A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapters 3–4

Dan Needham not only took over the dramatic performances of the Gravesend Academy boys, he revitalized the amateur theatrical company of our small town, the formerly lackluster Gravesend Players. Dan talked everyone into The Gravesend Players; he got half the faculty at the academy to bring out the hams in themselves, and he roused the histrionic natures of half the townspeople by inviting them to try out for his productions.

Although he did not (at the time) delineate the plot of this Divine Narrative to me, I know that’s what he believed: he, Owen Meany, had interrupted the Angel of Death at her holy work; she had reassigned the task—she gave it to him.

Mr. Fish was as afraid of my grandmother as Owen was; at least, regarding all matters concerning the zoning laws and the traffic on Front Street, he was always extremely deferential to her.

Dan Needham was right, as usual: “brilliant but preposterous”—that was such an apt description of The Granite Mouse; that was exactly what I thought Owen Meany was, “brilliant but preposterous.”

Even my grandmother, who was ever alert for what she feared was her wayward daughter’s proclivity to jump into things, was impatient with my mother to set a date for the wedding.

Even my grandmother, who was ever alert for what she feared was her wayward daughter’s proclivity to jump into things, was impatient with my mother to set a date for the wedding.

But neither my grandmother nor I dared to postulate this theory to my mother, and Dan Needham was clearly untroubled by the ongoing singing lessons, and the ongoing one night away; or else Dan possessed some reassuring piece of knowledge that remained a secret from my grandmother and me.

Whereas the Rev. Mr. Merrill had heeded his calling as a young man—he had always been in, and of, the church—the Rev. Mr. Wiggin was a former airline pilot; some difficulty with his eyesight had forced his early retirement from the skies, and he had descended to our wary town with a newfound fervor—the zeal of the convert giving him the healthy but frantic appearance of one of those “elder” citizens who persist in entering vigorous sporting competitions in the over-fifty category.

Whereas Pastor Merrill spoke an educated language—he’d been an English major at Princeton; he’d heard Niebuhr and Tillich lecture at Union Theological—Rector Wiggin spoke in ex-pilot homilies; he was a pulpit-thumper who had no doubt.

The Rev. Mr. Wiggin was especially fond of the word “firmament”; there was always a firmament in his Bible selections.

The Lord is surrounded by seraphim. One of the seraphim flies to Isaiah, who is complaining that he’s “a man of unclean lips.” Not for long; not according to Isaiah. The seraphim touches Isaiah’s mouth with “a burning coal” and Isaiah is as good as new.

But his family labored under a plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even their proneness to illness, which was remarkable.

No one could remember the denomination of the school minister, a sepulchral old gentleman who favored bow ties and had the habit of pinning his vestment to the floor with an errant stab of his cane; he suffered from gout.

The gray granite edifice of Hurd’s Church, which was so plain it might have been a Registry of Deeds or a Town Library or a Public Water Works, seemed to have composed itself around old Mr. Scammon’s gouty limp and his sepulchral features.

Then Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wiggin indulged in a kind of face-off, with each of them demonstrating his particular notion of pertinent passages from the Bible—Mr. Merrill’s passages being more “pertinent,” Mr. Wiggin’s more flowery.

It was Owen Meany who then blew his nose, which drew my attention to his pew, where Owen sat on a precarious stack of hymnals—in order to see over the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular.

It was a muggy day with a hot, hazy sun, and my grandmother complained that her rose garden was not flattered by the weather; indeed, the roses looked wilted by the heat. It was the kind of day that produces a torpor that can be refreshed by nothing less than a violent thunderstorm; my grandmother complained of the likelihood of a thunderstorm, too.

Her brothers predictably balked at this and made derisive comments regarding the desirability of holding Hester’s panties—under any circumstances.

We went and stared at the wedding presents, until I acknowledged the propitious placement of the present from Owen and his father.

And although there was much mirth in evidence at my mother’s wedding, and even my grandmother exhibited an unusual tolerance for the many young and not-so-young adults who were cavorting and jolly with drink, the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a funeral.

I’m certain that his rearranging of my mother’s body in its repose had been the only time he had ever touched her; both the memory of that, and of Police Chief Pike’s inquiries regarding the “instrument of death,” the “murder weapon,” had clearly rattled Mr. Chickering, who wept openly at the funeral, as if he were mourning the death of baseball itself.

He missed a year of competition with a knee injury, and managed to finagle a fifth year of college—retaining his student draft deferment for the extra year. After that, he was “draft material,” but he rather desperately strove to miss the trip to Vietnam by poisoning himself for his physical.

It’s not the fault of Canon Mackie that he’ll never replace Canon Campbell in my heart; Canon Mackie is warm and kind—and his loquaciousness doesn’t offend me.

“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus says.

And before I received Holy Communion, I balked at the general Confession.

Dan drank too much, and he filled the empty, echoing dormitory with his strident caroling; his rendition of the Christmas carols was quite painfully a far cry from my mother’s singing.

The second-floor faculty occupant had gone home for Christmas—like one of the boys himself, young Mr. Peabody, a fledgling Math instructor, and a bachelor not likely to improve upon his single status, was what my mother had called a “Nervous Nelly.”

A well-liked teacher, of liberal methods not universally favored by the stodgier Gravesend faculty, Mr. Brinker-Smith enjoyed all opportunities to bring “life,” as he called it, into the classroom.

I preferred to think that the rooms we searched were more haphazard and less revealing than Owen imagined—after all, they were supposed to be the monastic cells of transient scholars; they were something between a nest and a hotel room, they were not natural abodes, and what we found there was a random disorder and a depressing sameness.

It was in the third-floor room of a senior named Potter—an advisee of Dan’s—that Owen found a half-dozen or more prophylactics, in their foil wrappers, not very ably concealed in the sock compartment of the dresser drawers.

This part of our lives in the near future was especially hard for us to imagine; but I realize now that the ritual we enacted in Potter’s daring room also had the significance of religious rebellion for Owen Meany—it was but one more affront to the Catholics whom he had, in his own words, ESCAPED.

The first rehearsal, in the nave of the church, was held on the Second Sunday of Advent and followed a celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

Like most things that happened to Harold Crosby, his fall was more astonishing for its awkwardness than for anything intrinsically spectacular.

“The apparatus—” she started to say, but the rector silenced her with an admonishing wave of his hand. Surely you’re not going to make the poor boy feel self-conscious about his weight, the rector’s glance toward his wife implied; surely the wires and the harness are strong enough.

“No touching Baby Jesus.”
“But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation.

And so it came to pass that the Virgin Mary sulked through our rehearsal—a mother denied the tactile pleasures of her own infant!

It is time to be critical of Canon Mackie’s cassock; it is the color of pea soup.

The dark-stained, wooden buttresses against the high, vaulted, white-plaster ceiling accentuate how well lit the church is; despite the edifice’s predominance of stone and stained glass, there are no corners lost to darkness or to gloom.

The wooden buttresses are quite elaborate—they are wainscoted, and even the lines of the wainscoting are visible on the buttresses, despite their height; that’s how brightly lit the church is.

Mr. Fish gave no indication that he was even slightly troubled by his hypocrisy on this issue—for surely old Sagamore would roll over in his grave to hear his former master espousing canine restraints of any kind; Sagamore had run free, to the end.

He was a tall, thin, lugubrious presence; a sourness radiated from him—dogs not only refrained from biting him, they slunk away from him; they must have known that the taste of him was as toxic as a toad’s. He had a gloomy, detached quality that Dan had imagined would be perfect for the grim, final phantom...

No one could remember Mr. Morrison ever speaking—as a mailman—and yet, as a harbinger of doom, the poor man clearly felt he had much to say.

Mr. Fish had no children but he enjoyed throwing and kicking a football, and on those blue-sky, fall afternoons, he cajoled Owen and me to play football with him; Owen and I didn’t care for the sport—except for those times when we could include Sagamore in the game.

As never before, this question seemed to seize the attention of every amateur among The Gravesend Players; even Mr. Fish appeared to be mortally interested in the answer. But the midget Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was inexorable; the tiny phantom’s indifference to the question made Dan Needham shiver.

She actually held the door open for him; she even managed a charming curtsy—inappropriately girlish, but Harriet Wheelwright was gifted with those essentially regal properties that make the inappropriate gesture work...those being facetiousness and sarcasm.