A prayer for Owen Meany (49 page)

Randy White dressed like a businessman; he looked exceedingly
sharp alongside old Archie Thorndike's more rumpled and wrinkled appearance.
White wore a steel-gray, pin-striped suit with a crisp white shirt; he liked a
thin, gold collar pin that pulled the unusually narrow points of his collar a
little too closely together-the pin also thrust the perfectly tight knot of his
necktie a little too far forward. He put his hand on top of Owen Meany's head
and rumpled Owen's hair; before the famous Nativity of ', Barb Wiggin used to
do that to Owen.

"I'll talk to Owen after I get the job!" White said to
old Thorny. He smiled at his own joke. "I know what Owen wants,
anyway," White said; he winked at Owen. " 'An educator first, a
fund-raiser second'-isn't that it?" Owen nodded, but he couldn't speak.
"Well, I'll tell you what a headmaster is, Owen-he's a decision-maker.
He's both an educator and a fund-raiser, but-first and foremost-he makes

         
 
decisions." Then Randy White looked at
his watch; he steered old Thorny back into the headmaster's office.
"Remember, I've got that plane to catch," White said. "Let's get
those department heads together." And just before old Archie Thomdike
closed his office door, Owen heard what White said; in Owen's view, he was
supposed to hear what White said. "I hope that kid hasn't stopped
growing," said Randy White. Then the door to the headmaster's office was
closed; The Voice was left speechless; the candidate had not heard a word from
Owen Meany. Of course, the Ghost of the Future saw it coming; sometimes I think
Owen saw everything that was coming. I remember how he predicted that the
school would pick Randolph White. For The Grave, The Voice titled his column
"WHITEWASH." He began: "THE TRUSTEES LIKE BUSINESSMEN-THE
TRUSTEES ARE BUSINESSMEN! THE FACULTY ARE A BUNCH OF TYPICAL TEACHERS-INDECISIVE,
WISHY-WASHY, THEY'RE ALWAYS SAYING 'ON THE OTHER HAND.' NOW ALONG COMES THIS
GUY WHO SAYS HIS SPECIALTY IS MAKING DECISIONS. ONCE HE STARTS MAKING THOSE
DECISIONS, HE'LL DRIVE EVERYONE CRAZY-WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE SEES WHAT BRILLIANT
DECISIONS THE GUY COMES UP WITH! BUT RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE THINKS SOMEONE WHO
MAKES DECISIONS IS JUST WHAT WE NEED. RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE'S A SUCKER FOR A
DECISION-MAKER," Owen wrote. "WHAT GRAVESEND NEEDS IS A HEADMASTER
WITH A STRONG EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND; MR. WHITE'S BACKGROUND IS MEAT."
There was more, and it was worse. Owen suggested that someone check into the
admissions policy at the small private day school in Lake Forest; were there
any Jews or blacks in Mr. White's school? Mr. Early, in his capacity as faculty
adviser to The Grave, killed the column; the part about the faculty being
"TYPICAL TEACHERS-INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY" ... that was what forced
Mr. Early's hand. Dan Needham agreed that the column should have been killed.

"You can't imply that someone is a racist or an anti-Semite,
Owen," Dan told him. "You have to have proof."

Owen sulked about such a stern rejection from The Grave; but he
took Dan's advice seriously. He talked to the Gravesend students who came from
Lake Forest, Illinois; he encouraged them to write to their mothers and fathers
and urge them to inquire about the admissions policy at Mr. White's school. The
parents could pretend they were considering the school for their children; they
could even ask directly if their children were going to be rubbing shoulders
with blacks or Jews. The result-the unhappily second- and thirdhand
information-was typically unclear; the parents were told that the school had
"no specific admissions policy''; they were also told that the school had
no blacks or Jews. Dan Needham had his own story about meeting Randy White;
that was after White was offered the job. It was a beautiful spring day-the
forsythia and the lilacs were in blossom-and Dan Needham was walking in the
main quadrangle with Randy White and his wife, Sam; it was Sam's first visit to
the school, and she was interested in the theater. Almost immediately upon the
Whites' arrival, Mr. White made his decision to accept the headmastership. Dan
said the school had never looked prettier. The grass was trim and a spring-green
color, but it had not been mowed so recently that it looked shorn; the ivy was
glossy against the red-brick buildings, and the arborvitae and the privet
hedges that outlined the quadrangle paths stood in uniform, dark-green contrast
to the few, bright-yellow dandelions. Dan let the new headmaster maul the
fingers of his right hand; Dan looked into the pretty-blonde blandness of Sam's
vacant, detached smile.

"Look at those dandelions, dear," said Randolph White.

' 'They should be ripped out by their roots,'' Mrs. White said
decisively.

' 'They should, they should-and they will be!'' said the new
headmaster. Dan confessed to Owen and me that the Whites had given him the
shivers.

"YOU THINK THEY GIVE YOU THE SHIVERS NOW," Owen said.
"JUST WAIT UNTIL HE STARTS MAKING  
Toronto: May , -another gorgeous day, sunny
and cool; Mrs. Brocklebank and others of my neighbors who were attacking their
dandelions, yesterday, are having a go at their lawns today. It smells as fresh
as a farm along Russell Hill Road and Lonsdale Road. I read The Globe and Mail
again, but I was good; I didn't bring it to school with me, and I re-

        
 
solved that I would not discuss the sales of
U.S. arms to Iran and the diversion of the profits to the Nicaraguan rebels-or
the gift from the sultan of Brunei that was supposed to help support the rebels
but was instead transferred to the wrong account in a Swiss bank. A
ten-million-dollar "mistake"! The Globe and Mail said: "Brunei
was only one foreign country approached during the Reagan Administration's
attempt to find financial support for the contras after Congress forbade any
money's being spent on their behalf by the U.S. Government." But in my
Grade  English class, the ever-clever Claire Clooney read that sentence
aloud to the class and then asked me if I didn't think it was "the
awk-wardest sentence alive."

I have encouraged the girls to find clumsy sentences in
newspapers and magazines, and to bring them into class for our hearty
ridicule-and that bit about "any money's being spent" is enough to
turn an English teacher's eyeballs a blank shade of pencil-gray-but I knew that
Claire Clooney was trying to get me started; I resisted the bait. It is that
time in the spring term when the minds of the Grade  girls are elsewhere,
and I reminded them that-yesterday- we had not traveled sufficiently far in our
perusal of Chapter Three of The Great Gatsby; that the class had bogged down in
a mire of interpretations regarding the "quality of eternal
reassurance" in Gatsby's smile; and that we'd wasted more valuable time
trying to grasp the meaning of Jordan Baker exhibiting "an urban distaste
for the concrete." Claire Clooney, I might add, has such a general
"distaste for the concrete" that she confused Daisy Buchanan with
Myrtle Wilson. I suggested that mistaking a wife for a mistress was of more
dire substance than a slip of the tongue. I suspect that Claire Clooney is too
clever for an error of this magnitude; that, yesterday, she had not read past
Chapter One; and that, today-by her ploy of distracting me with the news-she
was not finished with Chapter Four.

"Here's another one, Mr. Wheelwright," Claire Clooney
said, continuing her merciless attack on The Globe and Mail. "This is the
second-awkwardest sentence alive," she said. "Get this: 'Mr. Reagan
denied yesterday that he had solicited third-country aid for the rebels, as Mr.
McFarlane had said on Monday.' That's some dangling clunker there, isn't it?''
Claire Clooney asked me. "I like that, 'as Mr. McFarlane had said'- it's
just like tacked on to the sentence!" she cried.

"Is it 'tike tacked on' or is it tacked on?" I asked
her. She smiled; the other girls tittered. They were not going to get me to
blow a forty-minute class on Ronald Reagan. But I had to keep my hands under
the desk-my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole
criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate
above the law-they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for
democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood*. I know that
some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver "ranting
lectures" to them about the United States; some parents have complained to
the headmistress, and Kather-ine has cautioned me to keep my politics out of
the classroom- "or at least say something about Canada; BSS girls are
Canadians, for the most part, you know."

"I don't know anything about Canada," I say.

"I know you don't!" the Rev. Mrs. Keeling says,
laughing; she is always friendly, even when she's teasing me, but the substance
of her remark hurts me-if only because it is the same, critical message that
Canon Mackie delivers to me, without cease. In short: You've been with us for
twenty years; when are you going to take an interest in MS? In my Grade 
English class, Frances Noyes said: "/ think he's lying." She meant
President Reagan, of course.

"They should impeach him. Why can't they impeach him?"
said Debby LaRocca. "If he's lying, they should impeach him. If he's not
lying-if all these other clowns are running his administration for him-then
he's too stupid to be president. Either way, they should impeach him. In
Canada, they'd call for a vote of confidence and he'd be gone!"

Sandra Darcy said, "Yeah."

"What do you think, Mr. Wheelwright?" Adrienne Hewlett
asked me sweetly.

"I think that some of you have not read to the end of
Chapter Four," I said. "What does it mean that Gatsby was 'delivered
suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor'-what does that mean?"
I asked them. At least Ruby Newell had done her homework. "It means that
Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay-that all the
parties he throws ... in a way, he throws them for her. It means that he's not
just crazy-that he's made all the money, and he's spending all the money, just
for her\ To catch her eye, you know?" Ruby said.

"I like .the part about the guy who fixed the World
Series!" Debby LaRocca cried.

"Meyer Wolfshears!" said Claire Clooney.

"-shiem," I said softly. "Meyer Wolfsheim."

"Yeah!" Sandra Darcy said.

"I like the way he says 'Oggsford' instead of Oxford,"
Debby LaRocca said.

"Like he thinks Gatsby's an 'Oggsford man,' " said
Frances Noyes.

"I think the guy who's telling the story is a snob,"
said Adrienne Hewlett.

"Nick," I said softly. "Nick Carraway."

"Yeah," Sandra Darcy said. "But he's supposed to
be a snob-that's part of it."

"And when he says he's so honest, that he's 'one of the few
honest people' he's ever known, I think we're not supposed to trust him-not completely,
I mean," Claire Clooney said. "I know he's the one telling the story,
but he's a part of them-he's judging them, but he's one of them."

"They're trashy people, all of them," Sandra Darcy
said.

" 'Trashy'?" I asked.

"They're very careless people," Ruby Newell said
correctly.

"Yes," I said. "They certainly are." Very
smart, these BSS girls. They know what's going on in The Great Gatsby, and they
know what should be done to Ronald Reagan's rotten administration, too! But I
contained myself very well in class today. I restricted my observations to The
Great Gatsby. I bade the class to look with special care in the following
chapters at Gatsby's notion that he can "repeat the past," at
Gatsby's observation of Daisy-that "her voice is full of money''-and at
the frequency of how often Gatsby appears in moonlight (once, at the end of
Chapter Seven, "watching over nothing"). I asked them to consider the
coincidence of Nick's thirtieth birthday; the meaning of the sentence
"Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade"
might give our class as much trouble as the meaning of "an urban distaste
for the concrete.''

"And remember what Ruby said!" I told them.
"They're very 'careless' people." Ruby Newell smiled;
"careless" is how Fitzgerald himself described those characters; Ruby
knew that I knew she had already read to the end of the book.

"They were careless people," the book says "...
they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money
or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made. ..."

The Reagan administration is full of such "careless
people"; their kind of carelessness is immoral. And President Reagan calls
himself a Christian! How does he dare? The kind of people claiming to be in
communication with God today . . . they are enough to drive a real Christian
crazy! And how about these evangelical types, performing miracles for money?
Oh, there's big bucks in interpreting the gospel for idiots-or in having idiots
interpret the gospel for you-and some of these evangelists are even
hypocritical enough to indulge in sexual activity that would embarrass former
Senator Hart. Perhaps poor Gary Hart missed his true calling, or are they all
the same-these presidential candidates and evangelicals who are caught with
their pants down? Mr. Reagan has been caught with his pants down, too-but the
American people reserve their moral condemnation for sexual misconduct.
Remember when the country was killing itself in Vietnam, and the folks at home
were outraged at the length and cleanliness of the protesters' hair? In the
staff room, Evelyn Barber, one of my colleagues in the English Department,
asked me what I thought of the contra-aid article in The Globe and Mail. I said
I thought that the Reagan administration exhibited "an urban distaste for
the concrete." That got quite a few laughs from my colleagues, who were
expecting a diatribe from me; on the one hand, they complain about my "predictable
politics," but they are just like the students-they enjoy getting me riled
up. I have spent twenty years teaching teenagers; I don't know if I've been a
maturing influence on any of them, but they have turned me and my colleagues
into teenagers. We teenagers are much maligned; for example, we would not keep
Mr. Reagan in office. In the staff room, my colleagues were yapping about the
school elections; the elections were yesterday, when I noticed an impatient
thrill in morning chapel-before the balloting for head girl. The girls sang
"Sons of God" with even more pep than usual; how I love to hear them
sing that hymn! There are verses only the voices of young girls can
convincingly sing. Brothers, sisters, we are one, and our life has just begun;
in the Spirit we are young, we can live for ever!