The soldier screamed. On his feet and falling back, he 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, later. "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. Someone else in the theater was whimpering, in fright.
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 keen 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 immediate attention, but the soldier was not 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 nurse's uniform. They quickly realized she had done it. The theater lackeys would not let her touch the fainted soldier, and 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. They were 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 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 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 uniform was so besmirched.
"I'm a good girl," Jenny told them.
"Jennifer," said the older one, and 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 Mother," 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 that 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 tiny soldier, all in brown, was climbing down from Uncle Sam's big hands. The soldier was going to land on a map of Europe. The words under the poster said: SUPPORT OUR BOYS! Jenny's oldest brother looked at Jenny looking at the poster.
"And don't get involved with soldiers," he added, though in a very few months he would be a soldier himself. He would be one of the soldiers who wouldn't come home from the war. He would break his mother's heart, an act he once spoke of with distaste.
Jenny's only other brother would be killed in a sailboat accident long after the war was over. He would be drowned several miles offshore from the Fields' family estate at Dog's Head Harbor. Of his grieving wife, Jenny's mother would say, "She's still young and attractive, and the children aren't obnoxious. At least not yet. After a decent time, I'm sure she'll be able to find someone else." It was to Jenny that her brother's widow eventually spoke, almost a year after the drowning. She asked Jenny if she thought a "decent time" had passed and she could begin whatever had to be begun "to find someone else." She was anxious about offending Jenny's mother. She wondered if Jenny thought it would be all right to emerge from mourning.
"If you don't feel like mourning, what are you mourning for?" Jenny asked her. In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: "That poor woman needed to be told what to feel."
"That was the stupidest woman my mother said she ever met," Garp wrote. "And she had gone to Wellesley."
But Jenny Fields, when she said good-night to her brothers at her small rooming house near Boston Mercy, 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, which 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 love-making; they were used for general feminine hygiene, and in venereal cases. To Jenny Fields a douche bag was a gentler, more commodious version of the Valentine irrigator.
Jenny opened all her mother's packages. In each one was a douche bag. "Please use it, dear!" her mother had begged her. Jenny knew that her mother, though she meant well, assumed that Jenny's sexual activity was considerable and 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 your 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.
That was the beginning, of course, of the book that many years later would make Jenny Fields famous. However crudely put, her autobiography was said to bridge the usual gap between literary merit and popularity, although Garp claimed that his mother's work had "the same literary merit as the Sears, Roebuck catalog."
* * *
--
But what made Jenny Fi
elds vulgar? Not her legal brothers, not the man in the movie theater who stained her uniform. Not her mother's douche bags, though these were responsible for Jenny's eventual eviction. Her landlady (a fretful woman who for obscure reasons of her own suspected that every woman was on the verge of an explosion of lasciviousness) discovered that there were nine douche bags in Jenny's tiny room and bath. A matter of guilt by association: in the mind of the troubled landlady, such a sign indicated a fear of contamination beyond even the landlady's fear. Or worse, this profusion of douche bags represented an actual and awesome need for douching, the conceivable reasons for which penetrated the worst of the landlady's dreams.
Whatever she made of the twelve pairs of nursing shoes cannot even be hinted. Jenny thought the matter so absurd--and found her own feelings toward her parents' provisions so ambiguous--that she hardly protested. She moved.
But this did not make her vulgar. Since her brothers, her parents, and her landlady assumed a life of lewdness for her--regardless of her own, private example--Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive. She took a small apartment, which prompted a new assault of packaged douche bags from her mother and a stack of nursing shoes from her father. 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 no 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 at Boston Mercy; in an army field hospital, she assumed, it could only be worse.
First of all, she would have missed the babies. That was really why she stayed, when so many were leaving. 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 these 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 own child, with a life ahead of them--just the two of them. A baby with no strings attached, thought Jenny Fields. An almost virgin birth. At least, no future peter treatment would be necessary.
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.
"Don't you believe you're a good woman?" she'd ask them. Most of them thought they were.
"And isn't your baby beautiful?" Most of them thought their babies were.
"And the father? What was he like?" A bum, many thought. A swine, a lout, a liar--a no-good run-out fuck-around of a man! But he's dead! sobbed a few.
"Then you're better off, aren't you?" Jenny asked.
Some of them came around to seeing it her way, but Jenny's reputation at the hospital suffered for her crusade. The hospital policy toward unwed mothers was not generally so encouraging.
"Old Virgin Mary Jenny," the other nurses said. "Doesn't want a baby the easy way. Why not ask God for one?"
In her autobiography, 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."
And that was what made her vulgar, too. (And that was where she got her famous title: A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.)
Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy. Jenny told the other nurses that she would one day find a man to make her pregnant--just that, and 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 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 baby'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 would-be child with such handicaps.
One of the other nurses' boyfriends treated her most cruelly; he frightened her in the hospital cafeteria by handing her a milk glass nearly full of a cloudy, viscous substance.
"Sperm," he said, nodding at 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. 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 dumped 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 seemed too 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 to be superior to them. Nobody's colleagues appreciate this."
So they initiated a get-tough policy with Jenny Fields. 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.
Thus they separated Jenny Fields 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 Boston Mercy's intensive care 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 that she also 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 patients, and there were always the terminal cases. There were the usual elderly patients, 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 non-accidents that happened to the soldiers; she came up with her own categories for them.
1. Their were the men who'd been burned; for the most part, they'd been burned on board ship (the most complicated cases came from Chelsea Naval Hospital), but they'd also been burned in airplanes and on the ground. Jenny called them the Externals.
2. 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.
3. There were the men whose injuries seemed almost mystical, to Jenny; they were 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 th
e Absentees. Occasionally, one of the Absentees had External or Vital Organ damage as well; all the hospital had a name for them.
4. 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 a non-accident in the air over France.
"The ball turret gunner," Garp wrote, "was a member of the bomber's crew who was among the most vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire from the ground. That was called flak; flak often looked to the gunner like fast-moving ink flung upward and spread on the sky as if the sky were a blotter. The little man (for in order to fit in the ball turret, a man was better off if he was small) crouched with his machine guns in his cramped nest--a cocoon in which he resembled one of those insects trapped in glass. This ball turret was a metal sphere with a glass porthole; it was set into the fuselage of a B-17 like a distended navel--like a nipple on the bomber's belly. In this tiny dome were two fifty-caliber machine guns and a short, small man whose chore was to track in his gunsights a fighter plane attacking his bomber. When the turret moved, the gunner revolved with it. There were wooden handles with buttons on the tops to fire the guns; gripping these trigger sticks, the ball turret gunner looked like some dangerous fetus suspended in the bomber's absurdly exposed amniotic sac, intent on protecting his mother. These handles also steered the turret--to a cut-off point, so that the ball turret gunner would not shoot off the props forward.
"With the sky under him, the gunner must have felt especially cold, appended to the plane like an afterthought. Upon landing, the ball turret was retracted--usually. Upon landing, an unretracted ball turret would send up sparks--as long and violent as automobiles--off the old tarmac."
Technical Sergeant Garp, the late gunner whose familiarity with violent death cannot be exaggerated, served with the Eighth Air Force--the air force that bombed the Continent from England. Sergeant Garp had experience as a nose gunner in the B-17C and a waist gunner in the B-17E before they made him a ball turret gunner.