A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

by John Irving

  the Rev. Mr. Merrill's BUSINESS to give testimony to how faithful a servant of God Owen Meany had been? I sat in the dark of the vestry office, thinking that religion was only a career for Pastor Merrill. He taught the same old stories, with the same old cast of characters; he preached the same old virtues and values; and he theologized on the same old "miracles"-yet he appeared not to believe in any of it. His mind was closed to the possibility of a new story; there was no room in his heart for a new character of God's holy choosing, or for a new "miracle." Owen Meany had believed that his death was necessary if others were to be saved from a stupidity and hatred that was destroying him. In that belief, surely he was not so unfamiliar a hero. In the darkness of the vestry office, I suddenly felt that Owen Meany was very near. The Rev. Lewis Merrill turned on the lamp; he looked as if I'd awakened him, and that he'd been dreaming-he looked as if he'd suffered a nightmare. When he tried to speak, his stutter gripped his throat so tightly that he needed to raise both his hands to his mouth-almost to pull the words out. But no words came. He looked as if he might be choking. Then his mouth opened-still he found no words. His hands grasped the top of his desk; his hands wandered to the handles of his old desk drawers. When the Rev. Mr. Merrill spoke, he spoke not with his own voice-he spoke in. the exact falsetto, the "permanent scream," of Owen Meany. It was Mr. Merrill's mouth that formed the words, but it was Owen Meany's voice that spoke to me: "LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE." Then the Rev. Mr. Merrill's right hand flew down to the third desk drawer on the right-hand side; he pulled the drawer out so far that it came free of the desk-and the baseball rolled across the cool, stone floor of the vestry office. When I looked into Pastor Merrill's face, I had no doubt about which baseball it was.

  "Father?" I said.

  "Forgive me, my s-s-s-"vz!" said the Rev. Lewis Merrill. That was the first time that Owen Meany let me hear from him-after he was gone. The second time was this August, when-as if to remind me that he would never allow anything bad to happen to me-he kept me from falling down the cellar stairs in the secret passageway. And I know: I will hear from him-from time to time-again. It is typical of Owen, who was always guilty of overkill; he should understand that I don't need to hear from him to know if he is there. Like his rough, gray replacement of Mary Magdalene, the statue that Owen said was like the God he knew was there-even in the dark, even though invisible-I have no doubt that Owen is there. Owen promised me that God would tell me who my father was. I always suspected that Owen would tell me-he was always so much more interested in the story than / was. It's no surprise to me that when God decided it was time to tell me who my father was, God chose to speak to me in Owen's voice.

  "LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE," God said. And there Was the ball that Owen Meany hit; and there was my wretched father, asking me to forgive him, I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes-toward an infinity of unsatisfying and disagreeable endings. The wholly anticlimactic, unsatisfying, and disagreeable news that the Rev. Lewis Merrill was my father-not to mention the death of Owen Meany-is just one example of the condition of universal disappointment. In my sorry father's case, my disappointment with him was heightened by his refusal to admit that Owen Meany had managed-from beyond the grave-to reveal the Rev. Mr. Merrill's identity to me. This was another miracle that my father lacked the faith to believe in. It had been an emotional moment; I was-by my own admission-becoming an expert in imitating Owen's voice. Furthermore, Mr. Merrill himself had always desired to tell me who he was; he'd simply lacked the courage; perhaps he'd found the courage by using a voice not his own. He'd always wanted to show me the baseball, too, he admitted-"to confess."

  The Rev. Lewis Merrill was so intellectually detached from his faith, he had so long removed himself from the necessary amount of winging it that is required of belief, that he could not accept a small but firm miracle when it happened not only in his presence but was even spoken by his own lips and enacted with his own hand-which had, with a force not his own, ripped the third drawer on the right-hand side completely out of his desk. Here was an ordained minister of the Congregational Church, a pastor and a spokesman for the faithful, telling me that the miracle of Owen Meany's voice speaking out in the vestry office-not to mention the forceful revelation of my

  mother's "murder weapon," the "instrument of death"-was not so much a demonstration of the power of God as it was an indication of the power of the subconscious; namely, the Rev. Mr. Merrill thought that both of us had been "subconsciously motivated"-in my case, to use Owen Meany's voice, or to make Mr. Merrill use it; and in Mr. MerriU's case, to confess to me that he was my father.

  "Are you a minister or a psychiatrist?" I asked him. He was so confused. I might as well have been speaking to Dr. Dolder! Like so many things in the last twenty years: it got worse. The Rev. Mr. Merrill confessed that he had no faith at all; he had lost his faith, he told me, when my mother died. God had stopped speaking to him then; and the Rev. Mr. Merrill had stopped asking to be spoken to. My father had sat in the bleacher seats at that Little League game, and when he saw my mother strolling carelessly along the third-base line-when she had spotted him in the stands and waved to him, with her back to home plate-at that moment, my father told me, he had prayed to God that my mother would drop dead! Infuriatingly, he assured me that he hadn't really meant it-it had been only a "passing thought." More often, he wished that they could be friends, and that the sight of her didn't fill him with self-disgust for his long-ago transgression. When he saw her bare shoulders at the baseball game, he hated himself-he was ashamed that he was still attracted to her. Then she spotted him, and-shamelessly, without an ounce of guilt-she waved to him. She made him feel so guilty, he wished her dead. The first pitch to Owen Meany was way outside; he let it go. My mother had left my father's church, but it never seemed to upset her when she encountered him-she was always friendly, she spoke to him, she waved. It pained him to remember every little thing about her-the pretty hollow of her bare armpit, which he could see so clearly as she waved to him. The second pitch almost hit Owen Meany in the head; he dove in the dirt to avoid it. Whatever my mother remembered, my father thought that nothing pained her. She just went on waving. Oh, just drop dead! he thought. At that precise moment, that is what he'd prayed. Then Owen Meany hit the next pitch. This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends. How could the Rev. Lewis Merrill agree with me-that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were "monsters of superstition"-if he himself believed that God had listened to his prayer at that Little League game; and that God had not "listened" to him since? Because he'd wished my mother dead, my father said, God had punished him; God had taught Pastor Merrill not to trifle with prayer. And I suppose that was why it had been so difficult for Mr. Merrill to pray for Owen Meany-and why he had invited us all to offer up our silent prayers to Owen, instead of speaking out himself. And he called Mr. and Mrs. Meany "superstitious"! Look at the world: look at how many of our peerless leaders presume to tell us that they know what God wants! It's not God who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name! Why the Rev. Lewis Merrill had so whimsically prayed that my mother would drop dead was such an old, tired story. My mother's little romance, I was further disappointed to learn, had been more pathetic than romantic; Mother, after all, was simply a very young woman from a very hick town. When she'd started singing at The Orange Grove, she'd wanted the honest approval of her hometown pastor-she'd needed to be assured that she was engaged in a decent and honorable endeavor; she'd asked him to come see her and hear her sing. Clearly, it was the sight of her that had impressed him; in that setting-in that unfamiliarly scarlet dress-"The Lady in Red'' did not strike the Rev. Mr. Merrill as the same choir girl he had tutored through her teens. I suppose it was a seduction accomplished with only slightly more than the usual sincerity- for my moth
er was sincerely innocent, and I will at least credit the Rev. Lewis Merrill with supposing that he was sincerely "in love"; after all, he'd had no great experience with love. Afterward, the reality that he had no intentions of leaving his wife and children-who were already (and always had been) unhappy!-must have shamed him. I know that my mother took it fairly well; in my memory, she never winced to call me her' 'little fling.'' In short, Tabitha Wheelwright got over Lewis Merrill rather quickly; and she bore up better than stoically to the task of bearing his illegitimate child. Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my

  mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his "love" of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his "belief" was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing. But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death. And when she met and became engaged to Dan Needham, how that must have threatened to put an end to his conjecturing; and when she married Dan, how that must have threatened to put an end to the self-inflicted pain of which he had grown so fond. That for all his sourness, her disposition remained sunny-that she even cheerfully sought the bleacher seats for him, and waved to him only a split second before she died-how insubstantial that must have made her in his eyes! The closest that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had come to God was in his remorse for his "sin" with my mother. And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith-his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his meanspirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother-that she'd had the good sense to shrug him off. It's no wonder it was such a tribulation for Mr. Merrill to know what he was going to say about Owen-at Owen's funeral. How could a man like him know what to say about Owen Meany? He called Owen's parents "monstrous," while he outrageously presumed that God had actually "listened" to his ardent, narrow prayer that my mother drop dead; and he arrogantly presumed further that God was now silent, and wouldn't listen to him-as if the Rev. Mr. Merrill, all by himself, possessed the power both to make God pay attention to him and to harden God's heart against him. What a hypocrite he was-to agree with me that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were "monsters of superstition"! In the vestry office, where we were supposed to be preparing ourselves for Owen Meany's funeral, I said-very sarcastically -to my father: "How I wish I could help restore your faith." Then I left him there-possibly imagining how such a restoration could ever be possible. I have never been angrier; that was when I felt' 'moved to do evil''-and when I remembered how Owen Meany had tried to prepare me for what a disappointment my father was going to be. Toronto: September , -overcast, with rain inevitable by the end of the day. Katherine says that the least Christian thing about me is my lack of forgiveness, which I know is true and is hand-in-hand with my constantly resurfacing desire for revenge. I sat in Grace Church on-the-Hill; I sat there all alone, in the dim light-as overcast as the outdoor weather. To make matters worse: the Toronto Blue Jays are involved in a pennant race; if the Blue Jays make it to the World Series, the talk of the town will be baseball. There are times when I need to read the Thirty-seventh Psalm, over and over again. Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:

  fret not thyself, else shall thou be moved to do evil. I've had a hard week at Bishop Strachan. Every fall, I start out demanding too much of my students; then I become unreasonably disappointed in them-and in myself. I have been too sarcastic with them. And my new colleague-Ms. Eleanor Pribst-truly moves me to do evil! This week I was reading my Grade girls a ghost story by Robertson Davies-"The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees." In the middle of the story, which I adore, I began to think: What do Grade girls know about graduate students or Ph.D. theses or the kind of academic posturing that Mr. Davies makes such great, good fun of? The students looked sleepy-headed to me; they were paying, at best, faltering attention. I felt cross with them, and therefore I read badly, not doing the story justice; then I felt cross with myself for choosing this particular story and not considering the age and inexperience of my audience. God, what a situation! It is in this story where Davies says that "the wit of a graduate student is like champagne-Canadian champagne ..." That's absolutely priceless, as Grandmother used to say; I think I'll try that one on Eleanor Pribst the next time she tries to be witty with me! I think I'll stick the stump of my right index finger into the right nostril of my nose-

  thereby giving her the impression that I have managed to insert the first two joints of my finger so far into my nose that the tip must be lodged between my eyes; thus catching her attention, I'm sure, I will then deliver to her that priceless line about the wit of graduate students. In Grace Church on-the-Hill, I bowed my head and tried to let my anger go. There is no way to be more alone in church than to linger there, after a Sunday service. This week I was haranguing my Canadian Literature students on the subject of "bold beginnings." I said that if the books I asked them to read began half as lazily as their papers on Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words, they would never have managed to plow through a single one of them! I used Mr. Findley's novel as an example of what I meant by a bold beginning-that shocking scene when the father takes his twelve-year-old son up on the roof of the Arlington Hotel to show him the view of Boston and Cambridge and Harvard and the Charles, and then leaps fifteen stories to his death in front of his son; imagine that. That ranks right up there with the opening chapter to The Mayor ofCasterbridge, wherein Michael Hen-chard gets so drunk that he loses his wife and daughter in a bet; imagine that! Hardy knew what he was doing; he always knew. What did it mean, I asked my sloppy students, that their papers generally ' 'began" after four or five pages of wandering around in a soup of ideas for beginnings? If it took them four or five pages to find the right beginning, didn't they think they should consider revising their papers and beginning them on page four or five? Oh, young people, young people, young people-where is your taste for wit? I weep to teach Trollope to these BSS girls; I care less that they appear to weep because they're forced to read him. I especially worship the pleasures of Bar Chester Towers; but it is pearls before swine to teach Trollope to this television generation of girls! Their hips, their heads, and even their hearts are moved by those relentlessly mindless rock videos; yet the opening of Chapter IV does not extract from them even so much as a titter.

  "Of the Rev. Mr. Slope's parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he added an 'e' to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him."

  Not even a titter! But how their hearts thump and patter, how their hips jolt this way and that, how their heads loll and nod-and their eyes roll inward, completely disappearing into their untrained little skulls-just to hear Hester the Molester; not to mention see the disjointed nonsense that accompanies the sound track of her most recent rock video! You can understand why I needed to sit by myself in Grace Church on-the-Hill. This week I was reading "The Moons of Jupiter"-that marvelous short story by Alice Munro-to my Grade Can Lit students, as the abrasive Ms. Pribst would say. I was a touch anxious about reading the story, because one of my students-Yvonne Hewlett-was in a situation all too similar to the narrator's
situation in that story: her father was in the hospital, about to undergo a ticklish heart surgery. I didn't remember what was happening to Yvonne Hewlett's father until I'd already begun to read "The Moons of Jupiter" to the class; it was too late to stop, or change the story as I went along. Besides: it is by no means a brutal story-it is warm, if not exactly reassuring to the children of heart patients. Anyway, what could I do? Yvonne Hewlett had missed a week of classes just recently when her father suffered a heart attack; she looked tense and drained as I read the Munro story-she had looked tense and drained, naturally, from the opening line: "I found my father in the heart wing ..."

  How could I have been so thoughtless? I was thinking. I wanted to interrupt the story and tell Yvonne Hewlett that everything was going to turn out just fine-although I had no right to make any such promise to her, especially not about her poor father. God, what a situation! Suddenly I felt like my father-I am my sorry father's sorry son, I thought. Then I regretted the evil I did to him; actually, it turned out all right in the end-it turned out that I did him a favor. But I did not intend what I did to him as any favor. When I left him alone in the vestry office, pondering what he would find to say at Owen Meany's funeral, I took the baseball with me. When I went to see Dan Needham, I left the baseball in the glove compartment of my car. I was so angry, I didn't know what I was going to do-beginning with: tell Dan, or not tell him? That was when I asked Dan Needham-since he had no apparent religious faith-why he had insisted that my mother and I change churches, that we leave the Congregational Church and become Episcopalians!