A prayer for Owen Meany (79 page)

"John," Dan said. "Let bygones be bygones-not
even Owen would still be angry. Do you think Owen Meany would have blamed the
whole country for what happened to him? That was madness; this is madness,
too."

"How do you teach madness onstage?" I asked Dan.
"Hamlet, I suppose, for starters-I give Hamlet to my Grade Thirteen girls,
but they have to make do with reading it; they don't get to see it. And Crime
and Punishment-even my Grade Thirteen girls struggle with the so-called
'psychological' novel. The 'concentrated wretchedness' of Raskolnikov is
entirely within their grasp, but they don't see how the novel's psychology is
at work in even Dostoevski's simplest descriptions; once again, it's the
description they miss. Raskolnikov's landlord, for example-'his face seemed to
be thickly covered with oil, like an old iron lock.' What a perfect face for
his landlord to have! 'Isn't that marvekms?' I ask the class; they stare at me
as if they think I'm crazier than Raskolnikov."

Dan Needham, occasionally, stares at me that way, too. How could
he possibly think I could "forgive and forget"? There is too much
forgetting. When we schoolteachers worry that our students have no sense of
history, isn't it what people forget that worries us? For years I tried to
forget who my father might be; I didn't want to find out who he was, as Owen
pointed out. How many times, for example, did I call back my mother's old
singing teacher, Graham McSwiney? How many times did I call him and ask him if
he'd learned the whereabouts of Buster Freebody, or if he'd remembered anything
about my mother that he hadn't told Owen and me? Only once; I called him only
once. Graham McSwiney told me to forget about who my father was; I was willing.
Mr. McSwiney said: "Buster Freebody-if he's alive, if you find him-would
be so old that he wouldn't even remember your mother-not to mention who her
boyfriend was!" Mr. McSwiney was much more interested in Owen Meany-in why
Owen's voice hadn't changed. "He should see a doctor- there's really no
good reason for a voice like his," Graham McSwiney said. But, of course,
there was a reason. When I learned what the reason was, I never called Mr.
McSwiney to tell him; I doubt it would have been a scientific enough
explanation for Mr. McSwiney. I tried to tell Hester, but Hester said she
didn't want to know. "I'd tielieve what you'd tell me," Hester said,
"so please spare me the details."

As for the purpose of Owen Meany's voice, and everything that
happened to him, I told only Dan and the Rev. Lewis Merrill. "I suppose
it's possible," Dan said. "I suppose stranger things have
happened-although I can't, off the top of my head, think of an example. The
important thing is that you believe it, and I would never challenge your right
to believe what you want."

"But do you believe it?" I asked him.

"Well, I believe you" Dan said.

' 'How can you not believe it?'' I asked Pastor Merrill. ' 'You
of all people," I told him. "A man of faith-how can you not believe
it?"

"To believe it-I mean all of it," the Rev. Lewis
Merrill said, "-to believe everything . . . well, that calls upon more
faith than I have."

"But you of all people!" I said to him. "Look at
me-I never was a believer, not until this happened. If / can believe it, why
can't you?" I asked Mr. Merrill. He began to stutter.

"It's easier for you to j-j-j-just accept it. Belief is not
something you have felt, and then not felt; you haven't ---lived with belief,
and with Mnbelief. It's easier f-f-f-for you," the Rev. Mr. Merrill
repeated. "You haven't ever been f-f-f-full of faith, and full of
d-d-d-doubt. Something j-j-j-just strikes you as a miracle, and you believe it.
For me, it's not that s-s-s-simple," said Pastor Merrill.

"But it is a miracle!" I cried. "He told you that
dream-I know he did! And you were there-when he saw his name, and the date of
his death, on Scrooge's grave. You were there!" I cried. "How can you
doubt that he knew" I asked Mr. Merrill. "He knew-he knew everything]
What do you call that-if you don't call it a miracle?"

"You've witnessed what you c-c-c-call a miracle and now you
believe-you believe everything," Pastor Merrill said. "But miracles
don't c-c-c-cause belief-real miracles don't m-m-m-make faith out of thin air;
you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles. I believe
that Owen was extraordinarily g-g-g-gifted-yes, gifted and powerfully sure of
himself. No doubt he suffered some powerfully disturbing visions, too-and he
was certainly emotional, he was very emotional. But as to knowing what he
appeared to 'know'-there are other examples of p-p-p-precognition; not every
example is necessarily ascribed to God. Look at you- you never even believed in
G-G-G-God; you've said so, and here you are ascribing to the h-h-h-hand of God
everything that happened to Owen M-M-M-Meany!"

This August, at  Front Street, a dog woke me up. In the
deepest part of my sleep, I heard the dog and thought it was Sagamore; then I
thought it was my dog-I used to have a dog, in Toronto-and only when I was wide
awake did I catch up to myself, in the present time, and realize that both
Sagamore and my dog were dead. It used to be nice to have a dog to walk in
Winston Churchill Park; perhaps I should get another. Out on Front Street, the
strange dog barked and barked. I got out of bed; I took the familiar walk along
the dark hall to my mother's room-where it is always lighter, where the
curtains are never drawn. Dan sleeps in my grandmother's former bedroom-the
official master bedroom of  Front Street, I suppose. I looked out my
mother's window but I couldn't see the dog. Then I went into the den-or so it
had been called when my grandfather had been alive. Later, it was a kind of
children's playroom, the room where my mother had played the old Victrola,
where she had sung along with Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It
was on the couch in that room where Hester had spread herself out, and waited,
while Noah and Simon and I searched all of  Front Street, in vain, for
Owen Meany. We'd never learned where she'd hidden him, or where he'd hidden
himself. I lay down on that old couch and remembered all of that. I must have
fallen asleep there; it was a vastly historical couch, upon which-I also
remembered- my mother had first whispered into my ear: "My little
fling!"

When I woke up, my right hand had drifted under one of the deep
couch cushions; my wrist detected something there-it felt like a playing card,
but when I extracted it from under the cushion, I saw that it was a relic from
Owen Meany's long-ago collection: a very old and bent baseball card. Hank
Bauer! Remember him? The card was printed in  when Bauer was twenty-eight,
in only his second full season as an outfielder for the Yankees. But he looked
older; perhaps it was the war-he left baseball for World War Two, then he
returned to the game. Not being a baseball fan, I nevertheless remembered Hank
Bauer as a reliable, unfancy player-and, indeed, his slightly tired, tanned
face reflected his solid work ethic. There was nothing of the hotshot in his
patient smile, and he wasn't hiding his eyes under the visor of his baseball
cap, which was pushed well back on his head, revealing his thoughtful, wrinkled
brow. It was one of those old photographs wherein the color was optimistically
added-his tan was too tan, the sky too blue, the clouds too uniformly white.
The high, fluffy clouds and the brightness of the blue sky created such a
strikingly unreal background for Mr. Bauer in his white, pin-striped uniform-it
was as if he had died and gone to heaven.

        
 
Of course I knew then where Hester had hidden
Owen Meany; he'd been under the couch cushions-and under her]-all the while we
were searching. That explained why his appearance had been so rumpled, why his
hair had looked slept on. The Hank Bauer card must have fallen out of his
pocket. Discoveries like this-not to mention, Owen's voice "speaking"
to me in the secret passageway, and his hand (or something like a hand) seeming
to take hold of me- occasionally make me afraid of  Front Street. I know
that Grandmother was afraid of the old house, near the end. "Too many
ghosts!" she would mutter. Finally, I think, she was happy not to be
"murdered by a maniac"-a condition she had once found favorable to
being removed from  Front Street. She left the old house rather quietly
when she left; she was philosophic about her departure. "Time to leave,"
she said to Dan and me. "Too many ghosts!"

At the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, her decline was fairly
swift and painless. At first she forgot all about Owen, then she forgot me;
nothing could remind her even of my mother-nothing except my fairly expert
imitation of Owen's voice. That voice would jolt her memory; that voice caused
her recollections to surface, almost every time. She died in her sleep, only
two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She didn't like things that
"stood out"-as in: "That hairdo stands out like a sore
thumb!"

I imagine her contemplating her hundredth birthday; the family
celebration that was planned to honor this event would surely have killed
Grandmother-I suspect she knew this. Aunt Martha had already alerted the Today
show; as you may know, the Today show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every
hundred-year-old in the United States-provided that the Today show knows about
it. Aunt Martha saw to it that they knew. Harriet Wheelwright would be one
hundred years old on Halloween! My grandmother hated Halloween; it was one of
her few quarrels with God-that He had allowed her to be born on this day. It
was a day, in her view, that had been invented to create mayhem among the lower
classes, a day when they were invited to abuse people of property-and my
grandmother's house was always abused on Halloween. Eighty Front Street was
feathered with toilet paper, the garage windows were dutifully soaped, the
driveway lampposts were spray-painted (orange), and once someone inserted the
greater half of a lamprey eel in Grandmother's letter slot. Owen had always
suspected Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman. Upon her arrival in the old-age
home, Grandmother considered that the remote-control device for switching
television channels was a true child of Satan; it was television's final
triumph, she said, that it could render you brain-dead without even allowing
you to leave your chair. It was Dan who discovered Grandmother to be dead, when
he visited her one evening in the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly. He visited
her every evening, and he brought her a Sunday newspaper and read it aloud to
her on Sunday mornings, too. The night she died, Dan found her propped up in
her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with
the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept
changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached
itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels-looking for something
good. How I wish that Owen Meany could have died as peacefully as that!
Toronto: September , -rainy and cool; back-to-school weather, back-to-church
weather. These familiar rituals of church and school are my greatest comfort.
But Bishop Strachan has hired a new woman in the English Department; I could
tell when she was interviewing, last spring, that she was someone to be
endured-a woman who gives new meaning to that arresting first sentence of Pride
and Prejudice, with which the fall term begins for my Grade  girls:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

I don't know if I quite qualify for Jane Austen's notion of
"a good fortune"; but my grandmother provided for me very generously.
My new colleague's name is Eleanor Pribst, and I would love to read what Jane
Austen might have written about her. I would be vastly happier to have read
about Ms. Pribst than I am pleased to have met her. But I shall endure her; I
will outlast her, in the end. She is alternately silly and aggressive, and in
both methods of operation she is willfully insufferable- she is a Germanic
bully. When she laughs, I am reminded of that wonderful sentence near the end
of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: "I laugh, and a noise comes out like something
being killed: a mouse, a bird?''

        
 
In the case of the laughter of Eleanor
Pribst, I could swear I hear the death rattle of a rat or a vulture. In
department meeting, when I once again brought up the matter of my request to
teach Giinter Grass's Cat and Mouse in Grade , Ms. Pribst went on the attack.

"Why would you want to teach that nasty book to
girls?" she asked. "That is a boys' book," she said. "The
masturbation scene alone is offensive to women."

Then she complained that I was ' 'using up'' both Margaret
Atwood and Alice Munro in the Canadian Literature course for my Grade s; there
was nothing preventing Ms. Pribst from teaching either Atwood or Munro in
another course-but she was out to make trouble. A man teaching those two women
effectively "used them up," she said--so that women in the department
could not teach them. I have her figured out. She's one of those who tells you
that if you teach a Canadian author in the Canadian Literature course, you're
condescending to Canadians-by not teaching them in another literature course.
And if you "use them up" in another literature course, then she'll
ask you what you think is "wrong" with Canadian Literature; she'll
say you're being condescending to Canadians. It's all because I'm a former
American, and she doesn't like Americans; this is so obvious-that and the fact
that I am a bachelor, I live alone, and I have not fallen all over myself to
ask her (as they say) "out." She's one of those pushy women who will
readily humiliate you if you do ask her "out"; and if you don't ask
her, she'll attempt to humiliate you more. I am reminded of some years ago, and
of a New York woman who so reminded me of Mitzy Lish. She brought her daughter
to Bishop Strachan for an interview; the mother wanted to interview someone
from the English Department-to ascertain, she told the headmistress, if we were
guilty of a "parochial'' approach to literature. This woman was a seething
pot of sexual contradictions. First of all, she wanted her daughter in a
Canadian school-in "an old-fashioned sort of school," she kept
saying-because she wanted her daughter to be "saved" from the perils
of growing up in New York. All the New England schools, she said, were full of
New Yorkers; it was tragic that a young girl should have no opportunity to
entertain the values and the virtues of a saner, safer time. On the other hand,
she was one of those New Yorkers who thought she would "die" if she
spent a minute outside New York-who was sure that the rest of the world was a
provincial whipping post whereat people like herself, of sophisticated tastes
and highly urban energies, would be lashed to the stake of old-fashioned values
and virtues until she expired of boredom.