A prayer for Owen Meany (40 page)

I had my own radio, and after Mother died, I listened to it more
and more; I thought it would upset my grandmother to play-on the Victrola-those
old Sinatra songs. When Lydia was alive, my grandmother seemed content with her
reading; either she and Lydia took turns reading to each other, or they forced
Germaine to read aloud to them-while they rested their eyes and exercised their
acute interest in educating Germaine. But after Lydia died, Germaine refused to
read aloud to my grandmother; Germaine was convinced that her reading aloud to
Lydia had either killed Lydia or had hastened her death, and Germaine was
resolute in not wanting to murder Grandmother in a similar fashion. For a
while, my grandmother read aloud to Germaine; but this afforded no opportunity
for Grandmother to rest her eyes, and she would often interrupt her reading to
make sure that Germaine was paying proper attention. Germaine could not
possibly pay attention to the subject-she was so intent on keeping herself
alive for the duration of the reading. You can see that this was a home already
vulnerable to invasion by television. Ethel, for example, would never be the
companion to my grandmother that Lydia had been. Lydia had been an alert and
appreciative audience to my grandmother's nearly constant comments, but Ethel
was entirely unresponsive-efficient but uninspired, dutiful but passive. Dan
Needham sensed that it was Ethel's lack of spark that made my grandmother feel
old; yet whenever Dan suggested to Grandmother that she might replace Ethel
with someone livelier, my grandmother defended Ethel with bulldog loyalty.
Wheelwrights were snobs but they were fair-minded; Wheelwrights did not fire
their servants because they were stodgy and dull. And so Ethel stayed, and my
grandmother grew old-old and restless to be entertained; she was vulnerable to
invasion by television, too. Germaine, who was terrified when my grandmother
read to her-and too terrified to read aloud to Grandmother at all-had too
little to do; she resigned. Wheelwrights accept resignations graciously,
although I was sorry to see Germaine go. The desire she had provoked in me-as
distasteful as it was to me at the time-was a clue to my father; moreover, the
lustful fantasies that Germaine provided were, although evil, more entertaining
to me than anything I could hear on my radio. With Lydia gone, and with me
spending half my days and nights with Dan, Grandmother didn't need two maids;
there was no reason to replace Germaine-Ethel would suffice. And with Germaine
gone, / was vulnerable to invasion by television, too.

"YOUR GRANDMOTHER IS GETTING A TELEVISION!" said Owen
Meany. The Meanys did not have a television. Dan didn't have one, either; he'd
voted against Eisenhower in ', and he'd promised himself that he wouldn't buy a
TV as long as Ike was president. Even the Eastmans didn't have a television.
Uncle Alfred wanted one, and Noah and Simon and Hester begged to have one; but
TV reception was still rather primitive in the north country, Sawyer Depot
received mostly snow, and Aunt Martha refused to build a tower for the
necessary antenna-it would be too "unsightly," she said, although
Uncle Alfred wanted a television so badly that he claimed he would construct an
antenna tower capable of interfering with low-flying planes if it could get him
adequate reception.

"You're getting a televisionT" Hester said to me on
the phone from Sawyer Depot. "You lucky little prick!" Her jealousy
was thrilling to hear. Owen and I had no idea what would be on television. We
were used to the Saturday matinees at the decrepit Gravesend movie house,
inexplicably called The Idaho-after the faraway western state or the potato of
that name, we never knew. The Idaho was partial to Tarzan films, and-increasingly-to
biblical epics. Owen and I hated the latter: in his view, they were
SACRILEGIOUS; in my opinion, they were boring. Owen was also critical of Tarzan
movies.

"ALL THAT STUPID SWINGING ON VINES-AND THE VINES NEVER
BREAK. AND EVERY TIME HE GOES SWIMMING, THEY SEND IN THE ALLIGATORS OR THE
CROCODILES-ACTUALLY, I THINK IT'S ALWAYS THE SAME ALLIGATOR OR CROCODILE; THE
POOR CREATURE IS TRAINED TO WRESTLE WITH TARZAN. IT PROBABLY LOVES TARZAN! AND
IT'S ALWAYS THE SAME OLD ELEPHANT STAMPEDING- AND THE SAME LION, THE SAME
LEOPARD, THE

        
 
SAME STUPID WARTHOG! AND HOW CAN JANE STAND
HIM? HE'S SO STUPID; ALL THESE YEARS HE'S BEEN MARRIED TO JANE, AND HE STILL
CAN'T SPEAK ENGLISH. THE STUPID CHIMPANZEE IS SMARTER," Owen said. But
what really made him cross were the Pygmies; they gave him THE SHIVERS. He
wondered if the Pygmies got jobs in other movies; he worried that their
blowguns with their poison darts would soon be popular with JUVENILE GANGS.

"Where?" I asked. "What juvenile gangs?"

"MAYBE THEY'RE IN BOSTON," he said. We had no idea
what to expect from Grandmother's television. There may have been Pygmy movies
on The Late Show in , but Owen and I were not allowed to watch The Late Show
for several years; my grandmother-for all her love of effort and
regulation-imposed no other rules about television upon us. For all I know,
there may not have been a Late Show as long ago as ; it doesn't matter. The
point is, my grandmother was never a censor; she simply believed that Owen and
I should go to bed at a "decent" hour. She watched television all
day, and every evening; at dinner, she would recount the day's inanities to
me-or to Owen, or Dan, or even Ethel-and she would offer a hasty preview of the
absurdities available for nighttime viewing. On the one hand, she became a
slave to television; on the other hand, she expressed her contempt for nearly
everything she saw and the energy of her outrage may have added years to her
life. She detested TV with such passion and wit that watching television and
commenting on it-sometimes, commenting directly to it-became her job. There was
no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my
grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental
and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never
saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often-as if they were
shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then
abandoned. There was much on television that Owen and I were unprepared for;
but what we were most unprepared for was my grandmother's active participation
in almost everything we saw. On those rare occasions when we watched television
without my grandmother, we were disappointed; without Grandmother's running,
scathing commentary, there were few programs that could sustain our interest.
When we watched TV alone, Owen would always say, "I CAN JUST HEAR WHAT
YOUR GRANDMOTHER WOULD MAKE OF THIS."

Of course, there is no heart-however serious-that finds the death
of culture entirely lacking in entertainment; even my grandmother enjoyed one
particular television show. To my surprise, Grandmother and Owen were devoted
viewers of the same show-in my grandmother's case, it was the only show for
which she felt uncritical love; in Owen's case, it was his favorite among the
few shows he at first adored. The unlikely figure who captured the rarely
uncritical hearts of my grandmother and Owen Meany was a shameless crowd
pleaser, a musical panderer who chopped up Chopin and Mozart and Debussy into
two- and three-minute exaggerated flourishes on a piano he played with
diamond-studded hands. He at times played a see-through, glass-topped piano,
and he was proud of mentioning the hundreds of thousands of dollars that his pianos
cost; one of his diamond rings was piano-shaped, and he never played any piano
that was not adorned with an ornate candelabrum. In the childhood of
television, he was an idol-largely to women older than my grandmother, and of
less than half her education; yet my grandmother and Owen Meany loved him. He'd
once appeared as a soloist for the Chicago Symphony, when he was only fourteen,
but now-in his wavy-haired thirties-he was a man who was more dedicated to the
visual than to the acoustic. He wore floor-length furs and sequined suits; he
crammed sixty thousand dollars' worth of chinchilla onto one coat; he had a
jacket of twenty-four-karat gold braid; he wore a tuxedo with diamond buttons
that spelled out his name.

"LIBERACE!" Owen cried, every time he saw the man; his
TV show appeared ten times a week. He was a ridiculous peacock of a man with a
honey-coated, feminine voice and dimples so deep that they might have been the
handiwork of a ball peen hammer.

"Why don't I slip out and get into something more spectacular?"
he would coo; each time, my grandmother and Owen would roar with approval, and
Liberace would return to his piano, having changed his sequins for feathers.
Liberace was an androgynous pioneer, I suppose-preparing the society for freaks
like Elton John and Boy George-but I could never understand why Owen and
Grandmother liked him. It certainly wasn't his music, for he edited Mozart in
such

        
 
a jaunty fashion that you thought he was
playing "Mack the Knife"; now and then he played "Mack the
Knife," too.

"He loves his mother," my grandmother would say, in
Liberace's defense-and, in truth, it seemed to be true; not only did he ooh and
aah about his mother on TV, but it was reported that he actually lived with the
old lady until she died-in !

"HE GAVE HIS BROTHER A JOB," Owen pointed out,
"AND I DON'T THINK GEORGE IS ESPECIALLY TALENTED.' ' Indeed, George, the
silent brother, played a straight-man's violin until he left the act to become
the curator of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, where he died-in . But where
did Owen get the idea that Liberace was ESPECIALLY TALENTED? To me, his
principal gift was how unselfconsciously he amused himself-and he was capable
of making fun of himself, too. But my grandmother and Owen Meany twittered over
him as hysterically as the blue-haired ladies in Liberace's TV audience
did-especially when the famous fool skipped into the audience to dance with
them!

"He actually likes old people!" my grandmother said in
wonder.

"HE WOULD NEVER HURT ANYONE!" said Owen Meany
admiringly. At the time, I thought he was a fruitcake, but a London columnist
who made a similar slur regarding Liberace's sexual preferences lost a libel
judgment to him. (That was in ; on the witness stand, Liberace testified that
he was opposed to homosexuality. I remember how Owen and my grandmother
cheered!) And so, in , my excitement over the new television at  Front
Street was tempered by the baffling love of my grandmother and Owen Meany for
Liberace. I felt quite excluded from their mindless worship of such a kitschy
phenomenon-my mother would never have sung along with Liberace!-and I expressed
my criticism, as always, to Dan. Dan Needham took a creative, often a positive
view of misfortune; many faculty members in even the better secondary schools
are failures-in-hiding-lazy men and women whose marginal authority can be
exercised only over adolescents; but Dan was never one of these. Whether he
hoped to retire at Gravesend Academy when he first fell in love and married my
mother, I'll never know; but her loss, and his reaction to that injustice,
caused him to devote himself to the development of the education of "the
whole boy" in ways that surpassed even the loftily expressed goals in
Gravesend's curriculum-where "the whole boy" was the proposed result
of the four-year program of study. Dan became the best of those faculty found
at a prep school: he was not only a spirited, good teacher, but he believed
that it was a hardship to be young, that it was more difficult to be a teenager
than a grown-up-an opinion not widely held among grown-ups, and rarely held
among the faculty members at a private school (who more frequently look upon
their charges as the privileged louts of the luxury class-spoiled brats in need
of discipline). Dan Needham, although he encountered at Gravesend Academy many
spoiled brats in need of discipline, simply had more sympathy for people under
twenty than he had for people his own age, and older-although he increased his
sympathy for the elderly, who (he believed) were suffering a second adolescence
and (like the boys at Gravesend) required special care.

"Your grandmother is getting old," Dan told me.
"She's suffered losses-her husband, your mother. And Lydia- although
neither your grandmother nor Lydia knew it-was possibly your grandmother's
closest friend. Ethel is no better company than a fire hydrant. If your
grandmother loves Liberace, don't fault her for that. Don't be such a snob! If
someone makes her happy, don't complain," Dan said. But if it was
tolerable to be Grandmother's age and adore Liberace, it was intolerable that
Owen Meany should also love that simpering, piano-key smile.

"I'm sick of how smart Owen thinks he is," I said to
Dan. "If he's so smart, how can he like Liberace-at his age?"

"Owen is smart," Dan said. "He's smarter than
even he knows. But he is not worldly," Dan added. "God knows-in his
family-what terrible superstitions he's grown up with! His father is an
uneducated mystery, and no one knows the measure of his mother's mental problems-she's
in such a lunatic state, we can't even guess how insane she is! Maybe Owen
likes Liberace because Liberace couldn't exist in Graves-end. Why does he think
he'd be so happy in Sawyer Depot?" Dan asked me. "Because he's never
been there."

I thought Dan was right; but Dan's theories about Owen were
always a little too complete. When I told Dan that Owen remained convinced he
had seen the exact date of his own death-and that he refused to tell me what
the special day was-Dan too neatly put that problem to rest along with the

        
 
superstitions Owen's parents had subjected
him to; I couldn't help thinking that Owen was more creative, and more
responsible, than that. And if Dan was one of the gifted and tirelessly
unselfish faculty members at the academy, his sincere devotion to the goal of
"the whole boy" may have blinded him to the faults of the school-and
especially to the many flawed members of the faculty and the administration.
Dan believed that Gravesend Academy could rescue anyone. All that Owen needed
was to survive until he was old enough to enter the academy. Owen's naturally
good mind would mature when confronted with the academic challenges; Owen's
superstitions would vanish in the company of the academy's more worldly
students. Like many dedicated educators, Dan Needham had made education his
religion; Owen Meany lacked only the social and intellectual stimulation that a
good school could provide. At Gravesend Academy, Dan was sure, the brute-stupid
influence of Owen's parents would be washed clean away-as cleanly as the ocean
at Little Boar's Head could wash the quarry dust from Owen's body. My Aunt
Martha and Uncle Alfred couldn't wait for Noah and Simon to be old enough to
attend Gravesend Academy. The Eastmans, like Dan, believed in the powers of a good
private-school education-specifically, in the case of Noah and Simon, in the
power to rescue those two daredevils from the standard fates of rural, north
country boys: the marriage of driving fast on the back roads, and beer; and the
trailer-park girls in the back seats of those cars, those girls who
successfully conspired to get pregnant before their high-school graduations.
Like many boys who are sent off to private schools, my cousins Noah and Simon
had a wildness within them that couldn't be safely contained by their homes or
their communities; they had dangerous edges in need of blunting. Everyone
suspected that the rigors of a good school would have the desired, dulling
effect on Noah and Simon-Gravesend Academy would assault them with a host of new
demands, of impossible standards. The sheer volume (if not the value) of the
homework would tire them out, and everyone knew that tired boys were safer
boys; the numbing routine, the strict attentions paid to the dress code, the
regulations regarding only the most occasional and highly chaperoned encounters
with the female sex ... all this would certainly civilize them. Why my Aunt
Martha and Uncle Alfred were less concerned with civilizing Hester remains a
mystery to me. That Gravesend Academy did not admit girls, in those days,
should not have influenced the Eastmans' decision to send or not to send Hester
off to a private school; there were plenty of private schools for girls, and
Hester was in as much need of rescuing from the wildness within her-and from
the rural, north country rituals of her sex-as Noah and Simon were in need of
saving. But in this interim period of time-when Noah and Simon and Owen and I
were all waiting to be old enough to attend the academy-Hester began to resent
that there were no plans being made for her salvation. The idea that she was
not in need of rescuing would surely have insulted her; and the notion that my
aunt and uncle might have considered her beyond saving would have hurt her in
another way.