A prayer for Owen Meany (18 page)

"Hi! It's Barb Wiggin! Is your mommy or your daddy
home?"

She was very much a barb, if not a nail, in Owen's side, because
she enjoyed picking him up by his pants-she would grab him by his belt, her
fist in his belly, and lift him to her stewardess's face: a frankly handsome,
healthy, efficient face. "Oh, you're a cute-y!" she'd tell Owen.
"Don't you ever dare grow!"

Owen hated her; he always begged Dan to cast her as a prostitute
or a child-molester, but The Gravesend Players did not offer many roles of that
kind, and Dan admitted to thinking of no other good use for her. Her own
children were huge, oafish athletes, irritatingly "well rounded." AW
the Wiggins played in touch-football games, which they organized, every Sunday
afternoon, on the parish-house lawn. Yet-incredibly!-we moved to the Episcopal
Church. It was not for the touch football, which Dan and my mother and I
despised. I could only guess that Dan and my mother had discussed having
children of their own, and Dan had wanted his children to be baptized as
Episcopalians-although, as I've said, the whole church business didn't appear
to matter very much to him. Perhaps my mother took Dan's Episcopalianism more
seriously than Dan took it. All that my mother said to me was that it was
better if we were all in one church, and that Dan cared more about his church
than she cared about hers-and wasn't it fun for me to be where Owen was? Yes,
it was. Thank Heavens for Hurd's Church; that was the unfortunate name of the
nondenominational church at Gravesend Academy-it was named after the academy's
founder, that childless Puritan, the Rev. Emery Kurd himself. Without the
neutral territory of Hurd's Church, my mother might have started an
interdenominational war-because where would she have been married? Grandmother
wanted the Rev. Lewis Merrill to perform the ceremony, and the Rev. Dudley
Wiggin had every reason to expect that he would get to officiate. Fortunately,
there was some middle ground. As a faculty member at Gravesend Academy, Dan
Needham had a right to use Hurd's Church-especially for the all-important wedding
and the quick-to-follow funeral-and Hurd's Church was a

        
 
masterpiece of inoffensiveness. No one could
remember the denomination of the school minister, a sepulchral old gentleman
who favored bow ties and had the habit of pinning his vestment to the floor
with an errant stab of his cane; he suffered from gout. His role in Hurd's
Church was usually that of a bland master of ceremonies, for he rarely
delivered a sermon himself; he introduced one guest preacher after another,
each one more flamboyant or controversial than himself. The Rev.
"Pinky" Scammon also taught Religion at Gravesend Academy, where his
courses were known to begin and end with apologies for Kierkegaard; but old
Pinky Scammon cleverly delegated much of the teaching of his Religion classes
to guest preachers, too. He would invariably entice Sunday's minister to stay
through the day Monday, and teach his Monday class; the rest of the week, Mr.
Scammon devoted to discussing with his students what the interesting guest had
said. The gray granite edifice of Hurd's Church, which was so plain it might
have been a Registry of Deeds or a Town Library or a Public Water Works, seemed
to have composed itself around old Mr. Scammon's gouty limp and his sepulchral
features. Hurd's was dark and shabby, but it was comfy-the pews were wide and
worn so smooth that they invited instant dozing; the light, which was absorbed
by so much stone, was gray but soft; the acoustics, which may have been Hurd's
only miracle, were unmuddied and deep. Every preacher sounded better than he
was there; every hymn was distinct; each prayer was resonant; the organ had a
cathedral tone. If you shut your eyes-and you were inclined to shut your eyes
in Hurd's Church-you could imagine you were in Europe. Generations of Gravesend
Academy boys had carved up the racks for the hymnals with the names of their
girlfriends and the scores of football games; generations of academy
maintenance men had sanded away the more flagrant obscenities, although an
occasional "dork-brain" or "cunt-face" was freshly etched
in the wooden slats that secured the tattered copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal.
Given the darkness of the place, Hurd's was better suited for a funeral than
for a wedding; but my mother had both her wedding and her funeral there. The
wedding service at Hurd's was shared by Pastor Merrill and Rector Wiggin, who
managed to avoid any awkwardness- or any open demonstration of the competition
between them. ?

Old Pinky Scammon nodded peaceably to what both ministers had to
say. Those elements of the celebration that allow the impromptu were the
responsibility of Mr. Merrill, who was brief and charming-his nervousness was
manifest, as usual, only by his slight stutter. Pastor Merrill also got to
deliver the "Dearly beloved" part. " 'We have come together in
the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and
this woman in Holy Matrimony/ '' he began, and I noticed that Kurd's was
packed-there was standing-room only. The academy faculty had turned out in
droves, and there were the usual droves of women of my grandmother's generation
who turned out whenever there was a public opportunity to observe my
grandmother, who was-to women her age-the closest that the Gravesend community
came to royalty; and there was something special about her having a
"fallen" daughter who was choosing this moment to haul herself back
into the ranks of the respectable. That Tabby Wheelwright has some nerve to
wear white, I'm sure some of these old crones from my grandmother's bridge club
were thinking. But this sense of the richness of gossip that permeated
Gravesend society is, on my part, largely hindsight. At the time, I chiefly
thought it was a splendid turnout. The Ministry of the Word was muttered by
Captain Wiggin, who had no understanding of punctuation; he either trampled
over it entirely, or he paused and held his breath so long that you were sure
someone was pointing a gun at his head. " 'O gracious and everliving God,
you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this
man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with
your grace,' " he gasped. Then Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wiggin indulged in a
kind of face-off, with each of them demonstrating his particular notion of
pertinent passages from the Bible-Mr. Merrill's passages being more
"pertinent," Mr. Wiggin's more flowery. It was back to Ephesians for
the rector, who intoned that we should pay close attention to "The Father
from whom every family is named"; then he switched to Colossians and that
bit about "Love which binds everything together in harmony"; and, at
last, he concluded with Mark-"They are no longer two but one."

Pastor Merrill started us off with the Song of Solomon- "
'Many waters cannot quench love,' " he read. Then he hit us with
Corinthians ("Love is patient and kind"), and finished

        
 
us off with John-"Love one another as I
have loved you." It was Owen Meany who then blew his nose, which drew my
attention to his pew, where Owen sat on a precarious stack of hymnals-in order
to see over the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular.
There then followed a reception at  Front Street. It was a muggy day with
a hot, hazy sun, and my grandmother complained that her rose garden was not
flattered by the weather; indeed, the roses looked wilted by the heat. It was
the kind of day that produces a torpor that can be refreshed by nothing less
than a violent thunderstorm; my grandmother complained of the likelihood of a
thunderstorm, too. Yet the bar and the buffet tables were set out upon the
lawn; the men took off their suit jackets and rolled up their sleeves and
loosened their ties and sweated through their shirts-my grandmother
particularly disapproved of the men for draping their jackets on the privet
hedges, which gave the usually immaculate, dark-green border of the rose garden
the appearance of being strewn with litter that had blown in from another part
of town. Several of the women fanned themselves; some of them kicked off their
high heels and walked barefoot on the lawn. There had been a brief and
abandoned plan to have a dance floor put on the brick terrace, but this plan
withered in a disagreement concerning the proper music-and a good thing, too,
my grandmother concluded; she meant it was a good thing that there was no
dancing in such humid weather. But it was what a summer wedding should
be-sultry, something momentarily pretty, giving way to a heat that is
unrestrained. Uncle Alfred showed off for me and my cousins by chugging a beer.
A stray beagle, belonging to some new people on Pine Street, made off with
several cupcakes from the coffee and dessert table. Mr. Meany, standing so
stiffly in-waiting at the receiving line that he appeared to have granite in
his pockets, blushed when it was his turn to kiss the bride. "Owen's got
the weddin' present," he said, turning away. "We got just one
present, from the both of us." Mr. Meany and Owen wore the only dark suits
at the wedding, and Simon commented to Owen on the inappropriateness of his
solemn, Sunday school appearance.

"You look like you're at a funeral, Owen," Simon said.
Owen was hurt and looked cross.

"I was just kidding," Simon said. But Owen was still
cross and made a point of rearranging all the wedding presents on the terrace
so that his and his father's gift was the centerpiece. The wrapping paper had
Christmas trees all over it and the present, which Owen needed both hands to
lift, was the size and shape of a brick. I was sure it was granite.

"That's probably Owen's only suit, you asshole," Hester
told Simon; they quarreled. It was the first time I'd ever seen Hester in a
dress; she looked very pretty. It was a yellow dress; Hester was tan; her black
hair was as tangled as a briar patch in the heat, but her reflexes seemed
especially primed for the social challenge of an outdoor wedding. When Noah
tried to surprise her with a captured toad, Hester got the toad away from him
and slapped Simon in the face with it.

"I think you've killed it, Hester," Noah said, bending
over the stunned toad and exhibiting much more concern for it than for his
brother's face.

"It's not my fault," Hester said. "You started
it."

My grandmother had declared the upstairs bathrooms-
"off-limits" to wedding guests, so there got to be quite long lines
at the downstairs bathrooms-there were only two. Lydia had hand-painted two
shirt cardboards, "Gentlemen" and "Ladies"; the
"Ladies" had the much longer of the lines. When Hester tried to use
an upstairs bathroom-she feh that she was "family," and therefore not
bound by the rules governing the guests-her mother told her that she would wait
in line like everyone else. My Aunt Martha-like many Americans-could become
quite tyrannical in the defense of democracy. Noah and Simon and Owen and I
bragged that we could pee in the bushes, and Hester begged only our slightest
cooperation-in order that she could follow us in that pursuit. She asked that
one of us stand guard-so that other boys and men, with an urge to pee in the
denser sections of the privet hedges, would not surprise her midsquat; and she
requested that one of us keep her panties safe for her. Her brothers
predictably balked at this and made derisive comments regarding the
desirability of holding Hester's panties-under any circumstances. I was,
typically, slow to respond. Hester simply stepped out of her underwear and
handed her white cotton briefs to Owen Meany. You would have thought she had
handed him a live armadillo; his little face reflected his devout curiosity and
his extreme anxiety. But Noah snatched Hester's panties out of

        
 
Owen's hands and Simon snatched them away
from his brother, pulling them over Owen's head-they fit over his head rather
easily, with his face peering through the hole for one of Hester's ample
thighs. He snatched them off his head, blushing; but when he tried to stuff
them into his suit-jacket pocket, he discovered that the side pockets were
still sewn shut. Although he'd worn this suit to Sunday school for several
years, no one had unsewn the pockets for him; or perhaps he thought they were
meant to be closed. He recovered, however, and stuffed the panties into the
inside breast pocket of the jacket, where they made quite a lump. At least he
was not wearing the panties on his head when his father walked up to him, and
Noah and Simon began to scuff their feet in the rough grass and loose twigs at
the foot of the privet hedge; by so doing, they managed to conceal the sound of
Hester pissing. Mr. Meany was stirring a glass of champagne with a dill pickle
the size of this thick forefinger. He had not drunk a drop of champagne, but he
appeared to enjoy using it as a dip for his pickle.

"Are you comin' home with me, Owen?" Mr. Meany asked.
He had announced, from the moment he arrived at the reception, that he couldn't
stay long; my mother and grandmother were most impressed that he'd come at all.
He was uncomfortable going out. His simple navy-blue suit was from the same
family of cheap material as Owen's-since Owen was often up in the air in his
suit, perhaps Mr. Meany's suit had been better treated; I could not tell if Mr.
Meany had unsewn his side pockets. Owen's suit was creased--just above the
cuffs of his trousers and at the wrists of his jacket sleeves, indicating that
his suit had been let down; but the sleeves and trousers had been "let down"
so little, Owen appeared to be growing at the rate of an underfed tree.

"I WANT TO STAY," Owen said.

"Tabby won't be bringin' you up the hill on her weddin'
day," Mr. Meany told him.

"My father or mother will bring Owen home, sir," Noah
said. My cousins-as rough as they could be with other children-had been brought
up to be friendly and polite to adults, and Noah's cheerfulness seemed to
surprise Mr. Meany. I introduced him to my cousins, but I could tell that Owen
wanted to walk his father away from us, immediately-perhaps fearing that Hester
would at any moment emerge from the privet hedge and demand her panties back.
Mr. Meany had come in his pickup, and several of the guests had blocked it in
our driveway, so I went with him and Owen to help identify the cars. We were
well across the lawn, and quite far from the hedges, when I saw Hester's bare
arm protrude from the dark-green privet. "Just hand them over!" she
was saying, and Noah and Simon began to tease her.