by John Irving
Dan told me that the former American Legion commander was none other than Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman.
“I’d like to know how that idiot got his hands on a North Vietnamese flag!” my grandmother said.
Thus, with precious little to interrupt them, the years have also swung up Front Street and marched on by.
Owen Meany taught me to keep a diary; but my diary reflects my unexciting life, just as Owen’s diary reflected the vastly more interesting things that happened to him. Here’s a typical entry from my diary.
“Toronto: November 17, 1970—the Bishop Strachan greenhouse burned down today, and the faculty and students had to evacuate the school buildings.”
And let’s see: I also note in my diary every day when the girls sing “Sons of God” in morning chapel. I also entered in my diary the day that a journalist from some rock-music magazine tried to stop me for an on-the-spot “interview” as I was about to take a seat in morning chapel. He was a wild, hairy young man in a purple caftan—oblivious to how the girls stared at him and seemingly held together by wires and cords that entangled him in his cumbersome recording equipment. There he was, uninvited—unannounced!—sticking a microphone in my face and asking me, as Hester the Molester’s “kissing cousin,” if I didn’t agree that it all began to “happen” for Hester after she met someone called “Janet the Planet.”
“I beg your pardon!” I said. Around me, streams of girls were staring and giggling.
The interviewer was interested in asking me about Hester’s “influences”; he was writing a piece about Hester’s “early years,” and he had some ideas about who had influenced her—he said he wanted to “bounce” his ideas off me! I said I didn’t know who the fuck “Janet the Planet” even was, but if he was interested in who had “influenced” Hester, he should begin with Owen Meany. He didn’t know the name, he asked me how to spell it. He was very puzzled, he thought he’d heard of everyone!
“And would this be someone who was an influence in her early years?” he wanted to know. I assured him that Owen’s influence on Hester could be counted among the earliest.
And let’s see: what else? There was Mrs. Meany’s death, not long after Owen’s; I made note of it. And there was that spring when I was in Gravesend for Grandmother’s funeral—it was at the old Congregational Church, Grandmother’s lifelong church, and Pastor Merrill did not perform the service; whoever had replaced him at the Congregational Church was the officiant. There was still a lot of snow on the ground that spring—old, dead-gray snow—and I was opening another beer for Dan and myself in the kitchen at 80 Front Street, when I happened to look out the kitchen window at the withered rose garden, and there was Mr. Meany! Grayer than the old snow, and following some melted and refrozen footprints in the crust, he made his way slowly toward the house. I thought he was a kind of apparition. Speechless, I pointed at him, and Dan said: “It’s just poor old Mister Meany.”
The Meany Granite Company was dead and gone; the quarries had been unworked—and for sale—for years. Mr. Meany had a part-time job as a meter reader for the electric company. He appeared in the rose garden once a month, Dan said; the electric meter was on the rose-garden side of the house.
I didn’t want to speak with him; but I watched him through the window. I’d written him my condolences when I’d heard that Mrs. Meany had died—and how she’d died—but he’d never written back; I hadn’t expected him to write back.
Mrs. Meany had caught fire. She’d been sitting too close to the fireplace and a spark, an ember, had ignited the American flag, which—Mr. Meany told Dan—she was accustomed to wrapping around herself, like a shawl. Although her burns had not appeared to be that severe, she died in the hospital—of undisclosed complications.
When I saw Mr. Meany reading the electric meter at 80 Front Street, I realized that Owen’s medal had not been consumed with the flag in the fire. Mr. Meany wore the medal—he always wore it, Dan said. The cloth that shielded the pin above the medal was much faded—red and white stripes on a chevron of blue—and the gold of the medal itself blazed less brightly than it had blazed that day when a beam of sunlight had been reflected by it in Hurd’s Church; but the raised, unfurled wings of the American eagle were no less visible.
Whenever I think of Owen Meany’s medal for heroism, I’m reminded of Thomas Hardy’s diary entry in 1882—Owen showed it to me, that little bit about “living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.” I remember it whenever I think of Mr. Meany wearing Owen’s medal while he reads the electric meters.
Let’s see: there’s not much else—there’s almost nothing to add. Only this: that it took years for me to face my memory of how Owen Meany died—and once I forced myself to remember the details, I could never forget how he died; I will never forget it. I am doomed to remember this.
I had never been a major participant in Fourth of July celebrations in Gravesend; but the town was faithfully patriotic—it did not allow Independence Day to pass unnoticed. The parade was organized at the bandstand in the center of town, and marched nearly the whole length of Front Street, achieving peak band noise and the maximum number of barking dogs, and accompanying children on bicycles, at the midpoint of the march—precisely at 80 Front Street, where my grandmother was in the habit of viewing the hullabaloo from her front doorstep. Grandmother suffered ambivalent feelings every Fourth of July; she was patriotic enough to stand on her doorstep waving a small American flag—the flag itself was not any larger than the palm of her hand—but at the same time, she frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool barking.
I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died, Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles—for the final destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street. From 80 Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves that knew too much quiet all the other days of the year.
It was no different on July 4, 1968—except that Owen Meany was in Arizona, possibly watching or even participating in a parade at Fort Huachuca; I didn’t know what Owen was doing. Dan Needham and I had enjoyed a late breakfast with my grandmother, and we’d all taken our coffee out on the front doorstep to wait for the parade; by the sound of it, coming nearer, it was passing the Main Academy Building—gathering force, bicyclists, and dogs. Dan and I sat on the stone doorstep, but my grandmother chose to stand; sitting on a doorstep would not have measured up to Harriet Wheelwright’s high standards for women of her age and position.
If I was thinking anything—if I was thinking at all—I was considering that my life had become a kind of doorstep-sitting, watching parades pass by. I was not working that summer; I would not be working that fall. With my Master’s degree in hand, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts; I didn’t really know what I wanted to study, I didn’t even know if I wanted to rent a room or an apartment in Amherst, but I was scheduled to be a full-time graduate student there. I never thought about it. So that I could carry the fullest possible course load, I wasn’t planning to teach for at least a year—not even part-time, not even one course. Naturally, Grandmother was bankrolling my studies, and that further contributed to my sense of myself as a doorstep-sitter. I wasn’t doing anything; there wasn’t anything I had to do.
Hester was in the same boat. That Fourth of July night, we sat on the grass border of the Swasey Parkway and watched the fireworks display over the Squamscott—Gravesend maintained a Town Fireworks Board, and every Fourth of July the members who knew their rocketry and bombs set up the fireworks on the docks of the academy boathouse. The townspeople lined the Swasey Parkway, all along the grassy riverbank, and the bombs burst in the air, and the rockets flared—the
y hissed when they fell into the dirty river. There had been a small, ecological protest lately; someone said that the fireworks disturbed the birds that nested in the tidal marsh on the riverbank opposite the Swasey Parkway. But in a dispute between herons and patriots, the herons are not generally favored to win; the bombardment proceeded, as planned—the night sky was brilliantly set afire, and the explosions gratified us all.
An occasional white light spread like a newly invented liquid across the dark surface of the Squamscott, reflecting there so brightly that the darkened stores and offices of the town, and the huge building that housed the town’s foul textile mills, sprang up in silhouette—a town created instantly by the explosions. The many empty windows of the textile mills bounced back this light—the building’s vast size and emptiness suggested an industry so self-possessed that it functioned completely without a human labor force.
“If Owen won’t marry me, I’ll never marry anyone,” Hester told me between flashes and blasts. “If he won’t give me babies, no one’s ever gonna give me babies.”
One of the demolition experts on the dock was none other than that old dynamiter Mr. Meany. Something like an exploding star showered over the black river.
“That one looks like sperm,” Hester said sullenly. I was not expert enough on sperm to challenge Hester’s imagery; fireworks that looked “like sperm” seemed highly unlikely if not far-fetched to me—but what did I know?
Hester was so morose, I didn’t want to spend the night in Durham with her. It was a not-quite-comfortable summer night, but there was a breeze. I drove to 80 Front Street and watched the eleven o’clock news with Grandmother; she had lately taken an interest in a terrible local channel on which the news detailed the grim statistics of a few highway fatalities and made no mention of the war in Vietnam; and there was a “human interest” story about a bad child who’d blinded a poor dog with a firecracker.
“Merciful Heavens!” Grandmother said.
When she went to bed, I tuned in to The Late Show—one channel was showing a so-called Creature Feature, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, an old favorite of Owen’s; another channel featured Mother Is a Freshman, in which Loretta Young is a widow attending college with her teenage daughter; but my favorite, An American in Paris, was on a third channel. I could watch Gene Kelly dance all night; in between the songs and dances, I switched back to the channel where the prehistoric monster was mashing Manhattan, or I wandered out to the kitchen to get myself another beer.
I was in the kitchen when the phone rang; it was after midnight, and Owen was so respectful of my grandmother’s sleep that he never called 80 Front Street at an hour when he might awaken her. At first I thought that the different time zone—in Arizona—had confused him; but I knew he would have called Hester in Durham and Dan in Waterhouse Hall before he found me at my grandmother’s, and I was sure that Hester or Dan, or both of them, would have told him how late it was.
“I HOPE I DIDN’T WAKE UP YOUR GRANDMOTHER!” he said.
“The phone only rang once—I’m in the kitchen,” I told him. “What’s up?”
“YOU MUST APOLOGIZE TO HER FOR ME—IN THE MORNING,” Owen said. “BE SURE TO TELL HER I’M VERY SORRY—BUT IT’S A KIND OF EMERGENCY.”
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“THERE’S BEEN A BODY MISPLACED IN CALIFORNIA—THEY THOUGHT IT GOT LOST IN VIETNAM, BUT IT JUST TURNED UP IN OAKLAND. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME THERE’S A HOLIDAY—SOMEONE GOES TO SLEEP AT THE SWITCH. IT’S STANDARD ARMY—THEY GIVE ME TWO HOURS TO PACK A BAG AND THE NEXT THING I KNOW, I’M IN CALIFORNIA. I’M SUPPOSED TO TAKE A COMMUTER PLANE TO TUCSON, I’VE GOT A CONNECTION WITH A COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO OAKLAND—FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING. THEY’VE GOT ME BOOKED ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO BACK TO PHOENIX THE NEXT DAY. THE BODY BELONGS IN PHOENIX—THE GUY WAS A WARRANT OFFICER, A HELICOPTER PILOT. THAT USUALLY MEANS HE CRASHED AND BURNED UP—YOU HEAR ‘HELICOPTER,’ YOU CAN COUNT ON A CLOSED CASKET.
“CAN YOU MEET ME IN PHOENIX?” he asked me.
“Can I meet you in Phoenix? Why?” I asked him.
“WHY NOT?” Owen said. “YOU DON’T HAVE ANY PLANS, DO YOU?”
“Well, no,” I admitted.
“YOU CAN AFFORD THE FLIGHT, CAN’T YOU?” he asked me.
“Well, yes,” I admitted. Then he told me the flight information—he knew exactly when my plane left Boston, and when my plane arrived in Phoenix; I’d arrive a little earlier than his flight with the body from San Francisco, but I wouldn’t have to wait long. I could just meet his plane, and after that, we’d stick together; he’d already booked us into a motel—“WITH AIR CONDITIONING, GOOD TV, A GREAT POOL. WE’LL HAVE A BLAST!” Owen assured me; he’d already arranged everything.
The proposed funeral was all fouled up because the body was already two days late. Relatives of the deceased warrant officer—family members from Modesto and Yuma—had been delayed in Phoenix for what must have seemed forever. Arrangements with the funeral parlor had been made and canceled and made again; Owen knew the mortician and the minister—“THEY’RE REAL ASSHOLES: DYING IS JUST A BUSINESS TO THEM, AND WHEN THINGS DON’T COME OFF ON SCHEDULE, THEY BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT THE MILITARY AND MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR THE POOR FAMILY.”
Apparently the family had planned a kind of “picnic wake”; the wake was now in its third day. Owen was pretty sure that all he’d have to do was deliver the body to the mortuary; the survivor assistance officer—a ROTC professor at Arizona State University, a major whom Owen also knew—had warned Owen that the family was so pissed off at the Army that they probably wouldn’t want a military escort at the funeral.
“BUT YOU NEVER KNOW,” Owen told me. “WE’LL JUST HANG AROUND, SORT OF PLAY IT BY EAR—EITHER WAY, I CAN GET A COUPLE OF FREE DAYS OUT OF IT. WHEN THERE’S BEEN A FUCKUP LIKE THIS, THERE’S NEVER ANY PROBLEM WITH ME GETTING A COUPLE OF DAYS AWAY FROM THE POST. I JUST NOTIFY THE ARMY THAT I’M STICKING AROUND PHOENFX—‘AT THE REQUEST OF THE FAMILY,’ IS HOW I PUT IT. SOMETIMES, IT’S EVEN TRUE—LOTS OF TIMES, THE FAMILY WANTS YOU TO STICK AROUND. THE POINT IS, I’LL HAVE LOTS OF FREE TIME AND WE CAN JUST HANG OUT TOGETHER. LIKE I TOLD YOU, THE MOTEL HAS A GREAT SWIMMING POOL; AND IF IT’S NOT TOO HOT, WE CAN PLAY SOME TENNIS.”
“I don’t play tennis,” I reminded him.
“WE DON’T HAVE TO PLAY TENNIS,” Owen said.
It seemed to me to be a long way to go for only a couple of days. I also thought that the details of the body-escorting business—as they might pertain to this particular body—were more than a little uncertain, if not altogether vague. But there was no doubt that Owen had his heart set on my meeting him in Phoenix, and he sounded even more agitated than usual. I thought he might need the company; we hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. After all, I’d never been to Arizona—and, I admit, at the time I was curious to see something of the so-called body escorting. It didn’t occur to me that July was not the best season to be in Phoenix—but what did I know?
“Sure, let’s do it—it sounds like fun,” I told him.
“YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND,” said Owen Meany—his voice breaking a little. I assumed it was the telephone; I thought we had a bad connection.
That was the day they made desecrating the U.S. flag a federal crime. Owen Meany spent the night of July 5, 1968, in Oakland, California, where he was given a billet in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters; on the morning of July 6, Owen left quarters at the Oakland Army Depot—noting, in his diary, “THE ENLISTED MEN ON FAR EAST LEVY ARE REQUIRED TO LINE UP AT A NUMBERED DOOR, WHERE THEY ARE ISSUED JUNGLE FATIGUES, AND OTHER CRAP. THE RECRUITS ARE GIVEN STEAK DINNERS BEFORE BEGINNING THEIR FLIGHT TO VIETNAM. I’VE SEEN THIS PLACE TOO MANY TIMES: THE SPARS AND CRANES AND THE TIN WAREHOUSE ROOFS, AND THE GULLS GLIDING OVER THE AIRPLANE HANGARS—AND ALL THE NEW RECRUITS, ON THEIR WAY OVER THERE, AND THE BODIES COMING HOME. SO MANY GREEN DUFFEL BAGS ON THE SIDEWALKS. DO THE RECRUITS KNOW THE CONTENTS OF THOSE GRAY PLYWOOD BOXES?”
Owen noted in his diary that he was issued, as usual, the t
riangular cardboard box, in which the correctly prefolded flag was packaged—“WHO THINKS UP THESE THINGS? DOES THE PERSON WHO MAKES THE CARDBOARD BOX KNOW WHAT IT’S FOR?” He was issued the usual funeral forms and the usual black armband—he lied to a clerk about dropping his armband in a urinal, in order to be issued another one; he wanted me to have a black armband, too, so that I would look ACCEPTABLY OFFICIAL. About the time my plane left Boston, Owen Meany was identifying a plywood container in the baggage area of the San Francisco airport.
From the air, flying over Phoenix, you notice the nothingness first of all. It resembles a tan- and cocoa-colored moon, except that there are vast splotches of green—golf courses and the other pampered land where irrigation systems have been installed. From my Geology course, I knew that everything below me had once been a shallow ocean; and at dusk, when I flew into Phoenix, the shadows on the rocks were a tropical-sea purple, and the tumbleweeds were aquamarine—so that I could actually imagine the ocean that once was there. In truth, Phoenix still resembled a shallow sea, marred by the fake greens and blues of swimming pools. Some ten or twenty miles in the distance, a jagged ridge of reddish, tea-colored mountains were here and there capped with waxy deposits of limestone—to a New Englander, they looked like dirty snow. But it was far too hot for snow.
Although, at dusk, the sun had lost its intensity, the dry heat shimmered above the tarmac; despite a breeze, the heat persisted with furnacelike generation. After the heat, I noticed the palm trees—all the beautiful, towering palm trees.
Owen’s plane, like the body he was escorting home, was late.
I waited with the men in their guayabera shirts and huaraches, and their cowboy boots; the women, from petite to massive, appeared immodestly content in short shorts and halter tops, their rubber thongs slapping the hard floors of the Phoenix airport, which was optimistically called the Sky Harbor. Both the men and women were irrepressibly fond of the local silver-and-turquoise jewelry.