A prayer for Owen Meany (38 page)

        
 
what Owen did-before Dan Needham could call
for the curtain. Mr. Fish fell over what was meant to be his grave, and the
sheer terror in Owen's cry was matched by a corresponding terror in the
audience. There were screams, there were gasps; I knew that Maureen Early's
pants were wet again. Just what had the Ghost of the Future actually seen ? Mr.
Fish, a veteran at making the best of a mess, found himself sprawled on the
stage in a perfect position to "read" his own name on the
papier-mache gravestone-which he had half-crushed, in falling over it. "
'Ebenezer Scrooge! Am / that man?' " he asked Owen, but something was
wrong with Owen, who appeared to be more frightened of the papier-mlche
gravestone than Scrooge was afraid of it; Owen kept backing away. He retreated
across the stage, with Mr. Fish imploring him for an answer. Without a word,
without so much as pointing again at the gravestone that had the power to
frighten even the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Owen Meany retreated
offstage. In the dressing room, he sobbed upon the makeup table, coating his
hair with baby powder, the black eyeliner streaking his face. Dan Needham felt
his forehead. "You're burning up, Owen!" Dan said. "I'm getting
you straight home, and straight to bed."

"What is it? What happened?" I asked Owen, but he
shook his head and cried harder.

"He fainted, that's what happened!" Dan said; Owen
shook his head.

"Is he all right?" Mr. Fish asked from the door; Dan
had called for a curtain before Mr. Fish's last scene. "Are you all right,
Owen?" Mr. Fish asked. "My God, you looked as if you'd seen a
ghost!"

"I've seen everything now," Dan said. "I've seen
Scrooge upstaged, I've seen the Ghost of the Future scare himself!"

The Rev. Lewis Merrill came to the crowded dressing room to
offer his assistance, although Owen appeared more in need of a doctor than a
minister.

"Owen?" Pastor Merrill asked. "Are you all
right?" Owen shook his head. "What did you see?"

Owen stopped crying and looked up at him. That Pastor Merrill
seemed so sure that Owen had seen something surprised me. Being a minister,
being a man of faith, perhaps he was more familiar with "visions"
than the rest of us; possibly he had the ability to recognize those moments
when visions appear to others.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?" Owen asked Mr. Merrill.

"You saw something, didn't you?" Pastor Merrill asked
Owen. Owen stared at him. "Didn't you?" Mr. Merrill repeated.

"I SAW MY NAME-ON THE GRAVE," said Owen Meany. Dan put
his arms around Owen and hugged him. "Owen, Owen-it's part of the story!
You're sick, you have a fever! You're too excited. Seeing a name on that grave
is just like the story-it's make-believe, Owen," Dan said.

"rrWASMKNAME," Owen said. "NOT SCROOGE'S."

The Rev. Mr. Merrill knelt beside him. "It's a natural
thing to see that, Owen," Mr. Merrill told him. "Your own name on
your own grave-it's a vision we all have. It's just a bad dream, Owen."

But Dan Needham regarded Mr. Merrill strangely, as if such a
vision were quite foreign to Dan's experience; he was not at all sure that
seeing one's own name on one's own grave was exactly "natural." Mr.
Fish stared at the Rev. Lewis Merrill as if he expected more
"miracles" on the order of the Nativity he had only recently, and for
the first time, experienced. In the baby powder on the makeup table, the name
OWEN MEANY-as he himself had written it-was still visible. I pointed to it.
"Owen," I said, "look at what you wrote yourself-just tonight.
You see, you were already thinking about it-your name, I mean."

But Owen Meany only stared at me; he stared me down. Then he
stared at Dan until Dan said to Mr. Fish, "Let's get that curtain up,
let's get this over with."

Then Owen stared at the Rev. Mr. Merrill until Mr. Merrill said,
"I'll take you home right now, Owen. You shouldn't be waiting around for
your curtain call with a temperature of the-good-Lord-knows-what.'' I rode with
them; the last scene of A Christmas Carol was boring to me-after the departure
of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the story turns to syrup. Owen preferred
staring at the darkness out the passenger-side window to the lit road ahead.

"You had a vision, Owen," Pastor Merrill repeated. I
thought it was nice of him to be so concerned, and to drive

        
 
Owen home-considering that Owen had never
been a Con-gregationalist. I noticed that Mr. MenilFs stutter abandoned him
when he was being directly helpful to someone, although Owen responded
ungenerously to the pastor's help-he appeared to be sullenly embracing his
"vision," like the typically doubtless prophet he so often seemed to
be, to me. He had "seen" his own name on his own grave; the world,
not to mention Pastor Merrill, would have a hard time convincing him otherwise.
Mr. Merrill and I sat in the car and watched him hobble over the snow-covered
ruts in the driveway; there was an outside light left on for him, and another
light was on-in what I knew was Owen's room-but I was shocked to see that, on
Christmas Eve, his mother and father had not waited up for him!

"An unusual boy," said the pastor neutrally, as he
drove me home. Without thinking to ask me which of my two "homes" he
should take me to, Mr. Merrill drove me to  Front Street. I wanted to
attend the cast party Dan was throwing in Waterhouse Hall, but Mr. Merrill had
driven off before I remembered where I wanted to be. Then I thought I might as
well go inside and see if my grandmother had come home, or if Dan had persuaded
her to kick up her heels-such as she was willing-at the cast party. I knew the
instant I opened the door that Grandmother wasn't home-perhaps they were still
having curtain calls at the Town Hall; maybe Mr. Merrill had been a faster
driver than he appeared to be. I breathed in the still air of the old house;
Lydia and Germaine must have been fast asleep, for even someone reading in bed
makes a little noise-and  Front Street was as quiet as a grave. That was
when I had the impression that it was a grave; the house itself frightened me.
I knew I was probably jumpy after Owen's alarming "vision"-or
whatever it was- and I was on the verge of leaving, and of running down Front
Street to the Gravesend Academy campus (to Dan's dormitory), when I heard
Germaine. She was difficult to hear because she had hidden herself in the
secret passageway, and she was speaking barely above a whisper; but the rest of
the house was so very quiet, I could hear her.

"Oh, Jesus, help me!" she was saying. "Oh, God;
oh, dear Christ-oh, good Lord-help me!"

So there were thieves in Gravesend! I thought. The Vestry
members had been wise to lock the parish house. Christmas Eve bandits had
pillaged  Front Street! Germaine had escaped to the secret passageway, but
what had the robbers done to Lydia? Perhaps they had kidnapped her, or stolen
her wheelchair and left her helpless. The books on the bookshelf-door to the
secret passageway were tumbled all about-half of them were on the floor, as if
Germaine, in her panic, had forgotten the location of the concealed lock and
key . . . upon which shelf, behind which books? She'd made such a mess that the
lock and key were now plainly visible to anyone entering the living
room-especially since the books strewn upon the floor drew your attention to
the bookshelf-door.

"Germaine?" I whispered. "Have they gone?"

"Have who gone?" Germaine whispered back.

"The robbers," I whispered.

"What robbers?" she asked me. I opened the door to the
secret passageway. She was cringing behind the door, near the jams and
jellies-as many cobwebs in her hair as adorned the relishes and chutneys and
the cans of overused, spongy tennis balls that dated back to the days when my
mother saved old tennis balls for Sagamore. Germaine was wearing her
ankle-length flannel dressing gown; but she was barefoot-suggesting that the
manner of her hiding herself in the secret passageway had not been unlike the
way she cleared the table.

"Lydia is dead," Germaine said. She would not emerge
from the cobwebs and shadows, although I held the heavy bookshelf-door wide
open for her.

"They killed her!" I said in alarm.

"No one killed her," Germaine said; a certain mystical
detachment flooded her eyes and caused her to slightly revise her statement.
"Death just came for her," Germaine said, shivering dramatically. She
was the sort of girl who personified Death; after all, she thought that Owen Meany's
voice was simply the speaking vehicle for the Devil.

"How did she die?" I asked.

"In her bed, when I was reading to her," Germaine
said. "She'd just corrected me," Germaine said. Lydia was always
correcting Germaine, naturally; Germaine's pronunciation was especially
offensive to Lydia, who modeled her own pronunciation exactly upon my
grandmother's speech and held Germaine accountable for any failures hi
imitating my grandmother's reading voice, as well. Grandmother and Lydia often

        
 
took turns reading to each other-because
their eyes, they said, needed rest. So Lydia had died while resting her eyes,
informing Germaine of her mispronunciation of this or mat. Occasionally, Lydia
would interrupt Germaine's reading and ask her to repeat a certain word. Whether
correctly or incorrectly pronounced, Lydia would then say, "I'll bet you
don't know what the word means, do you?" So Lydia had died in the act of
educating Germaine, a task-in my grandmother's opinion-that had no end,
Germaine had sat with the body as long as she could stand it.

"Things happened to the body," Germaine explained,
venturing cautiously into the living room. She viewed the spilled books with
surprise-as if Death had come for them, too; or perhaps Death had been looking
for her and had flung the books about in the process.

"What things?" I asked.

"Not nice things," Germaine said, shaking her head. I
could imagine the old house settling and creaking, groaning against the winter
wind; poor Germaine had probably concluded that Death was still around.
Possibly Death had expected that coming for Lydia would have been more of a
struggle; having found her and taken her so easily, probably Death felt
inclined to stay and take a second soul. Why not make a night of it? We held
hands, as if we were siblings taking a great risk together, and went to view
Lydia. I was quite shocked to see her, because Germaine had not told me of the
efforts she had made to shut Lydia's mouth; Germaine had bound Lydia's jaws
together with one of her pink leg-warmers, which she had knotted at the top of
Lydia's head. Upon closer inspection, I saw that Germaine had also exercised
considerable creativity in her efforts to permanently close Lydia's eyes; upon
closing them, she had fastened two unmatched coins-a nickel and a quarter-to
Lydia's eyelids, with Scotch tape. She told me that the only matching coins she
could find had been dimes, which were too small-and that one eyelid fluttered,
or had appeared to flutter, knocking the nickel off; hence the tape. She used
the tape on both eyelids, she explained-even though the quarter had stayed in
place by itself-because to tape one coin and not the other had not appealed to
her sense of symmetry. Years later, I would remember her use of that word and
conclude that Lydia and my grandmother had managed to educate Germaine, a
little; "symmetry," I was sure, was not a word in Ger-maine's
vocabulary before she came to live at  Front Street. I would remember,
too, that although I was only eleven, such words were in my vocabulary-largely
through Lydia's and my grandmother's efforts to educate me. My mother had never
paid very particular attention to words, and Dan Needham let boys be boys. When
Dan returned to  Front Street with my grandmother, Germaine and I were
much relieved; we'd been sitting with Lydia's body, reassuring ourselves that
Death had come and got what it came for, and gone-that Death had left 
Front Street in peace, at least for the rest of Christmas Eve. But we could not
have gone on sitting with Lydia for very long. As usual, Dan Needham took
charge; he'd brought my grandmother home-from her brief appearance at the cast
party-and he allowed the cast party to go on without him. He put Grandmother to
bed with a rum toddy; naturally, Owen's outburst in A Christmas Carol had upset
her-and now she expressed her conviction that Owen had somehow foreseen Lydia's
death and had confused it with his own. This point of view was immediately
convincing to Germaine, who remarked that while she was reading to Lydia, only
shortly before Lydia died, both of them had thought they'd heard a scream.
Grandmother was insulted that Germaine should actually agree with her about
anything and wanted to disassociate herself from Germaine's hocus-pocus; it was
nonsense that Lydia and Germaine could have heard Owen screaming all the way
from the Gravesend Town Hall, on a windy winter night, with everyone's doors
and windows shut. Germaine was superstitious and probably heard screaming, of
one kind or another, every night; and Lydia-it was now clearly proven- was
suffering from a senility much in advance of my grandmother's. Nonetheless, in
Grandmother's view, Owen Meany had certain unlikable "powers"; that
he had "foreseen" Lydia's death was not superstitious nonsense-at
least not on the level that Germaine was superstitious.

"Owenforesaw absolutely nothing," Dan Needham told the
agitated women. "He must have had a fever of a hundred and four! The only
power he has is the power of his imagination."

But against this reasoning, my grandmother and Germaine saw themselves
as allies. There was-at the very least-some ominous connection between Lydia's
death and what Owen

"saw"; the powers of "that boy" went far
beyond the powers of the imagination.

"Have another rum toddy, Harriet," Dan Needham told my
grandmother.

"Don't you patronize me, Dan," my grandmother said.
"And shame on you," she added, "for letting a stupid butcher get
his bloody hands on such a wonderful part. Dismal casting," she told him.