A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “He’s the Baby Jesus!” I said. “I’m just old Joseph.”

  “The Baby Jesus?” said Mr. Meany. “I thought you was an angel, Owen.”

  “NOT THIS YEAR,” Owen said. “COME ON, WE GOTTA GO,” he said to me, pulling the back of my shirt.

  “You’re the Christ Child?” his father asked him.

  “I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN FIT IN THE CRIB,” Owen said.

  “Now we’re not even using a crib,” I explained. “Owen’s in charge of the whole thing—he’s the star and the director.” Owen yanked my shirt so hard he untucked it.

  “The director,” Mr. Meany repeated flatly. That was when I felt cold, as if a draft had pushed itself into the house in an unnatural way—down the warm chimney. But it was no draft; it was Mrs. Meany. She had actually moved. She was staring at Owen. There was confusion in her expression, a mix of terror and awe—of shock; but also of a most familiar resentment. By comparison to such a stare, I realized what a relief his mother’s profile must be to Owen Meany.

  Outside, in the raw wind off the Squamscott, I asked Owen if I had said anything I shouldn’t have said.

  “I THINK THEY LIKE ME BETTER AS AN ANGEL,” he said.

  The snow never seemed to stick on Maiden Hill; it could never get a grip on the huge, upthrust slabs of granite that marked the rims of the quarries. In the pits themselves the snow was dirty, mixed with sand, tracked by birds and squirrels; the sides of the quarries were too steep for dogs. There is always so much sand around a granite quarry; somehow, it works its way to the top of the snow; and around Owen’s house there was always so much wind that the sand stung against your face—like the beach in winter.

  I watched Owen pull down the earflaps of his red-and-black-checkered hunter’s cap; that was when I realized that I’d left my hat on his bed. We were on our way down Maiden Hill; Dan had said he’d meet us with the car, at the boathouse on the Swasey Parkway.

  “Just a second,” I told Owen. “I forgot my hat.” I ran back to the house; I left him kicking at a rock that had been frozen in the ruts of the dirt driveway.

  I didn’t knock; the clump of pine boughs on the door was blocking the most natural place to knock, anyway. Mr. Meany was standing by the mantel, either looking at the crèche or at the fire. “Just forgot my hat,” I said, when he looked up at me.

  I didn’t knock on the door of Owen’s room, either. At first, I thought the dressmaker’s dummy had moved; I thought that somehow it had found a way to bend at the waist and had sat down on Owen’s bed. Then I realized that Mrs. Meany was sitting on the bed; she was staring quite intently at my mother’s figure and she did not interrupt her gaze when I entered the room.

  “Just forgot my hat,” I repeated; I couldn’t tell if she heard me.

  I put on my hat and was leaving the room, closing the door as quietly as I could behind me, when she said, “I’m sorry about your poor mother.” It was the first time she had ever spoken to me. I peeked back into the room. Mrs. Meany hadn’t moved; she sat with her head slightly bowed to the dressmaker’s dummy, as if she were awaiting some instructions.

  It was noon when Owen and I passed under the railroad trestle bridge at the foot of the Maiden Hill Road, a few hundred yards below the Meany Granite Quarry; years later, the abutment of that bridge would be the death of Buzzy Thurston, who had successfully evaded the draft. But that Christmas of ’53, when Owen and I walked under the bridge, was the first time our being there coincided with the passing of The Flying Yankee—the express train that raced between Portland and Boston, in just two hours. It screamed through Gravesend every day at noon; and although Owen and I had watched it hurtle through town from the Gravesend depot, and although we had put pennies on the tracks for The Flying Yankee to flatten, we had never before been directly under the trestle bridge exactly as The Flying Yankee was passing over us.

  I was still thinking of Mrs. Meany’s attitude of supplication before my mother’s dummy when the trestlework of the bridge began to rattle. A fine grit sifted down between the railroad ties and the trestles and settled upon Owen and me; even the concrete abutments shook, and—shielding our eyes from the loosened sand—we looked up to see the giant, dark underbelly of the train, speeding above us. Through the gaps between the passing cars, flashes of the leaden, winter sky blinked down on us.

  “IT’S THE FLYING YANKEE!” Owen managed to scream above the clamor. All trains were special to Owen Meany, who had never ridden on a train; but The Flying Yankee—its terrifying speed and its refusal to stop in Gravesend—represented to Owen the zenith of travel. Owen (who had never been anywhere) was a considerable romantic on the subject of travel.

  “What a coincidence!” I said, when The Flying Yankee had gone; I meant that it was a far-fetched piece of luck that had landed us under the trestle bridge precisely at noon, but Owen smiled at me with his especially irritating combination of mild pity and mild contempt. Of course, I know now that Owen didn’t believe in coincidences. Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design—more powerful and unstoppable than The Flying Yankee.

  The maid who looked after my grandmother, the maid who was Lydia’s replacement after Lydia suffered her amputation, was named Ethel, and she was forced to endure the subtle comparisons that both Lydia and my grandmother made of her job-effectiveness. I say “subtle,” only because my grandmother and Lydia never discussed these comparisons with Ethel directly; but in Ethel’s company, Grandmother would say, “Do you remember, Lydia, how you used to bring up the jams and jellies from those shelves in the secret passageway—where they get so dusty—and line them all up in the kitchen, according to the dates when you’d put them up?”

  “Yes, I remember,” Lydia would say.

  “That way, I could look them over and say, ‘Well, we should throw out that one—it doesn’t seem to be a favorite around here, and it’s two years old.’ Do you remember?” my grandmother would ask.

  “Yes. One year we threw out all the quince,” Lydia said.

  “It was just pleasant to know what we had down there in the secret passageway,” my grandmother remarked.

  “Don’t let things get the upper hand on you, I always say,” Lydia said.

  And the next morning, of course, poor Ethel—properly, albeit indirectly instructed—would haul out all the jams and jellies and dust them off for my grandmother’s inspection.

  Ethel was a short, heavyset woman with an ageless, blocky strength; yet her physical power was undermined by a slow mind and a brutal lack of confidence. Her forward motion, even with something as basic as cleaning the house, was characterized by the strong swipes of her stubby arms—but these confident efforts were followed or preceded by the hesitant, off-balance steps of her short, broad feet upon her thick ankles; she was a stumbler. Owen said she was too slow-witted to frighten properly, and therefore we rarely bothered her—even when we discovered opportunities to surprise her, in the dark, in the secret passageway. In this way, too, Ethel was Lydia’s inferior, for Lydia had been great fun to terrorize, when she had two legs.

  The maid hired to look after Lydia was—as we used to say in Gravesend—“a whole other ball game.” Her name was Germaine, and both Lydia and Ethel bullied her; my grandmother purposefully ignored her. Among these contemptuous women, poor Germaine had the disadvantage of being young—and almost pretty, in a shy, mousy way. She possessed the nonspecific clumsiness of someone who makes such a constant effort to be inconspicuous that she is creatively awkward—without meaning to, Germaine hoarded attention to herself; her almost electric nervousness disturbed the atmosphere surrounding her.

  Windows, when Germaine was attempting to slip past them, would suddenly shut themselves; doors would open. Precious vases would totter when Germaine approached them; when she reached to steady them, they would shatter. Lydia’s wheelchair would malfunction the instan
t Germaine took tremulous command of it. The light in the refrigerator would burn out the instant Germaine opened the door. And when the garage light was left on all night, it would be discovered—in my grandmother’s early-morning investigation—that Germaine had been the last to bed.

  “Last one to bed turns out the lights,” Lydia would say, in her litanic fashion.

  “I was not only in bed but I was asleep, when Germaine came to bed,” Ethel would announce. “I know I was asleep because she woke me up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Germaine would whisper.

  My grandmother would sigh and shake her head, as if several rooms of the great house had been consumed in a fire overnight and there was nothing to salvage—and nothing to say, either.

  But I know why my grandmother sought to ignore Germaine. Grandmother, in a fit of Yankee frugality, had given Germaine all my mother’s clothes. Germaine was a little too small for the clothes, although they were the nicest clothes Germaine had ever owned and she wore them both happily and reverentially—Germaine never realized that my grandmother resented seeing her in such painfully familiar attire. Perhaps my grandmother never knew how much she would resent seeing those clothes on Germaine when she gave them to her; and Grandmother had too much pride to admit her error. She could only look away. That the clothes didn’t fit Germaine was referred to as Germaine’s fault.

  “You should eat more, Germaine,” Grandmother would say, not looking at her—and never noticing what Germaine ate; only that my mother’s clothes hung limply on her. But Germaine could have gorged herself and never matched my mother’s bosom.

  “John?” Germaine would whisper, when she would enter the secret passageway. The one overhead bulb at the bottom of those winding stairs never lit that passageway very brightly. “Owen?” she would ask. “Are you in here? Don’t frighten me.”

  And Owen and I would wait until she had turned the L-shaped corner between the tall, dusty shelves at shoulder level—the odd shadows of the jam and jelly jars zigzagging across the cobwebbed ceiling; the higher, more irregular shadows cast by the bigger jars of tomato and sweet-pepper relish, and the brandied plums, were as looming and contorted as volcanic conformations.

  “‘BE NOT AFRAID,’” Owen would whisper to Germaine in the dark; once, over that Christmas vacation, Germaine burst into tears. “I’M SORRY!” Owen called after her. “IT’S JUST ME!”

  But it was Owen whom Germaine was especially afraid of. She was a girl who believed in the supernatural, in what she was always calling “signs”—for example, the rather commonplace mutilation and murder of a robin by one of the Front Street cats; to witness this torture was “a sure sign” you would be involved with an even greater violence yet to come. Owen himself was taken as a “sign” by poor Germaine; his diminutive size suggested to her that Owen was small enough to actually enter the body and soul of another person—and cause that person to perform unnatural acts.

  It was a dinner table conversation about Owen’s voice that revealed to me Germaine’s point of view concerning that unnatural aspect of him. My grandmother had asked me if Owen or his family had ever taken any pains to inquire if something could be “done” about Owen’s voice—“I mean medically,” Grandmother said, and Lydia nodded so vigorously that I thought her hair pins might fall onto her dinner plate.

  I knew that my mother had once suggested to Owen that her old voice and singing teacher might be able to offer Owen some advice of a corrective kind—or even suggest certain vocal exercises, designed to train Owen to speak more … well … normally. My grandmother and Lydia exchanged their usual glances upon the mere mention of that voice and singing teacher; I explained, further, that Mother had even written out the address and telephone number of this mysterious figure, and she had given the information to Owen. Owen, I was sure, had never contacted the teacher.

  “And why not?” Grandmother asked. Why not, indeed? Lydia appeared to ask, nodding and nodding. Lydia’s nodding was the most detectable manifestation of how her senility was in advance of my grandmother’s senility—or so my grandmother had observed, privately, to me. Grandmother was extremely—almost clinically—interested in Lydia’s senility, because she took Lydia’s behavior as a barometer regarding what she could soon expect of herself.

  Ethel was clearing the table in her curious combination of aggression and slow motion; she took too many dishes at one time, but she lingered at the table with them for so long that you were sure she was going to put some of them back. I think now that she was just collecting her thoughts concerning where she would take the dishes. Germaine was also clearing—the way a crippled swallow might swoop down for a crumb off your plate at a picnic. Germaine took too little away—one spoon at a time, and often the wrong spoon; or else she took your salad fork before you’d been served your salad. But if her disturbance of your dinner area was slight and fanciful, it was also fraught with Germaine’s vast potential for accident. When Ethel approached, you feared a landslide of plates might fall in your lap—but this never happened. When Germaine approached, you guarded your plate and silverware, fearing that something you needed would be snatched from you, and that your water glass would be toppled during the sudden, flighty attack—and this often happened.

  It was therefore within this anxious arena—of having the dinner table cleared—that I announced to my grandmother and Lydia why Owen Meany had not sought the advice of Mother’s voice and singing teacher.

  “Owen doesn’t think it’s right to try to change his voice,” I said.

  Ethel, lumbering away from the table under the considerable burden of the two serving platters, the vegetable bowl, and all our dinner plates and silver, held her ground. My grandmother, sensing Germaine’s darting presence, held her water glass in one hand, her wineglass in the other. “Why on earth doesn’t he think it’s right?” she asked, as Germaine pointlessly removed the peppermill and let the salt shaker stay.

  “He thinks his voice is for a purpose; that there’s a reason for his voice being like that,” I said.

  “What reason?” my grandmother asked.

  Ethel had approached the kitchen door, but she seemed to be waiting, shifting her vast armload of dishes, wondering—possibly—if she should take them into the living room, instead. Germaine positioned herself directly behind Lydia’s chair, which made Lydia tense.

  “Owen thinks his voice comes from God,” I said quietly, as Germaine—reaching for Lydia’s unused dessert spoon—dropped the peppermill into Lydia’s water glass.

  “Merciful Heavens!” Lydia said; this was a pet phrase of my grandmother’s, and Grandmother eyed Lydia as if this thievery of her favorite language were another manifestation of Lydia’s senility being in advance of her own.

  To everyone’s astonishment, Germaine spoke. “I think his voice comes from the Devil,” Germaine said.

  “Nonsense!” my grandmother said. “Nonsense to it coming from God—or from the Devil! It comes from granite, that’s what it comes from. He breathed in all that dirt when he was a baby! It made his voice queer and it stunted his growth!”

  Lydia, nodding, prevented Germaine from trying to extract the peppermill from her water glass; to be safe, she did it herself. Ethel stumbled into the kitchen door with a great crash; the door swung wide, and Germaine fled the dining room—with absolutely nothing in her hands.

  My grandmother sighed deeply; even to Grandmother’s sighing, Lydia nodded—a more modest little nod. “From God,” my grandmother repeated contemptuously. And then she said: “The address and phone number of the voice and singing teacher … I don’t suppose your little friend would have kept it—not if he didn’t intend to use it, I mean?” To this artful question, my grandmother and Lydia exchanged their usual glances; but I considered the question carefully—its many levels of seriousness were apparent to me. I knew this was information that my grandmother had never known—and how it must have interested her! And, of course, I also knew that Owen would never have thrown this information away;
that he never intended to make use of the information was not the point. Owen rarely threw anything away; and something that my mother had given him would not only have been saved—it would have been enshrined!

  I am indebted to my grandmother for many things—among them the use of an artful question. “Why would Owen have kept it?” I asked her innocently.

  Again, Grandmother sighed; again, Lydia nodded. “Why indeed,” Lydia said sadly. It was my grandmother’s turn to nod. They were both getting old and frail, I observed, but what I was thinking was why I had decided to keep Owen’s probable possession of the singing teacher’s address and phone number to myself. I didn’t know why—not then. What I know now is that Owen Meany would have quickly said it was NO COINCIDENCE.

  And what would he have said regarding our discovery that we were not alone in the Christmas use we made of the empty rooms in Waterhouse Hall? Would he have termed it NO COINCIDENCE, too, that we (one afternoon) were engaged in our usual investigations of a second-floor room when we heard another master key engage the lock on the door? I was into the closet in a hurry, fearful that the empty coat hangers would not entirely have stopped chiming together by the time the new intruder entered the room. Owen scooted under the bed; he lay on his back with his hands crossed upon his chest, like a soldier in a hasty grave. At first, we thought Dan had caught us—but Dan was rehearsing The Gravesend Players, unless (in despair) he had fired the lot of them and canceled the production. The only other person it could be was Mr. Brinker-Smith, the biologist—but he was a first-floor resident; Owen and I were so quiet, we didn’t believe our presence could have been detected from the first floor.

  “Nap time!” we heard Mr. Brinker-Smith say; Mrs. Brinker-Smith giggled.

  It was instantly apparent to Owen and me that Ginger Brinker-Smith had not brought her husband to this empty room in order to nurse him; the twins were not with them—it was “nap time” for the twins, too. It strikes me now that the Brinker-Smiths were blessed with good-spirited initiative, with an admirable and inventive sense of mischief—for how else could they have maintained one of the pleasures of conjugal relations without disturbing their demanding twins? At the time, of course, it struck Owen and me that the Brinker-Smiths were dangerously oversexed; that they should make such reckless use of the dormitory beds, including—as we later learned—systematic process through all the rooms of Waterhouse Hall … well, it was perverse behavior for parents, in Owen’s and my view. Day by day, nap by nap, bed by bed, the Brinker-Smiths were working their way to the fourth floor of the dorm. Since Owen and I were working our way to the first floor, it was perhaps inevitable—as Owen would have suggested—and NO COINCIDENCE that we should have encountered the Brinker-Smiths in a second-floor room.