A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “Amazing!” said Mr. McSwiney. “You’ve got a permanently fixed larynx,” he told Owen. “I’ve rarely seen such a thing,” he said. “Your voice box is never in repose—your Adam’s apple sits up there in the position of a permanent scream. I could try giving you some exercises, but you might want to see a throat doctor; you might have to have surgery.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO HAVE SURGERY, I DON’T NEED ANY EXERCISES,” said Owen Meany. “IF GOD GAVE ME THIS VOICE, HE HAD A REASON,” Owen said.

  “How come his voice doesn’t change?” I asked Mr. McSwiney, who seemed on the verge of a satirical remark—regarding God’s role in the position of Owen’s voice box. “I thought every boy’s voice changed—at puberty,” I said.

  “If his voice hasn’t changed already, it’s probably never going to change,” Mr. McSwiney said. “Vocal cords don’t make words—they just vibrate. Vocal cords aren’t really ‘cords’—they’re just lips. It’s the opening between those lips that’s called the ‘glottis.’ It’s nothing but the act of breathing on the closed lips that makes a sound. When a male voice changes, it’s just a part of puberty—it’s called a ‘secondary sexual development.’ But I don’t think your voice is going to change,” Mr. McSwiney told Owen. “If it was going to change, it would have.”

  “THAT DOESN’T EXPLAIN WHY IT ALREADY HASN’T,” said Owen Meany.

  “I can’t explain that,” Mr. McSwiney admitted. “I can give you some exercises,” he repeated, “or I can recommend a doctor.”

  “I DON’T EXPECT MY VOICE TO CHANGE,” said Owen Meany.

  I could see that Mr. McSwiney was learning how exasperating Owen’s belief in God’s plans could be.

  “Why’d you come to see me, kid?” Mr. McSwiney asked him.

  “BECAUSE YOU KNOW HIS MOTHER,” Owen said, pointing to me. Graham McSwiney assessed me, as if he feared I might represent an elderly paternity suit.

  “Tabitha Wheelwright,” I said. “She was called Tabby. She was from New Hampshire, and she studied with you in the forties and the fifties—from before I was born until I was eight or nine.”

  “OR TEN,” said Owen Meany; into his pocket went his hand, again—he handed Mr. McSwiney the photograph.

  “‘The Lady in Red’!” Mr. McSwiney said. “I’m sorry, I forgot her name,” he told me.

  “But you remember her?” I asked.

  “Oh sure, I remember her,” he said. “She was pretty, and very pleasant—and I got her that silly job. It wasn’t much of a gig, but she had fun doing it; she had this idea that someone might ‘discover’ her if she kept singing there—but I told her no one ever got discovered in Boston. And certainly not in that supper club!”

  Mr. McSwiney explained that the club often called him and raided his students for local talent; as the Giordanos had told us, the club hired more established female vocalists for gigs that lasted for a month or more—but on Wednesdays, the club rested their stars; that’s when they called upon “local talent.” In my mother’s case, she had gained a small, neighborhood reputation and the club had made a habit of her. She’d not wanted to use her name—a form of shyness, or provincialism, that Mr. McSwiney found as silly as her idea that anyone might “discover” her.

  “But she was charming,” he said. “As a singer, she was all ‘head’—she had no ‘chest’—and she was lazy. She liked to perform simple, popular songs; she wasn’t very ambitious. And she wouldn’t practice.”

  He explained the two sets of muscles involved in a “head voice” and in a “chest voice”; although this was not what interested Owen and me about my mother, we were polite and allowed Mr. McSwiney to elaborate on his teacher’s opinion of her. Most women sing with the larynx in a high position, or with only what Mr. McSwiney called a “head voice”; they experience a lack of power from the E above middle C, downward—and when they try to hit their high notes loudly, they hit them shrilly. The development of a “chest voice” in women is very important. For men, it is the “head voice” that needs the development. For both, they must be willing to devote hours.

  My mother, a once-a-week singer, was what Mr. McSwiney called “the vocal equivalent of a weekend tennis player.” She had a pretty voice—as I’ve described it—but Mr. McSwiney’s assessment of her voice was consistent with my memory of her; she did not have a strong voice, she was not ever as powerful as Mr. McSwiney’s previous pupil had sounded to Owen and me through a closed door.

  “Who thought of the name ‘The Lady in Red’?” I asked the old teacher—in an effort to steer him back to what interested us.

  “She found a red dress in a store,” Mr. McSwiney said. “She told me she wanted to be ‘wholly out of character—but only once a week’!” He laughed. “I never went to hear her perform,” he said. “It was just a supper club,” he explained. “Really, no one who sang there was very good. Some of the better ones would work with me, so I heard them here—but I never set foot in the place. I knew Meyerson on the telephone; I don’t remember that I actually met him. I think Meyerson called her ‘The Lady in Red.’”

  “Meyerson?” I asked.

  “He owned the club, he was a nice old guy—from Miami, I think. He was honest, and unpretentious. The singers I sent to him all liked him—they said he treated them respectfully,” Mr. McSwiney said.

  “DO YOU REMEMBER THE NAME OF THE CLUB?” Owen asked him.

  It had been called The Orange Grove; my mother had joked to Mr. McSwiney about the decor, which she said was dotted everywhere with potted orange trees and tanks full of tropical fish—and husbands and wives celebrating their anniversaries. Yet she had imagined she might be “discovered” there!

  “DID SHE HAVE A BOYFRIEND?” Owen asked Mr. McSwiney, who shrugged.

  “She wasn’t interested in me—that’s all I know!” he said. He smiled at me fondly. “I know, because I made a pass at her,” he explained. “She handled it very nicely and I never tried it again,” he said.

  “There was a pianist, a black pianist—at The Orange Grove,” I said.

  “You bet there was, but he was all over—he played all over town, for years, before he ended up there. And after he left there, he played all over town again,” Mr. McSwiney said. “Big Black Buster Freebody!” he said, and laughed.

  “Freebody,” I said.

  “It was as made-up a name as ‘The Lady in Red,’” said Mr. McSwiney. “And he wouldn’t have been your mother’s boyfriend, either—Buster was as queer as a cat fart.”

  Graham McSwiney also told us that Meyerson had gone back to Miami; but Mr. McSwiney added that Meyerson was old—even in the forties and fifties, he’d been old; he was so old that he’d have to be dead now, “or at least lying down on a shuffleboard court.” As for Buster Freebody, Mr. McSwiney couldn’t remember where the big black man had played after The Orange Grove had seen its days. “I used to run into him in so many places,” Mr. McSwiney said. “I was as used to seeing Buster as a light fixture.” Buster Freebody had played what Mr. McSwiney called a “real soft” piano; singers liked him because they could be heard over him.

  “She had some trouble—your mother,” Mr. McSwiney remembered. “She went away—for a while—and then she came back again. And then she went away for good.”

  “HE WAS THE TROUBLE,” said Owen Meany, pointing to me.

  “Are you looking for your father?” the singing teacher asked me. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Don’t bother, kid,” said Mr. McSwiney. “If he was looking for you, he would have found you.”

  “GOD WILL TELL HIM WHO HIS FATHER IS,” Owen said; Graham McSwiney shrugged.

  “I’m not God,” Mr. McSwiney said. “This God you know,” he told Owen—“this God must be pretty busy.”

  I gave him my phone number in Gravesend—in case he ever remembered the last place he’d heard Buster Freebody play the piano. Buster Freebody, Mr. McSwiney warned me, was old enough to be “lying down on a shuffleboard court,” too. Mr. McSwiney as
ked Owen Meany for his phone number—in case he ever heard a theory regarding why Owen’s voice hadn’t already changed.

  “IT DOESN’T MATTER,” Owen said, but he gave Mr. McSwiney his number.

  “Your mother was a nice woman, a good person—a respectable woman,” Mr. McSwiney told me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “The Orange Grove was a stupid place,” he told me, “but it wasn’t a dive—nothing cheap would have happened to her there,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  “All she ever sang was Sinatra stuff—it used to bore me to tears,” Mr. McSwiney admitted.

  “I THINK WE CAN ASSUME THAT SOMEBODY LIKED TO LISTEN TO IT,” said Owen Meany.

  Toronto: May 30, 1987—I should know better than to read even as much as a headline in The New York Times; although, as I’ve often pointed out to my students at Bishop Strachan, this newspaper’s use of the semicolon is exemplary.

  Reagan Declares

  Firmness on Gulf;

  Plans Are Unclear

  Isn’t that a classic? I don’t mean the semicolon; I mean, isn’t that just what the world needs? Unclear firmness! That is typical American policy: don’t be clear, but be firm!

  In November 1961—after Owen Meany and I learned that his voice box was never in repose, and that my mother had enjoyed (or suffered) a more secret life than we knew—Gen. Maxwell Taylor reported to President Kennedy that U.S. military, economic, and political support could secure a victory for the South Vietnamese without the United States taking over the war. (Privately, the general recommended sending eight thousand U.S. combat troops to Vietnam.)

  That New Year’s Eve, which Owen and Hester and I celebrated at 80 Front Street—in the desultory manner that describes the partying habits of the late teen years (Hester was twenty), and in a relatively quiet manner (because Grandmother had gone to bed)—there were only 3,205 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.

  Hester would usher in the New Year more emphatically than Owen or I could manage; she greeted the New Year on her knees—in the snow, in the rose garden, where Grandmother would not hear her retching up her rum and Coke (a concoction she had learned to fancy in the budding days of her romance in Tortola). I was less enthusiastic about the watershed changing of the year; I fell asleep watching Charlton Heston’s agonies in Ben-Hur—somewhere between the chariot race and the leper colony, I nodded off. Owen watched the whole movie; during the commercials, he turned his detached attention to the window that overlooked the rose garden, where Hester’s pale figure could be discerned in the ghostly glow of the moonlight against the snow. It is a wonder to me that the changing of the year had so little effect on Owen Meany—when I consider that he thought he “knew,” at the time, exactly how many years he had left. Yet he appeared content to watch Ben-Hur, and Hester throwing up; maybe that’s what faith is—exactly that contentment, even facing the future.

  By our next New Year’s Eve together, in 1962, there would be 11,300 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. And once again, on the morning of New Year’s Day, my grandmother would notice the frozen splatter of Hester’s vomit in the snow—defacing that usually pristine area surrounding the birdbath in the center of the rose garden.

  “Merciful Heavens!” Grandmother would say. “What’s all that mess around the birdbath?”

  And just as he’d said the year before, Owen Meany said, “DIDN’T YOU HEAR THE BIRDS LAST NIGHT, MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT? I’D BETTER HAVE A LOOK AT WHAT ETHEL’S PUTTING IN YOUR BIRD FEEDERS.”

  Owen would have respected a book I read only two years ago: Vietnam War Almanac, by Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr. Colonel Summers is a combat infantry veteran of Korea and Vietnam; he doesn’t beat around the bush, as we used to say in Gravesend. Here is the first sentence of his very fine book: “One of the great tragedies of the Vietnam war is that although American armed forces defeated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in every major battle, the United States still suffered the greatest defeat in its history.” Imagine that! On the first page of his book, Colonel Summers tells a story about President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in 1945, when the Allied powers were trying to decide the composition of the postwar world. President Roosevelt wanted to give Indo-China to China’s leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, but the general knew a little Vietnamese history and tradition; Chiang Kai-shek understood that the Vietnamese were not Chinese, and that they would never allow themselves to be comfortably absorbed by the Chinese people. To Roosevelt’s generous offer—to give him Indo-China—Chiang replied: “We don’t want it.” Colonel Summers points out that it took the United States thirty years—and a war that cost them nearly fifty thousand American lives—to find out what Chiang Kai-shek explained to President Roosevelt in 1945. Imagine that!

  Is it any surprise that President Reagan is promising “firmness” in the Persian Gulf, and that his “plans are unclear”?

  Soon the school year will be over; soon the BSS girls will be gone. It is hot and humid in the summer in Toronto, but I like to watch the sprinklers wetting down the grass on the St. Clair Reservoir; they keep Winston Churchill Park as green as a jungle—all summer long. And the Rev. Katherine Keeling’s family owns an island in Georgian Bay; Katherine always invites me to visit her—I usually go there at least once every summer—and so I get my annual fix of swimming in fresh water and fooling around with someone else’s kids. Lots of wet life vests, lots of leaky canoes, and the smell of pine needles and wood preservative—a little of that lasts a long time for a fussy old bachelor like me.

  And in the summers I go to Gravesend and visit with Dan, too. It would hurt Dan’s feelings if I didn’t come to see a theatrical performance of his Gravesend summer-school students; he understands why I decline to see the performances of The Gravesend Players. Mr. Fish is quite old, but still acting; many of the town’s older amateurs are still acting for Dan, but I’d just as soon not see them anymore. And I don’t care for the view of the audience that, for a period of time, more than twenty years ago, intrigued Owen Meany and me.

  “IS HE OUT THERE TONIGHT?” Owen would whisper to me. “DO YOU SEE HIM?”

  In 1961, Owen and I searched the audience for that special face in the bleacher seats—maybe a familiar face; and maybe not. We were looking for the man who responded—or did not respond—to my mother’s wave. It was a face, we were sure, that would have registered some expression—upon witnessing the results of Owen Meany making contact with that ball. It was a face, we suspected, that my mother would have seen in many audiences before—not just at Little League games, but staring out at her from the potted orange trees and the tanks full of tropical fish at The Orange Grove. We were looking for a face that “The Lady in Red” would have sung to … at least once, if not many times.

  “Do you see him?” I would ask Owen Meany.

  “NOT TONIGHT,” Owen would say. “EITHER HE’S NOT HERE, OR HE’S NOT THINKING ABOUT YOUR MOTHER,” he said one night.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “SUPPOSE DAN DIRECTED A PLAY ABOUT MIAMI?” said Owen Meany. “SUPPOSE THE GRAVESEND PLAYERS PUT ON A PLAY ABOUT A SUPPER CLUB IN MIAMI, AND IT WAS CALLED THE ORANGE GROVE, AND THERE WAS A SINGER CALLED ‘THE LADY IN RED,’ AND SHE SANG ONLY THE OLD SINATRA SONGS.”

  “But there is no play like that,” I said.

  “JUST SUPPOSE!” Owen said. “USE YOUR IMAGINATION. GOD CAN TELL YOU WHO YOUR FATHER IS, BUT YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IT— YOU’VE GOT TO GIVE GOD A LITTLE HELP! JUST SUPPOSE THERE WAS SUCH A PLAY!”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m supposing.”

  “AND WE CALLED THE PLAY EITHER THE ORANGE GROVE OR THE LADY IN RED— DON’T YOU SUPPOSE THAT YOUR FATHER WOULD COME TO SEE THAT PLAY? AND DON’T YOU SUPPOSE WE COULD RECOGNIZE HIM THEN?” asked Owen Meany.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  The problem was, Owen and I didn’t dare tell Dan about The Orange Grove and “The Lady in Red”; we weren’t sure that Dan didn’t already know. I thought it w
ould hurt Dan to know that he wasn’t enough of a father to me—for wouldn’t he interpret my curiosity regarding my biological father as an indication that he (Dan) was less than adequate in his adoptive role?

  And if Dan didn’t know about The Orange Grove and “The Lady in Red,” wouldn’t that hurt him, too? It made my mother’s past—before Dan—appear more romantic than I ever thought it had been. Why would Dan Needham want to dwell on my mother’s romantic past?

  Owen suggested that there was a way to get The Gravesend Players to perform a play about a female vocalist in a Miami supper club without involving Dan in our discovery.

  “I COULD WRITE THE PLAY,” said Owen Meany. “I COULD SUBMIT IT TO DAN AS THE FIRST ORIGINAL PRODUCTION OF THE GRAVESEND PLAYERS. I COULD TELL IN ONE SECOND IF DAN ALREADY KNEW THE STORY.”

  “But you don’t know the story,” I pointed out to Owen. “You don’t have a story, you just have a setting—and a very sketchy cast of characters.”

  “IT CAN’T BE VERY HARD TO MAKE UP A GOOD STORY,” said Owen Meany. “CLEARLY, YOUR MOTHER HAD A TALENT FOR IT—AND SHE WASN’T EVEN A WRITER.”

  “I suppose you’re a writer,” I said; Owen shrugged.

  “IT CAN’T BE VERY HARD,” Owen repeated.

  But I said I didn’t want him to try it and take a chance of hurting Dan; if Dan already knew the story—even if he knew only the “setting”—he would be hurt, I said.

  “I DON’T THINK IT’S DAN YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT,” said Owen Meany.

  “What do you mean, Owen?” I asked him; he shrugged—sometimes I think that Owen Meany invented shrugging.

  “I THINK YOU’RE AFRAID TO FIND OUT WHO YOUR FATHER IS,” he said.

  “Fuck you, Owen,” I said; he shrugged again.

  “LOOK AT IT THIS WAY,” said Owen Meany. “YOU’VE BEEN GIVEN A CLUE. NO EFFORT FROM YOU WAS REQUIRED. GOD HAS GIVEN YOU A CLUE. NOW YOU HAVE A CHOICE: EITHER YOU USE GOD’S GIFT OR YOU WASTE IT. I THINK A LITTLE EFFORT FROM YOU IS REQUIRED.”

  “I think you care more about who my father is than I do,” I told him; he nodded. It was the day of New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1961, about two o’clock in the afternoon, and we were sitting in the grubby living room of Hester’s apartment in Durham, New Hampshire; it was a living room we routinely shared with Hester’s roommates—two university girls who were almost Hester’s equal in slovenliness, but sadly no match for Hester in sex appeal. The girls were not there; they had gone to their parents’ homes for Christmas vacation. Hester was not there, either; Owen and I would never have discussed my mother’s secret life in Hester’s presence. Although it was only two o’clock in the afternoon, Hester had already consumed several rum and Cokes; she was sound asleep in her bedroom—as oblivious to Owen’s and my discussion as my mother was.