?” asked Garp. He had heard the boys in the infirmary call someone “Mad Dog,” and Dean Bodger looked like a mad dog to Garp. But the dean was surprised; he had many nicknames, but he had never heard that one.

“I meant that the boys call me sir,” Bodger said, and was grateful that Garp was a sensitive child—he caught the injured tone in the dean's voice.

“Yes, sir.” Garp said.

“And you do like living here?” the dean repeated.

“Yes, sir,” Garp said.

“Well, if you ever go out on that fire escape, or anywhere near that roof again,” Bodger said. “you won't be allowed to live here anymore. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Garp said.

“Then be a good boy for your mother,” Bodger told him, “or you'll have to move to some place strange and far away.”

Garp felt a darkness surround him, akin to the darkness and sense of being far away that he must have felt while lying in the rain gutter, four stories above where the world was safe. He started to cry, but Bodger took his chin between one stumpish, deanly thumb and forefinger; he waggled the boy's head. “Don't ever disappoint your mother, boy,” Bodger told him. “If you do, you'll feel as bad as this all your life.”

“Poor Bodger meant well,” Garp wrote. “I have felt bad most of my life, and I did disappoint my mother. But Bodger's sense of what really happens in the world is as suspect as anyone's sense of that.”

Garp was referring to the illusion poor Bodger embraced in his later life: that it had been little Garp he caught falling from the annex roof, and not a pigeon. No doubt, in his advancing years, the moment of catching the bird had meant as much to the good-hearted Bodger as if he had caught Garp.

Dean Bodger's grasp of reality was often warped. Upon leaving the infirmary, the dean discovered that someone had removed the spotlight from his car. He went raging through every patient's room—even the contagious cases. “That light will one day shine on him who took it!” Bodger claimed, but no one came forward. Jenny was sure it had been Meckler, but she couldn't prove it. Dean Bodger drove home without his light. Two days later he came down with someone's flu and was treated as an outpatient at the infirmary. Jenny was especially sympathetic.

It was another four days before Bodger had reason to look in his glove compartment. The sneezing dean was out cruising the night-time campus, with a new spotlight mounted on his car, when he was halted by a freshly recruited patrolman from campus security.

“For God's sake, I'm the dean,” Bodger told the trembling youth.

“I don't know that for sure, sir,” the patrolman said. “They told me not to let anyone drive on the footpaths.”

“They should have told you not to tangle with Dean Bodger!” Bodger said.

“They told me that, too, sir,” the patrolman said, “but I don't know that you're Dean Bodger.”

“Well,” said Bodger, who was secretly very pleased with the young patrolman's humorless devotion to his duty, “I can certainly prove who I am.” Dean Bodger then remembered that his driver's license had expired, and he decided to show the patrolman his automobile registration instead. When Bodger opened the glove compartment, there was the deceased pigeon.

Meckler had struck again; and, again, there was no proof. The pigeon was not excessively ripe, not writhing with maggots (yet), but Dean Bodger's glove compartment was infested with lice. The pigeon was so dead that the lice were looking for a new home. The dean found his automobile registration as quickly as possible, but the young patrolman could not take his eyes off the pigeon.

“They told me they were a real problem around here,” the patrolman said. “They told me how they got into everything.”

“The boys get into everything,” Bodger crooned. “The pigeons are relatively harmless, but the boys bear watching.”

For what seemed to Garp like a long and unfair time, Jenny kept a very close watch on him. She really had always watched him closely, but she had learned to trust him, too. Now she made Garp prove to her that he could be trusted again.

In a community as small as Steering, news spread more easily than ringworm. The story of how little Garp climbed to the roof of the infirmary annex, and how his mother didn't know he was there, cast suspicion on them both—on Garp as a child who could ill influence other children, on Jenny as a mother who did not look after her son. Of course, Garp sensed no discrimination for a while, but Jenny, who was quick to recognize discrimination (and quick to anticipate it, too), felt once again that people were making unfair assumptions. Her five-year-old had gotten loose on the roof; therefore, she never looked after him properly. And, therefore, he was clearly an odd child.

A boy without a father, some said, has dangerous mischief forever on his mind.

“It's odd,” Garp wrote, “that the family who would convince me of my own uniqueness was never close to my mother's heart. Mother was practical, she believed in evidence and in results. She believed in Bodger, for example, for what a dean did was at least clear. She believed in specific jobs: teachers of history, coaches of wrestling—nurses, of course. But the family who convinced me of my own uniqueness was never a family my mother respected. Mother believed that the Percy family did nothing.”

Jenny Fields was not entirely alone in her belief. Stewart Percy, although he did have a title, did not have a real job. He was called the Secretary of Steering School, but no one ever saw him typing. In fact, he had his own secretary, and no one was very sure what she could have to type. For a while Stewart Percy appeared to have some connection with the Steering Alumni Association, a body of Steering graduates so powerful with wealth and sentimental with nostalgia that they were highly esteemed by the administration of the school. But the Director of Alumni Affairs claimed that Stewart Percy was too unpopular with the young alumni to be of use. The young alumni remembered Percy from the days when they had been students.

Stewart Percy was not popular with students, who themselves suspected Percy of doing nothing.

He was a large, florid man with the kind of false barrel chest that at any moment can reveal itself to be merely a stomach—the kind of bravely upheld chest that can drop suddenly and forcefully burst open the tweed jacket containing it, lifting the regimental striped tie with the Steering School colors. “Blood and blue,” Garp always called them.

Stewart Percy, whom his wife called Stewie—although a generation of Steering schoolboys called him Paunch—had a flat-top head of hair the color of Distinguished Silver. The boys said that Stewart's flat-top was meant to resemble an aircraft carrier, because Stewart had been in the Navy in World War II. His contribution to the curriculum at Steering was a single course he taught for fifteen years—which was as long as it took the History Department to develop the nerve and necessary disrespect to forbid him to teach it. For fifteen years it was an embarrassment to them all. Only the most unsuspecting freshmen at Steering were ever suckered into taking it. The course was called “My Part of the Pacific,” and it concerned only those naval battles of World War II which Stewart Percy had personally fought in. There had been two. There were no texts for the course; there were only Stewart's lectures and Stewart's personal slide collection. The slides had been created from old black and white photographs—an interestingly blurred process. At least one memorable class week of slides concerned Stewart's shore leave in Hawaii, where he met and married his wife, Midge.

“Mind you, boys, she was not a native,” he would faithfully tell his class (although, in the gray slide, it was hard to tell what she was). “She was just visiting there, she didn't come from there,” Stewart would say. And there would follow an endless number of slides of Midge's gray-blond hair.

All the Percy children were blond, too, and one suspected they would one day become Distinguished Silver, like Stewie, whom the Steering students of Garp's day named after a dish served them in the school dining-halls at least once every week: Fat Stew. Fat Stew was made from another of the weekly Steering dining-hall dishes: Mystery Meat. But Jenny Fields used to say that Stewart Percy was made entirely of Distinguished Silver hair.

And whether they called him Paunch or Fat Stew, the boys who took Stewart Percy's “My Part of the Pacific” course were supposed to know already that Midge was not a Hawaiian native, though some of them really did have to be told. What the smarter boys knew, and what every member of the Steering community was nearly born knowing—and committed thereafter to silent scorn—was that Stewart Percy had married Midge Steering. She was the last Steering. The unclaimed princess of the Steering School—no headmaster had yet come her way. Stewart Percy married into so much money that he didn't have to be able to do anything, except stay married.

Jenny Fields' father, the footwear king, used to think of Midge Steering's money and shake in his shoes.

“Midge was such a dingbat,” Jenny Fields wrote in her autobiography, “that she went to Hawaii for a vacation during World War II. And she was such a total dingbat,” Jenny wrote, “that she actually fell in love with Stewart Percy, and she began to have his empty, Distinguished Silver children almost immediately—even before the war was over. And when the war was over, she brought him and her growing family back to the Steering School. And she told the school to give her Stewie a job.”

“When I was a boy,” Garp wrote, “there were already three or four little Percys, and more—seemingly always more—on the way.”

Of Midge Percy's many pregnancies, Jenny Fields made up a nasty rhyme.

What lies in Midge Percy's belly,

so round and exceedingly fair?

In fact, it is really nothing

but a ball of Distinguished Silver hair.

“My mother was a bad writer,” Garp wrote, referring to Jenny's autobiography. “But she was an even worse poet.” When Garp was five, however, he was too young to be told such poems. And what made Jenny Fields so unkind concerning Stewart and Midge?

Jenny knew that Fat Stew looked down on her. But Jenny said nothing, she was just wary of the situation. Garp was a playmate of the Percy children, who were not allowed to visit Garp in the infirmary annex. “Our house is really better for children,” Midge told Jenny once, on the phone. “I mean!"—she laughed—"I don't think there's anything they can catch.”

Except a little stupidity, Jenny thought, but all she said was, “I know who's contagious and who isn't. And nobody plays on the roof.”

To be fair: Jenny knew that the Percy house, which had been the Steering family house, was a comforting house to children. It was carpeted and spacious and full of generations of tasteful toys. It was rich. And because it was cared for by servants, it was also casual. Jenny resented the casualness that the Percy family could afford. Jenny thought that neither Midge nor Stewie had the brains to worry about their children as much as they should; they also had so many children. Maybe when you have a lot of children, Jenny pondered, you aren't so anxious about each of them?

Jenny was actually worried for her Garp when he was off playing with the Percy children. Jenny had grown up in an upper-class home, too, and she knew perfectly well that upper-class children were not magically protected from danger just because they were somehow born safer, with hardier metabolisms and charmed genes. Around the Steering School, however, there were many who seemed to believe this—because, superficially, it often looked true. There was something special about the aristocratic children of those families: their hair seemed to stay in place, their skin did not break out. Perhaps they did not appear to be under any stress because there was nothing they wanted, Jenny thought. But then she wondered how she'd escaped being like them.

Her concern 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 Newfoundland retriever, was dangerous. A Newfoundland is a breed of oily-coated dog resembling an all-black Saint Bernard with webbed feet; they are generally slothful and friendly. But on the Percys' lawn, Bonkers broke up a touch football game by hurling his one hundred and seventy pounds on five-year-old Garp's back and biting off the child's left earlobe—and part of the rest of Garp's ear, as well. Bonkers would probably have taken all the ear, but he was a dog notably lacking concentration. The other children fled in all directions.

“Bonkie bit someone,” said a younger Percy, pulling Midge away from the phone. It was a Percy family habit to put a -y or an -ie at the end of almost every family member's name. Thus the children—Stewart (jr.), Randolph, William, Cushman (a girl), and Bainbridge (another girl)—were called, within the family, Stewie Two, Dopey, Shrill Willy, Cushie, and Pooh. Poor Bainbridge, whose name did not convert easily to a -y or an -ie ending, was also the last in the family to be in diapers; thus, in a cute attempt to be both descriptive and literary, she was Pooh.

It was Cushie at Midge's arm, telling her mother that “Bonkie bit someone.”

“Who'd he get this time?” said Fat Stew; he seized a squash racket, as if he were going to take charge of the matter, but he was completely undressed; it was Midge who drew her dressing gown together and prepared to be the first grownup to run outside to inspect the damage.

Stewart Percy was frequently undressed at home. No one knows why. Perhaps it was to relieve himself of the strain of how very dressed he was when he strolled the Steering campus with nothing to do, Distinguished Silver on display, and perhaps it was out of necessity for all the procreation he was responsible for, he must have been frequently undressed at home.

“Bonkie bit Garp,” said little Cushie Percy. Neither Stewart nor Midge noticed that Garp was there, in the doorway, the whole side of his head bloody and chewed.

“Mrs. Percy?” Garp whispered, not loud enough to be heard.

“So it was Garp?” Fat Stew said. Bending to return the squash racket to the closet, he farted. Midge looked at him. “So Bonkie bit Garp,” Stewart mused. “Well, at least the dog's got good taste, doesn't he?”

“Oh, Stewie,” Midge said; a laughter light as spit escaped her. “Garp's still just a little boy.” And there he was, in fact, near-to-fainting and bleeding on the costly hall carpet, which actually spread, without a tuck or a ripple, through four of the monstrous first-floor rooms.

Cushie Percy, whose young life would terminate in childbirth while she tried to deliver what would have been only her first child, saw Garp bleeding on the Steering family heirloom: the remarkable rug. “Oh, gross!” she cried, running out the door.

“Oh, I'll have to call your mother,” Midge told Garp, who felt dizzy with the great dog's growl and slobber still singing in his partial ear.

For years Garp would mistakenly interpret Cushie Percy's outcry of “Oh, gross!” He thought she was not referring to his gnawed and messy ear but to her father's great gray nakedness, which filled the hall. That was what was gross to Garp: the silver, barrel-bellied navy man approaching him in the nude from the well of the Percys' towering spiral staircase.

Stewart Percy knelt down in front of Garp and peered curiously into the boy's bloody face; Fat Stew did not appear to be directing his attention to the mauled ear, and Garp wondered if he should advise the enormous, naked man concerning the whereabouts of his injury. But Stewart Percy was not looking for where Garp was hurt. He was looking at Garp's shining brown eyes, at their color and at their shape, and he seemed to convince himself of something, because he nodded austerely and said to his foolish blond Midge, “Jap.”

It would be years before Garp would fully comprehend this, too. But Stewie Percy said to Midge, “I spent enough time in the Pacific to recognize Jap eyes when I see them. I told you it was a Jap.” The it Stewart Percy referred to was whoever he had decided was Garp's father. That was a frequent, speculative game around the Steering community: guessing who Garp's father was. And Stewart Percy, from his experience in his part of the Pacific, had decided that Garp's father was Japanese.

“At that moment,” Garp wrote, “I thought “Jap” was a word that meant my ear was all gone.”

“No sense in calling his mother,” Stewie said to Midge. “Just take him over to the infirmary. She's a nurse, isn't she? She'll know what to do.”

Jenny knew, all right. “Why not bring the dog over here?” she asked Midge, while she gingerly washed around what was left of Garp's little ear.

“Bonkers?” Midge asked.

“Bring him here,” Jenny said, “and I'll give him a shot.”

“An injection?” Midge asked. She laughed. “Do you mean there's actually a shot to make him so he won't bite any more people?”

“No,” Jenny said. “I mean you could save your money—instead of taking him to a vet. I mean there's a shot to make him dead. That kind of an injection. Then he won't bite any more people.”

“Thus,” Garp wrote, “was the Percy War begun. For my mother, I think, it was a class war, which she later said all wars were. For me, I just knew to watch out for Bonkers. And for the rest of the Percys.”

Stewart Percy sent Jenny Fields a memo on the stationery of the Secretary of the Steering School: “I cannot believe you actually want us to have Bonkers put to sleep,” Stewart wrote.

“You bet your fat ass I do,” Jenny said to him, on the phone. “Or at least tie him up, forever.”

“There's no point in having a dog if the dog can't run free,” Stewart said.

“Then kill him,” Jenny said.

“Bonkers has had all his shots, thank you just the same,” Stewart said. “He's a gentle dog, really. Only if he's provoked.”

“Obviously,” Garp wrote, “Fat Stew felt that Bonkers had been provoked by my Japness.”

“What's “good taste” mean?” little Garp asked Jenny. At the infirmary, Dr. Pell sewed up his ear; Jenny reminded the doctor that Garp had recently had a tetanus shot.

“Good taste?” Jenny asked. The odd-looking amputation of the ear forced Garp always to wear his hair long, a style he often complained about.

“Fat Stew said that Bonkers has got “good taste,"” Garp said.

“To bite you?” Jenny asked.

“I guess so,” Garp said. “What's it mean?”

Jenny knew, all right. But she said, “It means that Bonkers must have known you were the best-tasting kid in the whole pile of kids.”

“Am I?” Garp, asked.

“Sure,” Jenny said.

“How did Bonkers know?” Garp asked.

“I don't know,” Jenny said.

“What's “Jap” mean?” Garp asked.

“Did Fat Stew say that to you?” Jenny asked him.

“No,” Garp said. “I think he said it about my ear.”

“Oh yes, your ear,” Jenny said. “It means you have special ears.” But she was wondering whether to tell him what she felt about the Percys, now, or whether he was enough like her to profit at some later, more important time from the experience of anger. Perhaps, she thought, I should save this morsel for him, for a time when he could use it. In her mind, Jenny Fields saw always more and larger battles ahead.

“My mother seemed to need an enemy,” Garp wrote. “Real or imagined, my mother's enemy helped her see the way she should behave, and how she should instruct me. She was no natural at motherhood; in fact, I think my mother doubted that anything happened naturally. She was self-conscious and deliberate to the end.”

It was the world according to Fat Stew that became Jenny's enemy in those early years for Garp. That phase might be called “Getting Garp Ready for Steering.”

She watched his hair grow and cover the missing parts of his ear. She was surprised at his handsomeness, because handsomeness had not been a factor in her relationship with Technical Sergeant Garp. If the sergeant had been handsome, Jenny Fields hadn't really noticed. But young Garp was handsome, she could see, though he remained small—as if he were born to fit in the ball turret installation.

The band of children (who coursed the Steering footpaths and grassy quadrangles and playing fields) grew more awkward and self-conscious as Jenny watched them grow. Clarence DuGard soon needed glasses, which he was always smashing; over the years Jenny would treat him many times for ear infections and once for a broken nose. Talbot Mayer-Jones developed a lisp; he had a bottle-shaped body, though a lovely disposition, and low-grade chronic sinusitis. Emily Hamilton grew so tall that her knees and elbows were forever raw and bleeding from all her stumbling falls, and the way her small breasts asserted themselves made Jenny wince—occasionally wishing she had a daughter. Ira and Buddy Grove, “from the town,” were thick in the ankles and wrists and necks, their fingers smudged and mashed from messing around in their father's maintenance department. And up grew the Percy children, blond and metallically clean, their eyes the color of the dull ice on the brackish Steering River that seeped through the salt marshes to the nearby sea.

Stewart, Jr., who was called Stewie Two, graduated from Steering before Garp was even of age to enter the school; Jenny treated Stewie Two twice for a sprained ankle and once for gonorrhea. He later went through Harvard Business School, a staph infection, and a divorce.

Randolph Percy was called Dopey until his dying day (of a heart attack, when he was only thirty-five; he was a procreator after his fat father's heart, himself the father of five). Dopey never managed to graduate from Steering, but successfully transferred to some other prep school and graduated after a while. Once Midge cried out in the Sunday dining room, “Our Dopey's dead!” His nickname sounded so awful in that context that the family, after his death, finally spoke of him as Randolph.

William Percy, Shrill Willy, was embarrassed by his stupid nickname, to his credit, and although he was three years older than Garp, he befriended Garp in a very decent fashion while he was an upperclassman at Steering and Garp was just starting out. Jenny always liked William, whom she called William. She treated him many times for bronchitis and was moved enough by the news of his death (in a war, immediately following his graduation from Yale) that she even wrote a long letter of commiseration to Midge and Fat Stew.

As for the Percy girls, Cushie would get hers (and Garp would even get to play a small part; they were near the same age). And poor Bainbridge, the youngest Percy, who was cursed to be called Pooh, would be spared her encounter with Garp until Garp was in his prime.

All these children, and her Garp, Jenny watched grow. While Jenny waited for Garp to get ready for Steering, the black beast Bonkers grew very old, and slower—but not toothless, Jenny noticed. And always Garp watched out for him, even after Bonkers stopped running with the crowd; when he lurked, hulking by the Percys' white front pillars—as matted and tangled and nasty as a thorn bush in the dark—Garp still kept his eye on him. An occasional younger child, or someone new in the neighborhood, would get too close and be chomped. Jenny kept track of the stitches and missing bits of flesh for which the great slathering dog was accountable, but Fat Stew endured all Jenny's criticisms and Bonkers lived.

“I believe my mother grew fond of that animal's presence, although she would never have admitted it,” Garp wrote. “Bonkers was the Percy Enemy come alive—made into muscle and fur and halitosis. It must have pleased my mother to watch the old dog slowing down while I was growing up.”

By the time Garp was ready for Steering, black Bonkers was fourteen years old. By the time Garp entered the Steering School, Jenny Fields had a few Distinguished Silver hairs of her own. By the time Garp started Steering, Jenny had taken all the courses that were worth taking and had listed them in order of universal value and entertainment. By the time Garp was a Steering student, Jenny Fields had been awarded the traditional gift for faculty and staff enduring fifteen years of service: the famous Steering dinner plates. The stern brick buildings of the school, including the infirmary annex, were baked into the big-eating surfaces of the plates, vividly rendered in the Steering School colors. Good old blood and blue.