A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
hat Germaine, who was "in a state," should not be left in a room alone. It would be quite improper for her to share a room with Dan, and unthinkable that my grandmother would sleep in the same room with a maid. After all, I was only eleven.
I had shared that room so many times with Owen; how I wanted to talk to him now! What would he think of my grandmother's suggestion that he had foreseen Lydia's death? And would he be relieved to learn that Death didn't have a plan to come for him? Would he believe it? I knew he would be deeply disappointed if he missed seeing Lydia. And I wanted to tell him about my discovery--while watching the theater audience--that I believed I could, by this means, actually remember the faces in the audience at what Owen called that FATED baseball game. What would Owen Meany say about my sudden inspiration: that it had been my actual father whom my mother was waving to, the split second before the ball hit her? In the world of what the Rev. Lewis Merrill called "visions," what would Owen make of that one?
But Germaine distracted me. She wanted the night-light left on; she tossed and turned; she lay staring at the ceiling. When I got up to go to the bathroom, she asked me not to be gone long; she didn't want to be left alone--not for a minute.
If she would only fall asleep, I thought, I could telephone Owen. There was only one phone in the Meany house; it was in the kitchen, right outside Owen's bedroom. I could call him at any hour of the night, because he woke up in an instant and his parents slept through the night like boulders--like immovable slabs of granite.
Then I remembered it was Christmas Eve. My mother had once said it was "just as well" that we went to Sawyer Depot for Christmas, because it prevented Owen from comparing what he got for Christmas with what I got.
I got a half-dozen presents from each relative or loved one--from my grandmother, from my aunt and uncle, from my cousins, from Dan; and more than a half-dozen from my mother. I had looked under the Christmas tree this year, in the living room of 80 Front Street, and was touched at Dan's and my grandmother's efforts to match the sheer number of presents--for me--that usually lay under the Eastmans' tree in Sawyer Depot. I had already counted them; I had over forty wrapped presents--and, God knows, there was usually something hidden in the basement or in the garage that was too big to wrap.
I never knew what Owen got for Christmas, but it occurred to me that if his parents hadn't even waited up for him--on Christmas Eve!--that Christmas was not especially emphasized in the Meany household. In the past, by the time I came back from Sawyer Depot, half of my lesser toys were broken or lost, and the new things that were truly worth keeping were discovered--by Owen--gradually, over a period of days or weeks.
"WHERE'D YOU GET THAT?"
"For Christmas."
"OH, YES, I SEE ..."
Now that I thought of it, I could not remember him ever showing me a single thing he got "for Christmas." I wanted to call him, but Germaine kept me in my bed. The more I stayed in my bed, and the more I was aware of her--still awake--the stranger I began to feel. I began to think about Germaine the way I often thought about Hester--and how old would Germaine have been in '53? In her twenties, I suppose. I actually began to wish that she would climb into my bed, and I began to imagine climbing into hers; I don't think she would have prevented me--I think she would have favored an innocent hug and even a not-so-innocent boy in her arms, if only to keep Death away. I began to scheme--not at all in the manner of an eleven-year-old, but in the manner of an older, horny boy. I began to imagine how much advantage I might take of Germaine, given that she was distraught.
I actually said, "I believe you, about hearing him scream." I lied! I didn't believe her at all!
"It was his voice," she said instantly. "Now that I remember it, I know it was."
I reached out my hand, into the aisle between the twin beds; her hand was there to take mine. I thought about the way Barb Wiggin had kissed Owen; I was rewarded with an erection powerful enough to slightly raise my bed covers; but when I squeezed Germaine's hand especially hard, she made no response--she just held on.
"Go to sleep," she said. When her hand slipped out of mine, I realized that she had fallen asleep; I stared at her for a long time, but I didn't dare approach her. I was ashamed of how I felt. In the considerably grown-up vocabulary that I had been exposed to through my grandmother and Lydia, I had not been exposed to lust; that was not a word I could have learned from them--that was not a feeling I could label. What I was experiencing simply felt wrong; it made me feel guilty, that a part of myself was an enemy to the rest of myself, and that was when I thought I understood where the feeling came from; it had to come from my father. It was the part of him that stirred inside me. And for the first time, I began to consider that my father might be evil, or that what of himself he had given to me was what was evil in me.
Henceforward, whenever I was troubled by a way I felt--and especially when I felt this way, when I lusted--I thought that my father was asserting himself within me. My desire to know who he was took on a new urgency; I did not want to know who he was because I missed him, or because I was looking for someone to love; I had Dan and his love; I had my grandmother--and everything I remembered, and (I'm sure) exaggerated, about my mother. It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity--to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.
How I wanted to talk to Owen about this!
When Germaine started to snore, I got out of bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen phone to call him.
The sudden light in the kitchen sent a resident mouse into rapid abandonment of its investigations of the bread box; the light also surprised me, because it turned the myriad Colonial-style windowpanes into fragmented mirror images of myself--there instantly appeared to be many of me, standing outside the house, looking in at me. In one image of my shocked face I thought I recognized the fear and uneasiness peculiar to Mr. Morrison; according to Dan, Mr. Morrison's response to Owen's fainting spell and fit had been one of shock--the cowardly mailman had fainted. Chief Pike had carried the fallen postal thespian into the bracing night air, where Mr. Morrison had revived with a vengeance--wrestling in the snow with Gravesend's determined chief of police, until Mr. Morrison yielded to the strong arm of the law.
But I was alone in the kitchen; the small, square, mirror-black panes reflected many versions of my face, but no other face looked in upon me as I dialed the Meanys' number. It rang longer than I expected, and I almost hung up. Remembering Owen's fever, I was afraid he might be more soundly asleep than usual--and that Mr. and Mrs. Meany would be awakened by my call.
"MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said, when he finally answered the phone.
I told him everything. He was most sympathetic to the notion that I could "remember" the audience at the baseball game by observing the audience at Dan's play; he recommended that he watch with me--two pairs of eyes being better than one. As for my "imagining" that my mother had been waving to my actual father in the last seconds she was alive, Owen Meany believed in trusting such instincts; he said that I must be ON THE RIGHT TRACK, because the idea gave him THE SHIVERS--a sure sign. And as for my desire for Germaine giving me a hard-on, Owen couldn't have been more supportive; if Barb Wiggin could provoke lust in him, there was no shame in Germaine provoking such dreadful feelings in me. Owen had prepared a small sermon on the subject of lust, a feeling he would later describe as A TRUTHFUL PREMONITION THAT DAMNATION IS FOR REAL. As for the unpleasant sensation originating with my father--as for these hated feelings in myself being a first sign of my father's contribution to me--Owen was in complete agreement. Lust, he would later say, was God's way of helping me identify who my father was; in lust had I been conceived, in lust would I discover my father.
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies--inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities--made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
Of course, he agreed with me--how stupid Germaine was, to imagine she'd heard him screaming, all the way from the Gravesend Town Hall!
"I DIDN'T SCREAM THAT LOUDLY," he said indignantly.
It was Grandmother's interpretation of what he had foreseen that provided the only difference of opinion between us. If he had to believe anything, why couldn't he believe Grandmother--that it was Lydia's death that the gravestone foretold; that Owen had simply "seen" the wrong name?
"NO," he said. "IT WAS MY NAME. NOT SCROOGE'S--AND NOT LYDIA'S."
"But that was just your mistake," I said. "You were thinking of yourself--you'd even been writing your own name, just moments before. And you had a very high fever. If that gravestone actually told you anything, it told you that someone was going to die. That someone was Lydia. She's dead, isn't she? And you're not dead--are you?"
"IT WAS MY NAME," he repeated stubbornly.
"Look at it this way: you got it half-right," I told him. I was trying to sound as if I were an old hand at "visions," and at interpreting them. I tried to sound as if I knew more about the matter than Pastor Merrill.
"IT WASN'T JUST MY NAME," Owen said. "I MEAN, NOT THE WAY I EVER WRITE IT--NOT THE WAY I WROTE IT IN THE BABY POWDER. IT WAS MY REAL NAME--IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," he said.
That made me pause; he sounded so unbudging. His "real" name was Paul--his father's name. His real name was Paul O. Meany, Jr.; he'd been baptized a Catholic. Of course, he needed a saint's name, like St. Paul; if there is a St. Owen, I've never heard of him. And because there was already a "Paul" in the family, I suppose that's why they called him "Owen"; where that middle name came from, he never said--I never knew.
"The gravestone said, 'Paul O. Meany, Junior'--is that right?" I asked him.
"IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," Owen repeated. He hung up.
He was so crazy, he drove me crazy! I stayed up drinking orange juice and eating cookies; I put some fresh bacon in the mousetrap and turned out the light. Like my mother, I hate darkness; in the dark, it came to me--what he meant by THE WHOLE THING. I turned on the light; I called him back.
"MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said.
"Was there a date on the gravestone?" I asked him. He gave himself away by hesitating.
"NO," he said.
"What was the date, Owen?" I asked him. He hesitated again.
"THERE WAS NO DATE," Owen said. I wanted to cry--not because I believed a single thing about his stupid "vision," but because it was the first time he had lied to me.
"Merry Christmas," I said; I hung up.
When I turned the light out a second time, there was more darkness in the darkness.
What was the date? How much time had he given himself?
The only question that I wanted to ask the darkness was the one question Scrooge had also wanted an answer to: "'Are these the shadows of the things that Will be or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?'" But the Ghost of the Future was not answering.
6
The Voice
* * *
Above all things that she despised, what my grandmother loathed most was lack of effort; this struck Dan Needham as a peculiar hatred, because Harriet Wheelwright had never worked a day in her life--nor had she ever expected my mother to work; and she never once assigned me a single chore. Nevertheless, in my grandmother's view, it required nearly constant effort to keep track of the world--both our own world and the world outside the sphere of Gravesend--and it required effort and intelligence to make nearly constant comment on one's observations; in these efforts, Grandmother was rigorous and unswerving. It was her belief in the value of effort itself that prevented her from buying a television set.
She was a passionate reader, and she thought that reading was one of the noblest efforts of all; in contrast, she found writing to be a great waste of time--a childish self-indulgence, even messier than finger painting--but she admired reading, which she believed was an unselfish activity that provided information and inspiration. She must have thought it a pity that some poor fools had to waste their lives writing in order for us to have sufficient reading material. Reading also gave one confidence in and familiarity with language, which was a necessary tool for forming those nearly constant comments on what one had observed. Grandmother had her doubts about the radio, although she conceded that the modern world moved at such a pace that keeping up with it defied the written word; listening, after all, required some effort, and the language one heard on the radio was not much worse than the language one increasingly stumbled over in newspapers and magazines.
But she drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch--it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen--and what she imagined there was to watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it. She had protested to the Soldiers' Home, and to the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly--both of which she served as a trustee--that making television sets available to old people would surely hasten their deaths. She was unmoved by the claim made by both these homes for the aged: that the inmates were often too feeble or inattentive to read, and that the radio put them to sleep. My grandmother visited both homes, and what she observed only confirmed her opinions; what Harriet Wheelwright always observed always confirmed her opinions: she saw the process of death hastened. She saw very old, infirm people with their mouths agape; although they were, at best, only partially alert, they gave their stuporous attention to images that my grandmother described as "too surpassing in banality to recall." It was the first time she had actually seen television sets that were turned on, and she was hooked. My grandmother observed that television was draining what scant life remained in the old people "clean out of them"; yet she instantly craved a TV of her own!
My mother's death, which was followed in less than a year by Lydia's death, had much to do with Grandmother's decision to have a television installed at 80 Front Street. My mother had been a big fan of the old Victrola; in the evenings, we'd listened to Sinatra singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra--my mother liked to sing along with Sinatra. "That Frank," she used to say. "He's got a voice that's meant for a woman--but no woman was ever that lucky." I remember a few of her favorites; when I hear them, I'm still tempted to sing along--although I don't have my mother's voice. I don't have Sinatra's voice, either--nor his bullying patriotism. I don't think my mother would have been fond of Sinatra's politics, but she liked what she called his "early" voice, in particular those songs from Sinatra's first sessions with Tommy Dorsey. Because she liked to sing along with Sinatra, she preferred his voice before the war--when he was more subdued and less of a star, when Tommy Dorsey kept him in balance with the band. Her favorite recordings were from 1940--"I'll Be Seeing You," "Fools Rush In," "I Haven't Time to Be a Millionaire," "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow," "All This and Heaven, Too,"
"Do You Keep Your Heart?" "Trade Winds," "The Call of the Canyon"; and, most of all, "Too Romantic."
I had my own radio, and after Mother died, I listened to it more and more; I thought it would upset Grandmother to play--on the Victrola--those old Sinatra songs. When Lydia was alive, my grandmother seemed content with her reading; either she and Lydia took turns reading to each other, or they forced Germaine to read aloud to them--while they rested their eyes and exercised their acute interest in educating Germaine. But after Lydia died, Germaine refused to read aloud to my grandmother; Germaine was convinced that her reading aloud to Lydia had either killed Lydia or hastened her death, and Germaine was resolute in not wanting to murder Grandmother in a similar fashion. For a while, my grandmother read aloud to Germaine; but this afforded no opportunity for Grandmother to rest her eyes, and she would often interrupt her reading to make sure that Germaine was paying proper attention. Germaine could not possibly pay attention to the subject--she was so intent on keeping herself alive for the duration of the reading.
You can see that this was a home already vulnerable to invasion by television. Ethel, for example, would never be the companion to my grandmother that Lydia had been. Lydia had been an alert and appreciative audience to my grandmother's nearly constant comments, but Ethel was entirely unresponsive--efficient but uninspired, dutiful but passive. Dan Needham sensed that it was Ethel's lack of spark that made my grandmother feel old; yet whenever Dan suggested to Grandmother that she might replace Ethel with someone livelier, my grandmother defended Ethel with bulldog loyalty. Wheelrights were snobs, but they were fair-minded; Wheelrights did not fire their servants because they were stodgy and dull. And so Ethel stayed, and my grandmother grew old--old and restless to be entertained; she was vulnerable to invasion by television, too.
Germaine, who was terrified when my grandmother read to her--and too terrified to read aloud to Grandmother at all--had too little to do; she resigned. Wheelrights accept resignations graciously, although I was sorry to see Germaine go. The desire she had provoked in me--as distasteful as it was to me at the time--was a clue to my father; moreover, the lustful fantasies that Germaine provided were, although evil, more entertaining to me than anything I could hear on my radio.
With Lydia gone, and with me spending half my days and nights with Dan, Grandmother didn't need two maids; there was no reason to replace Germaine--Ethel would suffice. And with Germaine gone, I was vulnerable to invasion by television, too.
"YOUR GRANDMOTHER IS GETTING A TELEVISION?" said Owen Meany. The Meanys did not have a television. Dan didn't have one, either; he'd voted against Eisenhower in '52, and he'd promised himself that he wouldn't buy a TV as long as Ike was president. Even the Eastmans didn't have a television. Uncle Alfred wanted one, and Noah and Simon and Hester begged to have one; but TV reception was still rather primitive in the north country, Sawyer Depot received mostly snow, and Aunt Martha refused to build a tower for the necessary antenna--it would be too "unsightly," she said, although Uncle Alfred wanted a television so badly that he claimed he would construct an antenna tower capable of interfering with low-flying planes if it could get him adequate reception.
"You're ge
I had shared that room so many times with Owen; how I wanted to talk to him now! What would he think of my grandmother's suggestion that he had foreseen Lydia's death? And would he be relieved to learn that Death didn't have a plan to come for him? Would he believe it? I knew he would be deeply disappointed if he missed seeing Lydia. And I wanted to tell him about my discovery--while watching the theater audience--that I believed I could, by this means, actually remember the faces in the audience at what Owen called that FATED baseball game. What would Owen Meany say about my sudden inspiration: that it had been my actual father whom my mother was waving to, the split second before the ball hit her? In the world of what the Rev. Lewis Merrill called "visions," what would Owen make of that one?
But Germaine distracted me. She wanted the night-light left on; she tossed and turned; she lay staring at the ceiling. When I got up to go to the bathroom, she asked me not to be gone long; she didn't want to be left alone--not for a minute.
If she would only fall asleep, I thought, I could telephone Owen. There was only one phone in the Meany house; it was in the kitchen, right outside Owen's bedroom. I could call him at any hour of the night, because he woke up in an instant and his parents slept through the night like boulders--like immovable slabs of granite.
Then I remembered it was Christmas Eve. My mother had once said it was "just as well" that we went to Sawyer Depot for Christmas, because it prevented Owen from comparing what he got for Christmas with what I got.
I got a half-dozen presents from each relative or loved one--from my grandmother, from my aunt and uncle, from my cousins, from Dan; and more than a half-dozen from my mother. I had looked under the Christmas tree this year, in the living room of 80 Front Street, and was touched at Dan's and my grandmother's efforts to match the sheer number of presents--for me--that usually lay under the Eastmans' tree in Sawyer Depot. I had already counted them; I had over forty wrapped presents--and, God knows, there was usually something hidden in the basement or in the garage that was too big to wrap.
I never knew what Owen got for Christmas, but it occurred to me that if his parents hadn't even waited up for him--on Christmas Eve!--that Christmas was not especially emphasized in the Meany household. In the past, by the time I came back from Sawyer Depot, half of my lesser toys were broken or lost, and the new things that were truly worth keeping were discovered--by Owen--gradually, over a period of days or weeks.
"WHERE'D YOU GET THAT?"
"For Christmas."
"OH, YES, I SEE ..."
Now that I thought of it, I could not remember him ever showing me a single thing he got "for Christmas." I wanted to call him, but Germaine kept me in my bed. The more I stayed in my bed, and the more I was aware of her--still awake--the stranger I began to feel. I began to think about Germaine the way I often thought about Hester--and how old would Germaine have been in '53? In her twenties, I suppose. I actually began to wish that she would climb into my bed, and I began to imagine climbing into hers; I don't think she would have prevented me--I think she would have favored an innocent hug and even a not-so-innocent boy in her arms, if only to keep Death away. I began to scheme--not at all in the manner of an eleven-year-old, but in the manner of an older, horny boy. I began to imagine how much advantage I might take of Germaine, given that she was distraught.
I actually said, "I believe you, about hearing him scream." I lied! I didn't believe her at all!
"It was his voice," she said instantly. "Now that I remember it, I know it was."
I reached out my hand, into the aisle between the twin beds; her hand was there to take mine. I thought about the way Barb Wiggin had kissed Owen; I was rewarded with an erection powerful enough to slightly raise my bed covers; but when I squeezed Germaine's hand especially hard, she made no response--she just held on.
"Go to sleep," she said. When her hand slipped out of mine, I realized that she had fallen asleep; I stared at her for a long time, but I didn't dare approach her. I was ashamed of how I felt. In the considerably grown-up vocabulary that I had been exposed to through my grandmother and Lydia, I had not been exposed to lust; that was not a word I could have learned from them--that was not a feeling I could label. What I was experiencing simply felt wrong; it made me feel guilty, that a part of myself was an enemy to the rest of myself, and that was when I thought I understood where the feeling came from; it had to come from my father. It was the part of him that stirred inside me. And for the first time, I began to consider that my father might be evil, or that what of himself he had given to me was what was evil in me.
Henceforward, whenever I was troubled by a way I felt--and especially when I felt this way, when I lusted--I thought that my father was asserting himself within me. My desire to know who he was took on a new urgency; I did not want to know who he was because I missed him, or because I was looking for someone to love; I had Dan and his love; I had my grandmother--and everything I remembered, and (I'm sure) exaggerated, about my mother. It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity--to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.
How I wanted to talk to Owen about this!
When Germaine started to snore, I got out of bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen phone to call him.
The sudden light in the kitchen sent a resident mouse into rapid abandonment of its investigations of the bread box; the light also surprised me, because it turned the myriad Colonial-style windowpanes into fragmented mirror images of myself--there instantly appeared to be many of me, standing outside the house, looking in at me. In one image of my shocked face I thought I recognized the fear and uneasiness peculiar to Mr. Morrison; according to Dan, Mr. Morrison's response to Owen's fainting spell and fit had been one of shock--the cowardly mailman had fainted. Chief Pike had carried the fallen postal thespian into the bracing night air, where Mr. Morrison had revived with a vengeance--wrestling in the snow with Gravesend's determined chief of police, until Mr. Morrison yielded to the strong arm of the law.
But I was alone in the kitchen; the small, square, mirror-black panes reflected many versions of my face, but no other face looked in upon me as I dialed the Meanys' number. It rang longer than I expected, and I almost hung up. Remembering Owen's fever, I was afraid he might be more soundly asleep than usual--and that Mr. and Mrs. Meany would be awakened by my call.
"MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said, when he finally answered the phone.
I told him everything. He was most sympathetic to the notion that I could "remember" the audience at the baseball game by observing the audience at Dan's play; he recommended that he watch with me--two pairs of eyes being better than one. As for my "imagining" that my mother had been waving to my actual father in the last seconds she was alive, Owen Meany believed in trusting such instincts; he said that I must be ON THE RIGHT TRACK, because the idea gave him THE SHIVERS--a sure sign. And as for my desire for Germaine giving me a hard-on, Owen couldn't have been more supportive; if Barb Wiggin could provoke lust in him, there was no shame in Germaine provoking such dreadful feelings in me. Owen had prepared a small sermon on the subject of lust, a feeling he would later describe as A TRUTHFUL PREMONITION THAT DAMNATION IS FOR REAL. As for the unpleasant sensation originating with my father--as for these hated feelings in myself being a first sign of my father's contribution to me--Owen was in complete agreement. Lust, he would later say, was God's way of helping me identify who my father was; in lust had I been conceived, in lust would I discover my father.
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies--inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities--made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
Of course, he agreed with me--how stupid Germaine was, to imagine she'd heard him screaming, all the way from the Gravesend Town Hall!
"I DIDN'T SCREAM THAT LOUDLY," he said indignantly.
It was Grandmother's interpretation of what he had foreseen that provided the only difference of opinion between us. If he had to believe anything, why couldn't he believe Grandmother--that it was Lydia's death that the gravestone foretold; that Owen had simply "seen" the wrong name?
"NO," he said. "IT WAS MY NAME. NOT SCROOGE'S--AND NOT LYDIA'S."
"But that was just your mistake," I said. "You were thinking of yourself--you'd even been writing your own name, just moments before. And you had a very high fever. If that gravestone actually told you anything, it told you that someone was going to die. That someone was Lydia. She's dead, isn't she? And you're not dead--are you?"
"IT WAS MY NAME," he repeated stubbornly.
"Look at it this way: you got it half-right," I told him. I was trying to sound as if I were an old hand at "visions," and at interpreting them. I tried to sound as if I knew more about the matter than Pastor Merrill.
"IT WASN'T JUST MY NAME," Owen said. "I MEAN, NOT THE WAY I EVER WRITE IT--NOT THE WAY I WROTE IT IN THE BABY POWDER. IT WAS MY REAL NAME--IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," he said.
That made me pause; he sounded so unbudging. His "real" name was Paul--his father's name. His real name was Paul O. Meany, Jr.; he'd been baptized a Catholic. Of course, he needed a saint's name, like St. Paul; if there is a St. Owen, I've never heard of him. And because there was already a "Paul" in the family, I suppose that's why they called him "Owen"; where that middle name came from, he never said--I never knew.
"The gravestone said, 'Paul O. Meany, Junior'--is that right?" I asked him.
"IT SAID THE WHOLE THING," Owen repeated. He hung up.
He was so crazy, he drove me crazy! I stayed up drinking orange juice and eating cookies; I put some fresh bacon in the mousetrap and turned out the light. Like my mother, I hate darkness; in the dark, it came to me--what he meant by THE WHOLE THING. I turned on the light; I called him back.
"MERRY CHRISTMAS," he said.
"Was there a date on the gravestone?" I asked him. He gave himself away by hesitating.
"NO," he said.
"What was the date, Owen?" I asked him. He hesitated again.
"THERE WAS NO DATE," Owen said. I wanted to cry--not because I believed a single thing about his stupid "vision," but because it was the first time he had lied to me.
"Merry Christmas," I said; I hung up.
When I turned the light out a second time, there was more darkness in the darkness.
What was the date? How much time had he given himself?
The only question that I wanted to ask the darkness was the one question Scrooge had also wanted an answer to: "'Are these the shadows of the things that Will be or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?'" But the Ghost of the Future was not answering.
6
The Voice
* * *
Above all things that she despised, what my grandmother loathed most was lack of effort; this struck Dan Needham as a peculiar hatred, because Harriet Wheelwright had never worked a day in her life--nor had she ever expected my mother to work; and she never once assigned me a single chore. Nevertheless, in my grandmother's view, it required nearly constant effort to keep track of the world--both our own world and the world outside the sphere of Gravesend--and it required effort and intelligence to make nearly constant comment on one's observations; in these efforts, Grandmother was rigorous and unswerving. It was her belief in the value of effort itself that prevented her from buying a television set.
She was a passionate reader, and she thought that reading was one of the noblest efforts of all; in contrast, she found writing to be a great waste of time--a childish self-indulgence, even messier than finger painting--but she admired reading, which she believed was an unselfish activity that provided information and inspiration. She must have thought it a pity that some poor fools had to waste their lives writing in order for us to have sufficient reading material. Reading also gave one confidence in and familiarity with language, which was a necessary tool for forming those nearly constant comments on what one had observed. Grandmother had her doubts about the radio, although she conceded that the modern world moved at such a pace that keeping up with it defied the written word; listening, after all, required some effort, and the language one heard on the radio was not much worse than the language one increasingly stumbled over in newspapers and magazines.
But she drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch--it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen--and what she imagined there was to watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it. She had protested to the Soldiers' Home, and to the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly--both of which she served as a trustee--that making television sets available to old people would surely hasten their deaths. She was unmoved by the claim made by both these homes for the aged: that the inmates were often too feeble or inattentive to read, and that the radio put them to sleep. My grandmother visited both homes, and what she observed only confirmed her opinions; what Harriet Wheelwright always observed always confirmed her opinions: she saw the process of death hastened. She saw very old, infirm people with their mouths agape; although they were, at best, only partially alert, they gave their stuporous attention to images that my grandmother described as "too surpassing in banality to recall." It was the first time she had actually seen television sets that were turned on, and she was hooked. My grandmother observed that television was draining what scant life remained in the old people "clean out of them"; yet she instantly craved a TV of her own!
My mother's death, which was followed in less than a year by Lydia's death, had much to do with Grandmother's decision to have a television installed at 80 Front Street. My mother had been a big fan of the old Victrola; in the evenings, we'd listened to Sinatra singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra--my mother liked to sing along with Sinatra. "That Frank," she used to say. "He's got a voice that's meant for a woman--but no woman was ever that lucky." I remember a few of her favorites; when I hear them, I'm still tempted to sing along--although I don't have my mother's voice. I don't have Sinatra's voice, either--nor his bullying patriotism. I don't think my mother would have been fond of Sinatra's politics, but she liked what she called his "early" voice, in particular those songs from Sinatra's first sessions with Tommy Dorsey. Because she liked to sing along with Sinatra, she preferred his voice before the war--when he was more subdued and less of a star, when Tommy Dorsey kept him in balance with the band. Her favorite recordings were from 1940--"I'll Be Seeing You," "Fools Rush In," "I Haven't Time to Be a Millionaire," "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow," "All This and Heaven, Too,"
"Do You Keep Your Heart?" "Trade Winds," "The Call of the Canyon"; and, most of all, "Too Romantic."
I had my own radio, and after Mother died, I listened to it more and more; I thought it would upset Grandmother to play--on the Victrola--those old Sinatra songs. When Lydia was alive, my grandmother seemed content with her reading; either she and Lydia took turns reading to each other, or they forced Germaine to read aloud to them--while they rested their eyes and exercised their acute interest in educating Germaine. But after Lydia died, Germaine refused to read aloud to my grandmother; Germaine was convinced that her reading aloud to Lydia had either killed Lydia or hastened her death, and Germaine was resolute in not wanting to murder Grandmother in a similar fashion. For a while, my grandmother read aloud to Germaine; but this afforded no opportunity for Grandmother to rest her eyes, and she would often interrupt her reading to make sure that Germaine was paying proper attention. Germaine could not possibly pay attention to the subject--she was so intent on keeping herself alive for the duration of the reading.
You can see that this was a home already vulnerable to invasion by television. Ethel, for example, would never be the companion to my grandmother that Lydia had been. Lydia had been an alert and appreciative audience to my grandmother's nearly constant comments, but Ethel was entirely unresponsive--efficient but uninspired, dutiful but passive. Dan Needham sensed that it was Ethel's lack of spark that made my grandmother feel old; yet whenever Dan suggested to Grandmother that she might replace Ethel with someone livelier, my grandmother defended Ethel with bulldog loyalty. Wheelrights were snobs, but they were fair-minded; Wheelrights did not fire their servants because they were stodgy and dull. And so Ethel stayed, and my grandmother grew old--old and restless to be entertained; she was vulnerable to invasion by television, too.
Germaine, who was terrified when my grandmother read to her--and too terrified to read aloud to Grandmother at all--had too little to do; she resigned. Wheelrights accept resignations graciously, although I was sorry to see Germaine go. The desire she had provoked in me--as distasteful as it was to me at the time--was a clue to my father; moreover, the lustful fantasies that Germaine provided were, although evil, more entertaining to me than anything I could hear on my radio.
With Lydia gone, and with me spending half my days and nights with Dan, Grandmother didn't need two maids; there was no reason to replace Germaine--Ethel would suffice. And with Germaine gone, I was vulnerable to invasion by television, too.
"YOUR GRANDMOTHER IS GETTING A TELEVISION?" said Owen Meany. The Meanys did not have a television. Dan didn't have one, either; he'd voted against Eisenhower in '52, and he'd promised himself that he wouldn't buy a TV as long as Ike was president. Even the Eastmans didn't have a television. Uncle Alfred wanted one, and Noah and Simon and Hester begged to have one; but TV reception was still rather primitive in the north country, Sawyer Depot received mostly snow, and Aunt Martha refused to build a tower for the necessary antenna--it would be too "unsightly," she said, although Uncle Alfred wanted a television so badly that he claimed he would construct an antenna tower capable of interfering with low-flying planes if it could get him adequate reception.
"You're ge