A prayer for Owen Meany (7 page)

"Okay," I said, but I couldn't look at her. I remember
keeping my eyes on Lydia's hands, gripping her wheel-chair-and on my
grandmother's hands, toying with her brooch.

"What does he do, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked. That
was a Wheelwright thing to ask. In my grandmother's opinion, what one
"did" was related to where one's family "came from"-she
always hoped it was from England, and in the seventeenth century. And the short
list of things that my grandmother approved of "doing" was no less
specific than seventeenth-century England.

"Dramatics," my mother said. "He's a sort of
actor-but not really."

"An unemployed actor?" my grandmother asked. (I think
now that an employed actor would have been unsuitable enough.)

"No, he's not looking for employment as an actor-he's
strictly an amateur actor," my mother said. And I thought of those people
in the train stations who handled puppets-I meant street performers, although
at six years old I hadn't the vocabulary to suggest this. "He teaches
acting, and putting on plays," my mother said.

"A director?" my grandmother asked, more hopefully.

"Not exactly," my mother said, and she frowned.
"He was on his way to Gravesend for an interview."

"I can't imagine there's much opportunity for theater
here!" my grandmother said.

"He had an interview at the academy," my mother said.
"It's a teaching job-the history of drama, or something. And the boys have
their own theatrical productions-you know, Martha and I used to go to them. It
was so funny how they had to dress up as girls!"

That was the funniest part of those productions, in my memory;
I'd had no idea that directing such performances was anyone's job.

"So he's a teacher?" my grandmother asked. This was
borderline acceptable to Harriet Wheelwright-although my grandmother was a
shrewd enough businesswoman to know that the dollars and cents of teaching
(even at as prestigious a prep school as Gravesend Academy) were not exactly in
her league.

"Yes!" my mother said in an exhausted voice.
"He's a teacher. He's been teaching dramatics in a private school in
Boston. Before that, he went to Harvard-Class of Forty-five."

"Goodness gracious!" my grandmother said. "Why
didn't you begin with Harvard?"

"It's not important to him," my mother said. But
Harvard ' was important enough to my grandmother to calm her troubled hands;
they left her brooch alone, and returned to rest in her lap. After a polite
pause, Lydia inched her wheelchair forward and picked up the little silver bell
and shook it for the maids to come clear-the very bell that had summoned Lydia
so often (only yesterday, it seemed). And the bell had the effect of releasing
us all from the paralyzing tension we had just survived-but for only an
instant. My grandmother had forgotten to ask: What is the man's name? For in
her view, we Wheelwrights were not out of the woods without knowing the name of
the potential new member of the family. God forbid, he was a Cohen, or a
Calamari, or a Meany! Up went my grandmother's hands to her brooch again.

"His name is Daniel Needham," my mother said. Whew!
With what relief-down came my grandmother's hands! Need-ham was a fine old
name, a founding fathers sort of name, a name you could trace back to the
Massachusetts Bay Colony-if not exactly to Gravesend itself. And Daniel was as
Daniel as Daniel Webster, which was as good a name as a Wheelwright could wish
for.

"But he's called Dan," my mother added, bringing a
slight frown to my grandmother's countenance. She had never gone along with
making Tabitha a Tabby, and if she'd had a Daniel she wouldn't have made him a
Dan. But Harriet Wheelwright

 
 
was fair-minded
enough, and smart enough, to yield in the case of a small difference of
opinion.

"So, have you made a date?" my grandmother asked.

"Not exactly," my mother said. "But I know I'll
see him again.''

"But you haven't made any plans?" my grandmother
asked. Vagueness annoyed her. "If he doesn't get the job at the
academy," my grandmother said, "you may never see him again!"

"But I know I'll see him again!" my mother repeated.

"You can be such a know-it-all, Tabitha Wheelwright,"
my grandmother said crossly. "I don't know why young people find it such a
burden to plan ahead." And to this notion, as to almost everything my
grandmother said, Lydia wisely nodded her head-the explanation for her silence
was that my grandmother was expressing exactly what Lydia would have expressed,
only seconds before Lydia could have done so. Then the doorbell rang. Both
Lydia and my grandmother stared at me, as if only my Mends would be uncouth
enough to make a call after dinner, uninvited.

"Heavens, who is that?" Grandmother asked, and she and
Lydia both took a pointed and overly long look at their wristwatches-although
it was not even eight o'clock on a balmy spring evening; there was still some
light in the sky.

"I'll bet that's ton!" my mother said, getting up from
the table to go to the door. She gave herself a quick and approving look in the
mirror over the sideboard where the roast sat, growing cold, and she hurried
into the hall.

"Then you did make a date?" my grandmother asked.
"Did you invite him?"

"Not exactly!" my mother called. "But I told him
where I lived!"

"Nothing is exactly with young people, I've noticed,"
my grandmother said, more to Lydia than to me.

"It certainly isn't," said Lydia. But I'd heard enough
of them; I had heard them for years. I followed my mother to the door; my
grandmother, pushing Lydia in her wheelchair in front of her, followed me.
Curiosity, which-in New Hampshire, in those days-was often said to be
responsible for the death of cats, had got the better of us all. We knew that
my mother had no immediate plans to reveal to us a single clue regarding the
first man she'd supposedly met on the Boston & Maine; but the second man-we
could see him for ourselves. Dan Needham was on the doorstep of  Front
Street, Gravesend. Of course, my mother had had "dates" before, but
she'd never said of one of them that she wanted us to meet him, or that she
even liked him, or that she knew she'd see him again. And so we were aware that
Dan Needham was special, from the start. I suppose Aunt Martha would have said
that one aspect of my mother being "a little simple" was her
attraction to younger men; but in this habit my mother was simply ahead of her
time-because it's true, the men she dated were often a little younger than she
was. She even went out with a few seniors from Gravesend Academy when-if she'd
gone to college-she would have been a college senior herself; but she just
"went out" with them. While they were only prep-school boys and she
was in her twenties-with an illegitimate child-all she did with those boys was
dance with them, or go to movies or plays with them, or to the sporting events.
I was used to seeing a few goons come calling, I will admit; and they never
knew how to respond to me. They had no idea, for example, what a six-year-old
was. They either brought me rubber ducks for the bath, or other toys for
virtual infants-or else they brought me Fowler's Modern English Usage:
something every six-year-old should plunge into. And when they saw me-when they
were confronted with my short, sturdy presence, and the fact that I was too old
for bathtub toys and too young far Modern English Usage-they would become
insanely restless to impress me with their sensitivity to a waist-high person
like myself. They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle
an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby
talk about showing them my favorite toy-so that they might know what kind of
thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time. There was rarely a next
time. Once one of them asked my mother if I was toilet-trained-I guess he found
this a suitable question, prior to his inviting me to sit on his knees and play
bucking bronco.

"YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID YES," Owen Meany told me,
"AND THEN PISSED IN HIS LAP."

One thing about my mother's "beaus": they were all
good-looking. So on that superficial level I was unprepared for Dan Needham,
who was tall and gawky, with curly carrot-

 
 
colored hair, and
who wore eyeglasses that were too small for his egg-shaped face-the perfectly
round lenses giving him the apprehensive, hunting expression of a large, mutant
owl. My grandmother said, after he'd gone, that it must have been the first
time in the history of Gravesend Academy that they had hired "someone who
looks younger than the students." Furthermore, his clothes didn't fit him;
the jacket was too tight-the sleeves too short-and the trousers were so baggy
that the crotch napped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and
the only padded pans of his peculiar body. But I was too young and cynical to
spot his kindness. Even before he was introduced to my grandmother or to Lydia
or to me, he looked straight at me and said, "You must be Johnny. I heard
as much about you as anyone can hear in an hour and a half on the Boston and
Maine, and I know you can be trusted with an important package." It was a
brown shopping bag with another brown paper bag stuffed inside it. Oh boy, here
it comes, I thought: an inflatable camel-it floats and spits. But Dan Needham
said, "It's not for you, it's not for anyone your age. But I'm trusting
you to put it somewhere where it can't be stepped on-and out of the way of any
pets, if you have pets. You mustn't let a pet near it. And whatever you do,
don't open it. Just tell me if it moves."

Then he handed it to me; it didn't weigh enough to be Fowler's
Modern English Usage, and if I was to keep it away from pets-and tell him if it
moved-cleatly it was alive. I put it quickly under the hall table-the telephone
table, we called it-and I stood halfway in the hall and halfway in the living
room, where I could watch Dan Needham taking a seat. Taking a seat in my
grandmother's living room was never easy, because many of the available seats
were not for sitting in-they were antiques, which my grandmother was
preserving, for historical reasons; sitting in them was not good for them.
Therefore, although the living room was quite sumptuously arranged with
upholstered chairs and couches, very little of this furniture was usable-and so
a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would
suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, "Oh, for goodness
sake, not there! You can't sit therel" And the startled person would
attempt to try the next chair or couch, which in my grandmother's opinion would
also collapse or burst into flames at the strain. And I suppose my grandmother noticed
that Dan Needham was tall, and that he had a sizable bottom, and this no doubt
meant to her that an even fewer-than-usual number of seats were available to
him-while Lydia, not yet deft with her wheelchair, blocked the way here, and
the way there, and neither my mother nor my grandmother had yet developed that
necessary reflex to simply wheel her out of the way. And so the living room was
a scene of idiocy and confusion, with Dan Needham spiraling toward one
vulnerable antique after another, and my mother and grandmother colliding with
Lydia's wheelchair while Grandmother barked this and that command regarding who
should sit where. I hung back on the threshold of this awkwardness, keeping an
eye on the ominous shopping bag, imagining that it had moved, a little-or that
a mystery pet would suddenly materialize beside it and either eat, or be eaten
by, the contents of the bag. We had never had a pet-my grandmother thought that
people who kept pets were engaged in the basest form of self-mockery, intentionally
putting themselves on a level with animals. Nevertheless, it made me extremely
jumpy to observe the bag, awaiting its slightest twitch, and it made me even
jumpier to observe the foolish nervousness of the adult ritual taking place in
the living room. Gradually, I gave my whole attention to the bag; I slipped
away from the threshold of the living room and retreated into the hall, sitting
cross-legged on the scatter rug in front of the telephone table. The sides of
the bag were almost breathing, and I thought I could detect an odor foreign to
human experience. It was the suspicion of this odor that drew me nearer to the
bag, until I crawled under the telephone table and put my ear to the bag and
listened, and peered over the top of the bag-but the bag inside the bag blocked
my view. In the living room, they were talking about history-that was Dan
Needham's actual appointment: in the History Department. He had studied enough
history at Harvard to be qualified to teach the conventional courses in that field
at Gravesend. "Oh, you got the job!" my mother said. What was special
in his approach was his use of the history of drama-and here he said something
about the public entertainment of any period distinguishing the period as
clearly as its so-called politics, but I drifted in and out of the sense of his
remarks, so intent was I on the contents of the shopping bag in the hall. I
picked up the bag and held it in my lap and waited for it to move. In addition
to his interview with the History Department

 
 
members, and with
the headmaster, Dan Needham was saying, he had requested some time to address
those students interested in theater-and any faculty members who were
interested, too-and in this session he had attempted to demonstrate how the
development of certain techniques of the theatrical arts, how certain dramatic
skills, can enhance our understanding of not only the characters on a stage but
of a specific time and place as well. And for this session with the drama
students, Dan Needham was saying, he always brought along a certain
"prop"-something interesting, either to hold or focus the students'
attention, or to distract them from what he would, finally, make them see. He
was rather long-winded, I thought.