Jenny and the Ball-Turret Gunner

Carp's Mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested 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 of 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 22. 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 she 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). 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, law school men in Boston at the time, who had assured her parents that Wellesley women were not thought of loosely and were considered high in marriage potential.

Her declared major had been English literature, but when it seemed to her that her classmates were chiefly concerned with acquiring the sophistication and the 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. She liked the simple, no-nonsense uniform; the blouse of the dress made less of her breasts; the shoes were comfortable, 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 if 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, even the soldiers were full of the self-importance of college boys--and Jenny Fields stopped having anything to do with men.

•

The Fields family fortune was in shoes, though Mrs. Fields, a former Boston Bass, had brought some money of her own to the marriage. The Fields family had managed well enough with footwear to have removed themselves from the shoe factories years ago. They now lived in a large shingled house on the New Hampshire shore (Dog's Head Harbor).

There was a Fields line of nursing shoes, and Mr. Fields gave his daughter a free pair whenever she came home; Jenny must have had a dozen pairs. Mrs. Fields, who insisted on equating her daughter's leaving Wellesley with a sordid future, also gave Jenny a present every time she came home. Mrs. Fields gave her daughter a hot-water bottle, or so she said and so Jenny assumed; she never opened the packages. Her mother would say, "Dear, do you still have that hot-water bottle I gave you?"

And Jenny would think a minute, believing she had probably left it on the train or thrown it away, and she'd say, "I may have lost it, Mother, but I'm sure I don't need another one."

And Mrs. Fields, bringing the package out from apparent hiding, would press it to her, still concealed in the drugstore paper; she would say, "Please, Jennifer, be more careful. And use it, please!"

As a nurse, Jenny saw little use for the hot-water bottle; she assumed it to be a touching, odd device of old-fashioned and largely psychological comfort. But some of the packages made it back to her small room near the Boston General Hospital. She kept them in a closet that was nearly full of boxes of nursing shoes--also unopened.

When Jenny had left Wellesley for something as common as nursing, she realized that, unintentionally, she had dropped her family--and they, as if they couldn't help themselves, were dropping her. That must be how families are, thought Jenny Fields. She felt if she ever had children, she would love them no less when they were 20 than when they were two; they might need you more at 20, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

•

When the soldier in the movie theater first started changing seats--when he made his first move for her--Jenny wished she had her brothers with her. 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 in 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 from the end of the armrest, it twitched like the flank of a horse shuddering the flies away. Jenny kept her hand on the scalpel inside her purse; with her other hand, she held the purse tight 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 the 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 skirt; 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.")

The soldier, on his feet and falling back, 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. "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. Other women in the theater were screaming.

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 great 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 attention ("A hundred and forty-six stitches!" Garp would say proudly, whenever he told his mother's story), but the soldier was in no immediate danger of 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 nursing uniform. They quickly realized she had done it, and the theater lackeys would not let her touch the fainted soldier; 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.

"You been dating this guy long?" the first one asked her, en route to the precinct station.

And another one asked her, later: "But how did you know he was going to attack you? He says he was just trying to introduce himself."

"That's a real mean little weapon, honey," a third told her. "You shouldn't carry something like that around with you. That's asking for trouble."

So Jenny waited for her brothers to clear things up. The law school men from Cambridge, across the river. One was a law student, the other one taught in the law school. "Both," Garp wrote, "were of the opinion that the Practice(continued on page 146)Jenny(continued from page 90) of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime."

They were not so comforting when they came.

"Break your mother's heart," said one.

"If you'd only stayed at Wellesley," said the other.

"A girl alone has to protect herself," Jenny said. "What could be more proper?"

But one of her brothers asked her if she could prove that she had not had previous relations with the man.

"Confidentially," whispered the other one, "have you been dating this guy long?"

Finally, things were cleared up when the police discovered that the soldier was from New York, where he had a wife and a child. He had taken a leave in Boston and, more than anything else, he feared the story would get back to his wife. Everyone seemed to agree that would be awful, for everyone, so Jenny was released without charges. When she made a fuss that the police had not given her back her scalpel, one of her brothers said, "For God's sake, Jennifer, you can steal another one, can't you?"

"I didn't steal it," Jenny said.

"You should have some friends," a brother told her.

"At Wellesley," they repeated.

"Thank you for coming when I called you," Jenny said.

"What's a family for?" one said.

"Blood runs thick," said the other; then he paled, embarrassed at the association--her dress was so besmirched.

"I'm a good girl," Jenny told them.

"Jennifer," said the older one, her life's earliest model--for wisdom, for all that was right. He was rather solemn; he said, "It's best not to get involved with married men."

"We won't tell Momma," the other one said.

"And certainly not Father!" said the first. In an awkward attempt at some natural warmth, he winked at her--a gesture which contorted his face and for a moment convinced Jenny that her life's earliest model had developed a facial tic.

Beside the brothers was a mailbox with a poster of Uncle Sam. A little soldier, all in brown, was climbing down, gently, from Uncle Sam's big hands. The little soldier was going to land on a map of Europe. The words under the poster said: Support our boys! Jenny's older brother looked at Jenny looking at the poster.

"And don't get involved with soldiers," he added.

But Jenny Fields was too confused to be properly outraged. She was also sore--her ear, where the soldier had cuffed her, hurt her, and there was a deep muscle cramp between her shoulder blades that made it hard for her to sleep. She thought she must have wrenched something in there when the theater lackeys had grabbed her in the lobby and pulled her arms behind her back. She remembered that hot-water bottles were supposed to be good for sore muscles and she got out of bed and went to her closet and opened one of her mother's gift packages.

It was not a hot-water bottle. That had been her mother's euphemism for something her mother couldn't bring herself to discuss. In the package was a douche bag. Jenny's mother knew what they were for, and so did Jenny. She had helped many patients at the hospital use them, though at the hospital they were not much used to prevent pregnancies after lovemaking; they were used for general feminine hygiene, and in venereal cases.

Jenny was appalled. She opened all the packages. In each one was a douche bag. "Please use it!" her mother had begged her. Jenny knew that her mother, though she meant well, assumed that Jenny's sexual activity was considerable and probably irresponsible. No doubt, as her mother would put it, "since Wellesley." Since Wellesley, Jenny's mother thought that Jenny was fornicating (as she would also put it) "to beat the band."

Jenny Fields crawled back to bed with the douche bag filled with hot water and snuggled between her shoulder blades; she hoped the clamps that kept the water from running down the hose would not allow a leak, but to be sure, she held the hose in her hands, a little like a rubber rosary, and she dropped the nozzle with the tiny holes into her empty water glass. All night long, Jenny lay listening to the douche bag leak.

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore--or fast on the way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. But, she thought, there is nothing wrong with me.

She decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and only appeared defensive. She took a larger apartment, which prompted a new assault of packaged douche bags from her mother and a stack of nursing shoes from her father; he also paid her rent, thus tripling her previous allowance. It struck her that they were thinking: If she is to be a whore, let her at least be clean and well shod.

In part, the war kept Jenny from dwelling on how badly her family misread her--and kept her from any bitterness and self-pity, too; Jenny was not a dweller. She was a good nurse and she was increasingly busy. Many nurses were joining up, but Jenny had little desire for a change of uniform or for travel; she was a solitary girl and she didn't want to have to meet a lot of new people. Also, she found the system of rank irritating enough in the hospital; in the Army, or in the Navy, it could only be worse.

First of all, she would have missed the babies. She was at her best as a nurse, she felt, to mothers and their babies, and there were suddenly so many babies whose fathers were away, or dead or missing; Jenny wanted most of all to encourage those mothers. In fact, she envied them. It was, to her, the ideal situation: a mother alone with a new baby, the husband blown out of the sky over France. A young woman with her child, with a life ahead of them--just the two of them. A baby with no strings attached, thought Jenny. An almost virgin birth.

These women, of course, were not always as happy with their lot as Jenny thought she would have been. They were grieving, many of them, or abandoned (many others); they resented their children, some of them; they wanted a husband and a father for their babies (many others). But Jenny Fields was their encourager, she spoke up for solitude, she told them how lucky they were. Some of them came around to seeing it her way, but Jenny's reputation at the hospital suffered her crusade.

"Old Virgin Mary Jenny," the other nurses said. "Doesn't want a baby the easy way. Why not ask God for it?"

In her diary, Jenny wrote:

I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn't want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me a sexual suspect, too.

Jenny discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy. She told the other nurses that she would one day find a man to make her pregnant--just that, nothing more. She did not entertain the possibility that the man would need to try more than once, she told them. They, of course, couldn't wait to tell everyone they knew. It was not long before Jenny had several proposals. She had to make a sudden decision: She could retreat, ashamed and embarrassed that her secret was out, or she could be brazen.

A young medical student told her he would volunteer on the condition that he could have at least six chances over a three-day weekend. Jenny told him that he obviously lacked confidence; she wanted a child who would be more secure than that.

An anesthesiologist told her he would even pay for the child's education--through college--but Jenny told him that his eyes were too close together and his teeth were poorly formed; she would not saddle her child with such handicaps.

One of the other nurses' boyfriends (continued on page 169)Jenny(continued from page 146) treated her most cruelly; he frightened her in the hospital cafeteria by handing her a milk glass half-full of a cloudy, viscous substance. "Sperm," he said, nodding to the glass. "All that's one shot; I don't mess around. If one chance is all anyone gets, I'm your man." Jenny held up the horrid glass and inspected it coolly. God knows what was actually in the glass. "Don't drink it!" the nurse's boyfriend said. "That's just an indication of what kind of stuff I've got. Lots of seeds," he added, grinning. Jenny poured the contents of the glass into a potted plant.

"I want a baby," she said. "I don't want to start a sperm farm."

Jenny knew this was going to be hard; she learned to take a ribbing and she learned to respond in kind.

So they decided Jenny Fields was crude, that she was going too far; a joke was a joke, but Jenny neither took them seriously nor offered them any humor of her own. She was just determined about it; either she was sticking to her guns, just to be stubborn, or, worse, she really meant it. Her hospital colleagues couldn't make her laugh and they couldn't get her to bed. As Garp wrote of his mother's dilemma, "Her colleagues detected that she felt herself superior to them. Nobody's colleagues appreciate this."

So they initiated a get-tough policy with Jenny. It was a staff decision--"for her own good," of course. They decided to get Jenny away from the babies and the mothers. She's got babies on her brain, they said. No more obstetrics for Jenny Fields; keep her away from the incubators--she's got too soft a heart, or a head.

So they separated Jenny from the mothers and their babies. She's a good nurse, they all said; let her try some intensive care. It was their experience that a nurse in the intensive-care unit quickly lost interest in her own problems. Of course, Jenny knew why they had sent her away from the babies; she only resented that they thought so little of her self-control. Because what she wanted was strange to them, they assumed she had slim restraint. There is no logic to people, Jenny thought. There was lots of time to get pregnant, she knew. She was in no hurry. It was just part of an eventual plan.

Now there was a war. In intensive care, she saw a little more of it. The Service hospitals sent them their special cases, and there were always the terminal patients. There were the usual, elderly cases, hanging by the usual threads; there were the usual industrial accidents, and automobile accidents, and the terrible accidents to children. But mainly there were soldiers; what happened to them was no accident.

Jenny made her own divisions among the nonaccidents that happened to the soldiers; she came up with her own categories for them. One, there were the men who'd been burned; for the most part, they'd been burned on board ship (the most complicated cases from Chelsea Naval), but they'd also been burned in airplanes and on the ground. Jenny called them the Externals. Two, there were the men who'd been shot or damaged in bad places; internally, they were in trouble, and Jenny called them the Vital Organs. Three, there were the men whose injuries seemed almost mystical to Jenny; they were the men who weren't "there" anymore, whose heads or spines had been tampered with. Sometimes they were paralyzed, sometimes they were merely vague. Jenny called them the Absentees. Occasionally, one of these had External or Vital Organ damage as well; all the hospital had a name for them; four, they were Goners.

"My father," Garp wrote, "was a Goner. From my mother's point of view, that must have made him very attractive." No strings attached.

Garp's father was a ball-turret gunner who had had a nonaccident in the air over France.

"My mother was a stickler for detail," Garp wrote.

When they would bring in a new casualty, Jenny was the first to ask the doctor how it had happened. And Jenny classified them, silently: the Externals, the Vital Organs, the Absentees and the Goners. And she found little gimmicks to help her remember their names and their disasters. Private Jones fell off his bones, Ensign Potter stopped a whopper, Corporal Estes lost his testes, Captain Flynn has no skin, Major Longfellow is short on answers.

Sergeant Garp was a mystery. On his 35th flight over France, the little ball-turret gunner stopped shooting. The pilot noticed the absence of machine-gun fire from the ball turret and thought that Garp had taken a hit. If he had, the pilot had not felt it in the belly of his plane. He hoped Garp hadn't felt it much, either. When the plane landed, the pilot went to have a look at Garp. By the time he got back to the ball turret, quite a number of people had gathered to look at Garp.

Upside down in the ball turret, the tiny technical sergeant was playing with himself. For such a small man, he seemed to have an especially large erection, but he fumbled with it only a little more expertly than a child--not nearly so expertly as a monkey in the zoo. Like the monkey, however, Garp looked out of his glass cage and stared frankly into the faces of the human beings who were watching him; like the monkey, he seemed quite comfortable upside down.

"Garp?" the pilot said. Garp's forehead was freckled with blood that was mostly dry, but his flight cap was plastered to the top of his head and dripping; there didn't seem to be a mark on him. "Garp!" the pilot shouted at him. There was a hole in the Plexiglas bubble where the .50-caliber machine guns had been; it appeared that some flak had hit the barrels of the guns. possibly exploding the gun housing and even shattering the trigger grips, though there was nothing wrong with Garp's hands--they just seemed to be a little clumsy at masturbation.

"Garp!" cried the pilot.

"Garp?" said Garp. He was mimicking the pilot, like a smart crow. "Garp," said Garp, as if he had just learned the word. The pilot nodded to Garp, encouraging him to remember his name. Garp smiled. "Garp," he said; he seemed to think this was how people greeted each other. Not Hello, Hello--but Garp, Garp.

"Jesus, Garp," the pilot said. Garp still had his goggles on and when the pilot was able to climb near him, he gently pulled them off. A fine dust of Plexiglas was all over Garp's face, but the goggles had protected his eyes from splinters. Something was wrong with his eyes, though, because they rolled around independently of each other, and the pilot thought that the world, for Garp, was probably looming up, then going by, then looming up again--if Garp could see at all. What the pilot couldn't know, at the time, was that some sharp and slender shards from the flak blast had damaged one of the oculomotor nerves in Garp's brain, and other parts of his brain as well. The oculomotor nerve consists chiefly of motor fibers that innervate most of the muscles of the eyeball. As for the rest of Garp's brain, it had received some cuts and slashes a little like a prefrontal lobotomy--though it was rather careless surgery.

The pilot had a great fear of how carelessly a lobotomy had been performed on Sergeant Garp and, for that reason, he thought against taking off the blood-sodden flight cap. The pilot actually feared that if he took off the flight cap, what remained of Garp's brain might fall out.

"Garp?" Garp said to the pilot, trying his new word.

"Garp," the pilot confirmed; Garp seemed pleased. He had both his little hands on his impressive erection when he successfully masturbated.

"Garp!" he barked; there was joy in his voice but also surprise. He rolled his eyes at his audience, begging the world to loom up and hold still. He was unsure of what he'd done. "Garp?" he asked doubtfully.

The pilot patted his arm and nodded to the others of the flight and landing crew: Let's give a little support to the sergeant, men; please, let's make him feel at home. And the men, respectfully dumb-struck by Carp's ejaculation, all said, "Garp! Garp! Garp!" to him--a reassuring, seallike chorus intent on putting Garp at ease.

Garp nodded happily, but the pilot held his arm and whispered anxiously to him: "No, don't move your head, OK? Garp? Please don't move your head." Garp's eyes roamed past the pilot and the pilot waited for them to come around again. "Easy does it, Garp," he whispered. "Just sit tight, OK?"

Garp's face radiated pure peace. With both hands holding his dying erection, the little sergeant looked as if he knew he had done just the thing that the situation called for.

They could do nothing for Sergeant Garp in England. He was lucky to have been brought home to Boston long before the end of the war. Some Senator was responsible. The U.S. Navy had been accused of transporting wounded Servicemen back home only if they came from wealthy and important American families. In an effort to quell such a vile rumor, which was damaging to the war effort, the Senator claimed that if any of the severely wounded were lucky enough to get back to America, "even an orphan would get to make the trip--just like anyone else." There was then some scurrying around to come up with a wounded orphan--to prove the Senator's point--but they came up with a perfect person to enliven military morale. Not only was Technical Sergeant Garp an orphan, he was an idiot with a one-word vocabulary, so he was not complaining to the press. And in all the photographs they took, gunner Garp was smiling.

•

When the drooling sergeant was brought to Boston, Jenny Fields had trouble categorizing him. He was clearly an Absentee, more docile than a child, but she wasn't sure how much else was wrong with him.

"Hello, how are you?" she asked him, when they wheeled him into the ward.

"Garp!" he barked, smiling. His hands were wrapped in gauze mittens, the result of Garp's playing in an accidental fire that broke out in the hospital compound on board his transport ship. He'd seen the flames and reached out his hands to them, spreading some of the flames up to his face; he'd singed off his eyebrows. He looked to Jenny a little like a shaved owl.

With the burns, Garp was an External and an Absentee all at once. Also, with his hands so heavily bandaged, he had lost the ability to masturbate, an activity that his papers said he pursued frequently and successfully--and without any self-consciousness. Those who'd observed him closely, since his accident with the fire, feared that the childish little gunner was becoming depressed--his one adult pleasure taken from him, at least until his hands healed.

It was possible, of course, that Garp had Vital Organ damage as well. Many fragments had entered his head; many of them were too delicately located to remove. Garp's brain damage might not stop with his crude lobotomy; his internal destruction could be progressing.

There'd been a patient before Garp whose head had been similarly penetrated. He'd been fine for months, just talking to himself and occasionally peeing his bed. Then he started to lose his body hair and he had trouble completing his sentences. Just before he died, he began to develop breasts.

Given the evidence, the shadows (the white needles) in the X rays, gunner Garp was probably a Goner. But to Jenny Fields he looked very nice. A small, neat man, the former ball-turret gunner was as innocent and straightforward in his demands as a three-year-old. He cried "Garp!" when he was hungry and "Garp!" when he was glad; he asked "Garp?" when something puzzled him or when addressing strangers, and he said "Garp" without the question mark when he recognized you. He usually did what he was told, but he couldn't be trusted; he forgot easily, and if one time he was as obedient as a six-year-old, another time he was as mindlessly curious as if he were one and a half.

His depressions, which were well documented in his transport papers, seemed to occur simultaneously with his erections; at those moments, he would clamp his poor, grown-up part between his gauzy, mittened hands and weep. He wept because the gauze didn't feel as good as his short memory of his hands, and also because it hurt his hands to touch anything. It was then that Jenny Fields would sit with him. She would rub his back between his shoulder blades until he tipped back his head and half-shut his eyes, like a cat, and she'd talk to him all the while, her voice friendly and full of exciting shifts of accent. Most nurses droned to their patients, a steady, changeless voice intent on producing sleep, but Jenny knew that it wasn't sleep Garp needed. He was bored, he needed adventure, some action--so Jenny entertained him. She also played the radio for him, but some of the programs upset Garp; no one knew why. Other programs gave him terrific erections, which led to his depressions, and so on. One program, just once, gave Garp a wet dream, which so surprised and pleased him that he was always eager to see the radio. But Jenny couldn't find the program, she couldn't repeat the performance. She knew that if she could plug poor Garp into the wet-dream program, her job and his life would be much happier, but it wasn't that easy.

She gave up trying to teach him another word. When she fed him and she saw that he liked what he was eating, she'd say, "Good! That's good."

"Garp!" he'd agree.

And when he spat out food on his bib and made a terrible face, she'd say, "Bad! That stuff's bad, right?"

"Garp!" he'd gag.

The first sign Jenny had of his deterioration was when he seemed to lose the G. One morning he greeted her with an "Arp."

"Garp," she said to him. "G-arp."

"Arp," he said. She knew she was losing him.

Daily, he seemed to grow younger. When he slept, he kneaded the air with his wriggling fists, his lips puckering, his cheeks sucking, his eyelids trembling. Jenny had spent a lot of time around babies; she knew that the ball-turret gunner was nursing in his dreams. For a while, she contemplated stealing a pacifier from Maternity, but she stayed away from that place now; the jokes irritated her ("Here's Virgin Mary Jenny, swiping a phony nipple for her child. Who's the lucky father, Jenny?"). She watched Sergeant Garp suckle in his sleep and tried to imagine that his ultimate regression would be peaceful, that he would turn into his fetus phase and no longer breathe through his lungs; that his personality would blissfully separate, half of him turning to dreams of an egg, half of him to dreams of sperm. Finally, he simply wouldn't be anymore.

It was almost like that. Garp's nursing phase became so severe that he seemed to wake up like a child on a four-hour feeding schedule; he even cried like a baby, his face scarlet, his eyes springing tears in an instant, and in an instant being pacified--by the radio, by Jenny's voice. Once, when she rubbed his back, he burped. Jenny burst into tears. She sat at his bedside wishing him a swift painless journey back into the womb and beyond.

If only his hands would heal, she thought. Then he could suck his thumb. When he woke from his suckling dreams, hungry to nurse, or so he imagined, Jenny would put her own finger to his mouth and let his lips tug at her. Though he had real, grown-up teeth, in his mind he was toothless and he never bit her. It was this observation that led Jenny, one night, to offer him her breast, where he sucked inexhaustibly and didn't seem to mind that there was nothing to be had there. Jenny thought that if he kept nursing at her, she would have milk; she felt such a firm tugging in her womb, which was both maternal and sexual; her feelings were so vivid, she believed for a while that she could possibly conceive a child simply by suckling the baby ball-turret gunner.

It was almost like that. But gunner Garp was not all baby. One night, when he nursed at her, Jenny noticed that he had an erection which lifted the sheet; with his clumsy, bandaged hands he fanned himself, yelping frustration while he wolfed at her breast. And one night she helped him; with her cool, powdered hand, she took hold of him. At her breast, he stopped nursing, he just nuzzled her. "Ar," he moaned. He had lost the P. Once a Garp, then an Arp, now only an Ar; she knew he was dying. He had just one vowel and one consonant left. When he came, she felt his shot wet and hot in her hand. Under the sheet, it smelled like a greenhouse in summer, absurdly fertile, growth gotten out of hand; you could plant anything there and it would blossom. Garp's sperm struck Jenny that way: If you spilled a little in a greenhouse, babies would sprout out of the dirt. She gave the matter 24 hours of thought.

"Garp?" Jenny whispered. She unbuttoned the blouse of her dress and brought forth the breasts she had always considered too large. "Garp?" she whispered in his ear; his eyelids fluttered, his lips reached. Around them was a white shroud, a curtain on runners that enclosed them in the ward. On one side of Garp was an External, a flame-thrower victim, slippery with salve, swaddled in gauze. He had no eyelids, so it appeared he was always watching, but he was blind. Jenny took off her sturdy nurse's shoes, unfastened her white stockings, stepped out of her dress. She touched her finger to Garp's lips.

On the other side of Garp's white-shrouded bed was a Vital Organ patient on his way to becoming an Absentee. He had lost most of his lower intestine and his rectum; now a kidney was giving him trouble and his liver was driving him crazy. He had terrible nightmares that he was being forced to urinate and defecate, though this was ancient history for him. He was actually quite unaware when he did those things, and he did them through tubes into rubber bags. He groaned frequently and, unlike Garp, he groaned in whole words. "Shit," he groaned.

"Garp?" Jenny whispered. She stepped out of her slip and her panties; she took off her bra and pulled back the sheet.

"Christ," said the External, softly; his lips were blistered with burns.

"Goddamn shit!" said the Vital Organ man.

"Garp," said Jenny. She took hold of his erection and straddled him.

"Aaa," said Garp. Even the R was gone. He was reduced to a vowel sound to express his joy or his sadness. "Aaa," he said, as Jenny drew him inside her and sat on him with all her weight.

"Garp?" she asked. "Good? That's good, Garp."

"Good," he agreed, distinctly. But it was only a word from his wrecked memory, thrown clear for a moment when he came inside her. It was the first and last true word that Jenny Fields heard him speak: good. As he shrank inside her and his vital stuff seeped from her and was warm on his belly, he was once again reduced to "Aaas"; he closed his eyes and slept. When Jenny offered him her breast, he wasn't hungry.

"God," cried the External, being very gentle with the D; his tongue had been burned, too.

"Piss!" snarled the Vital Organ man.

Jenny washed Garp and herself with warm water and soap from a little white-enamel hospital bowl. She wasn't going to douche, of course, and she had no doubt that the magic had worked. She felt more receptive than prepared soil, the nourished earth, and she had felt Garp shoot up inside her as generously as a hose in summer (as if he could water a lawn).

She never did it with him again. There was no reason; she didn't particularly enjoy it. From time to time, she helped him with her hand, and when he cried for it, she gave him her breast; but in a few weeks, he had no more erections. When they took the bandages off his hands, even the healing process seemed to be arrested; they wrapped him back up again. He lost all interest in nursing. His dreams struck Jenny as the dreams a fish might have. He was back in the womb, Jenny knew; he resumed a fetal position, tucked up small in the center of the bed. He made no sound at all. One morning, when Jenny watched him kick with his little, weak feet, she imagined she felt a kick inside. Though it was too soon for the real thing, she knew the real thing was on its way.

Soon Garp stopped kicking. He still got his oxygen by breathing air with his lungs, but Jenny knew this was simply an example of human adaptability. He wouldn't eat; they had to feed him intravenously, so once again he was attached to a kind of umbilical cord. Jenny anticipated his last phase with some anxiousness. Would there be a struggle at the end, like the sperm's frantic struggle? Would the sperm shield be lifted and the naked egg wait, expectantly, for death? In little Garp's return trip, how would his soul at last divide? But the phase passed without Jenny's observation. One day, when she was off duty, Technical Sergeant Garp died.

"When else could he have died?" Garp has written. "With my mother off duty was the only way he could escape."

"Of course, I felt something when he died," Jenny wrote in her diary. "But the best of him was inside me. That was the best thing for both of us, the only way he could go on living, the only way I wanted to have a child. That the rest of the world finds this an immoral act only shows me that the rest of the world doesn't respect the rights of an individual."

It was 1943. When Jenny's pregnancy was apparent, she lost her job. Of course, it was all that her parents and her brothers had expected; they weren't surprised; Jenny had long ago stopped trying to convince them of her purity. She moved through the big corridors in the parental estate at Dog's Head Harbor like a satisfied ghost; her composure alarmed her family and they left her alone. Secretly, Jenny was quite happy, but with all the musing she must have done about this expected child, it's a wonder she never gave a thought to names.

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 thought she had burped, but her mother whispered to him: "The name is Garp."

"Garp?" he said. They knew they might find out who the 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?" her father asked crossly.

"I never knew," Jenny mumbled. That was 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 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 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. I used to say that they were just initials, but they never believed me. So I would 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.