A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “THERE’S ALSO DRESS SHIRTS, AND SHOES,” Owen said. “IF YOU GO TO SCHOOL WITH RICH PEOPLE, YOU DON’T WANT TO LOOK LIKE THEIR SERVANTS.” I now suppose that my mother could hear Mr. Meany’s prickly, working-class politics behind this observation.

  “Everything you need, Owen,” my mother said. “It will be taken care of.”

  We were in Rye, passing the First Church, and the breeze from the ocean was already strong. A man with a great stack of roofing shingles in a wheelbarrow was having difficulty keeping the shingles from blowing away; the ladder, leaning against the vestry roof, was also in danger of being blown over. The man seemed in need of a co-worker—or, at least, of another pair of hands.

  “WE SHOULD STOP AND HELP THAT MAN,” Owen observed, but my mother was pursuing a theme and, therefore, she’d noticed nothing unusual out the window.

  “Would it help if I talked to your parents about it, Owen?” my mother asked.

  “THERE’S ALSO THE MATTER OF THE BUS,” Owen said. “TO GO TO HIGH SCHOOL, YOU CAN TAKE A BUS. I DON’T LIVE RIGHT IN TOWN, YOU KNOW. HOW WOULD I GET TO THE ACADEMY? IF I WAS A DAY STUDENT, I MEAN—HOW WOULD I GET THERE? HOW WOULD I GET BACK HOME? BECAUSE MY PARENTS WOULD NEVER LET ME LIVE IN A DORMITORY. THEY NEED ME AT HOME. ALSO, DORMITORIES ARE EVIL. SO HOW DO THE DAY STUDENTS GET TO SCHOOL AND GET HOME?” he asked.

  “Someone drives them,” my mother said. “I could drive you, Owen—at least until you got a driver’s license of your own.”

  “NO, IT WON’T WORK,” Owen said. “MY FATHER’S TOO BUSY, AND MY MOTHER DOESN’T DRIVE.”

  Mrs. Meany—both my mother and I knew—not only didn’t drive; she never left the house. And even in the summer, the windows in that house were never open; his mother was allergic to dust, Owen had explained. Every day of the year, Mrs. Meany sat indoors behind the windows bleared and streaked with grit from the quarry. She wore an old set of pilot’s headphones (the wires dangling, unattached) because the sound of the channeling machine—the channel bar, and the rock chisels—disturbed her. On blasting days, she played the phonograph very loudly—the big band sound, the needle skipping occasionally when the dynamite was especially nearby and percussive.

  Mr. Meany did the shopping. He drove Owen to Sunday school, and picked him up—although he did not attend the Episcopal services himself. It was apparently enough revenge upon the Catholics to be sending Owen there; either the added defiance of his own attendance was unnecessary, or else Mr. Meany had suffered such an outrage at the hands of the Catholic authorities that he was rendered unreceptive to the teachings of any church.

  He was, my mother knew, quite unreceptive on the subject of Gravesend Academy. “There is the interests of the town,” he once said in Town Meeting, “and then there is the interests of them!” This regarded the request of the academy to widen the saltwater river and dredge a deeper low-tide channel at a point in the Squamscott that would improve the racing course for the academy crew; several shells had become mired in the mud flats at low tide. The part of the river the academy wished to widen was a peninsula of tidewater marsh bordering the Meany Granite Quarry; it was totally unusable land, yet Mr. Meany owned it and he resented that the academy wanted to scoop it away—“for purposes of recreation!” he said.

  “We’re talking about mud, not granite,” a representative of the academy had remarked.

  “I’m talkin’ about us and them!” Mr. Meany had shouted, in what is now recorded as a famous Town Meeting. In order for a Town Meeting to be famous in Gravesend, it is only necessary that there be a good row. The Squamscott was widened; the channel was dredged. If it was just mud, the town decided, it didn’t matter whose mud it was.

  “You’re going to the academy, Owen,” my mother told him. “That’s all there is to it. If any student ever belonged in a proper school, it’s you—that place was made with you in mind, or it was made for no one.”

  “WE MISSED DOING A GOOD DEED,” Owen said morosely. “THAT MAN SHINGLING THE CHURCH—HE NEEDED HELP.”

  “Don’t argue with me, Owen,” my mother said. “You’re going to the academy, if I have to adopt you. I’ll kidnap you, if I have to,” she said.

  But no one on this earth was ever as stubborn as Owen Meany; he waited a mile before he said another word, and then he said, “NO. IT WON’T WORK.”

  Gravesend Academy was founded in 1781 by the Rev. Emery Hurd, a follower of the original Wheelwright’s original beliefs, a childless Puritan with an ability—according to Wall—for “Oration on the advantages of Learning and its happy Tendency to promote Virtue and Piety.” What would the Rev. Mr. Hurd have thought of Owen Meany? Hurd conceived of an academy whereat “no vicious lad, who is liable to contaminate his associates, is allowed to remain an hour”; whereat “the student shall bear the laboring oar”—and learn heartily from his labor!

  As for the rest of his money, Emery Hurd left it for “the education and christianization of the American Indians.” In his waning years—ever watchful that Gravesend Academy devote itself to “pious and charitable purposes”—the Rev. Mr. Hurd was known to patrol Water Street in downtown Gravesend, looking for youthful offenders: specifically, young men who would not doff their hats to him, and young ladies who would not curtsy. In payment for such offense, Emery Hurd was happy to give these young people a piece of his mind; near the end, only pieces were left.

  I saw my grandmother lose her mind in pieces like that; when she was so old that she could remember almost nothing—certainly not Owen Meany, and not even me—she would occasionally reprimand the whole room, and anyone present in it. “What has happened to tipping the hat?” she would howl. “Bring back the bow!” she would croon. “Bring back the curtsy!”

  “Yes, Grandmother,” I would say.

  “Oh, what do you know?” she would say. “Who are you, anyway?” she would ask.

  “HE IS YOUR GRANDSON, JOHNNY,” I would say, in my best imitation of Owen Meany’s voice.

  And my Grandmother would say, “My God, is he still here? Is that funny little guy still here? Did you lock him in the passageway, Johnny?”

  Later, in that summer when we were ten, Owen told me that my mother had been to the quarry to visit his parents.

  “What did they say about it?” I asked him.

  They hadn’t mentioned the visit, Owen told me, but he knew she’d been there. “I COULD SMELL HER PERFUME,” Owen said. “SHE MUST HAVE BEEN THERE QUITE A WHILE BECAUSE THERE WAS ALMOST AS MUCH OF HER PERFUME AS THERE IS IN YOUR HOUSE. MY MOTHER DOESN’T WEAR PERFUME,” he added.

  This was unnecessary to tell me. Not only did Mrs. Meany not go outdoors; she refused to look outdoors. When I saw her positioned in the various windows of Owen’s house, she was always in profile to the window, determined not to be observing the world—yet making an obscure point: by sitting in profile, possibly she meant to suggest that she had not entirely turned her back on the world, either. It occurred to me that the Catholics had done this to her—whatever it was, it surely qualified for the unmentioned UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that Owen claimed his father and mother had suffered. There was something about Mrs. Meany’s obdurate self-imprisonment that smacked of religious persecution—if not eternal damnation.

  “How did it go with the Meanys?” I asked my mother.

  “They told Owen I was there?” she asked.

  “No, they didn’t tell him. He recognized your perfume.”

  “He would,” she said, and smiled. I think she knew Owen had a crush on her—all my friends had crushes on my mother. And if she had lived until they’d all been teenagers, their degrees of infatuation with her would doubtless have deepened, and worsened, and been wholly unbearable—both to them, and to me.

  Although my mother resisted the temptation of my generation—that is to say, she restrained herself from picking up Owen Meany—she could not resist touching Owen. You simply had to put your hands on Owen. He was mortally cute; he had a furry animal attractiveness—except for the nakedness of his nearly transparent ea
rs, and the rodentlike way they protruded from his sharp face. My grandmother said that Owen resembled an embryonic fox. When touching Owen, one avoided his ears; they looked as if they would be cold to the touch. But not my mother; she even rubbed warmth into his rubbery ears. She hugged him, she kissed him, she touched noses with him. She did all these things as naturally as if she were doing them to me, but she did none of these things to my other friends—not even to my cousins. And Owen responded to her quite affectionately; he’d blush sometimes, but he’d always smile. His standard, nearly constant frown would disappear; an embarrassed beam would overcome his face.

  I remember him best when he stood level to my mother’s girlish waist; the top of his head, if he stood on his toes, would brush against her breasts. When she was sitting down and he would go over to her, to receive his usual touches and hugs, his face would be dead-even with her breasts. My mother was a sweater girl; she had a lovely figure, and she knew it, and she wore those sweaters of the period that showed it.

  A measure of Owen’s seriousness was that we could talk about the mothers of all our friends, and Owen could be extremely frank in his appraisal of my mother to me; he could get away with it, because I knew he wasn’t joking. Owen never joked.

  “YOUR MOTHER HAS THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS.” No other friend could have said this to me without starting a fight.

  “You really think so?” I asked him.

  “ABSOLUTELY, THE BEST,” he said.

  “What about Missus Wiggin?” I asked him.

  “TOO BIG,” Owen said.

  “Missus Webster?” I asked him.

  “TOO LOW,” Owen said.

  “Missus Merrill?” I asked.

  “VERY FUNNY,” Owen said.

  “Miss Judkins?” I said.

  “I DON’T KNOW,” he said. “I CAN’T REMEMBER THEM. BUT SHE’S NOT A MOTHER.”

  “Miss Farnum!” I said.

  “YOU’RE JUST FOOLING AROUND,” Owen said peevishly.

  “Caroline Perkins!” I said.

  “MAYBE ONE DAY,” he said seriously. “BUT SHE’S NOT A MOTHER, EITHER.”

  “Irene Babson!” I said.

  “DON’T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,” Owen said. “YOUR MOTHER’S THE ONE,” he said worshipfully. “AND SHE SMELLS BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, TOO,” he added. I agreed with him about this; my mother always smelled wonderful.

  Your own mother’s bosom is a strange topic of conversation in which to indulge a friend, but my mother was an acknowledged beauty, and Owen possessed a completely reliable frankness; you could trust him, absolutely.

  My mother was often our driver. She drove me out to the quarry to play with Owen; she picked Owen up to come play with me—and she drove him home. The Meany Granite Quarry was about three miles out of the center of town, not too far for a bike ride—except that the ride was all uphill. Mother would often drive me out there with my bike in the car, and then I could ride my bike home; or Owen would ride his bike to town, and she’d take him and his bike back. The point is, she was so often our chauffeur that he might have seemed to her like a second son. And to the extent that mothers are the chauffeurs of small-town life, Owen had reason to identify her as more his mother than his own mother was.

  When we played at Owen’s, we rarely went inside. We played in the rock piles, in and around the pits, or down by the river, and on Sundays we sat in or on the silent machinery, imagining ourselves in charge of the quarry—or in a war. Owen seemed to find the inside of his house as strange and oppressive as I did. When the weather was inclement, we played at my house—and since the weather in New Hampshire is inclement most of the time, we played most of the time at my house.

  And play is all we did, it seems to me now. We were both eleven the summer my mother died. It was our last year in Little League, which we were already bored with. Baseball, in my opinion, is boring; one’s last year in Little League is only a preview of the boring moments in baseball that lie ahead for many Americans. Unfortunately, Canadians play and watch baseball, too. It is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action. At least, Little Leaguers play the game more quickly than grown-ups—thank God! We never devoted the attention to spitting, or to tugging at our armpits and crotches, that is the essential expression of nervousness in the adult sport. But you still have to wait between pitches, and wait for the catcher and umpire to examine the ball after the pitch—and wait for the catcher to trot out to the mound to say something to the pitcher about how to throw the ball, and wait for the manager to waddle onto the field and worry (with the pitcher and the catcher) about the possibilities of the next pitch.

  That day, in the last inning, Owen and I were just waiting for the game to be over. We were so bored, we had no idea that someone’s life was about to be over, too. Our side was up. Our team was far behind—we had been substituting second-string players for first-string players so often and so randomly that I could no longer recognize half of our own batters—and I had lost track of my place in the batting order. I wasn’t sure when I got to be up to bat next, and I was about to ask our nice, fat manager and coach, Mr. Chickering, when Mr. Chickering turned to Owen Meany and said, “You bat for Johnny, Owen.”

  “But I don’t know when I bat,” I said to Mr. Chickering, who didn’t hear me; he was looking off the field somewhere. He was bored with the game, too, and he was just waiting for it to be over, like the rest of us.

  “I KNOW WHEN YOU BAT,” Owen said. That was forever irritating about Owen; he kept track of things like that. He hardly ever got to play the stupid game, but he paid attention to all the boring details, anyway.

  “IF HARRY GETS ON, I’M ON DECK,” Owen said. “IF BUZZY GETS ON, I’M UP.”

  “Fat chance,” I said. “Or is there only one out?”

  “TWO OUT,” Owen said.

  Everyone on the bench was looking off the field, somewhere—even Owen, now—and I turned my attention to the intriguing object of their interest. Then I saw her: my mother. She’d just arrived. She was always late; she found the game boring, too. She had an instinct for arriving just in time to take me and Owen home. She was even a sweater girl in the summer, because she favored those summer-weight jersey dresses; she had a nice tan, and the dress was a simple, white-cotton one—clinging about the bosom and waist, full skirt below—and she wore a red scarf to hold her hair up, off her bare shoulders. She wasn’t watching the game. She was standing well down the left-field foul line, past third base, looking into the sparse stands, the almost-empty bleacher seats—trying to see if there was anyone she knew there, I guess.

  I realized that everyone was watching her. This was nothing new for me. Everyone was always staring at my mother, but the scrutiny seemed especially intense that day, or else I am remembering it acutely because it was the last time I saw her alive. The pitcher was looking at home plate, the catcher was waiting for the ball; the batter, I suppose, was waiting for the ball, too; but even the fielders had turned their heads to gape at my mother. Everyone on our bench was watching her—Mr. Chickering, the hardest; maybe Owen, the next hardest; maybe me, the least. Everyone in the stands stared back at her as she looked them over.

  It was ball four. Maybe the pitcher had one eye on my mother, too. Harry Hoyt walked. Buzzy Thurston was up, and Owen was on deck. He got up from the bench and looked for the smallest bat. Buzzy hit an easy grounder, a sure out, and my mother never turned her head to follow the play. She started walking parallel to the third-base line; she passed the third-base coach; she was still gazing into the stands when the shortstop bobbled Buzzy Thurston’s easy grounder, and the runners were safe all around.

  Owen was up.

  As a testimony to how boring this particular game was—and how very much lost it was, too—Mr. Chickering told Owen to swing away; Mr. Chickering wanted to go home, too.

  Usually, he said, “Have a good eye, Owen!” That meant, Walk! That meant, Don’t lift the bat off your
shoulders. That meant, Don’t swing at anything.

  But this day, Mr. Chickering said, “Hit away, kid!”

  “Knock the cover off the ball, Meany!” someone on the bench said; then he fell off the bench, laughing.

  Owen, with dignity, stared at the pitcher.

  “Give it a ride, Owen!” I called.

  “Swing away, Owen!” said Mr. Chickering. “Swing away!”

  Now the guys on our bench got into it; it was time to go home. Let Owen swing and miss the next three pitches, and then we were free. In addition, we awaited the potential comedy of his wild, weak swings.

  The first pitch was way outside and Owen let it go.

  “Swing!” Mr. Chickering said. “Swing away!”

  “THAT WAS TOO FAR AWAY!” Owen said. He was strictly by the book, Owen Meany; he did everything by the rules.

  The second pitch almost hit him in the head and he had to dive forward—across the dirt surrounding home plate and into the infield grass. Ball two. Everyone laughed at the explosion of dust created by Owen whacking his uniform; yet Owen made us all wait while he cleaned himself off.

  My mother had her back to home plate; she had caught someone’s eye—someone in the bleacher seats—and she was waving to whoever it was. She was past the third-base bag—on the third-base line, but still nearer third base than home plate—when Owen Meany started his swing. He appeared to start his swing before the ball left the pitcher’s hand—it was a fast ball, such as they are in Little League play, but Owen’s swing was well ahead of the ball, with which he made astonishing contact (a little in front of home plate, about chest-high). It was the hardest I’d ever seen him hit a ball, and the force of the contact was such a shock to Owen that he actually stayed on his feet—for once, he didn’t fall down.

  The crack of the bat was so unusually sharp and loud for a Little League game that the noise captured even my mother’s wandering attention. She turned her head toward home plate—I guess, to see who had hit such a shot—and the ball struck her left temple, spinning her so quickly that one of her high heels broke and she fell forward, facing the stands, her knees splayed apart, her face hitting the ground first because her hands never moved from her sides (not even to break her fall), which later gave rise to the speculation that she was dead before she touched the earth.