by John Irving
"What's this?" Randolph White asked. "I thought I already had the student interview,"
"Well," old Thorny said, "Owen, you know, is The Voice-you know our school newspaper, The Grave?"
"I know who he is," Mr. White said; he had still not shaken Owen's outstretched hand. "Why didn't he interview me when the other students interviewed me?"
"That was the student subcommittee," Archie Thorndike explained. "Owen has requested 'a private audience' ..."
"Request denied, Owen," said Randolph White, finally shaking Owen's small hand. "I want to have plenty of time to talk with the department heads," Mr. White explained; Owen rubbed his fingers, which were still throbbing from the candidate's handshake. Old Thorny tried to salvage the disaster. "Owen is almost a department head," he said cheerfully.
"Student opinion isn't a department, is it?" Mr. White asked Owen, who was speechless. White was a compact, trimly built man who played an aggressive, relentless game of squash-daily. His wife called him "Randy"; he called her "Sam"-from Samantha. She came from a "meat money" family in the Chicago area; his was a "meat family" background, too-although there was said to be more money in the meat she came from. One of the less-than-kind Chicago newspapers described their wedding as a "meat marriage." Owen remembered from the candidate's dossier that White had been credited with' 'revolutionizing packaging and distribution of meat products"; he'd left meat for education rather recently-when his own children (in his opinion) were in need of a better school; he'd started one up, from scratch, and the school had been quite a success in Lake Forest. Now White's children were in college and White was looking for a "bigger challenge in the education business." In Lake Forest, he'd had no "tradition" to work with; White said he liked the idea of "being a change-maker within a great tradition."
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
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!
It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion-from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading-and good writing about reading-moves the same way. It was Owen, using Tess of the d'Urbervilles as an example, who showed me how to write a term paper, describing the incidents that determine Tess's fate by relating them to that portentous sentence that concludes Chapter Thirty-six-"new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten." It was a triumph for me: by writing my first su
ccessful term paper about a book I'd read, I also learned to read. Most mechanically, Owen helped my reading by another means: he determined that my eyes wandered to both the left and to the right of where I was in a sentence, and that-instead of following the elusive next word with my finger-I should highlight a spot on the page by reading through a hole cut in a piece of paper. It was a small rectangle, a window to read through; I moved the window over the page-it was a window that opened no higher than two or three lines. I read more quickly and more comfortably than I ever had read with my finger; to this day, I read through such a window. As for my spelling, Owen was more helpful than Dr. Bolder. It was Owen who encouraged me to learn how to type; a typewriter doesn't cure the problem, but I often can recognize that a typewritten word looks wrong-in longhand, I was (and am) a disaster. And Owen made me read the poems of Robert Frost aloud to him-"IN MY VOICE, THEY DON'T SOUND SO GOOD." And so I memorized "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"; Owen memorized "Birches," but that one was too long for me. That summer of , when we swam in the abandoned quarry lake, we no longer tied a rope around ourselves or swam one-at-a-time-Mr. Meany had either lost interest in the rule, or in enforcing it; or he had acknowledged that Owen and I were no longer children. That was the summer we were eighteen. When we swam in the quarry, it didn't seem dangerous; nothing seemed dangerous. That was the summer we registered for the draft, too; it was no big deal. When we were sixteen, we got our driver's licenses; when we were eighteen, we registered for the draft. At the time, it seemed no more perilous than buying an ice-cream cone at Hampton Beach. On Sunday-when it was not a good beach day-Owen and I played basketball in the Gravesend Academy gym; the summer-school kids had an outdoor sports program, and they were so stir-crazy on weekends that they went to the beach even when it rained. We had the basketball court to ourselves, and it was cool in the gym. There was an old janitor who worked the weekends and who knew us from the regular school-year; he got us the best basketballs and clean towels out of the stock room, and sometimes he even let us swim in the indoor pool-I think he was a trifle retarded. He must have been damaged in some fashion because he actually enjoyed watching Owen and me practice our idiotic stunt with the basketball-the leaping, lift-him-up, slam-dunk shot.