A prayer for Owen Meany (17 page)

"Why should he?" my mother asked. The answer, which
was not forthcoming, was as obvious to my grandmother as it was to me: that the
most likely candidate for the unclaimed position of my father, and my mother's
mystery lover, was that "famous" singing teacher. But neither my
grandmother nor I dared to postulate this theory to my mother, and Dan Needham
was clearly untroubled by the ongoing singing lessons, and the ongoing one
night away; or else Dan possessed some reassuring piece of knowledge that
remained a secret from my grandmother and me.

"YOUR FATHER IS NOT THE SINGING TEACHER," Owen Meany
told me matter-of-factiy. "THAT WOULD BE TOO OBVIOUS."

"This is a real-life story, Owen," I said. "It's
not a mystery novel." In real life, I meant, there was nothing written
that the missing father couldn't be OBVIOUS-but I didn't really think it was
the singing teacher, either. He was only the most likely candidate because he
was the only candidate my grandmother and I could think of.

"IF IT'S HIM, WHY MAKE IT A SECRET?" Owen asked.
"IF IT'S HIM, WOULDN'T YOUR MOTHER SEE HIM MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK-OR NOT AT
ALL?"

Anyway, it was farfetched to think that the singing teacher was
the reason my mother and Dan didn't get married for four years. And so I
concluded what Owen Meany would call TOO OBVIOUS: that Dan was holding out for
more information, concerning me, and that my mother wasn't providing it. For
wouldn't it be reasonable of Dan to want to know the story of who my father
was? And I know that is a story my mother wouldn't have yielded to Dan. But
Owen rebuked me for this idea, too. "DON'T YOU SEE HOW MUCH DAN LOVES YOUR
MOTHER?" he asked me. "HE LOVES HER AS MUCH AS WE DO! HE WOULD NEVER
FORCE HER TO TELL HIM ANYTHING'."

I believe that now. Owen was right. It was something else: that
four-year delay of the obvious. Dan came from a very high-powered family; they
were doctors and lawyers, and they disapproved of Dan for not completing a more
serious education. To have started out at Harvard and not gone on to law
school, not gone on to medical school-this was criminal laziness; Dan came from
a family very keen about going on. They disapproved of him ending up as a mere
prep-school teacher, and of his indulging his hobby of amateur theatrical
performances-they believed these frivolities were unworthy of a grown-up's
interest! They disapproved of my mother, too-and that was the end of Dan having
any more to do with them. They called her "the divorcee"; I guess no
one in the Needham family had ever been divorced, and so that was the worst
thing you could say about a woman-even worse than calling my mother what she
really was: an unwed mother. Perhaps an unwed mother sounded merely hapless;
whereas a divorcee implied intent-a woman who was out to snare their dear
underachiever, Dan. I don't remember much about meeting Dan's family: at the
wedding, they chose not to mingle. My grandmother was outraged that there were
people who actually dared to condescend to her-to treat her like some
provincial fussbudget. I recall that Dan's mother had an acid tongue, and that,
when introduced to me, she said, "So this is the child." And then

        
 
there followed a period of time in which she
scrutinized my face-for any telltale indication of the race of my missing male
ancestor, I would guess. But that's all I remember. Dan refused to have anything
further to do with them. I cannot think that they played any role at all in the
four-year "engagement."

And what with all the comparing and contrasting of a theological
nature, there was no end of religious approval for matching Dan and my mother;
there was, in fact, double approval-the Congregationalists and the
Episcopalians appeared to be competing for the privilege of having Dan and my
mother come worship with them. In my opinion, it should have been no contest;
granted, I was happy to have the opportunity to lift Owen up in the air at
Sunday school, but that was the beginning and the end to any advantage the
Episcopalians had over the Congregationalists. There were not only those
differences I've already mentioned-of an atmospheric and architectural nature,
together with those ecclesiastical differences that made the Episcopal service
much more Catholic than the Congregational service-CATHOLIC, WITH A BIG C, as
Owen would say. But there were also vast differences between the Rev. Lewis
Merrill, whom I liked, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin-the rector of the Episcopal
Church-who was a bumpkin of boredom. To compare these two ministers as
dismissively as I did, I confess I was drawing on no small amount of snobbery
inherited from Grandmother Wheelwright. The Congregationalists had pastors-the
Rev. Lewis Merrill was our pastor. If you grow up with that comforting word,
it's hard to accept rectors-the Episcopal Church had rectors; the Rev. Dudley
Wiggin was the rector of Christ Church, Gravesend. I shared my grandmother's
distaste for the word rector-it sounded too much like rectum to be taken
seriously. But it would have been hard to take the Rev. Dudley Wiggin seriously
if he'd been a pastor. Whereas the Rev. Mr. Merrill had heeded his calling as a
young man-he had always been in, and of, the church-the Rev. Mr. Wiggin was a
former airline pilot; some difficulty with his eyesight had forced his early
retirement from the skies, and he had descended to our wary town with a
newfound fervor-the zeal of the convert giving him the healthy but frantic
appearance of one of those "elder" citizens who persist in entering
vigorous sporting competitions in the over-fifty category. Whereas Pastor
Merrill spoke an educated language-he'd been an English major at Princeton;
he'd heard Niebuhr and Tillich lecture at Union Theological- Rector Wiggin
spoke in ex-pilot homilies; he was a pulpit-thumper who had no doubt. What made
Mr. Merrill infinitely more attractive was that he was/w// of doubt; he
expressed our doubt in the most eloquent and sympathetic ways. In his
completely lucid and convincing view, the Bible is a book with a troubling
plot, but a plot that can be understood: God creates us out of love, but we
don't want God, or we don't believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to
Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us-at least, He continues to try to
get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick
of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without
any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless
universe. Although he knew all the best-or, at least, the least boring-stories
in the Bible, Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt
was the essence of faith, and not faith's opposite. By comparison, whatever the
Rev. Dudley Wiggin had seen to make him believe in God, he had seen
absolutely-possibly by flying an airplane too close to the sun. The rector was
not gifted with language, and he was blind to doubt or worry in any form;
perhaps the problem with his "eyesight" that had forced his early
retirement from the airlines was really a euphemism for the blinding power of
his total religious conversion-because Mr. Wiggin was fearless to an extent
that would have made him an unsafe pilot, and to an extent that made him a
madman as a preacher. Even his Bible selections were outlandish; a satirist
could not have selected them better. The Rev. Mr. Wiggin was especially fond of
the word "firmament"; there was always a firmament in his Bible
selections. And he loved all allusions to faith as a battle to be savagely
fought and won; faith was a war waged against faith's adversaries. "Take
the whole armor of God!" he would rave. We were instructed to wear
"the breastplate of righteousness"; our faith was a "shield"-
against "all the flaming darts of the evil one." The rector said he
wore a "helmet of salvation." That's from Ephesians; Mr. Wiggin was a
big fan of Ephesians. He also whooped it up about Isaiah-especially the part
when "the Lord is sitting upon a throne"; the rector was big on the
Lord upon a throne. The Lord is surrounded by seraphim. One of the seraphim
flies

 
 
to Isaiah, who is
complaining that he's "a man of unclean lips." Not for long; not
according to Isaiah. The seraphim touches Isaiah's mouth with "a burning coal"
and Isaiah is as good as new. That was what we heard from the Rev. Dudley
Wiggin: all the unlikeliest miracles.

"I DON'T LIKE THE SERAPHIM," Owen complained.
"WHAT'S THE POINT OF BEING SCARY?"

But although Owen agreed with me that the rector was a moron who
messed up the Bible for tentative believers by assaulting us with the worst of
God the Almighty and God the Terrible-and although Owen acknowledged that the
Rev. Mr. Wiggin's sermons were about as entertaining and convincing as a
pilot's voice in the intercom, explaining technical difficulties while the
plane plummets toward the earth and the stewardesses are screaming-Owen
actually preferred Wiggin to what little he knew of Pastor Merrill. Owen didn't
know much about Mr. Merrill, I should add; Owen was never a Congregationalist.
But Merrill was such a popular preacher that parishioners from the other
Gravesend churches would frequently skip a service of their own to attend his
sermons. Owen did so, on occasion, but Owen was always critical. Even when
Gravesend Academy bestowed the intellectual honor upon Pastor Merrill-of
inviting him to be a frequent guest preacher in the academy's nondenominational
church-Owen was critical.

"BELIEF IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL MATTER," he complained.
"IF HE'S GOT SO MUCH DOUBT, HE'S IN THE WRONG BUSINESS."

But who, besides Owen Meany and Rector Wiggin, had so little
doubt? Owen was a natural in the belief business, but my appreciation of Mr.
Merrill and my contempt for Mr. Wiggin were based on common sense. I took a
particularly Yankee view of them; the Wheelwright in me was all in favor of
Lewis Merrill, all opposed to Dudley Wiggin. We Wheelwrights do not scoff at
the appearance of things. Things often are as they appear. First impressions
matter. That clean, well-lit place of worship, which was the Congregational
Church-its pristine white clapboards, its tall, clear windows that welcomed the
view of branches against the sky-that was a first impression that lasted for
me; it was a model of purity and no-nonsense, against which the Episcopal gloom
of stone and tapestry and stained glass could pose no serious competition. And
Pastor Merrill was also good-looking-in an intense, pale, slightly
undernourished way. He had a boyish face-a sudden, winning, embarrassed smile
that contradicted a fairly constant look of worry that more usually gave him
the expression of an anxious child. An errant lock of hair flopped on his
forehead when he looked down upon his sermon, or bent over his Bible-his hair
problem was the unruly result of a pronounced widow's peak, which further
contributed to his boyishness. And he was always misplacing his glasses, which
he didn't seem to need-that is, he could read without them, he could look out
upon his congregation without them (at least not appearing to be blind); then,
all of a sudden, he would commence a frantic search for them. It was endearing;
so was his slight stutter, because it made us nervous for him-afraid for him,
should he have his eloquence snatched from him and be struck down with a crippling
speech impediment. He was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless;
on the contrary, he exhibited what hard work it was-to make his faith, in
tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter. And then,
to add to Mr. Merrill's appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from
California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been
one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes-a perfectly wholesome type, but
entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good
deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had
told her that health and energy and the Lord's work are harder to come by in
bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire. She suffered visibly. Her
blondness turned to dry straw; her cheeks and nose turned a raw salmon color,
her eyes watered- she caught every flu, every common cold there was; no
epidemic missed her. Aghast at the loss of her California color, she tried
makeup; but this turned her skin to clay. Even in summer, she couldn't tan; she
turned so dead white in the winter, there was nothing for her to do in the sun
but burn. She was sick all the time, and this cost her her energy; she grew
listless; she developed a matronly spread, and the vague, unfocused look of
someone over forty who might be sixty-or would be, tomorrow. All this happened
to Mrs. Merrill while her children were still small; they were sickly, too.
Although they were successful scholars, they were so often ill and missed so
many school

        
 
days that they had to repeat whole grades.
Two of them were older than I was, but not a lot older; one of them was even
demoted to my grade-I don't remember which one; I don't even remember which
sex. That was another problem that the Merrill children suffered: they were
utterly forgettable. If you didn't see the Merrill children for weeks at a
time, when you saw them again, they appeared to have been replaced by different
children. The Rev. Lewis Merrill had the appearance of a plain man who, with
education and intensity, had risen above his ordinariness; and his rise
manifested itself in his gift of speech. But his family labored under a
plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even
their proneness to illness, which was remarkable. It was said that Mrs. Merrill
had a drinking problem-?*r, at least, that her modest intake of alcohol was in
terrible conflict with her long list of prescription drugs. One of the children
once swallowed all the drugs in the house and had to have its stomach pumped.
And following a kind of pep talk that Mr. Merrill gave to the youngest Sunday
school class, one of his own children pulled the minister's hair and spit in
his face. When the Merrill children were growing up, one of them vandalized a
cemetery. Here was our pastor, clearly bright, clearly grappling with all the
most thoughtful elements of religious faith, and doubt; yet, clearly, God had
cursed his family. There was simply no comparable sympathy for the Rev. Dudley
Wiggin-Captain Wiggin, some of his harsher critics called him. He was a hale
and hearty type, he had a grin like a gash in his face; his smile was the smirk
of a restless survivor. He looked like a former downed pilot, a veteran of crash
landings, or shoot-outs in the sky-Dan Needham told me that Captain Wiggin had
been a bomber pilot in the war, and Dan would know: he was a sergeant himself,
in Italy and in Brazil, where he was a cryptographic technician. And even Dan
was appalled at the crassness with which Dudley Wiggin directed the Christmas
Pageant-and Dan was more tolerant of amateur theatrical performances than the
average Gravesend citizen. Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element
into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly
understood-threatening. And his wife, clearly, had not suffered. A former
stewardess, Barbara Wiggin was a brash, backslapping redhead; Mr. Wiggin called
her "Barb," which was how she introduced herself in various charity-inspired
phone calls.