by John Irving
“But it is a miracle!” I cried. “He told you that dream—I know he did! And you were there—when he saw his name, and the date of his death, on Scrooge’s grave. You were there!” I cried. “How can you doubt that he knew?” I asked Mr. Merrill. “He knew—he knew everything! What do you call that—if you don’t call it a miracle?”
“You’ve witnessed what you c-c-c-call a miracle and now you believe—you believe everything,” Pastor Merrill said. “But miracles don’t c-c-c-cause belief—real miracles don’t m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles. I believe that Owen was extraordinarily g-g-g-gifted—yes, gifted and powerfully sure of himself. No doubt he suffered some powerfully disturbing visions, too—and he was certainly emotional, he was very emotional. But as to knowing what he appeared to ‘know’—there are other examples of p-p-p-precognition; not every example is necessarily ascribed to God. Look at you—you never even believed in G-G-G-God; you’ve said so, and here you are ascribing to the h-h-h-hand of God everything that happened to Owen M-M-M-Meany!”
This August, at 80 Front Street, a dog woke me up. In the deepest part of my sleep, I heard the dog and thought it was Sagamore; then I thought it was my dog—I used to have a dog, in Toronto—and only when I was wide awake did I catch up to myself, in the present time, and realize that both Sagamore and my dog were dead. It used to be nice to have a dog to walk in Winston Churchill Park; perhaps I should get another.
Out on Front Street, the strange dog barked and barked. I got out of bed; I took the familiar walk along the dark hall to my mother’s room—where it is always lighter, where the curtains are never drawn. Dan sleeps in my grandmother’s former bedroom—the official master bedroom of 80 Front Street, I suppose.
I looked out my mother’s window but I couldn’t see the dog. Then I went into the den—or so it had been called when my grandfather had been alive. Later, it was a kind of children’s playroom, the room where my mother had played the old Victrola, where she had sung along with Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It was on the couch in that room where Hester had spread herself out, and waited, while Noah and Simon and I searched all of 80 Front Street, in vain, for Owen Meany. We’d never learned where she’d hidden him, or where he’d hidden himself. I lay down on that old couch and remembered all of that. I must have fallen asleep there; it was a vastly historical couch, upon which—I also remembered—my mother had first whispered into my ear: “My little fling!”
When I woke up, my right hand had drifted under one of the deep couch cushions; my wrist detected something there—it felt like a playing card, but when I extracted it from under the cushion, I saw that it was a relic from Owen Meany’s long-ago collection: a very old and bent baseball card. Hank Bauer! Remember him? The card was printed in 1950 when Bauer was twenty-eight, in only his second full season as an outfielder for the Yankees. But he looked older; perhaps it was the war—he left baseball for World War Two, then he returned to the game. Not being a baseball fan, I nevertheless remembered Hank Bauer as a reliable, unfancy player—and, indeed, his slightly tired, tanned face reflected his solid work ethic. There was nothing of the hotshot in his patient smile, and he wasn’t hiding his eyes under the visor of his baseball cap, which was pushed well back on his head, revealing his thoughtful, wrinkled brow. It was one of those old photographs wherein the color was optimistically added—his tan was too tan, the sky too blue, the clouds too uniformly white. The high, fluffy clouds and the brightness of the blue sky created such a strikingly unreal background for Mr. Bauer in his white, pin-striped uniform—it was as if he had died and gone to heaven.
Of course I knew then where Hester had hidden Owen Meany; he’d been under the couch cushions—and under her!—all the while we were searching. That explained why his appearance had been so rumpled, why his hair had looked slept on. The Hank Bauer card must have fallen out of his pocket. Discoveries like this—not to mention, Owen’s voice “speaking” to me in the secret passageway, and his hand (or something like a hand) seeming to take hold of me—occasionally make me afraid of 80 Front Street.
I know that Grandmother was afraid of the old house, near the end. “Too many ghosts!” she would mutter. Finally, I think, she was happy not to be “murdered by a maniac”—a condition she had once found favorable to being removed from 80 Front Street. She left the old house rather quietly when she left; she was philosophic about her departure. “Time to leave,” she said to Dan and me. “Too many ghosts!”
At the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, her decline was fairly swift and painless. At first she forgot all about Owen, then she forgot me; nothing could remind her even of my mother—nothing except my fairly expert imitation of Owen’s voice. That voice would jolt her memory; that voice caused her recollections to surface, almost every time. She died in her sleep, only two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She didn’t like things that “stood out”—as in: “That hairdo stands out like a sore thumb!”
I imagine her contemplating her hundredth birthday; the family celebration that was planned to honor this event would surely have killed Grandmother—I suspect she knew this. Aunt Martha had already alerted the Today show; as you may know, the Today show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every hundred-year-old in the United States—provided that the Today show knows about it. Aunt Martha saw to it that they knew. Harriet Wheelwright would be one hundred years old on Halloween! My grandmother hated Halloween; it was one of her few quarrels with God—that He had allowed her to be born on this day. It was a day, in her view, that had been invented to create mayhem among the lower classes, a day when they were invited to abuse people of property—and my grandmother’s house was always abused on Halloween. Eighty Front Street was feathered with toilet paper, the garage windows were dutifully soaped, the driveway lampposts were spray-painted (orange), and once someone inserted the greater half of a lamprey eel in Grandmother’s letter slot. Owen had always suspected Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman.
Upon her arrival in the old-age home, Grandmother considered that the remote-control device for switching television channels was a true child of Satan; it was television’s final triumph, she said, that it could render you brain-dead without even allowing you to leave your chair. It was Dan who discovered Grandmother to be dead, when he visited her one evening in the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly. He visited her every evening, and he brought her a Sunday newspaper and read it aloud to her on Sunday mornings, too.
The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels—looking for something good.
How I wish that Owen Meany could have died as peacefully as that!
Toronto: September 17, 1987—rainy and cool; back-to-school weather, back-to-church weather. These familiar rituals of church and school are my greatest comfort. But Bishop Strachan has hired a new woman in the English Department; I could tell when she was interviewing, last spring, that she was someone to be endured—a woman who gives new meaning to that arresting first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, with which the fall term begins for my Grade 9 girls: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
I don’t know if I quite qualify for Jane Austen’s notion of “a good fortune”; but my grandmother provided for me very generously.
My new colleague’s name is Eleanor Pribst, and I would love to read what Jane Austen might have written about her. I would be vastly happier to have read about Ms. Pribst than I am pleased to have met her. But I shall endure her; I will outlast her, in the end. She is alternately silly and aggressive, and in both methods of operation she is willfully insufferable—she is a Germanic bully.
When she laughs, I
am reminded of that wonderful sentence near the end of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: “I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being killed: a mouse, a bird?” In the case of the laughter of Eleanor Pribst, I could swear I hear the death rattle of a rat or a vulture. In department meeting, when I once again brought up the matter of my request to teach Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse in Grade 13, Ms. Pribst went on the attack.
“Why would you want to teach that nasty book to girls?” she asked. “That is a boys’ book,” she said. “The masturbation scene alone is offensive to women.”
Then she complained that I was “using up” both Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in the Canadian Literature course for my Grade 13s; there was nothing preventing Ms. Pribst from teaching either Atwood or Munro in another course—but she was out to make trouble. A man teaching those two women effectively “used them up,” she said—so that women in the department could not teach them. I have her figured out. She’s one of those who tells you that if you teach a Canadian author in the Canadian Literature course, you’re condescending to Canadians—by not teaching them in another literature course. And if you “use them up” in another literature course, then she’ll ask you what you think is “wrong” with Canadian Literature; she’ll say you’re being condescending to Canadians. It’s all because I’m a former American, and she doesn’t like Americans; this is so obvious—that and the fact that I am a bachelor, I live alone, and I have not fallen all over myself to ask her (as they say) “out.” She’s one of those pushy women who will readily humiliate you if you do ask her “out”; and if you don’t ask her, she’ll attempt to humiliate you more.
I am reminded of some years ago, and of a New York woman who so reminded me of Mitzy Lish. She brought her daughter to Bishop Strachan for an interview; the mother wanted to interview someone from the English Department—to ascertain, she told the headmistress, if we were guilty of a “parochial” approach to literature. This woman was a seething pot of sexual contradictions. First of all, she wanted her daughter in a Canadian school—in “an old-fashioned sort of school,” she kept saying—because she wanted her daughter to be “saved” from the perils of growing up in New York. All the New England schools, she said, were full of New Yorkers; it was tragic that a young girl should have no opportunity to entertain the values and the virtues of a saner, safer time.
On the other hand, she was one of those New Yorkers who thought she would “die” if she spent a minute outside New York—who was sure that the rest of the world was a provincial whipping post whereat people like herself, of sophisticated tastes and highly urban energies, would be lashed to the stake of old-fashioned values and virtues until she expired of boredom.
“Confidentially,” she whispered to me, “what does a grown-up person do here?” I suppose she meant, in all of Toronto—in all of Canada … this wilderness, so to speak. Yet she keenly desired to banish her daughter, lest the daughter be exposed to the eye-opening wisdom that had rendered the mother a prisoner of New York!
She was quite concerned at how many Canadian authors were on our reading lists; because she’d not read them, she suspected them of the gravest parochialism. I never met the daughter; she might have been nice—a little fearful of how homesick she would be, I’m sure, but possibly nice. The mother never enrolled her, although the girl’s application was accepted. Perhaps the mother had come to Canada on a whim—I cannot claim to have come here for entirely sound reasons myself! Maybe the mother never enrolled her daughter because she (the mother) could not endure the deprivations she (the mother) would suffer while she visited her daughter in this wilderness.
I have my own idea regarding why the child was never enrolled. The mother made a pass at me! It had been quite a while since anyone had done that; I was beginning to think that this danger was behind me, but suddenly the mother said: “What does one do here—for a good time? Perhaps you’d like to show me?”
The school had made some rather unusual, if not altogether extraordinary, arrangements for the daughter to spend a night in one of the dormitory rooms—she would get to know a few of the girls, a few of the other Americans … that sort of thing. The mother inquired if I might be available for a “night on the town”!
“I’m divorced,” she added hastily—and unnecessarily; I should hope she was divorced! But even so!
Well, I don’t pretend to possess any skill whatsoever at wriggling myself free from such bold invitations; I haven’t had much practice. I suppose I behaved as an absolute bumbler; I no doubt gave the woman yet another stunning example of the “parochialism” she was doomed to encounter outside New York.
Anyway, our encounter ended bitterly. The woman had been, in her view, courageous enough to present herself to me; that I hadn’t the courage to accept her generous gift clearly marked me as the fiendish essence of cowardice. Having honored me with her seductive charms, she then felt justified in heaping upon me her considerable contempt. She told Katherine Keeling that our English reading lists were “even more parochial” than she had feared. Believe me: it was not the reading lists that she found “parochial”—it was me! I was not savvy enough to recognize a good tryst when I saw one.
And now—in my very own English Department—I must endure a woman of an apparently similar temperament, a woman whose prickly disposition is also upheaved in a sea of sexual contradictions … Eleanor Pribst!
She even quarreled with my choice of teaching Tempest-Tost; she suggested that perhaps it was because I failed to recognize that Fifth Business was “better.” Naturally, I have taught both novels, and many other works by Robertson Davies, with great—no, with the greatest—pleasure. I stated that I’d had good luck teaching Tempest-Tost in the past. “Students feel so much like amateurs themselves,” I said. “I think they find all the intrigues of the local drama league both extremely funny and extremely familiar.” But Ms. Pribst wanted to know if I knew Kingston; surely I at least knew that the fictional town of Salterton is easily identified as Kingston. I had heard that this was true, I said, although—personally—I had not been in Kingston.
“Not been!” she cried. “I suppose that this is what comes of having Americans teaching Can Lit!” she said.
“I detest the term ‘Can Lit,’” I told ms. Pribst. “We do not call American Literature ‘Am Lit,’ I see no reason to shrivel this country’s most interesting literature to a derogatory abbreviation. Furthermore,” I said, “I consider Mister Davies an author of such universal importance that I choose not to teach what is ‘Canadian’ about his books, but what is wonderful about them.”
After that, it was simple warfare. She challenged my substitution—in Grade 11—of Orwell’s Burmese Days for Orwell’s Animal Farm. In terms of “lasting importance,” it was Nineteen Eighty-four or Animal Farm; Burmese Days, she said, was “a poor substitute.”
“Orwell is Orwell,” I said, “and Burmese Days is a good novel.”
But Ms. Pribst—a graduate of Queens (hence, her vast knowledge of Kingston)—is writing her doctorate at the University of Toronto on something related to “politics in fiction.” Wasn’t it Hardy I had written about? she asked—implying “merely” Hardy!—and wasn’t it only my Master’s I had written?
And so I asked my old friend Katherine Keeling: “Do you suppose that God created Eleanor Pribst just to test me?”
“You’re very naughty,” Katherine said. “Don’t you be wicked, too.”
When I want to be “wicked,” I show the finger; correction—I show what’s missing, I show not the finger. I shall save the missing finger for my next encounter with Ms. Pribst. I am grateful to Owen Meany for so many things; not only did he keep me out of Vietnam—he created for me a perfect teaching tool, he gave me a terrific attention-getter for whenever the class is lagging behind. I simply raise my hand; I point. It is the absence of my pointer that makes pointing an interesting and riveting thing for me to do. Instantly, I have everyone’s attention. It works very well in department meetings, too.
“Don’t you point that thing at me!” Hester was fond of saying.
But it was not “that thing,” it was not anything that upset her; it was what was missing! The amputation was very clean—it was the cleanest cut imaginable. There’s nothing grotesque, or mangled—or even raw-looking—about the stump. The only thing wrong with me is what’s missing. Owen Meany is missing.
It was after Owen cut off my finger—at the end of the summer of ’67, when he was home in Gravesend for a few days’ leave—when Hester told Owen that she wouldn’t attend his funeral; she absolutely refused.
“I’ll marry you, I’ll move to Arizona—I’ll go anywhere with you, Owen,” Hester said. “Can you see me as a bride on an Army base? Can you see us entertaining another couple of young marrieds—when you’re not off escorting a body? Just call me Hester Huachuca!” she cried. “I’ll even get pregnant—if you’d like that, Owen. Do you want babies? I’ll give you babies!” Hester cried. “I’d do anything for you—you know that. But I won’t go to your fucking funeral.”
She was true to her word; Hester was not in attendance at Owen Meany’s funeral—Hurd’s Church was packed, but Hester wasn’t a part of the crowd. He’d never asked her to marry him; he’d never made her move to Arizona, or anywhere. “IT WOULDN’T BE FAIR—I MEAN, IT WOULDN’T BE FAIR TO HER,” Owen had told me.
In the fall of ’67, Owen Meany made a deal with Major General LaHoad; he was not appointed LaHoad’s aide-de-camp—LaHoad was too proud of the commendations that Owen received as a casualty assistance officer. The major general was scheduled for a transfer in eighteen months; if Owen remained at Fort Huachuca—as the casualty branch’s “best” body escort—LaHoad promised Owen “a good job in Vietnam.” Eighteen months was a long wait, but First Lieutenant Meany felt the wait was worth it.
