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It was another four days before Bodger had reason to look in his glove compartment. The sneezing dean was out cruising the nighttime campus, with a new spotlight mounted on his car, when he was halted by a freshly recruited patrolman from campus security.
"For God's sake, I'm the dean," Bodger told the trembling youth.
"I don't know that for sure, sir," the patrolman said. "They told me not to let anyone drive on the footpaths."
"They should have told you not to tangle with Dean Bodger!" Bodger said.
"They told me that, too, sir," the patrolman said, "but I don't know that you're Dean Bodger."
"Well," said Bodger, who was secretly very pleased with the young patrolman's humorless devotion to his duty, "I can certainly prove who I am." Dean Bodger then remembered that his driver's license had expired, and he decided to show the patrolman his automobile registration instead. When Bodger opened the glove compartment, there was the deceased pigeon.
Meckler had struck again; and, again, there was no proof. The pigeon was not excessively ripe, not writhing with maggots (yet), but Dean Bodger's glove compartment was infested with lice. The pigeon was so dead that the lice were looking for a new home. The dean found his automobile registration as quickly as possible, but the young patrolman could not take his eyes off the pigeon.
"They told me they were a real problem around here," the patrolman said. "They told me how they got into everything."
"The boys get into everything," Bodger crooned. "The pigeons are relatively harmless, but the boys bear watching."
For what seemed to Garp like a long and unfair time, Jenny kept a very close watch on him. She really had always watched him closely, but she had learned to trust him, too. Now she made Garp prove to her that he could be trusted again.
In a community as small as Steering, news spread more easily than ringworm. The story of how little Garp climbed to the roof of the infirmary annex, and how his mother didn't know he was there, cast suspicion on them both--on Garp as a child who could ill influence other children, on Jenny as a mother who did not look after her son. Of course, Garp sensed no discrimination for a while, but Jenny, who was quick to recognize discrimination (and quick to anticipate it, too), felt once again that people were making unfair assumptions. Her five-year-old had gotten loose on the roof; therefore, she never looked after him properly. And, therefore, he was clearly an odd child.
A boy without a father, some said, has dangerous mischief forever on his mind.
* * *
--
"It's odd," Garp wrote, "that the family who would convince me of my own uniqueness was never close to my mother's heart. Mother was practical, she believed in evidence and in results. She believed in Bodger, for example, for what a dean did was at least clear. She believed in specific jobs: teachers of history, coaches of wrestling--nurses, of course. But the family who convinced me of my own uniqueness was never a family my mother respected. Mother believed that the Percy family did nothing."
Jenny Fields was not entirely alone in her belief. Stewart Percy, although he did have a title, did not have a real job. He was called the Secretary of Steering School, but no one ever saw him typing. In fact, he had his own secretary, and no one was very sure what she could have to type. For a while Stewart Percy appeared to have some connection with the Steering Alumni Association, a body of Steering graduates so powerful with wealth and sentimental with nostalgia that they were highly esteemed by the administration of the school. But the Director of Alumni Affairs claimed that Stewart Percy was too unpopular with the young alumni to be of use. The young alumni remembered Percy from the days when they had been students.
Stewart Percy was not popular with students, who themselves suspected Percy of doing nothing.
He was a large, florid man with the kind of false barrel chest that at any moment can reveal itself to be merely a stomach--the kind of bravely upheld chest that can drop suddenly and forcefully burst open the tweed jacket containing it, lifting the regimental-striped tie with the Steering School colors. "Blood and blue," Garp always called them.
Stewart Percy, whom his wife called Stewie--although a generation of Steering schoolboys called him Paunch--had a flat-top head of hair the color of Distinguished Silver. The boys said that Stewart's flat-top was
meant to resemble an aircraft carrier, because Stewart had been in the Navy in World War II. His contribution to the curriculum at Steering was a single course he taught for fifteen years--which was as long as it took the History Department to develop the nerve and necessary disrespect to forbid him to teach it. For fifteen years it was an embarrassment to them all. Only the most unsuspecting freshmen at Steering were ever suckered into taking it. The course was called "My Part of the Pacific," and it concerned only those naval battles of World War II which Stewart Percy had personally fought in. There had been two. There were no texts for the course; there were only Stewart's lectures and Stewart's personal slide collection. The slides had been created from old black and white photographs--an interestingly blurred process. At least one memorable class week of slides concerned Stewart's shore leave in Hawaii, where he met and married his wife, Midge.
"Mind you, boys, she was not a native," he would faithfully tell his class (although, in the gray slide, it was hard to tell what she was). "She was just visiting there, she didn't come from there," Stewart would say. And there would follow an endless number of slides of Midge's gray-blond hair.
All the Percy children were blond, too, and one suspected they would one day become Distinguished Silver, like Stewie, whom the Steering students of Garp's day named after a dish served them in the school dining halls at least once every week: Fat Stew. Fat Stew was made from another of the weekly Steering dining-hall dishes: Mystery Meat. But Jenny Fields used to say that Stewart Percy was made entirely of Distinguished Silver hair.
And whether they called him Paunch or Fat Stew, the boys who took Stewart Percy's "My Part of the Pacific" course were supposed to know already that Midge was not a Hawaiian native, though some of them really did have to be told. What the smarter boys knew, and what every member of the Steering community was nearly born knowing--and committed thereafter to silent scorn--was that Stewart Percy had married Midge Steering. She was the last Steering. The unclaimed princess of the Steering School--no headmaster had yet come her way. Stewart Percy married into so much money that he didn't have to be able to do anything, except stay married.
Jenny Fields' father, the footwear king, used to think of Midge Steering's money and shake in his shoes.
"Midge was such a dingbat," Jenny Fields wrote in her autobiography, "that she went to Hawaii for a vacation during World War II. And she was such a total dingbat," Jenny wrote, "that she actually fell in love with Stewart Percy, and she began to have his empty, Distinguished Silver children almost immediately--even before the war was over. And when the war was over, she brought him and her growing family back to the Steering School. And she told the school to give her Stewie a job."
"When I was a boy," Garp wrote, "there were already three or four little Percys, and more--seemingly always more--on the way."
Of Midge Percy's many pregnancies, Jenny Fields made up a nasty rhyme.
What lies in Midge Percy's belly,
so round and exceedingly fair?
In fact, it is really nothing
