The World According to Garp
by John Irving
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 437
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345418018
Publisher: Ballantine
Boston Mercy
Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.
This was shortly after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and people
were being tolerant of soldiers, because suddenly everyone was a soldier,
but Jenny Fields was quite firm in her intolerance of the behavior of
men in general and soldiers in particular. In the movie theater she had
to move three times, but each time the soldier moved closer to her until
she was sitting against the musty wall, her view of the newsreel almost
blocked by some silly colonnade, and she resolved she would not get up
and move again. The soldier moved once more and sat beside her.
Jenny was twenty-two. She had dropped out of college almost as soon as she'd begun, but she
had finished her nursing-school program at the head of her class and se
enjoyed being a nurse. She was an athletic-looking young woman who always
had high color in her cheeks; she had dark, glossy hair and what her mother
called a mannish way of walking (she swung her arms), and her rump and
hips were so slender and hard that, from behind, she resembled a young
boy. In Jenny's opinion, her breasts were too large; she thought the ostentation
of her bust made her look "cheap and easy."
She was nothing of the kind. In fact, she had dropped out of college when she suspected that
the chief purpose of her parents' sending her to Wellesley had been to
have her dated by and eventually mated to some well-bred man. The recommendation
of Wellesley had come from her older brothers, who had assured her parents
that Wellesley women were not thought of loosely and were considered high
in marriage potential. Jenny felt that her education was merely a polite
was to bide time, as if she were really a cow, being prepared only for
the insertion of the device for artificial insemination.
Her declared major had been English literature, but when it seemed to her that her classmates
were chiefly concerned with acquiring the sophistication and poise to
deal with men, she had no trouble leaving literature for nursing. She
saw nursing as something that could be put into immediate practice, and
its study had no ulterior motive that Jenny could see (later she wrote,
in her famous autobiography, that too many nurses put themselves on display
for too many doctors; but then her nursing days were over).
She liked the simple, no-nonsense uniform; the blouse of the dress made less of her breasts;
the shoes were comfortable, and suited to her fast pace of walking. When
she was at the night desk, she could still read. She did not miss the
young college men, who were sulky and disappointed if you wouldn't compromise
yourself, and superior and aloof it you would. At the hospital she saw
more soldiers and working boys than college men, and they were franker
and less pretentious in their expectations; if you compromised yourself
a little, they seemed at least grateful to see you again. Then, suddenly,
everyone was a soldier--and full of the self-importance of college boys--and
Jenny Fields stopped having anything to do with men.
"My mother," Garp wrote, "was a lone wolf."
...There was a popular joke among the nurses in Boston at that time, but it was not funny to
Jenny Fields. The joke involved the other hospitals in Boston. The hospital
Jenny worked in was Boston Mercy Hospital, which was called Boston Mercy;
there was also Massachusetts General Hospital, which was called Mass General.
And another hospital was the Peter Bent Brigham, which was called the
Peter Bent.
One day, the joke goes, a Boston cab driver had his taxi hailed by a man who staggered off
the curb toward him, almost dropping to his knees in the street. The man
was purple in the face with pain; he was either strangling or holding
his breath, so that talking was difficult for him, and the cabby opened
the door and helped him inside, where the man lay face down on the floor
alongside the back seat, tucking his knees up to his chest.
"Hospital! Hospital!" he cried.
"The Peter Bent?" the cabby asked. That was the closest hospital.
"It's worse than bent," the man moaned. "I think Molly bit it off!"
Few jokes were funny to Jenny Fields, and certainly not this one; no peter jokes for Jenny,
who was staying clear of the issue. She had seen the trouble peters could
get into; babies were not the worst of it. Of course she saw people who
didn't want to have babies, and they were sad that they were pregnant;
they shouldn't have to have babies, Jenny thought--though she mainly felt
sorry for the babies who were born. She saw people who wanted to have
babies, too, and they made her want to have one. One day, Jenny Fields
though, she would like to have a baby--just one. But the trouble was that
she wanted as little to do with a peter as possible, and nothing whatsoever
to do with a man.
Most peter treatment Jenny saw was done to soldiers. The U.S. Army would not begin to benefit
from the discovery of penicillin until 1943, and there were many soldiers
who didn't get penicillin until 1945. At Boston Mercy, in the early days
of 1942, peters were usually treated with sulfa and arsenic. Sulfathiazole
was for the clap--with lots of water recommended. For syphilis, in the
days before penicillin, they used neoarsphenamine; Jenny Fields thought
that this was the epitome of all that sex could lead to--to introduce
arsenic into the human chemistry, to try to clean the chemistry up.
The other peter treatment was local and also required a lot of fluid. Jenny frequently assisted
with this method of disinfecting, because the patient required lots of
attention at the time; sometimes, in fact, he needed to be held. It was
a simple procedure that could force as much as one hundred cc's of fluid
up the penis and through the surprised urethra before it all came back,
but the procedure left everyone feeling a bit raw. The man who invented
a device for this method of treatment was named Valentine, and his device
was called the Valentine irrigator. Long after Dr. Valentine's irrigator
was improved, or replaced with another irrigation device, the nurses at
Boston Mercy still referred to the procedure as the Valentine treatment--an
appropriate punishment for a lover, thought Jenny Fields.
"My mother," Garp wrote, "was not romantically inclined."
When the soldier in the movie theater first started changing seats--when he made his first
move on her-Jenny Fields felt that the Valentine treatment would be just
the thing for him. But she didn't have an irrigator with her; it was much
too large for her purse. It also required the considerable cooperation
of the patient. What she did have with her was a scalpel; she carried
it with her all the time. She had not stolen it from surgery, either;
it was a castaway scalpel with a deep nick taken out of the point (it
had probably been dropped on the floor, or in a sink)--it was no good
for fine work, but it was not for fine work that Jenny wanted it.
At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old
thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping
it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved
into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they
were (absurdly) meant to share. His long hand dangled off the end of the
armrest; it twitched like the flank of a horse shuddering flies away.
Jenny kept her hand on the scalpel inside her purse; with her other hand,
she held the purse tightly in her white lap. She was imagining that her
nurse's uniform shone like a holy shield, and for some perverse reason
this vermin beside her had been attracted by her light.
"My mother," Garp wrote, "went through her life on the lookout for purse-snatchers and snatch-snatchers."
In the theater, it was not her purse that the soldier wanted. He touched her knee. Jenny
spoke up fairly clearly. "Get your stinking hand off me," she said. Several
people turned around.
"Oh, come on," the soldier moaned, and his hand shot quickly under her uniform; he found
her thighs locked tightly together--he found his whole arm, from his shoulder
to his wrist, suddenly sliced open like a soft melon. Jenny had cut cleanly
through his insignia and his shirt, cleanly through his skin and muscles,
baring his bones at the joint of his elbow. ("If I'd wanted to kill him,"
she told the police, later, "I'd have slit his wrist. I'm a nurse. I know
how people bleed.")
The soldier screamed. On his feet and falling back, he swiped at Jenny's head with his uncut
arm, boxing her ear so sharply that her head sang. She pawed at him with
the scalpel, removing a piece of his upper lip the approximate shape and
thinness of a thumbnail. (I was not trying to slash his throat," she told
the police, later. "I was trying to cut his nose off but I missed.")
Crying, on all fours, the soldier groped his way to the theater aisle and headed toward the
safety of the light in the lobby. Someone else in the theater was whimpering,
in fright.
Jenny wiped her scalpel on the movie seat, returned it to her purse, and covered the blade with
the thermometer cap. Then she went to the lobby, where keen wailings could
be heard and the manager was calling through the lobby doors over the
dark audience, "Is there a doctor here? Please! Is someone a doctor?"
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.
Excerpted from The World According to Garp © Copyright 2009 by John Irving. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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