Jenny Fields’s conception of T. S. Garp occurs at the intersection of wartime injury, nursing, and a deliberate claim to reproductive choice. While caring for the dying Technical Sergeant Garp at Boston Mercy Hospital, Jenny becomes both his nurse and the person through whom he will have a child; she later describes the conception as a decision about her own life and body, even as others judge it immoral. The episode gives the novel’s central family its unusual beginning: a son is conceived by a woman who does not want a conventional marriage or a conventional account of motherhood.

Background: Wartime nursing

During the war, Jenny is reassigned from obstetrics to intensive care after hospital staff decide that she is too emotionally affected by the babies and mothers in her former ward. She resents their assumption that her wish to have a child means she lacks self-control. Jenny considers pregnancy part of an eventual plan, not an immediate necessity, and is not in a hurry. The reassignment nevertheless places her among the soldiers sent to Boston Mercy, whose injuries are not accidents of ordinary life but consequences of war.

Jenny organizes the soldiers’ conditions into her own categories. When Technical Sergeant Garp arrives, she has difficulty classifying him: he is an Absentee, profoundly docile, and also an External because of burns sustained in a fire aboard his transport ship. His brain has already been damaged by a crude lobotomy, and fragments lodged in his head may cause further deterioration. Medical uncertainty shadows his care; Jenny understands that his condition may continue to worsen, but she also sees him as a gentle, dependent person rather than only a set of injuries and prognoses.

A relationship formed through care

Garp’s speech has contracted to a single word, his hands are bandaged, and he depends on others for ordinary needs. His records describe recurring depression, and Jenny observes that he needs company and distraction more than sleep. She sits with him, rubs his back, speaks in an animated voice, and tries different radio programs to keep him engaged. When he is distressed, her attention is personal and patient rather than merely clinical.

As Garp’s condition regresses, Jenny interprets his sleeping movements and feeding behavior through her experience with babies. She comforts him and lets him suck her finger; eventually she offers him her breast, although she has no milk. The episode blurs, without erasing, the distinction between nursing and sexual intimacy. Jenny’s response is not presented simply as an impulsive bedside act: after the first sexual encounter, she gives the matter twenty-four hours of thought before deciding to proceed again. Her choice joins a longstanding wish for a child to the intimacy that has developed through daily care.

Conception and its immediate aftermath

On the night Jenny acts on that decision, the hospital ward remains a place of other patients’ suffering. A badly burned soldier lies nearby, and another patient is gravely ill. Their presence places Jenny and Garp’s private encounter inside the ward’s public reality: the scene does not suspend the hospital or Garp’s decline, but unfolds amid them.

Afterward, Jenny washes herself and Garp, and she decides against a procedure that might prevent pregnancy. She believes conception has occurred. She does not repeat the sexual encounter, but she continues to care for Garp, sometimes helping him in other ways and comforting him when he seeks to nurse. His physical regression continues; he eventually stops eating and must be fed intravenously. When Jenny is off duty, he dies. In her own later account, she acknowledges feeling his death while insisting that what mattered most of him was already within her, and that this was the way she wanted to have a child.

Pregnancy, birth, and Jenny’s account

In 1943, when Jenny’s pregnancy becomes apparent, she loses her job. Her family is not surprised, and Jenny has stopped trying to persuade them of her sexual purity. She remains composed at the family estate, privately happy about the child she expects. Yet she has not chosen a name. After giving birth to a nine-pound boy, she is asked by her mother what he should be called; Jenny answers with the only name she has: Garp.

The conception becomes a defining example of Jenny’s insistence on individual choice. In her autobiography, she argues that public condemnation of her conduct reflects a failure to respect individual rights. The novel does not make that conviction a simple escape from consequence: pregnancy costs Jenny her hospital position, exposes her to her family’s judgment, and gives her a son whose father dies before the birth. The episode’s significance lies in holding these facts together—the vulnerability of the dying soldier, the intimacy of nursing, Jenny’s desire for motherhood, and her refusal to let conventional ideas of sexual propriety determine her decision. Later, she continues to be understood through nursing: she cares for Garp as a boy, and, after her book brings women seeking advice to her, she becomes a source of practical counsel while remaining, in her son’s view, a nurse at heart.