A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  There we were, in our rented tuxedos, boys more afraid of pimples than of war; but Owen’s tux was not rented—my grandmother had bought it for him—and in its tailoring, in its lack of shine, in its touch of satin on its slim lapels, it eloquently spoke to the matter that was so obvious to us all: how The Voice expressed what we were unable to say.

  Like all dances at the academy, this one ended under extreme supervision; no one could leave the dance early; and when one left, and had escorted one’s date to the visitor’s dorm, one returned to one’s own dorm and “checked in” precisely fifteen minutes after having “checked out” of the dance. But Hester was staying at 80 Front Street.

  I was too mortified to spend that weekend at my grandmother’s—with Hester as Owen’s date—and so I returned to Dan’s dorm with the other boys who marched to the school’s rules. Owen, who had the day boy’s standing permission to drive himself to and from the academy, drove Hester back to 80 Front Street. Once in the cab of the tomato-red pickup, Hester and Owen were freed from the regulations of the Dance Committee; they lit up, the smoke from their cigarettes concealed the assumed complacency of their expressions, and each of them lolled an arm out a rolled-down window as Owen turned up the volume of the radio and drove artfully away. With his cigarette, with Hester beside him—in his tux, in the high cab of that tomato-red pickup—Owen Meany looked almost tall.

  Other boys claimed that they “did it” in the bushes—between leaving the dance and arriving at their dorms. Other boys displayed kissing techniques in lobbies, risked “copping a feel” in coat rooms, defied the chaperones’ quick censure of anything as vulgar as sticking a tongue in a girl’s ear. But beyond the indisputable fact of his nose embedded in Hester’s cleavage, Owen and Hester did not resort to either common or gross forms of public affection. And how he later rebuked our childishness by refusing to talk about her; if he “did it” with her, The Voice was not bragging about it. He took Hester back to 80 Front Street and they watched The Late Show together; he drove himself back to the quarry—“IT WAS RATHER LATE,” he admitted.

  “What was the movie?” I asked.

  “WHAT MOVIE?”

  “On The Late Show!”

  “OH, I FORGET …”

  “Hester must have fucked his brains out,” Simon said morosely; Noah hit him. “Since when does Owen ‘forget’ a movie?” Simon cried; but Noah hit him again. “Owen even remembers The Robe!” Simon said; Noah hit him in the mouth, and Simon started swinging. “It doesn’t matter!” Simon yelled. “Hester fucks everybody!”

  Noah had his brother by the throat. “We don’t know that,” he said to Simon.

  “We think it!” Simon cried.

  “It’s okay to think it,” Noah told his brother; he rubbed his forearm back and forth across Simon’s nose, which began to bleed. “But if we don’t know it, we don’t say it.”

  “Hester fucked Owen’s brains out!” Simon screamed; Noah drove the point of his elbow into the hollow between Simon’s eyes.

  “We don’t know that,” he repeated; but I had grown accustomed to their savage fights—they no longer frightened me. Their brutality seemed plain and safe alongside my conflicted feelings for Hester, my crushing envy of Owen.

  Once again, The Voice put us in our places. “IT IS HARD TO KNOW, IN THE WAKE OF THE DISTURBING DANCE-WEEKEND, WHETHER OUR ESTEEMED PEERS OR OUR ESTEEMED FACULTY CHAPERONES SHOULD BE MORE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES. IT IS PUERILE FOR YOUNG MEN TO DISCUSS WHAT DEGREE OF ADVANTAGE THEY TOOK OF THEIR DATES; IT IS DISRESPECTFUL OF WOMEN—ALL THIS CHEAP BRAGGING—AND IT GIVES MEN A BAD REPUTATION. WHY SHOULD WOMEN TRUST US? BUT IT IS HARD TO SAY WHETHER THIS BOORISH BEHAVIOR IS WORSE OR BETTER THAN THE GESTAPO TACTICS OF OUR PURITAN CHAPERONES. THE DEAN’S OFFICE TELLS ME THAT TWO SENIORS HAVE RECEIVED NOTICE OF DISCIPLINARY PROBATION—FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TERM!—FOR THEIR ALLEGED ‘OVERT INDISCRETIONS’; I BELIEVE THE TWO INCIDENTS FALL UNDER THE PUNISHABLE OFFENSE OF ‘MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE CONDUCT WITH GIRLS.’

  “AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING PRURIENT, I SHALL REVEAL THE SHOCKING NATURE OF THESE TWO SINS AGAINST THE SCHOOL AND WOMANKIND. ONE! A BOY WAS FOUND ‘FONDLING’ HIS DATE IN THE TROPHY ROOM OF THE GYM: AS THE COUPLE WAS FULLY DRESSED—AND STANDING—AT THE TIME, IT SEEMS UNLIKELY THAT A PREGNANCY COULD HAVE RESULTED FROM THEIR EXCHANGE; AND ALTHOUGH THE GYM IS NOTORIOUS FOR IT, I’M SURE THEY HADN’T EVEN EXPOSED THEMSELVES SUFFICIENTLY TO RISK AN ATHLETE’S FOOT INFECTION. TWO! A BOY WAS SEEN LEAVING THE BUTT ROOM IN BANCROFT HALL WITH HIS TONGUE IN HIS DATE’S EAR—AN ODD AND OSTENTATIOUS MANNER IN WHICH TO EXIT A SMOKING LOUNGE, I WILL AGREE, BUT THIS DEGREE OF PHYSICAL CONTACT IS ALSO NOT KNOWN TO RESULT IN A PREGNANCY. TO MY KNOWLEDGE, IT IS EVEN DIFFICULT TO COMMUNICATE THE COMMON COLD BY THIS METHOD.”

  After that one, it became customary for the applicants—for the position of headmaster—to request to meet him when they were interviewed. The Search Committee had a student subcommittee available to interview each candidate; but when the candidates asked to meet The Voice, Owen insisted that he be given A PRIVATE AUDIENCE. The issue of Owen being granted this privilege was the subject of a special faculty meeting where tempers flared; Dan said there was a movement to replace the faculty adviser to The Grave—there were those who said that the “pregnancy humor” in Owen’s column about the Senior Dance should not have escaped the adviser’s censorship. But the faculty adviser to The Grave was an Owen Meany supporter; Mr. Early—that deeply flawed thespian who brought to every role he was given in The Gravesend Players an overblown and befuddled sense of Learlike doom—cried that he would defend the “unsullied genius” of The Voice, if necessary, “to the death.” That would not be necessary, Dan Needham was sure; but that Owen was supported by such a boob as Mr. Early was conceivably worse than no defense at all.

  Several applicants for the headmaster position admitted that their interviews with The Voice had been “daunting”; I’m sure that they were unprepared for his size, and when they heard him speak, I’m sure they got the shivers and were troubled by the absurdity of that voice communicating strictly in upper-case letters. One of the favored candidates withdrew his application; although there was no direct evidence that Owen had contributed to the candidate’s retreat, the man admitted there was a certain quality of “accepted cynicism” among the students that had “depressed” him. The man added that these students demonstrated an “attitude of superiority”—and “such a degree of freedom of speech as to make their liberal education too liberal.”

  “Nonsense!” Dan Needham had cried in the faculty meeting. “Owen Meany isn’t cynical! If this guy was referring to Owen, he was referring to him incorrectly. Good riddance!”

  But not all the faculty felt that way. The Search Committee would need another year to satisfy their search; the present headmaster cheerfully agreed—for the good of the school—to stall his retirement. He was all “for the good of the school,” the old headmaster; and it was his support of Owen Meany that—for a while—kept Owen’s enemies from his throat.

  “He’s a delightful little fella!” the headmaster said. “I wouldn’t miss reading The Voice—not for all the world!”

  His name was Archibald Thorndike, and he’d been headmaster forever; he’d married the daughter of the headmaster before him, and he was about as “old school” as a headmaster could get. Although the newer, more progressive-minded faculty complained about Archie Thorndike’s reluctance to change a single course requirement—not to mention his views of “the whole boy”—the headmaster had no enemies. Old “Thorny,” as he was called—and he encouraged even the boys to address him as “Thorny”—was so headmasterly in every pleasing, comfortable, superficial way that no one could feel unfriendly toward him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired man with a face as serviceable as an oar; in fact, he was an oarsman, and an outdoorsman—a man who preferred soft, unironed trousers, maybe khakis or corduroys, and a tweed jacket with the elbow patches in need of a thread here or there. He went hatless in our New Hampshire winter
s, and was such a supporter of our teams—in the rawest weather—that he wore a scar from an errant hockey puck as proudly as a merit badge; the puck had struck him above the eye while he’d tended the goal during the annual Alumni-Varsity game. Thorny was an honorary member of several of Gravesend’s graduating classes. He played every alumni game in the goal.

  “Ice hockey’s not a sissy sport!” he liked to say. In another vein, in defense of Owen Meany, he maintained: “It is the well educated who will improve society—and they will improve it, at first, by criticizing it, and we are giving them the tools to criticize it. Naturally, as students, the brighter of them will begin their improvements upon society by criticizing us.” To Owen, old Archie Thorndike would sing a slightly different song: “It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change. I’m not going to change; I’m going to retire! Get the new headmaster to make the changes; that’s when I made changes—when I was new.”

  “WHAT CHANGES DID YOU MAKE?” Owen Meany asked.

  “That’s another reason I’m retiring!” old Thorny told Owen amiably. “My memory’s shot!”

  Owen thought that Archibald Thorndike was a blithering, glad-handing fool; but everyone, even The Voice, thought that old Thorny was a nice guy. “NICE GUYS ARE THE TOUGHEST TO GET RID OF,” Owen wrote for The Grave; but even Mr. Early was smart enough to censor that.

  Then it was summer; The Voice went back to work in the quarries—I don’t think he said much down in the pits—and I had my first job. I was a guide for the Gravesend Academy Admissions Office; I showed the school to prospective students and their parents—it was boring, but it certainly wasn’t hard. I had a ring of master keys, which amounted to the greatest responsibility anyone had given me, and I had freedom of choice regarding which typical classroom I would show, and which “typical” dormitory room. I chose rooms at random in Waterhouse Hall, in the vague hope that I might surprise Mr. and Mrs. Brinker-Smith at their game of musical beds; but the twins were older now, and maybe the Brinker-Smiths didn’t “do it” with their former gusto.

  In the evenings, at Hampton Beach, Owen looked tired to me; I reported to the Admissions Office for my first guided tour at ten, but Owen was stepping into the grout bucket by seven every morning. His fingernails were cracked; his hands were cut and swollen; his arms were tanned and thin and hard. He didn’t talk about Hester. The summer of ’59 was the first summer that we met with any success in picking up girls; or, rather, Owen met with this success, and he introduced the girls he met to me. We didn’t “do it” that summer; at least, I didn’t, and—to my knowledge—Owen never had a date alone.

  “IT’S A DOUBLE DATE OR IT’S NOTHING,” he’d tell one surprised girl after another. “ASK YOUR FRIEND OR FORGET IT.”

  And we were no longer afraid to cruise the pinball arcades around the casino on foot; delinquent thugs would still pick on Owen, but he quickly established a reputation as an untouchable.

  “YOU WANT TO BEAT ME UP?” he’d say to some punk. “YOU WANT TO GO TO JAIL? YOU’RE SO UGLY—YOU THINK I’LL HAVE TROUBLE REMEMBERING YOUR FACE?” Then he’d point to me. “YOU SEE HIM? ARE YOU SUCH AN ASSHOLE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A WITNESS IS? GO AHEAD—BEAT ME UP!” Only one guy did—or tried. It was like watching a dog go after a raccoon; the dog does all the work, but the raccoon gets the better of it. Owen just covered up; he grabbed for hands and feet, he went for the fingers first, but he was content to tear off a shoe and go for the toes. He took a pounding but he wrapped himself into a ball; he left no extremities showing. He broke the guy’s pinky—he bent it so sharply that after the fight the guy’s little finger pointed straight up off the back of his hand. He tore one of the guy’s shoes off and bit his toes; there was a lot of blood, but the guy was wearing a sock—I couldn’t see the actual damage, only that he had trouble walking. The guy was pulled off Owen by a cotton-candy vendor—he was arrested shortly thereafter for screaming obscenities, and we heard he was sent to reform school because he turned out to be driving a stolen car. We never saw him on the beachfront again, and the word about Owen—on the strip, around the casino, and along the boardwalk—was that he was dangerous to pick a fight with; the rumor was that he’d bitten off someone’s ear. Another summer, I heard that he’d blinded a guy with a Popsicle stick. That these reports weren’t exactly true did not matter at Hampton Beach. He was “that little dude in the red pickup,” he was “the quarry-worker—he carries some kind of tool on him.” He was “a mean little fucker—watch out for him.”

  We were seventeen; we had a sullen summer. In the fall, Noah and Simon started college out on the West Coast; they went to one of those California universities that no one on the East Coast can ever remember the name of. And the Eastmans continued their folly of considering Hester as less of an investment; they sent her to the University of New Hampshire, where—as a resident—she merited instate tuition. “They want to keep me in their own backyard,” was how Hester put it.

  “THEY PUT HER IN OUR BACKYARD,” was how Owen put it; the state university was only a twenty-minute drive from Gravesend. That it was a better university than the tanning club that Noah and Simon attended in California was not an argument that impressed Hester; the boys got to travel, the boys got the more agreeable climate—she got to stay home. To New Hampshire natives, the state university—notwithstanding how basically solid an education it offered—was not exotic; to Gravesend Academy students, with their elitist eyes on the Ivy League schools, it was “a cow college,” wholly beyond redemption. But in the fall of ’59, when Owen and I began our tenth-grade year at the academy, Owen was regarded as especially gifted—by our peers—because he was dating a college girl; that Hester was a cow-college girl did not tarnish Owen’s reputation. He was Ladies’ Man Meany, he was Older-Woman Master; and he was still and would always be The Voice. He demanded attention; and he got it.

  Toronto: May 9, 1987—Gary Hart, a former U.S. senator from Colorado, quit his campaign for the presidency after some Washington reporters caught him shacked up for the weekend with a Miami model; although both the model and the candidate claimed that nothing “immoral” occurred—and Mrs. Hart said that she supported her husband, or maybe it was that she “understood” him—Mr. Hart decided that such intense scrutiny of his personal life created an “intolerable situation” for him and his family. He’ll be back; want to bet? In the United States, no one like him disappears for long; remember Nixon?

  What do Americans know about morality? They don’t want their presidents to have penises but they don’t mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don’t want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don’t mind if their presidents deceive Congress—lie to the people and violate the people’s constitution! What Mr. Hart should have said was that nothing unusually immoral had occurred, or that what happened was only typically immoral; or that he was testing his abilities to deceive the American people by deceiving his wife first—and that he hoped the people would see by this example that he was immoral enough to be good presidential material! I can just hear what The Voice would have said about all this.

  A sunny day; my fellow Canadians in Winston Churchill Park have their bellies turned toward the sun. All the girls at Bishop Strachan are tugging up their middies and hiking up their pleated skirts; they are pushing their knee socks down around their ankles; the whole world wants a tan. But Owen hated the spring; the warm weather made him think that school was almost over, and Owen loved school. When school was over, Owen Meany went back to the quarries.

  When school began again—when we started the fall term of 1959—I realized that The Voice had not been idle for the summer; Owen came back to school with a stack of columns ready for The Grave. He charged the Search Committee to find a new headmaster who was dedicated to serving the faculty and the students—“NOT A SERVANT OF THE ALUMNI AND THE TRUSTEES.” Although he made fun of T
horny—particularly, of old Archie Thorndike’s notion of “the whole boy”—Owen praised our departing headmaster for being “AN EDUCATIOR FIRST, A FUND-RAISER SECOND.” Owen cautioned the Search Committee to “BEWARE OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES—THEY’LL PICK A HEADMASTER WHO CARES MORE ABOUT FUND DRIVES THAN THE CURRICULUM OR THE FACULTY WHO TEACH IT. AND DON’T LISTEN TO THE ALUMNI!” warned The Voice; Owen had a low opinion of the alumni. “THEY CAN’T EVEN BE TRUSTED TO REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS REALLY LIKE TO BE HERE; THEY’RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT WHAT THE SCHOOL DID FOR THEM—OR HOW THE SCHOOL MADE SOMETHING OUT OF THEM, AS IF THEY WERE UNFORMED CLAY WHEN THEY CAME HERE. AS FOR HOW HARSH THE SCHOOL COULD BE, AS FOR HOW MISERABLE THEY WERE WHEN THEY WERE STUDENTS—THE ALUMNI HAVE CONVENIENTLY FORGOTTEN.”

  Someone in faculty meeting called Owen “that little turd”; Dan Needham argued that Owen truly adored the school, but that a Gravesend education did not and should not teach respect for uncritical love, for blind devotion. It became harder to defend Owen when he started the petition against fish on Fridays.

  “WE HAVE A NONDENOMINATIONAL CHURCH,” he stated. “WHY DO WE HAVE A CATHOLIC DINING HALL? IF CATHOLICS WANT TO EAT FISH ON FRIDAY, WHY MUST THE REST OF US JOIN THEM? MOST KIDS HATE FISH! SERVE FISH BUT SERVE SOMETHING ELSE, TOO—COLD CUTS, OR EVEN PEANUT-BUTTER-AND-JELLY SANDWICHES. WE ARE FREE TO LISTEN TO THE GUEST PREACHER AT HURD’S CHURCH, OR WE CAN ATTEND ANY OF THE TOWN CHURCHES OF OUR CHOICE; JEWS AREN’T FORCED TO TAKE COMMUNION, UNITARIANS AREN’T DRAGGED TO MASS—OR TO CONFESSION—BAPTISTS AREN’T ROUNDED UP ON SATURDAYS AND HERDED OFF TO SYNAGOGUE (OR TO THEIR OWN, UNWILLING CIRCUMCISIONS). YET NON-CATHOLICS MUST EAT FISH; ON FRIDAYS, IT’S EAT FISH OR GO HUNGRY. I THOUGHT THIS WAS A DEMOCRACY. ARE WE ALL FORCED TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE CATHOLIC VIEW OF BIRTH CONTROL? WHY ARE WE FORCED TO EAT CATHOLIC FOOD?”