A prayer for Owen Meany (83 page)

fret not thyself, else shall thou be moved to do evil. I've had
a hard week at Bishop Strachan. Every fall, I start out demanding too much of
my students; then I become unreasonably disappointed in them-and in myself. I
have been too sarcastic with them. And my new colleague-Ms. Eleanor
Pribst-truly moves me to do evil! This week I was reading my Grade  girls
a ghost story by Robertson Davies-"The Ghost Who Vanished by
Degrees." In the middle of the story, which I adore, I began to think:
What do Grade  girls know about graduate students or Ph.D. theses or the
kind of academic posturing that Mr. Davies makes such great, good fun of? The
students looked sleepy-headed to me; they were paying, at best, faltering
attention. I felt cross with them, and therefore I read badly, not doing the
story justice; then I felt cross with myself for choosing this particular story
and not considering the age and inexperience of my audience. God, what a
situation! It is in this story where Davies says that "the wit of a
graduate student is like champagne-Canadian champagne ..." That's
absolutely priceless, as Grandmother used to say; I think I'll try that one on
Eleanor Pribst the next time she tries to be witty with me! I think I'll stick
the stump of my right index finger into the right nostril of my nose-

        
 
thereby giving her the impression that I have
managed to insert the first two joints of my finger so far into my nose that
the tip must be lodged between my eyes; thus catching her attention, I'm sure,
I will then deliver to her that priceless line about the wit of graduate
students. In Grace Church on-the-Hill, I bowed my head and tried to let my anger
go. There is no way to be more alone in church than to linger there, after a
Sunday service. This week I was haranguing my Canadian Literature students on
the subject of "bold beginnings." I said that if the books I asked
them to read began half as lazily as their papers on Timothy Findley's Famous
Last Words, they would never have managed to plow through a single one of them!
I used Mr. Findley's novel as an example of what I meant by a bold
beginning-that shocking scene when the father takes his twelve-year-old son up
on the roof of the Arlington Hotel to show him the view of Boston and Cambridge
and Harvard and the Charles, and then leaps fifteen stories to his death in
front of his son; imagine that. That ranks right up there with the opening
chapter to The Mayor ofCasterbridge, wherein Michael Hen-chard gets so drunk
that he loses his wife and daughter in a bet; imagine that! Hardy knew what he
was doing; he always knew. What did it mean, I asked my sloppy students, that
their papers generally ' 'began" after four or five pages of wandering
around in a soup of ideas for beginnings? If it took them four or five pages to
find the right beginning, didn't they think they should consider revising their
papers and beginning them on page four or five? Oh, young people, young people,
young people-where is your taste for wit? I weep to teach Trollope to these BSS
girls; I care less that they appear to weep because they're forced to read him.
I especially worship the pleasures of Bar Chester Towers; but it is pearls
before swine to teach Trollope to this television generation of girls! Their
hips, their heads, and even their hearts are moved by those relentlessly
mindless rock videos; yet the opening of Chapter IV does not extract from them
even so much as a titter.

"Of the Rev. Mr. Slope's parentage I am not able to say
much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent
physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he
added an 'e' to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done
before him."

Not even a titter! But how their hearts thump and patter, how
their hips jolt this way and that, how their heads loll and nod-and their eyes
roll inward, completely disappearing into their untrained little skulls-just to
hear Hester the Molester; not to mention see the disjointed nonsense that
accompanies the sound track of her most recent rock video! You can understand
why I needed to sit by myself in Grace Church on-the-Hill. This week I was
reading "The Moons of Jupiter"-that marvelous short story by Alice
Munro-to my Grade  Can Lit students, as the abrasive Ms. Pribst would say.
I was a touch anxious about reading the story, because one of my
students-Yvonne Hewlett-was in a situation all too similar to the narrator's
situation in that story: her father was in the hospital, about to undergo a
ticklish heart surgery. I didn't remember what was happening to Yvonne
Hewlett's father until I'd already begun to read "The Moons of
Jupiter" to the class; it was too late to stop, or change the story as I
went along. Besides: it is by no means a brutal story-it is warm, if not
exactly reassuring to the children of heart patients. Anyway, what could I do?
Yvonne Hewlett had missed a week of classes just recently when her father
suffered a heart attack; she looked tense and drained as I read the Munro
story-she had looked tense and drained, naturally, from the opening line:
"I found my father in the heart wing ..."

How could I have been so thoughtless? I was thinking. I wanted
to interrupt the story and tell Yvonne Hewlett that everything was going to
turn out just fine-although I had no right to make any such promise to her,
especially not about her poor father. God, what a situation! Suddenly I felt
like my father-I am my sorry father's sorry son, I thought. Then I regretted
the evil I did to him; actually, it turned out all right in the end-it turned
out that I did him a favor. But I did not intend what I did to him as any
favor. When I left him alone in the vestry office, pondering what he would find
to say at Owen Meany's funeral, I took the baseball with me. When I went to see
Dan Needham, I left the baseball in the glove compartment of my car. I was so
angry, I didn't know what I was going to do-beginning with: tell Dan, or not
tell him? That was when I asked Dan Needham-since he had no apparent religious
faith-why he had insisted that my mother and I change churches, that we leave
the Congregational Church and become Episcopalians!

"What do you mean?" Dan asked me. "That was your
idea!"

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Your mother told me that all your friends were in the
Episcopal Church-namely, Owen," Dan said. "Your mother told me that
you asked her if you could change churches so that you could attend Sunday
school with your friends. You didn't have any friends in the Congregational
Church, she said."

"Mother said that?" I asked him. "She told me
that both of us should become Episcopalians so that we'd belong to the same
church as you-because you were an Episcopalian."

"I'm a Presbyterian," Dan said "-not mat it
matters."

"So she lied to us," I said to Dan; after a while, he
shrugged.

"How old were you at the time?" Dan asked me.
"Were you eight or nine or ten? Maybe you haven't remembered all the
circumstances correctly."

I thought for a while, not looking at him. Then I said:
"You were engaged to her for a long time-before you got married. It was
about four years-as I recall."

"Yes, about four years-that's correct," Dan said
warily.

"Why did you wait so long to get married?" I asked
him. "You both knew you loved each other-didn't you?"

Dan looked at the bookshelves on the concealed door leading to
the secret passageway.

"Your father ..." he began; then he stopped.
"Your father wanted her to wait," Dan said.

"Why?" I asked Dan.

"To be sure-to be sure about me," Dan said.

"What business was it of hisT' I cried.

"Exactly-that's exactly what I told your mother: that it
wasn't any of his business . . . if your mother was'sure'about me. Of course
she was sure, and so was I!"

"Why did she do what he wanted?" I asked Dan.

"Because of you," Dan told me. "She wanted him to
promise never to identify himself to you. He wouldn't promise unless she waited
to marry me. We both had to wait before he promised never to speak to you. It
took four years," Dan said.

"I always thought that Mother would have told me herself-
if she'd lived," I said. "I thought she was just waiting for me to be
old enough-and then she'd tell me."

"She never intended to tell you," Dan Needham said.
"She made it clear to me that neither you nor I would ever know. I
accepted that; you would have accepted that from her, too. It was yaw father
who didn't accept that-not for four years."

' 'But he could have spoken to me after Mother died," I
said. "Who would have known that he'd broken a promise if he'd spoken to
me? Only / would have known-and I would never have known that she'd made him
promise anything. I never knew he was interested in identifying himself to
me!" I said.

"He must be someone who can be trusted to keep a
promise," Dan said. "I used to think he was jealous of me-that he
wanted her to wait all that time just because he thought I would give her up or
that she would get tired of me. I used to think he was trying to break us
up-that he was only pretending to care about her being sure of me or wanting
her permission to identify himself to you. But now I think that he must have
sincerely wanted her to be right about me-and it must have been difficult for
him to promise her that he would never try to contact you."

"Did you know about 'The Lady in Red'?" I asked Dan
Needham. "Did you know about The Orange Grove-and all of that?"

' 'It was the only way she could see him, it was the only way
they could talk," Dan said. "That's all I know about it," he
said. "I won't ask you how you know about it."

"Did you ever hear of Big Black Buster Freebody?'' I asked
Dan.

"He was an old black musician-your mother was very fond of
him," Dan said. "I remember who he was because of the last time your
mother and I took a trip together, before she was killed-we went to Buster
Freebody's funeral," Dan said. And so Dan Needham believed that my father
was a man of his word. How many men do we know like thaf! I wondered. It seemed
pointless for me to disabuse Dan of his notion of my father's sincerity. It
seemed almost pointless for me to know who my father was; I was quite sure that
this knowledge would never greatly benefit Dan. How could it benefit him to
know that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had sat in the bleacher seats, praying that my
mother would die-not to mention that Pastor Merrill was arrogant enough to
believe that his prayer had worked! I was sure that Dan didn't need to know
these things. And why else would my mother have wanted us to leave the
Congregational Church for the Episcopal-if not to get away from Mr. Merrill? My
father was not a brave or an honorable man; but he had once tried to be brave
and

        
 
honorable. He had been afraid, but he had
dared-in his fashion-to pray for Owen Meany; he had done that pretty well.
Whatever had he imagined might come of his identifying himself to me? What had
become of his own children, sadly, was that they had not felt much from their
father-not beyond his immeasurable and inexpressible remorse, which he clung to
in the manner of a man who'd forgotten how to pray. / could teach him how to
pray again, I thought. It was after speaking to Dan that I got an idea of how I
might teach Pastor Merrill to believe again-I knew how I might encourage him to
have a little faith. I thought of the sad man's shapeless middle child, who
with her brutally short hair was barely identifiable as a girl; I thought of
the tallish older boy, the sloucher-and cemetery vandal! And the youngest was a
groveler, a scrounger under the pews-I couldn't even remember what its sex was.
If Mr. Merrill failed to have faith in Owen Meany, if Mr. Merrill believed that
God was punishing him with silence-I knew I could give Mr. Merrill something to
believe in. If neither God nor Owen Meany could restore the Rev. Mr. MerriH's
faith, I thought I knew a "miracle" that my father was susceptible to
believing in. It was about ten o'clock in the evening when I left Pastor
Merrill sitting at his desk in the vestry office; it was only half an hour
later when I finished talking with Dan and drove again past Kurd's Church at
the corner of Front Street and Tan Lane. Lewis Merrill was still there, the
light still on in the vestry office; and now there was also light shining
through the stained-glass windows of the chancel-that enclosed and
meant-to-be-sacred space surrounding the altar of a church, where (no doubt) my
father was composing his last words for Owen Meany.

"I figure every thin' he kept was for somethin'!" Mr.
Meany had said-about my mother's dummy in the red dress. I'm sure the poor fool
didn't know how right he was about that. The Maiden Hill Road was dark; there
were still some emergency-road-repair cones and unlit flares off the side of
the road by the trestle bridge, the abutment of which had been the death of
Buzzy Thurston. The accident had made quite a mess of the cornerstones of the
bridge, and they'd had to tar the road where Buzzy's smashed Plymouth had
gouged up the surface. There was the usual light left on in the Meanys'
kitchen; it was the light they'd routinely left on for Owen. Mr. Meany was a
long time answering my knock on the door. I'd never seen him in pajamas before;
he looked oddly childish-or like a big clown dressed in children's clothes.
"Why it's Johnny Wheelwright!" he said automatically.

"I want the dummy," I told him.

"Well, sure!" he said cheerfully. "I thought
you'd want it."

It was not heavy, but it was awkward-trying to fit it in my
Volkswagen Beetle-because it wouldn't bend. I remembered how awkwardly, in his
swaddling clothes, Owen Meany had fitted in the cab of the big granite truck,
that day his mother and father had driven him home from the Christmas Pageant;
how Hester and Owen and I had ridden on the flatbed of the big truck, that
night Mr. Meany drove us-and the dummy-to the beach at Little Boar's Head.