by John Irving
And the pedestal upon which Owen had stood her—in contrast to Mary’s own rough finish (granite is never as smooth as marble)—was highly polished, exquisitely beveled; Owen had cut some very fine edges with the diamond wheel, creating the impression that Mary Magdalene either stood upon or was rising from her grave.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Owen asked Hester and me. “FATHER FINDLEY WAS VERY PLEASED.”
“It’s sick—it’s all sick,” said Hester. “It’s just death and more death—that’s all it is with you, Owen.”
“HESTER’S SO SENSITIVE,” Owen said.
“I like it better than the other one,” I ventured cautiously.
“THERE’S NO COMPARISON!” said Owen Meany.
“I like the pedestal,” I said. “It’s almost as if she’s … well, you know … stepping out of her own grave.”
Owen nodded vigorously. “YOU HAVE A GOOD EYE,” he said. “THAT’S EXACTLY THE EFFECT I WANTED. THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SAINT, ISN’T IT? A SAINT SHOULD BE AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY!”
“What a lot of shit!” said Hester. It was an uninspired year for Hester, too; here she was, a college graduate, still living in her squalid apartment in her old college town, still waitressing in the lobster-house restaurant in Kittery or Portsmouth. I had never eaten there, but Owen said it was nice enough—on the harbor, a little overquaint with the seafood theme (lobster pots and buoys and anchors and mooring ropes were prevalent in the decor). The problem was, Hester hated lobster—she called them “insects of the sea,” and she washed her hair every night with lemon juice because she thought her hair smelled fishy.
I think that her late hours (she waitressed only at night) were in part responsible for Owen Meany’s decline as a student; he was loyal about picking her up—and it seemed to me that she worked most nights. Hester had her own driver’s license and her own car—actually, it was Noah’s old ’57 Chevy—but she hated to drive; that Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha had given her a hand-me-down might have had something to do with it. In Owen’s view, the ’57 Chevy was in better shape than his tomato-red pickup; but Hester knew it had been secondhand when the Eastmans gave it to Noah, who had passed it to Simon, who’d had a minor accident with it before he’d handed it down to Hester.
But by picking up Hester after work, Owen Meany rarely got back to Hester’s apartment before one o’clock in the morning; Hester was so keyed up after waitressing that she wasn’t ready to go to bed before two—first, she had to wash her hair, which further woke her up; and then she needed to complain. Often someone had insulted her; sometimes it had been a customer who’d tried to pick her up—and failing that, had left her a rotten tip. And the other waitresses were “woefully unaware,” Hester said; what they were unaware of, she wouldn’t say—but they often insulted Hester, too. And if Owen Meany didn’t spend the night in her apartment—if he drove home to Gravesend—he sometimes didn’t get to bed before three.
Hester slept all morning; but Owen had morning classes—or, in the summer, he was at work very early in the quarries. Sometimes he looked like a tired, old man to me—a tired, old, married man. I tried to nag him into taking more of an interest in his studies; but, increasingly, he spoke of school as something to get out of.
“WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE,” he said, “I’VE GOT MY ACTIVE DUTY TO SERVE, AND I DON’T WANT TO SERVE IT AT A DESK—WHO WANTS TO BE IN THE ARMY FOR THE PAPERWORK?”
“Who wants to be in the Army at all?” I asked him. “You ought to sit at a desk a little more often than you do—the way you’re going to college, you might as well be in the Army already. I don’t understand you—with your natural ability, you ought to be sailing through this place with the highest honors.”
“IT DID ME A LOT OF GOOD TO SAIL THROUGH GRAVESEND ACADEMY WITH THE HIGHEST HONORS, DIDN’T IT?” he said.
“Maybe if you weren’t a stupid Geology major, you could be a little more enthusiastic about your courses,” I told him.
“GEOLOGY IS EASY FOR ME,” Owen said. “AT LEAST, I ALREADY KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT ROCKS.”
“You didn’t used to do things just because they were easy,” I said.
He shrugged. Remember when people “dropped out”—remember that? Owen Meany was the first person I ever saw “drop out.” Hester, of course, was born “dropped out”; maybe Owen got the idea from Hester, but I think he was more original than that. He was original, and stubborn.
I was stubborn, too; twenty-two-year-olds are stubborn. Owen tried to keep me working in the monument shop the whole summer of ’64. I said that one whole summer in the monument shop was enough—either he would let me work in the quarries or I would quit.
“IT’S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD,” he said. “IT’S THE BEST WORK IN THE BUSINESS—AND THE EASIEST.”
“So maybe I don’t want what’s ‘easiest,’” I said. “So maybe you should let me decide what’s ‘best.’”
“GO AHEAD AND QUIT,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “I guess I should speak to your father.”
“MY FATHER DIDN’T HIRE YOU,” said Owen Meany.
Naturally, I didn’t quit; but I matched his stubbornness sufficiently—I hinted that I was losing my interest in practicing the shot. In the summer of ’64, Owen Meany resembled a dropout—in many ways—but his fervor for practicing the shot had reappeared. We compromised: I apprenticed myself to the diamond wheel until August; and that August—when the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy were attacked in the Tonkin Gulf—Owen set me to work as a signalman in the quarries. When it rained, he let me work with the sawyers, and by the end of the summer he apprenticed me to the channel-bar drillers.
“NEXT SUMMER, I’LL LET YOU TRY THE DERRICK,” he said. “NEXT AUGUST, I’LL GIVE YOU A LITTLE DYNAMITE LESSON—WHEN I GET BACK FROM BASIC TRAINING.”
Just before we began our junior year at the University of New Hampshire—just before the students returned to Gravesend Academy, and to all the nation’s other schools and universities—Owen Meany slam-dunked the basketball in the Gravesend Academy gym in under three seconds.
I suggested that the retarded janitor might have started the official scorer’s clock a little late; but Owen insisted that we had sunk the shot in record time—he said that the clock had been accurate, that our success was official.
“I COULD FEEL THE DIFFERENCE—IN THE AIR,” he said excitedly. “EVERYTHING WAS JUST A LITTLE QUICKER, A LITTLE MORE SPONTANEOUS.”
“Now I suppose you’ll tell me that under two seconds is possible,” I said.
He was dribbling the ball—crazily, in a frenzy, like a speeded-up film of one of the Harlem Globetrotters. I didn’t think he’d heard me.
“I suppose you think that under two seconds is possible!” I shouted.
He stopped dribbling. “DON’T BE RIDICULOUS,” he said. “THREE SECONDS IS FAST ENOUGH.”
I was surprised. “I thought the idea was to see how fast we can get. We can always get faster,” I said.
“THE IDEA IS TO BE FAST ENOUGH,” he said. “THE TRICK IS, CAN WE DO IT IN UNDER THREE SECONDS EVERY TIME? THAT’S THE IDEA.”
So we kept practicing. When there were students in the Gravesend Academy gym, we went to the playground at St. Michael’s. We had no one to time us—we had nothing resembling the official scorer’s clock in the gym, and Hester was unwilling to participate in our practices; she was no substitute for the retarded janitor. And the rusty hoop of the basket was a little crooked, and the net long gone—and the macadam of the playground was so broken up, we couldn’t even dribble the ball; but we could still practice. Owen said he could FEEL when we were dunking the shot in under three seconds. And although there was no retarded janitor to cheer us on, the nuns in the saltbox at the far end of the playground often noticed us; sometimes, they even waved, and Owen Meany would wave back—although he said that nuns still gave him the shivers. And always Mary Magdalene watched over us; we could feel her silent encouragement. When it snowed, Owen would brush her off. It snowed early that fal
l—long before Thanksgiving. I remember practicing the shot with my ski hat and my gloves on; but Owen Meany would always do it bare-handed. And in the afternoons, when it grew dark early, the lights in the nuns’ house would be lit before we finished practicing. Mary Magdalene would turn a darker shade of gray; she would almost disappear in the shadows.
Once, when it was almost too dark to see the basket, I caught just a glimpse of her—standing at the edge of total darkness. I imagined that she resembled the angel that Owen thought he had seen at my mother’s bed. I said this to him, and he looked at Mary Magdalene; blowing on his cold, bare hands, he looked at her very intently.
“NO, THERE’S NOT REALLY ANY RESEMBLANCE,” he said. “THAT ANGEL WAS VERY BUSY—SHE WAS MOVING, ALWAYS MOVING. ESPECIALLY, HER HANDS—SHE KEPT REACHING OUT WITH HER HANDS.”
It was the first I’d heard that the angel had been moving—about what a busy angel he thought he’d seen.
“You never said it was moving,” I said.
“IT WAS MOVING, ALL RIGHT,” said Owen Meany. “THAT’S WHY I NEVER HAD ANY DOUBT. IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN THE DUMMY BECAUSE IT WAS MOVING,” he said. “AND IN ALL THESE YEARS THAT I’VE HAD THE DUMMY, THE DUMMY HAS NEVER MOVED.”
Since when, I wondered, did Owen Meany ever have ANY DOUBT? And how often had he stared at my mother’s dressmaker’s dummy? He expected it to move, I thought.
When it was so dark at the St. Michael’s playground that we couldn’t see the basket, we couldn’t see Mary Magdalene, either. What Owen liked best was to practice the shot until we lost Mary Magdalene in the darkness. Then he would stand under the basket with me and say, “CAN YOU SEE HER?”
“Not anymore,” I’d say.
“YOU CAN’T SEE HER, BUT YOU KNOW SHE’S STILL THERE—RIGHT?” he would say.
“Of course she’s still there!” I’d say.
“YOU’RE SURE?” he’d ask me.
“Of course I’m sure!” I’d say.
“BUT YOU CAN’T SEE HER,” he’d say—very teasingly. “HOW DO YOU KNOW SHE’S STILL THERE IF YOU CAN’T ACTUALLY SEE HER?”
“Because I know she’s still there—because I know she couldn’t have gone anywhere—because I just know!” I would say.
And one cold, late-fall day—it was November or even early December; Johnson had defeated Goldwater for the presidency; Khrushchev had been replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin; five Americans had been killed in a Viet Cong attack on the air base at Bien Hoa—I was especially exasperated by this game he played about not seeing Mary Magdalene but still knowing she was there.
“YOU HAVE NO DOUBT SHE’S THERE?” he nagged at me.
“Of course I have no doubt!” I said.
“BUT YOU CAN’T SEE HER—YOU COULD BE WRONG,” he said.
“No, I’m not wrong—she’s there, I know she’s there!” I yelled at him.
“YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW SHE’S THERE—EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN’T SEE HER?” he asked me.
“Yes!” I screamed.
“WELL, NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GOD,” said Owen Meany. “I CAN’T SEE HIM—BUT I ABSOLUTELY KNOW HE IS THERE!”
Georgian Bay: July 29, 1987—Katherine told me today that I should make an effort to not read any newspapers. She saw how The Globe and Mail ruined my day—and it is so gorgeous, so peaceful on this island, on all this water; it’s such a shame to not relax here, to not take the opportunity to think more tranquilly, more reflectively. Katherine wants only the best for me; I know she’s right—I should give up the news, just give it up. You can’t understand anything by reading the news, anyway.
If someone ever presumed to teach Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Robertson Davies to my Bishop Strachan students with the same, shallow, superficial understanding that I’m sure I possess of world affairs—or, even, American wrongdoing—I would be outraged. I am a good enough English teacher to know that my grasp of American misadventures—even in Vietnam, not to mention Nicaragua—is shallow and superficial. Whoever acquired any real or substantive intelligence from reading newspapers? I’m sure I have no in-depth comprehension of American villainy; yet I can’t leave the news alone! You’d think I might profit from my experience with ice cream. If I have ice cream in my freezer, I’ll eat it—I’ll eat all of it, all at once. Therefore, I’ve learned not to buy ice cream. Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
The island library, to be kind, is full of field guides—to everything I never knew enough about; I mean, real things, not “issues.” I could study pine needles, or bird identification—there are even categories for studying the latter: in-flight movement, perching silhouettes, feeding and mating cries. It’s fascinating—I suppose. And with all this water around, I could certainly take more than one day to go fishing with Charlie; I know it disappoints him that I’m not more interested in fishing. And Katherine has pointed out to me that it’s been a long time since she and I have talked about our respective beliefs—the shared and private articles of our faith. I used to talk about this for hours with her—and with Canon Campbell, before her. Now I’m ashamed to tell Katherine how many Sunday services I’ve skipped.
Katherine’s right. I’m going to try to give up the news. The Globe and Mail said today that the Nicaraguan contras have executed prisoners; the contras are being investigated for “22 major cases of human-rights abuse”—and these same filthy contras are the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers,” President Reagan says! Meanwhile, the spiritual leader of Iran, the ayatollah, urged all Moslems to “crush America’s teeth in its mouth”; this sounds like just the guy the Americans should sell arms to—right? The United States simply isn’t making sense.
I agree with Katherine. Time to fish; time to observe the flatness of that small, aquatic mammal’s tail—is it an otter or is it a muskrat? Time to find out. And out there, where the water of the bay turns blue-green and then to the color of a bruise, is that a loon or a coot I see diving there? Time to see; time to forget about the rest. And it’s “high time”—as Canon Mackie is always saying—for me to try to be a Canadian!
When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of the United States—I imagined it would be like moving to Maine, or Minnesota. It was a surprise to discover that Toronto wasn’t as snowy and cold as New Hampshire—and not nearly as provincial, either. It was more of a surprise to discover how different Canadians were—they were so polite! Naturally, I started out apologizing. “I’m not really a draft dodger,” I would say; but most Canadians didn’t care what I was. “I’m not here to evade the draft,” I would explain. “I would certainly classify myself as antiwar,” I said in those days. “I’m comfortable with the term ‘war resister,’” I told everyone, “but I don’t need to dodge or evade the draft—that’s not why I’m here.”
But most Canadians didn’t care why I’d come; they didn’t ask any questions. It was 1968, probably the midpoint of Vietnam “resisters” coming to Canada; most Canadians were sympathetic—they thought the war in Vietnam was stupid and wrong, too. In 1968, you needed fifty points to become a landed immigrant; landed immigrants could apply for Canadian citizenship, for which they’d be eligible in five years. Earning my fifty “points” was easy for me; I had a B.A. cum laude, and a Master’s degree in English—with Owen Meany’s help, I’d written my Master’s thesis on Thomas Hardy. I’d also had two years’ teaching experience; while I was in graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, I taught part-time at Gravesend Academy—Expository Writing for ninth graders. Dan Needham and Mr. Early had recommended me for the job.
In 1968, one out of every nine Canadians was an immigrant; and the Vietnam “resisters” were better-educated and more employable than most immigrants in Canada. That year the so-called Union of American Exiles was organized; compared to Hester—and her SDS friends, those
so-called Students for a Democratic Society—the few guys I knew in the Union of American Exiles were a pretty tame lot. I was used to rioters; Hester was big on riots then. That was the year she was arrested in Chicago.
Hester had her nose broken while rioting at the site of the Democratic Party’s national convention. She said a policeman mashed her face against the sliding side door of a van; but Hester would have been disappointed to return from Chicago with all her bones intact. The Americans I ran into in Toronto—even the AMEX organizers, even the deserters—were a whole lot more reasonable than Hester and many other Americans I had known “at home.”
There was a general misunderstanding about the so-called deserters; the deserters I knew were politically mild. I never met one who’d actually been in Vietnam; I never met one who was even scheduled to go. They were just guys who’d been drafted and had hated the service; some of them had even enlisted. Only a few of them told me that they’d deserted because it had shamed them to maintain any association with that insupportable war; as for a couple of the ones who told me that—I had the feeling that their stories weren’t true, that they were only saying they’d deserted because the war was “insupportable”; they’d learned that this was politically acceptable to say.
And there was another, general misunderstanding at that time: contrary to popular belief, coming to Canada was not a very shrewd way to beat the draft; there were better and easier ways to “beat” it—I’ll tell you about one, later. But coming to Canada—either as a draft dodger or as a deserter, or even for my own, more complicated reasons—was a very forceful political statement. Remember that? Remember when what you did was a kind of “statement”? I remember one of the AMEX guys telling me that “resistance as exile was the ultimate judgment.” How I agreed with him! How self-important it seemed: to be making “the ultimate judgment.”