The World According To Garp (24 page)

The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.

“There’s a nurse to see you,” his secretary said, rolling her eyes—as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny’s suitcase so heavy.

“It’s about me,” she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. “When can you read it?” It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office
while
he read it. He glanced at the first sentence (“In this dirty-minded world…”), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of
this
one?

Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!—they would certainly publish
this!
—he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).

“Where can they go every night?” Jenny asked. “They don’t come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don’t even have a car.”

They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.

“They say they want children,” Ernie complained. “Helen should finish her education.”

“Garp will never finish a book, with children,” Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she’d had to wait eighteen years to
begin
her book.

“They’re both hard workers,” Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.

“They’ll
have
to be,” Jenny said.

“I don’t know why they can’t just
live
together,” Ernie said. “And if it works out,
then
let them get married—then let them have a baby.”

“I don’t know why
anyone
wants to live with anyone else,” said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.

“Well, you like Garp living with you,” he reminded her, “and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she’s away at school.”

“It’s
lust
,” Jenny said, ominously. “The world is sick with lust.”

Ernie felt worried about her; he didn’t know she was about to become rich and famous forever. “Do you want a beer?” he asked Jenny.

“No, thank you,” Jenny said.

“They’re good kids,” Ernie reminded her.

“But lust gets them all, in the end,” said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.

It was the “lust” chapter of
A Sexual Suspect
that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need—his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.

“Lust makes the best men behave out of character,” wrote Jenny Fields—a line that particularly infuriated Garp.

“What the hell does
she
know about it?” he screamed. “She never felt it, not once. Some authority
she
is! It’s like listening to a plant describe the motives of a mammal!”

But other reviewers were kinder to Jenny; though the more serious journals occasionally chided her for her actual writing, the media, in general, felt warmly toward the book. “The first truly feminist autobiography that is as full of celebrating one kind of life as it is full of putting down another,” somebody wrote. “This brave book makes the important assertion that a woman can have a whole life without a sexual attachment of
any
kind,” wrote somebody else.

“These days,” John Wolf had forewarned Jenny, “you’re either going to be taken as the right voice at the right time, or you’re going to be put down as all wrong.” She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse’s uniform—in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers—felt discomfort at the word
feminism
. She was not sure what it meant, but the
word
reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment. After all, her formal training had been nursing. She said shyly that she’d only thought she made the right choice about how to live her life, and since it had not been a popular choice, she’d felt goaded into saying something to defend it. Ironically, a rash of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee found Jenny’s choice
very
popular; they generated a small controversy by plotting their own pregnancies. For a while, in New York, this syndrome among singular-minded women was called “doing a Jenny Fields.” But Garp always called it “doing a Grillparzer.” As for Jenny, she felt only that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she
was
one.

John Wolf liked Jenny Fields very much, and he did what he could to warn her that she might not understand either the attacks or the praise her book would receive. But Jenny never wholly understood how “political” a book it was—or how it would be used as such a book.

“I was trained to be a nurse,” she said later, in one of her disarming interviews. “Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy—and I have always been bealthy—to help people who weren’t healthy or who couldn’t help themselves. I think it was simply in that spirit that I wanted to write a book, too.”

In Garp’s opinion, his mother never stopped being a nurse. She had nursed him through the Steering School; she had been a plodding midwife to her own strange life story; finally, she became a kind of nurse to women with problems. She became a figure of famous strength; women sought her advice. With the sudden success of
A Sexual Suspect
, Jenny Fields uncovered a nation of women who faced making choices about how to live; these women felt encouraged by Jenny’s own example of making unpopular decisions.

She could have started an advice column for any newspaper, but Jenny Fields felt through with writing, now—just as she’d decided, once before, that she was through with education; just as she’d decided she was through with Europe. In a way, she was
never
through with nursing. Her father, the shocked shoe king, died of a heart attack shortly after the publication of
A Sexual Suspect
; although Jenny’s mother never blamed Jenny’s book for the tragedy—and Jenny never blamed herself—Jenny knew that her mother could not live alone. Unlike Jenny Fields, Jenny’s mother had developed a habit of living with someone else; she was old now, and Jenny thought of her as rattling about in the great rooms at Dog’s Head Harbor, purposeless and wholly without her few remaining wits in the absence of her mate.

Jenny went to care for her, and it was at the Dog’s Head Harbor Mansion that Jenny first began her role as counselor to the women who sought some comfort from her no-nonsense ability to make decisions.

“Even
weird
decisions!” Garp wailed, but he was happy, and taken care of. He and Helen had their first child, almost immediately. It was a boy named Duncan. Garp often joked that the reason his first novel was written with so many short chapters was because of Duncan. Garp wrote between feedings and naps and changes of diapers. “It was a novel of short takes,” he claimed, later, “and the credit is wholly Duncan’s.” Helen was at school every day; she had agreed to have a child only if Garp would agree to take care of it. Garp loved the idea of never having to go out. He wrote and took care of Duncan; he cooked and wrote and took care of Duncan some more. When Helen came home, she came home to a reasonably happy homemaker; as long as Garp’s novel progressed, no routine, however mindless, could upset him. In fact, the more mindless, the better. He left Duncan for two hours every day with the woman in the downstairs apartment; he went to the gym. He later became an oddity at the women’s college where Helen taught—running endless laps around the field hockey field, or jumping rope for half an hour in a corner of the gymnasium reserved for gymnastics. He missed wrestling and complained to Helen that she should have gotten a job somewhere where there was a wrestling team; Helen complained that the English Department was too small, and she disliked having no male students in her classes, but it was a good job and she would keep it until something better came along.

Everything in New England is at least near everything else. They got to visit Jenny at the shore and Ernie at Steering. Garp would take Duncan to the Steering wrestling room and roll him around like a ball. “This is where your daddy wrestled,” he told him.

“It’s where your daddy did
everything
,” Helen told Duncan, referring—of course—to Duncan’s own conception, and to her first rainy night with Garp in the locked and empty Seabrook Gymnasium, on the warm crimson mats stretching wall to wall.

“Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten
whom
.

When Jenny’s mother died, Jenny visited Helen and Garp more frequently, though Garp objected to what he called his mother’s “entourage.” Jenny Fields traveled with a small core of adorers, or with occasional other figures who felt they were part of what would be called the women’s movement; they often wanted Jenny’s support or her endorsement. There was often a case or a cause that needed Jenny’s pure white uniform on the speaker’s platform, although Jenny rarely spoke very much or for very long.

After the other speeches, they would introduce the author of
A Sexual Suspect
. In her nurse’s uniform, she was instantly recognizable. Into her fifties, Jenny Fields would remain an athletically attractive woman, crisp and plain. She would rise and say, “This is right.” Or, sometimes, “This is wrong”—depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who’d made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman’s problem.

The logic behind all this made Garp fume and stew for days, and once an interviewer from a women’s magazine asked if she could come interview him about what it was like to be the son of a famous feminist. When the interviewer discovered Garp’s chosen life, his “housewife’s role,” as she gleefully called it, Garp blew up at her.

“I’m doing what I want to do,” he said. “Don’t call it by any other name. I’m just doing what I want to do—and that’s all my mother ever did, too. Just what
she
wanted to do.”

The interviewer pressed him; she said he sounded bitter. Of course, it must be hard, she suggested, being an unknown writer with a mother whose book was known around the world. Garp said it was mainly painful to be misunderstood, and that he did not resent his mother’s success; he only occasionally disliked her new associates. “Those stooges who are living off her,” he said.

The article in the women’s magazine pointed out that
Garp
was also “living off” his mother, very comfortably, and that he had no right to be hostile toward the women’s movement. That was the first time Garp heard of it: “the women’s movement.”

It was not many days after this that Jenny came to visit him. One of her goons, as Garp called them, was with her: a large, silent, sullen woman who lurked in the doorway of Garp’s apartment and declined to take her coat off. She looked warily at little Duncan, as if she awaited, with extreme displeasure, the moment when the child might touch her.

“Helen’s at the library,” Garp told Jenny. “I was going to take Duncan for a walk. You want to come?” Jenny looked questioningly at the big woman with her; the woman shrugged. Garp thought that mother’s greatest weakness, since her success, was to be, in his words, “used by all the crippled and infirm women who wished they’d written
A Sexual Suspect
, or something equally successful.”

Garp resented standing cowed in his own apartment by his mother’s speechless companion, a woman large enough to be his mother’s bodyguard. Perhaps that’s what she is, he thought. And an unpleasant image of his mother with a tough dyke escort crossed his mind—a vicious killer who would keep the men’s hands off Jenny’s white uniform.

“Is there something the matter with that woman’s
tongue
, Mom?” Garp whispered to Jenny. The superiority of the big woman’s silence outraged him; Duncan was trying to talk with her, but the woman merely fixed the child with a quieting eye. Jenny quietly informed Garp that the woman wasn’t talking because the woman was without a tongue. Literally.

“It was cut off,” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Garp whispered. “How’d it happen?”

Jenny rolled her eyes; it was a habit she’d picked up from her son. “You really read nothing, don’t you?” Jenny asked him. “You just never have bothered to keep up with what’s going on.” What was “going on,” in Garp’s opinion, was never as important as what he was making up—what he was working on. One of the things that upset him about his mother (since she’d been adopted by women’s politics) was that she was always discussing the
news
.

“This is
news
, you mean?” Garp said. “It’s such a famous tongue accident that I should have heard about it?”

“Oh, God,” Jenny said wearily. “Not a famous accident. Very deliberate.”

“Mother, did someone cut her tongue off?”

“Precisely.” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Garp said.

“You haven’t heard of Ellen James?” Jenny asked.

“No.” Garp admitted.

“Well, there’s a whole
society
of women now,” Jenny informed him, “because of what happened to Ellen James.”

“What happened to her?” Garp asked.

“Two men raped her when she was eleven years old,” Jenny said. “Then they cut her tongue off so she couldn’t tell anyone who they were or what they looked like. They were so stupid that they didn’t know an eleven-year-old could
write
. Ellen James wrote a very careful description of the men, and they were caught, and they were tried and convicted. In jail, someone murdered them.”