A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  But what really made him cross were the Pygmies; they gave him THE SHIVERS. He wondered if the Pygmies got jobs in other movies; he worried that their blowguns with their poison darts would soon be popular with JUVENILE GANGS.

  “Where?” I asked. “What juvenile gangs?”

  “MAYBE THEY’RE IN BOSTON,” he said.

  We had no idea what to expect from Grandmother’s television.

  There may have been Pygmy movies on The Late Show in 1954, but Owen and I were not allowed to watch The Late Show for several years; my grandmother—for all her love of effort and regulation—imposed no other rules about television upon us. For all I know, there may not have been a Late Show as long ago as 1954; it doesn’t matter. The point is, my grandmother was never a censor; she simply believed that Owen and I should go to bed at a “decent” hour. She watched television all day, and every evening; at dinner, she would recount the day’s inanities to me—or to Owen, or Dan, or even Ethel—and she would offer a hasty preview of the absurdities available for nighttime viewing. On the one hand, she became a slave to television; on the other hand, she expressed her contempt for nearly everything she saw and the energy of her outrage may have added years to her life. She detested TV with such passion and wit that watching television and commenting on it—sometimes, commenting directly to it—became her job.

  There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation’s decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often—as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

  There was much on television that Owen and I were unprepared for; but what we were most unprepared for was my grandmother’s active participation in almost everything we saw. On those rare occasions when we watched television without my grandmother, we were disappointed; without Grandmother’s running, scathing commentary, there were few programs that could sustain our interest. When we watched TV alone, Owen would always say, “I CAN JUST HEAR WHAT YOUR GRANDMOTHER WOULD MAKE OF THIS.”

  Of course, there is no heart—however serious—that finds the death of culture entirely lacking in entertainment; even my grandmother enjoyed one particular television show. To my surprise, Grandmother and Owen were devoted viewers of the same show—in my grandmother’s case, it was the only show for which she felt uncritical love; in Owen’s case, it was his favorite among the few shows he at first adored.

  The unlikely figure who captured the rarely uncritical hearts of my grandmother and Owen Meany was a shameless crowd pleaser, a musical panderer who chopped up Chopin and Mozart and Debussy into two- and three-minute exaggerated flourishes on a piano he played with diamond-studded hands. He at times played a see-through, glass-topped piano, and he was proud of mentioning the hundreds of thousands of dollars that his pianos cost; one of his diamond rings was piano-shaped, and he never played any piano that was not adorned with an ornate candelabrum. In the childhood of television, he was an idol—largely to women older than my grandmother, and of less than half her education; yet my grandmother and Owen Meany loved him. He’d once appeared as a soloist for the Chicago Symphony, when he was only fourteen, but now—in his wavy-haired thirties—he was a man who was more dedicated to the visual than to the acoustic. He wore floor-length furs and sequined suits; he crammed sixty thousand dollars’ worth of chinchilla onto one coat; he had a jacket of twenty-four-karat gold braid; he wore a tuxedo with diamond buttons that spelled out his name.

  “LIBERACE!” Owen cried, every time he saw the man; his TV show appeared ten times a week. He was a ridiculous peacock of a man with a honey-coated, feminine voice and dimples so deep that they might have been the handiwork of a ball peen hammer.

  “Why don’t I slip out and get into something more spectacular?” he would coo; each time, my grandmother and Owen would roar with approval, and Liberace would return to his piano, having changed his sequins for feathers.

  Liberace was an androgynous pioneer, I suppose—preparing the society for freaks like Elton John and Boy George—but I could never understand why Owen and Grandmother liked him. It certainly wasn’t his music, for he edited Mozart in such a jaunty fashion that you thought he was playing “Mack the Knife”; now and then he played “Mack the Knife,” too.

  “He loves his mother,” my grandmother would say, in Liberace’s defense—and, in truth, it seemed to be true; not only did he ooh and aah about his mother on TV, but it was reported that he actually lived with the old lady until she died—in 1980!

  “HE GAVE HIS BROTHER A JOB,” Owen pointed out, “AND I DON’T THINK GEORGE IS ESPECIALLY TALENTED.” Indeed, George, the silent brother, played a straight-man’s violin until he left the act to become the curator of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, where he died—in 1983. But where did Owen get the idea that Liberace was ESPECIALLY TALENTED? To me, his principal gift was how unselfconsciously he amused himself—and he was capable of making fun of himself, too. But my grandmother and Owen Meany twittered over him as hysterically as the blue-haired ladies in Liberace’s TV audience did—especially when the famous fool skipped into the audience to dance with them!

  “He actually likes old people!” my grandmother said in wonder.

  “HE WOULD NEVER HURT ANYONE!” said Owen Meany admiringly.

  At the time, I thought he was a fruitcake, but a London columnist who made a similar slur regarding Liberace’s sexual preferences lost a libel judgment to him. (That was in 1959; on the witness stand, Liberace testified that he was opposed to homosexuality. I remember how Owen and my grandmother cheered!)

  And so, in 1954, my excitement over the new television at 80 Front Street was tempered by the baffling love of my grandmother and Owen Meany for Liberace. I felt quite excluded from their mindless worship of such a kitschy phenomenon—my mother would never have sung along with Liberace!—and I expressed my criticism, as always, to Dan.

  Dan Needham took a creative, often a positive view of misfortune; many faculty members in even the better secondary schools are failures-in-hiding—lazy men and women whose marginal authority can be exercised only over adolescents; but Dan was never one of these. Whether he hoped to retire at Gravesend Academy when he first fell in love and married my mother, I’ll never know; but her loss, and his reaction to that injustice, caused him to devote himself to the development of the education of “the whole boy” in ways that surpassed even the loftily expressed goals in Gravesend’s curriculum—where “the whole boy” was the proposed result of the four-year program of study. Dan became the best of those faculty found at a prep school: he was not only a spirited, good teacher, but he believed that it was a hardship to be young, that it was more difficult to be a teenager than a grown-up—an opinion not widely held among grown-ups, and rarely held among the faculty members at a private school (who more frequently look upon their charges as the privileged louts of the luxury class—spoiled brats in need of discipline). Dan Needham, although he encountered at Gravesend Academy many spoiled brats in need of discipline, simply had more sympathy for people under twenty than he had for people his own age, and older—although he increased his sympathy for the elderly, who (he believed) were suffering a second adolescence and (like the boys at Gravesend) required special care.

  “Your grandmother is getting old,” Dan told me. “She’s suffered losses—her husband, your mother. And Lydia—although neither your grandmother nor Lydia knew it—was possibly your grandmother’s closest friend. Ethel is no better company than a fire hydrant. If your grandmother loves Liberace, don’t fault her for that. Don’t be such a snob! If someone makes her happy, don’t complain,” Dan said.

  But if it was tolerable to be Grandmother’s age and adore Liberace, it was intolerable that Owen Meany should also love that simpering, piano-key smile.

  “I’m sick of how smart Owen thinks he is,” I said to Dan.
“If he’s so smart, how can he like Liberace—at his age?”

  “Owen is smart,” Dan said. “He’s smarter than even he knows. But he is not worldly,” Dan added. “God knows—in his family—what terrible superstitions he’s grown up with! His father is an uneducated mystery, and no one knows the measure of his mother’s mental problems—she’s in such a lunatic state, we can’t even guess how insane she is! Maybe Owen likes Liberace because Liberace couldn’t exist in Gravesend. Why does he think he’d be so happy in Sawyer Depot?” Dan asked me. “Because he’s never been there.”

  I thought Dan was right; but Dan’s theories about Owen were always a little too complete. When I told Dan that Owen remained convinced he had seen the exact date of his own death—and that he refused to tell me what the special day was—Dan too neatly put that problem to rest along with the superstitions Owen’s parents had subjected him to; I couldn’t help thinking that Owen was more creative, and more responsible, than that.

  And if Dan was one of the gifted and tirelessly unselfish faculty members at the academy, his sincere devotion to the goal of “the whole boy” may have blinded him to the faults of the school—and especially to the many flawed members of the faculty and the administration. Dan believed that Gravesend Academy could rescue anyone. All that Owen needed was to survive until he was old enough to enter the academy. Owen’s naturally good mind would mature when confronted with the academic challenges; Owen’s superstitions would vanish in the company of the academy’s more worldly students. Like many dedicated educators, Dan Needham had made education his religion; Owen Meany lacked only the social and intellectual stimulation that a good school could provide. At Gravesend Academy, Dan was sure, the brute-stupid influence of Owen’s parents would be washed clean away—as cleanly as the ocean at Little Boar’s Head could wash the quarry dust from Owen’s body.

  My Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred couldn’t wait for Noah and Simon to be old enough to attend Gravesend Academy. The Eastmans, like Dan, believed in the powers of a good private-school education—specifically, in the case of Noah and Simon, in the power to rescue those two daredevils from the standard fates of rural, north country boys: the marriage of driving fast on the back roads, and beer; and the trailer-park girls in the back seats of those cars, those girls who successfully conspired to get pregnant before their high-school graduations. Like many boys who are sent off to private schools, my cousins Noah and Simon had a wildness within them that couldn’t be safely contained by their homes or their communities; they had dangerous edges in need of blunting. Everyone suspected that the rigors of a good school would have the desired, dulling effect on Noah and Simon—Gravesend Academy would assault them with a host of new demands, of impossible standards. The sheer volume (if not the value) of the homework would tire them out, and everyone knew that tired boys were safer boys; the numbing routine, the strict attentions paid to the dress code, the regulations regarding only the most occasional and highly chaperoned encounters with the female sex … all this would certainly civilize them. Why my Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred were less concerned with civilizing Hester remains a mystery to me.

  That Gravesend Academy did not admit girls, in those days, should not have influenced the Eastmans’ decision to send or not to send Hester off to a private school; there were plenty of private schools for girls, and Hester was in as much need of rescuing from the wildness within her—and from the rural, north country rituals of her sex—as Noah and Simon were in need of saving. But in this interim period of time—when Noah and Simon and Owen and I were all waiting to be old enough to attend the academy—Hester began to resent that there were no plans being made for her salvation. The idea that she was not in need of rescuing would surely have insulted her; and the notion that my aunt and uncle might have considered her beyond saving would have hurt her in another way.

  “EITHER WAY,” said Owen Meany, “THAT’S WHEN HESTER WENT ON THE WARPATH.”

  “What warpath?” Grandmother asked Owen; but Owen and I were careful not to discuss Hester with my grandmother.

  A new bond had developed between Owen and Grandmother because of Liberace; they also watched lots of old movies together and encouraged each other’s constant comments. It was Grandmother’s appreciation of Owen’s commentary, which was as ripe with complaint as her own, that enlisted my grandmother’s support of Owen as Gravesend Academy “material.”

  “Just what do you mean, you think you ‘might not’ go to the academy?” she asked him.

  “WELL, I KNOW I’LL GET IN—AND I KNOW I’LL GET A FULL SCHOLARSHIP, TOO,” Owen said.

  “Of course you will!” my grandmother said.

  “BUT I DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT KIND OF CLOTHES,” Owen said. “ALL THOSE COATS AND TIES, AND DRESS SHIRTS, AND SHOES.”

  “Do you mean, they don’t make them in your size?” Grandmother asked him. “Nonsense! One just has to go shopping in the right places.”

  “I MEAN MY PARENTS CAN’T AFFORD THOSE KIND OF CLOTHES,” Owen said.

  We were watching an old Alan Ladd movie on The Early Show. It was called Appointment with Danger, and Owen thought it was ridiculous that all the men in Gary, Indiana, wore suits and hats.

  “They used to wear them here,” my grandmother said; but, probably, they never wore them at the Meany Granite Quarry.

  Jack Webb, before he was the good cop in Dragnet, was a bad guy in Appointment with Danger; he was, among his other endeavors, attempting to murder a nun. This gave Owen the shivers.

  The movie gave my grandmother the shivers, too, because she recalled that she had seen it at The Idaho in 1951—with my mother.

  “The nun will be all right, Owen,” she told him.

  “IT’S NOT THE IDEA OF MURDERING HER THAT GIVES ME THE SHIVERS,” Owen explained. “IT’S THE IDEA OF NUNS—IN GENERAL.”

  “I know what you mean,” my grandmother said; she harbored her own misgivings about the Catholics.

  “WHAT WOULD IT COST TO HAVE A COUPLE OF SUITS AND A COUPLE OF JACKETS AND A COUPLE OF PAIRS OF DRESS PANTS, AND SHIRTS, AND TIES, AND SHOES—YOU KNOW, THE WORKS?” Owen asked.

  “I’m going to take you shopping myself,” Grandmother told him. “You let me worry about what it will cost. Nobody needs to know what it costs.”

  “MAYBE, IN MY SIZE, IT’S NOT SO EXPENSIVE,” Owen said.

  And so—even without my mother alive to urge him—Owen Meany agreed that he was Gravesend Academy “material.” The academy agreed, too. Even without Dan Needham’s recommendation, they would have admitted Owen with a full scholarship; he was obviously in need of a scholarship, and he had all A’s at Gravesend Junior High School. The problem was—though Dan Needham had legally adopted me, and I therefore had the privileged status of a faculty son—the academy was reluctant to accept me. My junior-high-school performance was so undistinguished that the academy admissions officers advised Dan to have me attend the ninth grade at Gravesend High School; the academy would admit me to their ninth-grade class the following year—when, they said, it would be easier for me to make the adjustment because I would be repeating the ninth grade.

  I had always known I was a weak student; this was less a blow to my self-esteem than it was painful for me to think of Owen moving ahead of me—we wouldn’t be in the same class, we wouldn’t graduate together. There was another, more practical consideration: that, in my senior year, I wouldn’t have Owen around to help me with my homework. That was a promise Owen had made to my mother: that he would always help me with my homework.

  And so, before Grandmother took Owen shopping for his academy clothes, Owen announced his decision to attend the ninth grade at Gravesend High School, too. He would stay with me; he would enter the academy the following year—he could have skipped a grade, yet he volunteered to repeat the ninth grade with me! Dan convinced the admissions officers that although Owen was academically quite advanced, it would also be good for him to repeat a grade, to be a year older as a ninth grader—“because of his physical immaturit
y,” Dan argued. When the admissions officers met Owen, of course they agreed with Dan—they didn’t know that a year older, in Owen’s case, didn’t mean that he’d be a year bigger.

  Dan and my grandmother were quite touched by Owen’s loyalty to me; Hester, naturally, denounced Owen’s behavior as “queer”; naturally, I loved him, and I thanked him for his sacrifice—but in my heart I resented his power over me.

  “DON’T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT,” he said. “WE’RE PALS, AREN’T WE? WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR? I’LL NEVER LEAVE YOU.”

  Toronto: February 5, 1987—Liberace died yesterday; he was sixty-seven. His fans had been maintaining a candlelit vigil outside his Palm Springs mansion, which was formerly a convent. Wouldn’t that have given Owen the shivers? Liberace had revised his former opposition to homosexuality. “If you swing with chickens, that is your perfect right,” he said. Yet he denied the allegations in a 1982 palimony suit that he had paid for the sexual services of a male employee—a former valet and live-in chauffeur. There was a settlement out of court. And Liberace’s manager denied that the entertainer was a victim of AIDS; Liberace’s recent weight loss was the result, the manager said, of a watermelon-only diet.

  What would my grandmother and Owen Meany have said about that?

  “LIBERACE!” Owen would have cried. “WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE? LIBERACE! KILLED BY WATERMELONS!”

  It was Thanksgiving, 1954, before my cousins visited Gravesend and saw Grandmother’s TV at 80 Front Street for themselves. Noah had started at the academy that fall, so he’d watched television with Owen and me on occasional weekends; but no judgment on the culture around us could ever be complete without Simon’s automatic approval of every conceivable form of entertainment, and Hester’s similarly automatic disapproval.

  “Neat!” Simon said; he also thought that Liberace was “neat.”

  “It’s shit, all of it,” said Hester. “Until everything’s in color, and the color’s perfect, TV’s not worth watching.” But Hester was impressed by the energy of Grandmother’s constant criticism of nearly everything she saw; that was a style Hester sought to imitate—for even “shit” was worth watching if it afforded one the opportunity to elaborate on what sort of shit it was.