The World According to Garp by John Irving
One such person was Hathaway, who, Jenny heard, was buzzing her now from his room on the fourth floor of the annex. Hathaway was a lacrosse player who had done ligament damage to his knee; two days after they put him in a cast and turned him loose on crutches, Hathaway had gone out in the rain and his crutch tips had slipped at the top of the long marble stairs of Hyle Hall. In the fall, he had broken his other leg. Now Hathaway, with both his long legs in casts, sprawled in his bed on the fourth floor of the infirmary annex, a lacrosse stick held fondly in his large-knuckled hands. He had been put out of the way, almost all by himself on the fourth floor of the annex, because of his irritating habit of flinging a lacrosse ball across his room and letting it carom off the wall. Then he snared the hard, bouncy ball in the looping basket on the end of his lacrosse stick and flicked it back against the wall. Jenny could have put a stop to this, but she had a son of her own, after all, and she recognized the need in boys to devote themselves, mindlessly, to a repetitious physical act. It seemed to relax them, Jenny had noticed--whether they were five, like Garp, or seventeen, like Hathaway.
But it made her furious that Hathaway was so clumsy with his lacrosse stick that he was always losing his ball! She had gone out of her way to put him where other patients would not complain about the thumping, but whenever Hathaway lost his ball, he buzzed for someone to fetch it for him; although there was an elevator, the fourth floor of the annex was out of everyone's way. When Jenny saw the elevator was in use, she went up the four flights of stairs too quickly, and was out of breath, as well as angry, when she got to Hathaway's room.
"I know how much your game means to you, Hathaway," Jenny said, "but right now Garp is lost and I don't really have time to retrieve your ball."
Hathaway was an ever-pleasant, slow-thinking boy with a slack, hairless face and a forward-falling flop of reddish-blond hair, which partially hid one of his pale eyes. He had a habit of tipping his head back, perhaps so that he could see out from under his hair, and for this reason, and the fact that he was tall, everyone who looked at Hathaway looked up his wide nostrils.
"Miss Fields?" he said. Jenny noticed he was not holding his lacrosse stick.
"What is it, Hathaway?" Jenny asked. "I'm sorry I'm in a rush, but Garp is lost. I'm looking for Garp."
"Oh," Hathaway said. He looked around his room--perhaps for Garp--as if someone had just asked him for an ashtray. "I'm sorry," Hathaway said. "I wish I could help you look for him." He stared helplessly at both his casts.
Jenny rapped lightly on one of his plastered knees, as if she were knocking on a door behind which someone might be asleep. "Don't worry, please," she said; she waited for him to tell her what he wanted, but Hathaway seemed to have forgotten that he'd buzzed her. "Hathaway?" she asked, again knocking on his leg to see if anyone was home. "What did you want? Did you lose your ball?"
"No," Hathaway said. "I've lost my stick." Mechanically, they both took a moment to look around Hathaway's room for the missing lacrosse stick. "I was asleep," he explained, "and when I woke up, it was gone."
Jenny first thought of Meckler, the menace of the second-floor annex. Meckler was a sarcastically brilliant boy who was in the infirmary at least four days out of every month. He was a chain smoker at sixteen, he edited most of the school's student publications, and he had twice won the annual Classics Cup. Meckler scorned dining-hall food and lived on coffee and fried-egg sandwiches from Buster's Snack and Grill, where he actually wrote most of his long and long-overdue, but brilliant, term papers. Collapsing in the infirmary each month to recover from his physical self-abuse, and his brilliance, Meckler's mind turned to hideous pranks that Jenny could never quite prove him guilty of. Once there were boiled polliwogs in the teapot sent down to the lab technicians, who complained of the fishiness of the tea; once, Jenny was sure, Meckler had filled a prophylactic with egg whites and slipped its snug neck over the doorknob to her apartment. She knew the filling had been egg whites only because she later found the shells. In her purse. And it had been Meckler, Jenny was sure, who had organized the third floor of the infirmary during the chicken pox epidemic of a few years ago: the boys were beating off, in turn, and rushing with their hot spunk in their hands to the microscopes in the infirmary lab--to see if they were sterile.
But Meckler's style, Jenny thought, would have been to cut a hole in the netting of the lacrosse stick--and to have left the useless stick in the sleeping Hathaway's hands.
"I'll bet Garp has it," Jenny told Hathaway. "When we find Garp, we'll find your stick." She resisted, for the hundredth time, the impulse to take her hand and brush back the flop of hair that nearly hid one of Hathaway's eyes; instead, she gently squeezed Hathaway's big toes where they thrust out of his casts.
If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it's dark; he'd lose the ball. And the only place he might not have heard the intercom was in the underground tunnel between the annex and the infirmary--a perfect place for flinging that ball, Jenny knew. It had been done before; once Jenny had broken up an after-midnight scrimmage. She took the elevator directly to the basement. Hathaway is a sweet boy, she was thinking; Garp could do worse than grow up to be like that. But he could do better, too.
However slowly, Hathaway was thinking. He hoped little Garp was all right; he sincerely wished he could get up to help find the child. Garp was a frequent visitor to Hathaway's room. A crippled athlete with two casts was better than average. Hathaway had allowed Garp to draw all over his plastered legs; over and through the signatures of friends were the looping, crayoned faces and monsters of Garp's imagination. Hathaway now looked at the child's drawings on his casts and worried about Garp. That was why he saw the lacrosse ball, between his thighs; he had not felt it, through the plaster. It lay there as if it were Hathaway's own egg, keeping warm. How could Garp play lacrosse without a ball?
When he heard the pigeons, Hathaway knew Garp wasn't playing lacrosse. The pigeons! he remembered. He had complained about them to the boy. The pigeons kept Hathaway awake at night with their damn cooing, their cluckish fussing under the eaves and in the rain gutter beneath the steep slate roof. That was a problem with the sleeping conditions on the fourth and topmost floor; that was a problem for every top-floor sleeper at the Steering School--pigeons seemed to rule the campus. The maintenance men had caged off most of the eaves and perches with chicken wire, but the pigeons roosted in the rain gutters, in dry weather, and found niches under the roofs, and perches on the old gnarled ivy. There was no way to keep them off the buildings. And how they could coo! Hathaway hated them. He'd told Garp that if he had even one good leg, he would get them.
"How?" Garp asked.
"They don't like to fly at night," Hathaway told the boy. It was in Bio. II that Hathaway had learned about the habits of pigeons; Jenny Fields had taken the same course. "I could get up on the roof," Hathaway told Garp, "at night--when it wasn't raining--and trap them in the rain gutter. That's all they do, just sit in the rain gutter and coo and crap all night."
"But how would you trap them?" Garp asked.
And Hathaway twirled his lacrosse stick, cradling the ball. He rolled the ball between his legs, he dropped the net of the stick gently over Garp's little head. "Like that," he said. "With this, I'd get them easy--with my lacrosse stick. One by one, until I got them all."
Hathaway remembered how Garp had smiled at him--this big friendly boy with his two heroic casts. Hathaway looked out the window, saw that it was indeed dark and not raining. Hathaway rang his buzzer. "Garp!" he cried out. "Oh, God." He held his thumb on the buzzer button and did not let up.
When Jenny Fields saw it was the fourth-floor light that was flashing, she could only think that Garp had brought Hathaway's lacrosse equipment back to him. What a good boy, she thought, and rode the elevator, up again, to the fourth floor. She ran squeakily on her good nurse's shoes to Hathaway's room. She saw the lacrosse ball in Hathaway's hand. His one eye, which was clearly in view, loo
"He's on the roof," Hathaway told her.
"On the roof!" Jenny said.
"He's trying to capture pigeons with my lacrosse stick," Hathaway said.
* * *
--
A full-grown man, if he stood on the fourth-floor fire-escape landing, could reach over the rim of the rain gutter with his hands. When the Steering School cleaned its rain gutters, only after all the leaves were fallen and before the heavy spring rains, only tall men were sent to do the job because the shorter men complained of reaching into the rain gutters and touching things they couldn't see--dead pigeons and well-rotted squirrels and unidentified glop. Only the tall men could stand on the fire-escape landings and peek into the rain gutters before they reached. The gutters were as wide and nearly as deep as pig troughs, but they were not as strong--and they were old. In those days, everything at the Steering School was old.
When Jenny Fields went out the fourth-floor fire door and stood on the fire escape, she could barely reach the rain gutter with her fingertips; she could not see over the rain gutter to the steep slate roof--and in the darkness and fog, she could not even see the underside of the rain gutter as far down as either corner of the building. She could not see Garp at all.
"Garp?" she whispered. Four stories below, among the shrubbery and the occasional glint from the hood or roof of a parked car, she could hear some of the boys calling him, too. "Garp?" she whispered, a little louder.
"Mom?" he asked, startling her--although his whisper was softer than hers. His voice came from somewhere close, almost within her reach, she thought, but she couldn't see him. Then she saw the netted basket end of the lacrosse stick silhouetted against the foggy moon like the strange, webbed paw of some unknown, nocturnal animal; it jutted out from the rain gutter, almost directly above her. Now, when she reached up, she was frightened to feel Garp's leg, broken through the corroded gutter, which had torn his pants and cut him, wedging him there, one leg through the gutter up to his hip, the other leg sprawled out in the gutter behind him, along the edge of the steep slate roof. Garp lay on his belly in the creaky rain gutter.
When he had broken through the gutter, he'd been too scared to cry out; he could feel that the whole flimsy trough was rotted through and ready to tear apart. His voice, he thought, could make the roof fall down. He lay with his cheek in the gutter, and through a tiny rusted hole he watched the boys in the parking lot and bushes, four stories below him, looking for him. The lacrosse stick, which had indeed held a surprised pigeon, had swung out over the edge of the gutter, releasing the bird.
The pigeon, despite being captured and freed, had not moved. It squatted in the gutter, making its small, stupid sounds. Jenny realized that Garp could never have reached the rain gutter from the fire escape, and she shuddered to think of him climbing up the ivy to the roof with the lacrosse stick in one hand. She held his leg very tightly; his bare, warm calf was slightly sticky with blood, but he had not cut himself badly on the rusty gutter. A tetanus shot, she was thinking; the blood was almost dry and Jenny did not think he would need stitches--though, in the darkness, she could not clearly make out the wound. She was trying to think how she could get him down. Below her, the forsythia bushes winked in the light from the downstairs windows; from so far away, the yellow flowers looked (to her) like the tips of small gas flames.
"Mom?" Garp asked.
"Yes," she whispered. "I've got you."
"Don't let go," he said.
"Okay," she told him. As if triggered by her voice, a little more of the gutter gave way.
"Mom!" Garp said.
"It's okay," Jenny said. She wondered if the best way would be to yank him down, hard, and hope that she could pull him right through the rotten gutter. But then the whole gutter could possibly rip free of the roof--and then what? she thought. She saw them both swept off the fire escape and falling. But she knew no one could actually go up on the rain gutter and pull the child out of the hole, and then lower him to her over the edge. The gutter could barely support a five-year-old; it certainly couldn't support a grownup. And Jenny knew that she would not let go of Garp's leg long enough to let someone try.
It was the new nurse, Miss Creen, who saw them from the ground and ran inside to call Dean Bodger. Nurse Creen was thinking of Dean Bodger's spotlight, fastened to the dean's dark car (which cruised the campus each night in search of boys out after curfew). Despite the complaints of the grounds' crew, Bodger drove down the footpaths and over the soft lawns, flashing his spotlight into the deep shrubs alongside the buildings, making the campus an unsafe place for lurkers--or for lovers, with no indoor place to go.
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 he 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 hav
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.