by John Irving
“Yes!” my mother said in an exhausted voice. “He’s a teacher. He’s been teaching dramatics in a private school in Boston. Before that, he went to Harvard—Class of Forty-five.”
“Goodness gracious!” my grandmother said. “Why didn’t you begin with Harvard?”
“It’s not important to him,” my mother said.
But Harvard ’45 was important enough to my grandmother to calm her troubled hands; they left her brooch alone, and returned to rest in her lap. After a polite pause, Lydia inched her wheelchair forward and picked up the little silver bell and shook it for the maids to come clear—the very bell that had summoned Lydia so often (only yesterday, it seemed). And the bell had the effect of releasing us all from the paralyzing tension we had just survived—but for only an instant. My grandmother had forgotten to ask: What is the man’s name? For in her view, we Wheelwrights were not out of the woods without knowing the name of the potential new member of the family. God forbid, he was a Cohen, or a Calamari, or a Meany! Up went my grandmother’s hands to her brooch again.
“His name is Daniel Needham,” my mother said. Whew! With what relief—down came my grandmother’s hands! Needham was a fine old name, a founding fathers sort of name, a name you could trace back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony—if not exactly to Gravesend itself. And Daniel was as Daniel as Daniel Webster, which was as good a name as a Wheelwright could wish for.
“But he’s called Dan,” my mother added, bringing a slight frown to my grandmother’s countenance. She had never gone along with making Tabitha a Tabby, and if she’d had a Daniel she wouldn’t have made him a Dan. But Harriet Wheelwright was fair-minded enough, and smart enough, to yield in the case of a small difference of opinion.
“So, have you made a date?” my grandmother asked.
“Not exactly,” my mother said. “But I know I’ll see him again.”
“But you haven’t made any plans?” my grandmother asked. Vagueness annoyed her. “If he doesn’t get the job at the academy,” my grandmother said, “you may never see him again!”
“But I know I’ll see him again!” my mother repeated.
“You can be such a know-it-all, Tabitha Wheelwright,” my grandmother said crossly. “I don’t know why young people find it such a burden to plan ahead.” And to this notion, as to almost everything my grandmother said, Lydia wisely nodded her head—the explanation for her silence was that my grandmother was expressing exactly what Lydia would have expressed, only seconds before Lydia could have done so.
Then the doorbell rang.
Both Lydia and my grandmother stared at me, as if only my friends would be uncouth enough to make a call after dinner, uninvited.
“Heavens, who is that?” Grandmother asked, and she and Lydia both took a pointed and overly long look at their wristwatches—although it was not even eight o’clock on a balmy spring evening; there was still some light in the sky.
“I’ll bet that’s him!” my mother said, getting up from the table to go to the door. She gave herself a quick and approving look in the mirror over the sideboard where the roast sat, growing cold, and she hurried into the hall.
“Then you did make a date?” my grandmother asked. “Did you invite him?”
“Not exactly!” my mother called. “But I told him where I lived!”
“Nothing is exactly with young people, I’ve noticed,” my grandmother said, more to Lydia than to me.
“It certainly isn’t,” said Lydia.
But I’d heard enough of them; I had heard them for years. I followed my mother to the door; my grandmother, pushing Lydia in her wheelchair in front of her, followed me. Curiosity, which—in New Hampshire, in those days—was often said to be responsible for the death of cats, had got the better of us all. We knew that my mother had no immediate plans to reveal to us a single clue regarding the first man she’d supposedly met on the Boston & Maine; but the second man—we could see him for ourselves. Dan Needham was on the doorstep of 80 Front Street, Gravesend.
Of course, my mother had had “dates” before, but she’d never said of one of them that she wanted us to meet him, or that she even liked him, or that she knew she’d see him again. And so we were aware that Dan Needham was special, from the start.
I suppose Aunt Martha would have said that one aspect of my mother being “a little simple” was her attraction to younger men; but in this habit my mother was simply ahead of her time—because it’s true, the men she dated were often a little younger than she was. She even went out with a few seniors from Gravesend Academy when—if she’d gone to college—she would have been a college senior herself; but she just “went out” with them. While they were only prep-school boys and she was in her twenties—with an illegitimate child—all she did with those boys was dance with them, or go to movies or plays with them, or to the sporting events.
I was used to seeing a few goons come calling, I will admit; and they never knew how to respond to me. They had no idea, for example, what a six-year-old was. They either brought me rubber ducks for the bath, or other toys for virtual infants—or else they brought me Fowler’s Modern English Usage: something every six-year-old should plunge into. And when they saw me—when they were confronted with my short, sturdy presence, and the fact that I was too old for bathtub toys and too young for Modern English Usage—they would become insanely restless to impress me with their sensitivity to a waist-high person like myself. They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby talk about showing them my favorite toy—so that they might know what kind of thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time. There was rarely a next time. Once one of them asked my mother if I was toilet-trained—I guess he found this a suitable question, prior to his inviting me to sit on his knees and play bucking bronco.
“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 flapped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and the only padded parts 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—clearly 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 there!” 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 were lost—I kept the bony plates from the shell 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 the armadillo 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 80 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 armadil
lo … 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 IT 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.
