A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE THE MATTER WITH THAT?” Owen Meany asked Dan and me. When he announced his plans to us, it was only 1962; a total of 11,300 U.S. military personnel were in Vietnam, but not a single one of them was in combat.

  Even so, Dan Needham was uncomfortable with Owen’s decision. “I liked the Harvard deal better, Owen,” Dan said.

  “THIS WAY, I DON’T HAVE TO WAIT A YEAR,” he said. “AND I GET TO BE WITH YOU—ISN’T THAT GREAT?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, that’s great,” I said. “I’m just a little surprised, that’s all,” I told him.

  I was more than “a little surprised”—that the U.S. Army had accepted him was astonishing to me!

  “Isn’t there a height requirement?” Dan Needham whispered to me.

  “I thought there was a weight requirement, too,” I said.

  “IF YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT THE HEIGHT AND WEIGHT REQUIREMENTS,” Owen said, “IT’S FIVE FEET—EVEN—AND ONE HUNDRED POUNDS.”

  “Are you five feet tall, Owen?” Dan asked him.

  “Since when do you weigh a hundred pounds?” I said.

  “I’VE BEEN EATING A LOT OF BANANAS, AND ICE CREAM,” said Owen Meany, “AND WHEN THEY MEASURED ME, I TOOK A DEEP BREATH AND STOOD ON MY TOES!”

  Well, it was only proper to congratulate him; he was quite pleased with arranging his college “scholarship” in his own way. And, at the time, it appeared that he had defeated Randy White completely. Back then, neither Dan nor I knew about his “dream”; I think we might have been a little worried about his involvement with the U.S. Army if we’d had that dream described to us.

  And that February morning, when the Rev. Lewis Merrill entered The Great Hall and stared with such horror at the decapitated and amputated Mary Magdalene, Dan Needham and I weren’t thinking very far into the future; we were worried only that the Rev. Mr. Merrill might be too terrified to deliver his prayer—that the condition of Mary Magdalene might seize hold of his normally slight stutter and render him incomprehensible. He stood at the foot of the stage, staring up at her—for a long moment, he even forgot to remove his Navy pea jacket and his seaman’s watch cap; and since Congregationalists don’t always wear the clerical collar, the Rev. Lewis Merrill looked less like our school minister than like a drunken sailor who had finally staggered up against the incentive for his own religious conversion.

  The Rev. Mr. Merrill was standing there, thus stricken, when the headmaster arrived in The Great Hall. If Randy White was surprised to see so many faculty faces at morning meeting, it did not alter his usual aggressive stride; he took the stairs up to the stage at his usual two-at-a-time pace. And the headmaster did not flinch—or even appear the slightest surprised—to see someone already standing at the podium. The Rev. Lewis Merrill often announced the opening hymn; Pastor Merrill often followed the opening hymn with his prayer. Then the headmaster would make his remarks—he also told us the page number for the closing hymn; and that would be that.

  It took the headmaster a few seconds to recognize Mr. Merrill, who was standing at the foot of the stage in his pea jacket and wearing his watch cap and gawking at the figure who beseeched us from the podium. Our headmaster was a man who was used to taking charge—he was used to making decisions, our Randy White. When he saw the monstrosity at the podium, he did the first and most headmasterly thing that came into his mind; he strode up to the saint and seized her around her modest robes—he grabbed her around her waist and attempted to lift her. I don’t think he took any notice of the steel bands girdling her hips, or the four-inch bolts that penetrated her feet and were welded to their respective nuts under the stage. I suppose his back was still a trifle sore from his impressive effort with Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen; but the headmaster didn’t pay any attention to his back, either. He simply seized Mary Magdalene around her middle; he gave a grunt—and nothing happened. Mary Magdalene, and all that she represented, was not as easy to throw around as a Volkswagen.

  “I suppose you think this is funny!” the headmaster said to the assembled school; but nobody was laughing. “Well, I’ll tell you what this is,” said Randy White. “This is a crime,” he said. “This is vandalism, this is theft—and desecration! This is willful abuse of personal, even sacred property.”

  One of the students yelled. “What’s the hymn?” the student yelled.

  “What did you say?” Randy White said.

  “Tell us the number of the hymn!” someone shouted.

  “What’s the hymn?” said a few more students—in unison.

  I had not seen the Rev. Mr. Merrill climb—I suppose, shakily—to the stage; when I noticed him, he was standing beside the martyred Mary Magdalene. “The hymn is on page three-eighty-eight,” Pastor Merrill said clearly. The headmaster spoke sharply to him, but we couldn’t hear what the headmaster said—there was too much creaking of benches and bumping of hymnals as we rose to sing. I don’t know what influenced Mr. Merrill’s choice of the hymn. If Owen had told me about his dream, I might have found the hymn especially ominous; but as it was, it was simply familiar—a frequent choice, probably because it was victorious in tone, and squarely in that category of “pilgrimage and conflict,” which is often so inspiring to young men.

  The Son of God goes forth to war, A king-ly crown to gain;

  His blood-red ban-ner streams a-far; Who follows in his train?

  Who best can drink his cup of woe, Tri-um-phant o-ver pain,

  Who pa-tient bears his cross be-low, He fol-lows in his train.

  It was a hymn that Owen liked, and we belted it out; we sang much more heartily—much more defiantly—than usual. The headmaster had nowhere to stand; he occupied the center stage—but with nothing to stand behind, he looked exposed and unsure of himself. As we roared out the hymn, the Rev. Lewis Merrill appeared to gain in confidence—and even in stature. Although he didn’t look exactly comfortable beside the headless Mary Magdalene, he stood so close to her that the podium light shone on him, too. When we finished the hymn, the Rev. Mr. Merrill said: “Let us pray. Let us pray for Owen Meany,” he said.

  It was very quiet in The Great Hall, and although our heads were bowed, our eyes were on the headmaster. We waited for Mr. Merrill to begin. Perhaps he was trying to begin, I thought; then I realized that—awkward as ever—he had meant for us to pray for Owen. What he’d meant was that we were to offer our silent prayers for Owen Meany; and as the silence went on, and on, it became clear that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had no intention of hurrying us. He was not a brave man, I thought; but he was trying to be brave. On and on, we prayed and prayed; and if I had known about Owen’s dream, I would have prayed much harder.

  Suddenly, the headmaster said, “That’s enough.”

  “I’m s-s-s-sorry,” Mr. Merrill stuttered, “but I’ll say when it’s ‘enough.’”

  I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost; he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed; and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.

  After a while, Randy White left the stage; he had the good sense, if not the decency, to leave quietly—we could hear his careful footsteps on the marble staircase, and the morning ice was still so brittle that we could even hear him crunching his way on the path outside the Main Academy Building. When we could no longer hear his footsteps in our silent prayers for Owen Meany, Pastor Merrill said, “Amen.”

  Oh God, how often I have wished that I could relive that moment; I didn’t know how to pray very well then—I didn’t even believe in prayer. If I were given the opportunity to pray for Owen Meany now, I could do a better job of it; knowing what I know now, I might be able to pray hard enough.

  It would have helped me, of course, if I could have seen his diary; but he wasn’t offering it—he was keeping his diary to himself. So often in its pages he had written his name—his full name—in the big bloc
k letters he called MONUMENT STYLE or GRAVESEND LETTERING; so many times he had transcribed, in his diary, his name exactly the way he had seen it on Scrooge’s grave. And I mean, before all the ROTC business—even before he was thrown out of school and knew that the U.S. Army would be his ticket through college. I mean, before he knew he was signing up—even then he had written his name in that way you see names inscribed on graves.

  1LT PAUL O. MEANY, JR.

  That’s how he wrote it; that was what the Ghost of the Future had seen on Scrooge’s grave; that and the date—the date was written in the diary, too. He wrote the date in the diary many, many times, but he never told me what it was. Maybe I could have helped him, if I’d known that date. Owen believed he knew when he was going to die; he also believed he knew his rank—he would die a first lieutenant.

  And after the dream, he believed he knew more. The certainty of his convictions was always a little scary, and his diary entry about the dream is no exception.

  Yesterday I was kicked out of school. Last night I had a dream. Now I know four things. I know that my voice doesn’t change—but I still don’t know why. I know that I am God’s instrument. I know when I’m going to die—and now a dream has shown me how I’m going to die. I’m going to be a hero! I trust that God will help me, because what I’m supposed to do looks very hard.

  8

  The Finger

  * * *

  Until the summer of 1962, I felt that I couldn’t wait to grow up and be treated with the kind of respect I imagined adults were routinely offered and adamantly thought they deserved—I couldn’t wait to wallow in the freedom and the privileges I imagined grown-ups enjoyed. Until that summer, my long apprenticeship to maturity struck me as arduous and humiliating; Randy White had confiscated my fake draft card, and I wasn’t yet old enough to buy beer—I wasn’t independent enough to merit my own place to live, I wasn’t earning enough to afford my own car, and I wasn’t something enough to persuade a woman to bestow her sexual favors upon me. Not one woman had I ever persuaded! Until the summer of ’62, I thought that childhood and adolescence were a purgatory without apparent end; I thought that youth, in a word, “sucked.” But Owen Meany, who believed he knew when and how he was going to die, was in no hurry to grow up. And as to my calling the period of our youth a “purgatory,” Owen said simply, “THERE IS NO PURGATORY—THAT’S A CATHOLIC INVENTION. THERE’S LIFE ON EARTH, THERE’S HEAVEN—AND THERE’S HELL.”

  “I think life on earth is hell,” I said.

  “I HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE SUMMER,” Owen said.

  It was the first summer we spent apart. I suppose I should be grateful for that summer, because it afforded me my first glimpse of what my life without Owen would be like—you might say, it prepared me. By the end of the summer of 1962, Owen Meany had made me afraid of what the next phase was going to be. I didn’t want to grow up anymore; what I wanted was for Owen and me to go on being kids for the rest of our lives—sometimes Canon Mackie tells me, rather ungenerously, that I have succeeded. Canon Campbell, God Rest His Soul, used to tell me that being a kid for the rest of my life was a perfectly honorable aspiration.

  I spent that summer of ’62 in Sawyer Depot, working for my Uncle Alfred. After what had happened to Owen, I didn’t want to work for the Gravesend Academy Admissions Office and give guided tours of the school—not anymore. The Eastman Lumber Company offered me a good job. It was tiring, outdoor work; but I got to spend my time with Noah and Simon—and there were parties on Loveless Lake almost every night, and swimming and waterskiing on Loveless Lake nearly every day, after work, and every weekend. Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha welcomed me into the family; they gave me Hester’s room for the summer. Hester was keeping her school-year apartment in Durham, working as a waitress in one of those sandy, lobster-house restaurants … I think it was in Kittery or Portsmouth. After she got off work, she and Owen would cruise “the strip” at Hampton Beach in the tomato-red pickup. Hester’s school-year roommates were elsewhere for the summer, and Hester and Owen spent every night in her Durham apartment, alone. They were “living together as man and wife”—that was the disapproving and frosty way Aunt Martha put it, when she discussed it at all, which was rarely.

  Despite the fact that Owen and Hester were living together as man and wife, Noah and Simon and I could never be sure if they were actually “doing it.” Simon was sure that Hester could not live without doing it, Noah somehow felt that Owen and Hester had done it—but that, for some special reason, they had stopped. I had the strangest feeling that anything between them was possible: that they did it and had always done it with abandon; that they had never done it, but that they might be doing something even worse—or better—and that the real bond between them (whether they “did it” or not) was even more passionate and far sadder than sex. I felt cut off from Owen—I was working with wood and smelling a cool, northern air that was scented with trees; he was working with granite and feeling the sun beat down on the unshaded quarry, inhaling the rock dust and smelling the dynamite.

  Chain saws were relatively new then; the Eastman Company used them for their logging operations, but very selectively—they were heavy and cumbersome, not nearly so light and powerful as they are today. In those days, we brought the logs out of the woods by horse and crawler tractor, and the timber was often cut by crosscut saws and axes. We loaded the logs onto the trucks by hand, using peaveys or cant dogs; nowadays, Noah and Simon have shown me, they use self-loading trucks, grapple skidders, and chippers. Even the sawmill has changed; there’s no more sawdust! But in ’62, we debarked the logs at the mill and sawed them into various grades and sizes of lumber, and all that bark and sawdust was wasted; nowadays, Noah and Simon refer to that stuff as “wood-fired waste” or even “energy”—they use it to make their own electricity!

  “How’s that for progress?” Simon is always saying.

  Now we’re the grown-ups we were in such a hurry to become; now we can drink all the beer we want, with no one asking us for proof of our age. Noah and Simon have their own houses—their own wives and children—and they do an admirable job of looking after old Uncle Alfred and my Aunt Martha, who is still a lovely woman, although she’s quite gray; she looks much the way Grandmother looked to me in the summer of ’62.

  Uncle Alfred’s had two bypass operations, but he’s doing fine. The Eastman Company has provided him and my Aunt Martha with a good and long life. My aunt manifests only the most occasional vestige of her old interest in who my actual father is or was; last Christmas, in Sawyer Depot, she managed to get me alone for a second and she said, “Do you still not know? You can tell me. I’ll bet you know! How could you not have found out something—in all this time?”

  I put my finger to my lips, as if I were going to tell her something that I didn’t want Uncle Alfred or Dan or Noah or Simon to hear. Aunt Martha grew very attentive—her eyes sparkling, her smile widening with mischief and conspiracy.

  “Dan Needham is the best father a boy could have,” I whispered to her.

  “I know—Dan is wonderful,” Aunt Martha said impatiently; this was not what she wanted to hear.

  And what do Noah and Simon and I still talk about—after all these years? We talk about what Owen “knew” or thought he knew; and we talk about Hester. We’ll talk about Hester in our graves!

  “Hester the Molester!” Simon says.

  “Who would have thought any of it possible?” Noah asks.

  And every Christmas, Uncle Alfred or Aunt Martha will say: “I believe that Hester will be home for Christmas next year—that’s what she says.”

  And Noah and Simon will say: “That’s what she always says.”

  I suppose that Hester is my aunt and uncle’s only unhappiness. Even in the summer of ’62, I felt this was true. They treated her differently from the way they treated Noah and Simon, and she made them pay for it; how angry they made her! She took her anger away from Sawyer Depot and everywhere she went she found other things and people to fuel
her colossal anger.

  I don’t think Owen was angry, not exactly. But they shared a sense of some unfairness; there was an atmosphere of injustice that enveloped them both. Owen felt that God had assigned him a role that he was powerless to change; Owen’s sense of his own destiny—his belief that he was on a mission—robbed him of his capacity for fun. In the summer of ’62, he was only twenty; but from the moment he was told that Jack Kennedy was “diddling” Marilyn Monroe, he stopped doing anything for pleasure. Hester was just plain pissed off; she just didn’t give a shit. They were such a depressing couple!

  But in the summer of ’62, I thought my Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred were a perfect couple; and yet they depressed me because of how happy they were. In their happiness they reminded me of the brief time my mother and Dan Needham had been together—and how happy they’d been, too.

  Meanwhile, that summer, I couldn’t manage to have a successful date. Noah and Simon did everything they could for me. They introduced me to every girl on Loveless Lake. It was a summer of wet bathing suits drying from the radio aerial of Noah’s car—and the closest I came to sex was the view I had of the crotches of various girls’ bathing suits, snapping in the wind that whipped past Noah’s car. It was a convertible, a black-and-white ’57 Chevy, the kind of car that had fins. Noah would let me take it to the drive-in, if and when I managed to get a date.

  “How was the movie?” Noah would always ask me—when I brought the car home, always much too early.

  “He looks like he saw every minute of it,” Simon would say—and I had. I saw every minute of every movie I took every girl to. And more’s the shame: Noah and Simon created countless opportunities for me to be alone with various dates at the Eastman boathouse. At night, that boathouse had the reputation of a cheap motel; but all I ever managed was a long game of darts, or sometimes my date and I would sit on the dock, withholding any comment on the spectacle of the hard and distant stars until (finally) Noah or Simon would arrive to rescue us from our awkward torment.