"Perhaps, when people are sitting back a few rows--in the audience, I mean--it won't be quite so ... upsetting," Dan said.
"Do you think so?" Mr. Fish asked.
"Not really," Dan admitted.
"What if we saw his face--from the beginning?" Mr. Fish suggested.
"If you don't pull his hood off, we'll never see his face," Dan pointed out to Mr. Fish. "I think that will be better."
"Yes, much better," Mr. Fish agreed.
Mr. Meany dropped Owen off at 80 Front Street--so he could spend the night. Mr. Meany knew that my grandmother resented the racket his truck made in the driveway; that was why we didn't hear him come and go--he let Owen out of the cab on Front Street.
It was quite magical; I mean, the timing: Mr. Fish saying good night, opening the door to leave--precisely at the same time as Owen was reaching to ring the doorbell. My grandmother, at that instant, turned on the porch light; Owen blinked into the light. From under his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap, his small, sharp face stared up at Mr. Fish--like the face of a possum caught in a flashlight. A dull, yellowish bruise, the sheen of tarnished silver, marked Owen's cheek--where the Brinker-Smiths' mobile bed had struck him--giving him a cadaver's uneven color. Mr. Fish leaped backward, into the hall.
"Speak of the Devil," Dan said, smiling. Owen smiled back--at us all.
"I GUESS YOU HEARD--I GOT THE PART!" he said to my grandmother and me.
"I'm not surprised, Owen," my grandmother said. "Won't you come in?" 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.
Owen Meany did not miss the irony in my grandmother's voice; yet he beamed at her--and he returned her curtsy with a confident bow, and with a little tip of his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap. Owen had triumphed, and he knew it; my grandmother knew it, too. Even Harriet Wheelwright--with her Mayflower indifference toward the Meanys of this world--even my grandmother knew that there was more to The Granite Mouse than met the eye.
Mr. Fish, perhaps to compose himself, was humming the tune to a familiar Christmas carol. Even Dan Needham knew the words. As Owen finished knocking the snow off his boots--as the little Lord Jesus stepped inside our house--Dan half-sang, half-mumbled the refrain we knew so well: "Hark! the her-ald an-gels sing, 'Glo-ry to the newborn King!'"
5
The Ghost of the Future
* * *
Thus did Owen Meany remodel Christmas. Denied his long-sought excursion to Sawyer Depot, he captured the two most major, nonspeaking roles in the only dramatic productions offered in Gravesend that holiday season. As the Christ Child and as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he had established himself as a prophet--disquietingly, it was our future he seemed to know something about. Once, he thought, he had seen into my mother's future; he had even become an instrument of her future. I wondered what he thought he knew of Dan's or my grandmother's future--or Hester's, or mine, or his own.
God would tell me who my father was, Owen Meany had assured me; but, so far, God had been silent.
It was Owen who'd been talkative. He'd talked Dan and me out of the dressmaker's dummy; he'd stationed my mother's heartbreaking figure at his bedside--to stand watch over him, to be his angel. Owen had talked himself down from the heavens and into the manger--he'd made me a Joseph, he'd chosen a Mary for me, he'd turned turtledoves to cows. Having revised the Holy Nativity, he had moved on; he was reinterpreting Dickens--for even Dan had to admit that Owen had somehow changed A Christmas Carol. The silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had stolen the penultimate scene from Scrooge.
Even The Gravesend News-Letter failed to recognize that Scrooge was the main character; that Mr. Fish was the principal actor was a fact that entirely eluded The News-Letter's drama critic, who wrote, "The quintessential Christmas tale, the luster of which has been dulled (at least, for this reviewer) by its annual repetition, has been given a new sparkle." The critic added, "The shopworn ghost-story part of the tale has been energized by the brilliant performance of little Owen Meany, who--despite his diminutive size--is a huge presence onstage; the miniature Meany simply dwarfs the other performers. Director Dan Needham should consider casting the Tiny Tim-sized star as Scrooge in next year's A Christmas Carol!"
There was not a word about this year's Scrooge, and Mr. Fish fumed over his neglect. Owen responded crossly to any criticism.
"WHY IS IT NECESSARY TO REFER TO ME AS 'LITTLE,' AS 'DIMINUTIVE,' AS 'MINIATURE'?" Owen raved. "THEY DON'T MAKE SUCH QUALIFYING REMARKS ABOUT THE OTHER ACTORS!"
"You forgot 'Tiny Tim-sized,'" I told him.
"I KNOW, I KNOW," he said. "DO THEY SAY, 'FORMER DOG-OWNER FISH' IS A SUPERB SCROOGE? DO THEY SAY, 'VICIOUS SUNDAY-SCHOOL TYRANT WALKER' MAKES A CHARMING MOTHER FOR TINY TIM?"
"They called you a 'star,'" I reminded him. "They called you 'brilliant'--and a 'huge presence.'"
"THEY CALLED ME 'LITTLE,' THEY CALLED ME 'DIMINUTIVE,' THEY CALLED ME 'MINIATURE'!" Owen cried.
"It's a good thing it wasn't a speaking part," I reminded him.
"VERY FUNNY," Owen said.
In the case of this particular production, Dan wasn't bothered by the local press; what troubled Dan was what Charles Dickens might have thought of Owen Meany. Dan was sure that Dickens would have disapproved.
"Something's not right," Dan said. "Small children burst into tears--they have to be removed from the audience before they get to the happy ending. We've started warning mothers with small children at the door. It's not quite the family entertainment it's supposed to be. Kids leave the theater looking like they've seen Dracula!"
Dan was relieved to observe, however, that Owen appeared to be coming down with a cold. Owen was susceptible to colds; and now he was overtired all the time--rehearsing the Holy Nativity in the mornings, performing as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come at night. Some afternoons Owen was so exhausted that he fell asleep at my grandmother's house; he would drop off to sleep on the rug in the den, lying under the big couch, or on a stack of the couch pillows, where he'd been gunning down my metal soldiers with my toy cannon. I would go to the kitchen to get us some cookies; and when I came back to the den, Owen would be fast asleep. "He's getting to be like Lydia," my grandmother observed--because Lydia could not stay awake in the afternoons, either; she would nod off to sleep in her wheelchair, wherever Germaine had left her, sometimes facing into a corner. This was a further indication to my grandmother that Lydia's senility was in advance of her own.
But as Owen began to manifest the early signs of the common cold--a sneeze or a cough now and then, and a runny nose--Dan Needham imagined that his production of A Christmas Carol might be the beneficiary of Owen getting sick. Dan didn't want Owen to be ill; it was just a small cough and a sneeze--and maybe even Owen having to blow his nose--that Dan was wishing for. Such a human noise from under the dark hood would surely put the audience at ease; Owen sneezing and snorting might even draw a laugh or two. In Dan's opinion, a laugh or two wouldn't hurt.
"It might hurt Owen," I pointed out. "I don't think Owen would appreciate any laughter."
"I don't mean that I want to make the Ghost of the Future a comic character," Dan maintained. "I would just like to humanize him, a little." For that was the problem, in Dan's view: Owen did not look human. He was the size of a small child, but his movements were uncannily adult; and his authority onstage was beyond "adult"--it was supernatural.
"Look at it this way," Dan said to me. "A ghost who sneezes, a ghost who coughs--a ghost who has to blow his nose--he's just not quite so scary."
But what about a Christ Child who sneezes and coughs, and has to blow his nose? I thought. If the Wiggins insisted that the Baby Jesus couldn't cry, what would they think of a sick Prince of Peace?
Everyone was sick that Christmas: Dan got over bronchitis only to discover he had pinkeye; L
ydia had such a violent cough that she would occasionally propel herself backward in her wheelchair. When Mr. Early, who was Marley's Ghost, began to hack and sniffle, Dan confided to me that it would be perfect symmetry--for the play--if all the ghosts came down with something. Mr. Fish, who had by far the most lines, pampered himself so that he wouldn't catch anyone else's cold; thus Scrooge retreated from Marley's Ghost in an even more exaggerated fashion.
Grandmother complained that the weather was too slippery for her to go out; she was not worried about colds, but she dreaded falling on the ice. "At my age," she told me, "it's one fall, one broken hip, and then a long, slow death--from pneumonia." Lydia coughed and nodded, nodded and coughed, but neither woman would share her elderly wisdom with me ... concerning why a broken hip produced pneumonia; not to mention, "a long, slow death."
"But you have to see Owen in A Christmas Carol," I said.
"I see quite enough of Owen," Grandmother told me.
"Mister Fish is also quite good," I said.
"I see quite enough of Mister Fish, too," Grandmother remarked.
The rave review that Owen received from The Gravesend News-Letter appeared to drive Mr. Fish into a silent depression; when he came to 80 Front Street after dinner, he sighed often and said nothing. As for our morose mailman, Mr. Morrison, it is incalculable how much he suffered to hear of Owen's success. He stooped under his leather sack as if he shouldered a burden much more demanding than the excess of Christmas mail. How did it make him feel to deliver all those copies of The Gravesend News-Letter, wherein Mr. Morrison's former role was described as "not only pivotal but principal"--and Owen Meany was showered with the kind of praise Mr. Morrison might have imagined for himself?
In the first week, Dan told me, Mr. Morrison did not come to watch the production. To Dan's surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Meany had not made an appearance, either.
"Don't they read The News-Letter?" Dan asked me.
I could not imagine Mrs. Meany reading; the demands on her time were too severe. With all her staring--at walls, into corners, not quite out the window, into the dying fire, at my mother's dummy--when would Mrs. Meany have the time to read a newspaper? And Mr. Meany was not even one of those men who read about sports. I imagined, too, that the Meanys would never have heard about A Christmas Carol from Owen; after all, he hadn't wanted them to know about the pageant.
Perhaps one of the quarrymen would say something about the play to Mr. Meany; maybe a stonecutter or the derrickman's wife had seen it, or at least read about it in The News-Letter.
"Hear your boy's the star of the theater," someone might say.
But I could hear, too, how Owen would dismiss it.
"I'M JUST HELPING DAN OUT. HE GOT IN A FIX--ONE OF THE GHOSTS QUIT. YOU KNOW MORRISON, THE COWARDLY MAILMAN? WELL, IT WAS A CASE OF STAGE FRIGHT. IT'S A VERY SMALL PART--NOT EVEN A SPEAKING PART. I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND THE PLAY, EITHER--IT'S NOT VERY BELIEVABLE. AND BESIDES, YOU NEVER GET TO SEE MY FACE. I DON'T THINK I'M ONSTAGE FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES...."
I was sure that was how Owen would have handled it. I thought he was excessively proud of himself--and that he treated his parents harshly. We all go through a phase--it lasts a lifetime, for some of us--when we're embarrassed by our parents; we don't want them hanging around us because we're afraid they'll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them. But Owen seemed to me to suffer this embarrassment more than most; that's why I thought he held his parents at such a great distance from himself. And he was, in my opinion, exceedingly bossy toward his father. At an age when most of our peers were enduring how much their parents bossed them around, Owen was always telling his father what to do.
My sympathy for Owen's embarrassment was slight. After all, I missed my mother; I would have enjoyed her hanging around me. Because Dan wasn't my real father, I had never developed any resentment toward Dan; I always loved having Dan around--my grandmother, although she was a loving grandmother, was aloof.
"Owen," Dan said one evening. "Would you like me to invite your parents to see the play? Maybe for our last performance--on Christmas Eve?"
"I THINK THEY'RE BUSY ON CHRISTMAS EVE," Owen said.
"How about one of the earlier evenings, then?" Dan asked. "Some evening soon--shall I invite them? Any evening would be fine."
"THEY'RE NOT EXACTLY THEATERGOING TYPES," Owen said. "I DON'T MEAN TO INSULT YOU, DAN, BUT I'M AFRAID MY PARENTS WOULD BE BORED."
"But surely they'd enjoy seeing you, Owen," Dan said. "Wouldn't they like your performance?"
"THE ONLY STORIES THEY LIKE ARE TRUE STORIES," Owen said. "THEY'RE RATHER REALISTIC, THEY DON'T GET TOO EXCITED ABOUT MADE-UP STORIES. ANYTHING THAT'S SORT OF MAKE-BELIEVE--THAT'S NOT FOR THEM. AND ANYTHING WITH GHOSTS--THAT'S OUT."
"Ghosts are out?" Dan asked.
"ALL THAT KIND OF STUFF IS OUT--WITH THEM," Owen said. But--listening to him--I found I had just the opposite impression of his parents. I thought that Owen Meany's mother and father believed only in the so-called make-believe; that ghosts were all they believed in--that spirits were all they listened to. "WHAT I MEAN IS, DAN," Owen said, "IS THAT I'D RATHER NOT INVITE MY PARENTS. IF THEY COME, OKAY; BUT I THINK THEY WON'T."
"Sure, sure," Dan said. "Anything you say, Owen."
Dan Needham suffered from my mother's affliction: he, too, couldn't keep his hands off Owen Meany. Dan was not a hair-messer, not a patter of butts or shoulders. Dan grabbed your hands and mashed them, sometimes until your knuckles and his cracked together. But Dan's manifestations of physical affection for Owen exceeded, even, his fondness for me; Dan had the good instincts to keep his distance from me--to be like a father to me, but not to assert himself too exactly in the role. Because of a physical caution that Dan expressed when he touched me, he was less restrained with Owen, whose father never once (at least, not in my presence) touched him. I think Dan Needham knew, too, that Owen was not ever handled at home.
There was a fourth curtain call on Saturday night, and Dan sent Owen out onstage alone. It was apparent that the audience wanted Owen alone; Mr. Fish had already been out onstage with Owen, and by himself--it was clearly Owen whom the crowd adored.
The audience rose to greet him. The peak of his death-black hood was a trifle pointy, and too tall for Owen's small head; it had flopped over to one side, giving Owen a gnomish appearance and a slightly cocky, puckish attitude. When he flipped the hood back and showed the audience his beaming face, a young girl in one of the front rows fainted; she was about our age--maybe twelve or thirteen--and she dropped down like a sack of grain.
"It was quite warm where we were sitting," the girl's mother said, after Dan made sure the girl had recovered.
"STUPID GIRL!" Owen said, backstage. He was his own makeup man. Even though his face remained concealed throughout his performance by the overlarge, floppy hood, he whitened his face with baby powder and blackened the already-dark sockets under his eyes with eyeliner. He wanted even the merest glimpse that the audience might get of him to be properly ghostly; that his cold was worsening enhanced the pallor he desired.
He was coughing pretty regularly by the time Dan drove him home. The last Sunday before Christmas--the day of our pageant--was tomorrow.
"He sounds a little sicker than I had in mind," Dan told me on our way back to town. "I may have to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come myself. Or maybe--if Owen's too sick--maybe you can take the part."
But I was just a Joseph; I felt that Owen Meany had already chosen me for the only part I could play.
It snowed overnight, not a major storm; then the temperature kept dropping, until it was too cold to snow. A new coat of flat-white, flatter than church-white, lay spread over Gravesend that Sunday morning; the wind, which is the cruelest kind of cold, kicked up wisps and kite tails of the dry powder and made the empty rain gutters at 80 Front Street rattle and moan; the gutters were empty because the new snow was too cold to cling.
The snowplows were in no hurry to be early on Sunday mornings, and t
he only vehicle that didn't slip and skid as it made its way up Front Street was the heavy truck from the Meany Granite Company. Owen had so many clothes on, he had difficulty bending his knees as he trudged up the driveway--and his arms did not swing close to his sides, but protruded stiffly, like the limbs of a scarecrow. He was so muffled up in a long, dark-green scarf that I couldn't see his face at all--but who could ever mistake Owen Meany for anyone else? It was a scarf my mother had given him--when she'd discovered, one winter, that he didn't own one. Owen called it his LUCKY scarf, and he saved it for important occasions or for when it was especially cold.
The last Sunday before Christmas called for my mother's scarf--on both counts. As Owen and I tramped down Front Street toward Christ Church, the birds took flight at Owen's barking cough; there was a phlegmy rattle in his chest, loud enough for me to hear through his many layers of winter clothes.
"You don't sound very well, Owen," I pointed out to him.
"IF JESUS HAD TO BE BORN ON A DAY LIKE THIS, I DON'T THINK HE'D HAVE LASTED LONG ENOUGH TO BE CRUCIFIED," Owen said.
On Front Street's almost-virgin sidewalk, only one set of footprints had broken the snow before us; except for the clumsy peeing of dogs, the sidewalk was an unmarred path of white. The figure who had made the morning's first human tracks in the snow was too bundled up and too far ahead of Owen and me for us to recognize him.
"YOUR GRANDMOTHER ISN'T COMING TO THE PAGEANT?" Owen asked me.
"She's a Congregationalist," I reminded him.
"BUT IS SHE SO INFLEXIBLE THAT SHE CAN'T SWITCH CHURCHES FOR ONE SUNDAY OF THE YEAR? THE CONGREGATIONALISTS DON'T HAVE A PAGEANT."
"I know, I know," I said; but I knew more than that: I knew the Congregationalists didn't even have the conventional morning service on the last Sunday before Christmas--they had Vespers instead. It was a special event, largely for caroling. It wasn't that my grandmother's church service was in conflict with our pageant; it was that Grandmother was not enticed to see Owen play the Christ Child. She had remarked that she found the idea "repulsive." Also, she made such a fuss about the weather's potential for breaking her hip that she announced her intention to skip the Vespers at the Congregational Church. By the later afternoon, when the light was gone, it was even easier, she reasoned, to break your hip on the ice in the dark.