The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

  The Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House—and the Seabrook Stadium, and the Seabrook Ice Hockey Rinks—were named after the superb athlete and World War I flying ace Miles Seabrook, whose face and massive torso greeted Jenny in a triptych of photographs enshrined in the display case in the gym's vast entrance-way: Miles Seabrook, '09, his head in a leather football helmet, his shoulder pads probably unnecessary. Beneath the photo of old No. 32 was the near-demolished jersey itself: faded and frequently under the attack of moths, the jersey lay in a heap in the locked trophy case under the first third of Miles Seabrook's triptych photograph. A sign said: HIS ACTUAL SHIRT.

  The center shot in the triptych showed Miles Seabrook as a hockey goalie—in those old days the goalies wore pads, but the brave face was naked, the eyes clear and challenging, the scar tissue everywhere. Miles Seabrook's bulk filled the dwarfed net. How could anyone have scored on Miles Seabrook, his cat-quick and bear-sized leather paws, his club-like stick and swollen chest protector, his skates like the long claws of a giant anteater? Beneath the football and the hockey pictures were the scores of the annual big games: in every Steering sport, the season ended in the traditional contest with Bath Academy, nearly as old and famous as Steering, and every Steering schoolboy's hated rival. The vile Bath boys in their gold and green (in Garp's day, these colors were called puke and baby-shit): STEERING 7, BATH 6; STEERING 3, BATH 0. Nobody scored on Miles.

  Captain Miles Seabrook, as he was called in the third photo in the triptych, stared back at Jenny Fields in a uniform all too familiar to her. It was a flyboy's suit, she saw in an instant; although the costumes changed between world wars, they did not change so much that Jenny failed to recognize the Reece-lined collar of the flight jacket, turned up at a cocky angle, and the confident, untied chin strap of the flight cap, the tipped up earmuffs (miles Seabrook's ears could never get cold!), and the goggles pushed carelessly up off the forehead. At his throat, the pure white scarf. No score was cited beneath this portrait, but if anyone in the Steering Athletic Department had possessed a sense of humor, Jenny might have read: UNITED STATES 16, GERMANY 1. Sixteen was the number of planes Miles Seabrook shot down before the Germans scored on him.

  Ribbons and medals lay dusty in the locked trophy case, like offerings at an altar to Miles Seabrook. There was a battered wooden thing, which Jenny mistook for part of Miles Seabrook's shot-down plane; she was prepared for any tastelessness, but the wood was only all that remained of his last hockey stick. Why not his jock? thought Jenny Fields. Or, like a keepsake of a dead baby, a lock of his hair? Which was, in all three photos, covered by a helmet or a cap or a big striped sock. Perhaps, Jenny thought—with characteristic scorn—Miles Seabrook was hairless.

  Jenny resented the implications lying honored in that dusty case. The warrior-athlete, merely undergoing an other change of uniform. Each time the body was offered only a pretense of protection: as a Steering School nurse, Jenny had seen fifteen years of football and hockey injuries, in spite of helmets, masks, straps, buckles, hinges, and pads. And Sergeant Garp, and the others, had shown Jenny that men at war had the most illusory protection of all.

  Wearily, Jenny moved on; when she passed the display cases, she felt she was moving toward the engine of a dangerous machine. She avoided the arena-sized spaces in the gymnasium, where she could hear the shouts and grunts of contest. She sought the dark corridors, where, she supposed, the offices were. Have I spent fifteen years, she thought, to lose my child to this?

  She recognized a part of the smell. Disinfectant. Years of strenuous scrubbing. No doubt that a gym was a place where germs of monstrous potential lay waiting for a chance to breed. That part of the smell reminded her of hospitals, and of the Steering infirmary—bottled, post-operative air. But here in the huge house built to the memory of Miles Seabrook there was another smell, as distasteful to Jenny Fields as the smell of sex. The complex of gym and field house had been erected in 1919, less than a year before she was born: what Jenny smelled was almost forty years of the forced farts and the sweat of boys under stress and strain. What Jenny smelled was competition, fierce and full of disappointment. She was such an outsider, it had never been part of her growing up.

  In a corridor that seemed separated from the central areas of the gym's various energies, Jenny stood still and listened. Somewhere near her was a weight-lifting room; she heard the iron bashing and the terrible heaves of hernias in progress—a nurse's view of such exertion. In fact, it seemed to Jenny that the whole building groaned and pushed, as if every schoolboy at Steering suffered constipation and sought relievement in the horrid gym.

  Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.

  The bleeding wrestler was at that instant upon her. Jenny was not sure how the groggy, dripping boy had surprised her, but a door opened off this corridor of small, innocuous-appearing rooms, and the matted face of the wrestler was smack in front of her with his ear guards pulled so askew on his head that the chin strap had slipped to his mouth, where it tugged his upper lip into a fishlike sneer. The little bowl of the strap, which had once cupped his chin, now brimmed with blood from his streaming nose.

  As a nurse, Jenny was not over impressed with blood, but she cringed at her anticipated collision with the thick, wet, hard-looking boy, who somehow dodged her, lunging sideways. With admirable trajectory and volume, he vomited on his fellow wrestler who was struggling to support him. “Excuse me,” he burbled, for most of the boys at Steering were well brought up.

  His fellow wrestler did him the favor of pulling his head gear off, so that the hapless puker would not choke or strangle; quite unmindful of his own bespattering, he called loudly back into the open door of the wrestling room, “Carlisle didn't make it!”

  From the door of that room, whose heat beckoned Jenny in the way a tropical greenhouse might be alluring in midwinter, a man's clear tenor voice responded. “Carlisle! You had two helpings of that dining-hall slop for lunch, Carlisle! One helping and you deserve to lose it! No sympathy, Carlisle!”

  Carlisle, for whom there was no sympathy, continued his lurching progress down the corridor; he bled and barfed his way to a door, through which he made his smeared escape. His fellow wrestler, who in Jenny's opinion had also withheld his sympathy, dropped Carlisle's headgear in the corridor with the rest of Carlisle's muck; then he followed Carlisle to the lockers. Jenny hoped that he was going somewhere to change his clothes.

  She looked at the wrestling room's open door; she breathed deeply and stepped inside. Immediately, she felt off-balance. Underfoot was a soft fleshy feel, and the wall sank under her touch when she leaned against it; she was inside a padded cell, the floor and the wall mats warm and yielding, the air so stifling hot and stench-full of sweat that she hardly dared to breathe.

  “Shut the door!” said the man's tenor voice—because wrestlers, Jenny would later know, love the heat and their own sweat, especially when they're cutting weight, and they thrive when the walls and floors are as hot and giving as the buttocks of sleeping girls.

  Jenny shut the door. Even the door had a mat on it, and she slumped against it, imagining someone might open the door from the outside and mercifully release her. The man with the tenor voice was the coach and Jenny, through the shimmering heat, watched him pace against the long room's wall, unable to stand still while he squinted at his struggling wrestlers. “Thirty seconds!” he screamed to them. The couples on the mat bucked as if they were electrically stimulated. The batches of twosomes around the wrestling room were each locked in some violent tangle, the intent of each wrestler, in Jenny's eye, as deliberate and as desperate as rape.

  “Fifteen seconds!” the coach screamed. “Push it!”

  The twisted pair nearest Jenny suddenly came apart, their limbs unknotting, the veins on their arms and necks popping. A breathless cry and a string of saliva broke from one boy's mouth as his opponent broke free of him and they uncoupled, bashing into the padded wall
.

  “Time's up!” the coach screamed. He did not use a whistle. The wrestlers went suddenly limp, untying each other from each other with great slowness. A half dozen of them now lumbered toward Jenny at the door; they had the water fountain and fresh air on their minds, though Jenny assumed they were all heading for the hall in order to throw up, or bleed in peace—or both.

  Jenny and the coach were the only standing bodies left in the wrestling room. Jenny observed that the coach was a neat, small man, as compact as a spring; she also observed he was nearly blind, because the coach now squinted in her direction, recognizing that her whiteness and her shape were foreign to the wrestling room. He began to grope for his glasses, which he usually stashed above the wall mats, at about head level—where they would not be so easily crushed by a wrestler who was flung upon them. Jenny observed that the coach was about her age, and that she had never seen him on or about the Steering campus before—with or without his glasses.

  The coach was new at Steering. His name was Ernie Holm, and so far he had found the Steering community to be just as snotty as Jenny had found it. Ernie Holm had been a two-time Big Ten wrestling champion at the University of Iowa, but he had never won a national title and he had coached in high schools all over Iowa for fifteen years while trying to raise his only child, a daughter, all by himself. He was bone-tired of the Midwest, as he would have said it himself, and he had come East to assure his daughter of a classy education—as he would also have said it. She was the brains of the family, he was fond of saying—and she had her mother's fine looks, which he never mentioned.

  Helen Holm, at fifteen, had spent a lifetime of three-hour afternoons sitting in wrestling rooms, from Iowa to Steering, watching boys of many sizes sweat and throw each other around. Helen would remark, years later, that spending her childhood as the only girl in a wrestling room had made her a reader. “I was brought up to be a spectator,” Helen said. “I was raised to be a voyeur.”

  She was such a good and nonstop reader, in fact, that Ernie Holm had moved East just for her. He took the job at Steering for Helen's sake, because he had read in his contract that the children of the faculty and staff could attend the Steering School for free—or they could receive a comparable sum of money toward their tuition at another private school. Ernie Holm was a bad reader, himself; he had somehow overlooked the fact that Steering admitted only boys.

  He found himself moving into the chilly Steering community in the fall, with his brainy daughter once more enrolled in a small, bad public school. In fact, the public school in the town of Steering was probably worse than most public schools because the smart boys in the town went to Steering, and the smart girls went away. Ernie Holm hadn't figured he'd have to send his daughter away from him—that had been why he'd moved: to stay with her. So while Ernie Holm was getting used to his new duties at Steering, Helen Holm wandered the fringes of the great school, devouring its bookstore and its library (hearing stories, no doubt, of the community's other great reader: Jenny Fields); and Helen continued to be bored, as she had been bored in Iowa, by her boring classmates in her boring public school.

  Ernie Holm was sensitive to people who were bored. He had married a nurse sixteen years earlier; when Helen had been born, the nurse gave up her nursing to be a full-time mother. After six months she wanted to be a nurse again, but there were no day-care centers in Iowa in those years, and Ernie Holm's new wife grew gradually more distant under the strain of being a full-time mother and an ex-nurse. One day she left him. She left him with a full-time daughter and no explanation.

  So Helen Holm grew up in wrestling rooms, which are very safe for children—being padded everywhere, and always warm. Books had kept Helen from being bored, although Ernie Holm worried how long his daughter's studiousness could continue to be nourished in a vacuum. Ernie was sure that the genes for being bored were in his daughter.

  Thus he came to Steering. Thus Helen, who also wore glasses—as needfully as her father—was with him that day Jenny Fields walked into the wrestling room. Jenny didn't notice Helen; few people noticed Helen, when Helen was fifteen. Helen, however, noticed Jenny right away; Helen was unlike her father in that she didn't wrestle with the boys, or demonstrate moves and holds, and so she kept her glasses on.

  Helen Holm was forever on the lookout for nurses because she was forever on the lookout for her disappeared mother, whom Ernie had made no attempt to find. With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer. But when Helen had been small, Ernie had indulged her with a speculative fable he no doubt liked to imagine himself—it was a story that had always intrigued Helen, too. “One day,” went the story, “you might see a pretty nurse, sort of looking like she doesn't know where she is anymore, and she might look at you like she doesn't know who you are, either—but she might look curious to find out.”

  “And that will be my mom?” Helen used to ask her father.

  “And that will be your mom!” Ernie used to say.

  So when Helen Holm looked up from her book in the Steering wrestling room, she thought she saw her mother. Jenny Fields in her white uniform was forever appearing out of place; there on the crimson mats of the Steering School, she looked dark and healthy, strong-boned and handsome if not exactly pretty, and Helen Hohn must have thought that no other woman would have ventured into this soft-floored inferno where her father worked. Helen's glasses fogged, she closed her book; in her anonymous gray sweat suit, which hid her gawky fifteen-year-old frame—her hard hips and her small breasts—she stood up awkwardly against the wrestling-room wall and waited for her father's sign of recognition.

  But Ernie Holm was still groping for his glasses; in a blur he saw the white figure—vaguely womanly, perhaps a nurse—and his heart paused at the possibility he had never really believed in: his wife's return, her saying, “Oh, how I've missed you and our daughter!” What other nurse would enter his place of employment?

  Helen saw her father's fumbling, she took this to be the necessary sign. She stepped toward Jenny across the blood-warm mats, and Jenny thought: My God, that's a girl! A pretty girl with glasses. What's a pretty girl doing in a place like this?

  “Mom?” the girl said to Jenny. “It's me, Mom! It's Helen,” she said, bursting into tears; she flung her slim arms around Jenny's shoulders and pressed her wet face to Jenny's throat.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Jenny Fields, who was never a woman who liked to be touched. Still, she was a nurse and she must have felt Helen's need; she did not shove the girl away from her, though she knew very well she was not Helen's mother. Jenny Fields thought that having been a mother once was enough. She coolly patted the weeping girl's back and looked imploringly at the wrestling coach, who had just found his glasses. “I'm not your mother, either,” Jenny said politely to him, because he was looking at her with the same brief relief in his face that Jenny had seen in the face of the pretty girl.

  What Ernie Holm thought was that the resemblance went deeper than the uniform and the coincidence of a wrestling room in two nurses' lives; but Jenny stopped short of being as pretty as Ernie's runaway wife, and Ernie was reflecting that even fifteen years would not have made his wife as plain and merely handsome as Jenny. Still, Jenny looked all right to Ernie Holm, who smiled an unclear, apologetic smile that his wrestlers were familiar with, when they lost.

  “My daughter thought you were her mother,” Ernie Holm said to Jenny. “She hasn't seen her mother in quite a while.”

  Obviously, thought Jenny Fields. She felt the girl tense and spring out of her arms.

  “That's not your mom, darlin',” Ernie Holm said to Helen, who retreated to the wrestling-room wall; she was a tough-minded girl, not at all in the habit of emotionally displaying herself—not even to her father.

  “And did you think I was your wife?” Jenny asked Ernie, because it had looked to her, for a moment, that Ernie had mistaken her, too. She wondered how long a “while” Mrs. Holm had been missing.

  “You fooled me, fo
r a minute,” Ernie said, politely; he had a shy grin, which be used sparingly.

  Helen crouched in a corner of the wrestling room, fiercely eyeing Jenny as if Jenny were deliberately responsible for her embarrassment. Jenny felt moved by the girl; it had been years since Garp had hugged her like that, and it was a feeling that even a very selective mother, like Jenny, remembered missing.

  “What's your name?” she asked Helen. “My name is Jenny Fields.”

  It was a name Helen Holm knew, of course. She was the other mystery reader around the Steering School. Also, Helen had not previously given to anyone the feelings she reserved for a mother; even though it had been an accident that she'd flung those feelings around Jenny, Helen found it hard to call them back entirely. She had her father's shy smile and she looked thankfully at Jenny; oddly, Helen felt she would like to hug Jenny again, but she restrained herself. There were wrestlers shuffling back into the room, gasping from the drinking fountain, where those who were cutting weight had only rinsed their mouths.

  “No more practice,” Ernie Holm told them, waving them out of the room. “That's it for today. Go run your laps!” Obediently, even relieved, they bobbed in the doorway of the crimson room; they picked up their headgear, their rubber sweat suits, their spools of tape. Ernie Holm waited for the room to clear, while his daughter and Jenny Fields waited for him to explain; at the very least, an explanation was in order, he felt, and there was nowhere Ernie felt as comfortable as he felt in a wrestling room. For him it was the natural place to tell someone a story, even a difficult story with no ending—and even to a stranger. So when his wrestlers had left to run their laps, Ernie very patiently began his father-and-daughter tale, the brief history of the nurse who left them, and of the Midwest they only recently had left. It was a story Jenny could appreciate, of course, because Jenny did not know an other single parent with a single child. And although she may have felt tempted to tell them her story—there being interesting similarities, and differences—Jenny merely repeated her standard version: the father of Garp was a soldier, and so forth. And who takes the time for weddings when there is a war? Though it was not the whole story, it clearly appealed to Helen and Ernie, who had met no one else in the Steering community as receptive and frank as Jenny.