Garp is trapped on the infirmary roof

At five, Garp climbs onto the infirmary roof to catch a pigeon and becomes trapped in a corroded rain gutter above a four-story drop. His mother, Jenny Fields, reaches him from the fire escape, and both survive when the gutter breaks. The incident is at once a childhood adventure, a real danger narrowly survived, and the source of Dean Bodger’s enduring false memory: Bodger believes he caught Garp, though the falling body he caught was a pigeon. In Garp’s later account, the episode turns a rescue into a pointed example of how memory can remake what happened.

The search for Garp

Garp is five when Jenny, now head nurse, cannot find him after supper. He is usually free to wander through the infirmary and its annex, where he visits patients, runs errands, delivers messages, and sneaks them food. He particularly likes the athletic injuries, listening repeatedly to how the boys were hurt and examining their casts, slings, and bandages. Jenny’s ordinary way of calling him home is to page him over the intercom; that night, her call goes unanswered.

The intercom reaches even rooms Garp has been forbidden to enter, including the laboratory, surgery, and X-ray room. Since he cannot hear the page, Jenny concludes that he must be in trouble or outside the buildings. She organizes a search party from among the healthier, more mobile patients. On a foggy early-spring night, the boys search the parking lot, the forsythia, and dark corners of the infirmary. Jenny checks the laundry chute, the boiler room, and the stairwells—places where a child could have fallen or been badly hurt—before the search finally reveals that he is on the roof.

Trapped above the fire escape

Garp has climbed the ivy to the roof carrying a lacrosse stick, with which he has caught a pigeon. The route has taken him beyond the safe spaces Jenny knows to search: he cannot reach the rain gutter from the fire escape, and he is now lying on his belly in the gutter above it. When the rotten metal gives way under him, one leg breaks through and becomes wedged as the torn gutter cuts his pants and skin. He is frightened that calling out might bring down the already crumbling trough, so he lies still, watching the people searching below through a small rusted hole.

The pigeon remains in the gutter, making small sounds, while the lacrosse stick’s netted basket projects over the edge. From the fire escape, Jenny cannot see over the gutter or make out Garp in the fog and darkness. She hears his whisper before she sees him, then reaches up and finds his leg. The wound is bleeding, but she can hold him; he asks her not to let go, and she promises that she has him. At her voice, another piece of the gutter gives way, turning the rescue into the very collapse she feared.

The fall and rescue

Below, Dean Bodger has ordered the boys to pile mattresses beneath the fire escape in case Garp falls. Jenny is thrown down onto the landing with Garp and a substantial piece of gutter still around him. The pigeon, suddenly launched from the broken trough, flies into the spotlight and strikes the iron edge of the fire escape, breaking its neck. Its small body spirals toward the ground, outside the line of mattresses.

Bodger mistakes the falling pigeon for Garp. Convinced that a child is dropping toward him, he runs and dives with his arms outstretched, crying, “I’ve got you, son!” The bird hits his chest and knocks him onto his back. He ends up holding the pigeon, not the boy, before throwing the dead bird over the heads of the staring patients and into the parking lot. The simultaneous rescue above and mistaken rescue below create two sharply different versions of the same crisis: Jenny has actually held Garp fast, while Bodger’s dramatic attempt saves no child.

Garp’s injury is serious in appearance but superficial. At the infirmary, Dr. Pell trims and cleans the ragged wound without stitching it, and Nurse Creen gives him a tetanus shot. A small rusty particle is removed from Jenny’s eye, and she has strained her back while supporting Garp and the broken gutter. Her grip leaves a bruise on his calf in the shape of her fingerprints, a physical trace of the moment she refused to let him go.

Bodger’s memory and the episode’s significance

The episode continues after the immediate danger has passed. Garp remembers Bodger warning him not to disappoint his mother, but later judges the dean’s understanding of events as suspect. The belief at issue is specific: in later life, Bodger remembers catching little Garp as he fell from the annex roof. He had caught the pigeon. Garp allows that the false recollection may have meant as much to Bodger as if he had truly saved the child, without treating that emotional meaning as proof that the memory is accurate.

That distinction gives the rooftop incident its lasting significance in Garp’s account. The scene is not only an account of a child’s dangerous climb and his mother’s physical rescue; it also shows how fear and a powerful wish to have acted heroically can harden into a mistaken version of the past. The pigeon, mistaken for a falling boy beneath a spotlight, marks the gap between what happened and what Bodger later believes happened. Garp’s own writing preserves both layers: Jenny’s successful rescue and the dean’s enduring, mistaken story of having caught him.