A prayer for Owen Meany (69 page)

There was a general misunderstanding about the so-called
deserters; the deserters I knew were politically mild. I never met one who'd
actually been in Vietnam; I never met one who was even scheduled to go. They
were just guys who'd been drafted and had hated the service; some of mem had
even enlisted. Only a few of them told me that they'd deserted because it had
shamed them to maintain any association with that insupportable war; as for a
couple of the ones who told me that-I had the feeling that then- stories
weren't true, that they were only saying they'd deserted because the war was
"insupportable"; they'd learned that this was politically acceptable
to say. And there was another, general misunderstanding at that time: contrary to
popular belief, coming to Canada was not a very shrewd way to beat the draft;
there were better and easier ways to "beat" it-I'll tell you about
one, later. But coming to Canada-either as a draft dodger or as a deserter, or
even for my own, more complicated reasons-was a very forceful political
statement. Remember that? Remember when what you did was a kind of
"statement"? I remember one of the AMEX guys telling me that
"resistance as exile was the ultimate judgment." How I agreed with
him! How self-important it seemed: to be making "the ultimate
judgment."

The truth is, I never had to suffer. When I first came to
Toronto in ', I met a few confused and troubled young Americans; I was a little
older than most of them-and they certainly seemed no more confused or troubled
than many of the Americans I had known at home. Unlike Buzzy Thurston, for
example, they had not driven their cars head-on into a bridge abutment in an
effort to beat the draft. Unlike Harry Hoyt, they had not been bitten to death
by a Russell's viper while waiting for their turn with a Vietnamese whore. And
to my surprise, the Canadians I met actually liked me. And with my graduate
degree-and even my junior teaching experience at such a prestigious school as
Gravesend Academy-I was instantly respectable and almost immediately employed.
The distinction I hastened to make, to almost every Canadian I met, was
probably a waste of time; that I wasn't there as a draft dodger or a deserter
didn't really matter very much to the Canadians. It mattered to the Americans I
met, and I didn't like how they responded: that I was in Canada by choice, that
I was not a fugitive, and that I didn't have to be in Toronto-in my view, this
made my commitment more serious; but in their view I was less desperate and,
therefore, less serious. It's true: we Wheelwrights have rarely suffered. And
unlike most of those other Americans, I also had the church; don't
underestimate the church-its healing power, and the comforting way it can set
you apart. My first week in Toronto, I had an interview at Upper Canada
College; the whole school made me feel that I'd never left Gravesend Academy!
They didn't have an opening in their English Department, but they assured me
that my vitae was "most laudable" and that I'd have no trouble
finding a job. They were so helpful, they sent me the short distance down
Lonsdale Road to Grace Church on-the-Hill; Canon Campbell, they said, was
especially interested in helping Americans. Indeed he was. When the canon asked
me what my church was, I said, "I guess I'm an Episcopalian."

"You guess!" he said. I explained that I'd not
attended an actual service in the Episcopal Church since the famous Nativity of
'; thinking of Hurd's Church and Pastor Merrill's rather lapsed
Congregationalism, I said, "I guess I'm sort of nondenominational."

"Well, we'll fix thatl" Canon Campbell said. He gave
me my first Anglican prayer book, my first Canadian prayer book; it is The Book
of Common Prayer that I still use. It was as simple as that: joining a church,
becoming an Anglican. I wouldn't call any of it suffering. And so the first
Canadians I knew were churchgoers-an almost universally helpful lot, and much
less confused and troubled than the few Americans I'd met in Toronto (and most
Americans I had known at home). These Grace Church on-the-Hill Anglicans were
conservative; "conservative"-

        
 
about certain matters of propriety,
especially-is perfectly all right with us Wheelwrights. About such matters, New
Eng-landers have more in common with Canadians than we have with New Yorkersl
For example, I quickly learned to prefer the positions stated by the Toronto
Anti-Draft Programme to those more abrasive stances of the Union of American
Exiles. The Toronto Anti-Draft Programme favored "assimilation into mainstream
Canadian life"; they considered the Union of American Exiles "too
political"-by which they meant, too activist, too rnilitantly anti-United
States. Possibly, the Union of American Exiles was contaminated by their open
dealings with deserters. The object of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme was to
get Americans "assimilated" quickly; they reasoned that we Americans
should begin the process of our assimilation by dropping the subject of the
United States. At the beginning, this seemed so reasonable-and so easy- to me.
Within a year of my arrival, even the Union of American Exiles showed signs of
"assimilation." The acronym AMEX changed in meaning from American
Exile to American Expatriate. Doesn't that sound more agreeable to the aim of
"assimilation into mainstream Canadian life"? I thought so. When some
of those Grace Church on-the-Hill Anglicans asked me what I thought of Prime
Minister Pearson's "old point of view"-that the deserters (as opposed
to the war resistors) were in a category of U.S. citizens to be discouraged
from coming to Canada-I actually said I agreed! Even though-as I've
admitted-I'd never met a harsh deserter, not one. The ones I met were "in
a category of citizens" that any country could have used and even
appreciated. And when it was aired in the Twenty-eighth Parliament-in -that
U.S. deserters were being turned back at the border because they were
"persons who were likely to become public charges," I never actually
said-to any of my Canadian Mends-that I suspected these deserters were no more
likely to become "public charges" than / was likely to become such a
charge. By then, Canon Campbell had introduced me to old Teddybear Kilgore, who
had hired me to teach at Bishop Strachan. We Wheelwrights have always benefited
from our connections. Owen Meany didn't have any connections. It was never easy
for him to fit in. I think I know what he would have said to that bullshit that
was printed in The Toronto Daily Star; at the time, I thought that bullshit was
so right-on-target that I cut it out of the newspaper and taped it to my
refrigerator door-December , . It was in response to the AMEX published
statement of the "first five priorities" for American expatriates
(the fifth being "to try to fit into Canadian life"). To quote The
Toronto Daily Star: "Unless the young Americans for whom AMEX speaks
revise their priorities and put Number Five first, they risk arousing a growing
hostility and suspicion among Canadians." I never doubted that mis was
true. But I know what Owen Meany would have said about that. "THAT SOUNDS
LIKE SOMETHING AN AMERICAN WOULD SAY!'' Owen Meany would have said. "THE
'FIRST PRIORITY' IN EVERY YOUNG AMERICAN'S LIFE IS TO TRY TO FIT INTO AMERICAN
LIFE. DOESN'T THE STUPID TORONTO DAILY STAR KNOW WHO THESE YOUNG AMERICANS IN CANADA
ARE! THESE ARE AMERICANS WHO LEFT THEIR COUNTRY BECAUSE THEY COULDN'T AND
DIDN'T WANT TO 'FIT IN.' NOW THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO MAKE IT THEIR 'FIRST PRIORITY'
TO 'FIT IN' HERE? BOY-THAT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE; THAT'S REALLY BRILLIANT.
THAT'S WORTH ONE OF THOSE STUPID JOURNALISM AWARDSl"

But I didn't complain; I didn't bitch about anything-not then. I
thought I'd heard Hester "bitch" enough for a lifetime. Remember the
War Measures Act? I didn't say a word; I" agreed with everything. So what
if civil liberties were suspended for six months? So what that there could be
searches without warrants? So what if people could be detained without counsel
for up to ninety days? All the action was happening in Montreal. If Hester had
been in Toronto then, not even Hester would have been arrested! I just kept
quiet; I was cultivating my Canadian friendships, and most of my friends
thought that Trudeau could do no wrong, that he was a prince. Even my dear old
friend Canon Campbell made a rather empty remark to me-but I would never
challenge him. Canon Campbell said: "Trudeau is our Kennedy, you
know." I was glad that Canon Campbell didn't say "Trudeau is our
Kennedy" to Owen Meany; I think I know what Owen would have said.

"OH, YOU MEAN TRUDEAU DIDDLED MARILYN MONROE?" Owen Meany
would have said. But I didn't come to Canada to be a smart-ass American; and
Canon Campbell told me that most smart-ass Canadians tend to

        
 
move to the United States. I didn't want to
be one of those people who are critical of everything. In the seventies, there
were a lot of complaining Americans in Toronto; some of them complained about
Canada, too-Canada sold the United States over five hundred million dollars'
worth of ammunition and other war supplies, these complainers said.

"Is that Canadian or U.S. dollars?" I would ask. I was
very cool; I wasn't going to jump into anything. In short, I was doing my best
to be a Canadian; I wasn't ranting my head off about the goddamn U.S. this or
the motherfucking U.S. thatl And when I was told that, by , Canada-"per
capita"- was earning more money as an international arms exporter than any
other nation in the world, I said, "Really? That's very interesting!"

Someone said to me that most war resisters who returned to the
United States couldn't take the Canadian climate; and what did I think of the
seriousness of the war resistance if ' 'these people" could be deterred
from their commitment by a little cold weather? I said it was colder in New
Hampshire. And did I know why not so many black Americans had come to Canada?
someone asked me. And the ones who come don't stay, someone else said. It's
because the ghetto where they come from treats them nicer, said someone else. I
didn't say a word. I was more of an Anglican than I ever was either a
Congregationalist or an Episcopalian-or even a nondenomi-national, Kurd's
Church whatever-l-wns. I was a participant at Grace Church on-the-Hill in a way
that I had never been a participant before; and I was getting to be a good
teacher, too. I was still young then; I was only twenty-six. And I didn't have
a girlfriend when I started teaching all those BSS girls-and I never once
looked at one of them in that way; not once, not even at the ones who had their
schoolgirl crushes on me. Oh, there were quite a few years when those girls had
their crushes on me-not anymore; not now, of course. But I still remember those
pretty girls; some of them even asked me to attend their weddings! In those
early years, when Canon Campbell was such a friend and an inspiration to
me-when I carried my Book of Common Prayer, and my Manual for Draft-Age
Immigrants to Canada, everywhere I went!-I was a veritable card-carrying
Canadian. Whenever I'd run into one of that AMEX crowd-and I didn't run into
them often, not in Forest Hill-I wouldn't even talk about the United States, or
Vietnam. I must have believed that my anger and my loneliness would simply go
away-if I simply let them go. There were rallies; of course, there were
protests. But I didn't attend; I didn't even hang out in Yorkville-that's how
out of it I was! When "The Riverboat" was gone, I didn't mourn-or
even sing old folk songs to myself. I'd heard enough of Hester singing folk
songs. I cut my hair short then; I cut it short today. I've never had a beard.
All those hippies, all those days of protest songs and "sexual
freedom"; remember that? Owen Meany had sacrificed much more, he had
suffered much more-I was not even remotely interested in other people's
sacrifices or in what they imagined was their heroic suffering. They say
there's no zeal like the zeal of the convert-and that's the kind of Anglican I
was. They say there's no citizen as patriotic as the new immigrant-and there
was no one who tried any harder to be "assimilated" than I tried.
They say there's no teacher with such a desire for his subject as the novice
possesses-and I taught those BSS girls to read and write their little middies
off! In , there were , deserters from the U.S. armed forces; in , there were
,-that year, only , Americans were prosecuted for Selective Service violations.
I wonder how many more were burning or had already burned their draft cards.
What did I care? Burning your draft card, coming to Canada, getting your nose
busted by a cop in Chicago-I never thought these gestures were heroic, not
compared to Owen Meany's commitment. And by , more than forty thousand
Americans had died in Vietnam; I don't imagine that a single one of them would
have thought that draft-card burning or coming to Canada was especially
"heroic"-nor would they have thought that getting arrested for
rioting in Chicago was such a big fucking deal. And as for Gordon Lightfoot and
Neil Young, as for Joni Mitchell and lan and Sylvia-I'd already heard Bob Dylan
and Joan Baez, and Hester. I'd even heard Hester sing "Four Strong Winds."
She was always quite good with the guitar, she had her mother's pretty
voice-although Aunt Martha's voice was not as pretty as my mother's-which was
merely pretty, not strong enough, not developed. Hester could have

        
 
stood about five years of lessons from Graham
McSwiney, but she didn't believe in being taught to sing. Singing was something
"inside" her, she claimed.

"YOU MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A DISEASE," Owen told her; but
he was her number-one supporter. When she was struggling to write her own
songs, I know that Owen gave her some ideas; later she told me that he'd even
written some songs for her. And in those days she looked like a folk
singer-which is to say any old way she wanted, or like everyone else: a little
dirty, a little worldly, a lot knocked-about. She looked hard-traveled, she
looked as if she slept on a rug (with lots of men), she looked as if her hair
smelled of lobster. I remember her singing "Four Strong Winds"-I
remember this very vividly. I think I'll go out to Alberta, Weather's good
there in the fall; I got some friends that I can go to workin' for.