A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

by John Irving

  "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.

  "I agree, I agree," Dan said. It was also agreed that Lydia be allowed to lie in her own room, with the door firmly shut. Germaine would sleep in the other twin bed in my room. Although I much preferred the idea of returning to Waterhouse Hall with Dan, it was pointed out to me that the cast party might "rage on" into the small hours-a likelihood that I had been looking forward to-and that Germaine, who was "in a state," should not be left in a room alone. It would be quite improper for her to share a room with Dan, and unthinkable that my grandmother would sleep in the same room with a maid. After all, I was only eleven. I had shared that room so many times with Owen; how I wanted to talk to him now! What would he think of my grandmother's suggestion that he had foreseen Lydia's death? And would he be relieved to learn that Death didn't have a plan to come for him! Would he believe it? I knew he would be deeply disappointed if he missed seeing Lydia. And I wanted to tell him about my discovery-while watching the theater audience-that I believed I could, by this m
eans, actually remember the faces in the audience at what Owen called that FATED baseball game. What would Owen Meany say about my sudden inspiration: that it had been my actual father whom my mother was waving to, the split second before the ball hit her? In the world of what the Rev. Lewis Merrill called "visions," what would Owen make of that one? But Germaine distracted me. She wanted the night-light left on; she tossed and turned; she lay staring at the ceiling. When I got up to go to the bathroom, she asked me not to be gone long; she didn't want to be left alone-not for a minute. If she would only fall asleep, I thought, I could telephone Owen. There was only one phone in the Meany house; it was in the kitchen, right outside Owen's bedroom. I could call him at any hour of the night, because he woke up in an instant and his parents slept through the night like boulders-like immovable slabs of granite. Then I remembered it was Christmas Eve. My mother had once said it was "just as well" that we went to Sawyer Depot for Christmas, because it prevented Owen from comparing what he got for Christmas with what I got. I got a half-dozen presents from each relative or loved one-from my grandmother, from my aunt and uncle, from my cousins, from Dan; and more than a half-dozen from my mother. I had looked under the Christmas tree this year, in the living room of Front Street, and was touched at Dan's and my grandmother's efforts to match the sheer number of presents-for me-that usually lay under the Eastmans' tree in Sawyer Depot. I had already counted them; I had over forty wrapped presents-and, God knows, there was usually something hidden in the basement or in the garage that was too big to wrap. I never knew what Owen got for Christmas, but it occurred to me that if his parents hadn't even waited up for him-on Christmas Eve!-that Christmas was not especially emphasized in the Meany household. In the past, by the time I came back from Sawyer Depot, half of my lesser toys were broken or lost, and the new things that were truly worth keeping were discovered-by Owen-gradually, over a period of days or weeks.

  "WHERE'D YOU GET THAT?"

  "For Christmas."

  "OH, YES, I SEE . . ."

  Now that I thought of it, I could not remember him ever showing me a single thing he got''for Christmas.'' I wanted to call him, but Germaine kept me in my bed. The more I stayed in my bed, and the more I was aware of her-still awake-the stranger I began to feel. I began to think about Germaine the way I often thought about Hester-and how old would Germaine have been in '? In her twenties, I suppose. I actually began to wish that she would climb into my bed, and I began to imagine climbing into hers; I don't think she would have prevented me-I think she would have favored an innocent hug and even a not-so-innocent boy in her arms, if only to keep Death away. I began to scheme-not at all in the manner of an eleven-year-old, but in the manner of an older, horny boy. I began to imagine how much advantage I might take of Germaine, given that she was distraught. I actually said, "I believe you, about hearing him scream." I liedl I didn't believe her at all!

  "It was his voice," she said instantly. "Now that I remember it, I know it was."

  I reached out my hand, into the aisle between the twin beds; her hand was there to take mine. I thought about the way Barb Wiggin had kissed Owen; I was rewarded with an erection powerful enough to slightly raise my bed covers; but when I squeezed Germaine's hand especially hard, she made no response-she just held on.

  "Go to sleep," she said. When her hand slipped out of mine, I realized that she had fallen asleep; I stared at her for a long time, but I didn't dare approach her. I was ashamed of how I felt. In the considerably grown-up vocabulary that I had been exposed to through my grandmother and Lydia, I had not been exposed to lust; that was not a word I could have learned from them-that was not a feeling I could label. What I was experiencing simply felt wrong; it made me feel guilty, that a part of myself was an enemy to the rest of myself, and that was when I thought I understood where the feeling came from; it had to come from my father. It was the part of him that stirred inside me. And for the first time, I began to consider that my father might be evil, or that what of himself he had given to me was what was evil in me. Henceforward, whenever I was troubled by a way I felt- and especially when I felt this way, when I lusted-I thought that my father was asserting himself within me. My desire to know who he was took on a new urgency; I did not want to know who he was because I missed him, or because I was looking for someone to love; I had Dan and his love; I had my grandmother-and everything I remembered, and (I'm sure) exaggerated, about my mother. It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity-to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of. How I wanted to talk to Owen about this! When Germaine started to snore, I got out of bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen phone to call him. The sudden light in the kitchen sent a resident mouse into rapid abandonment of its investigations of the bread box; the light also surprised me, because it turned the myriad Colonial-style windowpanes into fragmented mirror images of myself- there instantly appeared to be many of me, standing outside the house, looking in at me. In one image of my shocked face I thought I recognized the fear and uneasiness peculiar to Mr. Morrison; according to Dan, Mr. Monison's response to Owen's fainting spell and fit had been one of shock-the cowardly mailman had fainted. Chief Pike had carried the fallen postal thespian into the bracing night air, where Mr. Morrison had revived with a vengeance-wrestling in the snow with Gravesend's determined chief of police, until Mr. Morrison yielded to the strong arm of the law. But I was alone in the kitchen; the small, square, mirror-black panes reflected many versions of my face, but no other face looked in upon me as I dialed the Meanys' number. It rang longer than I expected, and I almost hung up. Remembering Owen's fever, I was afraid he might be more soundly asleep than usual-and that Mr. and Mrs. Meany would be awakened by my call.

  "MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said, when he finally answered the phone. I told him everything. He was most sympathetic to the notion that I could "remember" the audience at the baseball game by observing the audience at Dan's play; he recommended that he watch with me-two pairs of eyes being better than one. As for my "imagining" that my mother had been waving to my actual father in the last seconds she was alive, Owen Meany believed in trusting such instincts; he said that I must be ON THE RIGHT TRACK, because the idea gave him THE SHIVERS-a sure sign. And as for my desire for Germaine giving me a hard-on, Owen couldn't have been more supportive; if Barb Wiggin could provoke lust in him, there was no shame in Germaine provoking such dreadful feelings in me. Owen had prepared a small sermon on the subject of lust, a feeling he would later describe as A TRUTHFUL PREMONITION THAT DAMNATION IS FOR REAL. As for the unpleasant sensation originating with my father-as for these hated feelings in myself being a first sign of my father's contribution to me-Owen was in complete agreement. Lust, he would later say, was God's way of helping me identify who my father was; in lust had I been conceived, in lust would I discover my father. It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies-inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities-made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

  Of course, he agreed with me-how stupid Germame was, to imagine she'd heard him screaming, all the way from the Gravesend Town Hall!

  "I DIDN'T SCREAM THAT LOUDLY," he said indignantly. It was Grandmother's interpretation of what he had foreseen that provided the only difference of opinion between us. If he had to believe anything, why couldn't he believe Grandmother-that it was Lydia's death that the gravestone foretold; that Owen had simply "seen" the wrong name?

  "NO," he said. "IT WAS MY NAME. NOT SCROOGE'S -AND NOT LYDIA'S."

  "But that was just your mistake," I said. "You were thinking of yourself-you'd even been writing your own name, just moments before. And you had a very high fever. If that gravestone actually told you anything, it told you that someone was going to die. That someone was Lydia. She's dead, isn't she? And you're not dead-are you?"

  "IT WAS MY NAME," he repeated stubbornly.

  "Look at it th
is way: you got it half-right," I told him. I was trying to sound as if I were an old hand at "visions," and at interpreting them. I tried to sound as if I knew more about the matter than Pastor Merrill.

  "IT WASN'T JUST MY NAME," Owen said. "I MEAN, NOT THE WAY I EVER WRITE IT-NOT THE WAY I WROTE FT IN THE BABY POWDER. IT WAS MY REAL NAME-IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," he said. That made me pause; he sounded so unbudging. His "real" name was Paul-his father's name. His real name was Paul O. Meany, Jr.; he'dbeen baptized aCatholic. Of course, he needed a saint's name, like St. Paul; if there is a St. Owen, I've never heard of him. And because there was already a "Paul" in the family, I suppose that's why they called him "Owen"; where that middle name came from, he never said-I never knew.