The World According to Garp

out of him and he lay gasping. The battered bird was hugged in his arms; its beak poked Bodger's bristly chin. One of the frightened boys cranked the spotlight down from the fourth floor and shone the beam directly on the dean. When Bodger saw that he clutched a pigeon to his breast, he threw the dead bird over the heads of the gaping boys and into the parking lot.

There was much fussing in the admittance room of the infirmary. Dr. Pell had arrived and he treated little Garp's leg—it was a ragged but superficial wound that needed a lot of trimming and cleaning, but no stitches. Nurse Creen gave the boy a tetanus shot while Dr. Pell removed a small, rusty particle from Jenny's eye; Jenny had strained her back supporting the weight of Garp and the rain gutter, but was otherwise fine. The aura of the admittance room was hearty and jocular, except when Jenny was able to catch her son's eye; in public, Garp was a kind of heroic survivor, but he must have been anxious about how Jenny would deal with him back in their apartment.

Dean Bodger became one of the few people at the Steering School to endear himself to Jenny. He beckoned her aside and confided to her that, if she thought it useful, he would be glad to reprimand the boy—if Jenny thought that, coming from Bodger, it would make a more lasting impression than any reprimand she could deliver. Jenny was grateful for the offer, and she and Bodger agreed upon a threat that would impress the boy. Bodger then brushed the feathers off his chest and tucked in his shirt, which was escaping, like a cream filling, from under his tight vest. He announced rather suddenly to the chattering admittance room that he would appreciate a moment alone with young Garp. There was a hush. Garp tried to leave with Jenny, who said, “No. The dean would like to speak to you.” Then they were alone. Garp didn't know what a dean was.

“Your mother runs a tight ship over here, doesn't she, boy?” Bodger asked. Garp didn't understand, but he nodded. “She runs things very well, if you ask me,” Dean Bodger said. “She should have a son whom she can trust. Do you know what trust means, boy?”

“No,” Garp said.

“It means: Can she believe you'll be where you say you'll be? Can she believe you'll never do what you're not supposed to do? That's trust, boy,” Bodger said. “Do you believe your mother can trust you?”

“Yes,” Garp, said.

“Do you like living here?” Bodger asked him. He knew perfectly well that the boy loved it; Jenny had suggested that this be the point Bodger touch.

“Yes,” Garp said.

“What do you hear the boys call me?” the dean asked.

“Mad Dog'?” asked Garp. He had heard the boys in the infirmary call someone “Mad Dog,” and Dean Bodger looked like a mad dog to Garp. But the dean was surprised; he had many nicknames, but he had never heard that one.

“I meant that the boys call me sir,” Bodger said, and was grateful that Garp was a sensitive child—he caught the injured tone in the dean's voice.

“Yes, sir.” Garp said.

“And you do like living here?” the dean repeated.

“Yes, sir,” Garp said.

“Well, if you ever go out on that fire escape, or anywhere near that roof again,” Bodger said. “you won't be allowed to live here anymore. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Garp said.

“Then be a good boy for your mother,” Bodger told him, “or you'll have to move to some place strange and far away.”

Garp felt a darkness surround him, akin to the darkness and sense of being far away that he must have felt while lying in the rain gutter, four stories above where the world was safe. He started to cry, but Bodger took his chin between one stumpish, deanly thumb and forefinger; he waggled the boy's head. “Don't ever disappoint your mother, boy,” Bodger told him. “If you do, you'll feel as bad as this all your life.”

“Poor Bodger meant well,” Garp wrote. “I have felt bad most of my life, and I did disappoint my mother. But Bodger's sense of what really happens in the world is as suspect as anyone's sense of that.”

Garp was referring to the illusion poor Bodger embraced in his later life: that it had been little Garp he caught falling from the annex roof, and not a pigeon. No doubt, in his advancing years, the moment of catching the bird had meant as much to the good-hearted Bodger as if he had caught Garp.

Dean Bodger's grasp of reality was often warped. Upon leaving the infirmary, the dean discovered that someone had removed the spotlight from his car. He went raging through every patient's room—even the contagious cases. “That light will one day shine on him who took it!” Bodger claimed, but no one came forward. Jenny was sure it had been Meckler, but she couldn't prove it. Dean Bodger drove home without his light. Two days later he came down with someone's flu and was treated as an outpatient at the infirmary. Jenny was especially sympathetic.

It was another four days before Bodger had reason to look in his glove compartment. The sneezing dean was out cruising the night-time 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