by John Irving
"EASTER MEANS WHAT IT SAYS," said Owen Meany. At Christ Church on Easter Sunday, Rector Wiggin always said: "Alleluia. Christ is risen."
And we, the People-we said: "The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia."
Toronto: April , -a humid, summery Easter Sunday. It does not matter what prelude begins the service; I will always hear Handel's Messiah-and my mother's not-quite-trained soprano singing, "I know that my Redeemer liveth/' This morning, in Grace Church on-the-Hill, I sat very still, waiting for that passage in John; I knew what was coming. In
the old King James version, it was called a "sepulchre"; in the Revised Standard version, it is just a "tomb." Either way, I know the story by heart.
"Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.' "
I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear. "THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS."
After the service today, my fellow Torontonians and I stood in the sun on the church steps-and we lingered on the sidewalk along Lonsdale Road; the sun was so welcome, and so hot. We were childishly delighted by the heat, as if we'd spent years in an atmosphere as cold as the tomb where Mary Magdalene found Jesus missing. Leaning against me, and whispering into my ear-in a manner remindful of Owen Meany-Katherine Keeling said: "Those birds that flew north, and then south-today they're flying north again."
"Alleluia," I said. I was thinking of Owen when I added, "He is risen."
"Alleluia," said the Rev. Mrs. Keeling. That the television was always "on" at Front Street ceased to tempt Owen and me. We could hear Grandmother, talking either to herself or to Ethel-or directly commenting to the TV-and we heard the rise and fall of the studio-made laughter. It was a big house; for four years, Owen and I had the impression that there was always a forbidding gathering of grown-ups, chattering away in a distant room. My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously-for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive. Thus Owen Meany and I learned what crap television was, without ever thinking that we hadn't come to this opinion by ourselves; had my grandmother allowed us only two hours of TV a day, or not permitted us more than one hour on a "school night," we probably would have become as slavishly devoted to television as the rest of our generation. Owen started out loving only a few things he saw on television, but he saw everything-as much of everything as he could stand. After four years of television, though, he watched nothing but Liberace and the old movies. I did, or tried to do, everything Owen did. For example; in the summer of ' when we were both sixteen, Owen got his driver's license before I got mine-not only because he was a month older, but because he already knew how to drive. He'd taught himself with his father's various trucks-he'd been driving on those steep, loopy roads that ran around the quarries that pockmarked most of Maiden Hill. He took his driver's test on the day of his sixteenth birthday, using his father's tomato-red pickup truck; in those days, there was no driver education course in New Hampshire, and you took your test with a local policeman in the passenger seat-the policeman told you where to turn, when to stop or back up or park. The policeman, in Owen's case, was Chief Ben Pike himself; Chief Pike expressed concern regarding whether or not Owen could reach the pedals-or see over the steering wheel. But Owen had anticipated this: he was mechanically inclined, and he'd raised the seat of the pickup so high that Chief Pike hit his head on the roof; Owen had shd the seat so far forward that Chief Pike had considerable difficulty cramming his knees under the dashboard-in fact, Chief Pike was so physically uncomfortable in the cab of the pickup that he cut Owen's test fairly short.
"HE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE ME PARALLEL-PARK!" Owen said; he was disappointed that he was denied the opportunity to show off his parallel-parking abilities-Owen Meany could slip that tomato-red pickup into a parking space that would have been challenging for a Volkswagen Beetle. In retrospect, I'm surprised that Chief Pike didn't search the interior of the pickup for that "instrument of death" he was always looking for. Dan Needham taught me to drive; it was the summer Dan directed Julius Caesar in the Gravesend Academy summer school, and he would take me for lessons every morning before rehearsals. Dan would drive me out the Swasey Parkway and up Maiden Hill. I practiced on the back roads around the quarries-the roads on which Owen Meany learned to drive were good enough for me; and Dan judged it safer for me off
the public highways, although the Meany Granite Company vehicles flew around those roads with reckless abandon. The quarrymen were fearless drivers and they trucked the granite and their machinery at full throttle; but, in the summer, the trucks raised so much dust that Dan and I had warning when one was coming-I always had time to pull over, while Dan recited his favorite Shakespeare from Julius Caesar. Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Whereupon, Dan would grip the dashboard and tremble while a dynamite truck hurtled past us. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me the most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. Owen, too, was fond of that passage. When we saw Dan's production of Julius Caesar, later that summer, I had passed my driver's test;-yet, in the evenings, when Owen and I would drive down to the boardwalk and the casino at Hampton Beach together, we took the tomato-red pickup and Owen always drove. I paid for the gas. Those summer nights of were the first nights I remember feeling "grown up"; we'd drive half an hour from Gravesend for the fleeting privilege of inching along a crowded, gaudy strip of beachfront, looking at girls who rarely looked at us. Sometimes, they looked at the truck. We could drive along this strip only two or three times before a cop would motion us over to the side of the street, examine Owen's driver's license-in disbelief-and then suggest that we find a place to park the truck and resume our looking at girls on foot, on either the boardwalk or on the sidewalk that threaded the arcades. Walking with Owen Meany at Hampton Beach was ill-advised; he was so strikingly small, he was teased and roughed up by the delinquent young men who tilted the pinball machines and swaggered in the heated vicinity of the girls in their cotton-candy-colored clothes. And the girls, who rarely returned our glances when we were secure in the Meany Granite Company pickup, took very long (and giggling) looks at Owen when we were on foot. When he was walking, Owen didn't dare look at the girls. Therefore, when a cop would, inevitably, advise us to park the track and pursue our interests "on foot," Owen and I would drive back to Gravesend. Or we would drive to a popular daytime beach-Little Boar's Head, which was beautifully empty at night. We'd sit on the sea wall, and feel the cool air off the ocean, and watch the phosphorescence sparkle in the surf. Or we would drive to Rye Harbor and sit on the breakwater, and watch the small boats slapping on the ruffled, pondlike surface; the breakwater itself had been built with the slag-the broken slabs-from the Meany Granite Quarry.
"THEREFORE, I HAVE A RIGHT TO SIT HERE," Owen always said; no one, of course, ever challenged our being there. Even though the girls ignored us that summer, that was when I noticed that Owen was attractive to women-not only to my mother. It is difficult to say how he was attractive, or why; but even when he was sixteen, even when he was especially shy or awkward, he looked like someone who had earned what grasp of the world he had. I might have been particularly conscious of this aspect of him because he had truly earned so much more than / had. It was not just that he was a better student, or a better driver, or so philosophically sure of himself; here was someone I had grown up with, and had grown used to teasing-I had picked him up over my head and passed h
im back and forth, I had derided his smallness as surely as the other children had-and yet, suddenly, by the time he was sixteen, he appeared in command. He was more in command of himself than the rest of us, he was more in command of us than the rest of us-and with women, even with those girls who giggled when they looked at him, you sensed how compelled they were to touch him. And by the end of the summer of ', he had something astonishing for a sixteen-year-old-in those days before all this ardent and cosmetic weightlifting, he had muscles! To be sure, he was tiny, but he was fiercely strong, and his sinewy strength was as visible as the strength of a whippet; although he was frighteningly lean, there was already something very adult about his muscular development-and why not? After all, he'd spent the summer working with granite. I hadn't even been working. In June, he'd started as a stonecutter; he spent most of the working day in the monument shop, cutting with the grain,
WITH THE RIFT, as he called it-using the wedge and feathers. By the middle of the month, his father had taught him how to saw against the grain; the sawyers cut up the bigger slabs, and they finished the gravestones with what was called a diamond wheel-a circular blade, impregnated with diamonds. By July, he was working in the quarries-he was often the signalman, but his father apprenticed him to the other quarrymen: the channel bar drillers, the derrickman, the dynamiters. It seemed to me that he spent most of the month of August in a single, remote pit-one hundred and seventy-five feet deep, a football field in diameter. He and the other men were lowered to work in a grout bucket-"grout" is waste, the rubble of broken rock that is raised from the pit all day long. At the end of the day, they bring up the men in the bucket. Granite is a dense, heavy stone; it weighs close to two hundred pounds per cubic foot. Ironically-even though they worked with the diamond wheel-most of the sawyers had all their fingers; but none of the quarrymen had all their fingers; only Mr. Meany had all his.
"I'LL KEEP ALL MINE, TOO," Owen said. "YOU'VE GOT TO BE MORE THAN QUICK, YOU'VE GOT TO FEEL WHEN THE ROCK'S GOING TO MOVE BEFORE IT MOVES-YOU'VE GOT TO MOVE BEFORE THE ROCK MOVES."
Just the slightest fuzz grew on his upper lip; nowhere else did his face show traces of a beard, and the faint moustache was so downy and such a pale-gray color that I first mistook it for pulverized granite, the familiar rock dust that clung to him. Yet his face-his nose, the sockets for his eyes, his cheekbones, and the contours of his jaw-had the gaunt definition that one sees in the faces of sixteen-year-olds only when they are starving. By September, he was smoking a pack of Camels a day. In the yellow glow of the dashboard lights, when we went out driving in the pickup at night, I would catch a glimpse of his profile with the cigarette dangling from his lips; his face had a permanent adult quality. Those mothers' breasts he'd once unfavorably compared to my mother's breasts were beneath his interest now, although Barb Wiggin's were still TOO BIG, Mrs. Webster's were still TOO LOW, and Mrs. Merrill's only VERY FUNNY. While Ginger Brinker-Smith, as a younger mother, had claimed our attention, we now (for the most part) coolly assessed our peers. THE TWO CAROLINES-Caroline Perkins and Caroline O'Day-appealed to us, although the breasts of Caroline O'Day were devalued, in Owen's view, by her Catholicism. Maureen Early's bosom was judged to be PERKY; Hannah Abbot's breasts were SMALL BUT SHAPELY; Irene Babson, who had given Owen the shivers as long ago as when my mother's bosom was under review, was now so out of control as to be SIMPLY SCARY. Deborah Perry, Lucy Dearborn, Betsy Bickford, Sarah Tilton, Polly Famum-to their names, and to the contours of their young breasts, Owen Meany would inhale a Camel deeply. The summer wind rushed through the rolled-down window of the pickup; when he exhaled, slowly, through his nostrils, the cigarette smoke was swept away from his face-dramatically exposing him as if he were a man miraculously emerging from a fire.
"IT'S TOO SOON TO TELL-WITH MOST SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS," Owen said, sounding already worldly enough for any conversation he might encounter at Gravesend Academy-although we both knew that the problem with the sixteen-year-old girls who interested us was that they dated eighteen-year-olds. "BY THE TIME WE'RE EIGHTEEN, WE'LL GET THEM BACK," Owen said. "AND WE'LL GET ALL THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS, TOO-THE ONES WE WANT," he added, inhaling again and squinting into the oncoming headlights. By the fall of ', when we entered Gravesend Academy, Owen seemed very sophisticated to me; the wardrobe my grandmother had acquired for him was more stylish than anything you could buy in New Hampshire. My clothes all came from Gravesend, but Grandmother took Owen shopping in Boston; it was his first time on a train, and-since they were both smokers-they rode in the smoking coach together and shared their nearly constant (and critical) comments on the attire of their fellow passengers on the Boston & Maine, and on the comparative courtesy (or lack thereof) of the conductors. Grandmother outfitted Owen almost entirely at Filene's and Jordan Marsh, one of which had a Small Gentlemen's Department, which the other called A Small Man's Special Needs. Jordan Marsh and Filene's were pretty flashy labels by New Hampshire standards-"THIS IS NOT BARGAIN-BASEMENT STUFF!" Owen said proudly. For our first day of classes, Owen showed up looking like a small Harvard lawyer.
He was not intimidated by the bigger boys because he had always been smaller; and he was not intimidated by the older boys because he was smarter. He saw immediately a crucial difference between Gravesend, the town, and Gravesend, the academy: the town paper, The Gravesend News-Letter, reported all the news that was decent and believed that all things decent were important; the school newspaper, which was called The Grave, reported every indecency that could escape the censorship of the paper's faculty adviser and believed that all things decent were boring. Gravesend Academy embraced a cynical tone of voice, savored a criticism of everything that anyone took seriously; the students hallowed, above everyone else, that boy who saw himself as born to break the rules, as destined to change the laws. And to the students of Gravesend who thus chafed against their bonds, the only accepted tone was caustic-was biting, mordant, bitter, scathing sarcasm, the juicy vocabulary of which Owen Meany had already learned from my grandmother. He had mastered sarcasm in much the same way he had become a smoker; he was a pack-a-day man in a month. In his first fall term at Gravesend, the other boys nicknamed him "Sarcasm Master." In the lingo of those times, everyone was a something "master"; Dan Needham tells me that this is one of those examples of student language that endures-at Graves-end Academy, the term is still in use. I have never heard it at Bishop Strachan. But Owen Meany was Sarcasm Master in the way that big Buster York was Barf Master, that Skipper Hilton was Zit Master, that Morris West was Nose Master, that DufFy Swain (who was prematurely bald) was Hair Master, that George Fogg (the hockey player) was Ice Master, that Horace Brigham (a lady's man) was Snatch Master. No one found a name for me. Among the editors of The Grave, in which Owen published the first essay he was assigned in English class, Owen was known as "The Voice." His essay was a satire on the source of food in the school dining hall-"MYSTERY MEAT," Owen titled the essay and the unrecognizable, gray steaks we were served weekly; the essay, which was published as an editorial, described the slaughter and refrigeration of an unidentified, possibly prehistoric beast that was dragged to the underground kitchen of the school in chains, "IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT."
The Voice The editorial and the subsequent weekly essays that Owen published in The Grave were ascribed not to Owen Meany by name, but to "The Voice"; and the text was printed in uniform upper-case letters. "I'M ALWAYS GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN CAPITALS," Owen explained to Dan and me, "BECAUSE IT WILL INSTANTLY GRAB THE READER'S ATTENTION, ESPECIALLY AFTER 'THE VOICE' GETS TO BE A KIND OF INSTITUTION."
By the Christmas of , in our first year at the academy, that is what Owen Meany had become: The Voice-A KIND OF INSTITUTION. Even the Search Committee-appointed to find a new headmaster-was interested in what The Voice had to say. Applicants for the position were given a subscription to The Grave; the snide, sneering precocity of the student body was well represented in its pages-and best represented by the capitals mat commanded one's gaze to Owen Meany. There were some old curm
udgeons on the faculty-and some young fuddy-duddies, too-who objected to Owen's style; and I don't mean that they objected only to his outrageous capitalization. Dan Needham told me that there'd been more than one heated debate in faculty meeting concerning the "marginal taste" of Owen's blanket criticism of the school; granted, it was well within a long-established tradition for Gravesend students to complain about the academy, but Owen's sarcasm suggested, to some, a total and threatening irreverence. Dan defended Owen; but The Voice was a proven irritant to many of the more insecure members of the Gravesend community- including those faraway but important subscribers to The Grave: "concerned" parents and alumni. The subject of "concerned" parents and alumni yielded an especially lively and controversial column for The Voice.
"WHAT ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' ABOUT?" Owen pondered. "ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' WITH OUR EDUCATION-THAT IT BE BOTH 'CLASSICAL' AND 'TIMELY'-OR ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' THAT WE MIGHT POSSIBLY LEARN MORE THAN THEY HAVE LEARNED; THAT WE MIGHT INFORM OURSELVES SUFFICIENTLY TO CHALLENGE A FEW OF THEIR MORE HARDENED AND IDIOTIC OPINIONS? ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' ABOUT THE QUALITY AND VIG-OROUSNESS OF OUR EDUCATION; OR ARE THEY MORE SUPERFICIALLY 'CONCERNED' THAT WE MIGHT FAIL TO GET INTO THE UNIVERSITY OR COLLEGE OF THEIR CHOICE?"
