A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  Then Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wiggin indulged in a kind of face-off, with each of them demonstrating his particular notion of pertinent passages from the Bible—Mr. Merrill’s passages being more “pertinent,” Mr. Wiggin’s more flowery. It was back to Ephesians for the rector, who intoned that we should pay close attention to “The Father from whom every family is named”; then he switched to Colossians and that bit about “Love which binds everything together in harmony”; and, at last, he concluded with Mark—“They are no longer two but one.”

  Pastor Merrill started us off with the Song of Solomon—“‘Many waters cannot quench love,’” he read. Then he hit us with Corinthians (“Love is patient and kind”), and finished us off with John—“Love one another as I have loved you.” It was Owen Meany who then blew his nose, which drew my attention to his pew, where Owen sat on a precarious stack of hymnals—in order to see over the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular.

  There then followed a reception at 80 Front Street. It was a muggy day with a hot, hazy sun, and my grandmother complained that her rose garden was not flattered by the weather; indeed, the roses looked wilted by the heat. It was the kind of day that produces a torpor that can be refreshed by nothing less than a violent thunderstorm; my grandmother complained of the likelihood of a thunderstorm, too. Yet the bar and the buffet tables were set out upon the lawn; the men took off their suit jackets and rolled up their sleeves and loosened their ties and sweated through their shirts—my grandmother particularly disapproved of the men for draping their jackets on the privet hedges, which gave the usually immaculate, dark-green border of the rose garden the appearance of being strewn with litter that had blown in from another part of town. Several of the women fanned themselves; some of them kicked off their high heels and walked barefoot on the lawn.

  There had been a brief and abandoned plan to have a dance floor put on the brick terrace, but this plan withered in a disagreement concerning the proper music—and a good thing, too, my grandmother concluded; she meant it was a good thing that there was no dancing in such humid weather.

  But it was what a summer wedding should be—sultry, something momentarily pretty, giving way to a heat that is unrestrained. Uncle Alfred showed off for me and my cousins by chugging a beer. A stray beagle, belonging to some new people on Pine Street, made off with several cupcakes from the coffee and dessert table. Mr. Meany, standing so stiffly in-waiting at the receiving line that he appeared to have granite in his pockets, blushed when it was his turn to kiss the bride. “Owen’s got the weddin’ present,” he said, turning away. “We got just one present, from the both of us.” Mr. Meany and Owen wore the only dark suits at the wedding, and Simon commented to Owen on the inappropriateness of his solemn, Sunday school appearance.

  “You look like you’re at a funeral, Owen,” Simon said.

  Owen was hurt and looked cross.

  “I was just kidding,” Simon said.

  But Owen was still cross and made a point of rearranging all the wedding presents on the terrace so that his and his father’s gift was the centerpiece. The wrapping paper had Christmas trees all over it and the present, which Owen needed both hands to lift, was the size and shape of a brick. I was sure it was granite.

  “That’s probably Owen’s only suit, you asshole,” Hester told Simon; they quarreled. It was the first time I’d ever seen Hester in a dress; she looked very pretty. It was a yellow dress; Hester was tan; her black hair was as tangled as a briar patch in the heat, but her reflexes seemed especially primed for the social challenge of an outdoor wedding. When Noah tried to surprise her with a captured toad, Hester got the toad away from him and slapped Simon in the face with it.

  “I think you’ve killed it, Hester,” Noah said, bending over the stunned toad and exhibiting much more concern for it than for his brother’s face.

  “It’s not my fault,” Hester said. “You started it.”

  My grandmother had declared the upstairs bathrooms “off-limits” to wedding guests, so there got to be quite long lines at the downstairs bathrooms—there were only two. Lydia had hand-painted two shirt cardboards, “Gentlemen” and “Ladies”; the “Ladies” had the much longer of the lines.

  When Hester tried to use an upstairs bathroom—she felt that she was “family,” and therefore not bound by the rules governing the guests—her mother told her that she should wait in line like everyone else. My Aunt Martha—like many Americans—could become quite tyrannical in the defense of democracy. Noah and Simon and Owen and I bragged that we could pee in the bushes, and Hester begged only our slightest cooperation—in order that she could follow us in that pursuit. She asked that one of us stand guard—so that other boys and men, with an urge to pee in the denser sections of the privet hedges, would not surprise her midsquat; and she requested that one of us keep her panties safe for her. Her brothers predictably balked at this and made derisive comments regarding the desirability of holding Hester’s panties—under any circumstances. I was, typically, slow to respond. Hester simply stepped out of her underwear and handed her white cotton briefs to Owen Meany.

  You would have thought she had handed him a live armadillo; his little face reflected his devout curiosity and his extreme anxiety. But Noah snatched Hester’s panties out of Owen’s hands and Simon snatched them away from his brother, pulling them over Owen’s head—they fit over his head rather easily, with his face peering through the hole for one of Hester’s ample thighs. He snatched then off his head, blushing; but when he tried to stuff them into his suit-jacket pocket, he discovered that the side pockets were still sewn shut. Although he’d worn this suit to Sunday school for several years, no one had unsewn the pockets for him; or perhaps he thought they were meant to be closed. He recovered, however, and stuffed the panties into the inside breast pocket of the jacket, where they made quite a lump. At least he was not wearing the panties on his head when his father walked up to him, and Noah and Simon began to scuff their feet in the rough grass and loose twigs at the foot of the privet hedge; by so doing, they managed to conceal the sound of Hester pissing.

  Mr. Meany was stirring a glass of champagne with a dill pickle the size of this thick forefinger. He had not drunk a drop of champagne, but he appeared to enjoy using it as a dip for his pickle.

  “Are you comin’ home with me, Owen?” Mr. Meany asked. He had announced, from the moment he arrived at the reception, that he couldn’t stay long; my mother and grandmother were most impressed that he’d come at all. He was uncomfortable going out. His simple navy-blue suit was from the same family of cheap material as Owen’s—since Owen was often up in the air in his suit, perhaps Mr. Meany’s suit had been better treated; I could not tell if Mr. Meany had unsewn his side pockets. Owen’s suit was creased—just above the cuffs of his trousers and at the wrists of his jacket sleeves, indicating that his suit had been let down; but the sleeves and trousers had been “let down” so little, Owen appeared to be growing at the rate of an underfed tree.

  “I WANT TO STAY,” Owen said.

  “Tabby won’t be bringin’ you up the hill on her weddin’ day,” Mr. Meany told him.

  “My father or mother will bring Owen home, sir,” Noah said. My cousins—as rough as they could be with other children—had been brought up to be friendly and polite to adults, and Noah’s cheerfulness seemed to surprise Mr. Meany. I introduced him to my cousins, but I could tell that Owen wanted to walk his father away from us, immediately—perhaps fearing that Hester would at any moment emerge from the privet hedge and demand her panties back.

  Mr. Meany had come in his pickup, and several of the guests had blocked it in our driveway, so I went with him and Owen to help identify the cars. We were well across the lawn, and quite far from the hedges, when I saw Hester’s bare arm protrude from the dark-green privet. “Just hand them over!” she was saying, and Noah and Simon began to tease her.

  “Hand what over?” Simon was saying.

  Owen and I wrote down the license-plate nu
mbers of the cars blocking Mr. Meany’s pickup, and then I presented the list to my grandmother, who enjoyed making announcements in a voice based on Maugham’s Mrs. Culver from The Constant Wife. It took us a while to free Mr. Meany from the driveway; Owen was visibly more relaxed after his father had departed.

  He was left holding his father’s nearly full glass of champagne, which I advised him not to drink; I was sure it tasted heavily of pickle. We went and stared at the wedding presents, until I acknowledged the propitious placement of the present from Owen and his father.

  “I MADE IT MYSELF,” he said. At first I thought he meant the Christmas wrapping paper, but then I realized that he had made the actual present. “MY FATHER HELPED ME SELECT THE PROPER STONE,” Owen admitted. Good God, so it is granite! I thought.

  Owen was upset that the newlyweds would not open their presents until after their honeymoon, but he restrained himself from describing the present to me. I would have many years to see it for myself, he explained. Indeed, I would.

  It was a brick-shaped piece of the finest granite—“MONUMENT QUALITY, AS GOOD AS THEY GET OUT OF BARRE,” Owen would say. Owen had cut it himself, polished it himself; he had designed and chiseled the border himself, and the engraving was all his, too. He had worked on it after school in the monument shop, and on weekends. It looked like a tombstone for a cherished pet—at best, a marker for a stillborn child; but more appropriate for a cat or a hamster. It was meant to lie lengthwise, like a loaf of bread, and it was engraved with the approximate date of my mother’s marriage to Dan:

  JULY

  1952

  Whether Owen was unsure of the exact date, or whether it would have meant hours more of engraving—or ruined his concept of the aesthetics of the stone—I don’t know. It was too big and heavy for a paperweight. Although Owen later suggested this use for it, he admitted it was more practical as a doorstop. For years—before he gave it to me—Dan Needham dutifully used it as a doorstop and frequently bashed his toes against it. But whatever it would become, it had to be left in the open where Owen would be sure to see it when he visited; he was proud of it, and my mother adored it. Well, my mother adored Owen; if he’d given her a gravestone with the date of death left blank—to be filled in at the appropriate time—she would have loved that, too. As it was, in my opinion—and in Dan’s—Owen did give her a gravestone. It had been made in a monument shop, with grave-marking tools; it may have had her wedding date on it, but it was a miniature tombstone.

  And although there was much mirth in evidence at my mother’s wedding, and even my grandmother exhibited an unusual tolerance for the many young and not-so-young adults who were cavorting and jolly with drink, the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a funeral.

  Owen became quite playful regarding his possession of Hester’s panties. He was not one to be bold with girls, and only a fool—or Noah or Simon—would be bold with Hester; but Owen managed to surround himself with the crowd, thus making it embarrassing for Hester to take back her panties. “Give them over, Owen,” she would hiss at him.

  “OKAY, SURE, DO YOU WANT THEM?” he would say, reaching for his pocket while standing firmly between Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred.

  “Not here!” Hester would say threateningly.

  “OH, SO YOU DON’T WANT THEM? CAN I KEEP THEM?” he would say.

  Hester stalked him through the party; she was only mildly angry, I thought—or she was mildly enjoying herself. It was a flirtation that made me the slightest bit jealous, and it went on so long that Noah and Simon got bored and began to arm themselves with confetti for my mother and Dan’s eventual departure.

  That came sooner than expected, because they had only begun to cut up the wedding cake when the storm started. It had been growing darker and darker, and the wind now carried some light rain in it; but when the thunder and lightning began, the wind dropped and the rain fell heavily and straight down—in sheets. Guests bolted for the cover of the house; my grandmother quickly tired of telling people to wipe their feet. The caterers struggled with the bar and the tables of food; they had set up a tent that extended over only half the terrace, like an awning, but there was not enough room under it for the wedding presents and for all the food and drink; Owen and I helped move the presents inside. My mother and Dan raced upstairs to change their clothes and grab their bags. Uncle Alfred was summoned to fetch the Buick, which he had not vandalized too badly in the usual “Just Married” fashion. “Just Married” was written, with chalk, across the tailgate, but the lettering was almost washed away by the time my mother and Dan came downstairs in their traveling clothes, carrying their luggage.

  The wedding guests crowded in the many windows that faced the driveway, to see the honeymooners leave; but they had a confused departure. The rain was pelting down as they tried to put the luggage in the car; Uncle Alfred, in the role of their valet, was soaking wet—and since Simon and Noah had hoarded all the confetti for themselves, they were the only throwers. They threw most of it on their father, on Uncle Alfred, because he was so wet that the confetti stuck to him, instantly turning him into a clown.

  People were cheering from the windows of 80 Front Street, but my grandmother was frowning. Chaos disturbed her; mayhem was mayhem, even if people were having a good time; bad weather was bad weather, even if no one seemed to mind. And some of her old crones were watching her, too. (How does royalty react to rain at a wedding? It’s what that Tabby Wheelwright deserves—her in her white dress.) My Aunt Martha risked the rain to hug and kiss my mother and Dan; Simon and Noah plastered her with confetti, too.

  Then, as suddenly as the wind had dropped and the rain had fallen, the rain changed to hail. In New Hampshire, you can’t even count on July. Hailstones bounced off the Buick like machine-gun fire, and Dan and my mother jumped into the car; Aunt Martha shrieked and covered her head—she and Uncle Alfred ran to the house. Even Noah and Simon felt the hailstones’ sting; they retreated, too. Someone shouted that a hailstone had broken a champagne glass, left on the terrace. The hailstones struck with such force that the people crowded close to the windows stepped back, away from the glass. Then my mother rolled down the car windows; I thought she was waving good-bye but she was calling for me. I held my jacket over my head, but the hailstones were still painful. One of them, the size of a robin’s egg, struck the bony knob of my elbow and made me wince.

  “Good-bye, darling!” my mother said, pulling my head inside the car window and kissing me. “Your grandmother knows where we’re going, but she won’t tell you unless there’s an emergency.”

  “Have a good time!” I said. When I looked at 80 Front Street, every downstairs window was a portrait—faces looking at me, and at the honeymooners. Well, almost everyone—not Gravesend’s two holy men; they weren’t watching me, or the newlyweds. At opposite ends of the house, alone in their own little windows, the Rev. Lewis Merrill and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin were watching the sky. Were they taking a religious view of the hailstorm? I wondered. In Rector Wiggin’s case, I imagined he was seeing the weather from the point of view of an ex-pilot—that he was simply observing that it would be a shitty day to fly. But Pastor Merrill was searching the heavens for the source of such a violent storm. Was there anything in the Holy Scriptures that tipped him off about the meaning of hailstones? In their zeal to demonstrate their knowledge of appropriate passages from the Bible, neither minister had offered my mother and Dan that most reassuring blessing from Tobit—the one that goes, “That she and I may grow old together.”

  Too bad neither of the ministers thought of that one, but the books of the Apocrypha are usually omitted from Protestant editions of the Bible. There would be no growing old together for Dan Needham and my mother, whose appointment with the ball that Owen hit was only a year away.

  I was nearly back inside the house when my mother called me again. “Where’s Owen?” she asked. It took me a while to locate him in the windows, because he was upstairs, in my mother’s bedroom; the f
igure of the woman in the red dress was standing beside him, my mother’s double, her dressmaker’s dummy. I know now that there were three holy men at 80 Front Street that day—three guys with their eyes on the weather. Owen wasn’t watching the departing honeymooners, either. Owen was also watching the skies, with one arm around the dummy’s waist, sagging on her hip, his troubled face peering upward. I should have known then what angel he was watching for; but it was a busy day, my mother was asking for Owen—I just ran upstairs and brought him to her. He didn’t seem to mind the hail; the pellets clattered off the car all around him, but I didn’t see one hit him. He stuck his face in the window and my mother kissed him. Then she asked him how he was getting home. “You’re not walking home, or taking your bike, Owen—not in this weather,” she said. “Do you want a ride?”

  “ON YOUR HONEYMOON?” he asked.

  “Get in,” she said. “Dan and I will drop you.”

  He looked awfully pleased; that he should get to go on my mother’s honeymoon—even for a little bit of the way! He tried to slide into the car, past her, but his trousers were wet and they stuck against my mother’s skirt.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Let me out. You get in first.” She meant that he was small enough to straddle the drive-shaft hump, in the middle of the seat, between her and Dan, but when she stepped outside the Buick—even for just a second—a hailstone ricocheted off the roof of the car and smacked her right between the eyes.

  “Ow!” she cried, holding her head.

  “I’M SORRY!” Owen said quickly.

  “Get in, get in,” Mother said, laughing.

  They started to drive away.

  It was then Hester realized that Owen had successfully made off with her panties.

  She ran out in the driveway and stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the slowly moving car; Dan and my mother, facing forward, stuck their hands out the windows, risking the hailstones, and waved. Owen turned around in the seat between them and faced backward; his grin took up his whole face, and it was very clear, from the flash of white, what he was waving to Hester.