A Prayer for Owen Meany

smile.

"Look at those dandelions, dear," said Randolph White.

"They should be ripped out by their roots," Mrs. White said decisively.

"They should, they should--and they will be!" said the new headmaster.

Dan confessed to Owen and me that the Whites had given him the shivers.

"YOU THINK THEY GIVE YOU THE SHIVERS NOW," Owen said. "JUST WAIT UNTIL HE STARTS MAKING DECISIONS!"


Toronto: May 13, 1987--another gorgeous day, sunny and cool; Mrs. Brocklebank and others of my neighbors who were attacking their dandelions, yesterday, are having a go at their lawns today. It smells as fresh as a farm along Russell Hill Road and Lonsdale Road. I read The Globe and Mail again, but I was good; I didn't bring it to school with me, and I resolved that I would not discuss the sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the diversion of the profits to the Nicaraguan rebels--or the gift from the sultan of Brunei that was supposed to help support the rebels but was instead transferred to the wrong account in a Swiss bank. A ten-million-dollar "mistake"! The Globe and Mail said: "Brunei was only one foreign country approached during the Reagan Administration's attempt to find financial support for the contras after Congress forbade any money's being spent on their behalf by the U.S. Government." But in my Grade 13 English class, the ever-clever Claire Clooney read that sentence aloud to the class and then asked me if I didn't think it was "the awkwardest sentence alive."

I have encouraged the girls to find clumsy sentences in newspapers and magazines, and to bring them into class for our hearty ridicule--and that bit about "any money's being spent" is enough to turn an English teacher's eyeballs a blank shade of pencil-gray--but I knew that Claire Clooney was trying to get me started; I resisted the bait.

It is that time in the spring term when the minds of the Grade 13 girls are elsewhere, and I reminded them that--yesterday--we had not traveled sufficiently far in our perusal of Chapter Three of The Great Gatsby; that the class had bogged down in a mire of interpretations regarding the "quality of eternal reassurance" in Gatsby's smile; and that we'd wasted more valuable time trying to grasp the meaning of Jordan Baker exhibiting "an urban distaste for the concrete." Claire Clooney, I might add, has such a general "distaste for the concrete" that she confused Daisy Buchanan with Myrtle Wilson. I suggested that mistaking a wife for a mistress was of more dire substance than a slip of the tongue. I suspect that Claire Clooney is too clever for an error of this magnitude; that, yesterday, she had not read past Chapter One; and that, today--by her ploy of distracting me with the news--she was not finished with Chapter Four.

"Here's another one, Mr. Wheelwright," Claire Clooney said, continuing her merciless attack on The Globe and Mail. "This is the second-awkwardest sentence alive," she said. "Get this: 'Mr. Reagan denied yesterday that he had solicited third-country aid for the rebels, as Mr. McFarlane had said on Monday.' That's some dangling clunker there, isn't it?" Claire Clooney asked me. "I like that, 'as Mr. McFarlane had said'--it's just like tacked on to the sentence!" she cried.

"Is it 'like tacked on' or is it tacked on?" I asked her. She smiled; the other girls tittered. They were not going to get me to blow a forty-minute class on Ronald Reagan. But I had to keep my hands under the desk--my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law--they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood!

I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver "ranting lectures" to them about the United States; some parents have complained to the headmistress, and Katherine has cautioned me to keep my politics out of the classroom--"or at least say something about Canada; BSS girls are Canadians, for the most part, you know."

"I don't know anything about Canada," I say.

"I know you don't!" the Rev. Mrs. Keeling says, laughing; she is always friendly, even when she's teasing me, but the substance of her remark hurts me--if only because it is the same, critical message that Canon Mackie delivers to me, without cease. In short: You've been with us for twenty years; when are you going to take an interest in us?

In my Grade 13 English class, Frances Noyes said: "I think he's lying." She meant President Reagan, of course.

"They should impeach him. Why can't they impeach him?" said Debby LaRocca. "If he's lying, they should impeach him. If he's not lying--if all these other clowns are running his administration for him--then he's too stupid to be president. Either way, they should impeach him. In Canada, they'd call for a vote of confidence and he'd be gone!"

Sandra Darcy said, "Yeah."

"What do you think, Mr. Wheelwright?" Adrienne Hewlett asked me sweetly.

"I think that some of you have not read to the end of Chapter Four," I said. "What does it mean that Gatsby was 'delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor'--what does that mean?" I asked them.

At least Ruby Newell had done her homework. "It means that Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay--that all the parties he throws ... in a way, he throws them for her. It means that he's not just crazy--that he's made all the money, and he's spending all the money, just for her! To catch her eye, you know?" Ruby said.

"I like the part about the guy who fixed the World Series!" Debby LaRocca cried.

"Meyer Wolfshears!" said Claire Clooney.

"-sheim," I said softly. "Meyer Wolfsheim."

"Yeah!" Sandra Darcy said.

"I like the way he says 'Oggsford' instead of Oxford," Debby LaRocca said.

"Like he thinks Gatsby's an 'Oggsford man,'" said Frances Noyes.

"I think the guy who's telling the story is a snob," said Adrienne Hewlett.

"Nick," I said softly. "Nick Carraway."

"Yeah," Sandra Darcy said. "But he's supposed to be a snob--that's part of it."

"And when he says he's so honest, that he's 'one of the few honest people' he's ever known, I think we're not supposed to trust him--not completely, I mean," Claire Cooney said. "I know he's the one telling the story, but he's a part of them--he's judging them, but he's one of them."

"They're trashy people, all of them," Sandra Darcy said.

"'Trashy'?" I asked.

"They're very careless people," Ruby Newell said correctly.

"Yes," I said. "They certainly are." Very smart, these BSS girls. They know what's going on in The Great Gatsby, and they know what should be done to Ronald Reagan's rotten administration, too! But I contained myself very well in class today. I restricted my observations to The Great Gatsby. I bade the class to look with special care in the following chapters at Gatsby's notion that he can "repeat the past," at Gatsby's observation of Daisy--that "her voice is full of money"--and at the frequency of how often Gatsby appears in moonlight (once, at the end of Chapter Seven, "watching over nothing"). I asked them to consider the coincidence of Nick's thirtieth birthday; the meaning of the sentence "Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade" might give our class as much trouble as the meaning of "an urban distaste for the concrete."

"And remember what Ruby said!" I told them. "They're very 'careless' people." Ruby Newell smiled; "careless" is how Fitzgerald himself described those characters; Ruby knew that I knew she had already read to the end of the book.

"They were careless people," the book says "... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...."

The Reagan administration is full of such "careless people"; their kind of carelessness is immoral. And President Reagan calls himself a Christian! How does he dare? The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today ... they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy! And how about these evangelical types, performing miracles for money? Oh, there's big bucks in interpreting the gospel for idiots--or in having idiots interpret the gospel for you--and some of these evangelists are even hypocritical enough to indulge in sexual activity that would embarrass former senator Hart. Perhaps poor Gary Hart missed his true calling, or are they all the same--these presidential candidates and evangelicals who are caught with their pants down? Mr. Reagan has been caught with his pants down, too--but the American people reserve their moral condemnation for sexual misconduct. Remember when the country was killing itself in Vietnam, and the folks at home were outraged at the length and cleanliness of the protesters' hair?

In the staff room, Evelyn Barber, one of my colleagues in the English Department, asked me what I thought of the contra-aid article in The Globe and Mail. I said I thought that the Reagan administration exhibited "an urban distaste for the concrete." That got quite a few laughs from my colleagues, who were expecting a diatribe from me; on the one hand, they complain about my "predictable politics," but they are just like the students--they enjoy getting me riled up. I have spent twenty years teaching teenagers; I don't know if I've been a maturing influence on any of them, but they have turned me and my colleagues into teenagers. We teenagers are much maligned; for example, we would not keep Mr. Reagan in office.

In the staff room, my colleagues were yapping about the school elections; the elections were yesterday, when I noticed an impatient thrill in morning chapel--before the balloting for head girl. The girls sang "Sons of God" with even more pep than usual; how I love to hear them sing that hymn! There are verses only the voices of young girls can convincingly sing.

Brothers, sisters, we are one,

and our life has just begun;

in the Spirit we are young,

we can live for ever!

It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion--from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading--and good writing about reading--moves the same way. It was Owen, using Tess of the d'Urbervilles as an example, who showed me how to write a term paper, describing the incidents that determine Tess's fate by relating them to that portentous sentence that concludes Chapter Thirty-six--"new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten." It was a triumph for me: by writing my first successful term paper about a book I'd read, I also learned to read. Most mechanically, Owen helped my reading by another means: he determined that my eyes wandered to both the left and to the right of where I was in a sentence, and that--instead of following the elusive next word with my finger--I should highlight a spot on the page by reading through a hole cut in a piece of paper. It was a small rectangle, a window to read through; I moved the window over the page--it was a window that opened no higher than two or three lines. I read more quickly and more comfortably than I ever had read with my finger; to this day, I read through such a window.

As for my spelling, Owen was more helpful than Dr. Dolder. It was Owen who encouraged me to learn how to type; a typewriter doesn't cure the problem, but I often can recognize that a typewritten word looks wrong--in longhand, I was (and am) a disaster. And Owen made me read the poems of Robert Frost aloud to him--"IN MY VOICE, THEY DON'T SOUND SO GOOD." And so I memorized "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and "Fire and Ice" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"; Owen memorized "Birches," but that one was too long for me.

That summer of 1960, when we swam in the abandoned quarry lake, we no longer tied a rope around ourselves or swam one-at-a-time--Mr. Meany had either lost interest in the rule, or in enforcing it; or he had acknowledged that Owen and I were no longer children. That was the summer we were eighteen. When we swam in the quarry, it didn't seem dangerous; nothing seemed dangerous. That was the summer we registered for the draft, too; it was no big deal. When we were sixteen, we got our driver's licenses; when we were eighteen, we registered for the draft. At the time, it seemed no more perilous than buying an ice-cream cone at Hampton Beach.

On Sunday--when it was not a good beach day--Owen and I played basketball in the Gravesend Academy gym; the summer-school kids had an outdoor sports program, and they were so stir-crazy on weekends that they went to the beach even when it rained. We had the basketball court to ourselves, and it was cool in the gym. There was an old janitor who worked the weekends and who knew us from the regular school-year; he got us the best basketballs and clean towels out of the stock room, and sometimes he even let us swim in the indoor pool--I think he was a trifle retarded. He must have been damaged in some fashion because he actually enjoyed watching Owen and me practice our idiotic stunt with the basketball--the leaping, lift-him-up, slam-dunk shot.

"LET'S PRACTICE THE SHOT," Owen would say; that was all we ever called it--"the shot." We'd go over it again and again. He would grasp the ball in both hands and leap into my arms (but he never took his eyes from the rim of the basket); sometimes he would twist in the air and slam the ball into the hoop backward--sometimes he would dunk it with one hand. I would turn in time to see the ball in the net and Owen Meany descending--his hands still higher than the rim of the basket but his head already below the net, his feet kicking the air. He always landed gracefully.

Sometimes we could entice the old janitor to time us with the official scorer's clock. "SET IT TO EIGHT SECONDS," Owen would instruct him. Over the summer, we twice managed "the shot" in under five seconds. "SET IT TO FOUR," Owen would say, and we'd keep practicing; under four seconds was tough. When I'd get bored, Owen would quote me a little Robert Frost. "'ONE COULD DO WORSE THAN BE A SWINGER OF BIRCHES.'"

In our wallets, in our pockets, the draft cards weighed nothing at all; we never looked at them. It wasn't until the fall term of 1960--with Headmaster White at the helm--that Gravesend Academy students found an interesting use for draft cards. Naturally, it was Owen Meany who made the discovery. He was in the office of The Grave, experimenting with a brand-new photocopier; he found that he could copy his draft card--then he found a way to make a blank draft card, one without a name and without a date of birth. The drinking age in New Hampshire was twenty-one; although Owen Meany didn't drink, he knew there were a lot of students at Gravesend Academy who liked to drink themselves silly--and none of them was twenty-one.

He charged twenty-one dollars a card. "THAT'S THE MAGIC NUMBER," he said. "JUST MAKE UP YOUR OWN BIRTHDAY. DON'T TELL ANYONE WHERE YOU GOT THIS. IF YOU GET CAUGHT, I DON'T KNOW YOU."

It was the first time he'd broken the law--unless you count the business with the tadpoles and toads, and Mary Magdalene in her goal.


Toronto: May 14, 1987--another sunny morning, but rain developing.

President Reagan is now taking the tack that he's proud of every effort he's made for the contras, whom he calls "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." The president confirmed that he had "discussed" the matter of aid with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; he's changed his story from only two days ago. The Globe and Mail pointed out that "the king had brought up the subject"; does it matter who brought it up? "My diary shows I never brought it up," the president said. "I expressed pleasure that he was doing that." I never thought the president could do anything that would make me feel at all close to him; but Mr. Reagan keeps a diary, too!

Owen kept a diary.

The first entry was as follows: "THIS DIARY WAS GIVEN TO ME FOR CHRISTMAS, 1960, BY MY BENEFACTOR, MRS. HARRIET WHEELWRIGHT; IT IS MY INTENTION TO MAKE MRS. WHEELWRIGHT PROUD OF ME."

I don't believe that Dan Needham and I thought of my grandmother as Owen's BENEFACTOR, although--quite literally--that is what she'd become; but that Christmas of 1960, Dan and I--and Grandmother--had reason to be especially proud of Owen Meany. He'd had a busy fall.

Randy White, our new headmaster, had also been busy; he'd been making decisions, left and right, and The Voice had not allowed a single headmasterly move to pass unchallenged. The first decision had actually been Mrs. White's; she'd not liked the Thorndikes' old home--it was, traditionally, the headmaster's house, it had already housed three headmasters (two of them had died there; old Thorny, when he retired, had moved to his former summer home in Rye, where he planned to live year-round). But the traditional house was not up to the Lake Forest standards that the Whites were used to; it was a well-kept, colonial house on Pine Street, but it was "too old" for the Whites--and "too dark," she said, and "too far from the main campus," he said; and a "poor place to entertain," they both agreed. Apparently, Sam White liked to "entertain."

"WHOM ARE THEY GOING TO ENTERTAIN?" asked The Voice, who was critical of what he called "THE WHITES' SOCIAL PRIORITIES." Indeed, it was an expensive decision, too; a new house was built for the headmaster--so central in its location that its ongoing construction was a campus eyesore throughout Owen's and my eleventh-grade year. There had been some problems with the architect--or else Mrs. White had changed her mind about a few of the interior particulars--after the construction was in progress; hence the delay. It was a rather plain saltbox--"NOT IN KEEPING WITH THE OLDER FACULTY HOUSES," as Owen pointed out; also, its positioning interrupted a broad, beautiful expanse of lawn between the old library and the Main Academy Building.

"There's going to be a new library one day soon, anyway," the headmaster said; he was working up an expanded building proposal that included a new library, two new dormitories, a new dining hall, and--"down the road"--a new gym with coeducational facilities. "Coeducation," the headmaster said, "is a part of the future of any progressive school."

The Voice said: "IT IS IRONIC AND SELF-SERVING THAT THE SO-CALLED 'EXPANDED BUILDING PROPOSAL' SHOULD BEGIN WITH A NEW HOUSE FOR THE HEADMASTER. IS HE GOING TO 'ENTERTAIN' ENOUGH HIGH-INCOME ALUMNI IN THAT HOUSE TO GET THE SO-CALLED 'CAPITAL FUND DRIVE' OFF THE GROUND? IS THIS THE HOUSE THAT PAYS FOR EVERYTHING--FROM THE GYM ON DOWN?"

When the headmaster's house was finally ready for occupancy, the Rev. Mr. Merrill and his family were moved out of a rather crowded dormitory apartment and into the former headmaster's house on Pine Street. It was, impractically, at some distance from Hurd's Church; but the Rev. Lewis Merrill, as a newcomer to the school, must have been grateful to have been given such a nice, old home. A