by John Irving
"YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID YES," Owen Meany told me, "AND THEN PISSED IN HIS LAP."
One thing about my mother's "beaus": they were all good-looking. So on that superficial level I was unprepared for Dan Needham, who was tall and gawky, with curly carrot-
colored hair, and who wore eyeglasses that were too small for his egg-shaped face-the perfectly round lenses giving him the apprehensive, hunting expression of a large, mutant owl. My grandmother said, after he'd gone, that it must have been the first time in the history of Gravesend Academy that they had hired "someone who looks younger than the students." Furthermore, his clothes didn't fit him; the jacket was too tight-the sleeves too short-and the trousers were so baggy that the crotch napped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and the only padded pans of his peculiar body. But I was too young and cynical to spot his kindness. Even before he was introduced to my grandmother or to Lydia or to me, he looked straight at me and said, "You must be Johnny. I heard as much about you as anyone can hear in an hour and a half on the Boston and Maine, and I know you can be trusted with an important package." It was a brown shopping bag with another brown paper bag stuffed inside it. Oh boy, here it comes, I thought: an inflatable camel-it floats and spits. But Dan Needham said, "It's not for you, it's not for anyone your age. But I'm trusting you to put it somewhere where it can't be stepped on-and out of the way of any pets, if you have pets. You mustn't let a pet near it. And whatever you do, don't open it. Just tell me if it moves."
Then he handed it to me; it didn't weigh enough to be Fowler's Modern English Usage, and if I was to keep it away from pets-and tell him if it moved-cleatly it was alive. I put it quickly under the hall table-the telephone table, we called it-and I stood halfway in the hall and halfway in the living room, where I could watch Dan Needham taking a seat. Taking a seat in my grandmother's living room was never easy, because many of the available seats were not for sitting in-they were antiques, which my grandmother was preserving, for historical reasons; sitting in them was not good for them. Therefore, although the living room was quite sumptuously arranged with upholstered chairs and couches, very little of this furniture was usable-and so a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, "Oh, for goodness sake, not there! You can't sit therel" And the startled person would attempt to try the next chair or couch, which in my grandmother's opinion would also collapse or burst into flames at the strain. And I suppose my grandmother noticed that Dan Needham was tall, and that he had a sizable bottom, and this no doubt meant to her that an even fewer-than-usual number of seats were available to him-while Lydia, not yet deft with her wheelchair, blocked the way here, and the way there, and neither my mother nor my grandmother had yet developed that necessary reflex to simply wheel her out of the way. And so the living room was a scene of idiocy and confusion, with Dan Needham spiraling toward one vulnerable antique after another, and my mother and grandmother colliding with Lydia's wheelchair while Grandmother barked this and that command regarding who should sit where. I hung back on the threshold of this awkwardness, keeping an eye on the ominous shopping bag, imagining that it had moved, a little-or that a mystery pet would suddenly materialize beside it and either eat, or be eaten by, the contents of the bag. We had never had a pet-my grandmother thought that people who kept pets were engaged in the basest form of self-mockery, intentionally putting themselves on a level with animals. Nevertheless, it made me extremely jumpy to observe the bag, awaiting its slightest twitch, and it made me even jumpier to observe the foolish nervousness of the adult ritual taking place in the living room. Gradually, I gave my whole attention to the bag; I slipped away from the threshold of the living room and retreated into the hall, sitting cross-legged on the scatter rug in front of the telephone table. The sides of the bag were almost breathing, and I thought I could detect an odor foreign to human experience. It was the suspicion of this odor that drew me nearer to the bag, until I crawled under the telephone table and put my ear to the bag and listened, and peered over the top of the bag-but the bag inside the bag blocked my view. In the living room, they were talking about history-that was Dan Needham's actual appointment: in the History Department. He had studied enough history at Harvard to be qualified to teach the conventional courses in that field at Gravesend. "Oh, you got the job!" my mother said. What was special in his approach was his use of the history of drama-and here he said something about the public entertainment of any period distinguishing the period as clearly as its so-called politics, but I drifted in and out of the sense of his remarks, so intent was I on the contents of the shopping bag in the hall. I picked up the bag and held it in my lap and waited for it to move. In addition to his interview with the History Department
members, and with the headmaster, Dan Needham was saying, he had requested some time to address those students interested in theater-and any faculty members who were interested, too-and in this session he had attempted to demonstrate how the development of certain techniques of the theatrical arts, how certain dramatic skills, can enhance our understanding of not only the characters on a stage but of a specific time and place as well. And for this session with the drama students, Dan Needham was saying, he always brought along a certain "prop"-something interesting, either to hold or focus the students' attention, or to distract them from what he would, finally, make them see. He was rather long-winded, I thought.
"What props?" my grandmother asked.
"Yes, what props ?" Lydia said. And Dan Needham said that a "prop" could be anything; once he'd used a tennis ball-and once a live bird in a cage. That was it! I thought, feeling that whatever it was in the bag was hard and lifeless and unmoving-and a birdcage would be all that. The bird, of course, I couldn't touch. Still, I wanted to see it, and with trepidation-and as silently as possible, so that the bores in the living room would not hear the paper crinkling of the two bags-I opened just a little bit of the bag within the bag. The face that stared intently into mine was not a bird's face, and no cage prevented this creature from leaping out at me-and the creature appeared not only poised to leap out at me, but eager to do so. Its expression was fierce; its snout, as narrow as the nose of a fox, was pointed at my face like a gun; its wild, bright eyes winked with hatred and fearlessness, and the claws of its forepaws, which were reaching toward me, were long and prehistoric. It looked like a weasel in a shell-like a ferret with scales. I screamed. I also forgot I was sitting under the telephone table, because I leaped up, knocking over the table and tangling my feet in the phone cord. I couldn't get away; and when I lunged out of the hall and into the living room, the telephone, and the phone table, and the beast in the bag were all dragged-with considerable clamor-after me. And so I screamed again.
"Goodness gracious!" my grandmother cried. But Dan Needham said cheerfully to my mother: "I told you he'd open the bag."
At first I had thought Dan Needham was a fool like all the others, and that he didn't know the first thing about six-year-olds-that to tell a six-year-old not to open a bag was an invitation to open it. But he knew very well what a six-year-old was like; to his credit, Dan Needham was always a little bit of a six-year-old himself.
"What in heaven's name is in the bag?" my grandmother asked, as I finally freed myself from the phone cord and went crawling to my mother.
"My prop!" Dan Needham said. It was some "prop," all right, for in the bag was a stuffed armadillo. To a boy from New Hampshire, an armadillo resembled a small dinosaur-for who in New Hampshire ever heard of a two-foot-long rat with a shell on its back, and claws as distinguished as an anteater's? Armadillos eat insects and earthworms and spiders and land snails, but I had no way of knowing that. It looked at least willing, if not able, to eat me. Dan Needham gave it to me. It was the first present any of my mother's "beaus" gave me that I kept. For years-long after its claws were gone, and its tail fell off, and its stuffing came out, and its sides collapsed, and its nose broke in half, and its glass eyes w
ere lost-I kept the bony plates from the sheD of its back. I loved the armadillo, of course, and Owen Meany also loved it. We would be playing in the attic, abusing my grandmother's ancient sewing machine, or dressing up in my dead grandfather's clothes, and Owen would say, out of nowhere, "LET'S GO GET THE ARMADILLO. LET'S BRING IT UP HERE AND HIDE IT IN THE CLOSET."
The closet that housed my dead grandfather's clothes was vast and mysterious, full of angles and overhead shelves, and rows upon rows of shoes. We would hide in the armpit of an old tuxedo; we would hide it in the leg of an old pair of waders, or under a derby hat; we would hang it from a pair of suspenders. One of us would hide it and the other one would have to find it in the dark closet with the aid of only a flashlight. No matter how many times we had seen the armadillo, to come upon it in the black closet-to suddenly light up its insane, violent face-was always frightening. Every time the finder found it, he would yell. Owen's yelling would occasionally produce my grandmother, who would not willingly mount the rickety staircase to the attic and struggle with the attic's trapdoor. She would stand at the foot of the staircase and say, "Not so loud, you boys!"
And she would sometimes add that we were to be careful with the ancient sewing machine, and with Grandfather's clothes-because she might want to sell them, someday. "That sewing machine is an antique, you know!" Well, almost everything at Front Street was an antique, and almost none of it-Owen and I knew perfectly well-would ever be sold; not, at least, while my grandmother was alive. She liked her antiques, as was evidenced by the growing number of chairs and couches in the living room that no one was allowed to sit on. As for the discards in the attic, Owen and I knew they were safe forever. And searching among those relics for the terrifying armadillo . . . which itself looked like some relic of the animal world, some throwback to an age when men were taking a risk every time they left the cave . . . hunting for that stuffed beast among the artifacts of my grandmother's culture was one of Owen Meany's favorite games.
"I CAN'T FIND IT," he would call out from the closet. "I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PUT IT IN THE SHOES, BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO STEP ON IT BEFORE I SEE IT. AND I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PUT IT ON THE TOP SHELF BECAUSE I DON'T LIKE TO HAVE IT ABOVE ME-I HATE TO SEE IT LOOKING DOWN AT ME. AND IT'S NO FAIR PUTTING IT WHERE IT WILL FALL DOWN IF I JUST TOUCH SOMETHING, BECAUSE THAT'S TOO SCARY. AND WHEN IT'S INSIDE THE SLEEVES, I CAN'T FIND FT WITHOUT REACHING INSIDE FOR IT-THAT'S NO FAIR, EITHER."
"Just shut up and find it, Owen," I would say.
"NO FAIR PUTTING IT IN THE HATBOXES," Owen would say, while I listened to him stumbling over the shoes inside the closet. "AND NO FAIR WHEN IT SPRINGS OUT AT ME BECAUSE YOU STRETCH THE SUSPENDERS IN THAT WAY . . . AAAAAAHHHHHH! THAT'S NO FAIR!"
Before Dan Needham brought anything as exotic as that armadillo or himself into my life, my expectations regarding anything unusual were reserved for Owen Meany, and for school holidays and portions of my summer vacation when my mother and I would travel "up north" to visit Aunt Martha and her family. To anyone in coastal New Hampshire, "up north" could mean almost anywhere else in the state, but Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred lived in the White Mountains, in what everyone called "the north country," and when they or my cousins said they were going "up north," they meant a relatively short drive to any of several towns that were a little north of them-to Bartlett or to Jackson, up where the real skiing was. And in the summers, Loveless Lake, where we went to swim, was also "up north" from where the Eastmans lived-in Sawyer Depot. It was the last train station on the Boston & Maine before North Conway, where most of the skiers got off. Every Christmas vacation and Easter, my mother and I, and our skis, departed the train in Sawyer Depot; from the depot itself, we could walk to the Eastmans' house. In the summer, when we visited at least once, it was an even easier walk-without our skis. Those train rides-at least two hours from Gravesend-were the most concrete occasions I was given in which to imagine my mother riding the Boston & Maine in the other direction -south, to Boston, where I almost never went. But the passengers traveling north, I always believed, were very different types from the citybound travelers-skiers, hikers, mountain-lake swimmers: these were not men and women seeking trysts, or keeping assignations. The ritual of those train rides north is unforgettable to me, although I remember nothing of the equal number of rides back to Gravesend; return trips, to this day-from anywhere-are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber. But every time we rode the train to Sawyer Depot, my mother and I weighed the advantages of sitting on the left-hand side of the train, so that we could see Mt. Chocorua-or on the right-hand side, so that we could see Ossipee Lake. Chocorua was our first indication of how much snow there would be where we were going, but there's more visible activity around a lake than there is on a mountain-and so we would sometimes "opt for Ossipee," as Mother and I described our decision. We also played a game that involved guessing where everyone was going to get off, and I always ate too many of those little tea sandwiches that they served on board, the kind with the crusts cut off; this overeating served to justify my inevitable trip to that lurching pit with the railroad ties going by underneath me, in a blur, and the whoosh of rank air that blew upward on my bare bottom.
My mother would always say, "We're almost at Sawyer Depot, Johnny. Wouldn't you be more comfortable if you waited until we got to your Aunt Martha's?"
Yes; and no. I could almost always have waited; yet it was not only necessary to empty my bladder and bowels before encountering my cousins-it was a needed test of courage to sit naked over that dangerous hole, imagining lumps of coal and loosened railroad spikes hurtling up at me at bruising speed. I needed the empty bladder and bowels because there was immediate, rough treatment ahead; my cousins always greeted me with instant acrobatics, if not actual violence, and I needed to brace myself for them, to frighten myself a little in order to be ready for all the future terrors that the vacation held in store for me. I would never describe my cousins as bullies; they were good-natured, rambunctious roughnecks and daredevils who genuinely wanted me to have fun-but fun in the north country was not what I was used to in my life with the women at Front Street, Gravesend. I did not wrestle with my grandmother or box with Lydia, not even when she had both her legs. I did play croquet with my mother, but croquet is not a contact sport. And given that my best friend was Owen Meany, I was not inclined to much in the way of athletic roughhousing. My mother loved her sister and brother-in-law; they always made her feel special and welcome-they certainly made me feel that way-and my mother doubtless appreciated a little time away from my grandmother's imperious wisdom. Grandmother would come to Sawyer Depot for a few days at Christmas, and she would make a grand appearance for one weekend every summer, but the north country was not to Grandmother's liking. And although Grandmother was perfectly tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at Front Street-and even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with Owen-she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her grandchildren. For Thanksgiving, the Eastmans came to Front Street, a disturbance that my grandmother referred to in terms of "the casualties" for several months after their visit. My cousins were active, combative athletes-my grandmother called them "the warriors"-and I lived a different life whenever I was with them. I was both crazy about them and terrified of them; I couldn't contain my excitement as the time to see them drew near, but after several days, I couldn't wait to get away from them-I missed the peace of my private games, and I missed Owen Meany; I even missed Grandmother's constant but consistent criticism. My cousins-Noah, Simon, and Hester (in order of their ages)-were all older than I: Hester was older by less than a year, although she would always be bigger; Simon was older by two years; Noah, by three. Those are not great differences in age, to be sure, but they were great enough in all those years before I was a teenager-when each of my cousins was better than I was, at everything. Since they grew up in the north country, they were fabulous skiers. I was, at best, a cautious skier, modeling my slow, wide turns on my
mother's graceful but undaring stem Christie-she was a pretty skier of intermediate ability who was consistently in control; she did not think that the essence of the sport was speed, nor did she fight the mountain. My cousins raced each other down the slopes, cutting each other off, knocking each other down-and rarely restraining their routes of descent to the marked trails. They would lead me into the deep, unmanageable powder snow in the woods, and in my efforts to keep up with them, I would abandon the controlled conservative skiing that my mother had taught me and end up straddling trees, embracing snow fences, losing my goggles in icy streams. My cousins were sincere in their efforts to teach me to keep my skis parallel-and to hop on my skis-but a school-vacation skier is never the equal to a north-country native. They set such standards for recklessness that, eventually, I could no longer have fun skiing with my mother. I felt guilty that I made her ski alone; but my mother was rarely left alone for long. By the end of the day, some man-a would-be ski instructor, if not an actual ski instructor-would be coaching her at her side. What I remember of skiing with my cousins is long, humiliating, and hurtling falls, followed by my cousins retrieving my ski poles, my mittens, and my hat-from which I became inevitably separated.
"Are you all right?" my eldest cousin, Noah, would ask me. "That looked rather harsh."
"That looked neat I" my cousin Simon would say; Simon loved to fall-he skied to crash.
"You keep doing that, you'll make yourself sterile,' * said my cousin Hester, to whom every event of our shared childhood was either sexually exhilarating or sexually damaging. In the summers, we went waterskiing on Loveless Lake, where the Eastmans kept a boathouse, the second floor of which was remodeled to resemble an English pub-Uncle Alfred was admiring of the English. My mother and Aunt Martha would go sailing, but Uncle Alfred drove the powerboat wildly and fast, a beer in his free hand. Because he did not water-ski himself, Uncle Alfred thought that the responsibility of the boat's driver was to make the skier's ride as harrowing as possible. He would double back in the middle of a turn so that the rope would go slack, or you could even catch up to the rope and ski over it. He drove a murderous figure ; he appeared to relish surprising you, by putting you directly in the path of an oncoming boat or of another surprised water-skier on the busy lake. Regardless of the cause of your fall, Uncle Alfred took credit for it. When anyone racing behind the boat would send up a fabulous spray, skimming lengthwise across the water, skis ripped off, head under one second, up the next, and then under again-Uncle Alfred would shout, "Bingo!"
