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an individual.”
    It was 1943. When Jenny’s pregnancy was apparent, she lost her job. Of course, it was all that her parents and brothers had expected; they weren’t surprised. Jenny had long ago stopped trying to convince them of her purity. She moved through the big corridors in the parental estate at Dog’s Head Harbor like a satisfied ghost. Her composure alarmed her family, and they left her alone. Secretly, Jenny was quite happy, but with all the musing she must have done about this expected child, it’s a wonder she never gave a thought to names.
    Because, when Jenny Fields gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy, she had no name in mind. Jenny’s mother asked her what she wanted to name him, but Jenny had just delivered and had just received her sedative; she was not cooperative.
    “Garp,” she said.
    Her father, the footwear king, thought she had burped, but her mother whispered to him, “The name is
Garp
.”
    “Garp?” he said. They knew they might find out who this baby’s father was, this way. Jenny, of course, had not admitted a thing.
    “Find out if that’s the son of a bitch’s first name or last name,” Jenny’s father whispered to Jenny’s mother.
    “Is that a first name or a last name, dear?” Jenny’s mother asked her.
    Jenny was very sleepy. “It’s Garp,” she said. “Just Garp. That’s the whole thing.”
    “I think it’s a last name,” Jenny’s mother told Jenny’s father.
    “What’s his
first
name?” Jenny’s father asked crossly.
    “I never knew,” Jenny mumbled. This is true; she never did.
    “She never knew his first name!” her father roared.
    “Please, dear,” her mother said. “He
must
have a first name.”
    “Technical Sergeant Garp,” said Jenny Fields.
    “A goddamn soldier, I knew it!” her father said.
    “Technical Sergeant?” Jenny’s mother asked her.
    “T. S.,” Jenny Fields said. “T. S. Garp. That’s my baby’s name.” She fell asleep.
    Her father was furious. “T. S. Garp!” he hollered. “What kind of a name for a baby is
that
?”
    “All his own,” Jenny told him, later. “It’s his
own
goddamn name, all his own.”
    “It was great fun going to school with a name like that,” Garp has written. “The teachers would ask you what the initials stood for. First I used to say that they were
just
initials, but they never believed me. So I’d have to say, “Call my mom. She’ll tell you.” And they would. And old Jenny would give them a piece of her mind.”
    Thus was the world given T. S. Garp: born from a good nurse with a will of her own, and the seed of a ball turret gunner—his last shot.

BLOOD AND BLUE
    T.S. GARP always suspected he would die young. “Like my father,” Garp wrote, “I believe I have a knack for brevity. I’m a one-shot man.”
    Garp narrowly escaped growing up on the grounds of an all-girls’ school, where his mother was offered the position of school nurse. But Jenny Fields saw the possibly harrowing future that would have been involved in this decision: her little Garp surrounded by women (Jenny and Garp were offered an apartment in one of the dorms). She imagined her son’s first sexual experience: a fantasy inspired by the sight and feel of the all-girls’ laundry room, where, as a game, the girls would bury the child in soft mountains of young women’s underwear. Jenny would have liked the job, but it was for Garp’s sake that she turned down the offer. She was hired instead by the vast and famous Steering School, where she would be simply one more school nurse among many, and where the apartment offered her and Garp was in the cold, prison-windowed wing of the school’s infirmary annex.
    “Never mind,” her father told her. He was irritated with her that she chose to work at all; there was money enough, and he’d have been happier if she’d gone into hiding at the family estate in Dog’s Head Harbor until her bastard son had grown up and moved away. “If the child has any native