A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

by John Irving

  "BUT LET'S SUPPOSE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT WE BELIEVE IN THE STATED OBJECTIVES OF THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION'S VIETNAM POLICY- AND THAT WE SUPPORT THIS POLICY. WE AGREE TO RESIST COMMUNIST AGGRESSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM-WHETHER IT COMES FROM THE NORTH VIETNAMESE OR THE VIET CONG. WE SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION FOR SOUTH VIETNAM- AND WE WANT PEACE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. IF THESE ARE OUR OBJECTIVES-IF WE AGREE THAT THIS IS WHAT WE WANT-WHY ARE WE ESCALATING THE WAR?

  "THERE DOESN'T APPEAR TO BE A GOVERNMENT IN SAIGON THAT CAN DO VERY WELL WITHOUT US. DO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE PEOPLE EVEN LIKE THE MILITARY JUNTA OF MARSHAL KY? NATURALLY, HANOI AND THE VIET CONG WILL NOT NEGOTIATE FOR A PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT IF THEY THINK THEY CAN WIN THE WAR! THERE'S EVERY REASON FOR THE UNITED STATES TO KEEP ENOUGH OF OUR GROUND FORCES IN SOUTH VIETNAM TO PERSUADE HANOI AND THE VIET CONG THAT THEY COULD NEVER ACHIEVE A MILITARY VICTORY. BUT WHAT DOES IT ACCOMPLISH FOR US TO BOMB THE NORTH?

  "SUPPOSING THAT WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY-THAT WE WANT SOUTH VIETNAM TO BE FREE TO GOVERN ITSELF-WE SHOULD BE PROTECTING SOUTH VIETNAM FROM ATTACK. BUT IT APPEARS THAT WE ARE ATTACKING THE WHOLE COUNTRY- FROM THE AIR! IF WE BOMB THE WHOLE COUNTRY TO BITS-TO PROTECT IT FROM COMMUNISM- WHAT KIND OF PROTECTION IS THAT?

  "I THINK THAT'S THE PROBLEM," said Owen Meany, "BUT I'D LIKE TO SEE THE SITUATION FOR MYSELF."

  My Uncle Alfred was speechless. My Aunt Martha said: "Yes, I see!" Both of them were impressed. I realized that a part of the reason why Owen had wanted to come to Sawyer Depot was to give himself an opportunity to impress Hester's parents. I'd heard Owen's Vietnam thesis before; it was not very original-I think it was borrowed from something Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had written or said-but Owen's delivery was impressive. I thought it was sad that Hester made so little effort to impress Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha, and that she was so unimpressed by them.

  At bedtime, I could hear Owen babbling away to Aunt Martha-she had put him in Hester's room. Owen was inquiring about the specific teddy bears and dolls and figurines.

  "AND HOW OLD WAS SHE WHEN SHE LIKED THIS ONE?'' he would ask Aunt Martha. "AND I SUPPOSE THAT THIS ONE DATES BACK TO THE FIREWATER ERA," he would say. Before I went to bed, Simon said to me appreciatively: "Owen's just as weird as ever! Isn't he great!"

  I fell asleep remembering how Owen had first appeared to my cousins-that day in the attic at Front Street when we were contending over the sewing machine and Owen stood in the sun from the skylight that blazed through his ears. I remembered how he had appeared to all of us: like a descending angel-a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways. In the morning, Owen suggested that we move on to Loveless Lake. Simon advised us to use the boathouse as a base camp. When he got off work at the sawmill, Simon said, he would come take us waterskiing; we could sleep in the boathouse at night. There were a couple of comfortable couches that unfolded to make beds, and the boathouse had new screens on the windows. There were some kerosene lamps; there was an outhouse nearby, and a hand pump drew the lake water into a sink by the bar; there was a propane-gas stove, and some kettles for boiling water-for drinking. In those days, we were allowed to bathe (with soap!) in the lake. Owen and I agreed that it was cozier than camping in our tent; also, for me it was relaxing to get away from Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha-and the effort that Owen made to impress them. At the lake, we were left alone; Simon appeared only at the end of the day to take us waterskiing-he had a steady girlfriend, so we rarely saw him at night. We cooked hamburgers on a charcoal grill on the boatslip; we caught sunfish and perch off the dock-and smallmouth bass when we went out in the canoe. At night, Owen and I sat on the dock until the mosquitoes bothered us. Then we went into the boathouse and turned on the kerosene lamps and talked for a while, or read our books. I was trying to read Parade's End; I was just beginning it. Graduate students have serious reading ambitions, but they don't finish a lot of books they start; I wouldn't finish Parade's End until I was in my forties-when I tried it again. Owen was reading a Department of the Army field manual called Survival, Evasion, and Escape.

  "I'LL READ YOU SOME OF MINE IF YOU READ ME SOME OF YOURS," Owen said.

  "Okay," I said.

  " 'SURVIVAL IS LARGELY A MATTER OF MENTAL OUTLOOK,' " he read.

  "Sounds reasonable," I said.

  "BUT LISTEN TO THIS," he said. "THIS IS ABOUT HOW TO GET ALONG WITH THE NATIVES." I couldn't help but imagine that the only "natives" Owen was going to have to ge.t along with were the residents of Indiana and Arizona. " 'RESPECT PERSONAL PROPERTY, ESPECIALLY THEIR WOMEN,' " he read.

  "It doesn't say that!" I said.

  "LISTEN TO THIS!" he said. " 'AVOID PHYSICAL CONTACT WITHOUT SEEMING TO DO SO.' "

  We both thought that was a scream-although I didn't tell him that I was laughing, in part, because I was thinking about the "natives" of Indiana and Arizona.

  "WANT TO HEAR HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR FEET?" Owen asked me.

  "Not really, "I said.

  "HOW ABOUT 'PRECAUTION AGAINST MOSQUITO BITES'?" he asked. " 'SMEAR MUD ON YOUR FACE, ESPECIALLY BEFORE GOING TO BED,' " he read. We laughed hysterically for a while.

  "HERE'S A PART ABOUT FOOD AND WATER," he said. " 'DO NOT DRINK URINE.' "

  "This sounds like a field manual for children]" I said.

  "THAT'S WHO MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE ARMY ARE," said Owen Meany.

  "What a world!" I said.

  "HERE'S SOME GOOD ADVICE ABOUT ESCAPING FROM A MOVING TRAIN," Owen said. " 'BEFORE JUMPING, MAKE SURE YOUR EXIT WILL BE MADE FROM THE APPROPRIATE SIDE, OR YOU MAY JUMP INTO THE PATH OF AN ONCOMING TRAIN.' "

  "No shit!" I cried.

  "LISTEN TO THIS," he said. " 'STRYCHNINE PLANTS GROW WILD THROUGHOUT THE TROPICS. THE LUSCIOUS-LOOKING WHITE OR YELLOW FRUIT IS ABUNDANT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. THE FRUIT HAS AN

  EXCEEDINGLY BITTER PULP, AND THE SEEDS CONTAIN A POWERFUL POISON.' "

  I restrained myself from saying that I doubted any strychnine grew in Indiana or Arizona.

  "HERE'S ANOTHER ENTRY IN THE 'NO KIDDING!' CATEGORY," Owen said. "THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT 'EVASION TECHNIQUES WHEN THERE IS LITTLE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FRIENDLY AND HOSTILE TERRITORY'-GET THIS: TT IS DIFFICULT TO DISTINGUISH THE INSURGENT FROM THE FRIENDLY POPULACE.' "

  I couldn't help myself; I said: "I hope you don't run into that problem in Indiana or Arizona."

  "LET'S HEAR SOMETHING FROM YOUR BOOK," he said, closing his field manual. I tried to explain about Mrs. Satterthwaite's daughter-that she was a woman who'd left her husband and child to run off with another man, and now she wanted her husband to take her back, although she hated him and intended to make him miserable. A friend of the family-a priest-is confiding to Mrs. Satterthwaite his opinion of how her daughter will, one day, respond to an infidelity of her husband's, which the priest believes is only to be expected. The priest believes that the daughter will "tear the house down"; that "the world will echo with her wrongs."

  Here is the scene I read to Owen Meany:

  " 'Do you mean to say,' Mrs. Satterthwaite said, 'that Sylvia would do anything vulgar?'

  " 'Doesn't every woman who's had a man to torture for years when she loses him?' the priest asked. 'The more she's made an occupation of torturing him the less right she thinks she has to lose him.' "

  "WHAT A WORLD!" said Owen Meany. There were more motorboats than loons on Loveless Lake; even at night, we heard more noise from engines than we heard from wildlife. We decided to drive north, through Dixville Notch, to Lake Francis; that was "real wilderness," Simon had told us. Indeed, the camping on Lake Francis, which is one of New Hampshire's northernmost lakes, was spectacular; but Owen Meany and I were not campers. On Lake Francis, the cries of the loons were so mournful that they frightened us; and the utter blackness of that empty lakeshore at night was terrifying. There was so much noise at night-insect, bird, and animal hoopla-that we couldn't sleep. One morning, we saw a moose.

  "LET'S GO HOME, BEFORE WE SEE A BEAR," said Owen Meany. "BESIDES," he said, "I SHOULD SPEND A LITTLE TIME WITH HESTER."

  But when we
left Lake Francis, he turned the pickup north-toward Quebec.

  "WE'RE VERY CLOSE TO CANADA," he said. "I WANT TO SEE IT."

  At that particular border, there's little to see-just forests, for miles, and a thin road so beaten by the winter that it is bruised to the color of pencil lead and pockmarked with frost heaves. The border outpost-the customs house-was a cabin; the gate across the road was as flimsy and innocent-looking as the gate guarding a railroad crossing-in fact, it was raised. The Canadian customs officers at the border didn't pay any attention to us-although we parked the pickup truck about a hundred yards from the border, facing back toward the United States; then we lowered the tailgate of the truck and sat on it for a while, facing Canada. We sat there for half an hour before one of the Canadian customs officers walked a short distance in our direction and stood there, staring back at us. No traffic passed us in either direction, and the dark fir trees that towered on either side of the border indicated no special respect for national boundaries.

  "I'M SURE IT'S A NICE COUNTRY TO LIVE IN," said Owen Meany, and we drove home to Gravesend. We had a modest going-away party for him at Front Street; Hester and Grandmother were a trifle teary, but the overall tone of our celebration was jolly. Dan Needham-our historian-delivered a lengthy and unresolved meditation on whether Fort Benjamin Harrison was named after William Henry Harrison's father or grandson; Dan offered a similarly unresolved speculation on the origins of "Hoosier," which we all knew was a nickname for a native of Indiana-but no one knew what else, if anything, a "Hoosier" was. Then we made Owen Meany stand in the dark inside the secret passageway, while Mr. Fish recited, too loudly, the passage that Owen had always admired from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

  " 'Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once,' " Mr. Fish intoned.

  "I KNOW! I KNOW! OPEN THE DOOR!" cried Owen Meany.

  " 'Of all the wonders that I have yet heard,' " said Mr. Fish, " 'it seems to me the most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.' "

  "OKAY! OKAY! I'M NOT AFRAID-BUT THERE ARE COBWEBS IN HERE! OPEN THE DOOR!" Owen cried. Perhaps the darkness inspired him to insist that Hester and I follow him up to the attic. He wanted us to stand in the closet of Grandfather's clothes with him; but this time we were not playing game-we had no flashlight- and we were not in danger of having Hester grab our doinks. Owen just wanted us all to stand there for a moment, in the dark.

  "Why are we doing this?" Hester asked.

  "SSSHHH! FORM A CIRCLE, HOLD HANDS!" he commanded. We did as we were told; Hester's hand was much bigger than Owen's.

  "Now what?" Hester asked.

  "SSSHHH!" Owen said. We breathed in the mothballs; the old clothes stirred against themselves-the mechanisms of the old umbrellas were so rusty that the umbrellas, I was sure, could never be opened again; and the brims of the old hats were so dry that they would crack if anyone attempted to give shape to them. "DON'T BE AFRAID," said Owen Meany. That was all he had to say to us before he left for Indiana. Several weeks went by before Hester and I heard from him; I guess they kept him pretty busy at Fort Benjamin Harrison. I would see Hester sometimes at night, along "the strip" at Hampton Beach; usually, some guy was with her-rarely the same guy, and never anyone she bothered to introduce me to.

  "Have you heard anything from him?" I would ask her.

  "Nothing yet," she'd say. "Have you?"

  When we heard from him, we heard together; his first letters weren't very special-he sounded more bored than overwhelmed. Hester and I probably put more effort into talking about those first letters than Owen had put into writing them. There was a major who'd taken a liking to him; Owen said that his writing and editorial work for The Grave had provided him with a better background for what the Army seemed to want of him than anything he'd learned in ROTC, or in Basic Training. Hester and I agreed that Owen sounded despondent. He said simply: "A GREAT DEAL HAS TO BE WRITTEN EVERYDAY."

  The second month he'd been away, or thereabouts, his letters were perkier. He was more optimistic about his orders; he'd heard some good things about Fort Huachuca, Arizona. All the talk at Fort Benjamin Harrison told him that Fort Huachuca was a fortunate place to be; he'd be working in the Adjutant's Office of the Strategic Communications Command- he'd been told that the major general who was in charge was "flexible" on the subject of reassignments; the major general had been known to assist his junior officers with their requests for transfers. When I started graduate school in the fall of ', was still looking for an apartment in Durham-or even in Newmarket, between Durham and Gravesend. I was looking halfheartedly, but-at twenty-four-I knew I had to admit to myself that what Owen had told me was true: that I was too old to be living with my stepfather or my grandmother.

  "Why don't you move in with me?" Hester said. "You'd have your own bedroom," she added-unnecessarily. When her two previous roommates had graduated, Hester had replaced only one of them; after all, Owen was there much of the time-Hester having only one roommate made it less awkward for Owen. When the one roommate had left to get married, Hester hadn't replaced her. My first anxiety about sharing an apartment with Hester was that Owen might disapprove.

  "It was Owen's idea," Hester told me. "Didn't he write you about it?"

  That letter came along, after he'd settled into Fort Huachuca.

  "IF HESTER STILL DOESN'T HAVE A ROOMMATE, WHY DON'T YOU MOVE IN WITH HER?" he wrote. "THAT WAY, I COULD CALL YOU BOTH-COLLECT!-AT THE SAME NUMBER.

  "YOU SHOULD SEE FORT HUACHUCA! SEVENTY-THREE THOUSAND ACRES! PRAIRIE GRASSLAND, ELEVATION ABOUT FIVE THOUSAND FEET- EVERYTHING IS YELLOW AND TAN, EXCEPT THE MOUNTAINS IN THE DISTANCE ARE BLUE AND PURPLE AND EVEN PINK. THERE'S A FISHING LAKE JUST BEHIND THE OFFICERS' CLUB! THERE ARE ALMOST TWENTY THOUSAND PERSONNEL HERE, BUT THE

  FORT IS SO SPREAD OUT, YOU'D NEVER KNOW THEY WERE HERE-IT'S SIX MILES FROM THE WEST ENTRANCE OF THE FORT TO THE AIRFIELD, AND ANOTHER MILE TO THE HEADQUARTERS BARRACKS, AND YOU CAN GO EAST ANOTHER SIX MILES FROM THERE. I'M GOING TO START PLAYING TENNIS-I CAN TAKE FLYING LESSONS, IF I WANT TO! AND MEXICO IS ONLY TWENTY MILES AWAY! THE PRAIRIE IS NOT LIKE THE DESERT-BUT THERE ARE JOSHUA TREES AND PRICKLY PEAR, AND THERE ARE WILD PIGS CALLED JAVELIN A, AND COYOTE. YOU KNOW WHAT COYOTES LIKE TO EAT BEST! HOUSE CATS!

  "FORT HUACHUCA HAS THE LARGEST HORSE POPULATION OF ANY ARMY POST. THE HORSES AND THE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE OF THE OLD HOUSES, AND THE WOODEN BARRACKS, AND THE PARADE GROUNDS-WHICH ARE LEFT OVER FROM THE INDIAN WARS-MAKE EVERYTHING FEEL LIKE THE PAST. AND ALTHOUGH EVERYTHING IS HUGE, IT IS ALSO ISOLATED; THAT FEELS LIKE THE PAST, TOO.

  "WHEN IT RAINS, YOU CAN SMELL THE CREOSOTE BUSHES. MOSTLY, IT'S SUNNY AND WARM-NOT TERRIBLY HOT; THE AIR IS DRIER THAN ANY PLACE I'VE EVER BEEN. BUT-DON'T WORRY-THERE ARE NO PALM TREES!"

  And so I moved in with Hester. I quickly realized that I had done her a disservice-to think of her as slovenly. It was only herself she treated carelessly; she kept the shared rooms of the apartment fairly neat, and she even picked up my clothes and books-when I left them in the kitchen or in the living room. Even the roaches in the kitchen were not there out of any dirtiness that could t"e ascribed to Hester; and although she appeared to know a lot of guys, not one of them ever returned to the apartment and spent the night with her. She often came home quite late, but she always came home. I did not ask her if she was being "faithful" to Owen Meany; I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt-and besides: who could even guess what Owen was doing? From his letters, we gathered he was doing a lot of typing; he was playing tennis, which Hester and I found unlikely-and he had actually taken a couple of flying lessons, which we found unbelievable. He complained that his room in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters-a dormitory-type room, with a private bath-was stifling. But he complained, for a while, of almost nothing else. He confessed he was "BUTTERING UP THE COMMANDER"-& certain Major General LaHoad. "WE CALL HIM LATOAD," Owen wrote, "BUT HE'S A GOOD GUY. I COULD DO A LOT WORSE THAN END UP AS HIS AIDE-DE
-CAMP-THAT'S THE ANGLE I'M SHOOTING. FORGIVE THE EXPRESSION-I'VE BEEN SHOOTING SOME POOL IN THE COMPANY DAY ROOM.

  "TYPICAL ARMY: WHEN I ARRIVE AND REPORT TO THE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMAND, THEY TELL ME THERE'S BEEN A MISTAKE-THEY WANT ME IN THE PERSONNEL SECTION, INSTEAD. THEY CALL IT 'PERSONNEL AND COMMUNITY ACTION' AT THE POST. I SIGN DISCHARGE PAPERS, I ATTEND THE OCS AND WARRANT OFFICER BOARDS-HAVE BEEN 'RECORDER' FOR THE LATTER. SCARIEST THING I DO IS PLAY NIGHT WATCHMAN: I CARRY A FLASHLIGHT AND A MILITARY-POLICE RADIO. IT TAKES TWO HOURS TO CHECK ALL THE LOCKS YOU THINK MIGHT BE JIMMIED AROUND THE FORT: THE SHOPS AND THE CLUBS AND THE STORAGE SHEDS, THE MOTOR POOL AND THE COMMISSARY AND THE AMMO DUMP. MEANWHILE, I KNOW THE EMERGENCY PROCEDURES IN THE STAFF DUTY OFFICER'S NOTEBOOK BY HEART-'UPON WARNING OF A NUCLEAR ATTACK YOU SHOULD NOTIFY . . . ' AND SO FORTH.

  "IDEALLY, MAJOR GENERAL LAHOAD WILL CHOOSE ME TO BE THE BARTENDER AT HIS PARTIES-AT THE LAST PARTY, I BROUGHT DRINKS TO HIS FLUFF OF A WIFE ALL NIGHT; STILL COULDN'T FILL HER UP, BUT SHE LIKED THE ATTENTION. SHE THINKS I'M 'CUTE'-YOU KNOW THE TYPE. I FIGURE IF I COULD BE LATOAD'S AIDE-DE-CAMP-IF I COULD SWING IT-THE MAJOR GENERAL WOULD LOOK KINDLY UPON MY REQUEST FOR TRANSFER. THINK WHAT A BLOW IT WOULD BE TO THE PERSONNEL SECTION-HOW THEY WOULD MISS ME! TODAY I SIGNED A CHAPLAIN OUT ON LEAVE, AND I HELPED A HYSTERICAL MOTHER LOCATE HER SON IN

  THE SIGNAL GROUP-APPARENTLY, THE BAD BOY HADN'T WRITTEN HOME.

  "SPEAKING OF HOME, I'M TAKING TEN DAYS' LEAVE FOR CHRISTMAS!"

  And so Hester and I waited to see him. That October, President Johnson visited the U.S. troops in Vietnam; but we heard no further word from Owen Meany-concerning what progress or success he had encountered with his efforts to be reassigned. All Owen said was: "MAJOR GENERAL LA-HOAD IS THE KEY. I SCRATCH HIS BACK . . . YOU KNOW THE REST."

  It was December before he mentioned that he'd sent another Personnel Action Form to Washington, asking for transfer to Vietnam; those forms, as many times as he would submit them, were routed through his chain of command-including Major General LaHoad. By December, the major general had Owen working as a casualty assistance officer in the Personnel Section. Apparently, Owen had made a favorable impression upon some grieving Arizona family who had connections at the Pentagon; through the chain of command, the major general had received a special letter of commendation-the Casualty Branch at the post had reason to be proud: a Second Lieutenant Paul O. Meany, Jr., had been of great comfort to the parents of a LT infantry type who'd been killed in Vietnam. Owen had been especially moving when he'd read the award citation for the Silver Star medal to the next of kin. Major General LaHoad had congratulated Owen personally. At Fort Huachuca, the Casualty Branch was composed of Second Lieutenant Paul O. Meany, Jr., and a staff sergeant in his thirties-"A DISGRUNTLED CAREER MAN," according to Owen; but the staff sergeant had an Italian wife whose homemade pasta was "SUCH AN IMPROVEMENT ON HESTER'S THAT IT MAKES THE STAFF SERGEANT OCCASIONALLY WORTH LISTENING TO." In the Casualty Branch, the second lieutenant and the staff sergeant were assisted by "A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SPECS AND A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD SPEC."