by John Irving
“I KNOW, I KNOW,” he said. “DO THEY SAY, ‘FORMER DOG-OWNER FISH’ IS A SUPERB SCROOGE? DO THEY SAY, ‘VICIOUS SUNDAY-SCHOOL TYRANT WALKER’ MAKES A CHARMING MOTHER FOR TINY TIM?”
“They called you a ‘star,’” I reminded him. “They called you ‘brilliant’—and a ‘huge presence.’”
“THEY CALLED ME ‘LITTLE,’ THEY CALLED ME ‘DIMINUTIVE,’ THEY CALLED ME ‘MINIATURE’!” Owen cried.
“It’s a good thing it wasn’t a speaking part,” I reminded him.
“VERY FUNNY,” Owen said.
In the case of this particular production, Dan wasn’t bothered by the local press; what troubled Dan was what Charles Dickens might have thought of Owen Meany. Dan was sure that Dickens would have disapproved.
“Something’s not right,” Dan said. “Small children burst into tears—they have to be removed from the audience before they get to the happy ending. We’ve started warning mothers with small children at the door. It’s not quite the family entertainment it’s supposed to be. Kids leave the theater looking like they’ve seen Dracula!”
Dan was relieved to observe, however, that Owen appeared to be coming down with a cold. Owen was susceptible to colds; and now he was overtired all the time—rehearsing the Holy Nativity in the mornings, performing as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come at night. Some afternoons Owen was so exhausted that he fell asleep at my grandmother’s house; he would drop off to sleep on the rug in the den, lying under the big couch, or on a stack of the couch pillows, where he’d been gunning down my metal soldiers with my toy cannon. I would go to the kitchen to get us some cookies; and when I came back to the den, Owen would be fast asleep. “He’s getting to be like Lydia,” my grandmother observed—because Lydia could not stay awake in the afternoons, either; she would nod off to sleep in her wheelchair, wherever Germaine had left her, sometimes facing into a corner. This was a further indication to my grandmother that Lydia’s senility was in advance of her own.
But as Owen began to manifest the early signs of the common cold—a sneeze or a cough now and then, and a runny nose—Dan Needham imagined that his production of A Christmas Carol might be the beneficiary of Owen getting sick. Dan didn’t want Owen to be ill; it was just a small cough and a sneeze—and maybe even Owen having to blow his nose—that Dan was wishing for. Such a human noise from under the dark hood would surely put the audience at ease; Owen sneezing and snorting might even draw a laugh or two. In Dan’s opinion, a laugh or two wouldn’t hurt.
“It might hurt Owen,” I pointed out. “I don’t think Owen would appreciate any laughter.”
“I don’t mean that I want to make the Ghost of the Future a comic character,” Dan maintained. “I would just like to humanize him, a little.” For that was the problem, in Dan’s view: Owen did not look human. He was the size of a small child, but his movements were uncannily adult; and his authority onstage was beyond “adult”—it was supernatural.
“Look at it this way,” Dan said to me. “A ghost who sneezes, a ghost who coughs—a ghost who has to blow his nose—he’s just not quite so scary.”
But what about a Christ Child who sneezes and coughs, and has to blow his nose? I thought. If the Wiggins insisted that the Baby Jesus couldn’t cry, what would they think of a sick Prince of Peace?
Everyone was sick that Christmas: Dan got over bronchitis only to discover he had pinkeye; Lydia had such a violent cough that she would occasionally propel herself backward in her wheelchair. When Mr. Early, who was Marley’s Ghost, began to hack and sniffle, Dan confided to me that it would be perfect symmetry—for the play—if all the ghosts came down with something. Mr. Fish, who had by far the most lines, pampered himself so that he wouldn’t catch anyone else’s cold; thus Scrooge retreated from Marley’s Ghost in an even more exaggerated fashion.
Grandmother complained that the weather was too slippery for her to go out; she was not worried about colds, but she dreaded falling on the ice. “At my age,” she told me, “it’s one fall, one broken hip, and then a long, slow death—from pneumonia.” Lydia coughed and nodded, nodded and coughed, but neither woman would share her elderly wisdom with me … concerning why a broken hip produced pneumonia; not to mention, “a long, slow death.”
“But you have to see Owen in A Christmas Carol,” I said.
“I see quite enough of Owen,” Grandmother told me.
“Mister Fish is also quite good,” I said.
“I see quite enough of Mister Fish, too,” Grandmother remarked.
The rave review that Owen received from The Gravesend News-Letter appeared to drive Mr. Fish into a silent depression; when he came to 80 Front Street after dinner, he sighed often and said nothing. As for our morose mailman, Mr. Morrison, it is incalculable how much he suffered to hear of Owen’s success. He stooped under his leather sack as if he shouldered a burden much more demanding than the excess of Christmas mail. How did it make him feel to deliver all those copies of The Gravesend News-Letter, wherein Mr. Morrison’s former role was described as “not only pivotal but principal”—and Owen Meany was showered with the kind of praise Mr. Morrison might have imagined for himself?
In the first week, Dan told me, Mr. Morrison did not come to watch the production. To Dan’s surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Meany had not made an appearance, either.
“Don’t they read The News-Letter?” Dan asked me.
I could not imagine Mrs. Meany reading; the demands on her time were too severe. With all her staring—at walls, into corners, not quite out the window, into the dying fire, at my mother’s dummy—when would Mrs. Meany have the time to read a newspaper? And Mr. Meany was not even one of those men who read about sports. I imagined, too, that the Meanys would never have heard about A Christmas Carol from Owen; after all, he hadn’t wanted them to know about the pageant.
Perhaps one of the quarrymen would say something about the play to Mr. Meany; maybe a stonecutter or the derrickman’s wife had seen it, or at least read about it in The News-Letter.
“Hear your boy’s the star of the theater,” someone might say.
But I could hear, too, how Owen would dismiss it.
“I’M JUST HELPING DAN OUT. HE GOT IN A FIX—ONE OF THE GHOSTS QUIT. YOU KNOW MORRISON, THE COWARDLY MAILMAN? WELL, IT WAS A CASE OF STAGE FRIGHT. IT’S A VERY SMALL PART—NOT EVEN A SPEAKING PART. I WOULDN’T RECOMMEND THE PLAY, EITHER—IT’S NOT VERY BELIEVABLE. AND BESIDES, YOU NEVER GET TO SEE MY FACE. I DON’T THINK I’M ONSTAGE FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES....”
I was sure that was how Owen would have handled it. I thought he was excessively proud of himself—and that he treated his parents harshly. We all go through a phase—it lasts a lifetime, for some of us—when we’re embarrassed by our parents; we don’t want them hanging around us because we’re afraid they’ll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them. But Owen seemed to me to suffer this embarrassment more than most; that’s why I thought he held his parents at such a great distance from himself. And he was, in my opinion, exceedingly bossy toward his father. At an age when most of our peers were enduring how much their parents bossed them around, Owen was always telling his father what to do.
My sympathy for Owen’s embarrassment was slight. After all, I missed my mother; I would have enjoyed her hanging around me. Because Dan wasn’t my real father, I had never developed any resentment toward Dan; I always loved having Dan around—my grandmother, although she was a loving grandmother, was aloof.
“Owen,” Dan said one evening. “Would you like me to invite your parents to see the play? Maybe for our last performance—on Christmas Eve?”
“I THINK THEY’RE BUSY ON CHRISTMAS EVE,” Owen said.
“How about one of the earlier evenings, then?” Dan asked. “Some evening soon—shall I invite them? Any evening would be fine.”
“THEY’RE NOT EXACTLY THEATERGOING TYPES,” Owen said. “I DON’T MEAN TO INSULT YOU, DAN, BUT I’M AFRAID MY PARENTS WOULD BE BORED.”
“But surely they’d enjoy seeing you, Owen,” Dan said.
“Wouldn’t they like your performance?”
“THE ONLY STORIES THEY LIKE ARE TRUE STORIES,” Owen said. “THEY’RE RATHER REALISTIC, THEY DON’T GET TOO EXCITED ABOUT MADE-UP STORIES. ANYTHING THAT’S SORT OF MAKE-BELIEVE—THAT’S NOT FOR THEM. AND ANYTHING WITH GHOSTS—THAT’S OUT.”
“Ghosts are out?” Dan asked.
“ALL THAT KIND OF STUFF IS OUT—WITH THEM,” Owen said. But—listening to him—I found I had just the opposite impression of his parents. I thought that Owen Meany’s mother and father believed only in the so-called make-believe; that ghosts were all they believed in—that spirits were all they listened to. “WHAT I MEAN IS, DAN,” Owen said, “IS THAT I’D RATHER NOT INVITE MY PARENTS. IF THEY COME, OKAY; BUT I THINK THEY WON’T.”
“Sure, sure,” Dan said. “Anything you say, Owen.”
Dan Needham suffered from my mother’s affliction: he, too, couldn’t keep his hands off Owen Meany. Dan was not a hair-messer, not a patter of butts or shoulders. Dan grabbed your hands and mashed them, sometimes until your knuckles and his cracked together. But Dan’s manifestations of physical affection for Owen exceeded, even, his fondness for me; Dan had the good instincts to keep his distance from me—to be like a father to me, but not to assert himself too exactly in the role. Because of a physical caution that Dan expressed when he touched me, he was less restrained with Owen, whose father never once (at least, not in my presence) touched him. I think Dan Needham knew, too, that Owen was not ever handled at home.
There was a fourth curtain call on Saturday night, and Dan sent Owen out onstage alone. It was apparent that the audience wanted Owen alone; Mr. Fish had already been out onstage with Owen, and by himself—it was clearly Owen whom the crowd adored.
The audience rose to greet him. The peak of his death-black hood was a trifle pointy, and too tall for Owen’s small head; it had flopped over to one side, giving Owen a gnomish appearance and a slightly cocky, puckish attitude. When he flipped the hood back and showed the audience his beaming face, a young girl in one of the front rows fainted; she was about our age—maybe twelve or thirteen—and she dropped down like a sack of grain.
“It was quite warm where we were sitting,” the girl’s mother said, after Dan made sure the girl had recovered.
“STUPID GIRL!” Owen said, backstage. He was his own makeup man. Even though his face remained concealed throughout his performance by the overlarge, floppy hood, he whitened his face with baby powder and blackened the already-dark sockets under his eyes with eyeliner. He wanted even the merest glimpse that the audience might get of him to be properly ghostly; that his cold was worsening enhanced the pallor he desired.
He was coughing pretty regularly by the time Dan drove him home. The last Sunday before Christmas—the day of our pageant—was tomorrow.
“He sounds a little sicker than I had in mind,” Dan told me on our way back to town. “I may have to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come myself. Or maybe—if Owen’s too sick—maybe you can take the part.”
But I was just a Joseph; I felt that Owen Meany had already chosen me for the only part I could play.
It snowed overnight, not a major storm; then the temperature kept dropping, until it was too cold to snow. A new coat of flat-white, flatter than church-white, lay spread over Gravesend that Sunday morning; the wind, which is the cruelest kind of cold, kicked up wisps and kite tails of the dry powder and made the empty rain gutters at 80 Front Street rattle and moan; the gutters were empty because the new snow was too cold to cling.
The snowplows were in no hurry to be early on Sunday mornings, and the only vehicle that didn’t slip and skid as it made its way up Front Street was the heavy truck from the Meany Granite Company. Owen had so many clothes on, he had difficulty bending his knees as he trudged up the driveway—and his arms did not swing close to his sides, but protruded stiffly, like the limbs of a scarecrow. He was so muffled up in a long, dark-green scarf that I couldn’t see his face at all—but who could ever mistake Owen Meany for anyone else? It was a scarf my mother had given him—when she’d discovered, one winter, that he didn’t own one. Owen called it his LUCKY scarf, and he saved it for important occasions or for when it was especially cold.
The last Sunday before Christmas called for my mother’s scarf—on both counts. As Owen and I tramped down Front Street toward Christ Church, the birds took flight at Owen’s barking cough; there was a phlegmy rattle in his chest, loud enough for me to hear through his many layers of winter clothes.
“You don’t sound very well, Owen,” I pointed out to him.
“IF JESUS HAD TO BE BORN ON A DAY LIKE THIS, I DON’T THINK HE’D HAVE LASTED LONG ENOUGH TO BE CRUCIFIED,” Owen said.
On Front Street’s almost-virgin sidewalk, only one set of footprints had broken the snow before us; except for the clumsy peeing of dogs, the sidewalk was an unmarred path of white. The figure who had made the morning’s first human tracks in the snow was too bundled up and too far ahead of Owen and me for us to recognize him.
“YOUR GRANDMOTHER ISN’T COMING TO THE PAGEANT?” Owen asked me.
“She’s a Congregationalist,” I reminded him.
“BUT IS SHE SO INFLEXIBLE THAT SHE CAN’T SWITCH CHURCHES FOR ONE SUNDAY OF THE YEAR? THE CONGREGATIONALISTS DON’T HAVE A PAGEANT.”
“I know, I know,” I said; but I knew more than that: I knew the Congregationalists didn’t even have the conventional morning service on the last Sunday before Christmas—they had Vespers instead. It was a special event, largely for caroling. It wasn’t that my grandmother’s church service was in conflict with our pageant; it was that Grandmother was not enticed to see Owen play the Christ Child. She had remarked that she found the idea “repulsive.” Also, she made such a fuss about the weather’s potential for breaking her hip that she announced her intention to skip the Vespers at the Congregational Church. By the later afternoon, when the light was gone, it was even easier, she reasoned, to break your hip on the ice in the dark.
The man on the sidewalk ahead of us was Mr. Fish, whom we rather quickly caught up to—Mr. Fish was making his unreckless way with absurdly great care; he must have feared breaking his hip, too. He was startled by the sight of Owen Meany, wrapped up so tightly in my mother’s scarf that only Owen’s eyes were showing; but Mr. Fish was often startled to see Owen.
“Why aren’t you already at the church, getting into your costumes?” he asked us. We pointed out that we would be almost an hour early. Even at the rate Mr. Fish was walking, he would be half an hour early; but Owen and I were surprised that Mr. Fish was attending the pageant.
“YOU’RE NOT A CHURCHGOER,” Owen said accusingly.
“Why no, I’m not, that’s true,” Mr. Fish admitted. “But I wouldn’t miss this for the world!”
Owen eyed his costar in A Christmas Carol cautiously. Mr. Fish seemed both so depressed and impressed by Owen’s success that his attendance at the Christ Church Christmas Pageant was suspicious. I suspect that Mr. Fish enjoyed depressing himself; also, he was so slavishly devoted to amateur acting that he desperately sought to pick up as many pointers as he could by observing Owen’s genius.
“I MAY NOT BE AT MY BEST TODAY,” Owen warned Mr. Fish; he then demonstrated his barking cough, dramatically.
“A trouper like you is surely undaunted by a little illness, Owen,” Mr. Fish observed. We three trudged through the snow together—Mr. Fish coming halfway to meet us, on the matter of pace.
He confided to Owen and me that he was a little nervous about attending church; that he’d never once been forced to go to church when he was a child—his parents had not been religious, either—and that he’d only “set foot” in churches for weddings and funerals. Mr. Fish wasn’t even sure how much of Christ’s story a Christmas pageant “covered.”
“NOT THE WHOLE THING,” Owen told him.
“Not the bit on the cross?” Mr. Fish asked.
“THEY DIDN’T NAIL HIM TO THE CROSS WHEN HE WAS A BABY!” Owen said.
“How
about the bit when he does all the healing—and all the lecturing to the disciples?” Mr. Fish asked.
“IT DOESN’T GO PAST CHRISTMAS!” Owen said, with exasperation. “IT’S JUST THE BIRTHDAY SCENE!”
“It’s not a speaking part,” I reminded Mr. Fish.
“Oh, of course, I forgot about that,” Mr. Fish said.
Christ Church was on Elliot Street, at the edge of the Gravesend Academy campus; at the corner of Elliot and Front streets, Dan Needham was waiting for us. Apparently the director intended to pick up a few pointers, too.
“My, my, look who’s here!” Dan said to Mr. Fish, who blushed.
Owen was cheered to see that Dan was coming.
“IT’S A GOOD THING YOU’RE HERE, DAN,” Owen told him, “BECAUSE THIS IS MISTER FISH’S FIRST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT, AND HE’S A LITTLE NERVOUS.”
“I’m just not sure when to genuflect, and all that nonsense!” Mr. Fish said, chuckling.
“NOT ALL EPISCOPALIANS GENUFLECT,” Owen announced.
“I don’t,” I said.
“I DO,” said Owen Meany.
“Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t,” Dan said. “When I’m in church, I watch the other people—I do what they do.”
Thus did our eclectic foursome arrive at Christ Church.
Despite the cold, the Rev. Dudley Wiggin was standing outdoors on the church steps to greet the early arrivals; he was not wearing a hat, and his scalp glowed a howling red under his thin, gray hair—his ears looked frozen bloodless enough to break off. Barb Wiggin stood in a silver-fur coat beside him, wearing a matching fur hat.
“SHE LOOKS LIKE A STEWARDESS ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILROAD,” Owen observed.
I got quite a shock to see the Rev. Lewis Merrill and his California wife standing next to the Wiggins; Owen was surprised, too.
“HAVE YOU CHANGED CHURCHES?” Owen asked them.
The long-suffering Merrills appeared not to possess the imaginative capacity to know what Owen meant; it was a question that raised havoc with Mr. Merrill’s usually slight stutter.
