by John Irving
Whether she died that quickly, I don’t know; but she was dead by the time Mr. Chickering reached her. He was the first one to her. He lifted her head, then turned her face to a slightly more comfortable position; someone said later that he closed her eyes before he let her head rest back on the ground. I remember that he pulled the skirt of her dress down—it was as high as midthigh—and he pinched her knees together. Then he stood up, removing his warm-up jacket, which he held in front of him as a bullfighter holds his cape. I was the first of the players to cross the third-base line, but—for a fat man—Mr. Chickering was agile. He caught me, and he threw the warm-up jacket over my head. I could see nothing; it was impossible to struggle effectively.
“No, Johnny! No, Johnny!” Mr. Chickering said. “You don’t want to see her, Johnny,” he said.
Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
Later, I would remember everything. In revisiting the scene of my mother’s death, I can remember everyone who was in the stands that day; I remember who wasn’t there, too—and what everyone said, and didn’t say, to me. But the first visit to that scene was very bare of details. I remember Chief Pike, our Gravesend chief of police—in later years, I would date his daughter. Chief Pike got my attention only because of what a ridiculous question he asked—and how much more absurd was his elaboration on his question!
“Where’s the ball?” the police chief asked—after the area had been cleared, as they say. My mother’s body was gone and I was sitting on the bench in Mr. Chickering’s lap, his warm-up jacket still over my head—now, because I liked it that way: because I had put it there.
“The ball?” Mr. Chickering said. “You want the fucking ball?”
“Well, it’s the murder weapon, kind of,” Chief Pike said. His Christian name was Ben. “The instrument of death, I guess you’d call it,” Ben Pike said.
“The murder weapon!” Mr. Chickering said, squeezing me as he spoke. We were waiting for either my grandmother or my mother’s new husband to come get me. “The instrument of death!” Mr. Chickering said. “Jesus Christ, Ben—it was a baseball!”
“Well, where is it?” Chief Pike said. “If it killed somebody, I’m supposed to see it—actually, I’m supposed to possess it.”
“Don’t be an asshole, Ben,” Mr. Chickering said.
“Did one of your kids take it?” Chief Pike asked our fat coach and manager.
“Ask them—don’t ask me!” Mr. Chickering said.
All the players had been made to stand behind the bleachers while the police took photographs of my mother. They were still standing there, peering out at the murderous field through the empty seats. Several townspeople were standing with the players—mothers and dads and ardent baseball fans. Later, I would remember Owen’s voice, speaking to me in the darkness—because my head was under the warm-up jacket.
“I’M SORRY!”
Bit by bit, over the years, all of it would come back to me—everyone who was standing there behind the bleachers, and everyone who had gone home.
But then I took the warm-up jacket off my head and all I knew was that Owen Meany was not standing there behind the bleachers. Mr. Chickering must have observed the same thing.
“Owen!” he called.
“He went home!” someone called back.
“He had his bike!” someone said.
I could easily imagine him, struggling with his bike up the Maiden Hill Road—first pedaling, then wobbling, then getting off to walk his bike; all the while, in view of the river. In those days, our baseball uniforms were an itchy wool, and I could see Owen’s uniform, heavy with sweat, the number 3 too big for his back—when he tucked his shirt into his pants, he tucked in half the number, too, so that anyone passing him on the Maiden Hill Road would have thought he was number 2.
I suppose there was no reason for him to wait; my mother always gave Owen and his bike a ride home after our Little League games.
Of course, I thought, Owen has the ball. He was a collector; one had to consider only his baseball cards. “After all,” Mr. Chickering would say—in later years—“it was the only decent hit the kid ever made, the only real wood he ever got on the ball. And even then, it was a foul ball. Not to mention that it killed someone.”
So what if Owen has the ball? I was thinking. But at the time I was mainly thinking about my mother; I was already beginning to get angry with her for never telling me who my father was.
At the time, I was only eleven; I had no idea who else had attended that Little League game, and that death—and who had his own reason for wanting to possess the ball that Owen Meany hit.
2
The Armadillo
* * *
My mother’s name was Tabitha, although no one but my grandmother actually called her that. Grandmother hated nicknames—with the exception that she never called me John; I was always Johnny to her, even long after I’d become just plain John to everyone else. To everyone else, my mother was Tabby. I recall one occasion when the Rev. Lewis Merrill said “Tabitha,” but that was spoken in front of my mother and grandmother—and the occasion was an argument, or at least a plea. The issue was my mother’s decision to leave the Congregational Church for the Episcopal, and the Rev. Mr. Merrill—speaking to my grandmother, as if my mother weren’t in the room—said, “Tabitha Wheelwright is the one truly angelic voice in our choir, and we shall be a choir without a soul if she leaves us.” I must add, in Pastor Merrill’s defense, that he didn’t always speak with such Byzantine muddiness, but he was sufficiently worked up about my mother’s and my own departure from his church to offer his opinions as if he were speaking from the pulpit.
In New Hampshire, when I was a boy, Tabby was a common name for house cats, and there was undeniably a feline quality to my mother—never in the sly or stealthy sense of that word, but in the word’s other catlike qualities: a clean, sleek, self-possessed, strokable quality. In quite a different way from Owen Meany, my mother looked touchable; I was always aware of how much people wanted, or needed, to touch her. I’m not talking only about men, although—even at my age—I was aware of how restlessly men moved their hands in her company. I mean that everyone liked to touch her—and depending on her attitude toward her toucher, my mother’s responses to being touched were feline, too. She could be so chillingly indifferent that the touching would instantly stop; she was well coordinated and surprisingly quick and, like a cat, she could retreat from being touched—she could duck under or dart away from someone’s hand as instinctively as the rest of us can shiver. And she could respond in that other way that cats can respond, too; she could luxuriate in being touched—she could contort her body quite shamelessly, putting more and more pressure against the toucher’s hand, until (I used to imagine) anyone near enough to her could hear her purr.
Owen Meany, who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water … remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain, untouchable … Owen said to me once, “YOUR MOTHER IS SO SEXY, I KEEP FORGETTING SHE’S ANYBODY’S MOTHER.”
As for my Aunt Martha’s insinuations, leaked to my cousins, who dribbled the suggestion, more than ten years late, to me—that my mother was “a little simple”—I believe this is the result of a jealous elder sister’s misunderstanding. My Aunt Martha failed to understand the most basic thing about my mother: that she was born into the entirely wrong body. Tabby Wheelwright looked like a starlet—lush, whimsical, easy to talk into anything; she looked eager to please, or “a little simple,” as my Aunt Martha observed; she looked touchable. But I firmly believe that my mother was of an entirely different character than her appearance would suggest; as her son, I know, she was almost perfect as a mother—her sole imperfection being that she died before she could
tell me who my father was. And in addition to being an almost perfect mother, I also know that she was a happy woman—and a truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy. If her body looked restless, she wasn’t. She was content—she was feline in that respect, too. She appeared to want nothing from life but a child and a loving husband; it is important to note these singulars—she did not want children, she wanted me, just me, and she got me; she did not want men in her life, she wanted a man, the right man, and shortly before she died, she found him.
I have said that my Aunt Martha is a “lovely woman,” and I mean it: she is warm, she is attractive, she is decent and kind and honorably intentioned—and she has always been loving to me. She loved my mother, too; she just never understood her—and when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is going to be trouble.
I have said that my mother was a sweater girl, and that is a contradiction to the general modesty with which she dressed; she did show off her bosom—but never her flesh, except for her athletic, almost-innocent shoulders. She did like to bare her shoulders. And her dress was never slatternly, never wanton, never garish; she was so conservative in her choice of colors that I remember little in her wardrobe that wasn’t black or white, except for some accessories—she had a fondness for red (in scarves, in hats, in shoes, in mittens and gloves). She wore nothing that was tight around her hips, but she did like her small waist and her good bosom to show—she did have THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS, as Owen observed.
I do not think that she flirted; she did not “come on” to men—but how much of that would I have seen, up to the age of eleven? So maybe she did flirt—a little. I used to imagine that her flirting was reserved for the Boston & Maine, that she was absolutely and properly my mother in every location upon this earth—even in Boston, the dreaded city—but that on the train she might have looked for men. What else could explain her having met the man who fathered me there? And some six years later—on the same train—she met the man who would marry her! Did the rhythm of the train on the tracks somehow unravel her and make her behave out of character? Was she altered in transit, when her feet were not upon the ground?
I expressed this absurd fear only once, and only to Owen. He was shocked.
“HOW COULD YOU THINK SUCH A THING ABOUT YOUR OWN MOTHER?” he asked me.
“But you say she’s sexy, you’re the one who raves about her breasts,” I told him.
“I DON’T RAVE,” Owen told me.
“Well, okay—I mean, you like her,” I said. “Men, and boys—they like her.”
“FORGET THAT ABOUT THE TRAIN,” Owen said. “YOUR MOTHER IS A PERFECT WOMAN. NOTHING HAPPENS TO HER ON THE TRAIN.”
Well, although she said she “met” my father on the Boston & Maine, I never imagined that my conception occurred there; it is a fact, however, that she met the man she would marry on that train. That story was neither a lie nor a secret. How many times I asked her to tell me that story! And she never hesitated, she never lacked enthusiasm for telling that story—which she told the same way, every time. And after she was dead, how many times I asked him to tell me the story—and he would tell it, with enthusiasm, and the same way, every time.
His name was Dan Needham. How many times I have prayed to God that he was my real father!
My mother and my grandmother and I—and Lydia, minus one of her legs—were eating dinner on a Thursday evening in the spring of 1948. Thursdays were the days my mother returned from Boston, and we always had a better-than-average dinner those nights. I remember that it was shortly after Lydia’s leg had been amputated, because it was still a little strange to have her eating with us at the table (in her wheelchair), and to have the two new maids doing the serving and the clearing that only recently Lydia had done. And the wheelchair was still new enough to Lydia so that she wouldn’t allow me to push her around in it; only my grandmother and my mother—and one of the two new maids—were allowed to. I don’t remember all the trivial intricacies of Lydia’s wheelchair rules—just that the four of us were finishing our dinner, and Lydia’s presence at the dinner table was as new and noticeable as fresh paint.
And my mother said, “I’ve met another man on the good old Boston and Maine.”
It was not intended, I think, as an entirely mischievous remark, but the remark took instant and astonishing hold of Lydia and my grandmother and me. Lydia’s wheelchair surged in reverse away from the table, dragging the tablecloth after her, so that all the dishes and glasses and silverware jumped—and the candlesticks wobbled. My grandmother seized the large brooch at the throat of her dress—she appeared to have suddenly choked on it—and I snapped so substantial a piece of my lower lip between my teeth that I could taste my blood.
We all thought that my mother was speaking euphemistically. I wasn’t present when she’d announced the particulars of the case of the first man she claimed she’d met on the train. Maybe she’d said, “I met a man on the good old Boston and Maine—and now I’m pregnant!” Maybe she said, “I’m going to have a baby as a result of a fling I had with a total stranger I met on the good old Boston and Maine—someone I never expect to see again!”
Well, anyway, if I can’t re-create the first announcement, the second announcement was spectacular enough. We all thought that she was telling us that she was pregnant again—by a different man!
And as an example of how wrong my Aunt Martha was, concerning her point of view that my mother was “a little simple,” my mother instantly saw what we were thinking, and laughed at us, very quickly, and said, “No, no! I’m not going to have a baby. I’m never going to have another baby—I have my baby. I’m just telling you that I’ve met a man. Someone I like.”
“A different man, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked, still holding her brooch.
“Oh, not that man! Don’t be silly,” my mother said, and she laughed again—her laughter drawing Lydia’s wheelchair, ever so cautiously, back toward the table.
“A man you like, you mean, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked.
“I wouldn’t mention him if I didn’t like him,” my mother said. “I want you to meet him,” she said to us all.
“You’ve dated him?” my grandmother asked.
“No! I just met him—just today, on today’s train!” my mother said.
“And already you like him?” Lydia asked, in a tone of voice so perfectly copied from my grandmother that I had to look to see which one of them was speaking.
“Well, yes,” my mother said seriously. “You know such things. You don’t need that much time.”
“How many times have you known such things—before?” my grandmother asked.
“This is the first time, really,” my mother said. “That’s why I know.”
Lydia and my grandmother instinctively looked at me, perhaps to ascertain if I’d understood my mother correctly: that the time “before,” when she’d had her “fling,” which had led to me, was not a time when my mother had enjoyed any special feelings toward whoever my father was. But I had another idea. I was thinking that maybe this was my father, that maybe this was the first man she’d met on the train, and he’d heard about me, and he was curious about me and wanted to see me—and something very important had kept him away for the last six years. There had, after all, been a war back when I’d been born, in 1942.
But as another example of how wrong my Aunt Martha was, my mother seemed to see what I was imagining, immediately, because she said, “Please understand, Johnny, that this man has no relationship whatsoever to the man who is your father—this is a man I saw for the first time today, and I like him. That’s all: I just like him, and I think you’ll like him, too.”
“Okay,” I said, but I couldn’t look at her. I remember keeping my eyes on Lydia’s hands, gripping her wheelchair—and on my grandmother’s hands, toying with her brooch.
“What does he do, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked. That was a Wheelwright thing to ask. In my
grandmother’s opinion, what one “did” was related to where one’s family “came from”—she always hoped it was from England, and in the seventeenth century. And the short list of things that my grandmother approved of “doing” was no less specific than seventeenth-century England.
“Dramatics,” my mother said. “He’s a sort of actor—but not really.”
“An unemployed actor?” my grandmother asked. (I think now that an employed actor would have been unsuitable enough.)
“No, he’s not looking for employment as an actor—he’s strictly an amateur actor,” my mother said. And I thought of those people in the train stations who handled puppets—I meant street performers, although at six years old I hadn’t the vocabulary to suggest this. “He teaches acting, and putting on plays,” my mother said.
“A director?” my grandmother asked, more hopefully.
“Not exactly,” my mother said, and she frowned. “He was on his way to Gravesend for an interview.”
“I can’t imagine there’s much opportunity for theater here!” my grandmother said.
“He had an interview at the academy,” my mother said. “It’s a teaching job—the history of drama, or something. And the boys have their own theatrical productions—you know, Martha and I used to go to them. It was so funny how they had to dress up as girls!”
That was the funniest part of those productions, in my memory; I’d had no idea that directing such performances was anyone’s job.
“So he’s a teacher?” my grandmother asked. This was borderline acceptable to Harriet Wheelwright—although my grandmother was a shrewd enough businesswoman to know that the dollars and cents of teaching (even at as prestigious a prep school as Gravesend Academy) were not exactly in her league.