The point is, it was my mother's body--exactly. "It can make you look twice," Dan Needham used to say.
Dan told some stories about the dummy, after he married my mother. When we moved into Dan's dormitory apartment at Gravesend Academy, the dummy--and my mother's sewing machine--became permanent residents of the dining room, which we never once ate in. We ate most of our meals in the school dining hall; and when we did eat at home, we ate in the kitchen.
Dan tried sleeping with the dummy in the bedroom only a few times. "Tabby, what's wrong?" he asked it the first night, thinking my mother was up. "Come back to bed," he said another time. And once he asked the dummy, "Are you ill?" And my mother, not quite asleep beside him, murmured, "No. Are you?"
Of course, it was Owen Meany who experienced the most poignant encounters with my mother's dummy. Long before Dan Needham's armadillo changed Owen's and my life, a game that Owen enjoyed at 80 Front Street involved dressing and undressing my mother's dummy. My grandmother frowned upon this game--on the basis that we were boys. My mother, in turn, was wary--at first, she feared for her clothes. But she trusted us: we had clean hands, we returned dresses and blouses and skirts to their proper hangers--and her lingerie, properly folded, to its correct drawers. My mother grew so tolerant of our game that she even complimented us--on occasion--for the creation of an outfit she hadn't thought of. And several times, Owen was so excited by our creation that he begged my mother to model the unusual combination herself.
Only Owen Meany could make my mother blush.
"I've had this old blouse and this old skirt for years," she would say. "I just never thought of wearing them with this belt! You're a genius, Owen!" she'd tell him.
"BUT EVERYTHING LOOKS GOOD ON YOU," Owen would tell her, and she'd blush.
If Owen had wanted to be less flattering, he might have remarked that it was easy to dress my mother, or her dummy, because all her clothes were black and white; everything went with everything else.
There was that one red dress, and we could never find a way to make her like it; it was never meant to be a part of her wardrobe, but I believed the Wheelwright in my mother made it impossible for her to give or throw the dress away. She'd found it in an exceptionally posh Boston store; she loved the clingy material, its scooped back, its fitted waist and full skirt, but she hated the color--a scarlet red, a poinsettia red. She'd meant to copy it--in white or in black--like all the others, but she liked the cut of the dress so much that she copied it in white and in black. "White for a tan," she said, "and black in the winter."
When she went to Boston to return the red dress, she said she discovered the store had burned to the ground. For a while, she couldn't remember the store's name; but she asked people in the neighborhood, she wrote to the former address. There was some crisis with insurance and it was months before she finally got to talk with someone, and then it was only a lawyer. "But I never paid for the dress!" my mother said. "It was very expensive--I was just trying it out. And I don't want it. I don't want to be billed for it, months later. It was very expensive," she repeated; but the lawyer said it didn't matter. Everything was burned. Bills of sale were burned. Inventory was burned. Stock was burned. "The telephone melted," he said. "The sash register melted," he added. "That dress is the least of their problems. It's your dress," the lawyer said. "You got lucky," he told her, in a way that made her feel guilty.
"Good Heavens," my grandmother said, "it's so easy to make Wheelwrights feel guilty. Get hold of yourself, Tabitha, and stop complaining. It's a lovely dress--it's a Christmas color," my grandmother decided. "There are always Christmas parties. It will be perfect." But I never saw my mother take the dress out of her closet; the only way that dress ever found its way to the dressmaker's dummy--after my mother had copied it--was when Owen dressed the dummy in it. Not even Owen could find a way to make my mother like that red dress.
"It may be a Christmas color," she said, "but I'm the wrong color--especially at Christmastime--in that dress." She meant she looked sallow in red when she didn't have a tan, and who in New Hampshire has a tan for Christmas?
"THEN WEAR IT IN THE SUMMER!" Owen suggested.
But it was a show-off thing to wear such a bright red color in the summer; that was making too much of a tan, in my mother's opinion. Dan suggested that my mother donate the red dress to his seedy collection of stage costumes. But my mother thought this was wasteful, and besides: none of the Gravesend Academy boys, and certainly no other woman from our town, had the figure to do that dress justice.
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. He even got my mother to be his leading lady--if only once.
As much as my mother liked to sing, she was extremely shy about acting. She agreed to be in only one play under Dan's direction, and I think she agreed only as an indication of her commitment to their prolonged courtship, and only if Dan was cast opposite her--if he was the leading man--and if he was not cast as her lover. She didn't want the town imagining all sorts of things about their courtship, she said. After they were married, my mother wouldn't act again; neither would Dan. He was always the director; she was always the prompter. My mother had a good voice for a prompter: quiet but clear. All those singing lessons were good for that, I guess.
Her one role, and it was a starring role, was in Angel Street. It was so long ago, I can't remember the names of the characters, or anything about the actual sets for the play. The Gravesend Players used the Town Hall, and sets were never very specially attended to there. What I remember is the movie that was made from Angel Street; it was called Gaslight, and I've seen it several times. My mother had the Ingrid Bergman part; she was the wife who was being driven insane by her villainous husband. And Dan was the villain--he was the Charles Boyer character. If you know the story, although Dan and my mother were cast as husband and wife, there is little love evidenced between them onstage; it was the only time or place I ever saw Dan be hateful to my mother.
Dan tells me that there are still people in Gravesend who give him "evil looks" because of that Charles Boyer role he played; they look at him as if he hit that long-ago foul ball--and as if he meant to.
And only once in that production--it was actually in dress rehearsal--did my mother wear the red dress. It might have been the evening when she is all dressed up to go to the theater (or somewhere) with her awful husband, but he has hidden the painting and accuses her of hiding it, and he makes her believe that she's hidden it, too--and then he banishes her to her room and doesn't let her go out at all. Or maybe it was when they go out to a concert and he finds his watch in her purse--he has put it there, but he makes her break down and plead with him to believe her, in front of all those snooty people. Anyway, my mother was supposed to wear the red dress in just one scene, and it was the only scene in the play where she was simply terrible. She couldn't leave the dress alone--she plucked imaginary lint off it; she kept staring at herself, as if the cleavage of the dress, all by itself, had suddenly plunged a foot; she never stopped itching around, as if the material of the dress made her skin crawl.
Owen and I saw every production of Angel Street; we saw all of Dan's plays--both the academy plays and the amateur theatricals of The Gravesend Players--but Angel Street was one of the few productions that we saw every showing of. To watch my mother onstage, and to watch Dan being awful to her, was such a riveting lie. It was not the play that interested us--it was what a lie it was: that Dan was awful to my mother, that he meant her harm. That was fascinating.
Owen and I always knew everyone in all the productions of The Gravesend Players. Mrs. Walker, the ogre of our Episcopal Sunday school, played the flirtatious maid in An
gel Street--the Angela Lansbury character, if you can believe it. Owen and I couldn't. Mrs. Walker acting like a tart! Mrs. Walker being vulgar! We kept expecting her to shout: "Owen Meany, you get down from up there! You get back to your seat!" And she wore a French maid's costume, with a very tight skirt and black, patterned stockings, so that every Sunday thereafter, Owen and I would search in vain for her legs--it was such a surprise to see Mrs. Walker's legs; and even more of a surprise to discover that she had pretty legs!
The good guy role in Angel Street--the Joseph Cotten part, I call it--was played by our neighbor Mr. Fish. Owen and I knew that he was still in mourning over the untimely death of Sagamore; the horror of the diaper truck disaster on Front Street was still visible in the pained expression with which he followed my mother's every movement onstage. Mr. Fish was not exactly Owen's and my idea of a hero; but Dan Needham, with his talent for casting and directing the rankest amateurs, must have been inspired, in the case of Mr. Fish, to tap our neighbor's sorrow and anger over Sagamore's encounter with the diaper truck.
Anyway, after the dress rehearsal of Angel Street, it was back to the closet with the red dress--except for those many occasions when Owen put it on the dummy. He must have felt especially challenged by my mother's dislike of that dress. It always looked terrific on the dummy.
I tell all this only to demonstrate that Owen was as familiar with that dummy as I was; but he was not familiar with it at night. He was not accustomed to the semidarkness of my mother's room when she was sleeping, when the dummy stood over her--that unmistakable body, in profile, in perfect silhouette. That dummy stood so still, it appeared to be counting my mother's breaths.
One night at 80 Front Street, when Owen lay in the other twin bed in my room, we were a long while falling asleep because--down the hall--Lydia had a cough. Just when we thought she was over a particular fit, or she had died, she would start up again. When Owen woke me up, I had not been asleep for very long; I was in the grips of such a deep and recent sleep that I couldn't make myself move--I felt as if I were lying in an extremely plush coffin and my pallbearers were holding me down, although I was doing my best to rise from the dead.
"I FEEL SICK," Owen was saying.
"Are you going to throw up?" I asked him, but I couldn't move; I couldn't even open my eyes.
"I DON'T KNOW," he said. "I THINK I HAVE A FEVER."
"Go tell my mother," I said.
"IT FEELS LIKE A RARE DISEASE," Owen said.
"Go tell my mother," I repeated. I listened to him bump into the desk chair. I heard my door open, and close. I could hear his hands brushing against the wall of the hall. I heard him pause with his hand trembling on my mother's doorknob; he seemed to wait there for the longest time.
Then I thought: He's going to be surprised by the dummy. I thought of calling out, "Don't be startled by the dummy standing there; it looks weird in that funny light." But I was sunk in my coffin of sleep and my mouth was clamped shut. I waited for him to scream. That's what Owen would do, I was sure; there would be a bloodcurdling wail--"AAAAAAAHHHHHH!"--and the entire household would be awake for hours. Or else, in a fit of bravery, Owen would tackle the dummy and wrestle it to the floor.
But while I was imagining the worst of Owen's encounter with the dummy, I realized he was back in my room, beside my bed, pulling my hair.
"WAKE UP! BUT BE QUIET!" he whispered. "YOUR MOTHER IS NOT ALONE. SOMEONE STRANGE IS IN HER ROOM. COME SEE! I THINK IT'S AN ANGEL!"
"An angel?" I said.
"SSSSSSHHHHHH!"
Now I was wide awake and eager to see him make a fool of himself, and so I said nothing about the dummy; I held his hand and went with him through the hall to my mother's room. Owen was shivering.
"How do you know it's an angel?" I whispered.
"SSSSSSHHHHHH!"
So we stealthily crept into my mother's room, crawling on our bellies like snipers in search of cover, until the whole picture of her bed--her body in an inverted question mark, and the dummy standing beside her--was visible.
After a while, Owen said, "IT'S GONE. IT MUST HAVE SEEN ME THE FIRST TIME."
I pointed innocently at the dummy. "What's that?" I whispered.
"THAT'S THE DUMMY, YOU IDIOT!" Owen said. "THE ANGEL WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BED."
I touched his forehead; he was burning up. "You have a fever, Owen," I said.
"I SAW AN ANGEL," he said.
"Is that you, boys?" my mother asked sleepily.
"Owen has a fever," I said. "He feels sick."
"Come here, Owen," my mother said, sitting up in bed. He went to her and she felt his forehead and told me to get him an aspirin and a glass of water.
"Owen saw an angel," I said.
"Did you have a nightmare, Owen?" my mother asked him, as he crawled into bed beside her.
Owen's voice was muffled in the pillows. "NOT EXACTLY," he said.
When I returned with the water and the aspirin, my mother had fallen asleep with her arm around Owen; with his protrusive ears spread on the pillow, and my mother's arm across his chest, he looked like a butterfly trapped by a cat. He managed to take the aspirin and drink the water without disturbing my mother, and he handed the glass back to me with a stoical expression.
"I'M GOING TO STAY HERE," he said bravely. "IN CASE IT COMES BACK."
He looked so absurd, I couldn't look at him. "I thought you said it was an angel," I whispered. "What harm would an angel do?"
"I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF ANGEL IT WAS," he whispered, and my mother stirred in her sleep; she tightened her grip around Owen, which must have simultaneously frightened and thrilled him, and I went back to my room alone.
From what nonsense did Owen Meany discern what he would later call a PATTERN? From his feverish imagination? Years later, when he would refer to THAT FATED BASEBALL, I corrected him too impatiently.
"That accident, you mean," I said.
It made him furious when I suggested that anything was an "accident"--especially anything that had happened to him; on the subject of predestination, Owen Meany would accuse Calvin of bad faith. There were no accidents; there was a reason for that baseball--just as there was a reason for Owen being small, and a reason for his voice. In Owen's opinion, he had INTERRUPTED AN ANGEL, he had DISTURBED AN ANGEL AT WORK, he had UPSET THE SCHEME OF THINGS.
I realize now that he never thought he saw a guardian angel; he was quite convinced, especially after THAT FATED BASEBALL, that he had interrupted the Angel of Death. 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. How could these fantasies become so monstrous, and so convincing to him?
My mother was too sleepy to take his temperature, but it's a fact that he had a fever, and that his fever led him to a night in my mother's bed--in her arms. And wouldn't his excitement to find himself there, with her--not to mention his fever--have contributed to his readiness to remain wide-eyed and wide awake, alert for the next intruder, be it angel or ghost or hapless family member? I think so.
Several hours later, there came to my mother's room the second fearful apparition. I say "fearful" because Owen was, at that time, afraid of my grandmother; he must have sensed her distaste for the granite business. I had left the light on in my mother's bathroom and the door to her bathroom open--into the hall--and worse, I had left the cold-water tap running (when I'd fixed Owen a glass of water for his aspirin). My grandmother always claimed she could hear the electric meter counting each kilowatt; as soon as it was dark, she followed my mother through the house, turning off the lights that my mother had turned on. And this night, in addition to her sensing that a light had been left on, Grandmother heard the water running--either the pump in the basement, or the cold-water tap itself. Finding my mother's bathroom in such reckless abandon, Grandmother proceeded to my mother's room--anxious that my mother was ill or else indignan
t with budget-mindedness and determined to point out my mother's carelessness, even if she had to wake her up.
Grandmother might have just turned out the light, turned off the water, and gone back to bed, if she hadn't made the mistake of turning the cold-water tap the wrong way--she turned it much more forcefully on, dousing herself in a spray of the coldest possible water; the tap had been left running for hours. Thus was her nightgown soaked; she would have to change it. This must have inspired her to wake my mother; not only had electricity and water been awasting, but here Grandmother was--soaked to the skin in her efforts to put a stop to all this escaping energy. I would guess, therefore, that her manner, upon entering my mother's room, was not calm. And although Owen was prepared for an angel, he might have expected that even the Angel of Death would reappear in a serene fashion.
My grandmother, dripping wet--her usually flowing nightgown plastered to her gaunt, hunched body, her hair arrayed in its nightly curlers, her face thickly creamed the lifeless color of the moon--burst into my mother's room. It was days before Owen could tell me what he thought: when you scare off the Angel of Death, the Divine Plan calls for the kind of angels you can't scare away; they even call you by name.
"Tabitha!" my grandmother said.
"AAAAAAHHHHHH!"
Owen Meany screamed so terribly that my grandmother could not catch her breath. Beside my mother on the bed, she saw a tiny demon spring bolt upright--propelled by such a sudden and unreal force that my grandmother imagined the little creature was preparing to fly. My mother appeared to levitate beside him. Lydia, who still had both her legs, leaped from her bed and ran straight into her dresser drawers; for days, she would display her bruised nose. Sagamore, who was a short time away from his appointment with the diaper truck, woke up Mr. Fish with his barking. Throughout the neighborhood, the lids of trash cans clattered--as cats and raccoons made good their escape from Owen Meany's alarm. A small segment of Gravesend must have rolled over in their beds, imagining that the Angel of Death had clearly come for someone.