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Since he was too small for football, and soccer certainly involved a ball, he ran long distance, which was called cross-country, but he stepped in too many puddles and suffered all fall from a perpetual cold.
When the winter sports season opened, Jenny was distressed at how much restlessness her son exhibited; she criticized him for making too much of a mere athletic decision--why didn't he know what form of exercise he might prefer? But sports did not feel like recreation to Garp. Nothing felt like recreation to Garp. From the beginning, he appeared to believe there was something strenuous to achieve. ("Writers do not read for fun," Garp would write, later, speaking for himself.) Even before young Garp knew he was going to be a writer, or knew what he wanted to be, it appears he did nothing "for fun."
Garp was confined to the infirmary on the day he was supposed to sign up for a winter sport. Jenny would not let him get out of bed. "You don't know what you want to sign up for, anyway," she told him. All Garp could do was cough.
"This is silly beyond mortal belief," Jenny told him. "Fifteen years in this snotty, rude community and you fall to pieces trying to decide what game you're going to play to occupy your afternoons."
"I haven't found my sport, Mom," Garp croaked. "I've got to have a sport."
"Why?" Jenny asked.
"I don't know," he moaned. He coughed and coughed.
"God, listen to you," Jenny complained. "I'll find you a sport," she said. "I'll go over to the gym and sign you up for something."
"No!" Garp begged.
And Jenny pronounced what was for Garp, in his four years at Steering, her litany. "I know more than you do, don't I?" she said. Garp fell back on his sweaty pillow.
"Not about this, Mom," he said. "You took all the courses but you never played on any of the teams."
If Jenny Fields recognized this as a rare oversight, she did not admit it. It was a typical Steering December day, the ground glassy with frozen slush and the snow gray and muddy from the boots of eight hundred boys. Jenny Fields bundled up and trudged across the winter-grim campus like the convinced and determined mother she was. She looked like a nurse resigned to bring what slim hope she could to the bitter Russian front. In such a manner Jenny Fields approached the Steering gym. In her fifteen years at Steering, Jenny had never been there; she had not known it was important. At the far end of the Steering campus, ringed by the acres of playing fields, the hockey rinks, the tennis courts like the cross section of a huge, human hive, Jenny saw the giant gymnasium loom out of the dirty snow like a battle she had not anticipated, and her heart filled with worry and with gloom.
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 entranceway. 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 clublike 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 babyshit). 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 fleece-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 another 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, postoperative 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 fats 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 overimpressed 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 Carlis
le 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.
