A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “An angel?” I said.

  “SSSSSSHHHHHH!”

  Now I was wide awake and eager to see him make a fool of himself, and so I said nothing about the dummy; I held his hand and went with him through the hall to my mother’s room. Owen was shivering.

  “How do you know it’s an angel?” I whispered.

  “SSSSSSHHHHHH!”

  So we stealthily crept into my mother’s room, crawling on our bellies like snipers in search of cover, until the whole picture of her bed—her body in an inverted question mark, and the dummy standing beside her—was visible.

  After a while, Owen said, “IT’S GONE. IT MUST HAVE SEEN ME THE FIRST TIME.”

  I pointed innocently at the dummy. “What’s that?” I whispered.

  “THAT’S THE DUMMY, YOU IDIOT!” Owen said. “THE ANGEL WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BED.”

  I touched his forehead; he was burning up. “You have a fever, Owen,” I said.

  “I SAW AN ANGEL,” he said.

  “Is that you, boys?” my mother asked sleepily.

  “Owen has a fever,” I said. “He feels sick.”

  “Come here, Owen,” my mother said, sitting up in bed. He went to her and she felt his forehead and told me to get him an aspirin and a glass of water.

  “Owen saw an angel,” I said.

  “Did you have a nightmare, Owen?” my mother asked him, as he crawled into bed beside her.

  Owen’s voice was muffled in the pillows. “NOT EXACTLY,” he said.

  When I returned with the water and the aspirin, my mother had fallen asleep with her arm around Owen; with his protrusive ears spread on the pillow, and my mother’s arm across his chest, he looked like a butterfly trapped by a cat. He managed to take the aspirin and drink the water without disturbing my mother, and he handed the glass back to me with a stoical expression.

  “I’M GOING TO STAY HERE,” he said bravely. “IN CASE IT COMES BACK.”

  He looked so absurd, I couldn’t look at him. “I thought you said it was an angel,” I whispered. “What harm would an angel do?”

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT KIND OF ANGEL IT WAS,” he whispered, and my mother stirred in her sleep; she tightened her grip around Owen, which must have simultaneously frightened and thrilled him, and I went back to my room alone.

  From what nonsense did Owen Meany discern what he would later call a PATTERN? From his feverish imagination? Years later, when he would refer to THAT FATED BASEBALL, I corrected him too impatiently.

  “That accident, you mean,” I said.

  It made him furious when I suggested that anything was an “accident”—especially anything that had happened to him; on the subject of predestination, Owen Meany would accuse Calvin of bad faith. There were no accidents; there was a reason for that baseball—just as there was a reason for Owen being small, and a reason for his voice. In Owen’s opinion, he had INTERRUPTED AN ANGEL, he had DISTURBED AN ANGEL AT WORK, he had UPSET THE SCHEME OF THINGS.

  I realize now that he never thought he saw a guardian angel; he was quite convinced, especially after THAT FATED BASEBALL, that he had interrupted the Angel of Death. Although he did not (at the time) delineate the plot of this Divine Narrative to me, I know that’s what he believed: he, Owen Meany, had interrupted the Angel of Death at her holy work; she had reassigned the task—she gave it to him. How could these fantasies become so monstrous, and so convincing to him?

  My mother was too sleepy to take his temperature, but it’s a fact that he had a fever, and that his fever led him to a night in my mother’s bed—in her arms. And wouldn’t his excitement to find himself there, with her—not to mention his fever—have contributed to his readiness to remain wide-eyed and wide awake, alert for the next intruder, be it angel or ghost or hapless family member? I think so.

  Several hours later, there came to my mother’s room the second fearful apparition. I say “fearful” because Owen was, at that time, afraid of my grandmother; he must have sensed her distaste for the granite business. I had left the light on in my mother’s bathroom and the door to her bathroom open—into the hall—and worse, I had left the cold-water tap running (when I’d fixed Owen a glass of water for his aspirin). My grandmother always claimed she could hear the electric meter counting each kilowatt; as soon as it was dark, she followed my mother through the house, turning off the lights that my mother had turned on. And this night, in addition to her sensing that a light had been left on, Grandmother heard the water running—either the pump in the basement, or the cold-water tap itself. Finding my mother’s bathroom in such reckless abandon, Grandmother proceeded to my mother’s room—anxious that my mother was ill or else indignant with budget-mindedness and determined to point out my mother’s carelessness, even if she had to wake her up.

  Grandmother might have just turned out the light, turned off the water, and gone back to bed, if she hadn’t made the mistake of turning the cold-water tap the wrong way—she turned it much more forcefully on, dousing herself in a spray of the coldest possible water; the tap had been left running for hours. Thus was her nightgown soaked; she would have to change it. This must have inspired her to wake my mother; not only had electricity and water been awasting, but here Grandmother was—soaked to the skin in her efforts to put a stop to all this escaping energy. I would guess, therefore, that her manner, upon entering my mother’s room, was not calm. And although Owen was prepared for an angel, he might have expected that even the Angel of Death would reappear in a serene fashion.

  My grandmother, dripping wet—her usually flowing nightgown plastered to her gaunt, hunched body, her hair arrayed in its nightly curlers, her face thickly creamed the lifeless color of the moon—burst into my mother’s room. It was days before Owen could tell me what he thought: when you scare off the Angel of Death, the Divine Plan calls for the kind of angels you can’t scare away; they even call you by name.

  “Tabitha!” my grandmother said.

  “AAAAAAHHHHHH!”

  Owen Meany screamed so terribly that my grandmother could not catch her breath. Beside my mother on the bed, she saw a tiny demon spring bolt upright—propelled by such a sudden and unreal force that my grandmother imagined the little creature was preparing to fly. My mother appeared to levitate beside him. Lydia, who still had both her legs, leaped from her bed and ran straight into her dresser drawers; for days, she would display her bruised nose. Sagamore, who was a short time away from his appointment with the diaper truck, woke up Mr. Fish with his barking. Throughout the neighborhood, the lids of trash cans clattered—as cats and raccoons made good their escape from Owen Meany’s alarm. A small segment of Gravesend must have rolled over in their beds, imagining that the Angel of Death had clearly come for someone.

  “Tabitha,” my grandmother said the next day. “I think it is most strange and improper that you should allow that little devil to sleep in your bed.”

  “He had a fever,” my mother said. “And I was very sleepy.”

  “He has something more serious than a fever, all the time,” my grandmother said. “He acts and sounds as if he’s possessed.”

  “You find fault with everyone who isn’t absolutely perfect,” my mother said.

  “Owen thought he saw an angel,” I explained to Grandmother.

  “He thought I was an angel?” Grandmother asked. “I told you he was possessed.”

  “Owen is an angel,” my mother said.

  “He is no such thing,” my grandmother said. “He is a mouse. The Granite Mouse!”

  When Mr. Fish saw Owen and me on our bicycles, he waved us over to him; he was pretending to mend a loose picket on his fence, but he was really just watching our house—waiting for someone to come down the driveway.

  “Hello, boys!” he said. “That was some hullabaloo last night. I suppose you heard it?” Owen shook his head.

  “I heard Sagamore barking,” I said.

  “No, no—before that!” Mr. Fish said. “I mean, did you hear what made him bark? Such cries! Such a yell! A
real hullabaloo!”

  Sometime after she’d managed to catch her breath, Grandmother had cried out, too, and of course Lydia had cried out as well—after she’d collided with her dresser drawers. Owen said later that my grandmother had been WAILING LIKE A BANSHEE, but there had been nothing of a caliber comparable to Owen’s scream.

  “Owen thought he saw an angel,” I explained to Mr. Fish.

  “It didn’t sound like a very nice angel, Owen,” Mr. Fish said.

  “WELL, ACTUALLY,” Owen admitted, “I THOUGHT MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT WAS A GHOST.”

  “Ah, that explains everything!” Mr. Fish said sympathetically. Mr. Fish was as afraid of my grandmother as Owen was; at least, regarding all matters concerning the zoning laws and the traffic on Front Street, he was always extremely deferential to her.

  What a phrase that is: “that explains everything!” I know better than to think that anything “explains everything” today.

  Later, of course, I would tell Dan Needham the whole story—including Owen’s belief regarding his interruption of the Angel of Death and how he was assigned that angel’s task.

  But one of the things I failed to notice about Owen was how exact he was—how he meant everything literally, which is not a usual feature of the language of children. For years he would say, “I WILL NEVER FORGET YOUR GRANDMOTHER, WAILING LIKE A BANSHEE.” But I paid no attention; I could hardly remember Grandmother making much of a ruckus—what I remembered was Owen’s scream. Also, I thought it was just an expression—“wailing like a banshee”—and I couldn’t imagine why Owen remembered my grandmother’s commotion with such importance. I must have repeated what Owen said to Dan Needham, because years later Dan asked me, “Did Owen say your grandmother was a banshee?”

  “He said she was ‘wailing like a banshee,’” I explained.

  Dan got out the dictionary, then; he was clucking his tongue and shaking his head, and laughing to himself, saying, “That boy! What a boy! Brilliant but preposterous!” And that was the first time I learned, literally, what a banshee was—a banshee, in Irish folklore, is a female spirit whose wailing is a sign that a loved one will soon die.

  Dan Needham was right, as usual: “brilliant but preposterous”—that was such an apt description of The Granite Mouse; that was exactly what I thought Owen Meany was, “brilliant but preposterous.” As time went on—as you shall see—maybe not so preposterous.

  It appeared to our town, and to us Wheelwrights ourselves, a strange reversal in my mother’s character that she should conduct a four-year courtship with Dan Needham before consenting to marry him. As my Aunt Martha would say, my mother hadn’t waited five minutes to have the “fling” that led to me! But perhaps that was the reason: if her own family, and all of Gravesend, had suspicions regarding my mother’s morals—regarding the general ease with which, they might assume, she could be talked into anything—my mother’s lengthy engagement to Dan Needham certainly showed them all a thing or two. Because it was obvious, from the start, that Dan and Mother were in love. He was devoted, she dated no one else, they were “engaged” within a few months—and it was clear to everyone how much I liked Dan. Even my grandmother, who was ever alert for what she feared was her wayward daughter’s proclivity to jump into things, was impatient with my mother to set a date for the wedding. Dan Needham’s personal charm, not to mention the speed with which he became a favorite in the Gravesend Academy community, had quickly won my grandmother over.

  Grandmother was not won over quickly, as a rule—not by anyone. Yet she became infatuated with the magic Dan wrought upon the amateurs at The Gravesend Players, so much so that she accepted a part in Maugham’s The Constant Wife; she was the regal mother of the deceived wife, and she proved to have the perfect, frivolous touch for drawing-room comedy—she was a model of the kind of sophistication we could all do well without. She even discovered a British accent, with no prodding from Dan, who was no fool and fully realized that a British accent lay never very deeply concealed in the bosom of Harriet Wheelwright—it simply wanted an occasion to bring it out.

  “‘I hate giving straight answers to a straight question,’” Grandmother, as Mrs. Culver, said imperiously—and completely in character. And at another memorable moment, commenting on her son-in-law’s affair with her daughter’s “‘greatest friend,’” she rationalized: “‘If John is going to deceive Constance, it’s nice it should be somebody we all know.’” Well, Grandmother was so marvelous she brought the house down; it was a grand performance, rather wasted—in my opinion—on poor John and Constance, who were drearily played by a somewhat sheepish Mr. Fish, our dog-loving neighbor (and a regular choice of Dan’s), and by the tyrannical Mrs. Walker, whose legs were her sexiest feature—and they were almost completely covered in the long dresses appropriate to this drawing-room comedy. Grandmother, who was rendered coy with false modesty, said simply that she had always had a special understanding of 1927—and I don’t doubt it: she would have been a beautiful young woman then; “and your mother,” Grandmother told me, “would have been younger than you.”

  So why did Dan and my mother wait four years?

  If there were arguments, if they were sorting out some differences of opinion, I never saw or heard them. Having been so improper as to have me, and never explain me, was Mother simply being overly proper the second time around? Was Dan wary of her? He never seemed wary. Was I the problem? I used to wonder. But I loved Dan—and he gave me every reason to feel that he loved me. I know he loved me; he still does.

  “Is it about children, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked one evening at dinner, and Lydia and I sat at attention to hear the answer. “I mean, does he want them—do you not want another? Or is it the other way around? I don’t think you should trouble yourself about having or not having children, Tabitha—not if it costs you such a lovely, devoted man.”

  “We’re just waiting, to be sure,” my mother said.

  “Good Heavens, you must be sure, by now,” Grandmother said impatiently. “Even I’m sure, and Johnny’s sure. Aren’t you sure, Lydia?” Grandmother asked.

  “Sure, I’m sure,” Lydia said.

  “Children are not the issue,” my mother said. “There is no issue.”

  “People have joined the priesthood in less time than it takes you to get married,” Grandmother said to my mother.

  As for joining the priesthood, that was a favorite expression of Harriet Wheelwright’s; it was always made in connection with some insupportable foolishness, some self-created difficulty, some action as inhuman as it was bizarre. Grandmother meant the Catholic priesthood; yet I know that one of the things that upset her about the possibility of Mother’s moving herself and me to the Episcopal Church was that Episcopalians had priests and bishops—and even “low” Episcopalians were much more like Catholics than like Congregationalists, in her opinion. A good thing: Grandmother never knew much about Anglicans.

  In their long courtship, Dan and my mother attended both the Congregational and the Episcopal services, as if they were conducting a four-year theological seminar, in private—and my introduction to the Episcopal Sunday school was also gradual; at my mother’s prompting, I attended several classes before Dan and my mother were married, as if Mother already knew where we were headed. What was also gradual was how my mother finally stopped going to Boston for her singing lessons. I never had a hint that Dan was the slightest bothered by this ritual, although I recall my grandmother asking my mother if Dan objected to her spending one night a week in Boston.

  “Why should he?” my mother asked.

  The answer, which was not forthcoming, was as obvious to my grandmother as it was to me: that the most likely candidate for the unclaimed position of my father, and my mother’s mystery lover, was that “famous” singing teacher. But neither my grandmother nor I dared to postulate this theory to my mother, and Dan Needham was clearly untroubled by the ongoing singing lessons, and the ongoing one night away; or else Dan possessed some reassuring piece of k
nowledge that remained a secret from my grandmother and me.

  “YOUR FATHER IS NOT THE SINGING TEACHER,” Owen Meany told me matter-of-factly. “THAT WOULD BE TOO OBVIOUS.”

  “This is a real-life story, Owen,” I said. “It’s not a mystery novel.” In real life, I meant, there was nothing written that the missing father couldn’t be OBVIOUS—but I didn’t really think it was the singing teacher, either. He was only the most likely candidate because he was the only candidate my grandmother and I could think of.

  “IF IT’S HIM, WHY MAKE IT A SECRET?” Owen asked. “IF IT’S HIM, WOULDN’T YOUR MOTHER SEE HIM MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK—OR NOT AT ALL?”

  Anyway, it was far-fetched to think that the singing teacher was the reason my mother and Dan didn’t get married for four years. And so I concluded what Owen Meany would call TOO OBVIOUS: that Dan was holding out for more information, concerning me, and that my mother wasn’t providing it. For wouldn’t it be reasonable of Dan to want to know the story of who my father was? And I know that is a story my mother wouldn’t have yielded to Dan.

  But Owen rebuked me for this idea, too. “DON’T YOU SEE HOW MUCH DAN LOVES YOUR MOTHER?” he asked me. “HE LOVES HER AS MUCH AS WE DO! HE WOULD NEVER FORCE HER TO TELL HIM ANYTHING!”

  I believe that now. Owen was right. It was something else: that four-year delay of the obvious.

  Dan came from a very high-powered family; they were doctors and lawyers, and they disapproved of Dan for not completing a more serious education. To have started out at Harvard and not gone on to law school, not gone on to medical school—this was criminal laziness; Dan came from a family very keen about going on. They disapproved of him ending up as a mere prep-school teacher, and of his indulging his hobby of amateur theatrical performances—they believed these frivolities were unworthy of a grown-up’s interest! They disapproved of my mother, too—and that was the end of Dan having any more to do with them. They called her “the divorcée”; I guess no one in the Needham family had ever been divorced, and so that was the worst thing you could say about a woman—even worse than calling my mother what she really was: an unwed mother. Perhaps an unwed mother sounded merely hapless; whereas a divorcée implied intent—a woman who was out to snare their dear underachiever, Dan.