A prayer for Owen Meany (4 page)

What I remember best is Sunday school in the Episcopal Church.
Both Owen and I were newcomers there. When my mother married the second man she
met on the train, she and I changed churches; we left the Congregational Church
for the church of my adoptive father-he was, my mother said, an Episcopalian,
and although I never saw any evidence that he was a particularly serious
Episcopalian, my mother insisted that she and I move with him to his church. It
was a move that disturbed my grandmother, because we Wheelwrights had been in
the Congregational Church ever since we got over being Puritans ("ever
since we almost got over being Puritans," my grandmother used to say,
because-in her opinion- Puritanism had never entirely relinquished its hold on
us Wheelwrights). Some Wheelwrights-not only our founding father-had even been
in the ministry; in the last century, the Congregational ministry. And the move
upset the pastor of the Congregational Church, the Rev. Lewis Merrill; he'd
baptized me, and he was woebegone at the thought of losing my mother's voice
from the choir-he'd known her since she was a young girl, and (my mother always
said) he'd been especially supportive of her when she'd been calmly and
good-naturedly insisting on her privacy regarding my origins. The move did not
sit well with me, either-as you shall see. But Owen Meany's manner of making
and keeping a thing mysterious was to allude to something too dark and terrible
to mention. He was changing churches, he said, TO ESCAPE THE CATHOLICS-or,
actually, it was his father who was escaping and defying the Catholics by
sending Owen to Sunday school, to be confirmed, in the Episcopal Church. When
Congregationalists turned into Episcopalians, Owen told me, there was nothing
to it; it simply represented a move upward in church formality-in HOCUS-POCUS,
Owen called it. But for Catholics to move to the Episcopal Church

 
 
was not only a
move away from the hocus-pocus; it was a move that risked eternal damnation.
Owen used to say, gravely, that his father would surely be damned for
initiating the move, but that the Catholics had committed an UNSPEAKABLE
OUTRAGE-that they had insulted his father and mother, irreparably. When I would
complain about the kneeling, which was new to me-not to mention the abundance
of litanies and recited creeds in the Episcopal service-Owen would tell me that
I knew nothing. Not only did Catholics kneel and mutter litanies and creeds
without ceasing, but they ritualized any hope of contact with God to such an
extent that Owen felt they'd interfered with his ability to pray-to talk to God
DIRECTLY, as Owen put it. And then there was confession! Here I was complaining
about some simple kneeling, but what did I know about confessing my sins? Owen
said the pressure to confess-as a Catholic-was so great that he'd often made
things up in order to be forgiven for them.

"But that's crazy!" I said. Owen agreed. And what was
the cause of the falling out between the Catholics and Mr. Meany? I always
asked. Owen never told me. The damage was irreparable, he would repeat; he
would refer only to the UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE. Perhaps my unhappiness at having traded
the Congregational Church for the Episcopal-in combination with Owen's
satisfaction at having ESCAPED the Catholics-contributed to my pleasure in our
game of lifting Owen Meany up in the air. It occurs to me now that we were all
guilty of thinking of Owen as existing only for our entertainment; but hi my
case- especially, in the Episcopal Church-I think I was also guilty of envying
him. I believe my participation in abusing him in Sunday school was faintly
hostile and inspired by the greatest difference between us: he believed more
than I did, and although I was always aware of this, I was most aware in
church. I disliked the Episcopalians because they appeared to believe more-or
in more things-than the Congregationalists believed; and because I believed
very little, I had been more comfortable with the Congregationalists, who
demanded a minimum of participation from worshipers. Owen disliked the
Episcopalians, too, but he disliked them far less than he had disliked the
Catholics; in his opinion, both of them believed less than he believed-but the
Catholics had interfered with Owen's beliefs and practices more. He was my best
friend, and with our best friends we overlook many differences; but it wasn't
until we found ourselves attending the same Sunday school, and the same church,
that I was forced to accept that my best friend's religious faith was more
certain (if not always more dogmatic) than anything I heard in either the
Congregational or the Episcopal Church. I don't remember Sunday school in the Congregational
Church at all-although my mother claimed that this was always an occasion
whereat I ate a lot, both in Sunday school and at various parish-house
functions. I vaguely remember the cider and the cookies; but I remember
emphatically-with a crisp, winter-day brightness-the white clapboard church,
the black steeple clock, and the services that were always held on the second
floor in an informal, well-lit, meetinghouse atmosphere. You could look out the
tall windows at the branches of the towering trees. By comparison, the
Episcopal services were conducted in a gloomy, basement atmosphere. It was a
stone church, and there was a ground-floor or even underground mustiness to the
place, which was overcrowded with dark wood bric-a-brac, somber with dull gold
organ pipes, garish with confused configurations of stained glass-through which
not a single branch of a tree was visible. When I complained about church, I
complained about the usual things a kid complains about: the claustrophobia,
the boredom. But Owen complained religiously. "A PERSON'S FAITH GOES AT
ITS OWN PACE," Owen Meany said. "THE TROUBLE WITH CHURCH IS THE
SERVICE. A SERVICE IS CONDUCTED FOR A MASS AUDIENCE. JUST WHEN I START TO LIKE
THE HYMN, EVERYONE PLOPS DOWN TO PRAY. JUST WHEN I START TO HEAR THE PRAYER,
EVERYONE POPS UP TO SING. AND WHAT DOES THE STUPID SERMON HAVE TO DO WITH GOD?
WHO KNOWS WHAT GOD THINKS OF CURRENT EVENTS? WHO CARES?"

To these complaints, and others like them, I could respond only
by picking up Owen Meany and holding him above my head.

"You tease Owen too much," my mother used to say to
me. But I don't remember much teasing, not beyond the usual lifting him
up-unless Mother meant that I failed to realize

 
 
how serious Owen
was; he was insulted by jokes of any kind. After all, he did read Wall's
History of Gravesend before he was ten; this was not lighthearted work, this
was never reading that merely skipped along. And he also read the Bible-not by
the time he was ten, of course; but he actually read the whole thing. And then
there was the question of Gravesend Academy; that was the question for every
boy born in Gravesend-the academy did not admit girls in those days. I was a
poor student; and even though my grandmother could well have afforded the
tuition, I was destined to stay at Gravesend High School-until my mother
married someone on the academy faculty and he legally adopted me. Faculty
children-faculty brats, we were called-could automatically attend the academy.
What a relief this must have been to my grandmother; she'd always resented that
her own children couldn't go to Gravesend Academy-she'd had daughters. My
mother and my Aunt Martha were high-school girls-what they saw of Gravesend
Academy was only at the dating end, although my Aunt Martha put this to good use:
she married a Gravesend Academy boy (one of the few who didn't prefer my
mother), which made my cousins sons of alumni, which favored their admittance,
too. (My only female cousin would not benefit from this alumni connection-as
you shall see.) But Owen Meany was a legitimate Gravesend Academy candidate; he
was a brilliant student; he was the kind of student who was supposed to go to
Gravesend. He could have applied and got in-and got a full scholarship, too,
since the Meany Granite Company was never flourishing and his parents could not
have afforded the tuition. But one day when my mother was driving Owen and me
to the beach-Owen and I were ten-my mother said, "I hope you never stop
helping Johnny with his homework, Owen, because when you're both at the
academy, the homework's going to be much harder-especially for Johnny."

"BUT I'M NOT GOING TO THE ACADEMY," Owen said.

"Of course you are!" my mother said. "You're the
best student in New Hampshire-maybe, in the whole country!"

"THE ACADEMY'S NOT FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME," Owen said.
"THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME."

I wondered for a moment if he meant, or small people-that public
high schools were for people who were exceptionally small-but my mother was
thinking far ahead of me, and she said, "You'll get a full scholarship,
Owen. I hope your parents know that. You'll go to the academy absolutely
free."

"YOU HAVE TO WEAR A COAT AND TIE EVERY DAY," Owen
said. "THE SCHOLARSHIP DOESN'T BUY THE COATS AND TIES."

"That can be arranged, Owen," my mother said, and I
could tell that she meant she'd arrange it-if no one else would, she'd buy him
every coat and tie he could possibly have use for.

"THERE'S ALSO DRESS SHIRTS, AND SHOES," Owen said.
"IF YOU GO TO SCHOOL WITH RICH PEOPLE, YOU DON'T WANT TO LOOK LIKE THEIR
SERVANTS." I now suppose that my mother could hear Mr. Meany's prickly,
working-class politics behind this observation.

"Everything you need, Owen," my mother said. "It
will be taken care of."

We were in Rye, passing the First Church, and the breeze from
the ocean was already strong. A man with a great stack of roofing shingles in a
wheelbarrow was having difficulty keeping the shingles from blowing away; the
ladder, leaning against the vestry roof, was also in danger of being blown
over. The man seemed in need of a co-worker-or, at least, of another pair of
hands.

"WE SHOULD STOP AND HELP THAT MAN," Owen observed, but
my mother was pursuing a theme and, therefore, she'd noticed nothing unusual
out the window.

"Would it help if I talked to your parents about it,
Owen?" my mother asked.

"THERE'S ALSO THE MATTER OF THE BUS," Owen said.
"TO GO TO HIGH SCHOOL, YOU CAN TAKE A BUS. I DON'T LIVE RIGHT IN TOWN, YOU
KNOW. HOW WOULD I GET TO THE ACADEMY? IF I WAS A DAY STUDENT, I MEAN-HOW WOULD
I GET THERE? HOW WOULD I GET BACK HOME? BECAUSE MY PARENTS WOULD NEVER LET ME
LIVE IN A DORMITORY. THEY NEED ME AT HOME. ALSO, DORMITORIES ARE EVIL. SO HOW
DO THE DAY STUDENTS GET TO SCHOOL AND GET HOME?" he asked.

"Someone drives them," my mother said. "/ could
drive

 
 
you, Owen-at least
until you got a driver's license of your own."

"NO, IT WON'T WORK," Owen said. "MY FATHER'S TOO
BUSY, AND MY MOTHER DOESN'T DRIVE."

Mrs. Meany-both my mother and I knew-not only didn't drive; she
never left the house. And even in the summer, the windows in that house were
never open; his mother was allergic to dust, Owen had explained. Every day of
the year, Mrs. Meany sat indoors behind the windows bleared and streaked with
grit from the quarry. She wore an old set of pilot's headphones (the wires
dangling, unattached) because the sound of the channeling machine-the channel
bar, and the rock chisels-disturbed her. On blasting days, she played the
phonograph very loudly-the big band sound, the needle skipping occasionally
when the dynamite was especially nearby and percussive. Mr. Meany did the
shopping. He drove Owen to Sunday school, and picked him up-although he did not
attend the Episcopal services himself. It was apparently enough revenge upon the
Catholics to be sending Owen there; either the added defiance of his own
attendance was unnecessary, or else Mr. Meany had suffered such an outrage at
the hands of the Catholic authorities that he was rendered unreceptive to the
teachings of any church. He was, my mother knew, quite unreceptive on the
subject of Gravesend Academy. "There is the interests of the town,"
he once said in Town Meeting, "and then there is the interests of
theml" This regarded the request of the academy to widen the saltwater river
and dredge a deeper low-tide channel at a point in the Squamscott that would
improve the racing course for the academy crew; several shells had become mired
in the mud flats at low tide. The part of the river the academy wished to widen
was a peninsula of tidewater marsh bordering the Meany Granite Quarry; it was
totally unusable land, yet Mr. Meany owned it and he resented that the academy
wanted to scoop it away-"for purposes of recreation!" he said.

"We're talking about mud, not granite," a representative
of the academy had remarked.

"I'm talkin' about us and them}" Mr. Meany had
shouted, in what is now recorded as a famous Town Meeting. In order for a Town
Meeting to be famous in Gravesend, it is only necessary that there be a good
row. The Squamscott was widened; the channel was dredged. If it was just mud,
the town decided, it didn't matter whose mud it was.

"You're going to the academy, Owen," my mother told
him. "That's all there is to it. If any student ever belonged in a proper
school, it's you-that place was made with you in mind, or it was made for no
one."

"WE MISSED DOING A GOOD DEED," Owen said morosely.
"THAT MAN SHINGLING THE CHURCH-HE NEEDED HELP."

"Don't argue with me, Owen," my mother said.
"You're going to the academy, if I have to adopt you. I'll kidnap you, if
I have to," she said. But no one on this earth was ever as stubborn as
Owen Meany; he waited a mile before he said another word, and then he said,
"NO. IT WON'T WORK."

Gravesend Academy was founded in  by the Rev. Emery Hurd, a
follower of the original Wheelwright's original beliefs, a childless Puritan
with an ability-according to Wall-for "Oration on the advantages of
Learning and its happy Tendency to promote Virtue and Piety." What would
the Rev. Mr. Hurd have thought of Owen Meany? Hurd conceived of an academy
whereat "no vicious lad, who is liable to contaminate his associates, is
allowed to remain an hour"; whereat "the student shall bear the
laboring oar"-and learn heartily from his labor! As for the rest of his
money, Emery Hurd left it for "the education and christianization of the
American Indians." In his waning years-ever watchful that Gravesend
Academy devote itself to "pious and charitable purposes"-the Rev. Mr.
Hurd was known to patrol Water Street in downtown Gravesend, looking for
youthful offenders: specifically, young men who would not doff their hats to
him, and young ladies who would not curtsy. In payment for such offense, Emery
Hurd was happy to give these young people a piece of his mind; near the end, only
pieces were left. I saw my grandmother lose her mind in pieces like that; when
she was so old that she could remember almost nothing-certainly not Owen Meany,
and not even me-she would occasionally reprimand the whole room, and anyone
present in it. "What has happened to tipping the hat?" she would
howl. "Bring back the bow!" she would croon. "Bring back the
curtsy!"