A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  Did he think that the downfall of President Kennedy might come from an editorial in The Grave?

  “Do you want to get kicked out of school for protecting the president?” I asked him.

  “HE’S MORE IMPORTANT THAN I AM,” said Owen Meany. Nowadays, I’m not sure that Owen was right about that; he was right about most things—but I’m inclined to think that Owen Meany was as worthy of protection as JFK.

  Look at what assholes are trying to protect the president these days!

  But Owen Meany could not be persuaded to protect himself; he told Dan Needham that the nature of Mrs. Lish’s incitement constituted “A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY”; not even to save himself from Randy White’s wrath would Owen Meany repeat what a slanderous rumor he had heard.

  In faculty meeting, the headmaster argued that this kind of disrespect to adults—to school parents!—could not be tolerated. Mr. Early argued that there was no school rule against propositioning mothers; Owen, Mr. Early argued, had not broken a rule.

  The headmaster attempted to have the matter turned over to the Executive Committee; but Dan Needham knew that Owen’s chances of survival would be poor among that group of (largely) the headmaster’s henchmen—at least, they comprised the majority in any vote, as The Voice had pointed out. It was not a matter for the Executive Committee, Dan argued; Owen had not committed an offense in any category that the school considered “grounds for dismissal.”

  Not so! said the headmaster. What about “reprehensible conduct with girls”? Several faculty members hastened to point out that Mitzy Lish was “no girl.” The headmaster then read a telegram that had been sent to him from Mrs. Lish’s ex-husband, Herb. The Hollywood producer said that he hoped the insult suffered by his ex-wife—and the embarrassment caused his son—would not go unpunished.

  “So put Owen on disciplinary probation,” Dan Needham said. “That’s punishment; that’s more than enough.”

  But Randy White said there was a more serious charge against Owen than the mere propositioning of someone’s mother; did the faculty not consider anti-Semitism “serious”? Could a school of such a broadly based ethnic population tolerate this kind of “discrimination”?

  But Mrs. Lish had never substantiated the charge that Owen had been anti-Semitic. Even Larry Lish, when questioned, couldn’t remember anything in Owen’s remarks that could be construed as anti-Semitic; Larry, in fact, admitted that his mother had a habit of labeling everyone who treated her with less than complete reverence as an anti-Semite—as if, in Mrs. Lish’s view, the only possible reason to dislike her was that she was Jewish. Owen, Dan Needham pointed out, hadn’t even known that the Lishes were Jewish.

  “How could he not know?” Headmaster White cried.

  Dan suggested that the headmaster’s remark was more anti-Semitic than any remark attributed to Owen Meany.

  And so he was spared; he was put on disciplinary probation—for the remainder of the winter term—with the warning, understood by all, that any offense of any kind would be considered “grounds for dismissal”; in such a case, he would be judged by the Executive Committee and none of his friends on the faculty could save him.

  The headmaster proposed—in addition to Owen’s probation—that he be removed from his position as editor-in-chief of The Grave, or that The Voice should be silenced until the end of the winter term; or both. But this was not approved by the faculty.

  In truth, Mrs. Lish’s charge of anti-Semitism had backfired with a number of the faculty, who were quite belligerently anti-Semitic themselves. As for Randy White: Dan and Owen and I suspected that the headmaster was about as anti-Semitic as anyone we knew.

  And so the incident rested with Owen Meany receiving the punishment of disciplinary probation for the duration of the winter term; aside from the jeopardy this put him in—in regard to any other trouble he might get into—disciplinary probation was no great imposition, especially for a day boy. Basically, he lost the senior privilege to go to Boston on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons; if he’d been a boarder, he would have lost the right to spend any weekend away from school, but since he was a day boy, he spent every weekend at home—or with me—anyway.

  Yet Owen was not grateful for the leniency shown to him by the school; he was outraged that he had been punished at all. His hostility, in turn, was not appreciated by the faculty—including many of his supporters. They wanted to be congratulated for their generosity, and for standing up to the headmaster; instead, Owen cut them dead on the quadrangle paths. He greeted no one; he wouldn’t even look up. He wouldn’t speak—not even in class!—unless spoken to; and when forced to speak, his responses were uncharacteristically brief. As for his duties as editor-in-chief of The Grave, he simply stopped contributing the column that had given The Voice his name and his fame.

  “What’s happened to The Voice, Owen?” Mr. Early asked him.

  “THE VOICE HAS LEARNED TO KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT,” Owen said.

  “Owen,” Dan Needham said, “don’t piss off your friends.”

  “THE VOICE HAS BEEN CENSORED,” said Owen Meany. “JUST TELL THE FACULTY AND THE HEADMASTER THAT THE VOICE IS BUSY—REVISING HIS VALEDICTORY! I GUESS NO ONE CAN THROW ME OUT OF SCHOOL FOR WHAT I SAY AT COMMENCEMENT!”

  Thus did Owen Meany respond to his punishment, by threatening the headmaster and the faculty with The Voice—only momentarily silenced, we all knew; but full of rage, we all were sure.

  It was that numbskull from Zürich, Dr. Dolder, who proposed to the faculty that Owen Meany should be required to talk with him.

  “Such hostility!” Dr. Dolder said. “He has a talent for speaking out—yes? And now he is withholding his talent from us, he is denying himself the pleasure of speaking his mind—why? Without expression, his hostility will only increase—no?” Dr. Dolder said. “Better I should give him the opportunity to vent his hostility—on me!” the doctor said. “After all, we would not want a repeated incident with another older woman. Maybe this time, it’s a faculty wife—yes?” he said.

  And so they told Owen Meany that he had to see the school psychiatrist.

  “‘FATHER, FORGIVE THEM; FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO,’” he said.

  Toronto: July 14, 1987—still waiting for my invitation to Georgian Bay; it can’t come soon enough. The New York Times appears to have reduced the Iran-contra affair to the single issue of whether or not President Reagan “knew” that profits from the secret arms sales to Iran were being diverted to support the Nicaraguan contras. Jesus Christ! Isn’t it enough to “know” that the president wanted and intended to continue his support of the contras after Congress told him what was enough?

  It makes me sick to hear the lectures delivered to Lt. Col. Oliver North. What are they lecturing him for? The colonel wants to support the contras—“for the love of God and for the love of country”; he’s already testified that he’d do anything his commander-in-chief wanted him to do. And now we get to listen to the senators and the representatives who are running for office again; they tell the colonel all he doesn’t know about the U.S. Constitution; they point out to him that patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda—and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American. They might add that God is not a proven right-winger! Why are they pontificating the obvious to Colonel North? Why don’t they have the balls to say this to their blessed commander-in-chief?

  If Hester has been paying attention to any of this, I’ll bet she’s throwing up; I’ll bet she’s barfing her brains out. She would remember, of course, those charmless bumper stickers from the Vietnam era—those cunning American flags and the red, white, and blue lettering of the name of our beloved nation. I’ll bet Colonel North remembers them.

  AMERICA!

  said the bumper stickers.

  LOVE IT OR

  LEAVE IT!

  That made a lot of sense, didn’t it? Remember that?

  And now we have to hear a civics lecture—t
he country’s elected officials are instructing a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps on the subject that love of country and love of God (and hatred of communism) can conceivably be represented, in a democracy, by differing points of view. The colonel shows no signs of being converted; why are these pillars of self-righteousness wasting their breath on him? I doubt that President Reagan could be converted to democracy, either.

  I know what my grandmother used to say, whenever she saw or read anything that was just a lot of bullshit. Owen picked up the phrase from her; he was quite lethal in its application, our senior year at Gravesend. Whenever anyone said anything that was a lot of bullshit to him, Owen Meany used to say, “YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS? THAT’S MADE FOR TELEVISION—THAT’S WHAT THAT IS.” And that’s what Owen would have said about the Iran-contra hearings—concerning what President Reagan did or didn’t “know.”

  “MADE FOR TELEVISION,” he would have said.

  That’s how he referred to his sessions with Dr. Dolder; the school made him see Dr. Dolder twice a week, and when I asked him to describe his dialogue with the Swiss idiot, Owen said, “MADE FOR TELEVISION.” He wouldn’t tell me much else about the sessions, but he liked to mock some of the questions Dr. Dolder had asked him by exaggerating the doctor’s accent.

  “ZO! YOU ARE ATTRACTED TO ZE OLDER VIMMEN—VY IS DAT?”

  I wondered if he answered by saying he’d always been fond of my mother—maybe, he’d even been in love with her. That would have caused Dr. Dolder great excitement, I’m sure.

  “ZO! ZE VOOMIN YOU KILT MIT ZE BASEBALL—SHE MADE YOU VANT TO PROP-O-SI-TION PEOPLE’S MUDDERS, YES?”

  “Come on,” I said to Owen. “He’s not that stupid!”

  “ZO! VITCH FACULTY VIFE HAF YOU GOT YOUR EYES ON?”

  “Come on!” I said. “What kind of stuff does he ask you, really?”

  “ZO! YOU BELIEF IN GOT—DAT’S FERRY IN-TER-EST-INK!”

  Owen would never tell me what really went on in those sessions. I knew Dr. Dolder was a moron; but I also knew that even a moron would have discovered some disturbing things about Owen Meany. For example, Dr. Dolder—dolt though he was—would have heard at least a little of the GOD’S INSTRUMENT theme; even Dr. Dolder would have uncovered Owen’s perplexing and troubling anti-Catholicism. And Owen’s particular brand of fatalism would have been challenging for a good psychiatrist; I’m sure Dr. Dolder was scared to death about it. And would Owen have gone so far as to tell Dr. Dolder about Scrooge’s grave? Would Owen have suggested that he KNEW how much time he had left on our earth?

  “What do you tell him?” I asked Owen.

  “THE TRUTH,” said Owen Meany. “I ANSWER EVERY QUESTION HE ASKS TRUTHFULLY, AND WITHOUT HUMOR,” he added.

  “My God!” I said. “You could really get yourself in trouble!”

  “VERY FUNNY,” he said.

  “But, Owen,” I said. “You tell him everything you think about, and everything you believe? Not everything you believe, right?” I said.

  “EVERYTHING,” said Owen Meany. “EVERYTHING HE ASKS.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I said. “And what has he got to say? What’s he told you?”

  “HE TOLD ME TO TALK WITH PASTOR MERRILL—SO I HAVE TO SEE HIM TWICE A WEEK, TOO,” Owen said. “AND WITH EACH OF THEM, I SIT THERE AND TALK ABOUT WHAT I TALKED ABOUT TO THE OTHER ONE. I GUESS THEY’RE FINDING OUT A LOT ABOUT EACH OTHER.”

  “I see,” I said; but I didn’t.

  Owen had taken all the Rev. Lewis Merrill’s courses at the academy; he had consumed all the Religion and Scripture courses so voraciously that there weren’t any left for him in his senior year, and Mr. Merrill had permitted him to pursue some independent study in the field. Owen was particularly interested in the miracle of the resurrection; he was interested in miracles in general, and life after death in particular, and he was writing an interminable term paper that related these subjects to that old theme from Isaiah 5:20, which he loved. “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil.” Owen’s opinion of Pastor Merrill had improved considerably from those earlier years when the issue of the minister’s doubt had bothered Owen’s dogmatic side; Mr. Merrill had to be aware—awkwardly so—of the role The Voice had played in securing his appointment as school minister. When they sat together in Pastor Merrill’s vestry office, I couldn’t imagine them—not either of them—as being quite at ease; yet there appeared to be much respect between them.

  Owen did not have a relaxing effect on anyone, and no one I knew was ever less relaxed than the Rev. Lewis Merrill; and so I imagined that Hurd’s Church would be creaking excessively during their interviews—or whatever they called them. They would both be fidgeting away in the vestry office, Mr. Merrill opening and closing the old desk drawers, and sliding that old chair on the casters from one end of the desk to the other—while Owen Meany cracked his knuckles, crossed and uncrossed his little legs, and shrugged and sighed and reached out his hands to the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s desk, if only to pick up a paperweight or a prayer book and put it down again.

  “What do you talk about with Mister Merrill?” I asked him.

  “I TALK ABOUT DOCTOR DOLDER WITH PASTOR MERRILL, AND I TALK ABOUT PASTOR MERRILL WITH DOCTOR DOLDER,” Owen said.

  “No, but I know you like Pastor Merrill—I mean, sort of. Don’t you?” I asked him.

  “WE TALK ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH,” said Owen Meany.

  “I see,” I said; but I didn’t. I didn’t realize the degree to which Owen Meany never got tired of talking about that.

  Toronto: July 21, 1987—it is a scorcher in town today. I was getting my hair cut in my usual place, near the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, and the girl-barber (something I’ll never get used to!) asked me the usual: “How short?”

  “As short as Oliver North’s,” I said.

  “Who?” she said. O Canada! But I’m sure there are young girls cutting hair in the United States who don’t know who Colonel North is, either; and in a few years, almost no one will remember him. How many people remember Melvin Laird? How many people remember Gen. Creighton Abrams or Gen. William Westmoreland—not to mention, which one replaced the other? And who replaced Gen. Maxwell Taylor? Who replaced Gen. Curtis LeMay? And whom did Ellsworth Bunker replace? Remember that? Of course you don’t!

  There was a terrible din of construction going on outside the barbershop at the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, but I was sure that my girl-barber had heard me.

  “Oliver North,” I repeated. “Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, United States Marine Corps,” I said.

  “I guess you want it really short,” she said.

  “Yes, please,” I said; I’ve simply got to stop reading The New York Times! There’s nothing in the news that’s worth remembering. Why, then, do I have such a hard time forgetting it?

  No one had a memory like Owen Meany. By the end of the winter term of ’62, I’ll bet he never once confused what he’d said to Dr. Dolder with what he’d said to the Rev. Lewis Merrill—but I’ll bet they were confused! By the end of the winter term, I’ll bet they thought that either he should have been thrown out of school or he should have been made the new headmaster. By the end of every winter term at Gravesend Academy, the New Hampshire weather had driven everyone half crazy.

  Who doesn’t get tired of getting up in the dark? And in Owen’s case, he had to get up earlier than most; because of his scholarship job, as a faculty waiter, he had to arrive in the dining-hall kitchen at least one hour before breakfast—on those mornings he waited on tables. The waiters had to set the tables—and eat their own breakfasts, in the kitchen—before the other students and the faculty arrived; then they had to clear the tables between the official end of breakfast and the beginning of morning meeting—as the new headmaster had so successfully called what used to be our morning chapel.

  That Saturday morning in February, the tomato-red pickup was dead and he’d had to jump-start the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck and get it rolling down Maiden Hill before it would
start—it was so cold. He did not like to have dining-hall duty, as it was called, on the weekend; and there was the added problem of him being a day boy and having to drive himself that extra distance to school. I guess he was cross when he got there; and there was another car parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, where he always parked. The trailer-truck was so big that the presence of only one other car in the circular driveway would force him to park the truck out on Front Street—and in the winter months, there was a ban regarding parking on Front Street, a snow-removal restriction that the town imposed, and Owen was hopping mad about that, too. The car that kept Owen from parking his truck in the circular driveway adjacent to the Main Academy Building was Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen Beetle.

  In keeping with the lovable and exasperating tidiness of his countrymen, Dr. Dolder was exact and predictable about his little VW. His bachelor apartment was in Quincy Hall—a dormitory on the far side of the Gravesend campus; it seemed to be “the far side” from everywhere, but it was as far from the Main Academy Building as you could get and still be on the Gravesend campus. Dr. Dolder parked his VW by the Main Academy Building only when he’d been drinking.

  He was a frequent dinner guest of Randy and Sam White’s; he parked by the Main Academy Building when he ate with the Whites—and when he drank too much, he left his car there and walked home. The campus was not so large that he couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have walked both ways—to dinner and back—but Dr. Dolder was one of those Europeans who had fallen in love with a most American peculiarity: how Americans will walk nowhere if they can drive there. In Zürich, I’m sure, Dr. Dolder walked everywhere; but he drove his little VW across the Gravesend campus, as if he were touring the New England states.

  Whenever Dr. Dolder’s VW was parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, everyone knew that the doctor was simply exercising his especially Swiss prudence; he was not a drunk, and the few small roads he might have traveled on to drive himself from dinner at the Whites’ to Quincy Hall would not have given him much opportunity to maim many of the sober and innocent residents of Gravesend. There’s a good chance he would never have encountered anyone; but Dr. Dolder loved his Beetle, and he was a cautious man.