A prayer for Owen Meany (3 page)

"fling," as Aunt Martha called it, with the man she'd
met on the Boston & Maine. My mother was so calm, so unrattled by either
criticism or slander, that she was quite comfortable with her sister Martha's
use of the word' 'fling''-in truth, I heard Mother use the word fondly.

"My fling," she would occasionally call me, with the
greatest affection. "My little fling!"

It was from my cousins that I first heard that my mother was
thought to be "a little simple"; it would have been from their
mother-from Aunt Martha-that they would have heard this. By the time I heard
these insinuations-"a little simple" -they were no longer fighting
words; my mother had been dead for more than ten years. Yet my mother was more
than a natural beauty with a beautiful voice and questionable reasoning powers;
Aunt Martha had good grounds to suspect that my grandmother and grandfather
spoiled my mother. It was not just that she was the baby, it was her
temperament-she was never angry or sullen, she was not given to tantrums or to
self-pity. She had such a sweet-tempered disposition, it was impossible to stay
angry with her. As Aunt Martha said: "She never appeared to be as
assertive as she was." She simply did what she wanted to do, and then
said, in her engaging fashion, "Oh! I feel terrible that what I've done
has upset you, and I intend to shower you with such affection that you'll
forgive me and love me as much as you would if I'd done the right thing!"
And it workedl It worked, at least, until she was killed-and she couldn't
promise to remedy how upsetting that was; there was no way she could make up
for that. And even after she went ahead and had me, unexplained, and named me
after the founding father of Gravesend-even after she managed to make all that
acceptable to her mother and sister, and to the town (not to mention to the
Congregational Church, where she continued to sing in the choir and was often a
participant in various parish-house functions). . . even after she'd carried
off my illegitimate birth (to everyone's satisfaction, or so it appeared), she
still took the train to Boston every Wednesday, she still spent every Wednesday
night in the dreaded city in order to be bright and early for her voice or
singing lesson. When I got a little older, I resented it-sometimes. Once when I
had the mumps, and another time when I had the chicken pox, she canceled the
trip; she stayed with me. And there was another time, when Owen and I had been
catching alewives in the tidewater culvert that ran into the Squamscott under
the Swasey Parkway and I slipped and broke my wrist; she didn't take the Boston
& Maine that week. But all the other tunes-until I was ten and she married
the man who would legally adopt me and become like a father to me; until
then-she kept going to Boston, overnight. Until then, she kept singing. No one
ever told me if her voice improved. That's why I was born in my grandmother's
house-a grand, brick, Federal monster of a house. When I was a child, the house
was heated by a coal furnace; the coal chute was under the ell of the house
where my bedroom was. Since the coal was always delivered very early in the
morning, its rumbling down the chute was often the sound that woke me up. On
the rare coincidence of a Thursday morning delivery (when my mother was in
Boston), I used to wake up to the sound of the coal and imagine that, at that
precise moment, my mother was starting to sing. In the summer, with the windows
open, I woke up to the birds in my grandmother's rose garden. And there lies
another of my grandmother's opinions, to take root alongside her opinions
regarding rocks and trees: anyone could grow mere flowers or vegetables, but a
gardener grew roses; Grandmother was a gardener. The Gravesend Inn was the only
other brick building of comparable size to my grandmother's house on Front
Street; indeed, Grandmother's house was often mistaken for the Gravesend Inn by
travelers following the usual directions given in the center of town:
"Look for the big brick place on your left, after you pass the
academy."

My grandmother was peeved at this-she was not in the slightest
flattered to have her house mistaken for an inn. "This is not an
inn," she would inform the lost and bewildered travelers, who'd been
expecting someone younger to greet them and fetch their luggage. "This is
my home," Grandmother would announce. "The inn is further
along," she would say, waving her hand in the general direction.
"Further along" is fairly specific compared to other New Hampshire
forms of directions; we don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend
to think that if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you
are. In Canada, we give directions more freely-to anywhere, to anyone who asks.
In our Federal house on Front Street, there was also a secret passageway-a
bookcase that was actually a door that led down a staircase to a dirt-floor
basement that was entirely separate from the basement where the coal furnace
was. That was just what it was: a bookcase that was a door that led to a place
where absolutely nothing happened-it was simply a place to hide. From
what  used to wonder. That this secret passageway to nowhere existed in
our house did not comfort me; rather, it provoked me to imagine what there
might be that was sufficiently threatening to hide from-and it is never
comforting to imagine that. I took little Owen Meany into that passageway once,
and I got him lost in there, in the dark, and I frightened the hell out of him;
I did this to all my friends, of course, but frightening Owen Meany was always
more special than frightening anyone else. It was his voice, that ruined voice,
that made his fear unique. I have been engaged in private imitations of Owen
Meany's voice for more than thirty years, and that voice used to prevent me
from imagining that I could ever write about Owen, because-on the page-the
sound of his voice is impossible to convey. And I was prevented from imagining
that I could even make Owen a part of oral history, because the thought of
imitating his voice-in public-is so embarrassing. It has taken me more than
thirty years to get up the nerve to share Owen's voice with strangers. My
grandmother was so upset by the sound of Owen Meany's voice, protesting his
abuse in the secret passageway, that she spoke to me, after Owen had gone home.
"I don't want you to describe to me-not ever-what you were doing to that
poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover
his mouth with your hand,'' Grandmother said. "You've seen the mice caught
in the mousetraps?" she asked me. "I mean caught-their little necks
broken-I mean absolutely dead" Grandmother said. "Well, that boy's
voice," my grandmother told me, "that boy's voice could bring those
mice back to life!"

And it occurs to me now that Owen's voice was the voice of all
those murdered mice, coming back to life-with a vengeance. I don't mean to make
my grandmother sound insensitive. She had a maid named Lydia, a Prince Edward
Islander, who was our cook and housekeeper for years and years. When Lydia
developed a cancer and her right leg was amputated, my grandmother hired two
other maids-one to look after Lydia. Lydia never worked again. She had her own
room, and her favorite wheel-chair routes through the huge house, and she
became the entirely served invalid that, one day, my grandmother had imagined
she herself might become-with someone like Lydia looking after her. Delivery
boys and guests in our house frequently mistook Lydia for my grandmother,
because Lydia looked quite regal in her wheelchair and she was about my
grandmother's age; she had tea with my grandmother every afternoon, and she
played cards with my grandmother's bridge club-with those very same ladies
whose tea she had once fetched. Shortly before Lydia died, even my Aunt Martha
was struck by the resemblance Lydia bore to my grandmother. Yet to various
guests and delivery boys, Lydia would always say-with a certain indignation of
tone that was borrowed from my grandmother-"I am not Missus Wheelwright, I
am Missus Wheelwright's former maid." It was exactly in the manner that
Grandmother would claim that her house was not the Gravesend Inn. So my
grandmother was not without humanity. And if she wore cocktail dresses when she
labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer
intended to wear to cocktail parties. Even in her rose garden, she did not want
to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw
them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my
grandmother said, "What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what
I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?"

From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative. But this story
really is about Owen Meany, about how I have apprenticed myself to his voice.
His cartoon voice has made an even stronger impression on me than has my
grandmother's imperious wisdom. Grandmother's memory began to elude her near
the end. Like many old people, she had a firmer grasp of her own childhood than
she had of the lives of her own children, or her grandchildren, or her
great-grandchildren. The more recent the memory was, the more poorly
remembered. "I remember you as a little boy," she told me, not long
ago, "but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told
her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself. And in one conversation
about her memory, I asked her if she remembered little Owen Meany.

"The labor man?" she said. "The unionist!"

"No, Owen Meany," I said.

"No," she said. "Certainly not."

"The granite family?" I said. "The Meany Granite
Quarry. Remember?"

"Granite," she said with distaste. "Certainly
not!"

"Maybe you remember his voice?" I said to my
grandmother, when she was almost a hundred years old. But she was impatient
with me; she shook her head. I was getting up the nerve to imitate Owen's
voice.

"I turned out the lights in the secret passageway, and
scared him," I reminded Grandmother.

"You were always doing that," she said indifferently.
"You even did that to Lydia-when she still had both her legs."

"TURN ON THE LIGHT!" said Owen Meany. "SOMETHING
IS TOUCHING MY FACE! TURN ON THE LIGHT! IT'S SOMETHING WITH A TONGUE! SOMETHING
IS LICKING ME!" Owen Meany cried.

"It's just a cobweb, Owen," I remember telling him.

"IT'S TOO WET FOR A COBWEB! IT'S A TONGUE I TURN ON THE
LIGHT!"

"Stop it!" my grandmother told me. "I remember, I
remember-for God's sake," she said. "Don't ever do that again!"
she told me. But it was from my grandmother that I gained the confidence that I
could imitate Owen Meany's voice at all. Even when her memory was shot,
Grandmother remembered Owen's voice; if she remembered him as the instrument of
her daughter's death, she didn't say. Near the end, Grandmother didn't remember
that I had become an Anglican-and a Canadian. The Meanys, in my grandmother's
lexicon, were not Mayflower stock. They were not descended from the founding
fathers; you could not trace a Meany back to John Adams. They were descended from
later immigrants; they were Boston Irish. The Meanys made their move to New
Hampshire from Boston, which was never England; they'd also lived in Concord,
New Hampshire, and in Barre, Vermont-those were much more working-class places
than Gravesend. Those were New England's true granite kingdoms. My grandmother
believed that mining and quarrying, of all kinds, was groveling work-and that
quarriers and miners were more closely related to moles than to men. As for the
Meanys: none of the family was especially small, except for Owen. And for all
the dirty tricks we played on him, he tricked us only once. We were allowed to
swim in one of his father's quarries only if we entered and left the water one
at a time and with a stout rope tied around our waists. One did not actually
swim in those quarry lakes, which were rumored to be as deep as the ocean; they
were as cold as the ocean, even in late summer; they were as black and still as
pools of oil. It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you'd
jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth-our fear of what was on the bottom, and
how far below us the bottom was. Owen's father, Mr. Meany, insisted on the
rope-insisted on one-at-a-time, in-and-out. It was one of the few parental
rules from my childhood that remained unbroken, except once-by Owen. It was
never a rule that any of us cared to challenge; no one wanted to untie the rope
and plunge without hope of rescue toward the unknown bottom. But one fine
August day, Owen Meany untied the rope, underwater, and he swam underwater to
some hidden crevice in the rocky shore while we waited for him to rise. When he
didn't surface, we pulled up the rope. Because we believed that Owen was nearly
weightless, we refused to believe what our arms told us-that he was not at the
end of the rope. We didn't believe he was gone until we had the bulging knot at
the rope's end out of the water. What a silence that was!-interrupted only by
the drops of water from the rope falling into the quarry. No one called his
name; no one dove in to look for him. In that water, no one could seel I prefer
to believe that we would have gone in to look for him-if he'd given us just a
few more seconds to gather up our nerve-but Owen decided that our response was
altogether too slow and uncaring. He swam out from the crevice at the opposite
shore; he moved as lightly as a water bug across the terrifying hole that
reached, we were sure, to the bottom of the earth. He swam to us, angrier than
we'd ever seen him.

"TALK ABOUT HURTING SOMEONE'S FEELINGS!" he cried.
"WHAT WERE YOU WATTING FOR? BUBBLES? DO YOU THINK I'M A FISH! WASN'T
ANYONE GOING TO TRY TO FIND ME?"

"You scared us, Owen," one of us said. We were too
scared to defend ourselves, if there was any defending ourselves -ever-in
regard to Owen.

"YOU LET ME DROWN!" Owen said. "YOU DIDN'T DO
ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I'M ALREADY DEAD!" he told us.
"REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE."