A prayer for Owen Meany (43 page)

Owen hated Palm Sunday: the treachery of Judas, the cowardice of
Peter, the weakness of Pilate.

"IT'S BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY CRUCIFIED HIM," Owen said,
"BUT THEY MADE FUN OF HIM, TOO!"

Canon Mackie read heavily from Matthew: how they mocked Jesus,
how they spit on him, how he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?"

I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I
have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is
undiminished-I am terrified that, this year, it won't happen; that, that year,
it didn't. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like
a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in
the resurrection, you're not a believer.

"IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN EASTER," Owen Meany said,
"DON'T KID YOURSELF-DON'T CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN."

For the Palm Sunday recessional, the organist chose the usual
"Alleluias." In a chilling drizzle, I crossed Russell Hill Road and
went in the service entrance of The Bishop Strachan School; I passed through
the kitchen, where the working women and the boarders whose turn it was to help
with the Sunday meal all spoke to me. The headmistress, the Rev. Mrs. Katharine
Keeling, sat in her usual head-of-table position among the housemothers. About
forty boarders-the poor girls who had no local friends to ask them home for the
weekend, and the girls who were happy to stay at school-sat around the other
tables. It is always a surprise to see the girls not in their uniforms; I know
it's a great relief to them to wear their uniforms day in, day out-because they
don't have to worry about what to wear. But they are so lazy about how they
wear their uniforms-they don't have much experience in dressing themselves-that
when they have a choice, when they're allowed to wear their own clothes, they
appear wholly less sophisticated, less worldly, than they appear in their
uniforms. In the twenty years that I have been a teacher at The Bishop Strachan
School, the girls' uniforms haven't changed very significantly; I've grown
rather fond of them. If I were a girl, of any age, I would wear a middie, a
loosely tied necktie, a blazer (with my school crest), knee socks-which the
Canadians used to call "knee highs"-and a pleated skirt; when they
kneel, it used to be the rule that the skirt should just touch the floor. But
for Sunday boarders' lunch, the girls wear their own clothes; some of them are
so badly dressed, I fail to recognize them-they make fun of me for that,
naturally. Some of them dress like boys-others, like their mothers or like the
floozies they see in movies or on TV. As I am, routinely, the only man in the
dining room for Sunday boarders' lunch, perhaps they dress for me. I've not
seen my friend-and, technically, my boss- Katherine Keeling since she delivered
her last baby. She has a large family-she's had so many children, I've lost
count-but she makes an effort to sit at the housemothers' table on Sundays; and
she chatters amiably to the weekend girls. I think Katherine is terrific; but
she is too thin. And she always is embarrassed when I catch her not eating,
although she should get over the surprise; I'm a more consistent fixture at the
housemothers' table for Sunday boarders' lunch than she is-I don't take time
off to have babies! But there she was on Palm Sunday, with mashed potatoes and
stuffing and turkey heaped upon her plate.

"Turkey rather dry, is it?" I asked; the ladies,
routinely, laughed-Katherine, typically, blushed. When she's wearing her
clerical collar, she looks slightly more underweight than she actually is.
She's my closest friend in Toronto, now that

        
 
Canon Campbell is gone; and even though she's
my boss, I've been at Bishop Strachan longer than she has. Old Teddybear
Kilgour, as we called him, was principal when I was hired. Canon Campbell
introduced us. Canon Campbell had been the chaplain at Bishop Strachan before
they made him rector of Grace Church on-the-Hill; I couldn't have had anyone
recommend me for a job at Bishop Strachan who was more "connected" to
the school than Canon Campbell- not even old Teddybear Kilgour himself. I still
tease Katherine about those days. What if she'd been headmistress when I
applied for a job? Would she have hired me? A young man from the States in
those Vietnam years, a not unattractive young man, and without a wife; Bishop
Strachan has never had many male teachers, and in my twenty years of teaching
these young girls, I have occasionally been the only male teacher at the
school. Canon Campbell and old Teddybear Kilgour don't count; they were not
male in the threatening sense-they were not potentially dangerous to young
girls. Although the canon taught Scripture and History, in addition to his
duties as chaplain, he was an elderly man; and he and old Teddybear Kilgour
were "married up to their ears," as Katherine Keeling likes to say.
Old Teddybear did ask me if I was "attracted to young girls"; but I
must have impressed him that I would take my faculty responsibilities
seriously, and that I would concern myself with those young girls' minds and
not their bodies.

"And have you?" Katherine Keeling likes to ask me. How
the housemothers titter at the question-like Liberace's live audiences of long
ago! Katherine is a much more jubilant soul than my grandmother, but she has a
certain twinkling sarcasm-and the proper elocution, the good diction-that reminds
me of Grandmother. They would have liked each other; Owen would have liked the
Rev. Mrs. Keeling, too. I've misled you if I've conveyed an atmosphere of
loneliness at Sunday boarders' lunch. Perhaps the boarders feel acutely lonely
then, but I feel fine. Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness. On
Palm Sunday, there was much talk about the weather. The week before, it had
been so cold that everyone commented on the annual error of the birds. Every
spring-at least, in Canada-some birds fly north too soon. Thousands are caught
The Voice
 
in the cold; they return south
in a reverse migration. Most common were tales of woe concerning robins and
starlings. Katherine had seen some killdeer flying south-I had a common-snipe
story that impressed them all. We'd all read The Globe and Mail that week: we'd
loved the story about the turkey vultures who "iced up" and couldn't
fly; they were mistaken for hawks and taken to a humane society for
thawing-out-there were nine of them and they threw up all over their handlers.
The humane society could not have been expected to know that turkey vultures
vomit when attacked. Who would guess that turkey vultures are so smart? I've
also misled you if I've conveyed an atmosphere of trivia at Sunday boarders'
lunch; these lunches are important to me. After the Palm Sunday lunch,
Katherine and I walked over to Grace Church and signed up for the All Night
Vigil on the notice board in the narthex. Every Maundy Thursday, the Vigil of
Prayer and Quiet is kept from nine o'clock that evening until nine o'clock in
the morning of Good Friday. Katherine and I always choose the hours no one else
wants; we take the Vigil from three to five o'clock in the morning, when
Katherine's husband and children are asleep and don't need her. This year she
cautioned me: "I may be a little late-if the two-o'clock feeding is much
later than two o'clock!" She laughs, and her endearingly stick-thin neck
looks especially vulnerable in her clerical collar. I see many parents of the
Bishop Strachan girls-they are so smartly dressed, they drive Jaguars, they
never have time to talk. I know that they dismiss the Rev. Mrs. Katherine
Keeling as a typical headmistress type-Katherine is not the sort of woman they
would look at twice. But she is wise and kind and witty and articulate; and she
does not bullshit herself about What Easter means.

"EASTER MEANS WHAT IT SAYS," said Owen Meany. At
Christ Church on Easter Sunday, Rector Wiggin always said: "Alleluia.
Christ is risen."

And we, the People-we said: "The Lord is risen indeed.
Alleluia."

Toronto: April , -a humid, summery Easter Sunday. It does not
matter what prelude begins the service; I will always hear Handel's Messiah-and
my mother's not-quite-trained soprano singing, "I know that my Redeemer
liveth/' This morning, in Grace Church on-the-Hill, I sat very still, waiting
for that passage in John; I knew what was coming. In

        
 
the old King James version, it was called a
"sepulchre"; in the Revised Standard version, it is just a
"tomb." Either way, I know the story by heart.

"Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to
the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken
away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple,
the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of
the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.' "

I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every
Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear. "THIS
IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS."

After the service today, my fellow Torontonians and I stood in
the sun on the church steps-and we lingered on the sidewalk along Lonsdale
Road; the sun was so welcome, and so hot. We were childishly delighted by the heat,
as if we'd spent years in an atmosphere as cold as the tomb where Mary
Magdalene found Jesus missing. Leaning against me, and whispering into my
ear-in a manner remindful of Owen Meany-Katherine Keeling said: "Those
birds that flew north, and then south-today they're flying north again."

"Alleluia," I said. I was thinking of Owen when I
added, "He is risen."

"Alleluia," said the Rev. Mrs. Keeling. That the
television was always "on" at  Front Street ceased to tempt Owen
and me. We could hear Grandmother, talking either to herself or to Ethel-or
directly commenting to the TV-and we heard the rise and fall of the studio-made
laughter. It was a big house; for four years, Owen and I had the impression
that there was always a forbidding gathering of grown-ups, chattering away in a
distant room. My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a
compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience
and to amuse them, almost simultaneously-for they rewarded her humor with their
punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice
she used on them was uniformly abusive. Thus Owen Meany and I learned what crap
television was, without ever thinking that we hadn't come to this opinion by
ourselves; had my grandmother allowed us only two hours of TV a day, or not
permitted us more than one hour on a "school night," we probably
would have become as slavishly devoted to television as the rest of our
generation. Owen started out loving only a few things he saw on television, but
he saw everything-as much of everything as he could stand. After four years of
television, though, he watched nothing but Liberace and the old movies. I did,
or tried to do, everything Owen did. For example; in the summer of ' when we were
both sixteen, Owen got his driver's license before I got mine-not only because
he was a month older, but because he already knew how to drive. He'd taught
himself with his father's various trucks-he'd been driving on those steep,
loopy roads that ran around the quarries that pockmarked most of Maiden Hill.
He took his driver's test on the day of his sixteenth birthday, using his
father's tomato-red pickup truck; in those days, there was no driver education
course in New Hampshire, and you took your test with a local policeman in the
passenger seat-the policeman told you where to turn, when to stop or back up or
park. The policeman, in Owen's case, was Chief Ben Pike himself; Chief Pike
expressed concern regarding whether or not Owen could reach the pedals-or see
over the steering wheel. But Owen had anticipated this: he was mechanically
inclined, and he'd raised the seat of the pickup so high that Chief Pike hit
his head on the roof; Owen had shd the seat so far forward that Chief Pike had
considerable difficulty cramming his knees under the dashboard-in fact, Chief
Pike was so physically uncomfortable in the cab of the pickup that he cut
Owen's test fairly short.

"HE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE ME PARALLEL-PARK!" Owen said; he
was disappointed that he was denied the opportunity to show off his
parallel-parking abilities-Owen Meany could slip that tomato-red pickup into a
parking space that would have been challenging for a Volkswagen Beetle. In
retrospect, I'm surprised that Chief Pike didn't search the interior of the
pickup for that "instrument of death" he was always looking for. Dan
Needham taught me to drive; it was the summer Dan directed Julius Caesar in the
Gravesend Academy summer school, and he would take me for lessons every morning
before rehearsals. Dan would drive me out the Swasey Parkway and up Maiden
Hill. I practiced on the back roads around the quarries-the roads on which Owen
Meany learned to drive were good enough for me; and Dan judged it safer for me
off

         
 
the public highways, although the Meany
Granite Company vehicles flew around those roads with reckless abandon. The
quarrymen were fearless drivers and they trucked the granite and their
machinery at full throttle; but, in the summer, the trucks raised so much dust
that Dan and I had warning when one was coming-I always had time to pull over,
while Dan recited his favorite Shakespeare from Julius Caesar. Cowards die many
times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.
Whereupon, Dan would grip the dashboard and tremble while a dynamite truck
hurtled past us. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me the
most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will
come when it will come. Owen, too, was fond of that passage. When we saw Dan's
production of Julius Caesar, later that summer, I had passed my driver's
test;-yet, in the evenings, when Owen and I would drive down to the boardwalk
and the casino at Hampton Beach together, we took the tomato-red pickup and
Owen always drove. I paid for the gas. Those summer nights of  were the
first nights I remember feeling "grown up"; we'd drive half an hour
from Gravesend for the fleeting privilege of inching along a crowded, gaudy
strip of beachfront, looking at girls who rarely looked at us. Sometimes, they
looked at the truck. We could drive along this strip only two or three times
before a cop would motion us over to the side of the street, examine Owen's
driver's license-in disbelief-and then suggest that we find a place to park the
truck and resume our looking at girls on foot, on either the boardwalk or on
the sidewalk that threaded the arcades. Walking with Owen Meany at Hampton
Beach was ill-advised; he was so strikingly small, he was teased and roughed up
by the delinquent young men who tilted the pinball machines and swaggered in
the heated vicinity of the girls in their cotton-candy-colored clothes. And the
girls, who rarely returned our glances when we were secure in the Meany Granite
Company pickup, took very long (and giggling) looks at Owen when we were on
foot. When he was walking, Owen didn't dare look at the girls. Therefore, when
a cop would, inevitably, advise us to park the track and pursue our interests
"on foot," Owen and I would drive back to Gravesend. Or we would
drive to a popular daytime beach-Little Boar's Head, which was beautifully
empty at night. We'd sit on the sea wall, and feel the cool air off the ocean,
and watch the phosphorescence sparkle in the surf. Or we would drive to Rye
Harbor and sit on the breakwater, and watch the small boats slapping on the
ruffled, pondlike surface; the breakwater itself had been built with the
slag-the broken slabs-from the Meany Granite Quarry.