A prayer for Owen Meany (14 page)

 
 
himself there-an
illusion that is made possible by the fresh snow covering the legion of dog
turds for which the St. Clair Reservoir is famous. In the snow, the clock tower
of Upper Canada College appears to preside over a preparatory school in a small
New England town; when it's not snowing, the cars and buses on the surrounding
roads are more numerous, the sounds of traffic are less muted, and the presence
of downtown Toronto seems closer. In the snow, the view of the clock tower of
Upper Canada College-especially from the distance of Kilbarry Road, or, closer,
from the end of Frybrook Road-reminds me of the clock tower of the Main Academy
Building in Graves-end; fastidious, sepulchral. In the snow, there is something
almost like New England about where I live on Russell Hill Road; granted,
Torontonians do not favor white clapboard houses with dark-green or black
shutters, but my grandmother's house, at  Front Street, was
brick-Torontonians prefer brick and stone. Inexplicably, Torontonians clutter
their brick and stone houses with too much trim, or with window trim and
shutters-and they also carve their shutters with hearts or maple leaves-but the
snow conceals these frills; and on some days, like today, when the snow is
especially wet and heavy, the snow turns even the brick houses white. Toronto
is sober, but not austere; Graves-end is austere, but also pretty; Toronto is
not pretty, but in the snow Toronto can look like Gravesend-both pretty and
austere. And from my bedroom window on Russell Hill Road, I can see both Grace
Church on-the-Hill and the Bishop Strachan chapel; how fitting that a boy whose
childhood was divided by two churches should live out his present life in view
of two more! But this suits me now; both churches are Anglican. The cold, gray
stones of both Grace Church and The Bishop Strachan School are also improved by
snow. My grandmother liked to say that snow was ' 'healing''-that it healed
everything. A typical Yankee point of view: if it snows a lot, snow must be
good for you. In Toronto, it's good for me. And the little children sledding at
the St. Clair Reservoir: they remind me of Owen, too-because I have fixed Owen
at a permanent size, which is the size he was when he was eleven, which was the
size of an average five-year-old. But I should be careful not to give too much
credit to the snow; there are so many things that remind me of Owen. I avoid
American newspapers and magazines, and American television-and other Americans
in Toronto. But Toronto is not far enough away. Just the day before yesterday-January
, -the front page of The Globe and Mail gave us a full account of President
Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Message. Will I ever learn? When I see such
things, I know I should simply not read them; I should pick up The Book of
Common Prayer, instead. I should not give in to anger; but, God forgive me, I
read the State of the Union Message. After almost twenty years in Canada, there
are certain American lunatics who still fascinate me.

"There must be no Soviet beachhead in Central
America," President Reagan said. He also insisted that he would not
sacrifice his proposed nuclear missiles in space-his beloved Star Wars plan-to
a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union. He even said that "a key
element of the U.S.-Soviet agenda" is "more responsible Soviet
conduct around the world''-as if the United States were a bastion of'
'responsible conduct around the world"! I believe that President Reagan
can say these things only because he knows that the American people will never
hold him accountable for what he says; it is history that holds you
accountable, and I've already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big
on history. How many of them even remember their own, recent history? Was
twenty years ago so long ago for Americans? Do they remember October , ? Fifty
thousand antiwar demonstrators were in Washington; I was there; that was the '
'March on the Pentagon''-remember? And two years later-in October of '-there
were fifty thousand people in Washington again; they were carrying flashlights,
they were asking for peace. There were a hundred thousand asking for peace in
Boston Common; there were two hundred fifty thousand in New York. Ronald Reagan
had not yet numbed the United States, but he had succeeded in putting
California to sleep; he described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and
comfort to the enemy." As president, he still didn't know who the enemy
was. I now believe that Owen Meany always knew; he knew everything. We were
seniors at Gravesend Academy in February of ; we watched a lot of TV at 
Front Street. President Kennedy said that U.S. advisers in Vietnam would return
fire if fired upon.

"I HOPE WE'RE ADVISING THE RIGHT GUYS," Owen Meany
said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation
exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and
fifty jet fighters were being sent there-"in response to Communist
expansion in Laos," President Kennedy said.

"I HOPE WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING," said Owen Meany. In
the summer of ', the summer following our first year at the university, the
Buddhists in Vietnam were demonstrating; there were revolts. Owen and I saw our
first self-immolation-on television. South Vietnamese government forces, led by
Ngo Dinh Diem-the elected president- attacked several Buddhist pagodas; that
was in August. In May, Diem's brother-Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the secret police
force-had broken up a Buddhist celebration by killing eight children and one
woman.

"DIEM IS A CATHOLIC," Owen Meany announced.
"WHAT'S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?"

That was the summer that Henry Cabot Lodge became the U.S.
ambassador to Vietnam; that was the summer that Lodge received a State
Department cable advising him that the United States would "no longer
tolerate" Ngo Dinh Nhu's "influence" on President Diem's regime.
In two months, a military coup toppled Diem's South Vietnamese government; the
next day, Diem and his brother, Nhu, were assassinated.

"IT LOOKS LIKE WE'VE BEEN ADVISING THE WRONG GUYS,"
Owen said. And the next summer, when we saw on TV the North Vietnamese patrol
boats in the Tonkin Gulf-within two days, they attacked two U.S.
destroyers-Owen said: "DO WE THINK THIS IS A MOVIE?"

President Johnson asked Congress to give him the power to
"take all necessary measures to repel an armed attack against the forces
of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Tonkin Gulf
Resolution was approved by the House by a unanimous vote of  to ; it
passed the Senate by a vote of  to . But Owen Meany asked my grandmother's
television set a question: "DOES THAT MEAN THE PRESIDENT CAN DECLARE A WAR
WITHOUT DECLARING IT?"

That New Year's Eve-I remember that Hester drank too much; she
was throwing up-there were barely more than twenty thousand U.S. military personnel
in Vietnam, and only a dozen (or so) had been killed. By the time the Congress
put an end to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution-in May of -there had been more than
half a million U.S. military personnel in Vietnam; and more than forty thousand
of them were dead. As early as , Owen Meany detected a problem of strategy. In
March, the U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder-to strike targets in
North Vietnam; to stop the flow of supplies to the South-and the first American
combat troops landed in Vietnam.

"THERE'S NO END TO THIS," Owen said. "THERE'S NO
GOOD WAY TO END IT."

On Christmas Day, President Johnson suspended Operation Rolling
Thunder; he stopped the bombing. In a month, the bombing began again, and the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened their televised hearings on the war.
That was when my grandmother started paying attention. In the fall of ,
Operation Rolling Thunder was said to be "closing in on Hanoi"; but
Owen Meany said, "I THINK HANOI CAN HANDLE IT."

Do you remember Operation Tiger Hound? How about Operation
Masher/WhiteWing/Than Phong II? That one produced , "known enemy
casualties." And then there was Operation Paul Revere/Than Phong -not
quite so successful, only  "known enemy casualties." And how
about Operation Maeng Ho ? There were , "known enemy casualties."

By New Year's Eve, , a total of , U.S. military had been killed
in action; it was Owen Meany who remembered that was  more casualties than
the enemy had suffered in Operation Maeng Ho.

"How do you remember such things, Owen?" my
grandmother asked him. From Saigon, General Westmoreland was asking for
"fresh manpower"; Owen remembered that, too. According to the State
Department, according to Dean Rusk-remember him?-we were "winning a war of
attrition."

"THAT'S NOT THE KIND OF WAR WE WIN," said Owen Meany.
By the end of ', there were five hundred thousand U.S.

 
 
military personnel
in Vietnam. That was when General West-moreland said, "We have reached an
important point where the end begins to come into view."

"WHAT END?" Owen Meany asked the general. "WHAT
HAPPENED TO THE 'FRESH MANPOWER'? REMEMBER THE 'FRESH MANPOWER'?"

I now believe that Owen remembered everything; a part of knowing
everything is remembering everything. Do you remember the Tet Offensive? That
was in January of '; "Tet" is a traditional Vietnamese holiday-the
equivalent of our Christmas and New Year's-and it was usual, during the Vietnam
War, to observe a cease-fire for the holiday season. But that year the North
Vietnamese attacked more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns-more than thirty
provincial capitals. That was the year President Johnson announced that he
would not seek reelection-remember? That was the year Robert Kennedy was
assassinated; you might recall that. That was the year Richard Nixon was
elected president; maybe you remember him. In the following year, in -the year
when Ronald Reagan described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and
comfort to the enemy"-there were still half a million Americans in
Vietnam. I was never one of them. More than thirty thousand Canadians served in
Vietnam, too. And almost as many Americans came to Canada during the Vietnam
War; I was one of them-one who stayed. By March of -when Lt. William Galley was
convicted of premeditated murder-I was already a landed immigrant, I'd already
applied for Canadian citizenship. It was Christmas, , when President Nixon
bombed Hanoi; that was an eleven-day attack, employing more than forty thousand
tons of high explosives. As Owen had said: Hanoi could handle it. What did he
ever say that wasn't right!  remember what he said about Abbie Hoffman,
for example-remember Abbie Hoffman? He was the guy who tried to
"levitate" the Pentagon off its foundations; he was quite a clown. He
was the guy who created the Youth International Party, the "Yippies";
he was very active in antiwar protests, while at the same time he conceived of
a meaningful revolution as roughly anything that conveyed irreverence with
comedy and vulgarity.

"WHO DOES THIS JERK THINK HE'S HELPING!" Owen said. It
was Owen Meany who kept me out of Vietnam-a trick that only Owen could have
managed.

"JUST THINK OF THIS AS MY LITTLE GIFT TO YOU"-that was
how he put it. It makes me ashamed to remember that I was angry with him for
taking my armadillo's claws. God knows, Owen gave me more than he ever took
from me-even when you consider that he took my mother.

THE ANGEL

IN HER BEDROOM at  Front Street, my mother kept a
.dressmaker's dummy; it stood at attention next to her bed, like a servant
about to awaken her, like a sentry guarding her while she slept-like a lover
about to get into bed beside her. My mother was good at sewing; in another
life, she could have been a seamstress. Her taste was quite uncomplicated, and
she made her own clothes. Her sewing machine, which she also kept in her
bedroom, was a far cry from the antique that we children abused in the attic;
Mother's machine was a strikingly modem piece of equipment, and it got a lot of
use. For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a
real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked
money-because my grandmother was generous to her-she was clever at keeping her
personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest
clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her
dressmaker's dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she'd return the
originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same
thing, and they never got angry at her-instead, they felt sorry for her, and
took the clothes back without an argument.

"My husband doesn't like it," she'd tell them. She
would laugh to my grandmother and me about it. "They must think I'm
married to a real tyrant! He doesn't like anything]" My grandmother,
keenly aware that my mother wasn't married at all, would laugh uncomfortably at
this, but it seemed such a solitary and innocent piece of mischief that I'm
sure Harriet Wheelwright did not object to her daughter having a little fun.
And Mother made beautiful clothes: simple, as I've described-most of them were
white or black, but they were made of the best material and they fitted her
perfectly. The dresses and blouses and skirts she brought home were
multicolored, and multipatterned, but my mother would expertly imitate the cut
of the clothes in basic black and white. As in many things, my mother could be
extremely accomplished without being in the least original or even inventive.
The game she acted out upon the perfect body of the dressmaker's dummy must
have pleased the frugal, Yankee part of her-the Wheelwright in her. My mother
hated darkness. There could never be enough light to suit her. I saw the dummy
as a kind of accomplice to my mother in her war against the night. She would
close her curtains only when she was undressing for bed; when she had her
nightgown and her robe on, she would open the curtains. When she turned out the
lamp on her bedside table, whatever light there was in the night flooded into
her room-and there was always some light. There were streetlights on Front
Street, Mr. Fish left lights on in his house all night, and my grandmother left
a light on-it pointlessly illuminated the garage doors. In addition to this
neighborhood light, there was starlight, or moonlight, or that unnameable light
that comes from the eastern horizon whenever you live near the Atlantic Coast.
There was not a night when my mother lay in her bed unable to see the
comforting figure of the dressmaker's dummy; it was not only her confederate
against the darkness, it was her double. It was never naked. I don't mean that
my mother was so crazy about sewing that there was always a dress-in-progress
upon the dummy; whether out of a sense of decency, or a certain playfulness
that my mother had not outgrown-from whenever it was that she used to dress up
her dolls-the dummy was always dressed. And I don't mean casually; Mother would
never allow the dummy to stand around in a slip. I mean that the dummy was
always completely dressed-and well dressed, too.