Because, when Jenny Fields gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy, she had no name in mind. Jenny's mother asked her what she wanted to name him, but Jenny had just delivered and had just received her sedative; she was not cooperative.
“Garp,” she said.
Her father, the footwear king, thought she had burped, but her mother whispered to him, “The name is Garp.”
“Garp?” he said. They knew they might find out who this baby's father was, this way. Jenny, of course, had not admitted a thing.
“Find out if that's the son of a bitch's first name or last name,” Jenny's father whispered to Jenny's mother.
“Is that a first name or a last name, dear?” Jenny's mother asked her.
Jenny was very sleepy. “It's Garp,” she said. “Just Garp. That's the whole thing.”
“I think it's a last name,” Jenny's mother told Jenny's father.
“What's his first name?” Jenny's father asked crossly.
“I never knew,” Jenny mumbled. This is true; she never did.
“She never knew his first name!” her father roared.
“Please, dear,” her mother said. “He must have a first name.”
“Technical Sergeant Garp,” said Jenny Fields.
“A goddamn soldier, I knew it!” her father said.
“Technical Sergeant?” Jenny's mother asked her.
“T. S.,” Jenny Fields said. “T. S. Garp. That's my baby's name.” She fell asleep.
Her father was furious. “T. S. Garp!” he hollered. “What kind of a name for a baby is that?”
“All his own,” Jenny told him, later. “It's his own goddamn name, all his own.”
“It was great fun going to school with a name like that,” Garp has written. “The teachers would ask you what the initials stood for. First I used to say that they were just initials, but they never believed me. So I'd have to say, “Call my mom. She'll tell you.” And they would. And old Jenny would give them a piece of her mind.”
Thus was the world given T. S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner—his last shot.
2. BLOOD AND BLUE
T. S. GARP always suspected he would die young. “Like my father,” Garp wrote, “I believe I have a knack for brevity. I'm a one-shot man.”
Garp narrowly escaped growing up on the grounds of an all-girls' school, where his mother was offered the position of school nurse. But Jenny Fields saw the possibly harrowing future that would have been involved in this decision: her little Garp surrounded by women (Jenny and Garp were offered an apartment in one of the dorms). She imagined her son's first sexual experience: a fantasy inspired by the sight and feel of the all-girls' laundry room, where, as a game, the girls would bury the child in soft mountains of young women's underwear. Jenny would have liked the job, but it was for Garp's sake that she turned down the offer. She was hired instead by the vast and famous Steering School, where she would be simply one more school nurse among many, and where the apartment offered her and Garp was in the cold, prison-windowed wing of the school's infirmary annex.
“Never mind,” her father told her. He was irritated with her that she chose to work at all; there was money enough, and he'd have been happier if she'd gone into hiding at the family estate in Dog's Head Harbor until her bastard son had grown up and moved away. “If the child has any native intelligence,” Jenny's father told her, “he should eventually attend Steering, but in the meantime, I suppose, there's no better atmosphere for a boy to be raised in.”
“Native intelligence” was one of the ways her father had of referring to Garp's dubious genetic background. The Steering School, where Jenny's father and brothers had gone, was at that time an all-boys' school. Jenny believed that if she could endure her confinement there—through young Garp's prep school years—she would be doing her best for her son. “To make up for denying him a father,” as her father put it to her.
“It's odd,” Garp wrote, “that my mother, who perceived herself well enough to know that she wanted nothing to do with living with a man, ended up living with eight hundred boys.”
So young Garp grew up with his mother in the infirmary annex of the Steering School. He was not exactly treated as a “faculty brat"—the students' term for all the underage children of the faculty and staff. A school nurse was not considered in quite the same class or category as a faculty member. Moreover, Jenny made no attempt to invent a mythology for Garp's father—to make up a marriage story for herself, to legitimize her son. She was a Fields, she made a point of telling you her name. Her son was a Garp. She made a point of telling you his name. “It's his own name,” she said.
Everyone got the picture. Not only were certain kinds of arrogance tolerated by the society of the Steering School, certain kinds were encouraged; but acceptable arrogance was a matter of taste and style. What you were arrogant about had to appear worthy—of higher purpose—and the manner in which you were arrogant was supposed to be charming. Wit did not come naturally to Jenny Fields. Garp wrote that his mother “never chose to be arrogant but was only arrogant under duress.” Pride was well loved in the community of the Steering School, but Jenny Fields appeared to be proud of an illegitimate child. Nothing to hang her head about, perhaps; however, she might show a little humility.
But Jenny was not only proud of Garp, she was especially pleased with the manner in which she had gotten him. The world did not know that manner, yet; Jenny had not brought out her autobiography—she hadn't begun to write it, in fact. She was waiting for Garp to be old enough to appreciate the story.
The story Garp knew was all that Jenny would tell anyone who was bold enough to ask. Jenny's story was a sober three sentences long.
1. The father of Garp was a soldier.
2. The war killed him.
3. Who took the time for weddings when there was a war?
Both the precision and mystery of this story might have been interpreted romantically. After all, given the mere facts, the father might have been a war hero. A doomed love affair could be imagined. Nurse Fields might have been a field nurse. She might have fallen in love “at the front.” And the father of Garp might have felt he owed one last mission “to the men.” But Jenny Fields did not inspire the imagination of such a melodrama. For one thing, she seemed too pleased with her aloneness; she didn't appear in the least misty about the past. She was never distracted, she was simply all for little Garp—and for being a good nurse.
Of course, the Fields name was known at the Steering School. The famous footwear king of New England was a generous alumnus, and whether or not it was suspected at the time, he would even become a trustee. His was not the oldest but not the newest of New England money, and his wife, Jenny's mother—a former Boston Weeks—was perhaps still better known at Steering. Among the older faculty there were those who could remember years and years, without interruption, when there had always been a graduating Weeks. Yet, to the Steering School, Jenny Fields didn't seem to have inherited all the credentials. She was handsome, they would admit, but she was plain; she wore her nurse's uniform when she could have dressed in something smarter. In fact, this whole business of being a nurse—of which she also appeared too proud—was curious. Considering her family. Nursing was not enough of a profession for a Fields or a Weeks.