A prayer for Owen Meany (24 page)

        
 
a European tradition, strangely enlarged by
its travel to New Hampshire, she seemed intent on nursing the twins until they
were old enough to go to school by themselves. The Brinker-Smiths were big on
nursing, as was evidenced by Mr. Brinker-Smith's demonstrative use of his wife
in his biology classes. A well-liked teacher, of liberal methods not
universally favored by the stodgier Gravesend faculty, Mr. Brinker-Smith
enjoyed all opportunities to bring "life," as he called it, into the
classroom. This included the eye-opening spectacle of Ginger Brinker-Smith
nursing the twins, an experience-sadly-that was wasted on the biology students
of Gravesend, in that it happened biefore Owen and I were old enough to attend
the academy. Anyway, Owen and I were not fearful of interference from the
Brinker-Smiths while we investigated the boys' rooms on the first floor of
Waterhouse Hall; in fact, we were disappointed to see so little of the
Brinker-Smiths over that Christmas- because we imagined that we might be
rewarded with a glimpse of Ginger Brinker-Smith in the act of nursing. We even,
occasionally, lingered in the first-floor hall-in the faraway hope that Mr.
Brinker-Smith might open the door to his apartment, see Owen and me standing
there, clearly with nothing educational to do, and therefore invite us forthwith
into his apartment so that we could watch his wife nurse the twins. Alas, he
did not. One icy day, Owen and I accompanied Mrs. Brinker-Smith to market,
taking turns pushing the bundled-up twins in their double-seater-and even
carrying the groceries into the Brinker-Smith apartment, after a trip in such
inclement weather that it might have qualified as a fifth of Mr. Tubulari's
winter pentathlon. But did Mrs. Brinker-Smith bring forth her breasts and
volunteer to nurse the twins in front of us? Alas, she did not. Thus Owen and I
were left to discover what Gravesend prep-school boys kept in their rooms when
they went home for Christmas. We took Dan Needham's master key from the hook by
the kitchen can opener; we began with the fourth-floor rooms. Owen's excitement
with our detective work was intense; he entered every room as if the occupant
had not gone home for Christmas, but in all likelihood was hiding under the
bed, or in the closet-with an ax. And there was no hurrying Owen, not even in
the dullest room. He looked in every drawer, examined every article of
clothing, sat in every desk chair, lay down on every bed-this was always his
last act in each of the rooms: he would lie down on the bed and close his eyes;
he would hold his breath. Only when he'd resumed normal breathing did he
announce his opinion of the room's occupant-as either happy or unhappy with the
academy; as possibly troubled by distant events at home, or in the past. Owen
would always admit it-when the room's occupant remained a mystery to him.
"THIS GUY IS A REAL MYSTERY," Owen would say. "TWELVE PAIRS OF
SOCKS, NO UNDERWEAR, TEN SHIRTS, TWO PAIRS OF PANTS, ONE SPORT JACKET, ONE TIE,
TWO LACROSSE STICKS, NO BALL, NO PICTURES OF GIRLS, NO FAMILY PORTRAITS, AND NO
SHOES."

"He's got to be wearing shoes," I said.

"ONLY ONE PAIR," Owen said.

"He sent a lot of his clothes to the cleaners, just before
vacation," I said.

"YOU DON'T SEND SHOES TO THE CLEANERS, OR FAMILY
PORTRAITS," Owen said. "A REAL MYSTERY."

We learned where to look for the sex magazines, or the dirty
pictures: between the mattress and bedspring. Some of these gave Owen THE
SHIVERS. In those days, such pictures were disturbingly unclear-or else they
were disappointingly wholesome; in the latter category were the swimsuit
calendars. The pictures of the more disturbing variety were of the quality of
snapshots taken by children from moving cars; the women themselves appeared
arrested in motion, rather than posed-as if they'd been in the act of something
hasty when they'd been caught by the camera. The acts themselves were
unclear-for example, a woman bent over a man for some undetermined purpose, as
if she were about to do some violence on an utterly helpless cadaver. And the
women's sex parts were often blurred by pubic hair-some of them had
astonishingly more pubic hair than either Owen or I thought was possible-and
their nipples were blocked from view by the censor's black slashes. At first,
we thought the slashes were actual instruments of torture-they struck us as
even more menacing than real nudity. The nudity was menacing-to a large extent,
because the women weren't pretty; or else their troubled, serious expressions
judged their own nakedness severely.

 
 
Many of the
pictures and magazines were partially destroyed by the effects of the boys'
weight grinding them into the metal bedsprings, which were flaked with rust;
the bodies of the women themselves were occasionally imprinted with a spiral
tattoo, as if the old springs had etched upon the women's flesh a grimy version
of lust's own descending spiral. Naturally, the presence of pornography
darkened Owen's opinion of each room's occupant; when he lay on the bed with
his eyes closed and, at last, expelled his long-held breath, he would say,
"NOT HAPPY. WHO DRAWS A MOUSTACHE ON HIS MOTHER'S FACE AND THROWS DARTS AT
HIS FATHER'S PICTURE? WHO GOES TO BED THINKING ABOUT DOING FT WITH GERMAN
SHEPHERDS? AND WHAT'S THE DOG LEASH IN THE CLOSET FOR? AND THE FLEA COLLAR IN
THE DESK DRAWER? IT'S NOT LEGAL TO KEEP A PET IN THE DORM, RIGHT?"

"Perhaps his dog was killed over the summer," I said.
"He kept the leash and the flea collar."

"SURE," Owen said. "AND I SUPPOSE HIS FATHER RAN
OVER THE DOG? I SUPPOSE HIS MOTHER DID IT WITH THE DOG?"

"They're just things," I said. "What can we tell
about the guy who lives here, really?"

"NOT HAPPY," Owen said. We were a whole afternoon
investigating the rooms on just the fourth floor, Owen was so systematic in his
methods of search, so deliberate about putting everything back exactly where it
had been, as if these Gravesend boys were anything at all like him; as if their
rooms were as intentional as the museum Owen had made of his room. His behavior
in the rooms was remindful of a holy man's search of a cathedral of
antiquity-as if he could divine some ancient and also holy intention there. He
pronounced few boarders happy. These few, in Owen's opinion, were the ones
whose dresser mirrors were ringed with family pictures, and with pictures of
real girlfriends (they could have been sisters). A keeper of swimsuit calendars
could conceivably be happy, or borderline-happy, but the boys who had cut out
the pictures of the lingerie and girdle models from the Sears catalog were at
least partially unhappy-and there was no saving anyone who harbored pictures of
thoroughly naked women. The bushier the women were, the unhappier the The
Little Lard Jesus
 
boy; the more the
women's nipples were struck with the censor's slash, the more miserable the
boarder.

"HOW CAN YOU BE HAPPY IF YOU SPEND ALL YOUR TIME THINKING
ABOUT DOING ITT' Owen asked. I preferred to think that the rooms we searched
were more haphazard and less revealing than Owen imagined-after all, they were
supposed to be the monastic cells of transient scholars; they were something
between a nest and a hotel room, they were not natural abodes, and what we
found there was a random disorder and a depressing sameness. Even the pictures
of the sports heroes and movie stars were the same, from room to room; and from
boy to boy, there was often a similar scrap of something missed from the life
at home: a picture of a car, with the boy proudly at the wheel (Gravesend
boarders were not allowed to drive, or even ride in, cars); a picture of a
perfectly plain backyard, or even a snapshot of such a deeply private moment-an
unrecognizable figure shambling away from the camera, back turned to our view-
that the substance of the picture was locked in a personal memory. The effect
of these cells, with the terrible sameness of each boy's homesickness, and the
chaos of travel, was what Owen had meant when he'd told my mother that
dormitories were EVIL. Since her death, Owen had hinted that the strongest
force compelling him to attend Gravesend Academy-namely, my mother's
insistence-was gone. Those rooms allowed us to imagine what we might become-if
not exactly boarders (because I would continue to live with Dan, and with
Grandmother, and Owen would live at home), we would still harbor such secrets,
such barely restrained messiness, such lusts, even, as these poor residents of
Waterhouse Hall. It was our lives in the near future that we were searching for
when we searched in those rooms, and therefore it was shrewd of Owen that he
made us take our time. It was in a room on the third floor that Owen discovered
the prophylactics; everyone called them "rubbers," but in Grave-send,
New Hampshire, we called them "beetleskins." The origin of that word
is not known to me; technically, a "beetleskin" was a used
condom-and, even more specifically, one found in a parking lot or washed up on
a beach or floating in the urinal at the drive-in movie. I believe that only

        
 
those were authentic "beetleskins":
old and very-much-used condoms that popped out at you in public places. It was
in the third-floor room of a senior named Potter-an advisee of Dan's-that Owen
found a half-dozen or more prophylactics, in their foil wrappers, not very ably
concealed in the sock compartment of the dresser drawers.

"BEETLESKINS!" he cried, dropping them on the floor;
we stood back from them. We had never seen unused rubbers in their drugstore
packaging before.

"Are you sure?" I asked Owen.

"THEY'RE FRESH BEETLESKINS," Owen told me. "THE
CATHOLICS FORBID THEM," he added. "THE CATHOLICS ARE OPPOSED TO BIRTH
CONTROL."

"Why?" I asked.

"NEVER MIND," Owen said. "I'VE NOTHING MORE TO DO
WITH THE CATHOLICS."

"Right," I said. We tried to ascertain if Potter would
know exactly how many beetleskins he had in his sock drawer-whether he would
notice if we opened one of the foil wrappers and examined one of the
beetleskins, which naturally, then, we could not put back; we would have to
dispose of it. Would Potter miss it? That was the question. Owen determined
that an investigation of how organized a boarder Potter was would tell us. Was
his underwear all in one drawer, were his T-shirts folded, were his shoes in a
straight line on the closet floor, were his jackets and shirts and trousers
separated from each other, did his hangers face the same way, did he keep his
pens and pencils together, were his paper clips contained, did he have more
than one tube of toothpaste that was open, were his razor blades somewhere
safe, did he have a necktie rack or hang his ties willy-nilly? And did he keep
the beetleskins because he used them-or were they for show? In Potter's closet,
sunk in one of his size- hiking boots, was a fifth of Jack Daniel's Old No. ,
Black Label; Owen decided that if Potter risked keeping a bottle of whiskey in
his room, the beetleskkis were not for show. If Potter used them with any
frequency, we imagined, he would not miss one. The examination of the
beetleskin was a solemn occasion; it was the nonlubricated kind-I'm not even
sure if there were lubricated rubbers when Owen and I were eleven-and with some
difficulty, and occasional pain, we took turns putting the thing on our tiny
penises. This part of our lives in the near future was especially hard for us
to imagine; but I realize now that the ritual we enacted in Potter's daring room
also had the significance of religious rebellion for Owen Meany-it was but one
more affront to the Catholics whom he had, in his own words, ESCAPED. It was a
pity that Owen could not escape the Rev. Dudley Wiggin's Christmas Pageant. The
first rehearsal, in the nave of the church, was held on the Second Sunday of
Advent and followed a celebration of the Holy Eucharist. We were delayed
discussing our roles because the Women's Association Report preceded us; the
women wished to say that the Quiet Day they had scheduled for the beginning of
Advent had been very successful-that the meditations, and the following period
of quiet, for reflection, had been well received. Mrs. Walker, whose own term
as a Vestry member was expiring-thus giving her even more energy for her Sunday
school tyrannies- complained that attendance at the adult evening Bible study
was flagging.

"Well, everyone's so busy at Christmas, you know,"
said Barb Wiggin, who was impatient to begin the casting of the pageant-not
wanting to keep us potential donkeys and turtledoves waiting. I could sense
Owen's irritation with Barb Wiggin, in advance. Quite blind to his animosity,
Barb Wiggin began-as, indeed, the holy event itself had begun-with the
Announcing Angel. "Well, we all know who our Descending Angel is,"
she told us.

"NOT ME," Owen said.

"Why, Owen!" Barb Wiggin said.

"PUT SOMEONE ELSE UP IN THE AIR," Owen said.
"MAYBE THE SHEPHERDS CAN JUST STARE AT THE 'PILLAR OF LIGHT.' THE BIBLE
SAYS OF THE LORD APPEARED TO THE SHEPHERDS-NOT TO THE WHOLE CONGREGATION. AND
USE SOMEONE WITH A VOICE EVERYONE DOESN'T LAUGH AT," he said, pausing
while everyone laughed.

"But Owen-" Barb Wiggin said.

"No, no, Barbara," Mr. Wiggin said. "If Owen's
tired of being the angel, we should respect his wishes-this is a democracy,"
he added unconvincingly. The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband
as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.

"AND ANOTHER THING," Owen said. "JOSEPH SHOULD
NOT SMIRK."

"Indeed not!" the rector said heartily. "I had no
idea we'd suffered a smirking Joseph all these years."

"And who do you think would be a good Joseph, Owen?"
Barb Wiggin asked, without the conventional friendliness of the stewardess.
Owen pointed to me; to be singled out so silently, with Owen's customary
authority, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck-in later years, I
would think I had been chosen by the Chosen One. But that Second Sunday of
Advent, in the nave of Christ Church, I felt angry with Owen-once the hairs on
the back of my neck relaxed. For what an uninspiring role it is; to be
Joseph-that hapless follower, that stand-in, that guy along for the ride.