Founding of the Fields Foundation

The founding of the Fields Foundation is the posthumous realization of Jenny Fields’s wish to leave women a place to recover, work, or be alone. By making T. S. Garp executor of her estate and drawing Roberta Muldoon into the work, Jenny turns an inheritance into a practical, continuing form of care—and gives Garp a responsibility that changes the shape of his life after her death.

Jenny’s bequest and Garp’s reluctance

After Jenny dies, Garp discovers that her estate is substantial and that she has named him executor of her final wishes, including the use of her mansion for wounded women. He responds with bafflement and anger, asking Roberta why Jenny chose him rather than her. Roberta, who is hurt not to have been selected herself, cannot explain the choice at first. The bequest makes the son who has spent much of his life resisting other people’s demands responsible for interpreting and carrying out his mother’s intentions.

Garp puzzles for weeks over the single sentence in which Jenny states what she wants her money and seacoast house to accomplish: “I want to leave a place where worthy women can go to collect themselves and just be themselves, by themselves.” The wording offers a purpose but not a program. Garp immediately presses on its practical ambiguities: what the women should go there to do, and what kinds of grants the foundation should offer. His questions reveal the distance between inheriting a principle and knowing how to administer it.

From memorial wish to practical mission

Roberta interprets Jenny’s plan broadly: women might go to the house to get well, to be by themselves, or to write and paint; grants could support women’s needs beyond any single category. Garp raises the possibility of a home for unwed mothers and objects that “getting well” is too vague to define a grant. Their exchange gives the foundation its central challenge: to translate Jenny’s open-ended commitment into concrete assistance without reducing women’s circumstances to a narrow formula.

Roberta insists that Jenny wanted Garp to understand the legitimacy and complexity of women’s needs by making him deal with them. She is confident she would manage the work well and doubts Garp’s ability, yet accepts his role rather than replacing him. They agree to work together: Garp will be in charge, and Roberta will advise him and tell him when she thinks he is making a mistake. The arrangement preserves Jenny’s choice of executor while placing an experienced, forceful partner beside him.

Dog’s Head Harbor becomes the Foundation

Roberta becomes the Foundation’s in-residence administrator at Dog’s Head Harbor. Under her direction, the estate serves several purposes at once: it becomes a writers’ colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic, while its few well-lit garret rooms offer painters both light and solitude. This combination gives physical form to Jenny’s wish. The house is not only a memorial to its owner; it is a working refuge for women with different needs and forms of work.

As women learn of the Foundation, they write to Roberta to ask whether they qualify for aid. Roberta assembles a small staff of women, some of whom like Garp and some of whom dislike him, but all of whom argue with him. Twice a month, Roberta and the Board of Trustees meet with Garp to choose among applicants. The Foundation’s work thus rests on deliberation and disagreement, not on an automatic distribution of Jenny’s money: individual applications are considered by Roberta, staff, trustees, and the executor together.

Garp’s uneasy participation and the Foundation’s legacy

The estate’s porch becomes one setting for the Foundation’s meetings in good weather, but Garp increasingly refuses to go there. He calls the residents “weirdos-in-residence” and says they remind him of other times. The discomfort is attached to the very place Jenny chose and the people her project gathers under its roof. When he withdraws from the Dog’s Head Harbor meetings, the group meets instead at the Steering family mansion, where Garp feels somewhat more comfortable among the women trustees. His unease persists, but it does not erase his participation in the decisions.

The Foundation also extends Jenny’s influence beyond the immediate period of mourning. Before her death, Helen Holm had hoped Jenny could nurse Garp while Helen cared for Duncan during the family’s hospitalization at Dog’s Head Harbor. After Jenny’s death, the estate’s mission continues that pattern of care in institutional form: the house offers recovery and privacy, alongside places to write, paint, and seek birth-related advice. Garp’s task as executor converts a personal inheritance into sustained work on women’s behalf.

For Garp, the Foundation supplies a demanding connection to his mother after her death and ongoing friction when he has stopped writing. Roberta’s guidance and their arguments keep him engaged with the institution, while the Board’s twice-monthly meetings make Jenny’s broad wish consequential in particular decisions about applicants. The Foundation’s significance lies in this passage from maternal intention to shared administration: the house remains Jenny’s bequest, but its continuing purpose depends on Roberta, Garp, the staff, and the women who seek its help.