Old Thorny called him into his office. "You know, I like you, little fella," he told Owen. "You're a go-getter! But let me give you some advice. Your friends don't watch you as closely as your enemies--and you've got enemies. You've made more enemies in less than two years than I've made in more than twenty! Be careful you don't give your enemies a way to get you."
Thorny wanted Owen to cox the varsity crew; Owen was the perfect size for a coxswain, and--after all--he'd grown up on the Squamscott. But Owen said that the racing shells had always offended his father--"IT'S A MATTER OF BLOOD BEING THICKER THAN SCHOOL," he told the headmaster; furthermore, the river was polluted. In those days, the town didn't have a proper sewage system; the textile mill, my late grandfather's former shoe factory, and many private homes simply dumped their waste into the Squamscott. Owen said he had often seen "beetleskins" floating in the river; beetleskins still gave him the shivers.
Besides, in the fall he liked soccer; of course, he wasn't on the varsity or the junior varsity--but he had fun playing soccer, even on the lowest club-level. He was fast and scrappy--although, from all his smoking, he was easily winded. And in the spring--the other season for crew--Owen liked to play tennis; he wasn't very good, he was just a beginner, but my grandmother bought him a good racquet and Owen appreciated the orderliness of the game. The straight white lines, the proper tension in the net at its exactly correct height, the precise scoring. In the winter--God knows why!--he liked basketball; perversely, perhaps, because it was a tall boy's game. He played only in pickup games, to be sure--he could never have played on any of the teams--but he played with enthusiasm; he was quite a leaper, he had a jump shot that elevated him almost to eye level with the other players, and he became obsessed with an impossible frill of the game ("impossible" for him): the slam-dunk. We didn't call it a "slam-dunk" then; we called it "stuffing" the ball, and there wasn't very much of it--most kids weren't tall enough. Of course, Owen could never leap high enough to be above the basket; to stuff the ball down into the basket was a nonsense idea he had--it was his absurd goal.
He would devise an approach to the basket; dribbling at good speed, he would time his leap to coincide with a teammate's readiness to lift him higher--he would jump into a teammate's waiting arms, and the teammate would (occasionally) boost Owen above the basket's rim. I was the only one who was willing to practice the timing with him; it was such a ridiculous thing for him to want to do--for someone his size to set himself the challenge of soaring and reaching so high ... it was just silliness, and I tired of the mindless, repetitive choreography.
"Why are we doing this?" I'd ask him. "It would never work in a game. It's probably not even legal. I can't lift you up to the basket, I'm sure that's not allowed."
But Owen reminded me that I had once enjoyed lifting him up--at Sunday school. Now that it mattered to him, to get the timing of his leap adjusted to my lifting him even higher, why couldn't I simply indulge him without criticizing him?
"I TOLERATED YOU LIFTING ME UP--ALL THOSE YEARS WHEN I ASKED YOU NOT TO!" he said.
"'All those years,'" I repeated. "It was only a few Sunday school classes, it was only for a couple of years--and we didn't do it every time."
But it was important to him now--this crazy lifting him up--and so we did it. It became a very well-rehearsed stunt with us; "Slam-Dunk Meany," some of the boys on the basketball team began to call him--Slam-Dunk Master, after he'd perfected the move. Even the basketball coach was appreciative. "I may use you in a game, Owen," the coach said, joking with him.
"IT'S NOT FOR A GAME," said Owen Meany, who had his own reasons for everything.
That Christmas vacation of '59, we were in the Gravesend gym for hours every day; we were alone, and undisturbed--all the boarders had gone home--and we were full of contempt for the Eastmans, who appeared to be making a point of not inviting us to Sawyer Depot. Noah and Simon had brought a friend home from California; Hester was "in and out"; and some old friend of my Aunt Martha, from her university days, "might" be visiting. The real reason we were not invited, Owen and I were sure, was that Aunt Martha wanted to discourage the relationship between Owen and Hester. Hester had told Owen that her mother referred to him as "the boy who hit that ball," and as "that strange little friend of John's"--and "that boy my mother is dressing up like a little doll." But Hester thought so ill of her mother, and she was such a troublemaker, she might have made up all that and told Owen--chiefly so that Owen would dislike Aunt Martha, too. Owen didn't seem to care.
I had been granted an extension to make up two late term papers over the vacation--so it wasn't much of a vacation, anyway; Owen helped me with the history paper and he wrote the English paper for me. "I PURPOSELY DIDN'T SPELL EVERYTHING CORRECTLY. I MADE A FEW GRAMMATICAL ERRORS--OF THE KIND YOU USUALLY MAKE," he told me. "I REPEATED MYSELF OCCASIONALLY, AND THERE'S NO MENTION OF THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK--AS IF YOU SKIPPED THAT PART. THAT'S THE PART YOU SKIPPED, RIGHT?"
It was a problem: how my in-class writing, my quizzes and examinations, were not at all as good as the work Owen helped me with. But we studied for all announced tests together, and I was--gradually--improving as a student. Because of my weak spelling I was enrolled in an extra, remedial course, which was marginally insulting, and--also because of my spelling, and my often erratic performance when I was called upon in the classroom--I was asked to see the school psychiatrist once a week. Gravesend Academy was used to good students; when someone struggled, academically--even when one simply couldn't spell properly!--it was assumed to be a matter for a shrink.
The Voice had something to say about that, too. "IT SEEMS TO ME THAT PEOPLE WHO DON'T LEARN AS EASILY AS OTHERS SUFFER FROM A KIND OF LEARNING DISABILITY--THERE IS SOMETHING THAT INTERFERES WITH THE WAY THEY PERCEIVE NUMBERS AND LETTERS, THERE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT THE WAY THEY COMPREHEND UNFAMILIAR MATERIAL--BUT I FAIL TO SEE HOW THIS DISABILITY IS IMPROVED BY PSYCHIATRIC CONSULTATION. WHAT SEEMS TO BE LACKING IS A TECHNICAL ABILITY THAT THOSE OF US CALLED 'GOOD STUDENTS' ARE BORN WITH. SOMEONE SHOULD CONCRETELY STUDY THESE SKILLS AND TEACH THEM. WHAT DOES A SHRINK HAVE TO DO WITH THE PROCESS?"
These were the days before we'd heard about dyslexia and other "learning disabilities"; students like me were simply thought to be stupid, or slow. It was Owen who isolated my problem. "YOU'RE MAINLY SLOW," he said. "YOU'RE ALMOST AS SMART AS I AM, BUT YOU NEED TWICE THE TIME." The school psychiatrist--a retired Swiss gentleman who returned, every summer, to Zurich--was convinced that my difficulties as a student were the result of my best friend's "murder" of my mother, and the "tensions and conflicts" that he saw as the "inevitable result" of my dividing my life between my grandmother and my stepfather.
"At times, you must hate him--yes?" Dr. Dolder mused.
"Hate who?" I asked. "My stepfather? No--I love Dan!"
"Your best friend--at times, you hate him. Yes?" Dr. Dolder asked.
"No!" I said. "I love Owen--it was an accident."
"Yes, I know," Dr. Dolder said. "But nonetheless ... your grandmother, perhaps, she is a most difficult reminder--yes?"
"A 'reminder'?" I said. "I love my grandmother!"
"Yes, I know," Dr. Dolder said. "But this baseball business--it's most difficult, I imagine ..."
"Yes!" I said. "I hate baseball."
"Yes, for sure," Dr. Dolder said. "I've never seen a game, so it's hard for me to imagine exactly ... perhaps we should take in a game together?"
"No," I said. "I don't play baseball, I don't even watch it!"
"Yes, I see," Dr. Dolder said. "You hate it that much--I see!"
"I can't spell," I said. "I'm a slow reader, I get tired--I have to keep my finger on the particular sentence, or I'll lose my place ..."
"It must be rather hard--a baseball," Dr. Dolder said. "Yes?"
"Yes, it's very hard," I said; I sighed.
"Yes, I see," Dr. Dolder said. "Are you tired now? Are you getting tired?"
"It's the spelling," I told him. "The spelling and the reading."
/> There were photographs on the wall of his office in the Hubbard Infirmary--they were old black-and-white photographs of the clock-faces on the church spires in Zurich; and photographs of the water birds in the Limmat, and of the people feeding the birds from those funny, arched footbridges. Many of the people wore hats; you could almost hear those cathedral clocks sounding the hour.
Dr. Dolder had a quizzical expression on his long, goat-shaped face; his silver-white Vandyke beard was neatly trimmed, but the doctor often tugged its point.
"A baseball," he said thoughtfully. "Next time, you will bring a baseball--yes?"
"Yes, of course," I said.
"And this little baseball-hitter--The Voice, yes?--I would very much like to talk to him, too," said Dr. Dolder.
"I'll ask Owen if he's free," I said.
"NOT A CHANCE," said Owen Meany, when I asked him. "THERE'S NOTHING THE MATTER WITH MY SPELLING!"
Toronto: May 11, 1987--I regret that I had the right change to get The Globe and Mail out of the street-corner box; I had three dimes in my pocket, and a sentence in a front-page article proved irresistible. "It was unclear how Mr. Reagan intended to have his Administration maintain support for the contras while remaining within the law."
Since when did Mr. Reagan care about "remaining within the law"? I wish the president would spend a weekend with a Miami model; he could do a lot less harm that way. Think how relieved the Nicaraguans would be, if only for a weekend! We ought to find a model for the president to spend every weekend with! If we could tire the old geezer out, he wouldn't be capable of more damaging mischief. Oh, what a nation of moralists the Americans are! With what fervor do they relish bringing their sexual misconduct to light! A pity that they do not bring their moral outrage to bear on their president's arrogance above the law; a pity that they do not unleash their moral zest on an administration that runs guns to terrorists. But, of course, boudoir morality takes less imagination, and can be indulged in without the effort of keeping up with world affairs--or even bothering to know "the whole story" behind the sexual adventure.
It's sunny again in Toronto today; the fruit trees are blossoming--especially the pears and apples and crab apples. There's a chance of showers. Owen liked the rain. In the summer, in the bottom of a quarry, it could be brutally hot, and the dust was always a factor; the rain cooled the rock slabs, the rain held the dust down. "ALL QUARRYMEN LIKE RAIN," said Owen Meany.
I told my Grade 12 English class that they should reread what Hardy called the first "phase" of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the part called "The Maiden"; although I had drawn their attention to Hardy's fondness for foreshadowing, the class was especially sleepyheaded at spotting these devices. How could they have read over the death of the horse so carelessly? "Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself," Hardy writes; he even says, "Her face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess." And what did the class make of Tess's physical appearance? "It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was." They made nothing of it.
"Don't some of you look like that--to yourselves?" I asked the class. "What do you think about when you see one of yourselves who looks like that?"
Silence.
And what did they think happened at the end of the first "phase"--was Tess seduced, or was she raped? "She was sleeping soundly," Hardy writes. Does he mean that d'Urberville "did it" to her when she was asleep?
Silence.
Before they trouble themselves to read the second "phase" of Tess, called "Maiden No More," I suggested that they trouble themselves to reread "The Maiden"--or, perhaps, read it for the first time, as the case may be!
"Pay attention," I warned them. "When Tess says, 'Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?'--pay attention! Pay attention to where Tess's child is buried--'in that shabby corner of God's allotment where he lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.' Ask yourself what Hardy thinks of 'God's allotment'--and what does he think of bad luck, of coincidence, of so-called circumstances beyond our control? And does he imagine that being a virtuous character exposes you to greater or fewer liabilities as you roam the world?"
"Sir?" said Leslie Ann Grew. That was very old-fashioned of her; it's been years since anyone called me "Sir" at Bishop Strachan--unless it was a new kid. Leslie Ann Grew has been here for years. "If it's another nice day tomorrow," said Leslie Ann, "can we have class outside?"
"No," I said; but I'm so slow--I feel so dull. I know what The Voice would have told her.
"ONLY IF IT RAINS," Owen would have said. "IF IT POURS, THEN WE CAN HAVE CLASS OUTSIDE."
At the start of the winter term of our tenth-grade year at Gravesend Academy, the school's gouty minister--the Rev. Mr. Scammon, the officiant of the academy's nondenominational faith and the lackluster teacher of our Religion and Scripture classes--cracked his head on the icy steps of Hurd's Church and failed to regain consciousness. Owen was of the opinion that the Rev. Mr. Scammon never was fully conscious. For weeks after his demise, his vestments and his cane hung from the coat tree in the vestry office--as if old Mr. Scammon had journeyed no farther from this world than to the adjacent toilet. The Rev. Lewis Merrill was hired as his temporary replacement in our Religion and Scripture classes, and a Search Committee was formed to find a new school minister.
Owen and I had suffered through Religion One together in our ninth-grade year: old Mr. Scammon's sweeping, Caesar-to-Eisenhower approach to the major religions of the world. We had been suffering Scammon's Scripture course--and his Religion Two--when the icy steps of Hurd's Church rose to meet him. The Rev. Mr. Merrill brought his familiar stutter and his almost-as-familiar doubts to both courses. In Scripture, he set us to work in our Bibles--to find plentiful examples of Isaiah 5:20: "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil." In Religion Two--a heavy-reading course in "religion and literature"--we were instructed to divine Tolstoy's meaning: "There was no solution," Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, "but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day--that is forget oneself."
In both classes, Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy; it was a point of view that interested Owen more than it had once interested him. The apparent secret was "belief without miracles"; a faith that needed a miracle was not a faith at all. Don't ask for proof--that was Mr. Merrill's routine message.
"BUT EVERYONE NEEDS A LITTLE PROOF," said Owen Meany.
"Faith itself is a miracle, Owen," said Pastor Merrill. "The first miracle that I believe in is my own faith itself."
Owen looked doubtful, but he didn't speak. Our Religion Two class--and our Scripture class, too--was an atheistic mob; except for Owen Meany, we were such a negative, anti-everything bunch of morons that we thought Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were more interesting writers than Tolstoy. And so the Rev. Lewis Merrill, with his stutter and his well-worn case of doubt, had his hands full with us. He made us read Greene's The Power and the Glory--Owen wrote his term paper on "THE WHISKEY PRIEST: A SEEDY SAINT." We also read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lagerkvist's Barabbas and Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov--Owen wrote my term paper on "SIN AND SMERDYAKOV: A LETHAL COMBINATION." Poor Pastor Merrill! My old Congregationalist minister was suddenly cast in the role of Christianity's defender--and even Owen argued with the terms of Mr. Merrill's defense. The class loved Sartre and Camus--the concept of "the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation" was thrilling to us teenagers. The Rev. Mr. Merrill countered humbly with Kierkegaard: "What no person has a right to is to delude others into the belief that faith is something of no great significance, or that it is an easy matter, whereas it is the greatest and most difficult of all things."
Owen, who'd had his doubts about
Pastor Merrill, found himself in the role of the minister's defender. "JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" he said crossly. "LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS--THEY'RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE--THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST!"
"Yes, but let's not say 'asshole' in class, Owen," Pastor Merrill said.
And in our Scripture class, Owen said, "IT'S TRUE THAT THE DISCIPLES ARE STUPID--THEY NEVER UNDERSTAND WHAT JESUS MEANS, THEY'RE A BUNCH OF BUNGLERS, THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD AS MUCH AS THEY WANT TO BELIEVE, AND THEY EVEN BETRAY JESUS. THE POINT IS, GOD DOESN'T LOVE US BECAUSE WE'RE SMART OR BECAUSE WE'RE GOOD. WE'RE STUPID AND WE'RE BAD AND GOD LOVES US ANYWAY--JESUS ALREADY TOLD THE DUMB-SHIT DISCIPLES WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. 'THE SON OF MAN WILL BE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF MEN, AND THEY WILL KILL HIM ...' REMEMBER? THAT WAS IN MARK--RIGHT?"
"Yes, but let's not say 'dumb-shit disciples' in class, Owen," Mr. Merrill said; but although he struggled to defend God's Holy Word, Lewis Merrill--for the first time, in my memory--appeared to be enjoying himself. To have his faith assailed perked him up; he was livelier and less meek.
"I DON'T THINK THE CONGREGATIONALISTS EVER TALK TO HIM," Owen suggested. "I THINK HE'S LONELY FOR CONVERSATION; EVEN IF ALL HE GETS IS AN ARGUMENT, AT LEAST WE'RE TALKING TO HIM."
"I see no evidence that his wife ever talks to him," Dan Needham observed. And the monosyllabic utterances of Pastor Merrill's surly children were not of the engaging tones that invited conversation.
"WHY DOES THE SCHOOL WASTE ITS TIME WITH TWO SEARCH COMMITTEES?" asked The Voice in The Grave. "FIND A HEADMASTER--WE NEED A HEADMASTER--BUT WE DON'T NEED A SCHOOL MINISTER. WITH NO DISRESPECT FOR THE DEAD, THE REV. LEWIS MERRILL IS A MORE-THAN-ADEQUATE REPLACEMENT FOR THE LATE MR. SCAMMON: FRANKLY, MR. MERRILL IS AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE CLASSROOM. AND THE SCHOOL THINKS WELL ENOUGH OF HIS POWERS IN THE PULPIT TO HAVE ALREADY INVITED HIM TO BE THE GUEST PREACHER AT HURD'S CHURCH--ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. THE REV. MR. MERRILL WOULD BE A GOOD SCHOOL MINISTER. WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT THE CONGREGATIONALISTS ARE PAYING HIM AND OFFER HIM MORE."