Read Online The World According To Garp by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

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