A Prayer for Owen Meany

  Mr. Meany had come in his pickup, and several of the guests had blocked it in our driveway, so I went with him and Owen to help identify the cars. We were well across the lawn, and quite far from the hedges, when I saw Hester's bare arm protrude from the dark-green privet. "Just hand them over!" she was saying, and Noah and Simon began to tease her.

  "Hand what over?" Simon was saying.

  Owen and I wrote down the license-plate numbers of the cars blocking Mr. Meany's pickup, and then I presented the list to my grandmother, who enjoyed making announcements in a voice based on Maugham's Mrs. Culver from The Constant Wife. It took us a while to free Mr. Meany from the driveway; Owen was visibly more relaxed after his father had departed.

  He was left holding his father's nearly full glass of champagne, which I advised him not to drink; I was sure it tasted heavily of pickle. We went and stared at the wedding presents, until I acknowledged the propitious placement of the present from Owen and his father.

  "I MADE IT MYSELF," he said. At first I thought he meant the Christmas wrapping paper, but then I realized that he had made the actual present. "MY FATHER HELPED ME SELECT THE PROPER STONE," Owen admitted. Good God, so it is granite! I thought.

  Owen was upset that the newlyweds would not open their presents until after their honeymoon, but he restrained himself from describing the present to me. I would have many years to see it for myself, he explained. Indeed, I would.

  It was a brick-shaped piece of the finest granite--"MONUMENT QUALITY, AS GOOD AS THEY GET OUT OF BARRE," Owen would say. Owen had cut it himself, polished it himself; he had designed and chiseled the border himself, and the engraving was all his, too. He had worked on it after school in the monument shop, and on weekends. It looked like a tombstone for a cherished pet--at best, a marker for a stillborn child; but more appropriate for a cat or a hamster. It was meant to lie lengthwise, like a loaf of bread, and it was engraved with the approximate date of my mother's marriage to Dan:

  JULY

  1952

  Whether Owen was unsure of the exact date, or whether it would have meant hours more of engraving--or ruined his concept of the aesthetics of the stone--I don't know. It was too big and heavy for a paperweight. Although Owen later suggested this use for it, he admitted it was more practical as a doorstop. For years--before he gave it to me--Dan Needham dutifully used it as a doorstop and frequently bashed his toes against it. But whatever it would become, it had to be left in the open where Owen would be sure to see it when he visited; he was proud of it, and my mother adored it. Well, my mother adored Owen; if he'd given her a gravestone with the date of death left blank--to be filled in at the appropriate time--she would have loved that, too. As it was, in my opinion--and in Dan's--Owen did give her a gravestone. It had been made in a monument shop, with grave-marking tools; it may have had her wedding date on it, but it was a miniature tombstone.

  And although there was much mirth in evidence at my mother's wedding, and even my grandmother exhibited an unusual tolerance for the many young and not-so-young adults who were cavorting and jolly with drink, the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a funeral.

  Owen became quite playful regarding his possession of Hester's panties. He was not one to be bold with girls, and only a fool--or Noah or Simon--would be bold with Hester; but Owen managed to surround himself with the crowd, thus making it embarrassing for Hester to take back her panties. "Give them over, Owen," she would hiss at him.

  "OKAY, SURE, DO YOU WANT THEM?" he would say, reaching for his pocket while standing firmly between Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred.

  "Not here!" Hester would say threateningly.

  "OH, SO YOU DON'T WANT THEM? CAN I KEEP THEM?" he would say.

  Hester stalked him through the party; she was only mildly angry, I thought--or she was mildly enjoying herself. It was a flirtation that made me the slightest bit jealous, and it went on so long that Noah and Simon got bored and began to arm themselves with confetti for my mother and Dan's eventual departure.

  That came sooner than expected, because they had only begun to cut up the wedding cake when the storm started. It had been growing darker and darker, and the wind now carried some light rain in it; but when the thunder and lightning began, the wind dropped and the rain fell heavily and straight down--in sheets. Guests bolted for the cover of the house; my grandmother quickly tired of telling people to wipe their feet. The caterers struggled with the bar and the tables of food; they had set up a tent that extended over only half the terrace, like an awning, but there was not enough room under it for the wedding presents and for all the food and drink; Owen and I helped move the presents inside. My mother and Dan raced upstairs to change their clothes and grab their bags. Uncle Alfred was summoned to fetch the Buick, which he had not vandalized too badly in the usual "Just Married" fashion. "Just Married" was written, with chalk, across the tailgate, but the lettering was almost washed away by the time my mother and Dan came downstairs in their traveling clothes, carrying their luggage.

  The wedding guests crowded in the many windows that faced the driveway, to see the honeymooners leave; but they had a confused departure. The rain was pelting down as they tried to put the luggage in the car; Uncle Alfred, in the role of their valet, was soaking wet--and since Simon and Noah had hoarded all the confetti for themselves, they were the only throwers. They threw most of it on their father, on Uncle Alfred, because he was so wet that the confetti stuck to him, instantly turning him into a clown.

  People were cheering from the windows of 80 Front Street, but my grandmother was frowning. Chaos disturbed her; mayhem was mayhem, even if people were having a good time; bad weather was bad weather, even if no one seemed to mind. And some of her old crones were watching her, too. (How does royalty react to rain at a wedding? It's what that Tabby Wheelwright deserves--her in her white dress.) My Aunt Martha risked the rain to hug and kiss my mother and Dan; Simon and Noah plastered her with confetti, too.

  Then, as suddenly as the wind had dropped and the rain had fallen, the rain changed to hail. In New Hampshire, you can't even count on July. Hailstones bounced off the Buick like machine-gun fire, and Dan and my mother jumped into the car; Aunt Martha shrieked and covered her head--she and Uncle Alfred ran to the house. Even Noah and Simon felt the hailstones' sting; they retreated, too. Someone shouted that a hailstone had broken a champagne glass, left on the terrace. The hailstones struck with such force that the people crowded close to the windows stepped back, away from the glass. Then my mother rolled down the car windows; I thought she was waving good-bye but she was calling for me. I held my jacket over my head, but the hailstones were still painful. One of them, the size of a robin's egg, struck the bony knob of my elbow and made me wince.

  "Good-bye, darling!" my mother said, pulling my head inside the car window and kissing me. "Your grandmother knows where we're going, but she won't tell you unless there's an emergency."

  "Have a good time!" I said. When I looked at 80 Front Street, every downstairs window was a portrait--faces looking at me, and at the honeymooners. Well, almost everyone--not Gravesend's two holy men; they weren't watching me, or the newlyweds. At opposite ends of the house, alone in their own little windows, the Rev. Lewis Merrill and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin were watching the sky. Were they taking a religious view of the hailstorm? I wondered. In Rector Wiggin's case, I imagined he was seeing the weather from the point of view of an ex-pilot--that he was simply observing that it would be a shitty day to fly. But Pastor Merrill was searching the heavens for the source of such a violent storm. Was there anything in the Holy Scriptures that tipped him off about the meaning of hailstones? In their zeal to demonstrate their knowledge of appropriate passages from the Bible, neither minister had offered my mother and Dan that most reassuring blessing from Tobit--the one that goes, "That she and I may grow old together."

  Too bad neither of the ministers thought of that one, but the books of the Apocrypha are usually omitted from Protestant editions of
the Bible. There would be no growing old together for Dan Needham and my mother, whose appointment with the ball that Owen hit was only a year away.

  I was nearly back inside the house when my mother called me again. "Where's Owen?" she asked. It took me a while to locate him in the windows, because he was upstairs, in my mother's bedroom; the figure of the woman in the red dress was standing beside him, my mother's double, her dressmaker's dummy. I know now that there were three holy men at 80 Front Street that day--three guys with their eyes on the weather. Owen wasn't watching the departing honeymooners, either. Owen was also watching the skies, with one arm around the dummy's waist, sagging on her hip, his troubled face peering upward. I should have known then what angel he was watching for; but it was a busy day, my mother was asking for Owen--I just ran upstairs and brought him to her. He didn't seem to mind the hail; the pellets clattered off the car all around him, but I didn't see one hit him. He stuck his face in the window and my mother kissed him. Then she asked him how he was getting home. "You're not walking home, or taking your bike, Owen--not in this weather," she said. "Do you want a ride?"

  "ON YOUR HONEYMOON?" he asked.

  "Get in," she said. "Dan and I will drop you."

  He looked awfully pleased; that he should get to go on my mother's honeymoon--even for a little bit of the way! He tried to slide into the car, past her, but his trousers were wet and they stuck against my mother's skirt.

  "Wait a minute," she said. "Let me out. You get in first." She meant that he was small enough to straddle the drive-shaft hump, in the middle of the seat, between her and Dan, but when she stepped outside the Buick--even for just a second--a hailstone ricocheted off the roof of the car and smacked her right between the eyes.

  "Ow!" she cried, holding her head.

  "I'M SORRY!" Owen said quickly.

  "Get in, get in," Mother said, laughing.

  They started to drive away.

  It was then Hester realized that Owen had successfully made off with her panties.

  She ran out in the driveway and stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the slowly moving car; Dan and my mother, facing forward, stuck their hands out the windows, risking the hailstones, and waved. Owen turned around in the seat between them and faced backward; his grin took up his whole face, and it was very clear, from the flash of white, what he was waving to Hester.

  "Hey! You little creep!" Hester called. But the hail was turning back to rain; Hester was instantly soaked as she stood there in the driveway--and her yellow dress clung to her so tenaciously that it was easy to see what she was missing. She bolted for the house.

  "Young lady," my Aunt Martha said to her, "where on earth are your..."

  "Merciful Heavens, Hester!" my grandmother said.

  But the heavens did not look merciful, not at the moment. And my grandmother's crones, observing Hester, must have been thinking: That may be Martha's girl but she's got more of Tabby's kind of trouble in her.

  Simon and Noah were gathering hailstones before they could melt in the returning rain. I ran outside to join them. They let fly at me with a few of the bigger ones; I gathered my own supply and fired back. I was surprised by the hailstones' coldness--as if they had traveled to earth from another, much icier universe. Squeezing a hailstone the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball.

  Mr. Chickering, our fat and friendly Little League coach and manager--the man who decided, that day, to have Owen bat for me, the man who instructed Owen to "Swing away!"--Mr. Chickering is spending his last days in the Soldiers' Home on Court Street. The wrecked images that his bout with Alzheimer's hurl at him from time to time have left him jumpy and dazed, but curiously alert. Like a man sitting under a tree full of children pelting him with acorns, he seems to expect he'll be hit at any moment, he even appears to be looking forward to it, but he has no notion where the acorns come from (despite what must be the firm feeling of the trunk of the tree against his back). When I visit him--when the acorns fly at him, and hit him just the right way--he perks up instantly. "You're on deck, Johnny!" he says cheerfully. And once he said, "Owen's batting for you, Johnny!" But, at other times, he is far away; perhaps he is turning my mother's face to the ground, but taking care to close her eyes first--or else he is pulling down the skirt of her dress, for decency's sake, and pinching her splayed knees together. Once, when he appeared to fail to recognize me--when I could establish no coherent communication with him--he spoke up as I was leaving; it was a sad, reflective voice that said, "You don't want to see her, Johnny."

  At my mother's funeral, in Hurd's Church, Mr. Chickering was visibly moved. I'm certain that his rearranging of my mother's body in its repose had been the only time he had ever touched her; both the memory of that, and of Police Chief Pike's inquiries regarding the "instrument of death," the "murder weapon," had clearly rattled Mr. Chickering, who wept openly at the funeral, as if he were mourning the death of baseball itself. Indeed, not only had Owen and I quit the team--and that infernal game--forever; other members of our Little League team had used the upsetting incident as a means to get out of a tedious obligation that had been much more their parents' notion of something that was "good for them" than it had ever been their sport of choice. Mr. Chickering, who was completely good-hearted, had always told us that when we won, we won as a team, and when we lost, we lost as a team. Now--in his view--we had killed as a team; but he wept in his pew as if he bore more than his share of team responsibility.

  He had encouraged some of my other teammates and their families to sit with him--among them, the hapless Harry Hoyt, who'd received a base on balls with two outs, who'd made his own, small contribution to Owen Meany coming to the plate. After all, Harry could have been the last out--in which case, my mother would have taken Owen and me home from the game, as usual. But Harry had walked. He sat in Hurd's, quite riveted by Mr. Chickering's tears. Harry was almost innocent. We had been so many runs behind, and there were already two outs in our last inning; it made no sense for Harry Hoyt to walk. What possible good could a base on balls have done us? Harry should have been swinging away.

  He was an otherwise harmless creature, although he would cause his mother no little grief. His father was dead, his mother was--for years--the receptionist at the Gas Works; she got all the calls about the billing errors, and the leaks. Harry would never be Gravesend Academy material. He dutifully finished Gravesend High School and enlisted in the Navy--the Navy was popular around Gravesend. His mother tried to get Harry out of the service, claiming she was a widow who needed his support; but--in the first place--she had a job, and in the second place, Harry wanted to go in the Navy. He was embarrassed by his mother's lack of patriotic zeal; it may have been the only time he argued with anyone, but he won the argument--he got to go to Vietnam, where he was killed by one of the poisonous snakes of that region. It was a Russell's viper and it bit him while he was peeing under a tree; a later revelation was that the tree stood outside a whorehouse, where Harry had been waiting his turn. He was like that; he was a walker--when there was no good reason to walk.

  His death made his mother quite political--or at least "quite political" for Gravesend. She called herself a war resister and she advertised that in her home she would give free counsel on how to evade the draft; it was never very accurately demonstrated that her evening draft-counseling sessions so exhausted her that she became an inadequate receptionist at the Gas Works--yet the Gas Works let her go. Several patriots from the town were apprehended in the act of vandalizing her car and garage; she didn't press charges, but she was gossiped about as a corrupter of the morals of youth. Although she was a plain, even dowdy woman, she was accused of seducing several of her young draft counselees, and she eventually moved away from Gravesend--I think she moved to Portsmouth; that was far enough away. I remember her at my mother's funeral; she didn't sit with her son Harry, where Mr. Chickering had gathered the team in adjacent pews. She was nev
er a team player, Mrs. Hoyt; but Harry was.

  Mrs. Hoyt was the first person I remember who said that to criticize a specific American president was not anti-American; that to criticize a specific American policy was not antipatriotic; and that to disapprove of our involvement in a particular war against the communists was not the same as taking the communists' side. But these distinctions were lost on most of the citizens of Gravesend; they are lost on many of my former fellow Americans today.

  I don't remember seeing Buzzy Thurston at my mother's funeral. He should have been there. After Harry Hoyt walked, Buzzy Thurston should have been the last out. He hit such an easy grounder--it was as sure an out as I've ever seen--but somehow the shortstop bobbled the ball. Buzzy Thurston reached base on an error. Who was that shortstop? He should have been in Hurd's Church, too.

  Possibly Buzzy wasn't there because he was Catholic; Owen suggested this, but there were other Catholics in attendance--Owen was simply expressing his particular prejudice. And I may be doing Buzzy an injustice; maybe he was there--after all, Hurd's was packed; it was as full as it had been for my mother's wedding. All those same crones of my grandmother were there. I know what they came to see. How does royalty react to this? How will Harriet Wheelwright respond to Fate with a capital F--to a Freak Accident (with a capital F, too), or to an Act of God (if that's what you believe it was)? All those same crones, as black and hunchbacked as crows gathered around some roadkill--they came to the service as if to say: We acknowledge, O God, that Tabby Wheelwright was not allowed to get off scot-free.

  Getting off "scot-free" was a cardinal crime in New Hampshire. And by the birdy alertness visible in the darting eyes of my grandmother's crones, I could tell that--in their view--my mother had not escaped her just reward.

  Buzzy Thurston, there or not there, would not get off scot-free, either. I really didn't dislike Buzzy--especially after he spoke up for Owen, when Owen and I got ourselves in hot water with some of Buzzy's Catholic classmates because of a little incident at St. Michael's, the parochial school. But Buzzy was judged harshly for his role in reaching base and bringing Owen Meany up to bat (if judgment is what you believe it was). He was not Gravesend Academy material, either; yet he did a postgraduate year at the academy, because he was a fair athlete--your standard outdoor New England variety: a football, hockey, and baseball man. He did not always need to reach base on an error.