by John Irving
“‘FATHER, FORGIVE THEM; FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO,’” Owen said.
Grandmother was testy about our playing at 80 Front Street; it’s no wonder that Owen and I sought the solitude of Waterhouse Hall. With Dan out of the dorm in the afternoons, Owen and I had the place almost to ourselves. There were four floors of boys’ rooms, the communal showers and urinals and crapper stalls on every floor, and one faculty apartment at the end of the hall on each floor, too. Dan’s apartment was on the third floor. The second-floor faculty occupant had gone home for Christmas—like one of the boys himself, young Mr. Peabody, a fledgling Math instructor, and a bachelor not likely to improve upon his single status, was what my mother had called a “Nervous Nelly.” He was fastidious and timid and easily teased by the boys on his floor; on the nights he was given dorm duty—for the entire four floors—Waterhouse Hall seethed with revolution. It was during an evening of Mr. Peabody’s duty that a first-year boy was dangled by his heels from the yawning portal of the fourth-floor laundry chute; his muffled howls echoed through the dorm, and Mr. Peabody, opening the laundry portal on the second floor, was shocked to peer two floors up and see the youngster’s screaming face looking down at him.
Mr. Peabody reacted in a fashion that could have been imitated from Mrs. Walker. “Van Arsdale!” he shouted upward. “Get out of the laundry chute! Get a grip on yourself, man! Get your feet on the floor!”
He never dreamed, poor Mr. Peabody, that Van Arsdale was held fast at both ankles by two brutal linemen from the Gravesend football team; they tortured Van Arsdale daily.
So Mr. Peabody had gone home to his parents, which left the second floor free of faculty; and the Physical Education fanatic on the fourth floor—the track-and-field coach, Mr. Tubulari—was also away for Christmas. He was also a bachelor, and he had insisted on the fourth floor—for his health; he claimed to relish running upstairs. He had many female visitors; when they wore dresses or skirts, the boys loved to watch them ascending and descending the stairwell from one of the lower floors. The nights that Waterhouse Hall suffered his turn at dorm duty, the boys were very well behaved. Mr. Tubulari was fast and silent and thrived on catching boys “in the act”—in the act of anything: shaving-cream fights, smoking in their rooms, even masturbation. Each floor had a designated common room, a butt room, so-called, for the smokers; but smoking in the dorm rooms was forbidden—as was sex in any form, alcohol in any form, and drugs that had not been prescribed by the school physician. Mr. Tubulari even had reservations about aspirin. According to Dan, Mr. Tubulari was off competing in some grueling athletic event over Christmas—actually, a pentathlon of the harshest-possible wintertime activities; a “winterthon,” Mr. Tubulari had called it. Dan Needham hated made-up words, and he became quite boisterous on the subject of what wintertime events Mr. Tubulari was competing in; the fanatic had gone to Alaska, or maybe Minnesota.
Dan would entertain Owen and me by describing Mr. Tubulari’s pentathlon, his “winterthon.”
“The first event,” Dan Needham said, “is something wholesome, like splitting a cord of wood—points off, if you break your ax. Then you have to run ten miles in deep snow, or snowshoe for thirty. Then you chop a hole in the ice, and—carrying your ax—swim a mile under a frozen lake, chopping your way out at the opposite shore. Then you build an igloo—to get warm. Then comes the dogsledding. You have to mush a team of dogs—from Anchorage to Chicago. Then you build another igloo—to rest.”
“THAT’S SIX EVENTS,” Owen said. “A PENTATHLON IS ONLY FIVE.”
“So forget the second igloo,” Dan Needham said.
“I WONDER WHAT MISTER TUBULARI DOES FOR NEW YEAR’S EVE,” Owen said.
“Carrot juice,” Dan said, fixing himself another whiskey. “Mister Tubulari makes his own carrot juice.”
Anyway, Mr. Tubulari was gone. When Dan was out in the afternoons, Owen and I were in total control of the top three floors of Waterhouse Hall. As for the first floor, we had only the Brinker-Smiths to contend with, and they were no match for us—if we were quiet. A young British couple, the Brinker-Smiths had recently launched twins; they were entirely and, for the most part, cheerfully engaged in how to survive life with twins. Mr. Brinker-Smith, who was a biologist, also fancied himself an inventor; he invented a double-seater high chair, a double-seater stroller, a double-seater swing—the latter hung in a doorway, where the twins could dangle like monkeys on a vine, in close enough proximity to each other to pull each other’s hair. In the double-seater high chair, they could throw food into each other’s faces, and so Mr. Brinker-Smith improvised a wall between them—too high for them to throw their food over it. Yet the twins would knock at this wall, to assure themselves that the other was really there, and they would smear their food on the wall, almost as a form of finger painting—a preliterate communication among siblings. Mr. Brinker-Smith found the twins’ methods of thwarting his various inventions “fascinating”; he was a true scientist—the failures of his experiments were almost as interesting to him as his successes, and his determination to press forward, with more and more twin-inspired inventions, was resolute.
Mrs. Brinker-Smith, on the other hand, appeared a trifle tired. She was too pretty a woman to look harried; her exhaustion at the hands of her twins—and with Mr. Brinker-Smith’s inventions for a better life with them—manifested itself in fits of distraction so pronounced that Owen and Dan and I suspected her of sleepwalking. She literally did not notice us. Her name was Ginger, in reference to her fetching freckles and her strawberry-blond hair; she was an object of lustful fantasies for Gravesend boys, both before and after my time at the academy—given the need of Gravesend boys to indulge in lustful fantasies, I believe that Ginger Brinker-Smith was seen as a sex object even when she was pregnant with her twins. But for Owen and me—during the Christmas of ’53—Mrs. Brinker-Smith’s appearance was only mildly alluring; she looked as if she slept in her clothes, and I’m sure she did. And her fabled voluptuousness, which I would later possess as firm a memory of as any Gravesend boy, was quite concealed by the great, loose blouses she wore—for such clothes, no doubt, enhanced the speed with which she could snap open her nursing bra. In a European tradition, strangely enlarged by its travel to New Hampshire, she seemed intent on nursing the twins until they were old enough to go to school by themselves.
The Brinker-Smiths were big on nursing, as was evidenced by Mr. Brinker-Smith’s demonstrative use of his wife in his biology classes. A well-liked teacher, of liberal methods not universally favored by the stodgier Gravesend faculty, Mr. Brinker-Smith enjoyed all opportunities to bring “life,” as he called it, into the classroom. This included the eye-opening spectacle of Ginger Brinker-Smith nursing the twins, an experience—sadly—that was wasted on the biology students of Gravesend, in that it happened before Owen and I were old enough to attend the academy.
Anyway, Owen and I were not fearful of interference from the Brinker-Smiths while we investigated the boys’ rooms on the first floor of Waterhouse Hall; in fact, we were disappointed to see so little of the Brinker-Smiths over that Christmas—because we imagined that we might be rewarded with a glimpse of Ginger Brinker-Smith in the act of nursing. We even, occasionally, lingered in the first-floor hall—in the faraway hope that Mr. Brinker-Smith might open the door to his apartment, see Owen and me standing there, clearly with nothing educational to do, and therefore invite us forthwith into his apartment so that we could watch his wife nurse the twins. Alas, he did not.
One icy day, Owen and I accompanied Mrs. Brinker-Smith to market, taking turns pushing the bundled-up twins in their double-seater—and even carrying the groceries into the Brinker-Smith apartment, after a trip in such inclement weather that it might have qualified as a fifth of Mr. Tubulari’s winter pentathlon. But did Mrs. Brinker-Smith bring forth her breasts and volunteer to nurse the twins in front of us? Alas, she did not.
Thus Owen and I were left to discover what Gravesend prep-school boys kept in their rooms when t
hey went home for Christmas. We took Dan Needham’s master key from the hook by the kitchen can opener; we began with the fourth-floor rooms. Owen’s excitement with our detective work was intense; he entered every room as if the occupant had not gone home for Christmas, but in all likelihood was hiding under the bed, or in the closet—with an ax. And there was no hurrying Owen, not even in the dullest room. He looked in every drawer, examined every article of clothing, sat in every desk chair, lay down on every bed—this was always his last act in each of the rooms: he would lie down on the bed and close his eyes; he would hold his breath. Only when he’d resumed normal breathing did he announce his opinion of the room’s occupant—as either happy or unhappy with the academy; as possibly troubled by distant events at home, or in the past. Owen would always admit it—when the room’s occupant remained a mystery to him. “THIS GUY IS A REAL MYSTERY,” Owen would say. “TWELVE PAIRS OF SOCKS, NO UNDERWEAR, TEN SHIRTS, TWO PAIRS OF PANTS, ONE SPORT JACKET, ONE TIE, TWO LACROSSE STICKS, NO BALL, NO PICTURES OF GIRLS, NO FAMILY PORTRAITS, AND NO SHOES.”
“He’s got to be wearing shoes,” I said.
“ONLY ONE PAIR,” Owen said.
“He sent a lot of his clothes to the cleaners, just before vacation,” I said.
“YOU DON’T SEND SHOES TO THE CLEANERS, OR FAMILY PORTRAITS,” Owen said. “A REAL MYSTERY.”
We learned where to look for the sex magazines, or the dirty pictures: between the mattress and bedspring. Some of these gave Owen THE SHIVERS. In those days, such pictures were disturbingly unclear—or else they were disappointingly wholesome; in the latter category were the swimsuit calendars. The pictures of the more disturbing variety were of the quality of snapshots taken by children from moving cars; the women themselves appeared arrested in motion, rather than posed—as if they’d been in the act of something hasty when they’d been caught by the camera. The acts themselves were unclear—for example, a woman bent over a man for some undetermined purpose, as if she were about to do some violence on an utterly helpless cadaver. And the women’s sex parts were often blurred by pubic hair—some of them had astonishingly more pubic hair than either Owen or I thought was possible—and their nipples were blocked from view by the censor’s black slashes. At first, we thought the slashes were actual instruments of torture—they struck us as even more menacing than real nudity. The nudity was menacing—to a large extent, because the women weren’t pretty; or else their troubled, serious expressions judged their own nakedness severely.
Many of the pictures and magazines were partially destroyed by the effects of the boys’ weight grinding them into the metal bedsprings, which were flaked with rust; the bodies of the women themselves were occasionally imprinted with a spiral tattoo, as if the old springs had etched upon the women’s flesh a grimy version of lust’s own descending spiral.
Naturally, the presence of pornography darkened Owen’s opinion of each room’s occupant; when he lay on the bed with his eyes closed and, at last, expelled his long-held breath, he would say, “NOT HAPPY. WHO DRAWS A MOUSTACHE ON HIS MOTHER’S FACE AND THROWS DARTS AT HIS FATHER’S PICTURE? WHO GOES TO BED THINKING ABOUT DOING IT WITH GERMAN SHEPHERDS? AND WHAT’S THE DOG LEASH IN THE CLOSET FOR? AND THE FLEA COLLAR IN THE DESK DRAWER? IT’S NOT LEGAL TO KEEP A PET IN THE DORM, RIGHT?”
“Perhaps his dog was killed over the summer,” I said. “He kept the leash and the flea collar.”
“SURE,” Owen said. “AND I SUPPOSE HIS FATHER RAN OVER THE DOG? I SUPPOSE HIS MOTHER DID IT WITH THE DOG?”
“They’re just things,” I said. “What can we tell about the guy who lives here, really?”
“NOT HAPPY,” Owen said.
We were a whole afternoon investigating the rooms on just the fourth floor, Owen was so systematic in his methods of search, so deliberate about putting everything back exactly where it had been, as if these Gravesend boys were anything at all like him; as if their rooms were as intentional as the museum Owen had made of his room. His behavior in the rooms was remindful of a holy man’s search of a cathedral of antiquity—as if he could divine some ancient and also holy intention there.
He pronounced few boarders happy. These few, in Owen’s opinion, were the ones whose dresser mirrors were ringed with family pictures, and with pictures of real girlfriends (they could have been sisters). A keeper of swimsuit calendars could conceivably be happy, or borderline-happy, but the boys who had cut out the pictures of the lingerie and girdle models from the Sears catalog were at least partially unhappy—and there was no saving anyone who harbored pictures of thoroughly naked women. The bushier the women were, the unhappier the boy; the more the women’s nipples were struck with the censor’s slash, the more miserable the boarder.
“HOW CAN YOU BE HAPPY IF YOU SPEND ALL YOUR TIME THINKING ABOUT DOING IT?” Owen asked.
I preferred to think that the rooms we searched were more haphazard and less revealing than Owen imagined—after all, they were supposed to be the monastic cells of transient scholars; they were something between a nest and a hotel room, they were not natural abodes, and what we found there was a random disorder and a depressing sameness. Even the pictures of the sports heroes and movie stars were the same, from room to room; and from boy to boy, there was often a similar scrap of something missed from the life at home: a picture of a car, with the boy proudly at the wheel (Gravesend boarders were not allowed to drive, or even ride in, cars); a picture of a perfectly plain backyard, or even a snapshot of such a deeply private moment—an unrecognizable figure shambling away from the camera, back turned to our view—that the substance of the picture was locked in a personal memory. The effect of these cells, with the terrible sameness of each boy’s homesickness, and the chaos of travel, was what Owen had meant when he’d told my mother that dormitories were EVIL.
Since her death, Owen had hinted that the strongest force compelling him to attend Gravesend Academy—namely, my mother’s insistence—was gone. Those rooms allowed us to imagine what we might become—if not exactly boarders (because I would continue to live with Dan, and with Grandmother, and Owen would live at home), we would still harbor such secrets, such barely restrained messiness, such lusts, even, as these poor residents of Waterhouse Hall. It was our lives in the near future that we were searching for when we searched in those rooms, and therefore it was shrewd of Owen that he made us take our time.
It was in a room on the third floor that Owen discovered the prophylactics; everyone called them “rubbers,” but in Gravesend, New Hampshire, we called them “beetleskins.” The origin of that word is not known to me; technically, a “beetleskin” was a used condom—and, even more specifically, one found in a parking lot or washed up on a beach or floating in the urinal at the drive-in movie. I believe that only those were authentic “beetleskins”: old and very-much-used condoms that popped out at you in public places.
It was in the third-floor room of a senior named Potter—an advisee of Dan’s—that Owen found a half-dozen or more prophylactics, in their foil wrappers, not very ably concealed in the sock compartment of the dresser drawers.
“BEETLESKINS!” he cried, dropping them on the floor; we stood back from them. We had never seen unused rubbers in their drugstore packaging before.
“Are you sure?” I asked Owen.
“THEY’RE FRESH BEETLESKINS,” Owen told me. “THE CATHOLICS FORBID THEM,” he added. “THE CATHOLICS ARE OPPOSED TO BIRTH CONTROL.”
“Why?” I asked.
“NEVER MIND,” Owen said. “I’VE NOTHING MORE TO DO WITH THE CATHOLICS.”
“Right,” I said.
We tried to ascertain if Potter would know exactly how many beetleskins he had in his sock drawer—whether he would notice if we opened one of the foil wrappers and examined one of the beetleskins, which naturally, then, we could not put back; we would have to dispose of it. Would Potter miss it? That was the question. Owen determined that an investigation of how organized a boarder Potter was would tell us. Was his underwear all in one drawer, were his
T-shirts folded, were his shoes in a straight line on the closet floor, were his jackets and shirts and trousers separated from each other, did his hangers face the same way, did he keep his pens and pencils together, were his paper clips contained, did he have more than one tube of toothpaste that was open, were his razor blades somewhere safe, did he have a necktie rack or hang his ties willy-nilly? And did he keep the beetleskins because he used them—or were they for show?
In Potter’s closet, sunk in one of his size-11 hiking boots, was a fifth of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, Black Label; Owen decided that if Potter risked keeping a bottle of whiskey in his room, the beetleskins were not for show. If Potter used them with any frequency, we imagined, he would not miss one.
The examination of the beetleskin was a solemn occasion; it was the nonlubricated kind—I’m not even sure if there were lubricated rubbers when Owen and I were eleven—and with some difficulty, and occasional pain, we took turns putting the thing on our tiny penises. This part of our lives in the near future was especially hard for us to imagine; but I realize now that the ritual we enacted in Potter’s daring room also had the significance of religious rebellion for Owen Meany—it was but one more affront to the Catholics whom he had, in his own words, ESCAPED.
It was a pity that Owen could not escape the Rev. Dudley Wiggin’s Christmas Pageant. The first rehearsal, in the nave of the church, was held on the Second Sunday of Advent and followed a celebration of the Holy Eucharist. We were delayed discussing our roles because the Women’s Association Report preceded us; the women wished to say that the Quiet Day they had scheduled for the beginning of Advent had been very successful—that the meditations, and the following period of quiet, for reflection, had been well received. Mrs. Walker, whose own term as a Vestry member was expiring—thus giving her even more energy for her Sunday school tyrannies—complained that attendance at the adult evening Bible study was flagging.
