by John Irving
"There must be no Soviet beachhead in Central America," President Reagan said. He also insisted that he would not sacrifice his proposed nuclear missiles in space-his beloved Star Wars plan-to a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union. He even said that "a key element of the U.S.-Soviet agenda" is "more responsible Soviet conduct around the world''-as if the United States were a bastion of' 'responsible conduct around the world"! I believe that President Reagan can say these things only because he knows that the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says; it is history that holds you accountable, and I've already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history. How many of them even remember their own, recent history? Was twenty years ago so long ago for Americans? Do they remember October , ? Fifty thousand antiwar demonstrators were in Washington; I was there; that was the ' 'March on the Pentagon''-remember? And two years later-in October of '-there were fifty thousand people in Washington again; they were carrying flashlights, they were asking for peace. There were a hundred thousand asking for peace in Boston Common; there were two hundred fifty thousand in New York. Ronald Reagan had not yet numbed the United States, but he had succeeded in putting California to sleep; he described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." As president, he still didn't know who the enemy was. I now believe that Owen Meany always knew; he knew everything. We were seniors at Gravesend Academy in February of ; we watched a lot of TV at Front Street. President Kennedy said that U.S. advisers in Vietnam would return fire if fired upon.
"I HOPE WE'RE ADVISING THE RIGHT GUYS," Owen Meany said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and fifty jet fighters were being sent there-"in response to Communist expansion in Laos," President Kennedy said.
"I HOPE WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING," said Owen Meany. In the summer of ', the summer following our first year at the university, the Buddhists in Vietnam were demonstrating; there were revolts. Owen and I saw our first self-immolation-on television. South Vietnamese government forces, led by Ngo Dinh Diem-the elected president- attacked several Buddhist pagodas; that was in August. In May, Diem's brother-Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the secret police force-had broken up a Buddhist celebration by killing eight children and one woman.
"DIEM IS A CATHOLIC," Owen Meany announced. "WHAT'S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?"
That was the summer that Henry Cabot Lodge became the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam; that was the summer that Lodge received a State Department cable advising him that the United States would "no longer tolerate" Ngo Dinh Nhu's "influence" on President Diem's regime. In two months, a military coup toppled Diem's South Vietnamese government; the next day, Diem and his brother, Nhu, were assassinated.
"IT LOOKS LIKE WE'VE BEEN ADVISING THE WRONG GUYS," Owen said. And the next summer, when we saw on TV the North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Tonkin Gulf-within two days, they attacked two U.S. destroyers-Owen said: "DO WE THINK THIS IS A MOVIE?"
President Johnson asked Congress to give him the power to "take all necessary measures to repel an armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved by the House by a unanimous vote of to ; it passed the Senate by a vote of to . But Owen Meany asked my grandmother's television set a question: "DOES THAT MEAN THE PRESIDENT CAN DECLARE A WAR WITHOUT DECLARING IT?"
That New Year's Eve-I remember that Hester drank too much; she was throwing up-there were barely more than twenty thousand U.S. military personnel in Vietnam, and only a dozen (or so) had been killed. By the time the Congress put an end to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution-in May of -there had been more than half a million U.S. military personnel in Vietnam; and more than forty thousand of them were dead. As early as , Owen Meany detected a problem of strategy. In March, the U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder-to strike targets in North Vietnam; to stop the flow of supplies to the South-and the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam.
"THERE'S NO END TO THIS," Owen said. "THERE'S NO GOOD WAY TO END IT."
On Christmas Day, President Johnson suspended Operation Rolling Thunder; he stopped the bombing. In a month, the bombing began again, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened their televised hearings on the war. That was when my grandmother started paying attention. In the fall of , Operation Rolling Thunder was said to be "closing in on Hanoi"; but Owen Meany said, "I THINK HANOI CAN HANDLE IT."
Do you remember Operation Tiger Hound? How about Operation Masher/WhiteWing/Than Phong II? That one produced , "known enemy casualties." And then there was Operation Paul Revere/Than Phong -not quite so successful, only "known enemy casualties." And how about Operation Maeng Ho ? There were , "known enemy casualties."
By New Year's Eve, , a total of , U.S. military had been killed in action; it was Owen Meany who remembered that was more casualties than the enemy had suffered in Operation Maeng Ho.
"How do you remember such things, Owen?" my grandmother asked him. From Saigon, General Westmoreland was asking for "fresh manpower"; Owen remembered that, too. According to the State Department, according to Dean Rusk-remember him?-we were "winning a war of attrition."
"THAT'S NOT THE KIND OF WAR WE WIN," said Owen Meany. By the end of ', there were five hundred thousand U.S.
military personnel in Vietnam. That was when General West-moreland said, "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."
"WHAT END?" Owen Meany asked the general. "WHAT HAPPENED TO THE 'FRESH MANPOWER'? REMEMBER THE 'FRESH MANPOWER'?"
I now believe that Owen remembered everything; a part of knowing everything is remembering everything. Do you remember the Tet Offensive? That was in January of '; "Tet" is a traditional Vietnamese holiday-the equivalent of our Christmas and New Year's-and it was usual, during the Vietnam War, to observe a cease-fire for the holiday season. But that year the North Vietnamese attacked more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns-more than thirty provincial capitals. That was the year President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection-remember? That was the year Robert Kennedy was assassinated; you might recall that. That was the year Richard Nixon was elected president; maybe you remember him. In the following year, in -the year when Ronald Reagan described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy"-there were still half a million Americans in Vietnam. I was never one of them. More than thirty thousand Canadians served in Vietnam, too. And almost as many Americans came to Canada during the Vietnam War; I was one of them-one who stayed. By March of -when Lt. William Galley was convicted of premeditated murder-I was already a landed immigrant, I'd already applied for Canadian citizenship. It was Christmas, , when President Nixon bombed Hanoi; that was an eleven-day attack, employing more than forty thousand tons of high explosives. As Owen had said: Hanoi could handle it. What did he ever say that wasn't right! remember what he said about Abbie Hoffman, for example-remember Abbie Hoffman? He was the guy who tried to "levitate" the Pentagon off its foundations; he was quite a clown. He was the guy who created the Youth International Party, the "Yippies"; he was very active in antiwar protests, while at the same time he conceived of a meaningful revolution as roughly anything that conveyed irreverence with comedy and vulgarity.
"WHO DOES THIS JERK THINK HE'S HELPING!" Owen said. It was Owen Meany who kept me out of Vietnam-a trick that only Owen could have managed.
"JUST THINK OF THIS AS MY LITTLE GIFT TO YOU"-that was how he put it. It makes me ashamed to remember that I was angry with him for taking my armadillo's claws. God knows, Owen gave me more than he ever took from me-even when you consider that he took my mother.
THE ANGEL
IN HER BEDROOM at Front Street, my mother kept a .dressmaker's dummy; it stood at attention next to her bed, like a servant about to awaken her, like a sentry guarding her while she slept-like a lover about to get into bed beside her. My mother was good at sewing; in a
nother life, she could have been a seamstress. Her taste was quite uncomplicated, and she made her own clothes. Her sewing machine, which she also kept in her bedroom, was a far cry from the antique that we children abused in the attic; Mother's machine was a strikingly modem piece of equipment, and it got a lot of use. For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked money-because my grandmother was generous to her-she was clever at keeping her personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her dressmaker's dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she'd return the originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same thing, and they never got angry at her-instead, they felt sorry for her, and took the clothes back without an argument.
"My husband doesn't like it," she'd tell them. She would laugh to my grandmother and me about it. "They must think I'm married to a real tyrant! He doesn't like anything]" My grandmother, keenly aware that my mother wasn't married at all, would laugh uncomfortably at this, but it seemed such a solitary and innocent piece of mischief that I'm sure Harriet Wheelwright did not object to her daughter having a little fun. And Mother made beautiful clothes: simple, as I've described-most of them were white or black, but they were made of the best material and they fitted her perfectly. The dresses and blouses and skirts she brought home were multicolored, and multipatterned, but my mother would expertly imitate the cut of the clothes in basic black and white. As in many things, my mother could be extremely accomplished without being in the least original or even inventive. The game she acted out upon the perfect body of the dressmaker's dummy must have pleased the frugal, Yankee part of her-the Wheelwright in her. My mother hated darkness. There could never be enough light to suit her. I saw the dummy as a kind of accomplice to my mother in her war against the night. She would close her curtains only when she was undressing for bed; when she had her nightgown and her robe on, she would open the curtains. When she turned out the lamp on her bedside table, whatever light there was in the night flooded into her room-and there was always some light. There were streetlights on Front Street, Mr. Fish left lights on in his house all night, and my grandmother left a light on-it pointlessly illuminated the garage doors. In addition to this neighborhood light, there was starlight, or moonlight, or that unnameable light that comes from the eastern horizon whenever you live near the Atlantic Coast. There was not a night when my mother lay in her bed unable to see the comforting figure of the dressmaker's dummy; it was not only her confederate against the darkness, it was her double. It was never naked. I don't mean that my mother was so crazy about sewing that there was always a dress-in-progress upon the dummy; whether out of a sense of decency, or a certain playfulness that my mother had not outgrown-from whenever it was that she used to dress up her dolls-the dummy was always dressed. And I don't mean casually; Mother would never allow the dummy to stand around in a slip. I mean that the dummy was always completely dressed-and well dressed, too.
I remember waking up from a nightmare, or waking up and feeling sick, and going down the dark hall from my room to hers-feeling my way to her doorknob. Once in her room, I sensed that I had traveled to another time zone; after the darkness of my room and the black hall, my mother's room glowed-by comparison to the rest of the house, it was always just before dawn in my mother's room. And there would be the dummy, dressed for real life, dressed for the world. Sometimes I would think the dummy was my mother, that she was already out of bed and on her way to my room-possibly she'd heard me coughing, or crying out in my sleep; perhaps she got up early; or maybe she was just coming home, very late. Other times, the dummy would startle me; I would have forgotten all about it, and in the gray half-light of that room I would think it was an assailant-for a figure standing so still beside a sleeping body could as easily be an attacker as a guard. The point is, it was my mother's body-exactly. "It can make you look twice," Dan Needham used to say. Dan told some stories about the dummy, after he married my mother. When we moved into Dan's dormitory apartment at Gravesend Academy, the dummy-and my mother's sewing machine-became permanent residents of the dining room, which we never once ate in. We ate most of our meals in the school dining hall; and when we did eat at home, we ate in the kitchen. Dan tried sleeping with the dummy in the bedroom only a few times. "Tabby, what's wrong?" he asked it the first night, thinking my mother was up. "Come back to bed," he said another time. And once he asked the dummy, "Are you ill?" And my mother, not quite asleep beside him, murmured, "No. AreyoM?"
Of course, it was Owen Meany who experienced the most poignant encounters with my mother's dummy. Long before Dan Needham's armadillo changed Owen's and my life, a game that Owen enjoyed at Front Street involved dressing and undressing my mother's dummy. My grandmother frowned upon this game-on the basis that we were boys. My mother, in turn, was wary-at first, she feared for her clothes. But she trusted us: we had clean hands, we returned dresses and blouses and skirts to their proper hangers-and her lingerie, properly folded, to its correct drawers. My mother grew so tolerant of our game that she even complimented us-on occasion-for the creation of an outfit she hadn't thought of. And several times, Owen was so excited by our creation that he begged my mother to model the unusual combination herself. Only Owen Meany could make my mother blush.
"I've had this old blouse and this old skirt for years," she would say. "I just never thought of wearing them with this belt! You're a genius, Owen!" she'd tell him.
"BUT EVERYTHING LOOKS GOOD ON YOU," Owen would tell her, and she'd blush. If Owen had wanted to be less flattering, he might have remarked that it was easy to dress my mother, or her dummy, because all her clothes were black and white; everything went with everything else. There was that one red dress, and we could never find a way to make her like it; it was never meant to be a part of her wardrobe, but I believed the Wheelwright in my mother made it impossible for her to give or throw the dress away. She'd found it in an exceptionally posh Boston store; she loved the clingy material, its scooped back, its fitted waist and full skirt, but she hated the color-a scarlet red, a poinsettia red. She'd meant to copy it-in white or in black-like all the others, but she liked the cut of the dress so much that she copied it in white and in black. "White for a tan," she said, "and black in the winter.'' When she went to Boston to return the red dress, she said she discovered the store had burned to the ground. For a while, she couldn't remember the store's name; but she asked people in the neighborhood, she wrote to the former address. There was some crisis with insurance and it was months before she finally got to talk with someone, and then it was only a lawyer. "But I never paid for the dress!" my mother said. "It was very expensive-I was just trying it out. And I don't want it. I don't want to be billed for it, months later. It was very expensive," she repeated; but the lawyer said it didn't matter. Everything was burned. Bills of sale were burned. Inventory was burned. Stock was burned. "The telephone melted," he said. "The cash register melted," he added. "That dress is the least of their problems. It's your dress," the lawyer said. "You got lucky," he told her, in a way that made her feel guilty.
"Good Heavens," my grandmother said, "it's so easy to make Wheelwrights feel guilty. Get hold of yourself, Tabitha, and stop complaining. It's a lovely dress-it's a Christmas color," my grandmother decided. "There are always Christmas parties. It will be perfect." But I never saw my mother
take the dress out of her closet; the only way that dress ever found its way to the dressmaker's dummy-after my mother had copied it-was when Owen dressed the dummy in it. Not even Owen could find a way to make my mother like that red dress.
"It may t>e a Christmas color," she said, "but I'm the wrong color-especially at Christmastime-in that dress." She meant she looked sallow in red when she didn't have a tan, and who in New Hampshire has a tan for Christmas?
"THEN WEAR IT IN THE SUMMER!" Owen suggested. But it was a show-off thing to
wear such a bright red color in the summer; that was making too much of a tan, in my mother's opinion. Dan suggested that my mother donate the red dress to his seedy collection of stage costumes. But my mother thought this was wasteful, and besides: none of the Gravesend Academy boys, and certainly no other woman from our town, had the figure to do that dress justice. Dan Needham not only took over the dramatic performances of the Gravesend Academy boys, he revitalized the amateur theatrical company of our small town, the formerly lackluster Gravesend Players. Dan talked everyone into The Gravesend Players; he got half the faculty at the academy to bring out the hams in themselves, and he roused the histrionic natures of half the townspeople by inviting them to try out for his productions. He even got my mother to be his leading lady-if only once. As much as my mother liked to sing, she was extremely shy about acting. She agreed to be in only one play under Dan's direction, and I think she agreed only as an indication of her commitment to their prolonged courtship, and only if Dan was cast opposite her-if he was the leading man-and if he was not cast as her lover. She didn't want the town imagining all sorts of things about their courtship, she said. After they were married, my mother wouldn't act again; neither would Dan. He was always the director; she was always the prompter. My mother had a good voice for a prompter: quiet but clear. All those singing lessons were good for that, I guess. Her one role, and it was a starring role, was in Angel Street. It was so long ago, I can't remember the names of the characters, or anything about the actual sets for the play. The Gravesend Players used the Town Hall, and sets were never very specially attended to there. What I remember is the movie that was made from Angel Street; it was called Gaslight, and I've seen it several times. My mother had the Ingrid Bergman part; she was the wife who was being driven insane by her villainous husband. And Dan was the villain-he was the Charles Boyer character. If you know the story, although Dan and my mother were cast as husband and wife, there is little love evidenced between them onstage; it was the only time or place I ever saw Dan be hateful to my mother. Dan tells me that there are still people in Gravesend who give him "evil looks" because of that Charles Boyer role he played; they look at him as if he hit that long-ago foul ball-and as if he meant to. And only once in that production-it was actually in dress rehearsal-did my mother wear the red dress. It might have been the evening when she is all dressed up to go to the theater (or somewhere) with her awful husband, but he has hidden the painting and accuses her of hiding it, and he makes her believe that she's hidden it, too-and then he banishes her to her room and doesn't let her go out at all. Or maybe it was when they go out to a concert and he finds his watch in her purse-he has put it there, but he makes her break down and plead with him to believe her, in front of all those snooty people. Anyway, my mother was supposed to wear the red dress in just one scene, and it was the only scene in the play where she was simply terrible. She couldn't leave the dress alone-she plucked imaginary lint off it; she kept staring at herself, as if the cleavage of the dress, all by itself, had suddenly plunged a foot; she never stopped itching around, as if the material of the dress made her skin crawl. Owen and I saw every production of Angel Street; we saw all of Dan's plays-both the academy plays and the amateur theatricals of The Gravesend Players-but Angel Street was one of the few productions that we saw every showing of. To watch my mother onstage, and to watch Dan being awful to her, was such a riveting lie. It was not the play that interested us-it was what a lie it was: that Dan was awful to my mother, that he meant her harm. That was fascinating. Owen and I always knew everyone in all the productions of The Gravesend Players. Mrs. Walker, the ogre of our Episcopal Sunday school, played the flirtatious maid in Angel Street-the Angela Lansbury character, if you can believe it. Owen and I couldn't. Mrs. Walker acting like a tart! Mrs. Walker being vulgar! We kept expecting her to shout: "Owen Meany, you get down from up there! You get back to your seat!" And she wore a French maid's costume, with a very tight skirt and
