The World According to Garp

Someone was a nurse, and she went to lend what assistance she could. When the soldier saw her, he fainted; it was not really from loss of blood. Jenny knew how facial wounds bled; they were deceptive. The deeper gash on his arm was of course in need of immediate attention, but the soldier was not bleeding to death. No one but Jenny seemed to know that--there was so much blood, and so much of it was on her white nurse's uniform. They quickly realized she had done it. The theater lackeys would not let her touch the fainted soldier, and someone took her purse from her. The mad nurse! The crazed slasher! Jenny Fields was calm. She thought it was only a matter of waiting for the true authorities to comprehend the situation. But the police were not very nice to her, either.

"You been dating this guy long?" the first one asked her, en route to the precinct station.

And another one asked her, later, "But how did you know he was going to attack you? He says he was just trying to introduce himself."

"That's a real mean little weapon, honey," a third told her. "You shouldn't carry something like that around with you. That's asking for trouble."

So Jenny waited for her brothers to clear things up. They were law-school men from Cambridge, across the river. One was a law student, the other one taught in the law school.

"Both," Garp wrote, "were of the opinion that the practice of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime."

They were not so comforting when they came.

"Break your mother's heart," said one.

"If you'd only stayed at Wellesley," said the other.

"A girl alone has to protect herself," Jenny said. "What could be more proper?"

But one of her brothers asked her if she could prove that she had not had previous relations with the man.

"Confidentially," whispered the other one, "have you been dating this guy long?"

Finally, things were cleared up when the police discovered that the soldier was from New York, where he had a wife and child. He had taken a leave in Boston and, more than anything else, he feared the story would get back to his wife. Everyone seemed to agree that would be awful--for everyone--so Jenny was released without charges. When she made a fuss that the police had not given her back her scalpel, one of her brothers said, "For God's sake, Jennifer, you can steal another one, can't you?"

"I didn't steal it," Jenny said.

"You should have some friends," a brother told her.

"At Wellesley," they repeated.

"Thank you for coming when I called you," Jenny said.

"What's a family for?" one said.

"Blood runs thick," said the other. Then he paled, embarrassed at the association--her uniform was so besmirched.

"I'm a good girl," Jenny told them.

"Jennifer," said the older one, and her life's earliest model--for wisdom, for all that was right. He was rather solemn. He said, "It's best not to get involved with married men."

"We won't tell Mother," the other one said.

"And certainly not Father!" said the first. In an awkward attempt at some natural warmth, he winked at her--a gesture that contorted his face and for a moment convinced Jenny that her life's earliest model had developed a facial tic.

Beside the brothers was a mailbox with a poster of Uncle Sam. A tiny soldier, all in brown, was climbing down from Uncle Sam's big hands. The soldier was going to land on a map of Europe. The words under the poster said: SUPPORT OUR BOYS! Jenny's oldest brother looked at Jenny looking at the poster.

"And don't get involved with soldiers," he added, though in a very few months he would be a soldier himself. He would be one of the soldiers who wouldn't come home from the war. He would break his mother's heart, an act he once spoke of with distaste.

Jenny's only other brother would be killed in a sailboat accident long after the war was over. He would be drowned several miles offshore from the Fields' family estate at Dog's Head Harbor. Of his grieving wife, Jenny's mother would say, "She's still young and attractive, and the children aren't obnoxious. At least not yet. After a decent time, I'm sure she'll be able to find someone else." It was to Jenny that her brother's widow eventually spoke, almost a year after the drowning. She asked Jenny if she thought a "decent time" had passed and she could begin whatever had to be begun "to find someone else." She was anxious about offending Jenny's mother. She wondered if Jenny thought it would be all right to emerge from mourning.

"If you don't feel like mourning, what are you mourning for?" Jenny asked her. In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: "That poor woman needed to be told what to feel."

"That was the stupidest woman my mother said she ever met," Garp wrote. "And she had gone to Wellesley."

But Jenny Fields, when she said good-night to her brothers at her small rooming house near Boston Mercy, was too confused to be properly outraged. She was also sore--her ear, where the soldier had cuffed her, hurt her; and there was a deep muscle cramp between her shoulder blades, which made it hard for her to sleep. She thought she must have wrenched something in there when the theater lackeys had grabbed her in the lobby and pulled her arms behind her back. She remembered that hot-water bottles were supposed to be good for sore muscles and she got out of bed and went to her closet and opened one of her mother's gift packages.

It was not a hot-water bottle. That had been her mother's euphemism for something her mother couldn't bring herself to discuss. In the package was a douche bag. Jenny's mother knew what they were for, and so did Jenny. She had helped many patients at the hospital use them, though at the hospital they were not much used to prevent pregnancies after love-making; they were used for general feminine hygiene, and in venereal cases. To Jenny Fields a douche bag was a gentler, more commodious version of the Valentine irrigator.