by John Irving
Owen coughed. It was not, as Dan had hoped, a “humanizing” sound; it was a rattle so deep, and so deeply associated with death, that the audience was startled—people twitched in their seats; Maureen Early, abandoning all hope of containing her urine, opened her eyes wide and stared at the source of such an unearthly bark. That was when I turned to look at him, too—at the instant his baby-powdered hand shot out of the black folds of his cowl, and he pointed. A fever chill sent a spasm down his trembling arm, and his hand responded to the jolt as to electricity. Mr. Fish flinched.
“‘Lead on!’” cried Scrooge. “‘Lead on!’” Gliding across the stage, Owen Meany led him. But the future was never quite clear enough for Scrooge to see it—until, at last, they came to the churchyard. “A worthy place!” Dickens called it … “overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation’s death, not life; choked up with too much burying, fat with repleted appetite.”
“‘Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,’” Scrooge began to say. Among the papier-mâché gravestones, where Mr. Fish was standing, one stone loomed larger than the others; it was this stone that Owen pointed to—again and again, he pointed and pointed. So that Mr. Fish would stop stalling—and get to the part where he reads his own name on that grave—Owen stepped closer to the gravestone himself.
Scrooge began to babble.
“‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But,’” Mr. Fish said to Owen, “‘if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!’”
Owen Meany, not moved to speak, bent over the gravestone; appearing to read the name he saw there to himself, he directly fainted.
“Owen!” Mr. Fish said crossly, but Owen was as committed to not answering as the Ghost of the Future. “Owen?” Mr. Fish asked, more sympathetically; the audience appeared to sympathize with Mr. Fish’s reluctance to touch the slumped, hooded figure.
It would be just like Owen, I thought, to regain consciousness by jumping to his feet and screaming; this was exactly what Owen did—before Dan Needham could call for the curtain. Mr. Fish fell over what was meant to be his grave, and the sheer terror in Owen’s cry was matched by a corresponding terror in the audience. There were screams, there were gasps; I knew that Maureen Early’s pants were wet again. Just what had the Ghost of the Future actually seen?
Mr. Fish, a veteran at making the best of a mess, found himself sprawled on the stage in a perfect position to “read” his own name on the papier-mâché gravestone—which he had half-crushed, in falling over it. “‘Ebenezer Scrooge! Am I that man?’” he asked Owen, but something was wrong with Owen, who appeared to be more frightened of the papier-mâché gravestone than Scrooge was afraid of it; Owen kept backing away. He retreated across the stage, with Mr. Fish imploring him for an answer. Without a word, without so much as pointing again at the gravestone that had the power to frighten even the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Owen Meany retreated offstage.
In the dressing room, he sobbed upon the makeup table, coating his hair with baby powder, the black eyeliner streaking his face. Dan Needham felt his forehead. “You’re burning up, Owen!” Dan said. “I’m getting you straight home, and straight to bed.”
“What is it? What happened?” I asked Owen, but he shook his head and cried harder.
“He fainted, that’s what happened!” Dan said; Owen shook his head.
“Is he all right?” Mr. Fish asked from the door; Dan had called for a curtain before Mr. Fish’s last scene. “Are you all right, Owen?” Mr. Fish asked. “My God, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost!”
“I’ve seen everything now,” Dan said. “I’ve seen Scrooge upstaged, I’ve seen the Ghost of the Future scare himself!”
The Rev. Lewis Merrill came to the crowded dressing room to offer his assistance, although Owen appeared more in need of a doctor than a minister.
“Owen?” Pastor Merrill asked. “Are you all right?” Owen shook his head. “What did you see?”
Owen stopped crying and looked up at him. That Pastor Merrill seemed so sure that Owen had seen something surprised me. Being a minister, being a man of faith, perhaps he was more familiar with “visions” than the rest of us; possibly he had the ability to recognize those moments when visions appear to others.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” Owen asked Mr. Merrill.
“You saw something, didn’t you?” Pastor Merrill asked Owen. Owen stared at him. “Didn’t you?” Mr. Merrill repeated.
“I SAW MY NAME—ON THE GRAVE,” said Owen Meany.
Dan put his arms around Owen and hugged him. “Owen, Owen—it’s part of the story! You’re sick, you have a fever! You’re too excited. Seeing a name on that grave is just like the story—it’s make-believe, Owen,” Dan said.
“IT WAS MY NAME,” Owen said. “NOT SCROOGE’S.”
The Rev. Mr. Merrill knelt beside him. “It’s a natural thing to see that, Owen,” Mr. Merrill told him. “Your own name on your own grave—it’s a vision we all have. It’s just a bad dream, Owen.”
But Dan Needham regarded Mr. Merrill strangely, as if such a vision were quite foreign to Dan’s experience; he was not at all sure that seeing one’s own name on one’s own grave was exactly “natural.” Mr. Fish stared at the Rev. Lewis Merrill as if he expected more “miracles” on the order of the Nativity he had only recently, and for the first time, experienced.
In the baby powder on the makeup table, the name OWEN MEANY—as he himself had written it—was still visible. I pointed to it. “Owen,” I said, “look at what you wrote yourself—just tonight. You see, you were already thinking about it—your name, I mean.”
But Owen Meany only stared at me; he stared me down. Then he stared at Dan until Dan said to Mr. Fish, “Let’s get that curtain up, let’s get this over with.”
Then Owen stared at the Rev. Mr. Merrill until Mr. Merrill said, “I’ll take you home right now, Owen. You shouldn’t be waiting around for your curtain call with a temperature of the-good-Lord-knows-what.”
I rode with them; the last scene of A Christmas Carol was boring to me—after the departure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the story turns to syrup.
Owen preferred staring at the darkness out the passenger-side window to the lit road ahead.
“You had a vision, Owen,” Pastor Merrill repeated. I thought it was nice of him to be so concerned, and to drive Owen home—considering that Owen had never been a Congregationalist. I noticed that Mr. Merrill’s stutter abandoned him when he was being directly helpful to someone, although Owen responded ungenerously to the pastor’s help—he appeared to be sullenly embracing his “vision,” like the typically doubtless prophet he so often seemed to be, to me. He had “seen” his own name on his own grave; the world, not to mention Pastor Merrill, would have a hard time convincing him otherwise.
Mr. Merrill and I sat in the car and watched him hobble over the snow-covered ruts in the driveway; there was an outside light left on for him, and another light was on—in what I knew was Owen’s room—but I was shocked to see that, on Christmas Eve, his mother and father had not waited up for him!
“An unusual boy,” said the pastor neutrally, as he drove me home. Without thinking to ask me which of my two “homes” he should take me to, Mr. Merrill drove me to 80 Front Street. I wanted to attend the cast party Dan was throwing in Waterhouse Hall, but Mr. Merrill had driven off before I remembered where I wanted to be. Then I thought I might as well go inside and see if my grandmother had come home, or if Dan had persuaded her to kick up her heels—such as she was willing—at the cast party. I knew the instant I opened the door that Grandmother wasn’t home—perhaps they were still having curtain calls at the Town Hall; maybe Mr. Merrill had been a faster driver than he appeared to be.
I breathed in the still air of the old house; Lydia and Germaine must have been fast asleep, for even someone reading in bed makes a little noise—and 80 Front Street was as quiet as a
grave. That was when I had the impression that it was a grave; the house itself frightened me. I knew I was probably jumpy after Owen’s alarming “vision”—or whatever it was—and I was on the verge of leaving, and of running down Front Street to the Gravesend Academy campus (to Dan’s dormitory), when I heard Germaine.
She was difficult to hear because she had hidden herself in the secret passageway, and she was speaking barely above a whisper; but the rest of the house was so very quiet, I could hear her.
“Oh, Jesus, help me!” she was saying. “Oh, God; oh, dear Christ—oh, good Lord—help me!”
So there were thieves in Gravesend! I thought. The Vestry members had been wise to lock the parish house. Christmas Eve bandits had pillaged 80 Front Street! Germaine had escaped to the secret passageway, but what had the robbers done to Lydia? Perhaps they had kidnapped her, or stolen her wheelchair and left her helpless.
The books on the bookshelf-door to the secret passageway were tumbled all about—half of them were on the floor, as if Germaine, in her panic, had forgotten the location of the concealed lock and key … upon which shelf, behind which books? She’d made such a mess that the lock and key were now plainly visible to anyone entering the living room—especially since the books strewn upon the floor drew your attention to the bookshelf-door.
“Germaine?” I whispered. “Have they gone?”
“Have who gone?” Germaine whispered back.
“The robbers,” I whispered.
“What robbers?” she asked me.
I opened the door to the secret passageway. She was cringing behind the door, near the jams and jellies—as many cobwebs in her hair as adorned the relishes and chutneys and the cans of overused, spongy tennis balls that dated back to the days when my mother saved old tennis balls for Sagamore. Germaine was wearing her ankle-length flannel dressing gown; but she was barefoot—suggesting that the manner of her hiding herself in the secret passageway had not been unlike the way she cleared the table.
“Lydia is dead,” Germaine said. She would not emerge from the cobwebs and shadows, although I held the heavy bookshelf-door wide open for her.
“They killed her!” I said in alarm.
“No one killed her,” Germaine said; a certain mystical detachment flooded her eyes and caused her to slightly revise her statement. “Death just came for her,” Germaine said, shivering dramatically. She was the sort of girl who personified Death; after all, she thought that Owen Meany’s voice was simply the speaking vehicle for the Devil.
“How did she die?” I asked.
“In her bed, when I was reading to her,” Germaine said. “She’d just corrected me,” Germaine said. Lydia was always correcting Germaine, naturally; Germaine’s pronunciation was especially offensive to Lydia, who modeled her own pronunciation exactly upon my grandmother’s speech and held Germaine accountable for any failures in imitating my grandmother’s reading voice, as well. Grandmother and Lydia often took turns reading to each other—because their eyes, they said, needed rest. So Lydia had died while resting her eyes, informing Germaine of her mispronunciation of this or that. Occasionally, Lydia would interrupt Germaine’s reading and ask her to repeat a certain word. Whether correctly or incorrectly pronounced, Lydia would then say, “I’ll bet you don’t know what the word means, do you?” So Lydia had died in the act of educating Germaine, a task—in my grandmother’s opinion—that had no end.
Germaine had sat with the body as long as she could stand it.
“Things happened to the body,” Germaine explained, venturing cautiously into the living room. She viewed the spilled books with surprise—as if Death had come for them, too; or perhaps Death had been looking for her and had flung the books about in the process.
“What things?” I asked.
“Not nice things,” Germaine said, shaking her head.
I could imagine the old house settling and creaking, groaning against the winter wind; poor Germaine had probably concluded that Death was still around. Possibly Death had expected that coming for Lydia would have been more of a struggle; having found her and taken her so easily, probably Death felt inclined to stay and take a second soul. Why not make a night of it?
We held hands, as if we were siblings taking a great risk together, and went to view Lydia. I was quite shocked to see her, because Germaine had not told me of the efforts she had made to shut Lydia’s mouth; Germaine had bound Lydia’s jaws together with one of her pink leg-warmers, which she had knotted at the top of Lydia’s head. Upon closer inspection, I saw that Germaine had also exercised considerable creativity in her efforts to permanently close Lydia’s eyes; upon closing them, she had fastened two unmatched coins—a nickel and a quarter—to Lydia’s eyelids, with Scotch tape. She told me that the only matching coins she could find had been dimes, which were too small—and that one eyelid fluttered, or had appeared to flutter, knocking the nickel off; hence the tape. She used the tape on both eyelids, she explained—even though the quarter had stayed in place by itself—because to tape one coin and not the other had not appealed to her sense of symmetry. Years later, I would remember her use of that word and conclude that Lydia and my grandmother had managed to educate Germaine, a little; “symmetry,” I was sure, was not a word in Germaine’s vocabulary before she came to live at 80 Front Street. I would remember, too, that although I was only eleven, such words were in my vocabulary—largely through Lydia’s and my grandmother’s efforts to educate me. My mother had never paid very particular attention to words, and Dan Needham let boys be boys.
When Dan returned to 80 Front Street with my grandmother, Germaine and I were much relieved; we’d been sitting with Lydia’s body, reassuring ourselves that Death had come and got what it came for, and gone—that Death had left 80 Front Street in peace, at least for the rest of Christmas Eve. But we could not have gone on sitting with Lydia for very long.
As usual, Dan Needham took charge; he’d brought my grandmother home—from her brief appearance at the cast party—and he allowed the cast party to go on without him. He put Grandmother to bed with a rum toddy; naturally, Owen’s outburst in A Christmas Carol had upset her—and now she expressed her conviction that Owen had somehow foreseen Lydia’s death and had confused it with his own. This point of view was immediately convincing to Germaine, who remarked that while she was reading to Lydia, only shortly before Lydia died, both of them had thought they’d heard a scream.
Grandmother was insulted that Germaine should actually agree with her about anything and wanted to disassociate herself from Germaine’s hocus-pocus; it was nonsense that Lydia and Germaine could have heard Owen screaming all the way from the Gravesend Town Hall, on a windy winter night, with everyone’s doors and windows shut. Germaine was superstitious and probably heard screaming, of one kind or another, every night; and Lydia—it was now clearly proven—was suffering from a senility much in advance of my grandmother’s. Nonetheless, in Grandmother’s view, Owen Meany had certain unlikable “powers”; that he had “foreseen” Lydia’s death was not superstitious nonsense—at least not on the level that Germaine was superstitious.
“Owen foresaw absolutely nothing,” Dan Needham told the agitated women. “He must have had a fever of a hundred and four! The only power he has is the power of his imagination.”
But against this reasoning, my grandmother and Germaine saw themselves as allies. There was—at the very least—some ominous connection between Lydia’s death and what Owen “saw”; the powers of “that boy” went far beyond the powers of the imagination.
“Have another rum toddy, Harriet,” Dan Needham told my grandmother.
“Don’t you patronize me, Dan,” my grandmother said. “And shame on you,” she added, “for letting a stupid butcher get his bloody hands on such a wonderful part. Dismal casting,” she told him.
“I agree, I agree,” Dan said.
It was also agreed that Lydia be allowed to lie in her own room, with the door firmly shut. Germaine would sleep in the other twin bed i
n my room. Although I much preferred the idea of returning to Waterhouse Hall with Dan, it was pointed out to me that the cast party might “rage on” into the small hours—a likelihood that I had been looking forward to—and that Germaine, who was “in a state,” should not be left in a room alone. It would be quite improper for her to share a room with Dan, and unthinkable that my grandmother would sleep in the same room with a maid. After all, I was only eleven.
I had shared that room so many times with Owen; how I wanted to talk to him now! What would he think of my grandmother’s suggestion that he had foreseen Lydia’s death? And would he be relieved to learn that Death didn’t have a plan to come for him? Would he believe it? I knew he would be deeply disappointed if he missed seeing Lydia. And I wanted to tell him about my discovery—while watching the theater audience—that I believed I could, by this means, actually remember the faces in the audience at what Owen called that FATED baseball game. What would Owen Meany say about my sudden inspiration: that it had been my actual father whom my mother was waving to, the split second before the ball hit her? In the world of what the Rev. Lewis Merrill called “visions,” what would Owen make of that one?
But Germaine distracted me. She wanted the night-light left on; she tossed and turned; she lay staring at the ceiling. When I got up to go to the bathroom, she asked me not to be gone long; she didn’t want to be left alone—not for a minute.
If she would only fall asleep, I thought, I could telephone Owen. There was only one phone in the Meany house; it was in the kitchen, right outside Owen’s bedroom. I could call him at any hour of the night, because he woke up in an instant and his parents slept through the night like boulders—like immovable slabs of granite.
