The World According To Garp (3 page)

And that was what made her vulgar, too. (And that was where she got her famous title:
A Sexual Suspect
, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.)

Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy. Jenny
told
the other nurses that she would one day find a man to make her pregnant—just that, and nothing more. She did not entertain the possibility that the man would need to try more than once, she told them. They, of course, couldn’t wait to tell everyone they knew. It was not long before Jenny had several proposals. She had to make a sudden decision: she could retreat, ashamed that her secret was out; or she could be brazen.

A young medical student told her he would volunteer on the condition that he could have at least six chances over a three-day weekend. Jenny told him that he obviously lacked confidence; she wanted a child who would be more secure than that.

An anesthesiologist told her he would even pay for the baby’s education—through college—but Jenny told him that his eyes were too close together and his teeth were poorly formed; she would not saddle her would-be child with such handicaps.

One of the other nurses’ boyfriends treated her most cruelly; he frightened her in the hospital cafeteria by handing her a milk glass nearly full of a cloudy, viscous substance.

“Sperm,” he said, nodding at the glass. “All that’s
one
shot—I don’t mess around. If one chance is all anyone gets, I’m your man.” Jenny held up the horrid glass and inspected it coolly. God knows what was actually in the glass. The nurse’s boyfriend said, “That’s just an indication of what kind of stuff I’ve got. Lots of seeds,” he added, grinning. Jenny dumped the contents of the glass into a potted plant.

“I want a baby,” she said. “I don’t want to start a sperm farm.”

Jenny knew this was going to be hard. She learned to take a ribbing, and she learned to respond in kind.

So they decided Jenny Fields was crude, that she was going too far. A joke was a joke, but Jenny seemed too determined about it. Either she was sticking to her guns, just to be stubborn—or worse, she really meant it. Her hospital colleagues couldn’t make her laugh, and they couldn’t get her to bed. As Garp wrote of his mother’s dilemma: “Her colleagues detected that she felt herself to be superior to them. Nobody’s colleagues appreciate this.”

So they initiated a get-tough policy with Jenny Fields. It was a staff decision—”for her own good,” of course. They decided to get Jenny away from the babies and the mothers. She’s got babies on her brain, they said. No more obstetrics for Jenny Fields. Keep her away from the incubators—she’s got too soft a heart, or a head.

Thus they separated Jenny Fields from the mothers and their babies. She’s a good nurse, they all said; let her try some intensive care. It was their experience that a nurse in Boston Mercy’s intensive care quickly lost interest in her own problems. Of course Jenny knew why they had sent her away from the babies; she only resented that they thought so little of her self-control. Because what she wanted was strange to them, they assumed that she also had slim restraint. There is no logic to people, Jenny thought. There was lots of time to get pregnant, she knew. She was in no hurry. It was just part of an eventual plan.

Now there was a war. In intensive care, she saw a little more of it. The service hospitals sent them their special patients, and there were always the terminal cases. There were the usual elderly patients, hanging by the usual threads; there were the usual industrial accidents, and automobile accidents, and the terrible accidents to children. But mainly there were soldiers. What happened to them was no accident.

Jenny made her own divisions among the non-accidents that happened to the soldiers; she came up with her own categories for them.

1. There were the men who’d been burned; for the most part, they’d been burned on board ship (the most complicated cases came from Chelsea Naval Hospital), but they’d also been burned in airplanes and on the ground. Jenny called them the Externals.

2. There were the men who’d been shot or damaged in bad places; internally, they were in trouble, and Jenny called them the Vital Organs.

3. There were the men whose injuries seemed almost mystical, to Jenny; they were men who weren’t “there” anymore, whose heads or spines had been tampered with. Sometimes they were paralyzed, sometimes they were merely vague. Jenny called them the Absentees. Occasionally, one of the Absentees had External or Vital Organ damage as well; all the hospital had a name for them.

4. They were Goners.

“My father,” Garp, wrote, “was a Goner. From my mother’s point of view, that must have made him very attractive. No strings attached.”

Garp’s father was a ball turret gunner who had a non-accident in the air over France.

“The ball turret gunner,” Garp wrote, “was a member of the bomber’s crew who was among the most vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire from the ground. That was called flak; flak often looked to the gunner like fast-moving ink flung upward and spread on the sky as if the sky were a blotter. The little man (for in order to fit in the ball turret, a man was better off if he was small) crouched with his machine guns in his cramped nest—a cocoon in which he resembled one of those insects trapped in glass. This ball turret was a metal sphere with a glass porthole; it was set into the fuselage of a B-17 like a distended navel—like a nipple on the bomber’s belly. In this tiny dome were two fifty-caliber machine guns and a short, small man whose chore was to track in his gunsights a fighter plane attacking his bomber. When the turret moved, the gunner revolved with it. There were wooden handles with buttons on the tops to fire the guns; gripping these trigger sticks, the ball turret gunner looked like some dangerous fetus suspended in the bomber’s absurdly exposed amniotic sac, intent on protecting his mother. These handles also steered the turret to a cut-off point, so that the ball turret gunner would not shoot off the props forward.

“With the sky
under
him, the gunner must have felt especially cold, appended to the plane like an after-thought. Upon landing, the ball turret was retracted usually. Upon landing, an
unretracted
ball turret would send up sparks—as long and violent as automobiles off the old tarmac.”

Technical Sergeant Garp, the late gunner whose familiarity with violent death cannot be exaggerated, served with the Eighth Air Force—the air force that bombed the Continent from England. Sergeant Garp had experience as a nose gunner in the B-17C and a waist gunner in the B-17E before they made him a ball turret gunner.

Garp did not like the waist gun arrangements on the B-17E. There were two waist gunners tucked into the rib cage of the plane, their gunports opposite each other, and Garp was always getting clouted in the ears when his mate swiveled his gun at the same time Garp was moving with his. In later models, precisely because of this interference between the waist gunners, the gunports would be staggered. But this innovation would happen too late for Sergeant Garp.

His first combat mission was a daylight sortie by B-17Es against Rouen, France, on August 17, 1942, which was accomplished without losses. Technical Sergeant Garp, at his waist gun position, was clouted once on the left ear by his gunner mate and twice on the right. A part of the problem was that the other gunner, compared to Garp, was so large; the man’s elbows were level with Garp’s ears.

In the ball turret the first day over Rouen was a man named Fowler who was even smaller than Garp. Fowler had been a jockey before the war. He was a better shot than Garp, but the ball turret was where Garp wished he could be. He was an orphan but he must have liked being alone, and he sought some escape from the crowding and elbowing of his fellow waist gunner. Of course, like a great many gunners, Garp dreamed of his fiftieth mission or so, whereat he hoped to be transferred to the Second Air Force—the bomber training command—where he could retire safely as a gunnery instructor. But until Fowler was killed, Garp envied Fowler his private place, his jockey’s sense of isolation.

“It’s a foul spot to be in if you fart a lot,” Fowler maintained. He was a cynical man with a dry, irritating tickle of a cough and a vile reputation among the nurses at the field hospital.

Fowler was killed during a crash landing on an unpaved road. The landing struts were shorn off in a pothole and the whole landing gear collapsed, dropping the bomber into a hard belly slide that burst the ball turret with all the disproportionate force of a falling tree hitting a grape. Fowler, who’d always said he had more faith in machines than he had in horses or in human beings, was crouched in the unretracted ball turret when the plane landed on him. The waist gunners, including Sergeant Garp, saw the debris skid away from under the belly of the bomber. The squadron adjutant, who was the closest ground observer of the landing, threw up in a Jeep. The squadron commander did not have to wait for Fowler’s death to become official in order to replace him with the squadron’s next-smallest gunner. Tiny Technical Sergeant Garp had always wanted to be a ball turret gunner. In September of 1942, he became one.

“My mother was a stickler for detail,” Garp wrote. When they would bring in a new casualty, Jenny Fields was the first to ask the doctor how it happened. And Jenny classified them, silently: the Externals, the Vital Organs, the Absentees, and the Goners. And she found little gimmicks to help her remember their names and their disasters. Thus: Private Jones fell off his bones, Ensign Potter stopped a whopper, Corporal Estes lost his testes, Captain Flynn has no skin, Major Longfellow is short on answers.

Sergeant Garp was a mystery. On his thirty-fifth flight over France, the little ball turret gunner stopped shooting. The pilot noticed the absence of machine-gun fire from the ball turret and thought that Garp had taken a hit. If Garp had, the pilot had not felt it in the belly of his plane. He hoped Garp hadn’t felt it much, either. After the plane landed, the pilot hurried to have Garp transferred to the sidecar of a medic’s motorcycle; all the ambulances were in use. Once seated in the sidecar, the tiny technical sergeant began to play with himself. There was a canvas canopy that covered the sidecar in foul weather; the pilot snapped this coveting in place. The canopy had a porthole, through which the medic, the pilot, and the gathering men could observe Sergeant Garp. For such a small man, he seemed to have an especially large erection, but he fumbled with it only a little more expertly than a child—not nearly so expertly as a monkey in the zoo. Like the monkey, however, Garp looked out of his cage and stared frankly into the faces of the human beings who were watching him.

“Garp?” the pilot said. Garp’s forehead was freckled with blood, which was mostly dry, but his flight hat was plastered to the top of his head and dripping; there didn’t seem to be a mark on him. “Garp!” the pilot shouted at him. There had been a gash in the metal sphere where the fifty-caliber machine gun had been; it appeared that some flak had hit the barrels of the guns, cracking the gun housing and even loosening the trigger handles, though there was nothing wrong with Garp’s hands—they just seemed to be clumsy at masturbation.

“Garp!” cried the pilot.

“Garp?” said Garp. He was mimicking the pilot, like a smart parrot or a crow. “Garp,” said Garp, as if he had just learned the word. The pilot nodded to Garp, encouraging him to remember his name. Garp smiled. “Garp,” he said. He seemed to think this was how people greeted each other. Not hello, hello!—but Garp, Garp!

“Jesus, Garp,” the pilot said. Some holes and glass cracks had been visible in the porthole of the ball turret. The medic now unzipped the porthole of the side car’s canopy and peered into Garp’s eyes. Something was wrong with Garp’s eyes, because they rolled around independently of each other; the medic thought that the world, for Garp, was probably looming up, then going by, then looming up again—if Garp could see at all. What the pilot and the medic couldn’t know, at the time, was that some sharp and slender shards from the flak blast had damaged one of the oculomotor nerves in Garp’s brain—and other parts of his brain as well. The oculomotor nerve consists chiefly of motor fibers that innervate most of the muscles of the eyeball. As for the rest of Garp’s brain, he had received some cuts and slashes a lot like a prefrontal lobotomy—though it was rather careless surgery.

The medic had a great fear of
how
carelessly a lobotomy had been performed on Sergeant Garp, and for that reason he thought against taking off the blood sodden flight hat which was stuck to Garp and yanked down to where it touched a taut, shiny knob that appeared, now, to be growing on his forehead. Everyone looked around for the medic’s motorcyclist, but he was off vomiting somewhere and the medic supposed he would have to find someone to sit in the sidecar with Garp while he drove the motorcycle himself.

“Garp?” Garp said to the medic, trying his new word.

“Garp,” the medic confirmed. Garp seemed pleased. He had both his small hands on his impressive erection when he successfully masturbated.

“Garp!” he barked. There was joy in his voice, but also surprise. He rolled his eyes at his audience, begging the world to loom up and hold still. He was unsure of what he’d done. “Garp?” he asked, doubtfully.

The pilot patted his arm and nodded to the others of the flight and landing crew, as if to say: Let’s give a bit of support to the sergeant, men. Please, let’s make him feel at home. And the men, respectfully dumbstruck by Garp’s ejaculation, all said, “Garp! Garp! Garp!” to him—a reassuring, seal-like chorus intent on putting Garp at ease.

Garp nodded his head, happily, but the medic held his arm and whispered anxiously to him, “No! Don’t move your head, okay? Garp? Please don’t move your head.” Garp’s eyes roamed past the pilot and the medic, who waited for them to come around again. “Easy does it, Garp,” the pilot whispered. “Just sit tight, okay?”

Garp’s face radiated pure peace. With both hands holding his dying erection, the little sergeant looked as if he had done just the thing that the situation called for.