A prayer for Owen Meany (19 page)

"Hand what over?" Simon was saying. Owen and I wrote
down the license-plate numbers of the cars blocking Mr. Meany's pickup, and
then I presented the list to my grandmother, who enjoyed making announcements
in a voice based on Maugham's Mrs. Culver from The Constant Wife. It took us a
while to free Mr. Meany from the driveway; Owen was visibly more relaxed after
his father had departed. He was left holding his father's nearly full glass of
champagne, which I advised him not to drink; I was sure it tasted heavily of
pickle. We went and stared at the wedding presents, until I acknowledged the
propitious placement of the present from Owen and his father.

"I MADE IT MYSELF," he said. At first I thought he
meant the Christmas wrapping paper, but then I realized that he had made the
actual present. "MY FATHER HELPED ME SELECT THE PROPER STONE," Owen
admitted. Good God, so it is granite! I thought. Owen was upset that the
newlyweds would not open their presents until after their honeymoon, but he
restrained himself from describing the present to me. I would have many years
to see it for myself, he explained. Indeed, I would. It was a brick-shaped
piece of the finest granite- "MONUMENT QUALITY, AS GOOD AS THEY GET OUT OF
BARRE," Owen would say. Owen had cut it himself, polished it himself; he
had designed and chiseled the border himself, and the engraving was all his,
too. He had worked on it after school in the monument shop, and on weekends. It
looked like a tombstone for a cherished pet-at best, a marker for a stillborn
child; but more appropriate for a cat or a hamster. It was meant to lie
lengthwise, like a loaf of bread, and it was engraved with the approximate date
of my mother's marriage to Dan:

JULY
 
Whether Owen was
unsure of the exact date, or whether it would have meant hours more of
engraving-or ruined his

        
 
concept of the aesthetics of the stone-I
don't know. It was too big and heavy for a paperweight. Although Owen later
suggested this use for it, he admitted it was more practical as a doorstop. For
years-before he gave it to me-Dan Needham dutifully used it as a doorstop and
frequently bashed his toes against it. But whatever it would become, it had to
be left in the open where Owen would be sure to see it when he visited; he was
proud of it, and my mother adored it. Well, my mother adored Owen; if he'd
given her a gravestone with the date of death left blank-to be filled in at the
appropriate time-she would have loved that, too. As it was, in my opinion-and
in Dan's-Owen did give her a gravestone. It had been made in a monument shop, with
grave-marking tools; it may have had her wedding date on it, but it was a
miniature tombstone. And although there was much mirth in evidence at my
mother's wedding, and even my grandmother exhibited an unusual tolerance for
the many young and not-so-young adults who were cavorting and jolly with drink,
the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a
funeral. Owen became quite playful regarding his possession of Hester's
panties. He was not one to be bold with girls, and only a fool-or Noah or
Simon-would be bold with Hester; but Owen managed to surround himself with the
crowd, thus making it embarrassing for Hester to take back her panties.
"Give them over, Owen," she would hiss at him.

"OKAY, SURE, DO YOU WANT THEM?" he would say, reaching
for his pocket while standing firmly between Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred.

"Not here I" Hester would say threateningly.

"OH, SO YOU DON'T WANT THEM? CAN I KEEP THEM?" he
would say. Hester stalked him through the party; she was only mildly angry, I
thought-or she was mildly enjoying herself. It was a flirtation that made me
the slightest bit jealous, and it went on so long that Noah and Simon got bored
and began to arm themselves with confetti for my mother and Dan's eventual
departure. That came sooner than expected, because they had only begun to cut
up the wedding cake when the storm started. It had been growing darker and
darker, and the wind now carried some light rain in it; but when the thunder
and lightning began, the wind dropped and the rain fell heavily and straight
down-in sheets. Guests bolted for the cover of the house; my grandmother
quickly tired of telling people to wipe their feet. The caterers straggled with
the bar and the tables of food; they had set up a tent that extended over only
half the terrace, like an awning, but there was not enough room under it for
the wedding presents and for all the food and drink; Owen and I helped move the
presents inside. My mother and Dan raced upstairs to change their clothes and
grab their bags. Uncle Alfred was summoned to fetch the Buick, which he had not
vandalized too badly in the usual "Just Married" fashion. "Just
Married" was written, with chalk, across the tailgate, but the lettering
was almost washed away by the time my mother and Dan came downstairs in their
traveling clothes, carrying their luggage. The wedding guests crowded in the
many windows that faced the driveway, to see the honeymooners leave; but they
had a confused departure. The rain was pelting down as they tried to put the luggage
in the car; Uncle Alfred, in the role of their valet, was soaking wet-and since
Simon and Noah had hoarded all the confetti for themselves, they were the only
throwers. They threw most of it on their father, on Uncle Alfred, because he
was so wet that the confetti stuck to him, instantly turning him into a clown.
People were cheering from the windows of  Front Street, but my grandmother
was frowning. Chaos disturbed her; mayhem was mayhem, even if people were
having a good time; bad weather was bad weather, even if no one seemed to mind.
And some of her old crones were watching her, too. (How does royalty react to
rain at a wedding? It's what that Tabby Wheelwright deserves-her in her white
dress.) My Aunt Martha risked the rain to hug and kiss my mother and Dan; Simon
and Noah plastered her with confetti, too. Then, as suddenly as the wind had
dropped and the rain had fallen, the rain changed to hail. In New Hampshire,
you can't even count on July. Hailstones bounced off the Buick like machine-gun
fire, and Dan and my mother jumped into the car; Aunt Martha shrieked and
covered her head-she and Uncle Alfred ran to the house. Even Noah and Simon
felt the hailstones' sting; they retreated, too. Someone shouted that a
hailstone had broken a champagne glass, left on the terrace. The hailstones
struck with such force that the people crowded close to the windows stepped
back, away from the glass. Then my mother rolled down the car windows; I
thought she was waving good-bye but she was calling for me. I held my jacket

        
 
over my head, but the hailstones were still
painful. One of them, the size of a robin's egg, struck the bony knob of my
elbow and made me wince.

"Good-bye, darling!" my mother said, pulling my head
inside the car window and kissing me. "Your grandmother knows where we're
going, but she won't tell you unless there's an emergency."

"Have a good time!" I said. When I looked at 
Front Street, every downstairs window was a portrait-faces looking at me, and
at the honeymooners. Well, almost everyone-not Gravesend's two holy men; they
weren't watching me, or the newlyweds. At opposite ends of the house, alone in
their own little windows, the Rev. Lewis Merrill and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin
were watching the sky. Were they taking a religious view of the hailstorm? I
wondered. In Rector Wiggin's case, I imagined he was seeing the weather from
the point of view of an ex-pilot-that he was simply observing that it would be
a shitty day to fly. But Pastor Merrill was searching the heavens for the
source of such a violent storm. Was there anything in the Holy Scriptures that
tipped him off about the meaning of hailstones? In their zeal to demonstrate
their knowledge of appropriate passages from the Bible, neither minister had
offered my mother and Dan that most reassuring blessing from Tobit-the one that
goes, "That she and I may grow old together."

Too bad neither of the ministers thought of that one, but the
books of the Apocrypha are usually omitted from Protestant editions of the
Bible. There would be no growing old together for Dan Needham and my mother,
whose appointment with the ball that Owen hit was only a year away. I was
nearly back inside the house when my mother called me again. "Where's
Owen?" she asked. It took me a while to locate him in the windows, because
he was upstairs, in my mother's bedroom; the figure of the woman in the red
dress was standing beside him, my mother's double, her dressmaker's dummy. I
know now that there were three holy men at  Front Street that day-three
guys with their eyes on the weather. Owen wasn't watching the departing
honeymooners, either. Owen was also watching the skies, with one arm around the
dummy's waist, sagging on her hip, his troubled face peering upward. I should
have known then what angel he was watching for; but it was a busy day, my
mother was asking for Owen-I just ran upstairs and brought him to her. He
didn't seem to mind the hail; the pellets clattered off the car all around him,
but I didn't see one hit him. He stuck his face in the window and my mother
kissed him. Then she asked him how he was getting home. "You're not
walking home, or taking your bike, Owen-not in this weather," she said.
"Do you want a ride?"

"ON YOUR HONEYMOON?" he asked.

"Get in," she said. "Dan and I will drop
you."

He looked awfully pleased; thai he should get to go on my
mother's honeymoon-even for a little bit of the way! He tried to slide into the
car, past her, but his trousers were wet and they stuck against my mother's
skirt.

"Wait a minute," she said. "Let me out. You get
in first." She meant that he was small enough to straddle the drive-shaft
hump, in the middle of the seat, between her and Dan, but when she stepped
outside the Buick-even for just a second-a hailstone ricocheted off the roof of
the car and smacked her right between the eyes.

"Ow!" she cried, holding her head.

"I'M SORRY!" Owen said quickly.

"Get in, get in," Mother said, laughing. They started
to drive away. It was then Hester realized that Owen had successfully made off
with her panties. She ran out in the driveway and stood with her hands on her
hips, staring at the slowly moving car; Dan and my mother, facing forward,
stuck their hands out the windows, risking the hailstones, and waved. Owen
turned around in the seat between them and faced backward; his grin took up his
whole face, and it was very clear, from the flash of white, what he was waving
to Hester.

"Hey! You little creep!" Hester called. But the hail
was turning back to rain; Hester was instantly soaked as she stood there in the
driveway-and her yellow dress clung to her so tenaciously that it was easy to
see what she was missing. She bolted for the house.

"Young lady," my Aunt Martha said to her, "where
on earth are your ..."

"Merciful Heavens, Hester!" my grandmother said. But
the heavens did not look merciful, not at the moment. And my grandmother's
crones, observing Hester, must have been thinking: That may be Martha's girl
but she's got more of Tabby's kind of trouble in her. Simon and Noah were
gathering hailstones before they could

        
 
melt in the returning rain. I ran outside to
join them. They let fly at me with a few of the bigger ones; I gathered my own
supply and fired back. I was surprised by the hailstones' coldness-as if they
had traveled to earth from another, much icier universe. Squeezing a hailstone
the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also
surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball. Mr. Chickering, our
fat and friendly Little League coach and manager-the man who decided, that day,
to have Owen bat for me, the man who instructed Owen to "Swing
away!"- Mr. Chickering is spending his last days in the Soldiers' Home on
Court Street. The wrecked images that his bout with Alzheimer's hurl at him
from time to time have left him jumpy and dazed, but curiously alert. Like a
man sitting under a tree full of children pelting him with acorns, he seems to
expect he'll be hit at any moment, he even appears to be looking forward to it,
but he has no notion where the acorns come from (despite what must be the firm
feeling of the trunk of the tree against his back). When I visit him-when the
acorns fly at him, and hit him just the right way-he perks up instantly.
"You're on deck, Johnny!" he says cheerfully. And once he said, "Owen's
batting for you, Johnny!" But, at other times, he is far away; perhaps he
is turning my mother's face to the ground, but taking care to close her eyes
first-or else he is pulling down the skirt of her dress, for decency's sake,
and pinching her splayed knees together. Once, when he appeared to fail to
recognize me-when I could establish no coherent communication with him-he spoke
up as I was leaving; it was a sad, reflective voice that said, "You don't
want to see her, Johnny."

At my mother's funeral, in Kurd's Church, Mr. Chickering was
visibly moved. I'm certain that his rearranging of my mother's body in its
repose had been the only time he had ever touched her; both the memory of that,
and of Police Chief Pike's inquiries regarding the "instrument of death,"
the "murder weapon," had clearly rattled Mr. Chickering, who wept
openly at the funeral, as if he were mourning the death of baseball itself.
Indeed, not only had Owen and I quit the team-and that infernal game-forever;
other members of our Little League team had used the upsetting incident as a
means to get out of a tedious obligation that had been much more their parents'
notion of something that was "good for them" than it had ever been
their sport of choice. Mr. Chickering, who was completely good-hearted, had
always told us that when we won, we won as a team, and when we lost, we lost as
a team. Now-in his view-we had killed as a team; but he wept in his pew as if
he bore more than his share of team responsibility. He had encouraged some of
my other teammates and their families to sit with him-among them, the hapless
Harry Hoyt, who'd received a base on balls with two outs, who'd made his own,
small contribution to Owen Meany coming to the plate. After all, Harry could
have been the last out-in which case, my mother would have taken Owen and me
home from the game, as usual. But Harry had walked. He sat in Kurd's, quite
riveted by Mr. Chickering's tears. Harry was almost innocent. We had been so
many runs behind, and there were already two outs in our last inning; it made
no sense for Harry Hoyt to walk. What possible good could a base on balls have
done us? Harry should have been swinging away. He was an otherwise harmless
creature, although he would cause his mother no little grief. His father was
dead, his mother was-for years-the receptionist at the Gas Works; she got all
the calls about the billing errors, and the leaks. Harry would never be
Gravesend Academy material. He dutifully finished Gravesend High School and
enlisted in the Navy-the Navy was popular around Gravesend. His mother tried to
get Harry out of the service, claiming she was a widow who needed his support;
but-in the first place-she had a job, and in the second place, Harry wanted to
go in the Navy. He was embarrassed by his mother's lack of patriotic zeal; it
may have been the only time he argued with anyone, but he won the argument-he
got to go to Vietnam, where he was killed by one of the poisonous snakes of
that region. It was a Russell's viper and it bit him while he was peeing under
a tree; a later revelation was that the tree stood outside a whorehouse, where
Harry had been waiting his turn. He was like that; he was a walker-when there
was no good reason to walk. His death made his mother quite political-or at
least "quite political" for Gravesend. She called herself a war
resister and she advertised that in her home she would give free counsel on how
to evade the draft; it was never very accurately demonstrated that her evening
draft-counseling sessions so exhausted her that she became an inadequate
receptionist at the Gas Works-yet the Gas Works let her go. Several patriots
from the town were apprehended in the act of vandalizing her car