“Garp will never finish a book, with children,” Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she'd had to wait eighteen years to begin her book.
“They're both hard workers,” Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.
“They'll have to be,” Jenny said.
“I don't know why they can't just live together,” Ernie said. “And if it works out, then let them get married—then let them have a baby.”
“I don't know why anyone wants to live with anyone else,” said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.
“Well, you like Garp living with you,” he reminded her, “and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she's away at school.”
“It's lust,” Jenny said, ominously. “The world is sick with lust.”
Ernie felt worried about her; he didn't know she was about to become rich and famous forever. “Do you want a beer?” he asked Jenny.
“No, thank you,” Jenny said.
“They're good kids,” Ernie reminded her.
“But lust gets them all, in the end,” said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.
It was the “lust” chapter of A Sexual Suspect that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need—his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.
“Lust makes the best men behave out of character,” wrote Jenny Fields—a line that particularly infuriated Garp.
“What the hell does she know about it?” he screamed. “She never felt it, not once. Some authority she is! It's like listening to a plant describe the motives of a mammal!”
But other reviewers were kinder to Jenny; though the more serious journals occasionally chided her for her actual writing, the media, in general, felt warmly toward the book. “The first truly feminist autobiography that is as full of celebrating one kind of life as it is full of putting down another,” somebody wrote. “This brave book makes the important assertion that a woman can have a whole life without a sexual attachment of any kind,” wrote somebody else.
“These days,” John Wolf had forewarned Jenny, “you're either going to be taken as the right voice at the right time, or you're going to be put down as all wrong.” She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse's uniform—in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers—felt discomfort at the word feminism. She was not sure what it meant, but the word reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment. After all, her formal training had been nursing. She said shyly that she'd only thought she made the right choice about how to live her life, and since it had not been a popular choice, she'd felt goaded into saying something to defend it. Ironically, a rash of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee found Jenny's choice very popular; they generated a small controversy by plotting their own pregnancies. For a while, in New York, this syndrome among singular-minded women was called “doing a Jenny Fields.” But Garp always called it “doing a Grillparzer.” As for Jenny, she felt only that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
John Wolf liked Jenny Fields very much, and he did what he could to warn her that she might not understand either the attacks or the praise her book would receive. But Jenny never wholly understood how “political” a book it was—or how it would be used as such a book.
“I was trained to be a nurse,” she said later, in one of her disarming interviews. “Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy—and I have always been bealthy—to help people who weren't healthy or who couldn't help themselves. I think it was simply in that spirit that I wanted to write a book, too.”
In Garp's opinion, his mother never stopped being a nurse. She had nursed him through the Steering School; she had been a plodding midwife to her own strange life story; finally, she became a kind of nurse to women with problems. She became a figure of famous strength; women sought her advice. With the sudden success of A Sexual Suspect, Jenny Fields uncovered a nation of women who faced making choices about how to live; these women felt encouraged by Jenny's own example of making unpopular decisions.
She could have started an advice column for any newspaper, but Jenny Fields felt through with writing, now —just as she'd decided, once before, that she was through with education; just as she'd decided she was through with Europe. In a way, she was never through with nursing. Her father, the shocked shoe king, died of a heart attack shortly after the publication of A Sexual Suspect; although Jenny's mother never blamed Jenny's book for the tragedy—and Jenny never blamed herself—Jenny knew that her mother could not live alone. Unlike Jenny Fields, Jenny's mother had developed a habit of living with someone else; she was old now, and Jenny thought of her as rattling about in the great rooms at Dog's Head Harbor, purposeless and wholly without her few remaining wits in the absence of her mate.
Jenny went to care for her, and it was at the Dog's Head Harbor Mansion that Jenny first began her role as counselor to the women who sought some comfort from her no-nonsense ability to make decisions.
“Even weird decisions!” Garp wailed, but he was happy, and taken care of. He and Helen had their first child, almost immediately. It was a boy named Duncan. Garp often joked that the reason his first novel was written with so many short chapters was because of Duncan. Garp wrote between feedings and naps and changes of diapers. “It was a novel of short takes,” he claimed, later, “and the credit is wholly Duncan's.” Helen was at school every day; she had agreed to have a child only if Garp would agree to take care of it. Garp loved the idea of never having to go out. He wrote and took care of Duncan; he cooked and wrote and took care of Duncan some more. When Helen came home, she came home to a reasonably happy homemaker; as long as Garp's novel progressed, no routine, however mindless, could upset him. In fact, the more mindless, the better. He left Duncan for two hours every day with the woman in the downstairs apartment; he went to the gym. He later became an oddity at the women's college where Helen taught—running endless laps around the field hockey field, or jumping rope for half an hour in a corner of the gymnasium reserved for gymnastics. He missed wrestling and complained to Helen that she should have gotten a job somewhere where there was a wrestling team; Helen complained that the English Department was too small, and she disliked having no male students in her classes, but it was a good job and she would keep it until something better came along.
Everything in New England is at least near everything else. They got to visit Jenny at the shore and Ernie at Steering. Garp would take Duncan to the Steering wrestling room and roll him around like a ball. “This is where your daddy wrestled,” he told him.
“It's where your daddy did everything,” Helen told Duncan, referring—of course—to Duncan's own conception, and to her first rainy night with Garp in the locked and empty Seabrook Gymnasium, on the warm crimson mats stretching wall to wall.
“Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
When Jenny's mother died, Jenny visited Helen and Garp more frequently, though Garp objected to what he called his mother's “entourage.” Jenny Fields traveled with a small core of adorers, or with occasional other figures who felt they were part of what would be called the women's movement; they often wanted Jenny's support or her endorsement. There was often a case or a cause that needed Jenny's pure white uniform on the speaker's platform, although Jenny rarely spoke very much or for very long.
After the other speeches, they would introduce the author of A Sexual Suspect. In her nurse's uniform, she was instantly recognizable. Into her fifties, Jenny Fields would remain an athletically attractive woman, crisp and plain. She would rise and say, “This is right.” Or, sometimes, “This is wrong'— depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who'd made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman's problem.
The logic behind all this made Garp fume and stew for days, and once an interviewer from a women's
