A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “How?” I asked the ski bum.

  “An overdose,” he said; he sounded disappointed—as if he’d been hoping for something bloodier. “Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was suicide,” he said.

  Maybe it was the Kennedys, I thought. It made me feel afraid; at first, that summer, it was something vague that had made me feel afraid. Now something concrete made me feel afraid—but my fear itself was still vague: what could Marilyn Monroe’s death ever have to do with me?

  “IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US,” said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. “SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY—NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING—I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE—JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT’S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY—AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY,” he repeated; he was on a roll. I could hear Hester playing her guitar in the background, as if she were trying to improvise a folk song from everything he said. “AND THOSE MEN,” he said. “THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN—DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN’T HAVE LOVED HER—THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL. THAT’S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY—IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON’T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD—THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL. THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT KENNEDY WAS: A MORALIST. BUT HE WAS JUST GIVING US A SNOW JOB, HE WAS JUST BEING A GOOD SEDUCER. I THOUGHT HE WAS A SAVIOR. I THOUGHT HE WANTED TO USE HIS POWER TO DO GOOD. BUT PEOPLE WILL SAY AND DO ANYTHING JUST TO GET THE POWER; THEN THEY’LL USE THE POWER JUST TO GET A THRILL. MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN—MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN—SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY’RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,” said Owen Meany. “WE’RE GOING TO BE USED.”

  Georgian Bay: July 26, 1987—The Toronto Star says that President Reagan “actually led the first efforts to conceal essential details of his secret arms-for-hostages program and keep it alive after it became public.” The Toronto Star added that “the President subsequently made misleading statements about the arms sales”—on four separate occasions!

  Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement—against the Vietnam War—was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all.

  Look at the United States today. Are they drafting young Americans to fight in Nicaragua? No; not yet. Are masses of young Americans outraged at the Reagan administration’s shoddy and deceitful behavior? Ho hum; not hardly.

  I know what Owen Meany would say about that; I know what he did say—and it still applies.

  “THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM,” Owen said. He said that once—when Hester proposed abolishing the draft. “IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT,” said Owen Meany, “MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.”

  I saw a mink run under the boathouse today; it had such a slender body, it was only slightly larger than a weasel—with a weasel’s undulating movement. It had such a thick, glossy coat of fur, I was instantly reminded of Larry Lish’s mother. Where is she now? I wondered.

  I know where Larry Lish is; he’s a well-known journalist in New York—“an investigative reporter” is what he’s called. I’ve read a few of his pieces; they’re not bad—he was always clever—and I notice that he’s acquired a necessary quality in his voice (“necessary,” I think, if a journalist is going to make a name for himself, and gain an audience, and so forth). Larry Lish has become particularly self-righteous, and the quality in his voice that I call “necessary” is a tone of moral indignation. Larry Lish has become a moralist—imagine that!

  I wonder what his mother has become. If she got the right guy to marry her—before it was too late—maybe Mitzy Lish has become a moralist, too!

  In the fall of ’62 when Owen Meany and I began our life as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire, we enjoyed certain advantages that set us apart from our lowly, less-experienced peers. We were not subject to dormitory rules because we lived at home—we were commuters from Gravesend and were permitted to park our own means of transportation on campus, which other freshmen were not allowed to do. I divided my at-home time between Dan and my grandmother; this had an added advantage, in that when there was a late-night university party in Durham, I could tell Dan I was staying with my grandmother and tell Grandmother I was staying with Dan—and never come home! Owen was not required to be home at any special time; considering that he spent every night of the summer at Hester’s apartment, I was surprised that he was going through the motions of living at home at all. Hester’s roommates were back, however; if Owen stayed at Hester’s, there was no question regarding the bed in which he spent the night—whether he and Hester “did it” or not, they were at least familiar with the intimate proximity that Hester’s queen-size mattress forced upon them. But once our classes began, Owen didn’t sleep at Hester’s apartment more than once or twice a week.

  Our other advantages over our fellow freshmen were several. We had suffered the academic rigors of Gravesend Academy; the course work at the University of New Hampshire was very easy in comparison. I benefited greatly from this, because—as Owen had taught me—I chiefly needed to give myself more time to do the work assigned. So much less work was assigned than what I had learned to expect from the academy that—for once—I had ample time. I got good grades, almost easily; and for the first time—although this took two or three years—I began to think of myself as “smart.” But the relatively undemanding expectations of the university had quite a different effect on Owen Meany.

  He could do everything he was asked without half trying, and this made him lazy. He quickly fell into a habit of getting no better grades than he needed to satisfy his ROTC “scholarship”; to my surprise, his best grades were always in the ROTC courses—in so-called Military Science. We took many of the same classes; in English and History, I actually got better grades than Owen—The Voice had become indifferent about his writing!

  “I AM DEVELOPING A MINIMALIST’S STYLE,” he told our English teacher, who’d complained that Owen never expanded a single point in any of his papers; he never employed more than one example for each point he made. “FIRST YOU TELL ME I CAN’T WRITE USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, NOW YOU WANT ME TO ‘ELABORATE’—TO BE MORE ‘EXPANSIVE.’ IS THAT CONSISTENT?” he asked our English teacher. “MAYBE YOU WANT ME TO CHANGE MY PERSONALITY, TOO?”

  If, at Gravesend Academy, The Voice had persuaded the majority of the faculty that his eccentricities and peculiarities were not only his individual rights but were inseparable from his generally acknowledged brilliance, the more diverse but also more specialized faculty at the University of New Hampshire were not interested in “the whole boy,” not at all; they were not even a community, the university faculty, and they shared no general opinion that Owen Meany was brilliant, they expressed no general concern that his individual rights needed protection, and they had no tolerance for eccentricities and peculiarities. The classes they taught were for no student’s special development; their interests were the subject themselves—their passions w
ere for the politics of the university, or of their own departments within it—and their overall view of us students was that we should conform ourselves to their methods of their disciplines of study.

  Owen Meany, who had been so conspicuous—all my life—was easily overlooked at the University of New Hampshire. He was in none of his classes as distinguished as the tomato-red pickup, which was so readily distinguishable among the many economy-model cars that most parents bought for most students who had their own cars—my grandmother had bought me a Volkswagen Beetle; in the campus parking lots, there were so many VWs of the same year and navy-blue color that I could identify mine only by its license plate or by the familiarity of whatever I had left on the back seat.

  And although Owen and I first counted Hester’s friendship as an advantage, her friendship was another means by which Owen Meany became lost in Durham; Hester had a lot of friends among the seniors in what was our first year. These seniors were the people Owen and I hung out with; we didn’t have to make any friends among the freshmen—and when Hester and her friends graduated, Owen and I didn’t have any friends.

  As for whatever had made me feel afraid in the summer of ’62——whatever that fear was, it was replaced by a kind of solitariness, a feeling of being oddly set apart, but without loneliness; the loneliness would come later. And as for fear, you would have thought the Cuban Missile Crisis—that October—would have sufficed; you would have thought that would have scared the shit out of us, as people in New Hampshire are always untruthfully claiming. But Owen said to Hester and me, and to a bunch of hangers-on in Hester’s apartment, “DON’T BE AFRAID. THIS IS NO BIG DEAL, THIS IS JUST A BIT OF NUCLEAR BLUFFING—NOTHING HAPPENS AS A RESULT OF THIS. BELIEVE ME. I KNOW.”

  What he meant was that he believed he “knew” what would happen to him; that it wasn’t missiles that would get him—neither the Soviets’ nor ours—and that, whatever “it” was, it didn’t happen in October 1962.

  “How do you know nothing’s going to happen?” someone asked him. It was the guy who hung around Hester’s apartment as if he were waiting for Owen Meany to drop dead. He kept encouraging Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet—especially Justine and Clea, which this guy claimed he had read four or five times. Hester wasn’t much of a reader, and I had read only Justine. Owen Meany had read the whole quartet and had told Hester and me not to bother with the last three novels.

  “IT’S JUST MORE OF THE SAME, AND NOT SO WELL DONE,” Owen said. “ONE BOOK ABOUT HAVING SEX IN A FOREIGN ATMOSPHERE IS ENOUGH.”

  “What do you know about ‘sex in a foreign atmosphere’?” the quartet-lover had asked Owen. Owen had not answered the guy. He surely knew the guy was a rival for Hester’s affections; he also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

  “Hey!” the guy shouted at Owen. “I’m talking to you. What makes you think you know there’s not going to be a war?”

  “OH, THERE’S GOING TO BE A WAR, ALL RIGHT,” said Owen Meany. “BUT NOT NOW—NOT OVER CUBA. EITHER KHRUSHCHEV WILL PULL THE MISSILES OUT OF CUBA OR KENNEDY WILL OFFER HIM SOMETHING TO HELP HIM SAVE FACE.”

  “This little man knows everything,” the guy said.

  “Don’t you call him ‘little,’” Hester said. “He’s got the biggest penis ever. If there’s a bigger one, I don’t want to know about it,” Hester said.

  “THERE’S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE,” said Owen Meany.

  That was the last we ever saw of the guy who wanted Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet. I will confess that in the showers in the Gravesend Academy gym—after practicing the shot—I had noticed that Owen’s doink was especially large; at least, it was disproportionately large. Compared to the rest of him, it was huge!

  My cousin Simon, whose doink was rather small—perhaps owing to Hester’s childhood violence upon it—once claimed that small doinks grew much, much bigger when they were erect; big doinks, Simon said, never grew much when they got hard. I confess: I don’t know—I have no doink theory as adamant or hopeful as Simon’s. The only time I saw Owen Meany with an erection, he was wrapped in swaddling clothes—he was only an eleven-year-old Baby Jesus; and although his hard-on was highly inappropriate, it didn’t strike me as astonishing.

  As for the shot, Owen and I were guilty of lack of practice; by the end of our freshman year, by the summer of 1963—when we were twenty-one, the legal drinking age at last!—we had trouble sinking the shot in under five seconds. We had to work at it all summer—just to get back to where we had been, just to break four seconds again. It was the summer the Buddhists in Vietnam were demonstrating—they were setting themselves on fire. It was the summer when Owen said, “WHAT’S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?” It was the summer when President Diem was not long for this world; President John F. Kennedy was not long for this world, either. And it was the first summer I went to work for Meany Granite.

  It was my illusion that I worked for Mr. Meany; it was his illusion, too. It had been amply demonstrated to me—who bossed whom, in that family. I should have known, from the start, that Owen was in charge.

  “MY FATHER WANTS TO START YOU OUT IN THE MONUMENT SHOP,” he told me. “YOU BEGIN WITH AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FINISHED PRODUCT—IN THIS BUSINESS, IT’S EASIER TO BEGIN WITH THE FINE-TUNING. IT’S GETTING THE STUFF OUT OF THE GROUND THAT CAN BE TRICKY. I HOPE YOU DON’T THINK I’M CONDESCENDING, BUT WORKING WITH GRANITE IS A LOT LIKE WRITING A TERM PAPER—IT’S THE FIRST DRAFT THAT CAN KILL YOU. ONCE YOU GET THE GOOD STUFF INTO THE SHOP, THE FINE WORK IS EASY: CUTTING THE STONE, EDGING THE LETTERS—YOU’VE JUST GOT TO BE FUSSY. IT’S ALL SMOOTHING AND POLISHING—YOU’VE GOT TO GO SLOWLY.

  “DON’T BE IN A HURRY TO WORK IN THE QUARRIES. AT THE MONUMENT-END, AT LEAST THE SIZE AND WEIGHT OF THE STONE ARE MANAGEABLE—YOU’RE WORKING WITH SMALLER TOOLS AND A SMALLER PRODUCT. AND IN THE SHOP, EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT; YOU NEVER KNOW HOW BUSY YOU’LL BE—MOST PEOPLE DON’T DIE ON SCHEDULE, MOST FAMILIES DON’T ORDER GRAVESTONES IN ADVANCE.”

  I don’t doubt that he was genuinely concerned for my safety, and I know he knew everything about granite; it was wise to develop a feeling for the stone—on a smaller, more refined scale—before one encountered the intimidating size and weight of it in the quarry. All the quarrymen—the signalman, the derrickman, the channel bar drillers, and the dynamiters—and even the sawyers who had to handle the rock before it was cut down to monument size … all the men who worked at the quarries were afforded a less generous margin for error than those of us who worked in the monument shop. Even so, I thought there was more than caution motivating Owen to keep me working in the monument shop for the entire summer of ’63. For one thing, I wanted muscles; and the physical work in the monument shop was a lot less strenuous than being a logger for my Uncle Alfred. For another thing, I envied Owen his tan—he worked in the quarries, unless it was raining; on rainy days, he worked in the shop with me. And we called him in from the quarries whenever there was a customer placing an order for a gravestone; Owen insisted that he be the one to handle that—and when the order was not placed by a funeral home, when the customer was a family member or a close friend of the deceased, we were all grateful that Owen wanted to handle it.

  He was very good at that part of it—very respectful of grief, very tactful (while at the same time he managed to be very specific). I don’t mean that this was simply a matter of spelling the name correctly and double-checking the date of birth, and the date of death; I mean that the personality of the deceased was discussed, in depth—Owen sought nothing less than a PROPER monument, a COMPATIBLE monument. The aesthetics of the deceased were taken into consideration; the size, shape, and color of the stone were only the rough drafts of the business; Owen wanted to know the tastes of those mourners who would be viewing the gravestone more than once. I never saw a customer who was displeased with the final product; unfortunately—for the enterprises of Meany Granite—I never saw very many customers, either.

  “DON’T BE VAIN,” Owen told m
e, when I complained about the length of my apprenticeship in the monument shop. “IF YOU’RE STANDING IN THE BOTTOM OF A QUARRY, THINKING ABOUT WHAT KIND OF TAN YOU’RE GETTING—OR YOUR STUPID MUSCLES—YOU’RE GOING TO END UP UNDER TEN TONS OF GRANITE. BESIDES, MY FATHER THINKS YOU’RE DOING A GREAT JOB WITH THE GRAVESTONES.”

  But I don’t think Mr. Meany ever noticed the work I was doing with the monuments; it was August before I even saw Mr. Meany in the shop, and he looked surprised to see me—but he always said the same thing, whenever and wherever he saw me. “Why, it’s Johnny Wheelwright!” he’d always say.

  And when it wasn’t raining—or when Owen wasn’t talking directly to a customer—the only other time that Owen was in the shop was when there was an especially difficult piece of stonecutting assigned, a particularly complicated gravestone, a demanding shape, lots of tight curves and sharp angles, and so forth. And the typical Gravesend families were plain and dour in the face of death; we had few calls for elaborate coping, even fewer for archways with dosserets, and not one for angels sliding down barber poles. That was too bad, because to see Owen at work with the diamond wheel was to witness state-of-the-art monument-making. There was no one as precise with the diamond wheel as Owen Meany.

  A diamond wheel is similar to a radial-arm saw, a wood saw familiar to me from my uncle’s mill; a diamond wheel is a table saw but the blade is not part of the table—the blade, which is a diamond-impregnated wheel, is lowered to the table in a gantry. The wheel blade is about two feet in diameter and studded (or “tipped”) with diamond segments—these are pieces of diamond, only a half inch long, only a quarter inch wide. When the blade is lowered onto the granite, it cuts through the stone at a preset angle into a waiting block of wood. It is a very sharp blade, it makes a very exact and smooth cut; it is perfect for making the precise, polished edges on the tops and sides of gravestones—like a scalpel, it makes no mistakes, or only the user’s mistakes. By comparison to other saws in the granite business, it is so fine and delicate a tool that it isn’t even called a saw—it is always called “the diamond wheel.” It passes through granite with so little resistance that its sound is far less snarly than many wood saws of the power type; a diamond wheel makes a single, high-pitched scream—very plaintive. Owen Meany said: “A DIAMOND WHEEL MAKES A GRAVESTONE SOUND AS IF THE STONE ITSELF IS MOURNING.”