The World According To Garp (7 page)

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.