Dog’s Head Harbor

Dog’s Head Harbor is the Fields family’s large coastal estate in New Hampshire. First a private home set apart from the family’s shoe-making fortune, it becomes Jenny Fields’s refuge for women, a place where the Garp family recovers from catastrophe, and ultimately the headquarters of the Fields Foundation. Its changing uses make the house more than a setting: it is a durable structure of care, carrying Jenny’s nursing work into the lives of those who come after her.

The Fields family estate

The Fields family’s wealth came from shoes, although Jenny’s mother brought money of her own to her marriage. By the time the family lived at Dog’s Head Harbor, it had left the shoe factories behind. Jenny returned to the estate during days and nights off from nursing, partly to satisfy her mother and to show that her work had not made her careless in speech or character. The house thus held a tension between inherited comfort and Jenny’s chosen life of service.

The family’s footwear business remained visible on Jenny’s journeys between Boston and home. Her brothers rode the train with her, following their father’s rule about which side to sit on so that the family would have to look toward the grimy source of its independence. The main Fields Factory Outlet at Haverhill stood beside the railway, marked by a billboard showing a work shoe advancing above the railroad yard. The factory and the estate belonged to the same family history, but they represented sharply different scenes: labor and commercial fortune on one side, the shore-side mansion on the other.

Dog’s Head Harbor also framed the losses of Jenny’s family. One brother died in the war; her other brother was later drowned in a sailboat accident several miles offshore from the estate. His widow worried about whether enough time had passed for her to emerge from mourning, anxious to offend Jenny’s mother. Jenny told her that she did not have to mourn if she did not feel like mourning, and later described the woman as needing to be told what to feel. The estate’s family history therefore includes both the pressures of convention and Jenny’s resistance to letting convention dictate another person’s grief.

A landscape of danger and return

The shoreline was not an uncomplicated sanctuary. The miles of beach in front of the estate were known for a powerful undertow, a danger the Garp parents repeatedly warned their children about. Years later, Duncan recalled how the family had cautioned Walt as he grew old enough to approach the water, and how Walt had retreated when warned. The repeated warnings became a family story, linking Dog’s Head Harbor’s beauty and familiarity to the real hazards of the sea.

The estate also became a place to return to after loss or bodily and emotional difficulty. Jenny had spent years nursing women in her white uniform, and at Dog’s Head Harbor she again cared for people in need. She suggested that the Garp family move into the estate after the car crash. The large house offered rooms for them, while the sea’s steady presence accompanied their recovery. Jenny helped Duncan as he healed and adjusted to life with an artificial eye; his parents struggled to look at the injury, while his grandmother could face it as part of her work as a nurse.

The house had a longer history of such recoveries. Jenny’s wounded women had lived there and regained their footing, and Roberta Muldoon had stayed with Jenny through difficult periods of her sex reassignment. Roberta had not managed to live alone or with several men, and she was again at Dog’s Head Harbor when the Garps arrived. The estate’s role as a refuge was therefore not created by the crash: the family’s arrival joined an existing community and a history of survival.

The Garp family’s convalescence

During the Garp family’s recovery, Dog’s Head Harbor shaped their routines. As summer visitors came, they exercised and played on the beach or in the water early in the day, then watched the world from the shaded porches and withdrew into the large, cool house during the busier hours. The estate offered room to retreat without severing the family from the shoreline around which their recovery was organized.

Roberta helped Duncan regain confidence and adapt to the effects of losing sight in one eye. When she tried to play catch with him on the beach, the ball struck his face because he had difficulty judging its distance. She abandoned the game and instead drew football plays in the sand, recalling her career as a tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles, including touchdowns, dropped balls, penalties, and hard tackles. When the story touched on the blind side Duncan would have to live with, she changed the subject. The beach thus became a place where physical limitation could be met with companionship and tact rather than treated as the whole of a person’s life.

Jenny’s estate also offered Garp a setting from which to begin writing again. During convalescence he started with outlines and character studies, approaching the frightening center of his novel through a more distant character. In late summer he began The World According to Bensenhaver. At the same time, the family’s stay offered a way for Helen and Garp to leave the unwanted familiarity of their house and driveway. The estate could serve both as a place of practical recovery and as a means of creating distance from painful surroundings.

From private home to foundation

After Jenny’s death, Garp discovered that her estate was considerable and that she had named him executor of her wishes concerning the mansion and her money. The appointment caused friction between Garp and Roberta, who was hurt that Jenny had not chosen her. They ultimately established the Fields Foundation, turning the estate’s private history of nursing and refuge into an organized institution.

Roberta became the Foundation’s in-residence administrator. Under her direction, Dog’s Head Harbor functioned at once as a writers’ colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic; its small, well-lit attic rooms also provided space and solitude for painters. Women seeking assistance applied to Roberta, who assembled a staff and worked with a board of trustees to decide among applicants. The work brought Garp into regular arguments with the women involved, creating a new source of friction in his life after he had stopped writing.

The mansion’s rooms were adapted to the Foundation’s varied residents. The downstairs included two kitchens, four full bathrooms, private sleeping space for as many as twelve people, former parlors and dens repurposed as conference rooms, and a large dining room where people gathered alongside food and mail. Its sociable common spaces suited some residents better than others. Garp joked that the downstairs might suit people at risk of suicide because the sea would be the alternative to jumping from a window; the line also registered the house’s unavoidable proximity to the ocean and the vulnerable people it sheltered.

Roberta’s authority joined warmth to practical force. She could persuade residents to reconsider a dangerous course and, when persuasion failed, physically overpower them. She also made the local police allies of the Foundation; officers sometimes collected distressed residents from the beach or village boardwalk and returned them gently to her. Their respect for Roberta was tied to her past as Robert Muldoon, a formidable football player. The mansion’s care thus depended not only on its rooms but on Roberta’s ability to build relationships beyond its grounds.

The Foundation’s work did not eliminate disagreement over whom it should help. Garp proposed that Ellen Jamesians be excluded from aid, and another board member seconded the motion. The moment exposed a conflict between the institution’s mission of support and Garp’s hostility toward the movement. Even as the estate continued Jenny’s work of sheltering women, its governance became a site where the limits and principles of that work were contested.

A continuing community

Dog’s Head Harbor remained part of the Garps’ life after the Foundation was established. Garp and Roberta ran between the estate and Steering, a six-mile route that connected the mansion with their other home and their shared routines. When Roberta went to New York, Garp ran alone. The road made the estate a recurring destination rather than a sealed retreat, joining daily exercise to the place where Jenny’s legacy had taken institutional form.

After Jenny was murdered, Roberta was at Dog’s Head Harbor with a group of women and called Garp in tears. He imagined the women gathered there with their leader gone. The house had become a community whose members shared the news and the immediate shock of Jenny’s death; Roberta’s grief made clear that Jenny’s work and presence had bound them together.

Roberta herself later died at the estate. After running wind sprints on the beach, she sat in the porch hammock and asked Ellen James to bring her iced tea. She called for another glass, saying she wanted a whole life like that one. When Ellen returned, Roberta was dead in the hammock. Her death took place within the domestic rhythm of the house she had helped administer, with the shoreline and porch still part of ordinary life.

The loss fell especially hard on Duncan, who was hospitalized in Vermont and remembered how often Roberta had helped the family, especially him. Ellen, whom Roberta had supported, took over the administrator’s job at the Fields Foundation and had to fill the large place Roberta had left. In this succession, Dog’s Head Harbor’s meaning endured beyond any single caregiver: the mansion remained a refuge and a working community, passing responsibility from Jenny to Roberta and then to Ellen.