Socially, Jenny had that kind of graceless seriousness which makes more frivolous people uncomfortable. She read a lot and was a great ransacker of the Steering library; the book someone wanted was always discovered to be checked out to Nurse Fields. Phone calls were politely answered; Jenny frequently offered to deliver the book directly to the party who wanted it, as soon as she finished it. She finished such books promptly, but she had nothing to say about them. In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
That she attended classes in her off-duty hours was stranger still. It was written in the constitution of the Steering School that faculty and staff and/or their spouses could attend, free of charge, any course offered at Steering, simply by securing the permission of the instructor. Who would turn away a nurse?—from the Elizabethans, from the Victorian Novel, from the History of Russia until 1917, from an Introduction to Genetics, from Western Civilization I and II. Over the years Jenny Fields would march from Caesar to Eisenhower—past Luther and Lenin, Erasmus and mitosis, osmosis and Freud, Rembrandt and chromosomes and van Gogh—from the Styx to the names, from Homer to Virginia Woolf. From Athens to Auschwitz, she never said a word. She was the only woman in the classes. In her white uniform she listened so quietly that the boys and finally the teacher forgot her and relaxed: they went on with the learning process while she sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything—maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
Jenny Fields was getting the education she had waited for; now the time seemed ripe. But her motives were not wholly selfish; she was screening the Steering School for her son. When Garp was old enough to attend, she'd be able to give him lots of advice—she'd know the deadweights in every department, those courses that meandered and those that sang.
Her books spilled out of the tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex. She spent ten years at the Steering School before discovering that the bookstore offered a 10 percent discount to the faculty and staff (which the bookstore had never offered her). This made her angry. She was generous with her books, too—eventually shelving them in every room of the bleak infirmary annex. But they outgrew the shelf space and slid into the main infirmary, into the waiting room, and into X-ray, first covering and then replacing the newspapers and the magazines. Slowly, the sick of the Steering School learned what a serious place Steering was—not your ordinary hospital, crammed with light reading and the media trash. While you waited to see the doctor, you could browse through The Waning of the Middle Ages; waiting for your lab results, you could ask the nurse to bring you that invaluable genetics manual, The Fruit Fly Handbook. If you were seriously ill, or might be visiting the infirmary for a long time, there was sure to be a copy of The Magic Mountain. For the boy with the broken leg, and all the athletically wounded, there were the good heroes and their meaty adventures—there were Conrad and Melville instead of Sports Illustrated; instead of Time and Newsweek, there were Dickens and Hemingway and Twain. What a wet dream for the lovers of literature, to lie sick at Steering! At last, a hospital with something good to read.
When Jenny Fields had spent twelve years at Steering, it was a habit among the school librarians, upon recognizing that they didn't have a book which someone sought, to say, “Perhaps the infirmary has it.”
And at the bookstore, when something was out of stock or out of print, they might recommend that you “find Nurse Fields over at the infirmary; she might have it.”
And Jenny would frown upon hearing the request, and say, “I believe that's in twenty-six, at the annex, but McCarty is reading it. He has the flu. Perhaps when he's through, he'll be glad to let you have it.” Or she might respond, “I last saw that one down at the whirlpool bath. It might be a little wet, in the beginning.”
It is impossible to judge Jenny's influence on the quality of education at Steering, but she never got over her anger at being cheated out of the 10 percent discount for ten years. “My mother supported that bookstore,” Garp wrote. “By comparison, nobody else at Steering ever read anything.”
When Garp was two, the Steering School offered Jenny a three-year contract; she was a good nurse, everyone agreed, and the slight distaste that everyone felt toward her had not increased in those first two years. The baby, after all, was like any baby; perhaps a little darker-skinned in summer than most, and a little sallow-skinned in winter—and a little fat. There was something rounded about him, like a bundled Eskimo, even when he wasn't actually bundled. And those younger faculty who had just gotten over the last war remarked that the shape of the child was as blunt as a bomb. But illegitimate children are still children, after all. The irritation at Jenny's oddness was acceptably mild.
She accepted the three-year contract. She was learning, improving herself but also preparing the way through Steering for her Garp. “A superior education” is what the Steering School could offer, her father had said. Jenny thought she'd better make sure.
When Garp was five, Jenny Fields was made head nurse. It was hard to find young, active nurses who could tolerate the freshness and wild behavior of the boys; it was hard to find anyone willing to live in, and Jenny seemed quite content to stay in her wing of the infirmary annex. In this sense she became a mother to many: up in the night when one of the boys threw up, or buzzed her, or smashed his water glass. Or when the occasionally bad boys fooled around in the dark aisles, raced their hospital beds, engaged in gladiatorial combat in wheelchairs, stole conversations with girls from the town through the iron-grate windows, attempted to climb down, or up, the thick rungs of ivy that laced the old brick buildings of the infirmary and its annex.
The infirmary was connected to the annex by an underground tunnel, wide enough for a bed-on-wheels with a slim nurse on either side of it. The bad boys occasionally bowled in the tunnel, the sound reaching Jenny and Garp in their faraway wing—as if the test rats and rabbits in the basement laboratory had overnight grown terribly large and were rolling the rubbish barrels deeper underground with their powerful snouts.
But when Garp was five—when his mother was made head nurse—the Steering School community noticed something strange about him. What could be exactly different about a five-year-old boy is not clear, but there was a certain sleek, dark, wet look to his head (like the head of a seal), and the exaggerated compactness of his body brought back the old speculations about his genes. Temperamentally, the child appeared to resemble his mother: determined, possibly dull, aloof but eternally watchful. Although he was small for his age, he seemed unnaturally mature in other ways; he had a discomforting calmness. Close to the ground, like a well-balanced animal, he seemed unusually well coordinated. Other mothers noted, with occasional alarm, that the child could climb anything. Look at jungle gyms, swing sets, high slides, bleacher seats, the most dangerous trees: Garp would be at the top of them.
One night after supper, Jenny could not find him. Garp was free to wander through the infirmary and the annex, talking to the boys, and Jenny normally paged him on the intercom when she wanted him back in the apartment. “GARP HOME,” she'd say. He had his instructions: which rooms he was not to visit, the contagious cases, the boys who felt really rotten and would prefer to be left alone. Garp liked the athletic injuries best; he liked looking at casts and slings and big bandages, and he liked listening to the cause of the injury, over and over again. Like his mother, perhaps a nurse at heart, he was happy to run errands for the patients, deliver messages, sneak food. But one night, when he was five, Garp did not respond to the GARP HOME call. The intercom was broadcast through every room of the infirmary and the annex, even those rooms Garp was under strict orders not to be in—the lab, surgery, and X-ray. If Garp couldn't hear the GARP HOME message, Jenny knew that he was either in trouble or not in the buildings. She quickly organized a search party among the healthier and more mobile patients.