A prayer for Owen Meany (39 page)

"I agree, I agree," Dan said. It was also agreed that
Lydia be allowed to lie in her own room, with the door firmly shut. Germaine
would sleep in the other twin bed in my room. Although I much preferred the
idea of returning to Waterhouse Hall with Dan, it was pointed out to me that
the cast party might "rage on" into the small hours-a likelihood that
I had been looking forward to-and that Germaine, who was "in a
state," should not be left in a room alone. It would be quite improper for
her to share a room with Dan, and unthinkable that my grandmother would sleep
in the same room with a maid. After all, I was only eleven. I had shared that
room so many times with Owen; how I wanted to talk to him now! What would he
think of my grandmother's suggestion that he had foreseen Lydia's death? And
would he be relieved to learn that Death didn't have a plan to come for him!
Would he believe it? I knew he would be deeply disappointed if he missed seeing
Lydia. And I wanted to tell him about my discovery-while watching the theater
audience-that I believed I could, by this means, actually remember the faces in
the audience at what Owen called that FATED baseball game. What would Owen
Meany say about my sudden inspiration: that it had been my actual father whom
my mother was waving to, the split second before the ball hit her? In the world
of what the Rev. Lewis Merrill called "visions," what would Owen make
of that one? But Germaine distracted me. She wanted the night-light left on;
she tossed and turned; she lay staring at the ceiling. When I got up to go to
the bathroom, she asked me not to be gone long; she didn't want to be left
alone-not for a minute. If she would only fall asleep, I thought, I could
telephone Owen. There was only one phone in the Meany house; it was in the
kitchen, right outside Owen's bedroom. I could call him at any hour of the
night, because he woke up in an instant and his parents slept through the night
like boulders-like immovable slabs of granite. Then I remembered it was
Christmas Eve. My mother had once said it was "just as well" that we
went to Sawyer Depot for Christmas, because it prevented Owen from comparing
what he got for Christmas with what I got. I got a half-dozen presents from
each relative or loved one-from my grandmother, from my aunt and uncle, from my
cousins, from Dan; and more than a half-dozen from my mother. I had looked
under the Christmas tree this year, in the living room of  Front Street,
and was touched at Dan's and my grandmother's efforts to match the sheer number
of presents-for me-that usually lay under the Eastmans' tree in Sawyer Depot. I
had already counted them; I had over forty wrapped presents-and, God knows,
there was usually something hidden in the basement or in the garage that was
too big to wrap. I never knew what Owen got for Christmas, but it occurred to
me that if his parents hadn't even waited up for him-on Christmas Eve!-that
Christmas was not especially emphasized in the Meany household. In the past, by
the time I came back from Sawyer Depot, half of my lesser toys were broken or
lost, and the new things that were truly worth keeping were discovered-by
Owen-gradually, over a period of days or weeks.

"WHERE'D YOU GET THAT?"

"For Christmas."

"OH, YES, I SEE . . ."

Now that I thought of it, I could not remember him ever showing
me a single thing he got''for Christmas.'' I wanted to call him, but Germaine
kept me in my bed. The more I stayed in my bed, and the more I was aware of
her-still awake-the stranger I began to feel. I began to think about Germaine
the way I often thought about Hester-and how old would Germaine have been in '?
In her twenties, I suppose. I actually began to wish that she would climb into
my bed, and I began to imagine climbing into hers; I don't think she would have
prevented me-I think she would have favored an innocent hug and even a
not-so-innocent boy in her arms, if only to keep Death away. I began to
scheme-not at all in the manner of an eleven-year-old, but in the manner of an
older, horny boy. I began to imagine how much advantage I might take of
Germaine, given that she was distraught. I actually said, "I believe you,
about hearing him scream." I liedl I didn't believe her at all!

"It was his voice," she said instantly. "Now that
I remember it, I know it was."

I reached out my hand, into the aisle between the twin beds; her
hand was there to take mine. I thought about the way Barb Wiggin had kissed
Owen; I was rewarded with an erection powerful enough to slightly raise my bed
covers; but when I squeezed Germaine's hand especially hard, she made no
response-she just held on.

"Go to sleep," she said. When her hand slipped out of
mine, I realized that she had fallen asleep; I stared at her for a long time,
but I didn't dare approach her. I was ashamed of how I felt. In the
considerably grown-up vocabulary that I had been exposed to through my
grandmother and Lydia, I had not been exposed to lust; that was not a word I
could have learned from them-that was not a feeling I could label. What I was
experiencing simply felt wrong; it made me feel guilty, that a part of myself
was an enemy to the rest of myself, and that was when I thought I understood
where the feeling came from; it had to come from my father. It was the part of
him that stirred inside me. And for the first time, I began to consider that my
father might be evil, or that what of himself he had given to me was what was
evil in me. Henceforward, whenever I was troubled by a way I felt- and
especially when I felt this way, when I lusted-I thought that my father was
asserting himself within me. My desire to know who he was took on a new
urgency; I did not want to know who he was because I missed him, or because I
was looking for someone to love; I had Dan and his love; I had my
grandmother-and everything I remembered, and (I'm sure) exaggerated, about my
mother. It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the
darkest curiosity-to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be
capable of. How I wanted to talk to Owen about this! When Germaine started to
snore, I got out of bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen phone to call him.
The sudden light in the kitchen sent a resident mouse into rapid abandonment of
its investigations of the bread box; the light also surprised me, because it
turned the myriad Colonial-style windowpanes into fragmented mirror images of
myself- there instantly appeared to be many of me, standing outside the house,
looking in at me. In one image of my shocked face I thought I recognized the
fear and uneasiness peculiar to Mr. Morrison; according to Dan, Mr. Monison's
response to Owen's fainting spell and fit had been one of shock-the cowardly
mailman had fainted. Chief Pike had carried the fallen postal thespian into the
bracing night air, where Mr. Morrison had revived with a vengeance-wrestling in
the snow with Gravesend's determined chief of police, until Mr. Morrison
yielded to the strong arm of the law. But I was alone in the kitchen; the
small, square, mirror-black panes reflected many versions of my face, but no
other face looked in upon me as I dialed the Meanys' number. It rang longer
than I expected, and I almost hung up. Remembering Owen's fever, I was afraid
he might be more soundly asleep than usual-and that Mr. and Mrs. Meany would be
awakened by my call.

"MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said, when he finally answered
the phone. I told him everything. He was most sympathetic to the notion that I
could "remember" the audience at the baseball game by observing the
audience at Dan's play; he recommended that he watch with me-two pairs of eyes
being better than one. As for my "imagining" that my mother had been
waving to my actual father in the last seconds she was alive, Owen Meany
believed in trusting such instincts; he said that I must be ON THE RIGHT TRACK,
because the idea gave him THE SHIVERS-a sure sign. And as for my desire for
Germaine giving me a hard-on, Owen couldn't have been more supportive; if Barb
Wiggin could provoke lust in him, there was no shame in Germaine provoking such
dreadful feelings in me. Owen had prepared a small sermon on the subject of
lust, a feeling he would later describe as A TRUTHFUL PREMONITION THAT
DAMNATION IS FOR REAL. As for the unpleasant sensation originating with my
father-as for these hated feelings in myself being a first sign of my father's
contribution to me-Owen was in complete agreement. Lust, he would later say,
was God's way of helping me identify who my father was; in lust had I been
conceived, in lust would I discover my father. It is amazing to me, now, how such
wild imaginings and philosophies-inspired by a night charged with frights and
calamities-made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good
friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

        
 
Of course, he agreed with me-how stupid
Germame was, to imagine she'd heard him screaming, all the way from the
Gravesend Town Hall!

"I DIDN'T SCREAM THAT LOUDLY," he said indignantly. It
was Grandmother's interpretation of what he had foreseen that provided the only
difference of opinion between us. If he had to believe anything, why couldn't
he believe Grandmother-that it was Lydia's death that the gravestone foretold;
that Owen had simply "seen" the wrong name?

"NO," he said. "IT WAS MY NAME. NOT SCROOGE'S
-AND NOT LYDIA'S."

"But that was just your mistake," I said. "You
were thinking of yourself-you'd even been writing your own name, just moments
before. And you had a very high fever. If that gravestone actually told you
anything, it told you that someone was going to die. That someone was Lydia.
She's dead, isn't she? And you're not dead-are you?"

"IT WAS MY NAME," he repeated stubbornly.

"Look at it this way: you got it half-right," I told
him. I was trying to sound as if I were an old hand at "visions," and
at interpreting them. I tried to sound as if I knew more about the matter than
Pastor Merrill.

"IT WASN'T JUST MY NAME," Owen said. "I MEAN, NOT
THE WAY I EVER WRITE IT-NOT THE WAY I WROTE FT IN THE BABY POWDER. IT WAS MY
REAL NAME-IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," he said. That made me pause; he
sounded so unbudging. His "real" name was Paul-his father's name. His
real name was Paul O. Meany, Jr.; he'dbeen baptized aCatholic. Of course, he
needed a saint's name, like St. Paul; if there is a St. Owen, I've never heard
of him. And because there was already a "Paul" in the family, I
suppose that's why they called him "Owen"; where that middle name
came from, he never said-I never knew.

"The gravestone said, 'Paul O. Meany, Junior'-is that
right?" I asked him.

"IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," Owen repeated. He hung up.
He was so crazy, he drove me crazy! I stayed up drinking orange juice and
eating cookies; I put some fresh bacon in the mousetrap and turned out the
light. Like my mother, I hate darkness; in the dark, it came to me-what he
meant by THE WHOLE THING. I turned on the light; I called him back.

"MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said.

' 'Was there a date on the gravestone?'' I asked him. He gave
himself away by hesitating.

"NO," he said.

"What was the date, Owen?" I asked him. He hesitated
again.

"THERE WAS NO DATE," Owen said. I wanted to cry-not
because I believed a single thing about his stupid "vision," but
because it was the first time he had lied to me.

"Merry Christmas," I said; I hung up. When I turned
the light out a second time, there was more darkness in the darkness. What was
the date? How much time had he given himself? The only question that I wanted
to ask the darkness was the one question Scrooge had also wanted an answer to:
" 'Are these the shadows of the things that Will be or are they shadows of
the things that May be, only?' " But the Ghost of the Future was not
answering.

 
THE VOICE

 
ABOVE ALL THINGS that she
despised, what my grandmother loathed most was lack of effort; this struck Dan
Needham as a peculiar hatred, because Harriet Wheelwright had never worked a
day in her life-nor had she ever expected my mother to work; and she never once
assigned me a single chore. Nevertheless, in my grandmother's view, it required
nearly constant effort to keep track of the world-both our own world and the
world outside the sphere of Gravesend-and it required effort and intelligence
to make nearly constant comment on one's observations; in these efforts,
Grandmother was rigorous and unswerving. It was her belief in the value of
effort itself that prevented her from buying a television set. She was a
passionate reader, and she thought that reading was one of the noblest efforts
of all; in contrast, she found writing to be a great waste of time-a childish
self-indulgence, even messier than finger painting-but she admired reading,
which she believed was an unselfish activity that provided information and
inspiration. She must have thought it a pity that some poor fools had to waste
their lives writing in order for us to have sufficient reading material.
Reading also gave one confidence in and familiarity with language, which was a
necessary tool for forming those nearly constant Comments on what one had
observed. Grandmother had her doubts about the radio, although she conceded
that the modem world moved at such a pace that keeping up with it defied the
written word; listening, after all, required some effort, and the language one
heard on the radio was not much worse than the language one increasingly
stumbled over in newspapers and magazines. But she drew the line at television.
It took no effort to watch-it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and
to the intelligence, to read or to listen-and what she imagined there was to
watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it. She had
protested to the Soldiers' Home, and to the Gravesend Retreat for the
Elderly-both of which she served as a trustee-that making television sets
available to old people would surely hasten their deaths. She was unmoved by
the claim made by both these homes for the aged: that the inmates were often
too feeble or inattentive to read, and that the radio put them to sleep. My
grandmother visited both homes, and what she observed only confirmed her
opinions; what Harriet Wheelwright always observed always confirmed her
opinions: she saw the process of death hastened. She saw very old, infirm
people with their mouths agape; although they were, at best, only partially
alert, they gave their stuporous attention to images that my grandmother
described as "too surpassing in banality to recall." It was the first
time she had actually seen television sets that were turned on, and she was
hooked. My grandmother observed that television was draining what scant life
remained in the old people "clean out of them"; yet she instantly
craved a TV of her own! My mother's death, which was followed in less than a
year by Lydia's death, had much to do with Grandmother's decision to have a
television installed at  Front Street. My mother had been a big fan of the
old Victrola; in the evenings, we'd listened to Sinatra singing with the Tommy
Dorsey Orchestra- my mother liked to sing along with Sinatra. "That
Frank," she used to say. "He's got a voice that's meant for a
woman-but no woman was ever that lucky." I remember a few of her favorites;
when I hear them, I'm still tempted to sing along- although I don't have my
mother's voice. I don't have Sinatra's voice, either-nor his bullying
patriotism. I don't think my mother would have been fond of Sinatra's politics,
but she liked what she called his "early" voice, in particular those
songs from Sinatra's first sessions with Tommy Dorsey. Because she liked to
sing along with Sinatra, she preferred his voice before the war-when he was
more subdued and less of a star, when Tommy Dorsey kept him in balance with the
band. Her favorite recordings were from -"I'll Be Seeing You,"
"Fools Rush In," "I Haven't Time to Be a Millionaire,"
"It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow," "All This and Heaven, Too,"
"Where Do You Keep Your Heart?," "Trade Winds," "The
Call of the Canyon"; and, most of all, "Too Romantic."