A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
ite lethal in its application, our senior year at Gravesend. Whenever anyone said anything that was a lot of bullshit to him, Owen Meany used to say, "YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS? THAT'S MADE FOR TELEVISION--THAT'S WHAT THAT IS." And that's what Owen would have said about the Iran-contra hearings--concerning what President Reagan did or didn't "know."
"MADE FOR TELEVISION," he would have said.
That's how he referred to his sessions with Dr. Dolder; the school made him see Dr. Dolder twice a week, and when I asked him to describe his dialogue with the Swiss idiot, Owen said, "MADE FOR TELEVISION." He wouldn't tell me much else about the sessions, but he liked to mock some of the questions Dr. Dolder had asked him by exaggerating the doctor's accent.
"ZO! YOU ARE ATTRACTED TO ZE OLDER VIMMEN--VY IS DAT?"
I wondered if he answered by saying he'd always been fond of my mother--maybe, he'd even been in love with her. That would have caused Dr. Dolder great excitement, I'm sure.
"ZO! ZE VOOMIN YOU KILT MIT ZE BASEBALL--SHE MADE YOU VANT TO PROP-O-SI-TION PEOPLE'S MUDDERS, YES?"
"Come on," I said to Owen. "He's not that stupid!"
"ZO! VITCH FACULTY VIFE HAF YOU GOT YOUR EYES ON?"
"Come on!" I said. "What kind of stuff does he ask you, really?"
"ZO! YOU BELIEF IN GOT--DAT'S FERRY IN-TER-EST-INK!"
Owen would never tell me what really went on in those sessions. I knew Dr. Dolder was a moron; but I also knew that even a moron would have discovered some disturbing things about Owen Meany. For example, Dr. Dolder--dolt though he was--would have heard at least a little of the GOD'S INSTRUMENT theme; even Dr. Dolder would have uncovered Owen's perplexing and troubling anti-Catholicism. And Owen's particular brand of fatalism would have been challenging for a good psychiatrist; I'm sure Dr. Dolder was scared to death about it. And would Owen have gone so far as to tell Dr. Dolder about Scrooge's grave? Would Owen have suggested that he KNEW how much time he had left on our earth?
"What do you tell him?" I asked Owen.
"THE TRUTH," said Owen Meany. "I ANSWER EVERY QUESTION HE ASKS TRUTHFULLY, AND WITHOUT HUMOR," he added.
"My God!" I said. "You could really get yourself in trouble!"
"VERY FUNNY," he said.
"But, Owen," I said. "You tell him everything you think about, and everything you believe? Not everything you believe, right?" I said.
"EVERYTHING," said Owen Meany. "EVERYTHING HE ASKS."
"Jesus Christ!" I said. "And what has he got to say? What's he told you?"
"HE TOLD ME TO TALK WITH PASTOR MERRILL--SO I HAVE TO SEE HIM TWICE A WEEK, TOO," Owen said. "AND WITH EACH OF THEM, I SIT THERE AND TALK ABOUT WHAT I TALKED ABOUT TO THE OTHER ONE. I GUESS THEY'RE FINDING OUT A LOT ABOUT EACH OTHER."
"I see," I said; but I didn't.
Owen had taken all the Rev. Lewis Merrill's courses at the academy; he had consumed all the Religion and Scripture courses so voraciously that there weren't any left for him in his senior year, and Mr. Merrill had permitted him to pursue some independent study in the field. Owen was particularly interested in the miracle of the resurrection; he was interested in miracles in general, and life after death in particular, and he was writing an interminable term paper that related these subjects to that old theme from Isaiah 5:20, which he loved. "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil." Owen's opinion of Pastor Merrill had improved considerably from those earlier years when the issue of the minister's doubt had bothered Owen's dogmatic side; Mr. Merrill had to be aware--awkwardly so--of the role The Voice had played in securing his appointment as school minister. When they sat together in Pastor Merrill's vestry office, I couldn't imagine them--not either of them--as being quite at ease; yet there appeared to be much respect between them.
Owen did not have a relaxing effect on anyone, and no one I knew was ever less relaxed than the Rev. Lewis Merrill; and so I imagined that Hurd's Church would be creaking excessively during their interviews--or whatever they called them. They would both be fidgeting away in the vestry office, Mr. Merrill opening and closing the old desk drawers, and sliding that old chair on the casters from one end of the desk to the other--while Owen Meany cracked his knuckles, crossed and uncrossed his little legs, and shrugged and sighed and reached out his hands to the Rev. Mr. Merrill's desk, if only to pick up a paperweight or a prayer book and put it down again.
"What do you talk about with Mister Merrill?" I asked him.
"I TALK ABOUT DOCTOR DOLDER WITH PASTOR MERRILL, AND I TALK ABOUT PASTOR MERRILL WITH DOCTOR DOLDER," Owen said.
"No, but I know you like Pastor Merrill--I mean, sort of. Don't you?" I asked him.
"WE TALK ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH," said Owen Meany.
"I see," I said; but I didn't. I didn't realize the degree to which Owen Meany never got tired of talking about that.
Toronto: July 21, 1987--it is a scorcher in town today. I was getting my hair cut in my usual place, near the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, and the girl-barber (something I'll never get used to!) asked me the usual: "How short?"
"As short as Oliver North's," I said.
"Who?" she said. O Canada! But I'm sure there are young girls cutting hair in the United States who don't know who Colonel North is, either; and in a few years, almost no one will remember him. How many people remember Melvin Laird? How many people remember Gen. Creighton Abrams or Gen. William Westmoreland--not to mention, which one replaced the other? And who replaced Gen. Maxwell Taylor? Who replaced Gen. Curtis LeMay? And whom did Ellsworth Bunker replace? Remember that? Of course you don't!
There was a terrible din of construction going on outside the barbershop at the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, but I was sure that my girl-barber had heard me.
"Oliver North," I repeated. "Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, United States Marine Corps," I said.
"I guess you want it really short," she said.
"Yes, please," I said; I've simply got to stop reading The New York Times! There's nothing in the news that's worth remembering. Why, then, do I have such a hard time forgetting it?
No one had a memory like Owen Meany. By the end of the winter term of '62, I'll bet he never once confused what he'd said to Dr. Dolder with what he'd said to the Rev. Lewis Merrill--but I'll bet they were confused! By the end of the winter term, I'll bet they thought that either he should have been thrown out of school or he should have been made the new headmaster. By the end of every winter term at Gravesend Academy, the New Hampshire weather had driven everyone half crazy.
Who doesn't get tired of getting up in the dark? And in Owen's case, he had to get up earlier than most; because of his scholarship job, as a faculty waiter, he had to arrive in the dining-hall kitchen at least one hour before breakfast--on those mornings he waited on tables. The waiters had to set the tables--and eat their own breakfasts, in the kitchen--before the other students and the faculty arrived; then they had to clear the tables between the official end of breakfast and the beginning of morning meeting--as the new headmaster had so successfully called what used to be our morning chapel.
That Saturday morning in February, the tomato-red pickup was dead and he'd had to jump-start the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck and get it rolling down Maiden Hill before it would start--it was so cold. He did not like to have dining-hall duty, as it was called, on the weekend; and there was the added problem of him being a day boy and having to drive himself that extra distance to school. I guess he was cross when he got there; and there was another car parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, where he always parked. The trailer-truck was so big that the presence of only one other car in the circular driveway would force him to park the truck out on Front Street--and in the winter months, there was a ban regarding parking on Front Street, a snow-removal restriction that the town imposed, and Owen was hopping mad about that, too. The car that kept Owen from parking his truck in the circular driveway adjacent to the Main Academy Building was Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen Beetle.
In keeping with the lovable and exasperating tidiness of his countrymen, Dr. Dolder was exact and predictable about his little VW. His bachelor apartment was in Quincy Hall--a dormitory on the far side of the Gravesend campus; it seemed to be "the far side" from everywhere, but it was as far from the Main Academy Building as you could get and still be on the Gravesend campus. Dr. Dolder parked his VW by the Main Academy Building only when he'd been drinking.
He was a frequent dinner guest of Randy and Sam White's; he parked by the Main Academy Building when he ate with the Whites--and when he drank too much, he left his car there and walked home. The campus was not so large that he couldn't (or shouldn't) have walked both ways--to dinner and back--but Dr. Dolder was one of those Europeans who had fallen in love with a most American peculiarity: how Americans will walk nowhere if they can drive there. In Zurich, I'm sure, Dr. Dolder walked everywhere; but he drove his little VW across the Gravesend campus, as if he were touring the New England states.
Whenever Dr. Dolder's VW was parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, everyone knew that the doctor was simply exercising his especially Swiss prudence; he was not a drunk, and the few small roads he might have traveled on to drive himself from dinner at the Whites' to Quincy Hall would not have given him much opportunity to maim many of the sober and innocent residents of Gravesend. There's a good chance he would never have encountered anyone; but Dr. Dolder loved his Beetle, and he was a cautious man.
Once--in the fresh snow upon his Volkswagen's windshield--a first-year German student had written with his finger: Herr Doktor Dolder hat zu viel betrunken! I could usually tell--when I saw Owen, either at breakfast or at morning meeting--if Dr. Dolder had had too much to drink the night before; if it was winter, and if Owen was surly-looking, I knew he'd faced an early-morning parking problem. I knew when the pickup had failed to start--and there was no room for him to park the trailer-truck--just by looking at him.
"What's up?" I would ask him.
"THAT TIGHT-ASS TIPSY SWISS DINK!" Owen Meany would say.
"I see," I would say.
And this particular February morning, I can imagine how the Swiss psychiatrist's Beetle would have affected him.
I guess Owen must have been sitting in the frigid cab of the truck--you could drive that big hauler for an hour before you'd even notice that the heater was on--and I'll bet he was smoking, and probably talking to himself, too, when he looked into the path of his headlights and saw about three quarters of the basketball team walking his way. In the cold air, their breathing must have made him think that they were smoking, too--although he knew all of them, and knew they didn't smoke; he entertained them at least two or three times a week by his devotion to practicing the shot.
He told me later that there were about eight or ten basketball players--not quite the whole team. All of them lived in the same dorm--it was one of the traditional jock dorms on the campus; and because the basketball team was playing at some faraway school, they were on their way to the dining hall for an early breakfast with the waiters who had dining-hall duty. They were big, happy guys with goofy strides, and they didn't mind being out of bed before it was light--they were going to miss their Saturday morning classes, and they saw the whole day as an adventure. Owen Meany was not quite in such a cheerful mood; he rolled down the window of the big truck's frosty cab and called them over.
They were friendly, and--as always--extremely glad to see him, and they jumped onto the flatbed of the trailer and roughhoused with each other, pushing each other off the flatbed, and so forth.
"YOU GUYS LOOK VERY STRONG TODAY," said Owen Meany, and they hooted in agreement. In the path of the truck's headlights, the innocent shape of Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen Beetle stood encased in ice and dusted very lightly with last night's snow. "I'LL BET YOU GUYS AREN'T STRONG ENOUGH TO PICK UP THAT VOLKSWAGEN," said Owen Meany. But, of course, they were strong enough; they were not only strong enough to lift Dr. Dolder's Beetle--they were strong enough to carry it out of town.
The captain of the basketball team was an agreeable giant; when Owen practiced the shot with this guy, the captain lifted Owen with one hand.
"No problem," the captain said to Owen. "Where do you want it?"
Owen swore to me that it wasn't until that moment that he got THE IDEA.
It's clear to me that Owen never overcame his irritation with Randy White for moving morning chapel from Hurd's Church to the Main Academy Building and calling it morning meeting, that he still thought of that as the headmaster's GRANDSTANDING. The sets for Dan's winter-term play had already been dismantled; the stage of The Great Hall, as it was called, was bare. And that broad, sweeping, marble stairway that led up to The Great Hall's triumphant double doors ... all of that, Owen was sure, was big enough to permit the easy entrance of Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen. And wouldn't that be something: to have that perky little automobile parked on center stage--a kind of cheerful, harmless message to greet the headmaster and the entire student body; a little something to make them smile, as the dog days of March bore down upon us and the long-awaited break for spring vacation could not come soon enough to save us all.
"CARRY IT INTO THE MAIN ACADEMY BUILDING," Owen Meany told the captain of the basketball team. "TAKE IT UPSTAIRS TO THE GREAT HALL AND CARRY IT UP ON THE STAGE," said The Voice. "PUT IT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STAGE, FACING FORWARD--RIGHT NEXT TO THE HEADMASTER'S PODIUM. BUT BE CAREFUL YOU DON'T SCRATCH IT--AND FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T DROP IT! DON'T PUT A MARK ON ANYTHING," he cautioned the basketball players. "DON'T DO THE SLIGHTEST DAMAGE--NOT TO THE CAR AND NOT TO THE STAIRS, NOT TO THE DOORS OF THE GREAT HALL, NOT TO THE STAGE," he said. "MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT FLEW UP THERE," he told them. "MAKE IT LOOK LIKE AN ANGEL DROVE IT ONSTAGE!" said Owen Meany.
When the basketball players carried off Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen, Owen thought very carefully about using the available parking space; he decided it was wiser to drive all the way over to Waterhouse Hall and park next to Dan's car, instead. Not even Dan saw him park the truck there; and if anyone had seen him running across the campus, as it was growing light, that would not have seemed strange--he was just a faculty waiter with dining-hall duty, hurrying so he wouldn't be late.
He ate his breakfast in the dining-hall kitchen with the other waiters and with an extraordinarily hungry and jolly bunch of basketball players. Owen was setting the head faculty table when the captain of the basketball team said good-bye to him.
"There wasn't the slightest damage--not to anything," the captain assured him.
"HAVE A GOOD GAME!" said Owen Meany.
It was one of the janitors in the Main Academy Building who discovered the Beetle onstage--when he was raising the blinds on the high windows that welcomed so much morning light into The Great Hall. Naturally, the janitor called the headmaster. From the kitchen window of his obtrusive house, directly across from the Main Academy Building, Headmaster White could see the small rectangle of bare ground where Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen had spent the night.
According to Dan Needham, the headmaster called him while he was getting out of the shower; most of the faculty made breakfast for themselves at home, or they skipped breakfast rather than eat in the school dining hall. The headmaster told Dan that he was rounding up all able-bodied faculty for the purpose of removing Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen from the stage of The Great Hall--before morning meeting. The students, the headmaster told Dan, were not going to have "the last laugh." Dan said he didn't feel particularly able-bodied himself, but he'd certainly try to help out. When he hung up the phone, he was laughing to himself--until he looked out the window of Waterhouse Hall and saw the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck parked next to his own car. Dan suddenly thought that THE IDEA of putting Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen on the stage of The Great Hall had Owen Meany's name written all over it.
That was exactly what the headmaster said, when he and about a dozen, not-very-able-bodied faculty members, along with a few hefty faculty wives, were struggling with Dr. Dolder's Beetle.
"This has Owen Meany's name written all over it!" the headmaster said.
"I don't think Owen could lift a Volkswagen," Dan Needham ventured cautiously.
"I mean, the idea!" the headmaster said.
As Dan describes it, the faculty were ill-trained for lifting anything; even the athletic types were neither as strong nor as flexible as young basketball players--and they should have considered something basic to their task: it is much easier to carry something heavy and awkward upstairs than it is to lug it down.
Mr. Tubulari, the track-and-field coach, was overzealous in his descent of the stairs from the stage; he fell off and landed on the hard, wooden bench in the front row of assembled seats--a hymnal fortunately cushioned the blow to his head, or he might have been knocked senseless. Dan Needham described Mr. Tubulari as "already senseless, before his fall," but the track-and-field coach severely sprained his ankle in the mishap and had to be carried to the Hubbard Infirmary. That left even fewer less-than-able-bodied faculty--and some beefy wives--to deal with the unfortunate wreck of Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen, which now stood on its rear end, which is a Beetle's heavy end, where its engine is. The little car, standing so oddly upright, appeared to be saluting or applauding the weary faculty who had so ungracefully dropped it offstage.
"It's a good thing Dr. Dolder isn't here," Dan observed.
Because the headmaster was so riled up, no one wished to point out the obvious: that they would have been better off to let the students have "the last laugh"--then the faculty could have ordered a strong, healthy bunch of students to carry the car safely offstage. If the students wrecked the car in the course of its removal from the Main Academy Building, then the students would have been responsible. As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper--and in a hurry.
The students would be arriving for morning meeting in another ten or fifteen minutes; a smashed Volkswagen sitting on its rear end in the front of The Great Hall might very well produce a louder and longer laugh than a natty, well-cared-for car facing them, undamaged, onstage. But there was brief discussion, if any, of this
"MADE FOR TELEVISION," he would have said.
That's how he referred to his sessions with Dr. Dolder; the school made him see Dr. Dolder twice a week, and when I asked him to describe his dialogue with the Swiss idiot, Owen said, "MADE FOR TELEVISION." He wouldn't tell me much else about the sessions, but he liked to mock some of the questions Dr. Dolder had asked him by exaggerating the doctor's accent.
"ZO! YOU ARE ATTRACTED TO ZE OLDER VIMMEN--VY IS DAT?"
I wondered if he answered by saying he'd always been fond of my mother--maybe, he'd even been in love with her. That would have caused Dr. Dolder great excitement, I'm sure.
"ZO! ZE VOOMIN YOU KILT MIT ZE BASEBALL--SHE MADE YOU VANT TO PROP-O-SI-TION PEOPLE'S MUDDERS, YES?"
"Come on," I said to Owen. "He's not that stupid!"
"ZO! VITCH FACULTY VIFE HAF YOU GOT YOUR EYES ON?"
"Come on!" I said. "What kind of stuff does he ask you, really?"
"ZO! YOU BELIEF IN GOT--DAT'S FERRY IN-TER-EST-INK!"
Owen would never tell me what really went on in those sessions. I knew Dr. Dolder was a moron; but I also knew that even a moron would have discovered some disturbing things about Owen Meany. For example, Dr. Dolder--dolt though he was--would have heard at least a little of the GOD'S INSTRUMENT theme; even Dr. Dolder would have uncovered Owen's perplexing and troubling anti-Catholicism. And Owen's particular brand of fatalism would have been challenging for a good psychiatrist; I'm sure Dr. Dolder was scared to death about it. And would Owen have gone so far as to tell Dr. Dolder about Scrooge's grave? Would Owen have suggested that he KNEW how much time he had left on our earth?
"What do you tell him?" I asked Owen.
"THE TRUTH," said Owen Meany. "I ANSWER EVERY QUESTION HE ASKS TRUTHFULLY, AND WITHOUT HUMOR," he added.
"My God!" I said. "You could really get yourself in trouble!"
"VERY FUNNY," he said.
"But, Owen," I said. "You tell him everything you think about, and everything you believe? Not everything you believe, right?" I said.
"EVERYTHING," said Owen Meany. "EVERYTHING HE ASKS."
"Jesus Christ!" I said. "And what has he got to say? What's he told you?"
"HE TOLD ME TO TALK WITH PASTOR MERRILL--SO I HAVE TO SEE HIM TWICE A WEEK, TOO," Owen said. "AND WITH EACH OF THEM, I SIT THERE AND TALK ABOUT WHAT I TALKED ABOUT TO THE OTHER ONE. I GUESS THEY'RE FINDING OUT A LOT ABOUT EACH OTHER."
"I see," I said; but I didn't.
Owen had taken all the Rev. Lewis Merrill's courses at the academy; he had consumed all the Religion and Scripture courses so voraciously that there weren't any left for him in his senior year, and Mr. Merrill had permitted him to pursue some independent study in the field. Owen was particularly interested in the miracle of the resurrection; he was interested in miracles in general, and life after death in particular, and he was writing an interminable term paper that related these subjects to that old theme from Isaiah 5:20, which he loved. "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil." Owen's opinion of Pastor Merrill had improved considerably from those earlier years when the issue of the minister's doubt had bothered Owen's dogmatic side; Mr. Merrill had to be aware--awkwardly so--of the role The Voice had played in securing his appointment as school minister. When they sat together in Pastor Merrill's vestry office, I couldn't imagine them--not either of them--as being quite at ease; yet there appeared to be much respect between them.
Owen did not have a relaxing effect on anyone, and no one I knew was ever less relaxed than the Rev. Lewis Merrill; and so I imagined that Hurd's Church would be creaking excessively during their interviews--or whatever they called them. They would both be fidgeting away in the vestry office, Mr. Merrill opening and closing the old desk drawers, and sliding that old chair on the casters from one end of the desk to the other--while Owen Meany cracked his knuckles, crossed and uncrossed his little legs, and shrugged and sighed and reached out his hands to the Rev. Mr. Merrill's desk, if only to pick up a paperweight or a prayer book and put it down again.
"What do you talk about with Mister Merrill?" I asked him.
"I TALK ABOUT DOCTOR DOLDER WITH PASTOR MERRILL, AND I TALK ABOUT PASTOR MERRILL WITH DOCTOR DOLDER," Owen said.
"No, but I know you like Pastor Merrill--I mean, sort of. Don't you?" I asked him.
"WE TALK ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH," said Owen Meany.
"I see," I said; but I didn't. I didn't realize the degree to which Owen Meany never got tired of talking about that.
Toronto: July 21, 1987--it is a scorcher in town today. I was getting my hair cut in my usual place, near the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, and the girl-barber (something I'll never get used to!) asked me the usual: "How short?"
"As short as Oliver North's," I said.
"Who?" she said. O Canada! But I'm sure there are young girls cutting hair in the United States who don't know who Colonel North is, either; and in a few years, almost no one will remember him. How many people remember Melvin Laird? How many people remember Gen. Creighton Abrams or Gen. William Westmoreland--not to mention, which one replaced the other? And who replaced Gen. Maxwell Taylor? Who replaced Gen. Curtis LeMay? And whom did Ellsworth Bunker replace? Remember that? Of course you don't!
There was a terrible din of construction going on outside the barbershop at the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, but I was sure that my girl-barber had heard me.
"Oliver North," I repeated. "Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, United States Marine Corps," I said.
"I guess you want it really short," she said.
"Yes, please," I said; I've simply got to stop reading The New York Times! There's nothing in the news that's worth remembering. Why, then, do I have such a hard time forgetting it?
No one had a memory like Owen Meany. By the end of the winter term of '62, I'll bet he never once confused what he'd said to Dr. Dolder with what he'd said to the Rev. Lewis Merrill--but I'll bet they were confused! By the end of the winter term, I'll bet they thought that either he should have been thrown out of school or he should have been made the new headmaster. By the end of every winter term at Gravesend Academy, the New Hampshire weather had driven everyone half crazy.
Who doesn't get tired of getting up in the dark? And in Owen's case, he had to get up earlier than most; because of his scholarship job, as a faculty waiter, he had to arrive in the dining-hall kitchen at least one hour before breakfast--on those mornings he waited on tables. The waiters had to set the tables--and eat their own breakfasts, in the kitchen--before the other students and the faculty arrived; then they had to clear the tables between the official end of breakfast and the beginning of morning meeting--as the new headmaster had so successfully called what used to be our morning chapel.
That Saturday morning in February, the tomato-red pickup was dead and he'd had to jump-start the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck and get it rolling down Maiden Hill before it would start--it was so cold. He did not like to have dining-hall duty, as it was called, on the weekend; and there was the added problem of him being a day boy and having to drive himself that extra distance to school. I guess he was cross when he got there; and there was another car parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, where he always parked. The trailer-truck was so big that the presence of only one other car in the circular driveway would force him to park the truck out on Front Street--and in the winter months, there was a ban regarding parking on Front Street, a snow-removal restriction that the town imposed, and Owen was hopping mad about that, too. The car that kept Owen from parking his truck in the circular driveway adjacent to the Main Academy Building was Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen Beetle.
In keeping with the lovable and exasperating tidiness of his countrymen, Dr. Dolder was exact and predictable about his little VW. His bachelor apartment was in Quincy Hall--a dormitory on the far side of the Gravesend campus; it seemed to be "the far side" from everywhere, but it was as far from the Main Academy Building as you could get and still be on the Gravesend campus. Dr. Dolder parked his VW by the Main Academy Building only when he'd been drinking.
He was a frequent dinner guest of Randy and Sam White's; he parked by the Main Academy Building when he ate with the Whites--and when he drank too much, he left his car there and walked home. The campus was not so large that he couldn't (or shouldn't) have walked both ways--to dinner and back--but Dr. Dolder was one of those Europeans who had fallen in love with a most American peculiarity: how Americans will walk nowhere if they can drive there. In Zurich, I'm sure, Dr. Dolder walked everywhere; but he drove his little VW across the Gravesend campus, as if he were touring the New England states.
Whenever Dr. Dolder's VW was parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, everyone knew that the doctor was simply exercising his especially Swiss prudence; he was not a drunk, and the few small roads he might have traveled on to drive himself from dinner at the Whites' to Quincy Hall would not have given him much opportunity to maim many of the sober and innocent residents of Gravesend. There's a good chance he would never have encountered anyone; but Dr. Dolder loved his Beetle, and he was a cautious man.
Once--in the fresh snow upon his Volkswagen's windshield--a first-year German student had written with his finger: Herr Doktor Dolder hat zu viel betrunken! I could usually tell--when I saw Owen, either at breakfast or at morning meeting--if Dr. Dolder had had too much to drink the night before; if it was winter, and if Owen was surly-looking, I knew he'd faced an early-morning parking problem. I knew when the pickup had failed to start--and there was no room for him to park the trailer-truck--just by looking at him.
"What's up?" I would ask him.
"THAT TIGHT-ASS TIPSY SWISS DINK!" Owen Meany would say.
"I see," I would say.
And this particular February morning, I can imagine how the Swiss psychiatrist's Beetle would have affected him.
I guess Owen must have been sitting in the frigid cab of the truck--you could drive that big hauler for an hour before you'd even notice that the heater was on--and I'll bet he was smoking, and probably talking to himself, too, when he looked into the path of his headlights and saw about three quarters of the basketball team walking his way. In the cold air, their breathing must have made him think that they were smoking, too--although he knew all of them, and knew they didn't smoke; he entertained them at least two or three times a week by his devotion to practicing the shot.
He told me later that there were about eight or ten basketball players--not quite the whole team. All of them lived in the same dorm--it was one of the traditional jock dorms on the campus; and because the basketball team was playing at some faraway school, they were on their way to the dining hall for an early breakfast with the waiters who had dining-hall duty. They were big, happy guys with goofy strides, and they didn't mind being out of bed before it was light--they were going to miss their Saturday morning classes, and they saw the whole day as an adventure. Owen Meany was not quite in such a cheerful mood; he rolled down the window of the big truck's frosty cab and called them over.
They were friendly, and--as always--extremely glad to see him, and they jumped onto the flatbed of the trailer and roughhoused with each other, pushing each other off the flatbed, and so forth.
"YOU GUYS LOOK VERY STRONG TODAY," said Owen Meany, and they hooted in agreement. In the path of the truck's headlights, the innocent shape of Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen Beetle stood encased in ice and dusted very lightly with last night's snow. "I'LL BET YOU GUYS AREN'T STRONG ENOUGH TO PICK UP THAT VOLKSWAGEN," said Owen Meany. But, of course, they were strong enough; they were not only strong enough to lift Dr. Dolder's Beetle--they were strong enough to carry it out of town.
The captain of the basketball team was an agreeable giant; when Owen practiced the shot with this guy, the captain lifted Owen with one hand.
"No problem," the captain said to Owen. "Where do you want it?"
Owen swore to me that it wasn't until that moment that he got THE IDEA.
It's clear to me that Owen never overcame his irritation with Randy White for moving morning chapel from Hurd's Church to the Main Academy Building and calling it morning meeting, that he still thought of that as the headmaster's GRANDSTANDING. The sets for Dan's winter-term play had already been dismantled; the stage of The Great Hall, as it was called, was bare. And that broad, sweeping, marble stairway that led up to The Great Hall's triumphant double doors ... all of that, Owen was sure, was big enough to permit the easy entrance of Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen. And wouldn't that be something: to have that perky little automobile parked on center stage--a kind of cheerful, harmless message to greet the headmaster and the entire student body; a little something to make them smile, as the dog days of March bore down upon us and the long-awaited break for spring vacation could not come soon enough to save us all.
"CARRY IT INTO THE MAIN ACADEMY BUILDING," Owen Meany told the captain of the basketball team. "TAKE IT UPSTAIRS TO THE GREAT HALL AND CARRY IT UP ON THE STAGE," said The Voice. "PUT IT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STAGE, FACING FORWARD--RIGHT NEXT TO THE HEADMASTER'S PODIUM. BUT BE CAREFUL YOU DON'T SCRATCH IT--AND FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T DROP IT! DON'T PUT A MARK ON ANYTHING," he cautioned the basketball players. "DON'T DO THE SLIGHTEST DAMAGE--NOT TO THE CAR AND NOT TO THE STAIRS, NOT TO THE DOORS OF THE GREAT HALL, NOT TO THE STAGE," he said. "MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT FLEW UP THERE," he told them. "MAKE IT LOOK LIKE AN ANGEL DROVE IT ONSTAGE!" said Owen Meany.
When the basketball players carried off Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen, Owen thought very carefully about using the available parking space; he decided it was wiser to drive all the way over to Waterhouse Hall and park next to Dan's car, instead. Not even Dan saw him park the truck there; and if anyone had seen him running across the campus, as it was growing light, that would not have seemed strange--he was just a faculty waiter with dining-hall duty, hurrying so he wouldn't be late.
He ate his breakfast in the dining-hall kitchen with the other waiters and with an extraordinarily hungry and jolly bunch of basketball players. Owen was setting the head faculty table when the captain of the basketball team said good-bye to him.
"There wasn't the slightest damage--not to anything," the captain assured him.
"HAVE A GOOD GAME!" said Owen Meany.
It was one of the janitors in the Main Academy Building who discovered the Beetle onstage--when he was raising the blinds on the high windows that welcomed so much morning light into The Great Hall. Naturally, the janitor called the headmaster. From the kitchen window of his obtrusive house, directly across from the Main Academy Building, Headmaster White could see the small rectangle of bare ground where Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen had spent the night.
According to Dan Needham, the headmaster called him while he was getting out of the shower; most of the faculty made breakfast for themselves at home, or they skipped breakfast rather than eat in the school dining hall. The headmaster told Dan that he was rounding up all able-bodied faculty for the purpose of removing Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen from the stage of The Great Hall--before morning meeting. The students, the headmaster told Dan, were not going to have "the last laugh." Dan said he didn't feel particularly able-bodied himself, but he'd certainly try to help out. When he hung up the phone, he was laughing to himself--until he looked out the window of Waterhouse Hall and saw the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck parked next to his own car. Dan suddenly thought that THE IDEA of putting Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen on the stage of The Great Hall had Owen Meany's name written all over it.
That was exactly what the headmaster said, when he and about a dozen, not-very-able-bodied faculty members, along with a few hefty faculty wives, were struggling with Dr. Dolder's Beetle.
"This has Owen Meany's name written all over it!" the headmaster said.
"I don't think Owen could lift a Volkswagen," Dan Needham ventured cautiously.
"I mean, the idea!" the headmaster said.
As Dan describes it, the faculty were ill-trained for lifting anything; even the athletic types were neither as strong nor as flexible as young basketball players--and they should have considered something basic to their task: it is much easier to carry something heavy and awkward upstairs than it is to lug it down.
Mr. Tubulari, the track-and-field coach, was overzealous in his descent of the stairs from the stage; he fell off and landed on the hard, wooden bench in the front row of assembled seats--a hymnal fortunately cushioned the blow to his head, or he might have been knocked senseless. Dan Needham described Mr. Tubulari as "already senseless, before his fall," but the track-and-field coach severely sprained his ankle in the mishap and had to be carried to the Hubbard Infirmary. That left even fewer less-than-able-bodied faculty--and some beefy wives--to deal with the unfortunate wreck of Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen, which now stood on its rear end, which is a Beetle's heavy end, where its engine is. The little car, standing so oddly upright, appeared to be saluting or applauding the weary faculty who had so ungracefully dropped it offstage.
"It's a good thing Dr. Dolder isn't here," Dan observed.
Because the headmaster was so riled up, no one wished to point out the obvious: that they would have been better off to let the students have "the last laugh"--then the faculty could have ordered a strong, healthy bunch of students to carry the car safely offstage. If the students wrecked the car in the course of its removal from the Main Academy Building, then the students would have been responsible. As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper--and in a hurry.
The students would be arriving for morning meeting in another ten or fifteen minutes; a smashed Volkswagen sitting on its rear end in the front of The Great Hall might very well produce a louder and longer laugh than a natty, well-cared-for car facing them, undamaged, onstage. But there was brief discussion, if any, of this