A Prayer for Owen Meany Read online

  In our Federal house on Front Street, there was also a secret passageway—a bookcase that was actually a door that led down a staircase to a dirt-floor basement that was entirely separate from the basement where the coal furnace was. That was just what it was: a bookcase that was a door that led to a place where absolutely nothing happened—it was simply a place to hide. From what? I used to wonder. That this secret passageway to nowhere existed in our house did not comfort me; rather, it provoked me to imagine what there might be that was sufficiently threatening to hide from—and it is never comforting to imagine that.

  I took little Owen Meany into that passageway once, and I got him lost in there, in the dark, and I frightened the hell out of him; I did this to all my friends, of course, but frightening Owen Meany was always more special than frightening anyone else. It was his voice, that ruined voice, that made his fear unique. I have been engaged in private imitations of Owen Meany’s voice for more than thirty years, and that voice used to prevent me from imagining that I could ever write about Owen, because—on the page—the sound of his voice is impossible to convey. And I was prevented from imagining that I could even make Owen a part of oral history, because the thought of imitating his voice—in public—is so embarrassing. It has taken me more than thirty years to get up the nerve to share Owen’s voice with strangers.

  My grandmother was so upset by the sound of Owen Meany’s voice, protesting his abuse in the secret passageway, that she spoke to me, after Owen had gone home. “I don’t want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand,” Grandmother said. “You’ve seen the mice caught in the mousetraps?” she asked me. “I mean caught—their little necks broken—I mean absolutely dead,” Grandmother said. “Well, that boy’s voice,” my grandmother told me, “that boy’s voice could bring those mice back to life!”

  And it occurs to me now that Owen’s voice was the voice of all those murdered mice, coming back to life—with a vengeance.

  I don’t mean to make my grandmother sound insensitive. She had a maid named Lydia, a Prince Edward Islander, who was our cook and housekeeper for years and years. When Lydia developed a cancer and her right leg was amputated, my grandmother hired two other maids—one to look after Lydia. Lydia never worked again. She had her own room, and her favorite wheelchair routes through the huge house, and she became the entirely served invalid that, one day, my grandmother had imagined she herself might become—with someone like Lydia looking after her. Delivery boys and guests in our house frequently mistook Lydia for my grandmother, because Lydia looked quite regal in her wheelchair and she was about my grandmother’s age; she had tea with my grandmother every afternoon, and she played cards with my grandmother’s bridge club—with those very same ladies whose tea she had once fetched. Shortly before Lydia died, even my Aunt Martha was struck by the resemblance Lydia bore to my grandmother. Yet to various guests and delivery boys, Lydia would always say—with a certain indignation of tone that was borrowed from my grandmother—“I am not Missus Wheelwright, I am Missus Wheelwright’s former maid.” It was exactly in the manner that Grandmother would claim that her house was not the Gravesend Inn.

  So my grandmother was not without humanity. And if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. Even in her rose garden, she did not want to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, “What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?”

  From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative.

  But this story really is about Owen Meany, about how I have apprenticed myself to his voice. His cartoon voice has made an even stronger impression on me than has my grandmother’s imperious wisdom.

  Grandmother’s memory began to elude her near the end. Like many old people, she had a firmer grasp of her own childhood than she had of the lives of her own children, or her grandchildren, or her great-grandchildren. The more recent the memory was, the more poorly remembered. “I remember you as a little boy,” she told me, not long ago, “but when I look at you now, I don’t know who you are.” I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself. And in one conversation about her memory, I asked her if she remembered little Owen Meany.

  “The labor man?” she said. “The unionist!”

  “No, Owen Meany,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Certainly not.”

  “The granite family?” I said. “The Meany Granite Quarry. Remember?”

  “Granite,” she said with distaste. “Certainly not!”

  “Maybe you remember his voice?” I said to my grandmother, when she was almost a hundred years old.

  But she was impatient with me; she shook her head. I was getting up the nerve to imitate Owen’s voice.

  “I turned out the lights in the secret passageway, and scared him,” I reminded Grandmother.

  “You were always doing that,” she said indifferently. “You even did that to Lydia—when she still had both her legs.”

  “TURN ON THE LIGHT!” said Owen Meany. “SOMETHING IS TOUCHING MY FACE! TURN ON THE LIGHT! IT’S SOMETHING WITH A TONGUE! SOMETHING IS LICKING ME!” Owen Meany cried.

  “It’s just a cobweb, Owen,” I remember telling him.

  “IT’S TOO WET FOR A COBWEB! IT’S A TONGUE! TURN ON THE LIGHT!”

  “Stop it!” my grandmother told me. “I remember, I remember—for God’s sake,” she said. “Don’t ever do that again!” she told me. But it was from my grandmother that I gained the confidence that I could imitate Owen Meany’s voice at all. Even when her memory was shot, Grandmother remembered Owen’s voice; if she remembered him as the instrument of her daughter’s death, she didn’t say. Near the end, Grandmother didn’t remember that I had become an Anglican—and a Canadian.

  The Meanys, in my grandmother’s lexicon, were not Mayflower stock. They were not descended from the founding fathers; you could not trace a Meany back to John Adams. They were descended from later immigrants; they were Boston Irish. The Meanys made their move to New Hampshire from Boston, which was never England; they’d also lived in Concord, New Hampshire, and in Barre, Vermont—those were much more working-class places than Gravesend. Those were New England’s true granite kingdoms. My grandmother believed that mining and quarrying, of all kinds, was groveling work—and that quarriers and miners were more closely related to moles than to men. As for the Meanys: none of the family was especially small, except for Owen.

  And for all the dirty tricks we played on him, he tricked us only once. We were allowed to swim in one of his father’s quarries only if we entered and left the water one at a time and with a stout rope tied around our waists. One did not actually swim in those quarry lakes, which were rumored to be as deep as the ocean; they were as cold as the ocean, even in late summer; they were as black and still as pools of oil. It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you’d jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth—our fear of what was on the bottom, and how far below us the bottom was.

  Owen’s father, Mr. Meany, insisted on the rope—insisted on one-at-a-time, in-and-out. It was one of the few parental rules from my childhood that remained unbroken, except once—by Owen. It was never a rule that any of us cared to challenge; no one wanted to untie the rope and plunge without hope of rescue toward the unknown bottom.

  But one fine August day, Owen Meany untied the rope, underwater, and he swam underwater to some hidden crevice in the rocky shore while we waited for him to rise. When he didn’t surface, we pulled up the rope. Because we believed that Owen was nearly weightless, we refused to believe what our arms told us—that he was not at the end of the rope. We didn’t believe he was gone until we had the bulging knot at the rope’s end out of the water. What a silence that was!—interrupted only by the drops of water from the rope falling into the quarry.

  No one called his name; no one dove in to look for him. In that water, no one could see! I prefer to believe that we would have gone in to look for him—if he’d given us just a few more seconds to gather up our nerve—but Owen decided that our response was altogether too slow and uncaring. He swam out from the crevice at the opposite shore; he moved as lightly as a water bug across the terrifying hole that reached, we were sure, to the bottom of the earth. He swam to us, angrier than we’d ever seen him.

  “TALK ABOUT HURTING SOMEONE’S FEELINGS!” he cried. “WHAT WERE YOU WAITING FOR? BUBBLES? DO YOU THINK I’M A FISH? WASN’T ANYONE GOING TO TRY TO FIND ME?”

  “You scared us, Owen,” one of us said. We were too scared to defend ourselves, if there was any defending ourselves—ever—in regard to Owen.

  “YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.”

  What I remember best is Sunday school in the Episcopal Church. Both Owen and I were newcomers there. When my mother married the second man she met on the train, she and I changed churches; we left the Congregational Church for the church of my adoptive father—he was, my mother said, an Episcopalian, and although I never saw any evidence that he was a particularly serious Episcopalian, my mother insisted that she and I move with him to his church. It was a move that disturbed my grandmother, because we Wheelwrights had been in the Congregational Church ever since we got over being Puritans (“ever since we almost got over being Puritans,” my grandmother used to say, because—in her opinion—Puritanism had never entirely relinquished its hold on us Wheelwrights). Some Wheelwrights—not only our founding father—had even been in the ministry; in the last century, the Congregational ministry. And the move upset the pastor of the Congregational Church, the Rev. Lewis Merrill; he’d baptized me, and he was woebegone at the thought of losing my mother’s voice from the choir—he’d known her since she was a young girl, and (my mother always said) he’d been especially supportive of her when she’d been calmly and good-naturedly insisting on her privacy regarding my origins.

  The move did not sit well with me, either—as you shall see. But Owen Meany’s manner of making and keeping a thing mysterious was to allude to something too dark and terrible to mention. He was changing churches, he said, TO ESCAPE THE CATHOLICS—or, actually, it was his father who was escaping and defying the Catholics by sending Owen to Sunday school, to be confirmed, in the Episcopal Church. When Congregationalists turned into Episcopalians, Owen told me, there was nothing to it; it simply represented a move upward in church formality—in HOCUS-POCUS, Owen called it. But for Catholics to move to the Episcopal Church was not only a move away from the hocus-pocus; it was a move that risked eternal damnation. Owen used to say, gravely, that his father would surely be damned for initiating the move, but that the Catholics had committed an UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE—that they had insulted his father and mother, irreparably.

  When I would complain about the kneeling, which was new to me—not to mention the abundance of litanies and recited creeds in the Episcopal service—Owen would tell me that I knew nothing. Not only did Catholics kneel and mutter litanies and creeds without ceasing, but they ritualized any hope of contact with God to such an extent that Owen felt they’d interfered with his ability to pray—to talk to God DIRECTLY, as Owen put it. And then there was confession! Here I was complaining about some simple kneeling, but what did I know about confessing my sins? Owen said the pressure to confess—as a Catholic—was so great that he’d often made things up in order to be forgiven for them.

  “But that’s crazy!” I said.

  Owen agreed. And what was the cause of the falling out between the Catholics and Mr. Meany? I always asked. Owen never told me. The damage was irreparable, he would repeat; he would refer only to the UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE.

  Perhaps my unhappiness at having traded the Congregational Church for the Episcopal—in combination with Owen’s satisfaction at having ESCAPED the Catholics—contributed to my pleasure in our game of lifting Owen Meany up in the air. It occurs to me now that we were all guilty of thinking of Owen as existing only for our entertainment; but in my case—especially, in the Episcopal Church—I think I was also guilty of envying him. I believe my participation in abusing him in Sunday school was faintly hostile and inspired by the greatest difference between us: he believed more than I did, and although I was always aware of this, I was most aware in church. I disliked the Episcopalians because they appeared to believe more—or in more things—than the Congregationalists believed; and because I believed very little, I had been more comfortable with the Congregationalists, who demanded a minimum of participation from worshipers.

  Owen disliked the Episcopalians, too, but he disliked them far less than he had disliked the Catholics; in his opinion, both of them believed less than he believed—but the Catholics had interfered with Owen’s beliefs and practices more. He was my best friend, and with our best friends we overlook many differences; but it wasn’t until we found ourselves attending the same Sunday school, and the same church, that I was forced to accept that my best friend’s religious faith was more certain (if not always more dogmatic) than anything I heard in either the Congregational or the Episcopal Church.

  I don’t remember Sunday school in the Congregational Church at all—although my mother claimed that this was always an occasion whereat I ate a lot, both in Sunday school and at various parish-house functions. I vaguely remember the cider and the cookies; but I remember emphatically—with a crisp, winter-day brightness—the white clapboard church, the black steeple clock, and the services that were always held on the second floor in an informal, well-lit, meetinghouse atmosphere. You could look out the tall windows at the branches of the towering trees. By comparison, the Episcopal services were conducted in a gloomy, basement atmosphere. It was a stone church, and there was a ground-floor or even underground mustiness to the place, which was overcrowded with dark wood bric-a-brac, somber with dull gold organ pipes, garish with confused configurations of stained glass—through which not a single branch of a tree was visible.

  When I complained about church, I complained about the usual things a kid complains about: the claustrophobia, the boredom. But Owen complained religiously. “A PERSON’S FAITH GOES AT ITS OWN PACE,” Owen Meany said. “THE TROUBLE WITH CHURCH IS THE SERVICE. A SERVICE IS CONDUCTED FOR A MASS AUDIENCE. JUST WHEN I START TO LIKE THE HYMN, EVERYONE PLOPS DOWN TO PRAY. JUST WHEN I START TO HEAR THE PRAYER, EVERYONE POPS UP TO SING. AND WHAT DOES THE STUPID SERMON HAVE TO DO WITH GOD? WHO KNOWS WHAT GOD THINKS OF CURRENT EVENTS? WHO CARES?”

  To these complaints, and others like them, I could respond only by picking up Owen Meany and holding him above my head.

  “You tease Owen too much,” my mother used to say to me. But I don’t remember much teasing, not beyond the usual lifting him up—unless Mother meant that I failed to realize how serious Owen was; he was insulted by jokes of any kind. After all, he did read Wall’s History of Gravesend before he was ten; this was not lighthearted work, this was never reading that merely skipped along. And he also read the Bible—not by the time he was ten, of course; but he actually read the whole thing.

  And then there was the question of Gravesend Academy; that was the question for every boy born in Gravesend—the academy did not admit girls in those days. I was a poor student; and even though my grandmother could well have afforded the tuition, I was destined to stay at Gravesend High School—until my mother married someone on the academy faculty and he legally adopted me. Faculty children—faculty brats, we were called—could automatically attend the academy.

  What a relief this must have been to my grandmother; she’d always resented that her own children couldn’t go to Gravesend Academy—she’d had daughters. My mother and my Aunt Martha were high-school girls—what they saw of Gravesend Academy was only at the dating end, although my Aunt Martha put this to good use: she married a Gravesend Academy boy (one of the few who didn’t prefer my mother), which made my cousins sons of alumni, which favored their admittance, too. (My only female cousin would not benefit from this alumni connection—as you shall see.)

  But Owen Meany was a legitimate Gravesend Academy candidate; he was a brilliant student; he was the kind of student who was supposed to go to Gravesend. He could have applied and got in—and got a full scholarship, too, since the Meany Granite Company was never flourishing and his parents could not have afforded the tuition. But one day when my mother was driving Owen and me to the beach—Owen and I were ten—my mother said, “I hope you never stop helping Johnny with his homework, Owen, because when you’re both at the academy, the homework’s going to be much harder—especially for Johnny.”

  “BUT I’M NOT GOING TO THE ACADEMY,” Owen said.

  “Of course you are!” my mother said. “You’re the best student in New Hampshire—maybe, in the whole country!”

  “THE ACADEMY’S NOT FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME,” Owen said. “THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME.”

  I wondered for a moment if he meant, for small people—that public high schools were for people who were exceptionally small—but my mother was thinking far ahead of me, and she said, “You’ll get a full scholarship, Owen. I hope your parents know that. You’ll go to the academy absolutely free.”

  “YOU HAVE TO WEAR A COAT AND TIE EVERY DAY,” Owen said. “THE SCHOLARSHIP DOESN’T BUY THE COATS AND TIES.”

  “That can be arranged, Owen,” my mother said, and I could tell that she meant she’d arrange it—if no one else would, she’d buy him every coat and tie he could possibly have use for.