A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

I had forgotten: Owen had learned welding—Mr. Meany had wanted at least one of his quarrymen to be a welder, and Owen, who was such a natural at learning, had been the one to learn.

  “Have you told the headmaster?” Dan asked the janitor.

  “Nope!” the janitor said. “I ain’t goin’ to, either,” he said—“not this time.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good for him to know, anyway,” Dan said.

  “That’s what I thought!” the janitor said.

  Dan and I went to the school dining hall, where we were unfamiliar faces at breakfast; but we were very hungry, after driving around all night—and besides, I wanted to pass the word: “Tell everyone to get to morning meeting a little early,” I told my friends. I heard Dan passing the word to some of his friends on the faculty: “If you go to only one more morning meeting for the rest of your life, I think this should be the one.”

  Dan and I left the dining hall together. There wasn’t time to return to Waterhouse Hall and take a shower before morning meeting, although we badly needed one. We were both anxious for Owen, and agitated—not knowing how his presentation of the mutilated Mary Magdalene might make his dismissal from the academy appear more justified than it was; we were worried how his desecration of the statue of a saint might give those colleges and universities that were sure to accept him a certain reluctance.

  “Not to mention what the Catholic Church—I mean, Saint Michael’s—is going to do to him,” Dan said. “I better have a talk with the head guy over there—Father What’s-His-Name.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked Dan.

  “No, not really,” Dan said; “but I think he’s a friendly sort of fellow—Father O’Somebody, I think. I wish I could remember his name—O’Malley, O’Leary, O’Rourke, O’Somebody,” he said.

  “I’ll bet Pastor Merrill knows him,” I said. And that was why Dan and I walked to Hurd’s Church before morning meeting; sometimes the Rev. Lewis Merrill said his prayers there before walking to the Main Academy Building; sometimes he was up early, just biding his time in the vestry office. Dan and I saw the trailer-truck from the Meany Granite Company parked behind the vestry. Owen was sitting in the vestry office—in Mr. Merrill’s usual chair, behind Mr. Merrill’s desk, tipping back in the creaky old chair and rolling the chair around on its squeaky casters. There was no sign of Pastor Merrill.

  “I HAVE AN EARLY APPOINTMENT,” Owen explained to Dan and me. “PASTOR MERRILL’S A LITTLE LATE.”

  He looked all right—a little tired, a little nervous, or just restless. He couldn’t sit still in the chair, and he fiddled with the desk drawers, pulling them open and closing them—not appearing to pay any attention to what was inside the drawers, but just opening and closing them because they were there.

  “You’ve had a busy night, Owen,” Dan told him.

  “PRETTY BUSY,” said Owen Meany.

  “How are you?” I asked him.

  “I’M FINE,” he said. “I BROKE THE LAW, I GOT CAUGHT, I’M GOING TO PAY—THAT’S HOW IT IS,” he said.

  “You got screwed!” I said.

  “A LITTLE BIT,” he nodded—then he shrugged. “IT’S NOT AS IF I’M ENTIRELY INNOCENT,” he added.

  “The important thing for you to think about is getting into college,” Dan told him. “The important thing is that you get in, and that you get a scholarship.”

  “THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS,” said Owen Meany. He opened, in rapid succession, the three drawers on the right-hand side of the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s desk; then he closed them, just as rapidly. That was when Pastor Merrill walked into the vestry office.

  “What are you doing?” Mr. Merrill asked Owen.

  “NOTHING,” said Owen Meany. “WAITING FOR YOU.”

  “I mean, at my desk—you’re sitting at my desk,” Mr. Merrill said. Owen looked surprised.

  “I GOT HERE EARLY,” he explained. “I WAS JUST SITTING IN YOUR CHAIR—I WASN’T DOING ANYTHING.” He got up and walked to the front of Pastor Merrill’s desk, where he sat down in his usual chair—at least, I guess it was his “usual” chair; it reminded me of “the singer’s seat” in Graham McSwiney’s funny studio. I was disappointed that I hadn’t heard from Mr. McSwiney; I guessed that he had no news about Big Black Buster Freebody.

  “I’m sorry if I snapped at you, Owen,” Pastor Merrill said. “I know how upset you must be.”

  “I’M FINE,” Owen said.

  “I was glad you called me,” Mr. Merrill told Owen.

  Owen shrugged. I had not seen him sneer before, but it seemed to me that he almost sneered at the Rev. Mr. Merrill.

  “Oh, well!” Mr. Merrill said, sitting down in his creaky desk chair. “Well, I’m very sorry, Owen—for everything,” he said. He had a way of entering a room—a classroom, The Great Hall, Hurd’s Church, or even his own vestry office—as if he were offering an apology to everyone. At the same time, he was struggling so sincerely that you didn’t want to stop or interrupt him. You liked him and just wished that he could relax; yet he made you feel guilty for being irritated with him, because of how hard and unsuccessfully he was trying to put you at ease.

  Dan said: “I came here to ask you if you knew the name of the head guy at Saint Michael’s—it’s the same guy, for the church and for the school, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Pastor Merrill said. “It’s Father Findley.”

  “I guess I don’t know him,” Dan said. “I thought it was a Father O’Somebody.”

  “No, it’s not an O’Anybody,” said Mr. Merrill. “It’s Father Findley.” The Rev. Mr. Merrill did not yet know why Dan wanted to know who the Catholic “head guy” was. Owen, of course, knew what Dan was up to.

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING FOR ME, DAN,” Owen said.

  “I can try to keep you out of jail,” Dan said. “I want you to get into college—and to have a scholarship. But, at the very least, I can try to keep you from getting charged with theft and vandalism,” Dan said.

  “What did you do, Owen?” the Rev. Mr. Merrill asked him.

  Owen bowed his head; for a moment, I thought he was going to cry—but then he shrugged off this moment, too. He looked directly into the Rev. Lewis Merrill’s eyes.

  “I WANT YOU TO SAY A PRAYER FOR ME,” said Owen Meany.

  “A p-p-p-prayer—for you?” the Rev. Mr. Merrill stuttered.

  “JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING—IF IT’S NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK,” Owen said. “IT’S YOUR BUSINESS, ISN’T IT?”

  The Rev. Mr. Merrill considered this. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “At morning meeting?” he asked.

  “TODAY—IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY,” said Owen Meany.

  “Yes, all right,” the Rev. Lewis Merrill said; but he looked as if he might panic.

  Dan took my arm and steered me toward the door of the vestry office.

  “We’ll leave you alone, if you want to talk,” Dan said to Mr. Merrill and Owen.

  “Was there anything else you wanted?” Mr. Merrill asked Dan.

  “No, just Father Findley—his name,” Dan said.

  “And was that all you wanted to see me about—the prayer?” Mr. Merrill asked Owen, who appeared to consider the question very carefully—or else he was waiting for Dan and me to leave.

  We were outside the vestry office, in the dark corridor where two rows of wooden pegs—for coats—extended for the entire length of two walls; off in the darkness, several lost or left-behind overcoats hung there, like old churchgoers who had loitered so long that they had fallen asleep, slumped against the walls. And there were a few pairs of galoshes in the corridor; but they were not directly beneath the abandoned overcoats, so that the churchgoers in the darkness appeared to have been separated from their feet. On the wooden peg nearest the door to the vestry office was the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s double-breasted and oddly youthful Navy pea jacket—and, on the peg next to it, his seaman’s watch cap. Dan and I, passing these, heard Pastor Merrill say: “Owen? Is it the dream? Have you had that dream again?”


  “YES,” said Owen Meany, who began to cry—he started to sob, like a child. I had not heard him sound like that since the Thanksgiving vacation when he’d peed in his pants—when he’d peed on Hester.

  “Owen? Owen, listen to me,” Mr. Merrill said. “Owen? It’s just a dream—do you hear me? It’s just a dream.”

  “NO!” said Owen Meany.

  Then Dan and I were outside in the February cold and gray; the old footprints in the rutted slush were frozen—fossils of the many souls who had traveled to and from Hurd’s Church. It was still early morning; although Dan and I had seen the sun rise, the sun had been absorbed by the low, uniformly ice-gray sky.

  “What dream?” Dan Needham asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Owen hadn’t told me about the dream; not yet. He would tell me—and I would tell him what the Rev. Mr. Merrill had told him: that it was “just a dream.”

  I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye. But not then; at that moment, Dan and I were not imagining very much beyond Randy White’s reaction to the headless, armless Mary Magdalene—whose steely embrace of the podium on the stage of The Great Hall would force the headmaster to address the school from a new and more naked position.

  Directly opposite the Main Academy Building, the headmaster was getting into his camelhair overcoat; his wife, Sam, was brushing the nap of that pretty coat for him, and kissing her husband good-bye for the day. It would be a bad day for the headmaster—a FATED day, Owen Meany might have called it—but I’m sure Randy White didn’t have his eyes on the future that morning. He thought he was finished with Owen Meany. He didn’t know that, in the end, Owen Meany would defeat him; he didn’t know about the vote of “no confidence” the faculty would give him—or the decision of the Board of Trustees to not renew his appointment as headmaster. He couldn’t have imagined what a travesty Owen Meany’s absence would make of the commencement exercises that year—how such a timid, rather plain, and much-ignored student, who was the replacement valedictorian of our class, would find the courage to offer as a valedictory only these words: “I am not the head of this class. The head of this class is Owen Meany; he is The Voice of our class—and the only voice we want to listen to.” Then that good, frightened boy would sit down—to tumultuous pandemonium: our classmates raising their voices for The Voice, bedsheets and more artful banners displaying his name in capital letters (of course), and the chanting that drowned out the headmaster’s attempts to bring us to order.

  “Owen Meany! Owen Meany! Owen Meany!” cried the Class of ’62.

  But that February morning when the headmaster was outfitting himself in his camelhair coat, he couldn’t have known that Owen Meany would be his undoing. How frustrated and powerless Randy White would appear at our commencement, when he threatened to withhold our diplomas if we didn’t stop our uproar; he must have known then that he had lost … because Dan Needham and Mr. Early, and a solid one third or one half of the faculty stood up to applaud our riotous support of Owen; and we were joined by several informed members of the Board of Trustees as well, not to mention all those parents who had written angry letters to the headmaster regarding that illiberal business of confiscating our wallets. I wish Owen could have been there to see the headmaster then; but, of course, Owen wasn’t there—he wasn’t graduating.

  And he was not at morning meeting on that February day, just before spring vacation; but the surrogate he had left onstage was grotesquely capable of holding our attention. It was a packed house—so many of the faculty had turned out for the occasion. And Mary Magdalene was there to greet us: armless, but reaching out to us; headless, but eloquent—with the clean-cut stump of her neck, which was slashed at her Adam’s apple, expressing so dramatically that she had much to say to us. We sat in a hush in The Great Hall, waiting for the headmaster.

  What a horrible man Randy White was! There is a tradition among “good” schools: when you throw out a senior—only months before he’s scheduled to graduate—you make as little trouble for that student’s college admission as you have to. Yes, you tell the colleges what they need to know; but you have already done your damage—you’ve fired the kid, you don’t try to keep him out of college, too! But not Randy White; the headmaster would do his damnedest to put an end to Owen Meany’s university life before it began!

  Owen was accepted at Harvard; he was accepted at Yale—and he was offered full scholarships by both. But in addition to what Owen’s record said: that he was expelled from Gravesend Academy for printing fake draft cards, and selling them to other students … in addition to that, the headmaster told Harvard and Yale (and the University of New Hampshire) much more. He said that Owen Meany was “so virulently antireligious” that he had “desecrated the statue of a saint at a Roman Catholic school”; that he had launched a “deeply anti-Catholic campaign” on the Gravesend campus, under the demand of not wanting a fish-only menu in the school dining hall on Fridays; and that there were “charges against him for being anti-Semitic, too.”

  As for the New Hampshire Honor Society, they withdrew their offer of an Honor Society Scholarship; a student of Owen Meany’s academic achievements was welcome to attend the University of New Hampshire, but the Honor Society—“in the light of this distressing and distasteful information”—could not favor him with a scholarship; if he attended the University of New Hampshire, he would do so at his own expense.

  Harvard and Yale were more forgiving; but they were also more complicated. Yale wanted to interview him again; they quickly saw the anti-Semitic “charges” for what they were—a lie—but Owen was undoubtedly too frank about his feelings for (or, rather, against) the Catholic Church. Yale wanted to delay his acceptance for a year. In that time, their admissions director suggested, Owen should “find some meaningful employment”; and his employer should write to Yale periodically and report on Owen’s “character and commitment.” Dan Needham told Owen that this was reasonable, fair-minded, and not uncommon behavior—on the part of a university as good as Yale. Owen didn’t disagree with Dan; he simply refused to do it.

  “IT’S LIKE BEING ON PAROLE,” he said.

  Harvard was also fair-minded and reasonable—and slightly more demanding and creative than Yale. Harvard said they wanted to delay his acceptance, too; but they were more specific about the kind of “meaningful employment” they wanted him to take. They wanted him to work for the Catholic Church—in some capacity; he could volunteer his time for Catholic Relief Services, he could be a kind of social worker for one of the Catholic charities, or he could even work for the very same parochial school whose statue of Mary Magdalene he had ruined. Father Findley, at St. Michael’s, turned out to be a nice man; not only did he not press charges against Owen Meany—after talking to Dan Needham, Father Findley agreed to help Owen’s cause (regarding his college admission) in any way he could.

  Even some parochial students had spoken up for Owen. Buzzy Thurston—who hit that easy ground ball, the one that should have been the last out, the one that should have kept Owen Meany from ever coming to bat—even Buzzy Thurston spoke up for Owen, saying that Owen had had “a tough time”; Owen “had his reasons” for being upset, Buzzy said. Headmaster White and Chief Ben Pike were all for “throwing the book” at Owen Meany for the theft and mutilation of Mary Magdalene. But St. Michael’s School, and Father Findley, were very forgiving.

  Dan said that Father Findley “knew the family” and was most sympathetic when he realized who Owen’s parents were—he’d had dealings with the Meanys; and although he wouldn’t go into any detail regarding what those “dealings” had been, Father Findley said he would do anything he could to help Owen. “I certainly won’t lift a finger to hurt him!” Father Findley said.

  Dan Needham told Owen that Harvard had a good idea. “Lots of Catholics do lots of good things, Owen,” Dan said. “Why not see what some of the good things are?”

>   For a while, I thought Owen was going to accept the Harvard proposal—“THE CATHOLIC DEAL,” he called it. He even went to see Father Findley; but it seemed to confuse him—how genuinely concerned for Owen’s welfare Father Findley was. Maybe Owen liked Father Findley; that might have confused him, too.

  In the end, he would turn THE CATHOLIC DEAL down.

  “MY PARENTS WOULD NEVER UNDERSTAND IT,” he said. “BESIDES, I WANT TO GO TO THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE—I WANT TO STICK WITH YOU, I WANT TO GO WHERE YOU GO,” he told me.

  “But they’re not offering you a scholarship,” I reminded him.

  “DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT,” he said. He wouldn’t tell me, at first, how he’d already got a “scholarship” there.

  He went to the U.S. Army recruiting offices in Gravesend; it was arranged “in the family,” as we used to say in New Hampshire. They already knew who he was—he was the best of his class at Gravesend Academy, even if he ended up just barely getting his diploma from Gravesend High School. He was admitted to the University of New Hampshire—they also knew that; they had read about it in The Gravesend News-Letter. What’s more, he was a kind of local hero; even though he had been absent, he had disrupted the academy’s commencement exercises. As for making and selling the fake draft cards, the U.S. Army recruiters knew what that was about: that was about drinking—no disrespect for the draft had been intended, they certainly knew that. And what red-blooded American young man didn’t indulge in a little vandalism, from time to time?

  And that was how Owen Meany got his “scholarship” to the University of New Hampshire; he signed up for the Reserve Officers Training Corps—ROTC, we called it “rot-see”; remember that? You went to college at the expense of the U.S. Army, and while you were in college, you took a few courses that the U.S. Army offered—Military History and Small Unit Tactics; stuff like that, not terribly taxing. The summer following your junior year, you would be required to take a little Basic Training—the standard, six-week course. And upon your graduation you would receive your commission; you would graduate a second lieutenant in the United States Army—and you would owe your country four years of active duty, plus two years in the Army Reserve.