A prayer for Owen Meany (27 page)

        
 
decide about church for themselves, this man
will stay home on Sundays. The frazzled mother, who is the lesser piece of
bread to this family sandwich-and who is holding down that part of the pew from
which the most unflattering view of the preacher in the pulpit is possible
(directly under the preacher's jowls)-is trying to keep her hand off her
daughter's lap. If she smooths out her daughter's skirt only one more time,
both of them know that the daughter will start to cry. The son takes from his
suit jacket pocket a tiny, purple truck; the father snatches this away-with
considerable bending and crushing of the boy's fingers in the process.
"Just one more obnoxious bit of behavior from you," the father
whispers harshly, '' and you will be grounded-for the rest of the day.''

"The whole rest of the day?" the boy says,
incredulous. The apparent impossibility of sustaining wnobnoxious behavior for
even part of the day weighs heavily on the lad, and overwhelms him with a
claustrophobia as impenetrable as the claustrophobia of church itself. The
daughter has begun to cry.

"Why is she crying?" the boy asks his father, who
doesn't answer. "Are you having your period?" the boy asks his
sister, and the mother leans across the daughter's lap and pinches the son's
thigh-a prolonged, twisting sort of pinch. Now he is crying, too. Time to pray!
The kneeling pads flop down, the family flops forward. The son manages the old
hymnal trick; he slides a hymnal along the pew, placing it where his sister
will sit when she's through praying.

"Just one more thing," the father mutters in his
prayers. But how can you pray, thinking about the daughter's period? She looks
old enough to be having her period, and young enough for it to be the first
time. Should you move the hymnal before she's through praying and sits on it?
Should you pick up the hymnal and bash the boy with it? But the father is the
one you'd like to hit; and you'd like to pinch the mother's thigh, exactly as
she pinched her son. How can you pray? It is time to be critical of Canon
Mackie's cassock; it is the color of pea soup. It is time to be critical of
Warden Harding's wart. And Deputy Warden Holt is a racist; he is always
complaining that "the West Indians have taken over Bathurst Street";
he tells a terrible story about standing in line in the copying-machine
store-two young black men are having the entire contents of a pornographic
magazine duplicated. For this offense, Deputy Warden Holt wants to have the
young men arrested. How can you pray? The weekday services are almost
unattended-quiet, serene. The drumming wing-whir of the slowly moving overhead
fan is metronomic, enhancing to the concentration-and from the fourth and fifth
rows of pews, you can feel the air moving regularly against your face. In the
Canadian climate, the fan is supposed to push the warm, rising air down-back
over the chilly congregation. But it is possible to imagine you're in a
missionary church, in the tropics. Some say that Grace Church is overly
lighted. The dark-stained, wooden buttresses against the high, vaulted,
white-plaster ceiling accentuate how well lit the church is; despite the
edifice's predominance of stone and stained glass, there are no corners lost to
darkness or to gloom. Critics say the light is too artificial, and too
contemporary for such an old building; but surely the overhead fan is
contemporary, too-and not propelled by Mother Nature-and no one complains about
the fan. The wooden buttresses are quite elaborate-they are wainscoted, and
even the lines of the wainscoting are visible on the buttresses, despite their
height; that's how brightly lit the church is. Harold Crosby, or any other
Announcing Angel, could never be concealed in these buttresses. Any
angel-lowering or angel-raising apparatus would be most visible. The miracle of
the Nativity would seem less of a miracle here- indeed, I have never watched a
Christinas pageant at Grace Church. I have already seen that miracle; once was
enough. The Nativity of ' is all the Nativity I need. That Christmas, the
evenings were long; dinners with Dan, or with my grandmother, were slow and
solemn. My enduring perception of those nights is that Lydia's wheelchair
needed to be oiled and that Dan complained, with uncharacteristic bitterness,
about what a mess amateurs could make of A Christmas Carol, Dan's mood was not
improved by the frequent presence of our neighbor-and Dan's most veteran
amateur-Mr. Fish.

"I'd so looked forward to being Scrooge," Mr. Fish
would say, pretending to stop by  Front Street, after dinner, for some
other reason-whenever he saw Dan's car in the driveway. Sometimes it was to
once again agree with my grand-

        
 
mother about Gravesend's pending leash law;
Mr. Fish and my grandmother were in favor of leashing dogs. Mr. Fish gave no
indication that he was even slightly troubled by his hypocrisy on this
issue-for surely old Sagamore would roll over in his grave to hear his former
master espousing canine restraints of any kind; Sagamore had run free, to the
end. But it was not the leash law Mr. Fish really cared about; it was Scrooge-a
plum part, ruined (in Mr. Fish's view) by amateur ghosts.

"The ghosts are only the beginning of what's wrong,"
Dan said. "By the end of the play, the audience is going to be rooting for
Tiny Tim to die-someone might even rush the stage and kill that brat with his
crutch." Dan was still disappointed that he could not entice Owen to play
the plucky cripple, but the little Lord Jesus was unmoved by Dan's pleas.

"What wretched ghosts!" Mr. Fish whined. The first
ghost, Marley's Ghost, was a terrible ham from the Gravesend Academy English
Department; Mr. Early embraced every part that Dan gave him as if he were King
Lear- madness and tragedy fueled his every action, a wild melancholy spilled
from him in disgusting fits and seizures. " 'I am here tonight to warn
you,' " Mr. Early tells Mr. Fish, " 'that you have yet a chance and
hope of escaping my fate . . .' " all the while unwrapping the bandage
that dead men wear to keep their lower jaws from dropping on their chests.

" 'You were always a good friend to me,' " Mr. Fish
tells Mr. Early, but Mr. Early has become entangled in his jaw bandage, the
unwinding of which has caused him to forget his lines.

" 'You will be haunted by ... Four Spirits,' " Mr.
Early says; Mr. Fish shuts his eyes.

"Three, not Four!" Dan cries.

"But aren't I the fourth?" Mr. Early asks.

"You're the first!" Mr. Fish tells him.

"But there are three others," Mr. Early says.

"Jesus Christ!" Dan says. But Marley's Ghost was not
as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Past, an irritating young woman who was a
member of the Town Library Board and who wore men's clothes and chain-smoked,
aggressively; and she was not as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Mr.
Kenmore, a butcher at our local A&P, who (Mr. Fish said) smelled like raw
chicken and shut his eyes whenever Mr. Fish spoke-Mr. Kenmore needed to
concentrate with such fervor on his own role that he found Scrooge's presence a
distraction. And none of them was as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to
Come-Mr. Morrison, our mailman, who had looked so perfect for the part. He was
a tall, thin, lugubrious presence; a sourness radiated from him-dogs not only
refrained from biting him, they slunk away from him; they must have known that
the taste of him was as toxic as a toad's. He had a gloomy, detached quality
that Dan had imagined would be perfect for the grim, final phantom-but when Mr.
Morrison discovered that he had no lines, that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to
Come never speaks, he became contemptuous of the part; he threatened to quit,
but then remained in the role with a vengeance, sneering and scoffing at poor
Scrooge's questions, and leering at the audience, attempting to seize their
attention from Mr. Fish (as if to accuse Dan, and Dickens, of idiocy-for
denying this most important spirit the power of speech). No one could remember
Mr. Morrison ever speaking-as a mailman-and yet, as a harbinger of doom, the poor
man clearly felt he had much to say. But the deepest failure was that none of
these ghosts was frightening. "How can I be Scrooge if I'm not
frightened?" Mr. Fish asked Dan.

"You're an actor, you gotta fake it," Dan said. To my
thinking, which was silent, Mrs. Walker's legs were again wasted-in the part of
Tiny Tim's mother. Poor Mr. Fish. I never knew what he did for a living. He was
Sagamore's master, he was the good guy in Angel Street-at the end, he took my
mother by the aim-he was the unfaithful husband in The Constant Wife, he was
Scrooge. But what did he do  never knew. I could have asked Dan; I still
could. But Mr. Fish was the quintessential neighbor; he was all neighbors-all
dog owners, all the friendly faces from familiar backyards, all the hands on
your shoulders at your mother's funeral, I don't remember if he had a wife. I
don't even remember what he looked like, but he manifested the fussy
concentration of a man about to pick up a fallen leaf; he was all rakers of all
lawns, all snow-shovelers of all sidewalks. And although he began the Christmas
season as an unfrightened Scrooge, I saw Mr. Fish when he was frightened, too.
I also saw him when he was young and carefree, which is how he appeared to me
before the death of Sagamore. I remember a

        
 
brilliant September afternoon when the maples
on Front Street were starting to turn yellow and red; above the crisp, white
clapboards and the slate rooflines of the houses, the redder maples appeared to
be drawing blood from the ground. Mr. Fish had no children but he enjoyed
throwing and kicking a football, and on those blue-sky, fall afternoons, he
cajoled Owen and me to play football with him; Owen and I didn't care for the
sport-except for those times when we could include Sagamore in the game.
Sagamore, like many a Labrador, was a mindless retriever of balls, and it was
fun to watch him try to pick up the football in his mouth; he would straddle
the ball with his fore-paws, pin it to the ground with his chest, but he never
quite succeeded in fitting the ball in his mouth. He would coat the ball with
slobber, making it exceedingly difficult to pass and catch, and ruining what
Mr. Fish referred to as the aesthetics of the game. But the game had no
aesthetics that were available to Owen Meany and me; I could not master the
spiral pass, and Owen's hand was so small that he refused to throw the ball at
all-he only kicked it. The ferocity with which Sagamore tried to contain the
ball in his mouth and the efforts we made to keep the ball away from him were
the most interesting aspects of the sport to Owen and me-but Mr. Fish took the
perfection of passing and catching quite seriously.

"This will be more fun when you boys get a little
older," he used to say, as the ball rolled under the privet, or wobbled
into my grandmother's rose beds, and Owen and I purposely fumbled in front of
Sagamore-such was our pleasure in watching the dog lunge and drool, lunge and
drool. Poor Mr. Fish. Owen and I dropped so many perfect passes. Owen liked to
run with the ball until Sagamore ran him down; and then Owen would kick the
ball in no particular or planned direction. It was dogball, not football, that
we played on those afternoons, but Mr. Fish was ever optimistic that Owen and I
would, miraculously-one day-grow up and play pass-and-catch as it was meant to
be played. A few houses down Front Street lived a young couple with a new baby;
Front Street was not much of a street for young couples, and the street had
only one new baby. The couple cruised the neighborhood with the air of an
entirely novel species-as if they were the first couple in New Hampshire to
have given birth. Owen shrieked so loudly when we played football with Mr. Fish
that the young father or mother from down the street would fretfully appear,
popping up over a hedge to ask us if we would keep our voices down ". . .
because of the baby."

His years in The Gravesend Players would exercise Mr. Fish's
natural ability at rolling his eyes; and after the young parent had returned to
guard the precious newborn, Mr. Fish would commence rolling his eyes with
abandon.

"STUPE) BABY," Owen complained, "WHO EVER HEARD
OF TRYING TO CONTROL THE NOISE OUTDOORS?"

That had just happened-for about the hundredth time-the day Owen
managed to punt the football out of the yard ... out of my grandmother's yard,
and beyond Mr. Fish's yard, too; the ball floated over the roof of my
grandmother's garage and rolled end-over-end down the driveway, toward Front
Street, with Owen and me and Sagamore chasing after it. Mr. Fish stood sighing,
with his hands on his hips; he did not chase after errant passes and
kicks-these were imperfections that he sought to eliminate from our game-but on
this day he was impressed by the unusual power of Owen Meany's kick (if not the
kick's direction).

"That's getting your foot into the ball, Owen!" Mr.
Fish called. As the ball rolled into Front Street with Sagamore in close
pursuit, the baby-rattle tinkle of the odd bell of the diaper truck dinged
persistently, even at the moment of the truck's sudden confluence with
Sagamore's unlucky head. Poor Mr. Fish; Owen ran to get him, but Mr. Fish had
heard the squealing tires-and even the dull thud-and he was halfway down the
driveway when Owen met him. "I DON'T THINK YOU WANT TO SEE IT," Owen
said to him. "WHY DON'T YOU GO SIT DOWN AND LET US TAKE CARE OF
THINGS?"

Mr. Fish was on his porch when the young parents came up Front
Street, to complain again about the noise-or to investigate the delay of the
diaper truck, because their baby was the sole reason the truck was there. The
diaper truck driver sat on the running board of the cab. "Shit," he
said. Up close, the odor of urine radiated from the truck in waves. My
grandmother had her kindling delivered in burlap sacks, and my mother helped me
empty one; I helped Owen get Sagamore into the sack. The football, still
smeared with saliva, had gathered some gravel and a candy-bar wrapper; it lay
uninvitingly at the curb. In late September, in Gravesend, it could feel like
August or