by John Irving
"YOU CAN'T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT!" he said indignantly. "YOU CAN'T PROVE A MIRACLE-YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE IT! IF THE RED SEA ACTUALLY PARTED, IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THAT," he said. "IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING- IT'S NOT A PICTURE ANYONE CAN EVEN IMAGINE!"
But there wasn't logic to his anger. If The Ten Commandments made him cross, why take it out on Mary Magdalene and a bunch of toads and tadpoles? In these years before we attended Gravesend Academy, Owen and I were educated-primarily-by what we saw at The Idaho and on my grandmother's television. Who hasn't been "educated" in this slovenly fashion? Who can blame Owen for his reaction to The Ten Commandments'? Almost any reaction would be preferable to believing it! But if a movie as stupid as The Ten Commandments could make Owen Meany murder toads by throwing them at Mary Magdalene, a performance as compelling as Bette Davis's in Dark Victory could convince Owen that he, too, had a brain tumor. At first, Bette Davis is dying and doesn't know it. Her doctor and her best friend won't tell her.
"THEY SHOULD TELL HER IMMEDIATELY!" Owen said anxiously. The doctor was played by George Brent.
"He could never do anything right, anyway," Grandmother observed. Humphrey Bogart is a stableman who speaks with an Irish accent. It was the Christmas of ' and we were watching a movie made in ; it was the first time Grandmother had permitted us to watch The Late Show-at least, I think it was The Late Show. After a certain evening hour-or whenever it was that my grandmother began to feel tired-she called everything The Late Show. She felt sorry for us because the Eastmans were spending another Christmas in the Caribbean; Sawyer Depot was a pleasure slipping into the past, for me-for Owen, it was becoming mere wishful thinking.
"You'd think that Humphrey Bogart could learn a better Irish accent than that," my grandmother complained. Dan Needham said that he wouldn't give George Brent a part in a production of The Gravesend Players; Owen added that Mr. Fish would have been a more convincing doctor to Bette Davis, but Grandmother argued that "Mr. Fish would have his hands full as Bette Davis's husband"-her doctor eventually gets to be her husband, too.
"Anyone would have his hands full as Bette Davis's husband," Dan observed. Owen thought it was cruel that Bette Davis had to find out she was dying all by herself; but Dark Victory is one of those movies that presumes to be instructive on the subject of how to die. We see Bette Davis accepting her fate gracefully; she moves to Vermont with George Brent and takes up gardening- cheerfully living with the fact that one day, suddenly, darkness will come.
"THIS IS VERY SAD!" Owen cried. "HOW CAN SHE NOT THINK ABOUT IT?"
Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk.
"She should have married him," Grandmother said. "She's dying and he's already dead."
Owen said that the symptoms of Bette Davis's terminal tumor were familiar to him.
"Owen, you don't have a brain tumor," Dan Needham told him.
"Bette Davis doesn't have one, either!" Grandmother said. "But I think Ronald Reagan has one."
"Maybe George Brent, too," Dan said.
"YOU KNOW THE PART ABOUT THE DIMMING VISION?" Owen asked. "WELL, SOMETIMES MY VISION DIMS-JUST LIKE BETTE DAVIS'S!"
"You should have your eyes examined, Owen," Grandmother said.
"You don't have a brain tumor!" Dan Needham repeated.
"I HAVE SOMETHING," said Owen Meany. In addition to watching television, Owen and I spent many nights backstage with The Gravesend Players, but we rarely watched the performances; we watched the audiences-we repopulated those bleacher seats at that Little League game in the summer of '; gradually, the stands were filling. We had no doubts about the exact placement of the Kenmores or the Dowlings; Owen disputed my notion that Maureen Early and Caroline O'Day were in the top row-he SAW them nearer the bottom. And we couldn't agree about the Brinker-Smiths.
"THE BRITISH NEVER WATCH BASEBALL!" Owen said. But I always had an eye for Ginger Blinker-Smith's fabled voluptuousness; I argued that she had been there, that I "saw" her.
"YOU WOULDN'T HAVE LOOKED TWICE IF SHE HAD BEEN THERE-NOT THAT SUMMER," Owen insisted. "YOU WERE TOO YOUNG, AND BESIDES- SHE'D JUST HAD THE TWINS, SHE WAS A MESS!"
I suggested that Owen was prejudiced against the Brinker-Smiths ever since their strenuous lovemaking had battered him under their bed; but, for the most part, we agreed about who had been at the game, and where they had been sitting. Morrison the mailman, we had no doubt, had never watched a game; and poor Mrs. Merrill-despite how fondly the baseball season must have reminded her of the perpetual weather of her native California-was never a fan, either. We were not sure about the Rev. Mr. Merrill; we decided against his being there on the grounds that we had rarely seen him anywhere without his wife. We were sure the Wiggins had not been there; they were often in attendance, but they displayed such a boorish enthusiasm for every pitch that if they'd been at that game, we would have noticed them. Since it had been a time when Barb Wiggin still thought of Owen as "cute," she would have rushed to console him for his unfortunate contact with the fated ball-and Rector Wiggin would have bungled some rites over my mother's prostrate form, or pounded my shaking shoulders with manly camaraderie. As Owen put it, "IF THE WIGGINS HAD BEEN THERE, THEY WOULD HAVE MADE A SPECTACLE OF THEMSELVES-WE WOULD NEVER HAVE FORGOTTEN FT!"
Despite how exciting is any search for a missing parent- however mindless the method-Owen and I had to admit that, so far, we'd discovered a rather sparse and uninteresting lot of baseball fans. It never occurred to us to question whether the town's ardent Little League followers were also steady patrons of The Gravesend Players.
' 'THERE'S ONE THING YOU MUST NEVER FORGET,'' Owen told me. "SHE WAS A GOOD MOTHER. IF SHE THOUGHT THE GUY COULD BE A GOOD FATHER TO YOU, YOU'D ALREADY KNOW HIM."
"You sound so sure," I said.
"I'M JUST WARNING YOU," he said. "IT'S EXCITING TO LOOK FOR YOUR FATHER, BUT DON'T EXPECT TO BE THRILLED WHEN YOU FIND HIM. I HOPE YOU KNOW WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR ANOTHER DAN I"
I didn't know; I thought Owen presumed too much. It was exciting to look for my father-that much I knew. THE LUST CONNECTION, as Owen called it, also contributed to our ongoing enthusiasm for THE FATHER HUNT-as Owen called our overall enterprise.
"EVERY TIME YOU GET A BONER, TRY TO THINK IF YOU REMIND YOURSELF OF ANYONE YOU KNOW"-that was Owen's interesting advice on the matter of my lust being my most traceable connection to my missing father. As for lust, I had hoped to see more of Hester-now that Noah and Simon were attending Gravesend Academy. But, in fact, I saw her less. Noah's academic difficulties had caused him to repeat a year; Simon's first year had been smoother,
probably because it thrilled Simon to have Noah demoted to his grade in school. Both boys, by the Christmas of ', were juniors at Gravesend-and so thoroughly involved in what Owen and I presumed to be the more sophisticated activities of private-school life that I saw only slightly more of them than I saw of Hester. It was rare that Noah and Simon were so bored at the academy that they visited Front Street-not even on weekends, which they increasingly spent with their doubtless more exotic classmates. Owen and I assumed that-in Noah's and Simon's eyes-we were too immature for them. Clearly, we were too immature for Hester, who-in response to Noah being forced to repeat a grade-had managed to have herself promoted. She encountered few academic difficulties at Sawyer Depot High School, where-Owen and I imagined- she was terrorizing faculty and students alike. She had probably gone to some effort to skip a grade, motivated-as she always was-to get the better of her brothers. Nonetheless, all three of my cousins were scheduled to graduate with the Class of '-when Owen and I would be completing our first and lowly ninth-grade year at the academy; we would graduate with the class of '. It was humiliating to me; I'd hoped that, one day, I would feel more equal to my exciting cousins, but I felt I was less equal to them than I'd ever been. Hester, in particular, seemed beyond my reach.
"WELL, SHE YOUR COUSIN-SHE SHOULD BE BEYOND YOUR REACH," Owen said. "ALSO, SHE'S DANGEROUS-YOU'RE PROBABLY LUCKY SHE'S BEYOND YOUR REACH. HOWEVER," Owen added, "IF YO
U'RE REALLY CRAZY ABOUT HER, I THINK IT WILL WORK OUT-HESTER WOULD DO ANYTHING TO DRIVE HER PARENTS NUTS, SHE'D EVEN MARRY YOU!"
"Marry me!" I cried; the thought of marrying Hester gave me the shivers.
"WELL, THAT WOULD DRIVE HER PARENTS AROUND THE BEND," Owen said. "WOULDN'T IT?"
It would have; and Owen was right: Hester was obsessed with driving her parents-and her brothers-crazy. To drive them to madness was the penalty she exacted for all of them treating her "like a girl"; according to Hester, Sawyer Depot was "boys' heaven"-my Aunt Martha was a "fink of womanhood"; she bowed to Uncle Alfred's notion that the boys needed a private-school education, that the boys needed to "expand their horizons." Hester would expand her own horizons in directions conceived to educate her parents regarding the errors of their ways. As for Owen's idea that Hester would go to the extreme of marrying her own cousin, if that could provide Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred with an educational wallop ... it was inconceivable to me!
"I don't think that Hester even likes me," I told Owen; he shrugged.
"THE POINT IS," said Owen Meany, "HESTER WOULDN'T NECESSARILY MARRY YOU BECAUSE SHE LIKED YOU."
Meanwhile, we couldn't even manage to get ourselves invited to Sawyer Depot for Christmas. After their holidays in the Caribbean, the Eastmans had decided to stay at home for the Yuletide of '; Owen and I got our hopes up, but- alas!-they were quickly dashed; we were not invited to Sawyer Depot. The reason the Eastmans weren't going to the Caribbean was that Hester had been corresponding with a black boatman who had proposed a rendezvous in the British Virgin Islands; Hester had involved herself with this particular black boatman the previous Christmas, in Tortola-when she'd been only fifteen! Naturally, how she had "involved herself" was not made explicitly clear to Owen and me; we had to rely on those parts of the story that my Aunt Martha had reported to Dan-substantially more of the story than she had reported to my grandmother, who was of the opinion that a sailor had made a "pass" at poor Hester, an exercise in crudeness that had made Hester want to stay home. In fact, Hester was threatening to escape to Tortola. She was also not speaking to Noah and Simon, who had shown the black boatman's letters to Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha, and who had fiercely disappointed Hester by not introducing her to a single one of their Gravesend Academy friends. Dan Needham described the situation in the form of a headline: "Teenage Traumas Run Wild in Sawyer Depot!" Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling, real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
The closest that Owen Meany and I could get to love was a front-row seat at The Idaho. That Christmas of ', Owen and I were fifteen; we told each other that we had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn, the shy bookstore clerk in Funny Face; but we wanted Hester. What we were left with was a sense of how little, in the area of love, we must be worth; we felt more foolish than Fred Astaire, dancing with his own raincoat. And how worried we were that the sophisticated world of Graves-end Academy would esteem us even less than we esteemed ourselves. Toronto: April , -a rainy Palm Sunday. It is not a warm spring rain-not a "seasonal" rain, as my grandmother liked to say. It is a raw cold rain, a suitable day for the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At Grace Church on-the-Hill, the children and the acolytes stood huddled in the narthex; holding their palm fronds, they resembled tourists who'd landed in the tropics on an unseasonably cold day. The organist chose Brahms for the processional-"O Welt ich muss dich lassen"; "O world I must leave you."
Owen hated Palm Sunday: the treachery of Judas, the cowardice of Peter, the weakness of Pilate.
"IT'S BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY CRUCIFIED HIM," Owen said, "BUT THEY MADE FUN OF HIM, TOO!"
Canon Mackie read heavily from Matthew: how they mocked Jesus, how they spit on him, how he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished-I am terrified that, this year, it won't happen; that, that year, it didn't. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a believer.
"IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN EASTER," Owen Meany said, "DON'T KID YOURSELF-DON'T CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN."
For the Palm Sunday recessional, the organist chose the usual "Alleluias." In a chilling drizzle, I crossed Russell Hill Road and went in the service entrance of The Bishop Strachan School; I passed through the kitchen, where the working women and the boarders whose turn it was to help with the Sunday meal all spoke to me. The headmistress, the Rev. Mrs. Katharine Keeling, sat in her usual head-of-table position among the housemothers. About forty boarders-the poor girls who had no local friends to ask them home for the weekend, and the girls who were happy to stay at school-sat around the other tables. It is always a surprise to see the girls not in their uniforms; I know it's a great relief to them to wear their uniforms day in, day out-because they don't have to worry about what to wear. But they are so lazy about how they wear their uniforms-they don't have much experience in dressing themselves-that when they have a choice, when they're allowed to wear their own clothes, they appear wholly less sophisticated, less worldly, than they appear in their uniforms. In the twenty years that I have been a teacher at The Bishop Strachan School, the girls' uniforms haven't changed very significantly; I've grown rather fond of them. If I were a girl, of any age, I would wear a middie, a loosely tied necktie, a blazer (with my school crest), knee socks-which the Canadians used to call "knee highs"-and a pleated skirt; when they kneel, it used to be the rule that the skirt should just touch the floor. But for Sunday boarders' lunch, the girls wear their own clothes; some of them are so badly dressed, I fail to recognize them-they make fun of me for that, naturally. Some of them dress like boys-others, like their mothers or like the floozies they see in movies or on TV. As I am, routinely, the only man in the dining room for Sunday boarders' lunch, perhaps they dress for me. I've not seen my friend-and, technically, my boss- Katherine Keeling since she delivered her last baby. She has a large family-she's had so many children, I've lost count-but she makes an effort to sit at the housemothers' table on Sundays; and she chatters amiably to the weekend girls. I think Katherine is terrific; but she is too thin. And she always is embarrassed when I catch her not eating, although she should get over the surprise; I'm a more consistent fixture at the housemothers' table for Sunday boarders' lunch than she is-I don't take time off to have babies! But there she was on Palm Sunday, with mashed potatoes and stuffing and turkey heaped upon her plate.
"Turkey rather dry, is it?" I asked; the ladies, routinely, laughed-Katherine, typically, blushed. When she's wearing her clerical collar, she looks slightly more underweight than she actually is. She's my closest friend in Toronto, now that
Canon Campbell is gone; and even though she's my boss, I've been at Bishop Strachan longer than she has. Old Teddybear Kilgour, as we called him, was principal when I was hired. Canon Campbell introduced us. Canon Campbell had been the chaplain at Bishop Strachan before they made him rector of Grace Church on-the-Hill; I couldn't have had anyone recommend me for a job at Bishop Strachan who was more "connected" to the school than Canon Campbell- not even old Teddybear Kilgour himself. I still tease Katherine about those days. What if she'd been headmistress when I applied for a job? Would she have hired me? A young man from the States in those Vietnam years, a not unattractive young man, and without a wife; Bishop Strachan has never had many male teachers, and in my twenty years of teaching these young girls, I have occasionally been the only male teacher at the school. Canon Campbell and old Teddybear Kilgour don't count; they were not male in the threatening sense-they were not potentially dangerous to young girls. Although the can
on taught Scripture and History, in addition to his duties as chaplain, he was an elderly man; and he and old Teddybear Kilgour were "married up to their ears," as Katherine Keeling likes to say. Old Teddybear did ask me if I was "attracted to young girls"; but I must have impressed him that I would take my faculty responsibilities seriously, and that I would concern myself with those young girls' minds and not their bodies.
"And have you?" Katherine Keeling likes to ask me. How the housemothers titter at the question-like Liberace's live audiences of long ago! Katherine is a much more jubilant soul than my grandmother, but she has a certain twinkling sarcasm-and the proper elocution, the good diction-that reminds me of Grandmother. They would have liked each other; Owen would have liked the Rev. Mrs. Keeling, too. I've misled you if I've conveyed an atmosphere of loneliness at Sunday boarders' lunch. Perhaps the boarders feel acutely lonely then, but I feel fine. Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness. On Palm Sunday, there was much talk about the weather. The week before, it had been so cold that everyone commented on the annual error of the birds. Every spring-at least, in Canada-some birds fly north too soon. Thousands are caught The Voice in the cold; they return south in a reverse migration. Most common were tales of woe concerning robins and starlings. Katherine had seen some killdeer flying south-I had a common-snipe story that impressed them all. We'd all read The Globe and Mail that week: we'd loved the story about the turkey vultures who "iced up" and couldn't fly; they were mistaken for hawks and taken to a humane society for thawing-out-there were nine of them and they threw up all over their handlers. The humane society could not have been expected to know that turkey vultures vomit when attacked. Who would guess that turkey vultures are so smart? I've also misled you if I've conveyed an atmosphere of trivia at Sunday boarders' lunch; these lunches are important to me. After the Palm Sunday lunch, Katherine and I walked over to Grace Church and signed up for the All Night Vigil on the notice board in the narthex. Every Maundy Thursday, the Vigil of Prayer and Quiet is kept from nine o'clock that evening until nine o'clock in the morning of Good Friday. Katherine and I always choose the hours no one else wants; we take the Vigil from three to five o'clock in the morning, when Katherine's husband and children are asleep and don't need her. This year she cautioned me: "I may be a little late-if the two-o'clock feeding is much later than two o'clock!" She laughs, and her endearingly stick-thin neck looks especially vulnerable in her clerical collar. I see many parents of the Bishop Strachan girls-they are so smartly dressed, they drive Jaguars, they never have time to talk. I know that they dismiss the Rev. Mrs. Katherine Keeling as a typical headmistress type-Katherine is not the sort of woman they would look at twice. But she is wise and kind and witty and articulate; and she does not bullshit herself about What Easter means.