by John Irving
“WELL, SHE IS YOUR COUSIN—SHE SHOULD BE BEYOND YOUR REACH,” Owen said. “ALSO, SHE’S DANGEROUS—YOU’RE PROBABLY LUCKY SHE’S BEYOND YOUR REACH. HOWEVER,” Owen added, “IF YOU’RE REALLY CRAZY ABOUT HER, I THINK IT WILL WORK OUT—HESTER WOULD DO ANYTHING TO DRIVE HER PARENTS NUTS, SHE’D EVEN MARRY YOU!”
“Marry me!” I cried; the thought of marrying Hester gave me the shivers.
“WELL, THAT WOULD DRIVE HER PARENTS AROUND THE BEND,” Owen said. “WOULDN’T IT?”
It would have; and Owen was right: Hester was obsessed with driving her parents—and her brothers—crazy. To drive them to madness was the penalty she exacted for all of them treating her “like a girl”; according to Hester, Sawyer Depot was “boys’ heaven”—my Aunt Martha was a “fink of womanhood”; she bowed to Uncle Alfred’s notion that the boys needed a private-school education, that the boys needed to “expand their horizons.” Hester would expand her own horizons in directions conceived to educate her parents regarding the errors of their ways. As for Owen’s idea that Hester would go to the extreme of marrying her own cousin, if that could provide Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred with an educational wallop … it was inconceivable to me!
“I don’t think that Hester even likes me,” I told Owen; he shrugged.
“THE POINT IS,” said Owen Meany, “HESTER WOULDN’T NECESSARILY MARRY YOU BECAUSE SHE LIKED YOU.”
Meanwhile, we couldn’t even manage to get ourselves invited to Sawyer Depot for Christmas. After their holidays in the Caribbean, the Eastmans had decided to stay at home for the Yuletide of ’57; Owen and I got our hopes up, but—alas!—they were quickly dashed; we were not invited to Sawyer Depot. The reason the Eastmans weren’t going to the Caribbean was that Hester had been corresponding with a black boatman who had proposed a rendezvous in the British Virgin Islands; Hester had involved herself with this particular black boatman the previous Christmas, in Tortola—when she’d been only fifteen! Naturally, how she had “involved herself” was not made explicitly clear to Owen and me; we had to rely on those parts of the story that my Aunt Martha had reported to Dan—substantially more of the story than she had reported to my grandmother, who was of the opinion that a sailor had made a “pass” at poor Hester, an exercise in crudeness that had made Hester want to stay home. In fact, Hester was threatening to escape to Tortola. She was also not speaking to Noah and Simon, who had shown the black boatman’s letters to Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha, and who had fiercely disappointed Hester by not introducing her to a single one of their Gravesend Academy friends.
Dan Needham described the situation in the form of a headline: “Teenage Traumas Run Wild in Sawyer Depot!” Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling, real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
The closest that Owen Meany and I could get to love was a front-row seat at The Idaho. That Christmas of ’57, Owen and I were fifteen; we told each other that we had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn, the shy bookstore clerk in Funny Face; but we wanted Hester. What we were left with was a sense of how little, in the area of love, we must be worth; we felt more foolish than Fred Astaire, dancing with his own raincoat. And how worried we were that the sophisticated world of Gravesend Academy would esteem us even less than we esteemed ourselves.
Toronto: April 12, 1987—a rainy Palm Sunday. It is not a warm spring rain—not a “seasonal” rain, as my grandmother liked to say. It is a raw cold rain, a suitable day for the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At Grace Church on-the-Hill, the children and the acolytes stood huddled in the narthex; holding their palm fronds, they resembled tourists who’d landed in the tropics on an unseasonably cold day. The organist chose Brahms for the processional—“O Welt ich muss dich lassen”; “O world I must leave you.”
Owen hated Palm Sunday: the treachery of Judas, the cowardice of Peter, the weakness of Pilate.
“IT’S BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY CRUCIFIED HIM,” Owen said, “BUT THEY MADE FUN OF HIM, TOO!”
Canon Mackie read heavily from Matthew: how they mocked Jesus, how they spit on him, how he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished—I am terrified that, this year, it won’t happen; that, that year, it didn’t. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.
“IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN EASTER,” Owen Meany said, “DON’T KID YOURSELF—DON’T CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN.”
For the Palm Sunday recessional, the organist chose the usual “Alleluias.” In a chilling drizzle, I crossed Russell Hill Road and went in the service entrance of The Bishop Strachan School; I passed through the kitchen, where the working women and the boarders whose turn it was to help with the Sunday meal all spoke to me. The headmistress, the Rev. Mrs. Katherine Keeling, sat in her usual head-of-table position among the housemothers. About forty boarders—the poor girls who had no local friends to ask them home for the weekend, and the girls who were happy to stay at school—sat around the other tables. It is always a surprise to see the girls not in their uniforms; I know it’s a great relief to them to wear their uniforms day in, day out—because they don’t have to worry about what to wear. But they are so lazy about how they wear their uniforms—they don’t have much experience in dressing themselves—that when they have a choice, when they’re allowed to wear their own clothes, they appear wholly less sophisticated, less worldly, than they appear in their uniforms.
In the twenty years that I have been a teacher at The Bishop Strachan School, the girls’ uniforms haven’t changed very significantly; I’ve grown rather fond of them. If I were a girl, of any age, I would wear a middie, a loosely tied necktie, a blazer (with my school crest), knee socks—which the Canadians used to call “knee highs”—and a pleated skirt; when they kneel, it used to be the rule that the skirt should just touch the floor.
But for Sunday boarders’ lunch, the girls wear their own clothes; some of them are so badly dressed, I fail to recognize them—they make fun of me for that, naturally. Some of them dress like boys—others, like their mothers or like the floozies they see in movies or on TV. As I am, routinely, the only man in the dining room for Sunday boarders’ lunch, perhaps they dress for me.
I’ve not seen my friend—and, technically, my boss—Katherine Keeling since she delivered her last baby. She has a large family—she’s had so many children, I’ve lost count—but she makes an effort to sit at the housemothers’ table on Sundays; and she chatters amiably to the weekend girls. I think Katherine is terrific; but she is too thin. And she always is embarrassed when I catch her not eating, although she should get over the surprise; I’m a more consistent fixture at the housemothers’ table for Sunday boarders’ lunch than she is—I don’t take time off to have babies! But there she was on Palm Sunday, with mashed potatoes and stuffing and turkey heaped upon her plate.
“Turkey rather dry, is it?” I asked; the ladies, routinely, laughed—Katherine, typically, blushed. When she’s wearing her clerical collar, she looks slightly more underweight than she actually is. She’s my closest friend in Toronto, now that Canon Campbell is gone; and even though she’s my boss, I’ve been at Bishop Strachan longer than she has.
Old Teddybear Kilgour, as we called him, was principal when I was hired. Canon Campbell introduced us. Canon Campbell had been the chaplain at Bishop Strachan before they made him rector of Grace Church on-the-Hill; I couldn’t have had anyone recommend me for a job at Bishop Strachan who was more “connected” to the school than Canon Campbell—not even old Teddybear Kilgour himself.
I still tease Katherine about those days. What if she’d been headmistress when I applied for a job? Would she have hired me? A young man from the States in those Vietnam years, a not unattractive young man, and without a wife; Bishop Strachan has never had many male teachers, and in my twenty years of teaching these young girls, I have occasionally been the only male teacher at the school.
Canon Campbell and old Teddybear Kilgour don’t count; they were not male in the threatening sense—they were not potentially dangerous to young girls. Although the canon taught Scripture and History, in addition to his duties as chaplain, he was an elderly man; and he and old Teddybear Kilgour were “married up to their ears,” as Katherine Keeling likes to say.
Old Teddybear did ask me if I was “attracted to young girls”; but I must have impressed him that I would take my faculty responsibilities seriously, and that I would concern myself with those young girls’ minds and not their bodies.
“And have you?” Katherine Keeling likes to ask me. How the housemothers titter at the question—like Liberace’s live audiences of long ago!
Katherine is a much more jubilant soul than my grandmother, but she has a certain twinkling sarcasm—and the proper elocution, the good diction—that reminds me of Grandmother. They would have liked each other; Owen would have liked the Rev. Mrs. Keeling, too.
I’ve misled you if I’ve conveyed an atmosphere of loneliness at Sunday boarders’ lunch. Perhaps the boarders feel acutely lonely then, but I feel fine. Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
On Palm Sunday, there was much talk about the weather. The week before, it had been so cold that everyone commented on the annual error of the birds. Every spring—at least, in Canada—some birds fly north too soon. Thousands are caught in the cold; they return south in a reverse migration. Most common were tales of woe concerning robins and starlings. Katherine had seen some killdeer flying south—I had a common-snipe story that impressed them all. We’d all read The Globe and Mail that week: we’d loved the story about the turkey vultures who “iced up” and couldn’t fly; they were mistaken for hawks and taken to a humane society for thawing-out—there were nine of them and they threw up all over their handlers. The humane society could not have been expected to know that turkey vultures vomit when attacked. Who would guess that turkey vultures are so smart?
I’ve also misled you if I’ve conveyed an atmosphere of trivia at Sunday boarders’ lunch; these lunches are important to me. After the Palm Sunday lunch, Katherine and I walked over to Grace Church and signed up for the All Night Vigil on the notice board in the narthex. Every Maundy Thursday, the Vigil of Prayer and Quiet is kept from nine o’clock that evening until nine o’clock in the morning of Good Friday. Katherine and I always choose the hours no one else wants; we take the Vigil from three to five o’clock in the morning, when Katherine’s husband and children are asleep and don’t need her.
This year she cautioned me: “I may be a little late—if the two-o’clock feeding is much later than two o’clock!” She laughs, and her endearingly stick-thin neck looks especially vulnerable in her clerical collar. I see many parents of the Bishop Strachan girls—they are so smartly dressed, they drive Jaguars, they never have time to talk. I know that they dismiss the Rev. Mrs. Katherine Keeling as a typical headmistress type—Katherine is not the sort of woman they would look at twice. But she is wise and kind and witty and articulate; and she does not bullshit herself about what Easter means.
“EASTER MEANS WHAT IT SAYS,” said Owen Meany.
At Christ Church on Easter Sunday, Rector Wiggin always said: “Alleluia. Christ is risen.”
And we, the People—we said: “The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.”
Toronto: April 19, 1987—a humid, summery Easter Sunday. It does not matter what prelude begins the service; I will always hear Handel’s Messiah—and my mother’s not-quite-trained soprano singing, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
This morning, in Grace Church on-the-Hill, I sat very still, waiting for that passage in John; I knew what was coming. In the old King James version, it was called a “sepulchre”; in the Revised Standard version, it is just a “tomb.” Either way, I know the story by heart.
“Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’”
I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear. “THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS.”
After the service today, my fellow Torontonians and I stood in the sun on the church steps—and we lingered on the sidewalk along Lonsdale Road; the sun was so welcome, and so hot. We were childishly delighted by the heat, as if we’d spent years in an atmosphere as cold as the tomb where Mary Magdalene found Jesus missing. Leaning against me, and whispering into my ear—in a manner remindful of Owen Meany—Katherine Keeling said: “Those birds that flew north, and then south—today they’re flying north again.”
“Alleluia,” I said. I was thinking of Owen when I added, “He is risen.”
“Alleluia,” said the Rev. Mrs. Keeling.
That the television was always “on” at 80 Front Street ceased to tempt Owen and me. We could hear Grandmother, talking either to herself or to Ethel—or directly commenting to the TV—and we heard the rise and fall of the studio-made laughter. It was a big house; for four years, Owen and I had the impression that there was always a forbidding gathering of grown-ups, chattering away in a distant room. My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously—for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive.
Thus Owen Meany and I learned what crap television was, without ever thinking that we hadn’t come to this opinion by ourselves; had my grandmother allowed us only two hours of TV a day, or not permitted us more than one hour on a “school night,” we probably would have become as slavishly devoted to television as the rest of our generation. Owen started out loving only a few things he saw on television, but he saw everything—as much of everything as he could stand.
After four years of television, though, he watched nothing but Liberace and the old movies. I did, or tried to do, everything Owen did. For example: in the summer of ’58 when we were both sixteen, Owen got his driver’s license before I got mine—not only because he was a month older, but because he already knew how to drive. He’d taught himself with his father’s various trucks—he’d been driving on those steep, loopy roads that ran around the quarries that pockmarked most of Maiden Hill.
He took his driver’s test on the day of his sixteenth birthday, using his father’s tomato-red pickup truck; in those days, there was no driver education course in New Hampshire, and you took your test with a local policeman in the passenger seat—the policeman told you where to turn, when to stop or back up or park. The policeman, in Owen’s case, was Chief Ben Pike himself; Chief Pike expressed concern regarding whether or not Owen could reach the pedals—or see over the steering wheel. But Owen had anticipated this: he was mechanically inclined, and he’d raised the seat of the pickup so high that Chief Pike hit his head on the roof; Owen had slid the seat so far forward that Chief Pike had considerable difficulty cramming his knees under the dashboard—in fact, Chief Pike was so physically uncomfortable in the cab of the pickup that he cut Owen’s test fairly short.
“HE DIDN’T EVEN MAKE ME PARALLEL-PARK!” Owen said; he was disappointed that he was denied the opportunity to show off his parallel-parking abilities—Owen Meany could slip that tomato-red pickup into a parking space that would have been challenging for a Volks
wagen Beetle. In retrospect, I’m surprised that Chief Pike didn’t search the interior of the pickup for that “instrument of death” he was always looking for.
Dan Needham taught me to drive; it was the summer Dan directed Julius Caesar in the Gravesend Academy summer school, and he would take me for lessons every morning before rehearsals. Dan would drive me out the Swasey Parkway and up Maiden Hill. I practiced on the back roads around the quarries—the roads on which Owen Meany learned to drive were good enough for me; and Dan judged it safer for me off the public highways, although the Meany Granite Company vehicles flew around those roads with reckless abandon.
The quarrymen were fearless drivers and they trucked the granite and their machinery at full throttle; but, in the summer, the trucks raised so much dust that Dan and I had warning when one was coming—I always had time to pull over, while Dan recited his favorite Shakespeare from Julius Caesar.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Whereupon, Dan would grip the dashboard and tremble while a dynamite truck hurtled past us.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me the most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Owen, too, was fond of that passage. When we saw Dan’s production of Julius Caesar, later that summer, I had passed my driver’s test; yet, in the evenings, when Owen and I would drive down to the boardwalk and the casino at Hampton Beach together, we took the tomato-red pickup and Owen always drove. I paid for the gas. Those summer nights of 1958 were the first nights I remember feeling “grown up”; we’d drive half an hour from Gravesend for the fleeting privilege of inching along a crowded, gaudy strip of beachfront, looking at girls who rarely looked at us. Sometimes, they looked at the truck. We could drive along this strip only two or three times before a cop would motion us over to the side of the street, examine Owen’s driver’s license—in disbelief—and then suggest that we find a place to park the truck and resume our looking at girls on foot, on either the boardwalk or on the sidewalk that threaded the arcades.
