by John Irving
At the beach, at Little Boar’s Head, we took off our shoes and walked in the surf, while Mr. Meany dutifully waited—the engine still idling. Owen carried the dummy the whole time, careful not to go very far into the waves; the red dress never got wet.
“I’LL KEEP THE DUMMY WITH ME,” he said. “YOUR GRANDMOTHER SHOULDN’T HAVE THIS AROUND TO LOOK AT, EITHER—NOT TO MENTION, YOU,” he added.
“Not to mention, you,” Hester said, but Owen ignored this, high-stepping through the surf.
When Mr. Meany dropped Hester and me at 80 Front Street, the downstairs lights in the houses along the street were off—except for the lights in Grandmother’s house—but a few people were still upstairs, in their beds, reading. On very hot nights, Mr. Fish slept in the hammock on his screened-in porch, so Hester and I kept our voices down, saying good night to Owen and his father; Owen told his father to not turn around in our driveway. Because the dressmaker’s dummy wouldn’t fit in the cab—because it couldn’t bend—Owen stood on the flatbed with his arm around the hips of the red dress as the truck pulled away. With his free hand, he held fast to one of the loading chains—they were the chains for fastening down the curbstones or the monuments.
If Mr. Fish had been in his hammock, and if he had woken up, he would have seen something unforgettable passing under the Front Street lamplights. The dark and massive truck, lumbering into the night, and the woman in the red dress—a headless woman with a stunning figure, but with no arms—held around her hips by a child attached to a chain, or a dwarf.
“I hope you know he’s crazy,” said Hester tiredly.
But I looked at Owen’s departing image with wonder: he had managed to orchestrate my mourning on the evening of my mother’s funeral. And, like my armadillo’s claws, he’d taken what he wanted—in this case, my mother’s double, her shy dressmaker’s dummy in that unloved dress. Later, I thought that Owen must have known the dummy was important; he must have foreseen that even that unwanted dress would have a use—that it had a purpose. But then, that night, I was inclined to agree with Hester; I thought the red dress was merely Owen’s idea of a talisman—an amulet, to ward off the evil powers of that “angel” Owen thought he’d seen. I didn’t believe in angels then.
Toronto: February 1, 1987—the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany. I believe in angels now. I don’t necessarily claim that this is an advantage; for example, it was of no particular help to me during last night’s Vestry elections—I wasn’t even nominated. I’ve been a parish officer so many times, for so many years, I shouldn’t complain; perhaps my fellow parishioners thought they were being kind to me—to give me a year off. Indeed, had I been nominated for warden or deputy warden, I might have declined to accept the nomination. I admit, I’m tired of it; I’ve done more than my share for Grace Church on-the-Hill. Still, I was surprised I wasn’t nominated for a single office; out of politeness—if not out of recognition of my faithfulness and my devotion—I thought I should have been nominated for something.
I shouldn’t have let the insult—if it even is an insult—distract me from the Sunday service; that was not good. Once I was rector’s warden to Canon Campbell—back when Canon Campbell was our rector; when he was alive, I admit I felt a little better-treated. But since Canon Mackie has been rector, I’ve been deputy rector’s warden once—and people’s warden, too. And one year I was chairman of sidesmen; I’ve also been parish council chairman. It’s not the fault of Canon Mackie that he’ll never replace Canon Campbell in my heart; Canon Mackie is warm and kind—and his loquaciousness doesn’t offend me. It is simply that Canon Campbell was special, and those early days were special, too.
I shouldn’t brood about such a silly business as the annual installation of parish officers; especially, I shouldn’t allow such thoughts to distract me from the choral Eucharist and the sermon. I confess to a certain childishness.
The visiting preacher distracted me, too. Canon Mackie is keen on having guest ministers deliver the sermon—which does spare us the canon’s loquacity—but whoever the preacher was today, he was some sort of “reformed” Anglican, and his thesis seemed to be that everything that first appears to be different is actually the same. I couldn’t help thinking what Owen Meany would say about that.
In the Protestant tradition, we turn to the Bible; when we want an answer, that’s where we look. But even the Bible distracted me today. For the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany, Canon Mackie chose Matthew—those troublesome Beatitudes; at least, they always troubled Owen and me.
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
It’s just so hard to imagine “the poor in spirit” achieving very much.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
I was eleven years old when my mother was killed; I mourn her still. I mourn for more than her, too. I don’t feel “comforted”; not yet.
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
“BUT THERE’S NO EVIDENCE FOR THAT,” Owen told Mrs. Walker in Sunday school.
And on and on:
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.
“BUT WILL IT HELP THEM—TO SEE GOD?” Owen Meany asked Mrs. Walker.
Did it help Owen—to see God?
“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus says. “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
That was always something Owen and I found hard to take—a reward in heaven.
“GOODNESS AS BRIBERY,” Owen called it—an argument that eluded Mrs. Walker.
And then—after the Beatitudes, and the sermon by the stranger—the Nicene Creed felt forced to me. Canon Campbell used to explain everything to me—the part about believing in “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” bothered me; Canon Campbell helped me see beyond the words, he made me see in what sense “Catholic,” in what way “Apostolic.” Canon Mackie says I worry about “mere words” too much. Mere words?
And then there was the business about “all nations,” and—specifically—“our Queen”; I’m not an American anymore, but I still have trouble with the part that goes “grant unto thy servant ELIZABETH our Queen”; and to think that it is possible “to lead all nations in the way of righteousness” is utterly ridiculous!
And before I received Holy Communion, I balked at the general Confession.
“We acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness.” Some Sundays, this is so hard to say; Canon Campbell indulged me when I confessed to him that this confession was difficult for me, but Canon Mackie employs the “mere words” thesis with me until I am seeing him in a most unforgiving light. And when Canon Mackie proceeded with the Holy Eucharist, to the Thanksgiving and Consecration, which he sang, I even judged him unfairly for his singing voice, which is not and never will be the equal of Canon Campbell’s—God Rest His Soul.
In the entire service, only the psalm struck me as true, and properly shamed me. It was the Thirty-seventh Psalm, and the choir appeared to sing it directly to me:
Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:
fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil.
Yes, it’s true: I should “leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure.” What good is anger? I have been angry before. I have been “moved to do evil,” too—as you shall see.
4
The Little Lord Jesus
* * *
The first Christmas following my mother’s death was the first Christmas I didn’t spend in Sawyer Depot. My grandmother told Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred that if the family were all together, my mother’s absence would be too apparent. If Dan and Grandmother and I were alone in Gravesend, and if the Eastmans were alone in Sawyer Depot, my grandmother argued that we would all miss each other; then, she reasoned, we wo
uldn’t miss my mother so much. Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving—Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who’s not home.
Dividing my time between my grandmother’s house on 80 Front Street and the abandoned dormitory where Dan had his small apartment also gave me my first impressions of Gravesend Academy at Christmas, when all the boarders had gone home. The bleak brick and stone, the ivy frosted with snow, the dormitories and classroom buildings with their windows all closed—with a penitentiary sameness—gave the campus the aura of a prison enduring a hunger strike; and without the students hurrying on the quadrangle paths, the bare, bone-colored birches stood out in black-and-white against the snow, like charcoal drawings of themselves, or skeletons of the alumni.
The ringing of the chapel bell, and the bell for class hours, was suspended; and so my mother’s absence was underlined by the absence of Gravesend’s most routine music, the academy chimes I’d taken for granted—until I couldn’t hear them. There was only the solemn, hourly bonging of the great clock in the bell tower of Hurd’s Church; especially on the most brittle-cold days of December, and against the landscape of old snow—thawed and refrozen to the dull, silver-gray sheen of pewter—the clock-bell of Hurd’s Church tolled the time like a death knell.
’Twas not the season to be jolly—although dear Dan Needham tried. Dan drank too much, and he filled the empty, echoing dormitory with his strident caroling; his rendition of the Christmas carols was quite painfully a far cry from my mother’s singing. And whenever Owen would join Dan for a verse of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” or—worse—“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” the old stone stairwells of Dan’s dorm resounded with a dirgeful music that was not at all Christmasy but strictly mournful; they were the voices of the ghosts of those Gravesend boys unable to go home for Christmas, singing to their faraway families.
The Gravesend dormitories were named after the long-ago, dead-and-buried faculty and headmasters of the school: Abbot, Amen, Bancroft, Dunbar, Gilman, Gorham, Hooper, Lambert, Perkins, Porter, Quincy, Scott. Dan Needham lived in Waterhouse Hall, so named for some deceased curmudgeon of a classicist, a Latin teacher named Amos Waterhouse, whose rendering of Christmas carols in Latin—I was sure—could not have been worse than the gloomy muddle made of them by Dan and Owen Meany.
Grandmother’s response to my mother being dead for Christmas was to refuse to participate in the seasonal decoration of 80 Front Street; the wreaths were nailed too low on the doors, and the bottom half of the Christmas tree was overhung with tinsel and ornaments—the result of Lydia applying her heavy-handed touch at wheelchair level.
“We’d all have been better off in Sawyer Depot,” Dan Needham announced, in his cups.
Owen sighed. “I GUESS I’LL NEVER GET TO GO TO SAWYER DEPOT,” he said morosely.
Where Owen and I went instead was into every room of every boy who’d gone home for Christmas from Waterhouse Hall; Dan Needham had a master key. Almost every afternoon, Dan rehearsed The Gravesend Players for their annual version of A Christmas Carol; it was becoming old hat for many of the players, but—to freshen their performances—Dan made them change roles from one Christmas to the next. Hence, Mr. Fish, who one year had been Marley’s Ghost—and another year, the Ghost of Christmas Past—was now Scrooge himself. After years of using conventionally adorable children who muffed their lines, Dan had begged Owen to be Tiny Tim, but Owen said that everyone would laugh at him—if not on sight, at least when he first spoke—and besides: Mrs. Walker was playing Tiny Tim’s mother. That, Owen claimed, would give him THE SHIVERS.
It was bad enough, Owen maintained, that he was subject to seasonal ridicule for the role he played in the Christ Church Christmas Pageant. “JUST YOU WAIT,” he said darkly to me. “THE WIGGINS ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE ME THE STUPID ANGEL AGAIN!”
It would be my first Christmas pageant, since I was usually in Sawyer Depot for the last Sunday before Christmas; but Owen repeatedly complained that he was always cast as the Announcing Angel—a role forced upon him by the Rev. Captain Wiggin and his stewardess wife, Barbara, who maintained that there was “no one cuter” for the part than Owen, whose chore it was to descend—in a “pillar of light” (with the substantial assistance of a cranelike apparatus to which he was attached, with wires, like a puppet). Owen was supposed to announce the wondrous new presence that lay in the manger in Bethlehem, all the while flapping his arms (to draw attention to the giant wings glued to his choir robe, and to attempt to quiet the giggles of the congregation).
Every year, a grim group of shepherds huddled at the communion railing and displayed their cowardice to God’s Holy Messenger; a motley crew, they tripped on their robes and knocked off each other’s turbans and false beards with their staffs and shepherding crooks. Barb Wiggin had difficulty locating them in the “pillar of light,” while simultaneously illuminating the Descending Angel, Owen Meany.
Reading from Luke, the rector said, “‘And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear.’” Whereupon, Mr. Wiggin paused for the full effect of the shepherds cringing at the sight of Owen struggling to get his feet on the floor—Barb Wiggin operated the creaky apparatus that lowered Owen, too, placing him dangerously near the lit candles that simulated the campfires around which the shepherds watched their flock.
“‘BE NOT AFRAID,’” Owen announced, while still struggling in the air; “‘FOR BEHOLD, I BRING YOU GOOD NEWS OF A GREAT JOY WHICH WILL COME TO ALL THE PEOPLE; FOR TO YOU IS BORN THIS DAY IN THE CITY OF DAVID A SAVIOR, WHO IS CHRIST THE LORD. AND THIS WILL BE A SIGN FOR YOU: YOU WILL FIND A BABE WRAPPED IN SWADDLING CLOTHES AND LYING IN A MANGER.’” Whereupon, the dazzling, if jerky, “pillar of light” flashed, like lightning, or perhaps Christ Church suffered an electrical surge, and Owen was raised into darkness—sometimes, yanked into darkness; and once, so quickly that one of his wings was torn from his back and fell among the confused shepherds.
The worst of it was that Owen had to remain in the air for the rest of the pageant—there being no method of lowering him out of the light. If he was to be concealed in darkness, he had to stay suspended from the wires—above the babe lying in the manger, above the clumsy, nodding donkeys, the stumbling shepherds, and the unbalanced kings staggering under the weight of their crowns.
An additional evil, Owen claimed, was that whoever played Joseph was always smirking—as if Joseph had anything to smirk about. “WHAT DOES JOSEPH HAVE TO DO WITH ANY OF IT?” Owen asked crossly. “I SUPPOSE HE HAS TO STAND AROUND THE MANGER, BUT HE SHOULDN’T SMIRK!” And always the prettiest girl got to play Mary. “WHAT DOES PRETTY HAVE TO DO WITH IT?” Owen asked. “WHO SAYS MARY WAS PRETTY?”
And the individual touches that the Wiggins brought to the Christmas Pageant reduced Owen to incoherent fuming—for example, the smaller children disguised as turtledoves. The costumes were so absurd that no one knew what these children were supposed to be; they resembled science-fiction angels, spectacular life-forms from another galaxy, as if the Wiggins had decided that the Holy Nativity had been attended by beings from faraway planets (or should have been so attended). “NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE STUPID TURTLEDOVES ARE!” Owen complained.
As for the Christ Child himself, Owen was outraged. The Wiggins insisted that the Baby Jesus not shed a tear, and in this pursuit they were relentless in gathering dozens of babies backstage; they substituted babies so freely that the Christ Child was whisked from the manger at the first unholy croak or gurgle—instantly replaced by a mute baby, or at least a stuporous one. For this chore of supplying a fresh, silent baby to the manger—in an instant—an extended line of ominous-looking grown-ups reached into the shadows beyond the pulpit, behind the purple-a
nd-maroon curtains, under the cross. These large and sure-handed adults, deft at baby-handling, or at least certain not to drop a quickly moving Christ Child, were strangely out of place at the Nativity. Were they kings or shepherds—and why were they so much bigger than the other kings and shepherds, if not exactly larger than life? Their costumes were childish, although some of their beards were real, and they appeared less to relish the spirit of Christmas than they seemed resigned to their task—like a bucket brigade of volunteer firemen.
Backstage, the mothers fretted; the competition for the most properly behaved Christ Child was keen. Every Christmas, in addition to the Baby Jesus, the Wiggins’ pageant gave birth to many new members of that most monstrous sorority: stage mothers. I told Owen that perhaps he was better off to be “above” these proceedings, but Owen hinted that I and other members of our Sunday school class were at least partially responsible for his humiliating elevation—for hadn’t we been the first to lift Owen into the air? Mrs. Walker, Owen suggested, might have given Barb Wiggin the idea of using Owen as the airborne angel.
It’s no wonder that Owen was not tickled by Dan’s notion of casting him as Tiny Tim. “WHEN I SAY, ‘BE NOT AFRAID; FOR BEHOLD, I BRING YOU GOOD NEWS,’ ALL THE BABIES CRY AND EVERYONE ELSE LAUGHS. WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY’LL DO IF I SAY, ‘GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE!’?”
It was his voice, of course; he could have said, “HERE COMES THE END OF THE WORLD!” People still would have fallen down, laughing. It was torture to Owen that he was without much humor—he was only serious—while at the same time he had a chiefly comic effect on the multitude.
No wonder he commenced worrying about the Christmas Pageant as early as the end of November, for in the service bulletin of the Last Sunday After Pentecost there was already an announcement, “How to Participate in the Christmas Pageant.” The first rehearsal was scheduled after the Annual Parish Meeting and the Vestry elections—almost at the beginning of our Christmas vacation. “What would you like to be?” the sappy bulletin asked. “We need kings, angels, shepherds, donkeys, turtledoves, Mary, Joseph, babies, and more!”