by John Irving
What did it mean, I asked my sloppy students, that their papers generally “began” after four or five pages of wandering around in a soup of ideas for beginnings? If it took them four or five pages to find the right beginning, didn’t they think they should consider revising their papers and beginning them on page four or five?
Oh, young people, young people, young people—where is your taste for wit? I weep to teach Trollope to these BSS girls; I care less that they appear to weep because they’re forced to read him. I especially worship the pleasures of Barchester Towers; but it is pearls before swine to teach Trollope to this television generation of girls! Their hips, their heads, and even their hearts are moved by those relentlessly mindless rock videos; yet the opening of Chapter IV does not extract from them even so much as a titter.
“Of the Rev. Mr. Slope’s parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he added an ‘e’ to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him.”
Not even a titter! But how their hearts thump and patter, how their hips jolt this way and that, how their heads loll and nod—and their eyes roll inward, completely disappearing into their untrained little skulls—just to hear Hester the Molester; not to mention see the disjointed nonsense that accompanies the sound track of her most recent rock video!
You can understand why I needed to sit by myself in Grace Church on-the-Hill.
This week I was reading “The Moons of Jupiter”—that marvelous short story by Alice Munro—to my Grade 13 Can Lit students, as the abrasive Ms. Pribst would say. I was a touch anxious about reading the story, because one of my students—Yvonne Hewlett—was in a situation all too similar to the narrator’s situation in that story: her father was in the hospital, about to undergo a ticklish heart surgery. I didn’t remember what was happening to Yvonne Hewlett’s father until I’d already begun to read “The Moons of Jupiter” to the class; it was too late to stop, or change the story as I went along. Besides: it is by no means a brutal story—it is warm, if not exactly reassuring to the children of heart patients. Anyway, what could I do? Yvonne Hewlett had missed a week of classes just recently when her father suffered a heart attack; she looked tense and drained as I read the Munro story—she had looked tense and drained, naturally, from the opening line: “I found my father in the heart wing …”
How could I have been so thoughtless? I was thinking. I wanted to interrupt the story and tell Yvonne Hewlett that everything was going to turn out just fine—although I had no right to make any such promise to her, especially not about her poor father. God, what a situation! Suddenly I felt like my father—I am my sorry father’s sorry son, I thought. Then I regretted the evil I did to him; actually, it turned out all right in the end—it turned out that I did him a favor. But I did not intend what I did to him as any favor.
When I left him alone in the vestry office, pondering what he would find to say at Owen Meany’s funeral, I took the baseball with me. When I went to see Dan Needham, I left the baseball in the glove compartment of my car. I was so angry, I didn’t know what I was going to do—beginning with: tell Dan, or not tell him?
That was when I asked Dan Needham—since he had no apparent religious faith—why he had insisted that my mother and I change churches, that we leave the Congregational Church and become Episcopalians!
“What do you mean?” Dan asked me. “That was your idea!”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“Your mother told me that all your friends were in the Episcopal Church—namely, Owen,” Dan said. “Your mother told me that you asked her if you could change churches so that you could attend Sunday school with your friends. You didn’t have any friends in the Congregational Church, she said.”
“Mother said that?” I asked him. “She told me that both of us should become Episcopalians so that we’d belong to the same church as you—because you were an Episcopalian.”
“I’m a Presbyterian,” Dan said “—not that it matters.”
“So she lied to us,” I said to Dan; after a while, he shrugged.
“How old were you at the time?” Dan asked me. “Were you eight or nine or ten? Maybe you haven’t remembered all the circumstances correctly.”
I thought for a while, not looking at him. Then I said: “You were engaged to her for a long time—before you got married. It was about four years—as I recall.”
“Yes, about four years—that’s correct,” Dan said warily.
“Why did you wait so long to get married?” I asked him. “You both knew you loved each other—didn’t you?”
Dan looked at the bookshelves on the concealed door leading to the secret passageway.
“Your father …” he began; then he stopped. “Your father wanted her to wait,” Dan said.
“Why?” I asked Dan.
“To be sure—to be sure about me,” Dan said.
“What business was it of his?” I cried.
“Exactly—that’s exactly what I told your mother: that it wasn’t any of his business … if your mother was ‘sure’ about me. Of course she was sure, and so was I!”
“Why did she do what he wanted?” I asked Dan.
“Because of you,” Dan told me. “She wanted him to promise never to identify himself to you. He wouldn’t promise unless she waited to marry me. We both had to wait before he promised never to speak to you. It took four years,” Dan said.
“I always thought that Mother would have told me herself—if she’d lived,” I said. “I thought she was just waiting for me to be old enough—and then she’d tell me.”
“She never intended to tell you,” Dan Needham said. “She made it clear to me that neither you nor I would ever know. I accepted that; you would have accepted that from her, too. It was your father who didn’t accept that—not for four years.”
“But he could have spoken to me after Mother died,” I said. “Who would have known that he’d broken a promise if he’d spoken to me? Only I would have known—and I would never have known that she’d made him promise anything. I never knew he was interested in identifying himself to me!” I said.
“He must be someone who can be trusted to keep a promise,” Dan said. “I used to think he was jealous of me—that he wanted her to wait all that time just because he thought I would give her up or that she would get tired of me. I used to think he was trying to break us up—that he was only pretending to care about her being sure of me or wanting her permission to identify himself to you. But now I think that he must have sincerely wanted her to be right about me—and it must have been difficult for him to promise her that he would never try to contact you.”
“Did you know about ‘The Lady in Red’?” I asked Dan Needham. “Did you know about The Orange Grove—and all of that?”
“It was the only way she could see him, it was the only way they could talk,” Dan said. “That’s all I know about it,” he said. “I won’t ask you how you know about it.”
“Did you ever hear of Big Black Buster Freebody?” I asked Dan.
“He was an old black musician—your mother was very fond of him,” Dan said. “I remember who he was because of the last time your mother and I took a trip together, before she was killed—we went to Buster Freebody’s funeral,” Dan said.
And so Dan Needham believed that my father was a man of his word. How many men do we know like that? I wondered. It seemed pointless for me to disabuse Dan of his notion of my father’s sincerity. It seemed almost pointless for me to know who my father was; I was quite sure that this knowledge would never greatly benefit Dan. How could it benefit him to know that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had sat in the bleacher seats, praying that my mother would die—not to mention that Pastor Merrill was arrogant enough to believe that his prayer had worked? I was sure that Dan didn’t need to know these things. And why else would my mother have wanted us to leave the Co
ngregational Church for the Episcopal—if not to get away from Mr. Merrill? My father was not a brave or an honorable man; but he had once tried to be brave and honorable. He had been afraid, but he had dared—in his fashion—to pray for Owen Meany; he had done that pretty well.
Whatever had he imagined might come of his identifying himself to me? What had become of his own children, sadly, was that they had not felt much from their father—not beyond his immeasurable and inexpressible remorse, which he clung to in the manner of a man who’d forgotten how to pray. I could teach him how to pray again, I thought. It was after speaking to Dan that I got an idea of how I might teach Pastor Merrill to believe again—I knew how I might encourage him to have a little faith. I thought of the sad man’s shapeless middle child, who with her brutally short hair was barely identifiable as a girl; I thought of the tallish older boy, the sloucher—and cemetery vandal! And the youngest was a groveler, a scrounger under the pews—I couldn’t even remember what its sex was.
If Mr. Merrill failed to have faith in Owen Meany, if Mr. Merrill believed that God was punishing him with silence—I knew I could give Mr. Merrill something to believe in. If neither God nor Owen Meany could restore the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s faith, I thought I knew a “miracle” that my father was susceptible to believing in.
It was about ten o’clock in the evening when I left Pastor Merrill sitting at his desk in the vestry office; it was only half an hour later when I finished talking with Dan and drove again past Hurd’s Church at the corner of Front Street and Tan Lane. Lewis Merrill was still there, the light still on in the vestry office; and now there was also light shining through the stained-glass windows of the chancel—that enclosed and meant-to-be-sacred space surrounding the altar of a church, where (no doubt) my father was composing his last words for Owen Meany.
“I figure everythin’ he kept was for somethin’!” Mr. Meany had said—about my mother’s dummy in the red dress. I’m sure the poor fool didn’t know how right he was about that.
The Maiden Hill Road was dark; there were still some emergency-road-repair cones and unlit flares off the side of the road by the trestle bridge, the abutment of which had been the death of Buzzy Thurston. The accident had made quite a mess of the cornerstones of the bridge, and they’d had to tar the road where Buzzy’s smashed Plymouth had gouged up the surface.
There was the usual light left on in the Meanys’ kitchen; it was the light they’d routinely left on for Owen. Mr. Meany was a long time answering my knock on the door. I’d never seen him in pajamas before; he looked oddly childish—or like a big clown dressed in children’s clothes. “Why it’s Johnny Wheelwright!” he said automatically.
“I want the dummy,” I told him.
“Well, sure!” he said cheerfully. “I thought you’d want it.”
It was not heavy, but it was awkward—trying to fit it in my Volkswagen Beetle—because it wouldn’t bend. I remembered how awkwardly, in his swaddling clothes, Owen Meany had fitted in the cab of the big granite truck, that day his mother and father had driven him home from the Christmas Pageant; how Hester and Owen and I had ridden on the flatbed of the big truck, that night Mr. Meany drove us—and the dummy—to the beach at Little Boar’s Head.
“You can borrow the pickup, if it’s easier,” Mr. Meany suggested. But that wasn’t necessary; with Mr. Meany’s help, I managed to fit the dummy into the Beetle. I had to detach the former Mary Magdalene’s naked white arms from the wire-mesh sockets under the dummy’s shoulders. The dummy didn’t have any feet; she rose from a rod on a thin, flat pedestal—and this I stuck out the rolled-down window by the passenger’s seat, which I tilted forward so that the dummy’s boyish hips and slender waist and full bosom and small, squared shoulders could extend into the back seat. If she’d had a head, she wouldn’t have fit.
“Thank you,” I said to Mr. Meany.
“Well, sure!” he said.
I parked my Volkswagen on Tan Lane, well away from Hurd’s Church and the blinking yellow light at the intersection with Front Street. I jammed the baseball in my pocket; I carried the dummy under one arm, and Mary Magdalene’s long, pale arms under the other. I reassembled my mother in the flower beds that were dimly glowing in the dark-colored light that shone through the stained-glass windows of the chancel. The light was still on in the vestry office, but Pastor Merrill was practicing his prayers for Owen in the chancel of the old stone church; occasionally, he would dally with the organ. From his choirmaster days at the Congregational Church, Mr. Merrill had retained an amateur command of the organ. I was familiar with the hymns he was toying with—trying to get himself in the mood to pray for Owen Meany.
He played “Crown Him with Many Crowns”; then he tried “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.” There was a bed of portulaca where it was best to stand the dressmaker’s dummy; the fleshy-leaved, low-to-the-ground plants covered the pedestal, and the small flowers—most of which were closed for the night—didn’t clash with the poinsettia-red dress. The dress completely covered the wire-mesh hips of the dummy; and the thin, black stem upon which the dummy rose from its pedestal was invisible in the semidarkness—as if my mother didn’t exactly have her feet on the ground, but chose instead to hover just above the flower beds. I walked back and forth between the flower beds and the door to the vestry, trying to see how the dummy appeared from that distance—angling my mother’s body so that her unforgettable figure would be instantly recognizable. It was perfect how the dark-colored light from the chancel threw exactly the right amount of illumination upon her—there was just enough light to accentuate the scarlet glare of her dress, but not enough light to make her headlessness too apparent. Her head and her feet were just missing—or else consumed by the shadows of the night. From the door of the vestry, my mother’s figure was both vividly alive and ghostly; “The Lady in Red” looked ready to sing. The effect of the blinking yellow light at the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street was also enhancing; and even the headlights of an occasional passing car were far enough away to contribute to the uncertainty of the figure in the bed of portulaca.
I squeezed the baseball; I had not held one in my hand since that last Little League game. I worried about my grip, because the first two joints of your index finger are important in throwing a baseball; but I didn’t have far to throw it. I waited for Mr. Merrill to stop playing the organ; the second the music stopped, I threw the baseball—as hard as I could—through one of the tall, stained-glass windows of the chancel. It made a small hole in the glass, and a beam of white light—as if from a flashlight—shone upward into the leaves of a towering elm tree, behind which I concealed myself while I waited for Pastor Merrill.
It took him a moment to discover what had been thrown through one of the sacred chancel windows. I suppose that the baseball must have rolled past the organ pipes, or even close to the pulpit.
“Johnny!” I heard my father calling. The door from the church into the vestry opened and closed. “Johnny—I know you’re angry, but this is very childish!” he called. I heard his footsteps in the corridor where all the clothes pegs were—outside the vestry office. He flung open the vestry door, the baseball in his right hand, and he blinked into the blinking yellow light at the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street. “Johnny!” he called again. He stepped outside; he looked left, toward the Gravesend campus; he looked right, along Front Street—then he glanced into the flower beds that were glowing in the light from the stained-glass windows of the chancel. Then the Rev. Lewis Merrill dropped to his knees and pressed the baseball hard against his heart.
“Tabby!” he said in a whisper. He dropped the ball, which rolled out to the Front Street sidewalk. “God—forgive me!” said Pastor Merrill. “Tabby—I didn’t tell him! I promised you I wouldn’t, and I didn’t—it wasn’t me!” my father cried. His head began to sway—he couldn’t look at her—and he covered his eyes with both hands. He fell on his side, his head touching the grass border of the vestry path, and he drew up his knees to his chest—a
s if he were cold, or a baby going to sleep. He kept his eyes covered tightly, and he moaned: “Tabby—forgive me, please!”
After that, he began to babble incoherently; his voice was just a murmur, and he made slight jerking or twitching movements where he lay on the ground. There was just enough noise and motion from him to assure me that he wasn’t dead. I confess: I was slightly disappointed that the shock of my mother appearing before him hadn’t killed him. I picked up the dressmaker’s dummy and put her under my arm; one of Mary Magdalene’s dead-white arms fell off, and I carried this under my other arm. I picked up the baseball from the sidewalk and jammed it back into my pocket. I wondered if my father could hear me moving around, because he seemed to contort himself more tightly into a fetal position and to cover his eyes even more tightly—as if he feared my mother were coming nearer to him. Perhaps those bone-white, elongated arms had especially frightened him—as if Death itself had exaggerated my mother’s reach, and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was sure that she was going to touch him.
I put the dummy and Mary Magdalene’s arms into my Volkswagen and drove to the breakwater at Rye Harbor. It was midnight. I threw the baseball as far into the harbor as I could; it made a very small splash there—not disturbing the gulls. I flung Mary Magdalene’s long, heavy arms into the harbor, too; they made more of a splash, but the boats slapping on their moorings and the surf striking the breakwater outside the harbor had conditioned the gulls there to remain undisturbed by any noise of water.
