by John Irving
More than thirty thousand Canadians served in Vietnam, too. And almost as many Americans came to Canada during the Vietnam War; I was one of them—one who stayed. By March of 1971—when Lt. William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder—I was already a landed immigrant, I’d already applied for Canadian citizenship. It was Christmas, 1972, when President Nixon bombed Hanoi; that was an eleven-day attack, employing more than forty thousand tons of high explosives. As Owen had said: Hanoi could handle it.
What did he ever say that wasn’t right? I remember what he said about Abbie Hoffman, for example—remember Abbie Hoffman? He was the guy who tried to “levitate” the Pentagon off its foundations; he was quite a clown. He was the guy who created the Youth International Party, the “Yippies”; he was very active in antiwar protests, while at the same time he conceived of a meaningful revolution as roughly anything that conveyed irreverence with comedy and vulgarity.
“WHO DOES THIS JERK THINK HE’S HELPING?” Owen said.
It was Owen Meany who kept me out of Vietnam—a trick that only Owen could have managed.
“JUST THINK OF THIS AS MY LITTLE GIFT TO YOU”—that was how he put it.
It makes me ashamed to remember that I was angry with him for taking my armadillo’s claws. God knows, Owen gave me more than he ever took from me—even when you consider that he took my mother.
3
The Angel
* * *
In her bedroom at 80 Front Street, my mother kept a dressmaker’s dummy; it stood at attention next to her bed, like a servant about to awaken her, like a sentry guarding her while she slept—like a lover about to get into bed beside her. My mother was good at sewing; in another life, she could have been a seamstress. Her taste was quite uncomplicated, and she made her own clothes. Her sewing machine, which she also kept in her bedroom, was a far cry from the antique that we children abused in the attic; Mother’s machine was a strikingly modern piece of equipment, and it got a lot of use.
For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked money—because my grandmother was generous to her—she was clever at keeping her personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her dressmaker’s dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she’d return the originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same thing, and they never got angry at her—instead, they felt sorry for her, and took the clothes back without an argument.
“My husband doesn’t like it,” she’d tell them.
She would laugh to my grandmother and me about it. “They must think I’m married to a real tyrant! He doesn’t like anything!” My grandmother, keenly aware that my mother wasn’t married at all, would laugh uncomfortably at this, but it seemed such a solitary and innocent piece of mischief that I’m sure Harriet Wheelwright did not object to her daughter having a little fun.
And Mother made beautiful clothes: simple, as I’ve described—most of them were white or black, but they were made of the best material and they fitted her perfectly. The dresses and blouses and skirts she brought home were multicolored, and multipatterned, but my mother would expertly imitate the cut of the clothes in basic black and white. As in many things, my mother could be extremely accomplished without being in the least original or even inventive. The game she acted out upon the perfect body of the dressmaker’s dummy must have pleased the frugal, Yankee part of her—the Wheelwright in her.
My mother hated darkness. There could never be enough light to suit her. I saw the dummy as a kind of accomplice to my mother in her war against the night. She would close her curtains only when she was undressing for bed; when she had her nightgown and her robe on, she would open the curtains. When she turned out the lamp on her bedside table, whatever light there was in the night flooded into her room—and there was always some light. There were streetlights on Front Street, Mr. Fish left lights on in his house all night, and my grandmother left a light on—it pointlessly illuminated the garage doors. In addition to this neighborhood light, there was starlight, or moonlight, or that unnameable light that comes from the eastern horizon whenever you live near the Atlantic Coast. There was not a night when my mother lay in her bed unable to see the comforting figure of the dressmaker’s dummy; it was not only her confederate against the darkness, it was her double.
It was never naked. I don’t mean that my mother was so crazy about sewing that there was always a dress-in-progress upon the dummy; whether out of a sense of decency, or a certain playfulness that my mother had not outgrown—from whenever it was that she used to dress up her dolls—the dummy was always dressed. And I don’t mean casually; Mother would never allow the dummy to stand around in a slip. I mean that the dummy was always completely dressed—and well dressed, too.
I remember waking up from a nightmare, or waking up and feeling sick, and going down the dark hall from my room to hers—feeling my way to her doorknob. Once in her room, I sensed that I had traveled to another time zone; after the darkness of my room and the black hall, my mother’s room glowed—by comparison to the rest of the house, it was always just before dawn in my mother’s room. And there would be the dummy, dressed for real life, dressed for the world. Sometimes I would think the dummy was my mother, that she was already out of bed and on her way to my room—possibly she’d heard me coughing, or crying out in my sleep; perhaps she got up early; or maybe she was just coming home, very late. Other times, the dummy would startle me; I would have forgotten all about it, and in the gray half-light of that room I would think it was an assailant—for a figure standing so still beside a sleeping body could as easily be an attacker as a guard.
The point is, it was my mother’s body—exactly. “It can make you look twice,” Dan Needham used to say.
Dan told some stories about the dummy, after he married my mother. When we moved into Dan’s dormitory apartment at Gravesend Academy, the dummy—and my mother’s sewing machine—became permanent residents of the dining room, which we never once ate in. We ate most of our meals in the school dining hall; and when we did eat at home, we ate in the kitchen.
Dan tried sleeping with the dummy in the bedroom only a few times. “Tabby, what’s wrong?” he asked it the first night, thinking my mother was up. “Come back to bed,” he said another time. And once he asked the dummy, “Are you ill?” And my mother, not quite asleep beside him, murmured, “No. Are you?”
Of course, it was Owen Meany who experienced the most poignant encounters with my mother’s dummy. Long before Dan Needham’s armadillo changed Owen’s and my life, a game that Owen enjoyed at 80 Front Street involved dressing and undressing my mother’s dummy. My grandmother frowned upon this game—on the basis that we were boys. My mother, in turn, was wary—at first, she feared for her clothes. But she trusted us: we had clean hands, we returned dresses and blouses and skirts to their proper hangers—and her lingerie, properly folded, to its correct drawers. My mother grew so tolerant of our game that she even complimented us—on occasion—for the creation of an outfit she hadn’t thought of. And several times, Owen was so excited by our creation that he begged my mother to model the unusual combination herself.
Only Owen Meany could make my mother blush.
“I’ve had this old blouse and this old skirt for years,” she would say. “I just never thought of wearing them with this belt! You’re a genius, Owen!” she’d tell him.
“BUT EVERYTHING LOOKS GOOD ON YOU,” Owen would tell her, and she’d blush.
If Owen had wanted to be less flattering, he might have remarked that it was easy to dress my mother, or her dummy, because all her clothes were black and white; everything went with everything else.
There was that one red dress, and we could never find a way to make her like it; it was never meant to be a part of her wardrobe, but I believed the Wheelwright in my mother made it impossible for her to
give or throw the dress away. She’d found it in an exceptionally posh Boston store; she loved the clingy material, its scooped back, its fitted waist and full skirt, but she hated the color—a scarlet red, a poinsettia red. She’d meant to copy it—in white or in black—like all the others, but she liked the cut of the dress so much that she copied it in white and in black. “White for a tan,” she said, “and black in the winter.”
When she went to Boston to return the red dress, she said she discovered the store had burned to the ground. For a while, she couldn’t remember the store’s name; but she asked people in the neighborhood, she wrote to the former address. There was some crisis with insurance and it was months before she finally got to talk with someone, and then it was only a lawyer. “But I never paid for the dress!” my mother said. “It was very expensive—I was just trying it out. And I don’t want it. I don’t want to be billed for it, months later. It was very expensive,” she repeated; but the lawyer said it didn’t matter. Everything was burned. Bills of sale were burned. Inventory was burned. Stock was burned. “The telephone melted,” he said. “The sash register melted,” he added. “That dress is the least of their problems. It’s your dress,” the lawyer said. “You got lucky,” he told her, in a way that made her feel guilty.
“Good Heavens,” my grandmother said, “it’s so easy to make Wheelwrights feel guilty. Get hold of yourself, Tabitha, and stop complaining. It’s a lovely dress—it’s a Christmas color,” my grandmother decided. “There are always Christmas parties. It will be perfect.” But I never saw my mother take the dress out of her closet; the only way that dress ever found its way to the dressmaker’s dummy—after my mother had copied it—was when Owen dressed the dummy in it. Not even Owen could find a way to make my mother like that red dress.
“It may be a Christmas color,” she said, “but I’m the wrong color—especially at Christmastime—in that dress.” She meant she looked sallow in red when she didn’t have a tan, and who in New Hampshire has a tan for Christmas?
“THEN WEAR IT IN THE SUMMER!” Owen suggested.
But it was a show-off thing to wear such a bright red color in the summer; that was making too much of a tan, in my mother’s opinion. Dan suggested that my mother donate the red dress to his seedy collection of stage costumes. But my mother thought this was wasteful, and besides: none of the Gravesend Academy boys, and certainly no other woman from our town, had the figure to do that dress justice.
Dan Needham not only took over the dramatic performances of the Gravesend Academy boys, he revitalized the amateur theatrical company of our small town, the formerly lackluster Gravesend Players. Dan talked everyone into The Gravesend Players; he got half the faculty at the academy to bring out the hams in themselves, and he roused the histrionic natures of half the townspeople by inviting them to try out for his productions. He even got my mother to be his leading lady—if only once.
As much as my mother liked to sing, she was extremely shy about acting. She agreed to be in only one play under Dan’s direction, and I think she agreed only as an indication of her commitment to their prolonged courtship, and only if Dan was cast opposite her—if he was the leading man—and if he was not cast as her lover. She didn’t want the town imagining all sorts of things about their courtship, she said. After they were married, my mother wouldn’t act again; neither would Dan. He was always the director; she was always the prompter. My mother had a good voice for a prompter: quiet but clear. All those singing lessons were good for that, I guess.
Her one role, and it was a starring role, was in Angel Street. It was so long ago, I can’t remember the names of the characters, or anything about the actual sets for the play. The Gravesend Players used the Town Hall, and sets were never very specially attended to there. What I remember is the movie that was made from Angel Street; it was called Gaslight, and I’ve seen it several times. My mother had the Ingrid Bergman part; she was the wife who was being driven insane by her villainous husband. And Dan was the villain—he was the Charles Boyer character. If you know the story, although Dan and my mother were cast as husband and wife, there is little love evidenced between them onstage; it was the only time or place I ever saw Dan be hateful to my mother.
Dan tells me that there are still people in Gravesend who give him “evil looks” because of that Charles Boyer role he played; they look at him as if he hit that long-ago foul ball—and as if he meant to.
And only once in that production—it was actually in dress rehearsal—did my mother wear the red dress. It might have been the evening when she is all dressed up to go to the theater (or somewhere) with her awful husband, but he has hidden the painting and accuses her of hiding it, and he makes her believe that she’s hidden it, too—and then he banishes her to her room and doesn’t let her go out at all. Or maybe it was when they go out to a concert and he finds his watch in her purse—he has put it there, but he makes her break down and plead with him to believe her, in front of all those snooty people. Anyway, my mother was supposed to wear the red dress in just one scene, and it was the only scene in the play where she was simply terrible. She couldn’t leave the dress alone—she plucked imaginary lint off it; she kept staring at herself, as if the cleavage of the dress, all by itself, had suddenly plunged a foot; she never stopped itching around, as if the material of the dress made her skin crawl.
Owen and I saw every production of Angel Street; we saw all of Dan’s plays—both the academy plays and the amateur theatricals of The Gravesend Players—but Angel Street was one of the few productions that we saw every showing of. To watch my mother onstage, and to watch Dan being awful to her, was such a riveting lie. It was not the play that interested us—it was what a lie it was: that Dan was awful to my mother, that he meant her harm. That was fascinating.
Owen and I always knew everyone in all the productions of The Gravesend Players. Mrs. Walker, the ogre of our Episcopal Sunday school, played the flirtatious maid in Angel Street—the Angela Lansbury character, if you can believe it. Owen and I couldn’t. Mrs. Walker acting like a tart! Mrs. Walker being vulgar! We kept expecting her to shout: “Owen Meany, you get down from up there! You get back to your seat!” And she wore a French maid’s costume, with a very tight skirt and black, patterned stockings, so that every Sunday thereafter, Owen and I would search in vain for her legs—it was such a surprise to see Mrs. Walker’s legs; and even more of a surprise to discover that she had pretty legs!
The good guy role in Angel Street—the Joseph Cotten part, I call it—was played by our neighbor Mr. Fish. Owen and I knew that he was still in mourning over the untimely death of Sagamore; the horror of the diaper truck disaster on Front Street was still visible in the pained expression with which he followed my mother’s every movement onstage. Mr. Fish was not exactly Owen’s and my idea of a hero; but Dan Needham, with his talent for casting and directing the rankest amateurs, must have been inspired, in the case of Mr. Fish, to tap our neighbor’s sorrow and anger over Sagamore’s encounter with the diaper truck.
Anyway, after the dress rehearsal of Angel Street, it was back to the closet with the red dress—except for those many occasions when Owen put it on the dummy. He must have felt especially challenged by my mother’s dislike of that dress. It always looked terrific on the dummy.
I tell all this only to demonstrate that Owen was as familiar with that dummy as I was; but he was not familiar with it at night. He was not accustomed to the semidarkness of my mother’s room when she was sleeping, when the dummy stood over her—that unmistakable body, in profile, in perfect silhouette. That dummy stood so still, it appeared to be counting my mother’s breaths.
One night at 80 Front Street, when Owen lay in the other twin bed in my room, we were a long while falling asleep because—down the hall—Lydia had a cough. Just when we thought she was over a particular fit, or she had died, she would start up again. When Owen woke me up, I had not been asleep for very long; I was in the grips of such a deep and recent sleep that I couldn’t make mys
elf move—I felt as if I were lying in an extremely plush coffin and my pallbearers were holding me down, although I was doing my best to rise from the dead.
“I FEEL SICK,” Owen was saying.
“Are you going to throw up?” I asked him, but I couldn’t move; I couldn’t even open my eyes.
“I DON’T KNOW,” he said. “I THINK I HAVE A FEVER.”
“Go tell my mother,” I said.
“IT FEELS LIKE A RARE DISEASE,” Owen said.
“Go tell my mother,” I repeated. I listened to him bump into the desk chair. I heard my door open, and close. I could hear his hands brushing against the wall of the hall. I heard him pause with his hand trembling on my mother’s doorknob; he seemed to wait there for the longest time.
Then I thought: He’s going to be surprised by the dummy. I thought of calling out, “Don’t be startled by the dummy standing there; it looks weird in that funny light.” But I was sunk in my coffin of sleep and my mouth was clamped shut. I waited for him to scream. That’s what Owen would do, I was sure; there would be a bloodcurdling wail—“AAAAAAAHHHHHH!”—and the entire household would be awake for hours. Or else, in a fit of bravery, Owen would tackle the dummy and wrestle it to the floor.
But while I was imagining the worst of Owen’s encounter with the dummy, I realized he was back in my room, beside my bed, pulling my hair.
“WAKE UP! BUT BE QUIET!” he whispered. “YOUR MOTHER IS NOT ALONE. SOMEONE STRANGE IS IN HER ROOM. COME SEE! I THINK IT’S AN ANGEL!”