A prayer for Owen Meany (36 page)

"No, not like him," the rector agreed.

"He's a natural," Mr. Fish said.

"Yes, isn't he?" Mr. Wiggin said.

"Have you seen A Christmas Carol!" Mr. Fish asked.

"Not this year," the rector said.

"What are you doing on Christmas Eve?" Mr. Fish asked
him. I knew what I wished I was doing on Christmas Eve: I wished I was in
Sawyer Depot, waiting with my mother for Dan to arrive on the midnight train.
That's how our Christmas Eves had been, since my mother had gotten together
with Dan. Mother and I would enjoy the Eastmans' hospitality, and I would
exhaust myself with my violent cousins, and Dan would join us after the
Christmas Eve performance of The Gravesend Players. He would be tired when he
got off the train from Gravesend, at midnight, but everyone in the Eastman
house-even my grandmother-would be waiting up for him. Uncle Alfred would fix
Dan a "nightcap," while my mother and Aunt Martha put Noah and Simon
and Hester and me to bed. At a quarter to twelve, Hester and Simon and Noah and
I would bundle up and cross the street to the depot; the weather in the north
country on a Christmas Eve, at midnight, was not inviting to grown-ups-the
grown-ups all approved of letting us kids meet Dan's train. We liked to be
early so we could make plenty of snowballs; the train was always on time-in
those days. There were few people on it, and almost no one but Dan got off in
Sawyer Depot, where we would pelt him with snowballs. As tired as he was, Dan
put up a game fight. Earlier in the evening, my mother and Aunt Martha sang
Christmas carols; sometimes my grandmother would join in. We children could
remember most of the words to the first verses; it was in the later verses of
the carols that my mother and Aunt Martha put their years in the Congregational
Church Choir to the test. My mother won that contest; she knew every word to
every verse, so that-as a carol progressed-we heard nothing at all from
Grandmother, and less and less from Aunt Martha. In the end, my mother got to
sing the last verses by herself.

"What a waste, Tabby!" Aunt Martha would say.
"It's an absolute waste of your memory-knowing all those words to the
verses no one ever sings!"

"What else do I need my memory for?" my mother asked
her sister; the two women would smile at each other-my Aunt Martha coveting
that part of my mother's memory that might tell her the story of who my father
was. What really irked Martha about my mother's total recall of Christmas
carols was that my mother got to sing those last verses solo; even Uncle Alfred
would stop what he was doing-just to listen to my mother's voice. I remember-it
was at my mother's funeral-when the Rev. Lewis Merrill told my grandmother that
he'd lost my mother's voice twice. The first time was when Martha got married,
because that was when both girls started spending Christmas vacations in Sawyer
Depot-my mother would still practice singing carols with the choir, but she was
gone to visit her sister by the Sunday of Christmas Vespers. The second time
that Pastor Merrill lost my mother's voice was when she moved to Christ
Church-when he lost it forever. But I had not lost her voice until Christmas
Eve, , when the town I was bom in and grew up in felt so unfamiliar to me;
Gravesend just never was my Christmas Eve town. Of course, I was grateful to
have something to do. Although I'd seen every production of A Christmas
Carol-including the dress rehearsal-I was especially glad that the final
production was available to take up the time on Christmas Eve; I think both Dan
and I wanted our time taken up. After the play, Dan had scheduled a cast
party-and I understood why he'd done that: to take up every minute until
midnight, and even past midnight, so that he wouldn't be thinking of riding the
train to Sawyer Depot (and my mother in the Eastmans' warm house, waiting for
him). I could picture the Eastmans having a hard time on Christmas Eve, too;
after the first verse, Aunt Martha would be struggling with each carol. Dan had
wanted to have the cast party at  Front Street- and I understood that,
too: he wanted my grandmother to be just as busy as he was. Of course,
Grandmother would have complained bitterly about the party revelers-and about
such a "sundry" guest list, given the diverse personalities and
social

        
 
stations of a typical Dan Needham cast; but
Grandmother would, at least, have been occupied. As it was, she refused; Dan
had to beg her to get her to see the play. At first, she gave him every
excuse-she couldn't possibly leave Lydia alone, Lydia was sick, there was some
congestion in her lungs or bronchial tubes, and it was out of the question that
Lydia could go out to a play; furthermore, Grandmother argued, it being
Christmas Eve, she had allowed Ethel to visit her next of kin (Ethel would be
gone for Christmas Day, and the next day, too), and surely Dan knew how Lydia
hated to be left alone with Germaine. Dan pointed out that he thought Germaine
had been hired, specifically, to look after Lydia. Yes, Grandmother nodded,
that was certainly true-nevertheless, the girl was dismal, superstitious
company, and what Lydia needed on Christmas Eve was company. It was, Dan
politely reasoned, "strictly for company's sake" that he wanted my
grandmother to see A Christmas Carol, and even spend a short time enjoying the
festive atmosphere of the cast party. Since my grandmother had refused him the
use of  Front Street, Dan had decorated the entire third floor of
Waterhouse Hall-opening a few of the less-cluttered boys' rooms, and the common
room on that floor, for the cast; his own tiny apartment just wouldn't suffice.
He'd alerted the Brinker-Smiths that there might be a rumpus two floors above
them; they were welcome to join the festivities, or plug up the twins' ears
with cotton, as they saw fit. Grandmother did not see fit to do a damn thing,
but she enjoyed Dan's efforts to cajole her out of her veteran, antisocial
cantankerousness, and she agreed to attend the play; as for the cast party, she
would see how she felt after the performance. And so it fell to me: the task of
escorting Grandmother to the closing-night enactment of A Christmas Carol in
the Graves-end Town Hall. I took many precautions along the way, to protect
Grandmother from fracturing her hip-although the sidewalks were safely sanded,
there'd been no new snowfall, and the well-oiled wood of the old Town Meeting
place was slipperier than any surface Grandmother was likely to encounter
outdoors. The hinges of the ancient folding chairs creaked in unison as I led
Harriet Wheelwright to a favored center-aisle seat in the third row, our
townspeople's heads turning in the manner that a congregation turns to view a
bride-for my grandmother entered the theater as if she were still responding to
a curtain call, following her long-ago performance in Maugham's The Constant
Wife. Harriet Wheelwright had a gift for making a regal entry. There was even
some scattered applause, which Grandmother quieted with a well-aimed glower;
respect, in the form of awe-preferably, silent awe-was something she courted,
but hand-clapping was, under the circumstances, vulgar. It took a full five
minutes for her to be comfortably seated-her mink off, but positioned over her
shoulders; her scarf loosened, but covering the back of her neck from drafts
(which were known to approach from the rear); her hat on, despite the fact that
no one seated behind her could see over it (graciously, the gentleman so seated
moved). At last, I was free to venture backstage, where  had grown used to
the aura of spiritual calm surrounding Owen Meany at the makeup mirror. The
trauma of the Christmas Pageant shone in his eyes like a death in the family;
his cold had settled deep in his chest, and a fever drove him to alternate
states-first he burned, then he sweated, then he shivered. He needed very
little eyeliner to deepen the darkness entombing his eyes, and his nightly,
excessive applications of baby powder to his face-which was already as white as
the face of a china doll-had covered the makeup table with a silt as fine as
plaster dust, in which Owen wrote his name with his finger in square, block
letters, the style of lettering favored in the Meany Monument Shop. Owen had
offered no explanation regarding the offense he took at his parents' attendance
at the Christ Church Nativity. When I suggested that his response to their
presence in the congregation had been radical and severe, he dismissed me in a
fashion he'd perfected-by forgiving me for what I couldn't be expected to know,
and what he would never explain to me: that old UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that the
Catholics had perpetrated, and his parents' inability to rise above what amounted
to the RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION they had suffered; yet it was my opinion that Owen
was persecuting his parents. Why they accepted such persecution was a mystery
to me. From backstage I was uniquely positioned to search the audience for the
acquiescent presence of Mr. and Mrs. Meany; they were not there. My search was
rewarded, however, by the discovery of a sanguinary Mr. Morrison, the cowardly
mail-

        
 
man, his eyes darting daggers in all
directions, and wringing his hands-as he might around a throat-in his lap. The
look of a man who's come to see What Might Have Been is full of both bloodshed
and nostalgia; should Owen succumb to his fever, Mr. Morrison looked ready to
play the part. It was a full house; to my surprise, I'd seen many of the audience
at earlier performances. The Rev. Lewis Merrill, for example, was back for a
second, maybe even a third time! He always came to dress rehearsals, and often
to a later performance; he told Dan he enjoyed watching the actors "settle
into" their parts. Being a minister, he must have especially enjoyed A
Christmas Carol; it was such a heartfelt rendering of a conversion-not just a
lesson in Christian charity, but an example of man's humbleness before the
spiritual world. Even so, I could not find Rector Wiggin in the audience; I had
no expectations of finding Barb, either-I would guess their exposure to Owen
Meany's interpretations of the spiritual world was sufficient to inspire them,
until next Christmas. Lewis Merrill, forever in the company of the sour stamina
that radiated from his wife, was also in the company of his troubled children;
often rebellious, almost always unruly, uniformly sullen, the Merrill children
acted out their displeasure at being dragged to an amateur theatrical. The
tallish boy, the notorious cemetery vandal, sprawled his legs into the tenter
aisle, indifferently creating a hazard for the elderly, the infirm, and the
unwary. The middle child, a girl-her hair so brutally short, in keeping with
her square, shapeless body, that she might have been a boy-brooded loudly over
her bubble gum. She had sunk herself so low in her seat that her knees caused
considerable discomfort to the back of the neck of the unfortunate citizen who
sat in front of her. He was a plump, mild, middle-aged man who taught something
in the sciences at Gravesend Academy; and when he turned round in his seat to
reprove the girl with a scientific glance, she popped a bubble at him with her
gum. The third and youngest child, of undetermined sex, crawled under the
seats, disturbing the ankles of several surprised theatergoers and coating
itself with a film of grime and ashes-and all manner of muck that the patrons
had brought in upon their winter boots. Through all the unpleasantness created
by her children, Mrs. Merrill suffered silently. Although they caused her
obvious pain, she was unprotesting-since nearly everything caused her pain, she
thought it would be unfair to single them out for special distinction. Mr.
Merrill gazed undistracted toward center stage, apparently transfixed by the
crack where the curtain would part; he appeared to believe that by his special
scrutiny of this opening, by a supreme act of concentration, he might inspire
the curtains to open. Why, then, was he so surprised when they did? Why was /
so surprised by the applause that greeted old Scrooge in his countinghouse? It
was the way the play had opened every night; but it wasn't until Christmas Eve
that it occurred to me how many of these same townspeople must have been
present in those bleacher seats that summer day- applauding, or on the verge of
applauding, the force with which Owen Meany struck that ball. And, yes, there
was fat Mr. Chickering, whose warm-up jacket had kept me from too close a view
of the mortal injury; yes, there was Police Chief Pike. As always, he was
stationed by the door, his suspicious eyes roaming the audience as much as they
toured the stage, as if Chief Pike suspected that the culprit might have
brought the stolen baseball to the play!

" 'If I could work my will,' " said Mr. Fish
indignantly, " 'every idiot who goes about with "Merry
Christmas" on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart.' '' I saw Mr. Morrison silently move
his mouth to every word-in the absence of any lines to learn (as the Ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come), he had learned all of Scrooge's lines by heart. What
had he made of that so spectacularly spun my mother around? Had he been there
to see Mr. Chickering pinch her splayed knees together, for modesty's sake?
Just before Owen made contact, my mother had noticed someone in the bleachers;
as I remembered it, she was waving to someone just before she was struck. She
had not been waving to Mr. Morrison, I was sure; his cynical presence didn't
inspire a greeting as unselfconscious as a wave-that lugubrious mailman did not
invite so much as a nod of recognition. Yet who was that someone my mother had
been waving to, whose was the last face she'd seen, the face she'd singled out
in the crowd, the face she'd found there and had closed her eyes upon at the
moment of her death? With a shudder, I tried to imagine who it could have
been-if not my grandmother, if not Dan . . .

" 'I wear the chain I forged in life,' " Marley's
Ghost told Scrooge; with my attention fixed upon the audience, I had known
where I was in the play by the clanking of Marley's chains.