A prayer for Owen Meany (42 page)

"PENGUINS!" Owen would cry as he ran; everyone called
nuns "penguins." We'd run up Cass Street to the railroad tracks and
follow the tracks out of town. Before we reached Maiden Hill, or the quarries,
we would pass the Fort Rock Farm and throw what remained of our chestnuts at
the black angus cattle grazing there; despite their threatening size and their
blue lips and tongues, the black angus wouldn't chase us as enthusiastically as
the penguins, who always gave up their pursuit before Cass Street.

        
 
And every spring, the swamp between Tan Lane
and Garfield Street produced a pondful of tadpoles and toads. Who hasn't
already told you that boys of a certain age are cruel? We filled a tennis-ball
can with tadpoles and-under the cover of darkness-poured them over the feet of
Mary Magdalene. The tadpoles-those that didn't turn quickly into toads-would
dry up and die there. We even slaughtered toads and indelicately placed their
mutilated bodies in the holy goalie's upturned palms, staining her with
amphibian gore, God forgive us! We were such delinquents only in these few
years of adolescence before Gravesend Academy could save us from ourselves. In
the spring of ', Owen was especially destructive to the helpless swamplife of
Gravesend, and to Mary Magdalene; just before Easter, we'd been to The Idaho,
where we suffered through Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments-the life of
Moses, represented by Charlton Heston undergoing various costume changes and
radical hairstyles.

"IT'S ANOTHER MALE-NIPPLE MOVIE," Owen said; and,
indeed, in addition to Charlton Heston's nipples, there is evidence of Yul
Brynner and John Derek and even Edward G. Robinson having nipples, too. That
The Idaho should show The Ten Commandments so close to Easter was another
example of what my grandmother called the poor "seasonal" taste of
nearly everyone in the entertainment business: that we should see the Exodus of
the Chosen People on the eve of our Lord's Passion and Resurrection was
outrageous-"ALL THAT OLD-TESTAMENT HARSHNESS WHEN WE SHOULD BE THINKING
ABOUT JESUS!" as Owen put it. The parting of the Red Sea especially
offended him.

"YOU CAN'T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT!" he said
indignantly. "YOU CAN'T PROVE A MIRACLE-YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE IT! IF
THE RED SEA ACTUALLY PARTED, IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THAT," he said. "IT
DIDN'T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING- IT'S NOT A PICTURE ANYONE CAN EVEN IMAGINE!"

But there wasn't logic to his anger. If The Ten Commandments
made him cross, why take it out on Mary Magdalene and a bunch of toads and
tadpoles? In these years before we attended Gravesend Academy, Owen and I were
educated-primarily-by what we saw at The Idaho and on my grandmother's
television. Who hasn't been "educated" in this slovenly fashion? Who
can blame Owen for his reaction to The Ten Commandments'? Almost any reaction
would be preferable to believing it! But if a movie as stupid as The Ten
Commandments could make Owen Meany murder toads by throwing them at Mary
Magdalene, a performance as compelling as Bette Davis's in Dark Victory could
convince Owen that he, too, had a brain tumor. At first, Bette Davis is dying
and doesn't know it. Her doctor and her best friend won't tell her.

"THEY SHOULD TELL HER IMMEDIATELY!" Owen said
anxiously. The doctor was played by George Brent.

"He could never do anything right, anyway,"
Grandmother observed. Humphrey Bogart is a stableman who speaks with an Irish
accent. It was the Christmas of ' and we were watching a movie made in ; it was
the first time Grandmother had permitted us to watch The Late Show-at least, I
think it was The Late Show. After a certain evening hour-or whenever it was
that my grandmother began to feel tired-she called everything The Late Show.
She felt sorry for us because the Eastmans were spending another Christmas in
the Caribbean; Sawyer Depot was a pleasure slipping into the past, for me-for
Owen, it was becoming mere wishful thinking.

"You'd think that Humphrey Bogart could learn a better
Irish accent than that," my grandmother complained. Dan Needham said that
he wouldn't give George Brent a part in a production of The Gravesend Players;
Owen added that Mr. Fish would have been a more convincing doctor to Bette
Davis, but Grandmother argued that "Mr. Fish would have his hands full as
Bette Davis's husband"-her doctor eventually gets to be her husband, too.

"Anyone would have his hands full as Bette Davis's
husband," Dan observed. Owen thought it was cruel that Bette Davis had to
find out she was dying all by herself; but Dark Victory is one of those movies
that presumes to be instructive on the subject of how to die. We see Bette
Davis accepting her fate gracefully; she moves to Vermont with George Brent and
takes up gardening- cheerfully living with the fact that one day, suddenly,
darkness will come.

"THIS IS VERY SAD!" Owen cried. "HOW CAN SHE NOT
THINK ABOUT IT?"

Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk.

"She should have married him," Grandmother said.
"She's dying and he's already dead."

Owen said that the symptoms of Bette Davis's terminal tumor were
familiar to him.

"Owen, you don't have a brain tumor," Dan Needham told
him.

"Bette Davis doesn't have one, either!" Grandmother
said. "But I think Ronald Reagan has one."

"Maybe George Brent, too," Dan said.

"YOU KNOW THE PART ABOUT THE DIMMING VISION?" Owen
asked. "WELL, SOMETIMES MY VISION DIMS-JUST LIKE BETTE DAVIS'S!"

"You should have your eyes examined, Owen,"
Grandmother said.

"You don't have a brain tumor!" Dan Needham repeated.

"I HAVE SOMETHING," said Owen Meany. In addition to
watching television, Owen and I spent many nights backstage with The Gravesend
Players, but we rarely watched the performances; we watched the audiences-we
repopulated those bleacher seats at that Little League game in the summer of ';
gradually, the stands were filling. We had no doubts about the exact placement
of the Kenmores or the Dowlings; Owen disputed my notion that Maureen Early and
Caroline O'Day were in the top row-he SAW them nearer the bottom. And we
couldn't agree about the Brinker-Smiths.

"THE BRITISH NEVER WATCH BASEBALL!" Owen said. But I
always had an eye for Ginger Blinker-Smith's fabled voluptuousness; I argued
that she had been there, that I "saw" her.

"YOU WOULDN'T HAVE LOOKED TWICE IF SHE HAD BEEN THERE-NOT
THAT SUMMER," Owen insisted. "YOU WERE TOO YOUNG, AND BESIDES- SHE'D
JUST HAD THE TWINS, SHE WAS A MESS!"

I suggested that Owen was prejudiced against the Brinker-Smiths
ever since their strenuous lovemaking had battered him under their bed; but,
for the most part, we agreed about who had been at the game, and where they had
been sitting. Morrison the mailman, we had no doubt, had never watched a game;
and poor Mrs. Merrill-despite how fondly the baseball season must have reminded
her of the perpetual weather of her native California-was never a fan, either.
We were not sure about the Rev. Mr. Merrill; we decided against his being there
on the grounds that we had rarely seen him anywhere without his wife. We were
sure the Wiggins had not been there; they were often in attendance, but they
displayed such a boorish enthusiasm for every pitch that if they'd been at that
game, we would have noticed them. Since it had been a time when Barb Wiggin
still thought of Owen as "cute," she would have rushed to console him
for his unfortunate contact with the fated ball-and Rector Wiggin would have
bungled some rites over my mother's prostrate form, or pounded my shaking
shoulders with manly camaraderie. As Owen put it, "IF THE WIGGINS HAD BEEN
THERE, THEY WOULD HAVE MADE A SPECTACLE OF THEMSELVES-WE WOULD NEVER HAVE
FORGOTTEN FT!"

Despite how exciting is any search for a missing parent- however
mindless the method-Owen and I had to admit that, so far, we'd discovered a
rather sparse and uninteresting lot of baseball fans. It never occurred to us
to question whether the town's ardent Little League followers were also steady
patrons of The Gravesend Players.

' 'THERE'S ONE THING YOU MUST NEVER FORGET,'' Owen told me.
"SHE WAS A GOOD MOTHER. IF SHE THOUGHT THE GUY COULD BE A GOOD FATHER TO
YOU, YOU'D ALREADY KNOW HIM."

"You sound so sure," I said.

"I'M JUST WARNING YOU," he said. "IT'S EXCITING
TO LOOK FOR YOUR FATHER, BUT DON'T EXPECT TO BE THRILLED WHEN YOU FIND HIM. I
HOPE YOU KNOW WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR ANOTHER DAN I"

I didn't know; I thought Owen presumed too much. It was exciting
to look for my father-that much I knew. THE LUST CONNECTION, as Owen called it,
also contributed to our ongoing enthusiasm for THE FATHER HUNT-as Owen called
our overall enterprise.

"EVERY TIME YOU GET A BONER, TRY TO THINK IF YOU REMIND
YOURSELF OF ANYONE YOU KNOW"-that was Owen's interesting advice on the
matter of my lust being my most traceable connection to my missing father. As
for lust, I had hoped to see more of Hester-now that Noah and Simon were
attending Gravesend Academy. But, in fact, I saw her less. Noah's academic
difficulties had caused him to repeat a year; Simon's first year had been
smoother,

        
 
probably because it thrilled Simon to have
Noah demoted to his grade in school. Both boys, by the Christmas of ', were
juniors at Gravesend-and so thoroughly involved in what Owen and I presumed to
be the more sophisticated activities of private-school life that I saw only
slightly more of them than I saw of Hester. It was rare that Noah and Simon
were so bored at the academy that they visited  Front Street-not even on
weekends, which they increasingly spent with their doubtless more exotic
classmates. Owen and I assumed that-in Noah's and Simon's eyes-we were too immature
for them. Clearly, we were too immature for Hester, who-in response to Noah
being forced to repeat a grade-had managed to have herself promoted. She
encountered few academic difficulties at Sawyer Depot High School, where-Owen
and I imagined- she was terrorizing faculty and students alike. She had
probably gone to some effort to skip a grade, motivated-as she always was-to
get the better of her brothers. Nonetheless, all three of my cousins were
scheduled to graduate with the Class of '-when Owen and I would be completing
our first and lowly ninth-grade year at the academy; we would graduate with the
class of '. It was humiliating to me; I'd hoped that, one day, I would feel
more equal to my exciting cousins, but I felt I was less equal to them than I'd
ever been. Hester, in particular, seemed beyond my reach.

"WELL, SHE  YOUR COUSIN-SHE SHOULD BE BEYOND YOUR
REACH," Owen said. "ALSO, SHE'S DANGEROUS-YOU'RE PROBABLY LUCKY SHE'S
BEYOND YOUR REACH. HOWEVER," Owen added, "IF YOU'RE REALLY CRAZY
ABOUT HER, I THINK IT WILL WORK OUT-HESTER WOULD DO ANYTHING TO DRIVE HER
PARENTS NUTS, SHE'D EVEN MARRY YOU!"

"Marry me!" I cried; the thought of marrying Hester
gave me the shivers.

"WELL, THAT WOULD DRIVE HER PARENTS AROUND THE BEND,"
Owen said. "WOULDN'T IT?"

It would have; and Owen was right: Hester was obsessed with
driving her parents-and her brothers-crazy. To drive them to madness was the
penalty she exacted for all of them treating her "like a girl";
according to Hester, Sawyer Depot was "boys' heaven"-my Aunt Martha
was a "fink of womanhood"; she bowed to Uncle Alfred's notion that
the boys needed a private-school education, that the boys needed to
"expand their horizons." Hester would expand her own horizons in
directions conceived to educate her parents regarding the errors of their ways.
As for Owen's idea that Hester would go to the extreme of marrying her own
cousin, if that could provide Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred with an educational
wallop ... it was inconceivable to me!

"I don't think that Hester even likes me," I told
Owen; he shrugged.

"THE POINT IS," said Owen Meany, "HESTER WOULDN'T
NECESSARILY MARRY YOU BECAUSE SHE LIKED YOU."

Meanwhile, we couldn't even manage to get ourselves invited to
Sawyer Depot for Christmas. After their holidays in the Caribbean, the Eastmans
had decided to stay at home for the Yuletide of '; Owen and I got our hopes up,
but- alas!-they were quickly dashed; we were not invited to Sawyer Depot. The
reason the Eastmans weren't going to the Caribbean was that Hester had been
corresponding with a black boatman who had proposed a rendezvous in the British
Virgin Islands; Hester had involved herself with this particular black boatman
the previous Christmas, in Tortola-when she'd been only fifteen! Naturally, how
she had "involved herself" was not made explicitly clear to Owen and
me; we had to rely on those parts of the story that my Aunt Martha had reported
to Dan-substantially more of the story than she had reported to my grandmother,
who was of the opinion that a sailor had made a "pass" at poor
Hester, an exercise in crudeness that had made Hester want to stay home. In
fact, Hester was threatening to escape to Tortola. She was also not speaking to
Noah and Simon, who had shown the black boatman's letters to Uncle Alfred and
Aunt Martha, and who had fiercely disappointed Hester by not introducing her to
a single one of their Gravesend Academy friends. Dan Needham described the
situation in the form of a headline: "Teenage Traumas Run Wild in Sawyer
Depot!" Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not
involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in
the thrilling, real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick
of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only
vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact
with love.

 
 
The closest that
Owen Meany and I could get to love was a front-row seat at The Idaho. That
Christmas of ', Owen and I were fifteen; we told each other that we had fallen
in love with Audrey Hepburn, the shy bookstore clerk in Funny Face; but we
wanted Hester. What we were left with was a sense of how little, in the area of
love, we must be worth; we felt more foolish than Fred Astaire, dancing with
his own raincoat. And how worried we were that the sophisticated world of
Graves-end Academy would esteem us even less than we esteemed ourselves.
Toronto: April , -a rainy Palm Sunday. It is not a warm spring rain-not a
"seasonal" rain, as my grandmother liked to say. It is a raw cold
rain, a suitable day for the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At Grace Church
on-the-Hill, the children and the acolytes stood huddled in the narthex;
holding their palm fronds, they resembled tourists who'd landed in the tropics on
an unseasonably cold day. The organist chose Brahms for the
processional-"O Welt ich muss dich lassen"; "O world I must
leave you."