A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

More wigs were bought; most—but by no means all—of her old wigs were found. When Grandmother especially disliked a wig, she would retire it in the rose garden by submerging it in the birdbath.

  And when the Poggios continued to send total strangers to her door—intent on startling her—Harriet Wheelwright responded by startling them in return. She would dart to open the door for them—sprinting ahead of Ethel or Ethel’s replacements—and she would greet the terrified delivery boys by snatching her wig off her head and shrieking at them while she was bald.

  Poor Dominic Poggio’s grandchildren! How they fought among themselves not to be the boy who delivered the groceries to 80 Front Street.

  It was shortly after the fourth or fifth such incident when Dan telephoned me—in Toronto—and said: “It’s about your grandmother. You know how much I love her. But I think it’s time.”

  Even this August, the memory of those days made Dan Needham and me laugh. It was late at night, and we’d been drinking—as usual.

  “Do you know what?” Dan said. “There are still all those damn jams and jellies and some simply awful things that she had preserved—they’re still on those shelves, in the secret passageway!”

  “Not really!” I said.

  “Yes, really! See for yourself,” he said. Dan tried to get out of his chair—to investigate the mysteries of the secret passageway with me—but he lost his balance in the great effort he made to rise to his feet, and he settled back into his chair apologetically. “See for yourself!” he repeated, burping.

  I had some difficulty opening the concealed door; I don’t think that door had been opened for years. I knocked a few books off the shelves on the door while I was fumbling with the lock and key. I was reminded that Germaine had once been no less clumsy—when Lydia had died, and Germaine had chosen the secret passageway as the place to hide from Death itself.

  Then the door swung open. The secret passageway was dark; yet I could discern the scurrying of spiders. The cobwebs were dense. I remembered when I’d trapped Owen in the secret passageway and he’d cried out that something wet was licking him—he didn’t think it was a cobweb, he thought it was SOMETHING WITH A TONGUE. I also remembered the time we’d shut him in there during his going-away party, when Mr. Fish had recited those lines from Julius Caesar—just outside the closed door. “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once”—and so forth. And I remembered how Owen and I had scared Germaine in there—and poor Lydia, before Germaine.

  There were a lot of old memories lurking in the cobwebs in the secret passageway; I groped for the light switch, and couldn’t find it. I didn’t want to touch those dark objects on the shelves without seeing what they were.

  Then Dan Needham shut the door on me.

  “Cut it out, Dan!” I cried. I could hear him laughing. I reached out into the blackness. My hand found one of the shelves; I felt along the shelf, passing through cobwebs, in the direction of the door. I thought the light switch was near the door. That was when I put my hand on something awful. It felt springy, alive—I imagined a nest of newly born rats!—and I stepped backward and screamed.

  What my hand had found was one of Grandmother’s hidden wigs; but I didn’t know that. I stepped too far back, to the edge of the top step of the long stairs; I felt myself losing my balance and starting to fall. In less than a second, I imagined how Dan would discover my body on the dirt floor at the foot of the stairs—when a small, strong hand (or something like a small, strong hand) guided my own hand to the light switch; a small, strong hand, or something like it, pulled me forward from where I teetered on the top step of the stairs. And his voice—it was unmistakably Owen’s voice—said: “DON’T BE AFRAID. NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU.”

  I screamed again.

  When Dan Needham opened the door, it was his turn to scream. “Your hair!” he cried. When I looked in a mirror, I thought it was the cobwebs—my scalp appeared to have been dusted with flour. But when I brushed my hair, I saw that the roots had turned white. That was this August; my hair has grown in all-white since then. At my age, my hair was already turning gray; even my students think that my white hair is distinguished—an improvement.

  The morning after Owen Meany “spoke” to me, Dan Needham said: “Of course, we were both drunk—you, especially.”

  “Me, ‘especially’!” I said.

  “That’s right,” Dan said. “Look: I have never mocked your belief—have I? I will never make fun of your religious faith—you know that. But you can’t expect me to believe that Owen Meany’s actual hand kept you from falling down those cellar stairs; you can’t expect me to be convinced that Owen Meany’s actual voice ‘spoke’ to you in the secret passageway.”

  “Dan,” I said, “I understand you. I’m not a proselytizer, I’m no evangelist. Have I ever tried to make you a believer? If I wanted to preach, I’d be a minister, I’d have a congregation—wouldn’t I?”

  “Look: I understand you,” Dan said; but he couldn’t stop staring at the snow-white roots of my hair.

  A little later, Dan said: “You actually felt pulled—you felt an actual tug, as if from an actual hand?”

  “I admit I was drunk,” I said.

  And a little later, Dan said: “It was his voice—you’re sure it wasn’t something I said that you heard? It was his voice?”

  I replied rather testily: “How many voices have you heard, Dan, that could ever be mistaken for his voice?”

  “Well, we were both drunk—weren’t we? That’s my point,” Dan Needham said.

  I remember the summer of 1967, when my finger was healing—how that summer slipped away. That was the summer Owen Meany was promoted; his uniform would look a little different when Hester and I saw him again—he would be a first lieutenant. The bars on his shoulder epaulets would turn from brass to silver. He would also help me begin my Master’s thesis on Thomas Hardy. I had much trouble beginning anything—and, according to Owen, even more trouble seeing something through.

  “YOU MUST JUST PLUNGE IN,” Owen wrote to me. “THINK OF HARDY AS A MAN WHO WAS ALMOST RELIGIOUS, AS A MAN WHO CAME SO CLOSE TO BELIEVING IN GOD THAT WHEN HE REJECTED GOD, HIS REJECTION MADE HIM FEROCIOUSLY BITTER. THE KIND OF FATE HARDY BELIEVES IN IS ALMOST LIKE BELIEVING IN GOD—AT LEAST IN THAT TERRIBLE, JUDGMENTAL GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. HARDY HATES INSTITUTIONS: THE CHURCH—MORE THAN FAITH OR BELIEF—AND CERTAINLY MARRIAGE (THE INSTITUTION OF IT), AND THE INSTITUTION OF EDUCATION. PEOPLE ARE HELPLESS TO FATE, VICTIMS OF TIME—THEIR OWN EMOTIONS UNDO THEM, AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OF ALL KINDS FAIL THEM.

  “DON’T YOU SEE HOW A BELIEF IN SUCH A BITTER UNIVERSE IS NOT UNLIKE RELIGIOUS FAITH? LIKE FAITH, WHAT HARDY BELIEVED WAS NAKED, PLAIN, VULNERABLE. BELIEF IN GOD, OR A BELIEF THAT—EVENTUALLY—EVERYTHING HAS TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES … EITHER WAY, YOU DON’T LEAVE YOURSELF ANY ROOM FOR PHILOSOPHICAL DETACHMENT. EITHER WAY, YOU’RE NOT BEING VERY CLEVER. NEVER THINK OF HARDY AS CLEVER; NEVER CONFUSE FAITH, OR BELIEF—OF ANY KIND—WITH SOMETHING EVEN REMOTELY INTELLECTUAL.

  “PLUNGE IN—JUST BEGIN. I’D BEGIN WITH HIS NOTES, HIS DIARIES—HE NEVER MINCED WORDS THERE. EVEN EARLY—WHEN HE WAS TRAVELING IN FRANCE, IN 1882—HE WROTE: ‘SINCE I DISCOVERED SEVERAL YEARS AGO, THAT I WAS LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY, I HAVE TROUBLED MYSELF VERY LITTLE ABOUT THEORIES. I AM CONTENT WITH TENTATIVENESS FROM DAY TO DAY.’ YOU COULD APPLY THAT OBSERVATION TO EACH OF HIS NOVELS! THAT’S WHY I SAY HE WAS ‘ALMOST RELIGIOUS’—BECAUSE HE WASN’T A GREAT THINKER, HE WAS A GREAT FEELER!

  “TO BEGIN, YOU SIMPLY TAKE ONE OF HIS BLUNT OBSERVATIONS AND PUT IT TOGETHER WITH ONE OF HIS MORE LITERARY OBSERVATIONS—YOU KNOW, ABOUT THE CRAFT. I LIKE THIS ONE: ‘A STORY MUST BE EXCEPTIONAL ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY ITS TELLING. WE STORYTELLERS ARE ALL ANCIENT MARINERS, AND NONE OF US IS JUSTIFIED IN STOPPING WEDDING GUESTS, UNLESS HE HAS SOMETHING MORE UNUSUAL TO RELATE THAN THE ORDINARY EXPERIENCES OF EVERY AVERAGE MAN AND WOMAN.’

  “YOU SEE? IT’S EAS
Y. YOU TAKE HIS HIGH STANDARDS FOR STORIES THAT ARE ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ AND YOU PUT THAT TOGETHER WITH HIS BELIEF THAT ‘NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY,’ AND THERE’S YOUR THESIS! ACTUALLY, THERE IS HIS THESIS—ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS FILL IN THE EXAMPLES. PERSONALLY, I’D BEGIN WITH ONE OF THE BITTEREST—TAKE ALMOST ANYTHING FROM JUDE THE OBSCURE. HOW ABOUT THAT TERRIBLE LITTLE PRAYER THAT JUDE REMEMBERS FALLING ASLEEP TO, WHEN HE WAS A CHILD?

  “TEACH ME TO LIVE, THAT I MAY DREAD

  “THE GRAVE AS LITTLE AS MY BED.

  “TEACH ME TO DIE …

  “WHAT COULD BE EASIER?” wrote Owen Meany.

  And thus—having cut off my finger and allowed me to finish graduate school—he started my Master’s thesis for me, too.

  This August in Gravesend—where I try to visit every August—Dan’s students in the summer school were struggling with Euripides; I told Dan that I thought he’d made an odd and merciless choice. For students the age of my Bishop Strachan girls to spend seven weeks of the summer memorizing The Medea and The Trojan Women must have been an exercise in tedium—and one that risked disabusing the youngsters of their infatuation with the stage.

  Dan said: “What was I going to do? I had twenty-five kids in the class and only six boys!” Indeed, those boys looked mightily overworked as it was; a particularly pallid young man had to be Creon in one play and Poseidon in the other. All the girls were shuffled in and out of the Chorus of Corinthian Women and the Chorus of Trojan Women as if Corinthian and Trojan women possessed an interchangable shrillness. I was quite taken by the dolorous girl Dan picked to play Hecuba; in addition to the sorrows of her role, she had to physically remain on the stage for the entirety of The Trojan Women. Therefore, Dan rested her in The Medea; he gave her an especially rueful but largely silent part in the Chorus of Corinthian Women—although he singled her out at the end of the play; she was clearly one of his better actresses, and Dan was wise to emphasize those end lines of the Chorus by having his girl speak solo.

  “‘Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgment,’” said the sorrowful girl. “‘What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contrives.’”

  How true. Not even Owen Meany would dispute that.

  I sometimes envy Dan his ability to teach onstage; for the theater is a great emphasizer—especially to young people, who have no great experience in life by which they might judge the experiences they encounter in literature; and who have no great confidence in language, neither in using it nor in hearing it. The theater, Dan quite rightly claims, dramatizes both the experience and the confidence in language that young people—such as our students—lack. Students of the age of Dan’s, and mine, have no great feeling—for example—for wit; wit simply passes them by, or else they take it to be an elderly form of snobbery, a mere showing off with the language that they use (at best) tentatively. Wit isn’t tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize onstage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; onstage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is.

  August is my month to talk about teaching with Dan. When I meet Dan for Christmas, when we go together to Sawyer Depot, it is a busy time and there are always other people around. But in August we are often alone; as soon as the summer-school theater productions are over, Dan and I take a vacation together—although this usually means that we stay in Gravesend and are no more adventuresome than to indulge in day trips to the beach at Little Boar’s Head. We spend our evenings at 80 Front Street, just talking; since Dan moved in, the television has been gone. When Grandmother went to the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, she took her television set with her; when Grandmother died, she left the house at 80 Front Street to Dan and me.

  It is a huge and lonely house for a man who’s never even considered remarrying; but the house contains almost as much history for Dan as it holds for me. Although I enjoy my visits, not even the tempting nostalgia of the house at 80 Front Street could entice me to return to the United States. This is a subject—my return—that Dan broaches every August, always on an evening when it is clear to him that I am enjoying the atmosphere of 80 Front Street, and his friendship.

  “There’s more than enough room here for a couple of old bachelors like us,” he says. “And with your years of experience at Bishop Strachan—not to mention the recommendation I’m sure your headmistress would write for you, not to mention that you’re a distinguished alumnus—of course the Gravesend Academy English Department would be happy to have you. Just say the word.”

  Not to be polite, but out of my affection for Dan, I let the subject pass.

  This August, when he started that business again, I simply said: “How hard it is—without the showplace of the stage—to teach wit to teenagers. I despair that another fall is almost upon me and once again I shall strive to make my Grade Ten girls notice something in Wuthering Heights besides every little detail about Catherine and Heathcliff—the story, the story; it is all they are interested in!”

  “John, dear John,” Dan Needham said. “He’s been dead for twenty years. Forgive it. Forgive and forget—and come home.”

  “There’s a passage right at the beginning—they miss it every year!” I said. “I’m referring to Lockwood’s description of Joseph, I’ve been pointing it out to them for so many years that I know the passage by heart: ‘looking … in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner …’ I’ve even read this aloud to them, but it sails right over their heads—they don’t crack a smile! And it’s not just Emily Brontë’s wit that whistles clean past them. They don’t get it when it’s contemporary. Is Mordecai Richler too witty for eleventh-grade girls? It would appear so. Oh yes, they think The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is ‘funny’; but they miss half the humor! You know that description of the middle-class Jewish resort? It’s always description that they miss; I swear, they think it’s unimportant. They want dialogue, they want action; but there’s so much writing in the description! ‘There were still some pockets of Gentile resistance, it’s true. Neither of the two hotels that were still in their hands admitted Jews but that, like the British raj who still lingered on the Malabar Coast, was not so discomforting as it was touchingly defiant.’ Every year I watch their faces when I read to them—they don’t bat an eye!”

  “John,” Dan said. “Let bygones be bygones—not even Owen would still be angry. Do you think Owen Meany would have blamed the whole country for what happened to him? That was madness; this is madness, too.”

  “How do you teach madness onstage?” I asked Dan. “Hamlet, I suppose, for starters—I give Hamlet to my Grade Thirteen girls, but they have to make do with reading it; they don’t get to see it. And Crime and Punishment—even my Grade Thirteen girls struggle with the so-called ‘psychological’ novel. The ‘concentrated wretchedness’ of Raskolnikov is entirely within their grasp, but they don’t see how the novel’s psychology is at work in even Dostoevski’s simplest descriptions; once again, it’s the description they miss. Raskolnikov’s landlord, for example—‘his face seemed to be thickly covered with oil, like an old iron lock.’ What a perfect face for his landlord to have! ‘Isn’t that marvelous?’ I ask the class; they stare at me as if they think I’m crazier than Raskolnikov.”

  Dan Needham, occasionally, stares at me that way, too. How could he possibly think I could “forgive and forget”? There is too much forgetting. When we schoolteachers worry that our students have no sense of history, isn’t it what people forget that worries us? For years I tried to forget who my father might be; I didn’t want to find out who he was, as Owen pointed out. How many times, for example, did I call back my mother’s old singing teacher, Graham McSwiney? How many times did I call him and ask him if he’d learned the whereabouts of Buster Freebody, or if he’d remembered anything about my mother that he hadn’t told Owen and
me? Only once; I called him only once. Graham McSwiney told me to forget about who my father was; I was willing.

  Mr. McSwiney said: “Buster Freebody—if he’s alive, if you find him—would be so old that he wouldn’t even remember your mother—not to mention who her boyfriend was!” Mr. McSwiney was much more interested in Owen Meany—in why Owen’s voice hadn’t changed. “He should see a doctor—there’s really no good reason for a voice like his,” Graham McSwiney said.

  But, of course, there was a reason. When I learned what the reason was, I never called Mr. McSwiney to tell him; I doubt it would have been a scientific enough explanation for Mr. McSwiney. I tried to tell Hester, but Hester said she didn’t want to know. “I’d believe what you’d tell me,” Hester said, “so please spare me the details.”

  As for the purpose of Owen Meany’s voice, and everything that happened to him, I told only Dan and the Rev. Lewis Merrill. “I suppose it’s possible,” Dan said. “I suppose stranger things have happened—although I can’t, off the top of my head, think of an example. The important thing is that you believe it, and I would never challenge your right to believe what you want.”

  “But do you believe it?” I asked him.

  “Well, I believe you,” Dan said.

  “How can you not believe it?” I asked Pastor Merrill. “You of all people,” I told him. “A man of faith—how can you not believe it?”

  “To believe it—I mean all of it,” the Rev. Lewis Merrill said, “—to believe everything … well, that calls upon more faith than I have.”

  “But you of all people!” I said to him. “Look at me—I never was a believer, not until this happened. If I can believe it, why can’t you?” I asked Mr. Merrill. He began to stutter.

  “It’s easier for you to j-j-j-just accept it. Belief is not something you have felt, and then not felt; you haven’t l-l-l-lived with belief, and with unbelief. It’s easier f-f-f-for you,” the Rev. Mr. Merrill repeated. “You haven’t ever been f-f-f-full of faith, and full of d-d-d-doubt. Something j-j-j-just strikes you as a miracle, and you believe it. For me, it’s not that s-s-s-simple,” said Pastor Merrill.