And so they hired him away from the Congregationalists; once more, The Voice did not go unheard.
Toronto: May 12, 1987--a sunny, cool day, a good day to mow a lawn. The smell of freshly cut grass all along Russell Hill Road reflects how widespread is my neighbors' interest in lawnmowing. Mrs. Brocklebank--whose daughter, Heather, is in my Grade 12 English class--took a slightly different approach to her lawn; I found her ripping her dandelions out by their roots.
"You'd better do the same thing," she said to me. "Pull them out, don't mow them under. If you chop them up with the mower, you'll just make more of them."
"Like starfish," I said; I should have known better--it's never a good idea to introduce Mrs. Brocklebank to a new subject, not unless you have time to kill. If I'd assigned "The Maiden" to Mrs. Brocklebank, she would have gotten everything right--the first time.
"What do you know about starfish?" she asked.
"I grew up on the seacoast," I reminded her. It is occasionally necessary for me to tell Torontonians of the presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; they tend to think of the Great Lakes as the waters of the world.
"So what about starfish?" Mrs. Brocklebank asked.
"You cut them up, they grow more starfish," I said.
"Is that in a book?" asked Mrs. Brocklebank. I assured her that it was. I even have a book that describes the life of the starfish, although Owen and I knew not to chop them up long before we read about them; every kid in Gravesend learned all about starfish at the beach at Little Boar's Head. I remember my mother telling Owen and me not to cut them up; starfish are very destructive, and their powers of reproduction are not encouraged in New Hampshire.
Mrs. Brocklebank is persistent regarding new information; she goes after everything as aggressively as she attacks her dandelions. "I'd like to see that book," she announced.
And so I began again with what has become a fairly routine labor: discouraging Mrs. Brocklebank from reading another book--I work as hard at discouraging her, and with as little success, as I sometimes labor to encourage those BSS girls to read their assignments.
"It's not a very good book," I said. "It's written by an amateur; it's published by a vanity press."
"So what's wrong with an amateur writing a book?" Mrs. Brocklebank wanted to know. She is probably writing one of her own, it occurs to me now. "So what's wrong with a 'vanity press'?" she asked.
The book that tells the truth about the starfish is called The Life of the Tidepool by Archibald Thorndike. Old Thorny was an amateur naturalist and an amateur diarist, and after he retired from Gravesend Academy, he spent two years scrutinizing a tidepool in Rye Harbor; at his own expense, he published a book about it and sold autographed copies of the book every Alumni Day. He parked his station wagon by the tennis courts and sold his books off the tailgate, chatting with all the alumni who wanted to talk to him; since he was a very popular headmaster--and since he was replaced by a particularly unpopular headmaster--almost all the alumni wanted to talk to old Thorny. I suppose he sold a lot of copies of The Life of the Tidepool; he might even have made money. Maybe he wasn't such an amateur, after all. He knew how to handle The Voice--by not handling him. And The Voice would prove to be the undoing of the new headmaster, in the end.
In the end, I yielded to Mrs. Brocklebank's frenzy to educate herself; I said I'd lend her my copy of The Life of the Tidepool.
"Be sure to remind Heather to reread the first 'phase' of Tess," I told Mrs. Brocklebank.
"Heather's not reading her assignments?" Mrs. Brocklebank asked in alarm.
"It's spring," I reminded her. "All the girls aren't reading their assignments. Heather's doing just fine." Indeed, Heather Brocklebank is one of my better students; she has inherited her mother's ardor--while, at the same time, her imagination ranges far beyond dandelions.
In a flash, I think of giving my Grade 12 English class a sneak quiz; if they gave the first "phase" of Tess such a sloppy reading, I'll bet they skipped the Introduction altogether--and I had assigned the Introduction, too; I don't always do that, but there's an Introduction by Robert B. Heilman that's especially helpful to first readers of Hardy. I know a really nasty quiz question! I think--looking at Mrs. Brocklebank, clutching her murdered dandelions.
"What was Thomas Hardy's earlier title for Tess?"
Ha! It's nothing they could ever guess; if they'd read the Introduction, they'd know it was Too Late Beloved--they'd at least remember the "too late" part. Then I remembered that Hardy had written a story--before Tess--called "The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid"; I wondered if I could throw in that title, to confuse them. Then I remembered that Mrs. Brocklebank was standing on the sidewalk with her handful of dandelions, waiting for me to fetch her The Life of the Tidepool. And last of all I remembered that Owen Meany and I first read Tess of the d'Urbervilles in our tenth-grade year at Gravesend Academy; we were in Mr. Early's English class--it was the winter term of 1960--and I was struggling with Thomas Hardy to the point of tears. Mr. Early was a fool to try Tess on tenth graders. At Bishop Strachan, I have long argued with my colleagues that we should teach Hardy in Grade 13--even Grade 12 is too soon! Even The Brothers Karamazov is easier than Tess!
"I can't read this!" I remember saying to Owen. He tried to help me; he helped me with everything else, but Tess was simply too difficult. "I can't read about milking cows!" I screamed.
"IT'S NOT ABOUT MILKING COWS," Owen said crossly.
"I don't care what it's about; I hate it," I said.
"THAT'S A TRULY INTELLIGENT ATTITUDE," Owen said. "IF YOU CAN'T READ IT, DO YOU WANT ME TO READ IT ALOUD TO YOU?"
I am so ashamed of myself to remember this: that he would do even that for me--that he would read Tess of the d'Urbervilles aloud to me! At the time, the thought of hearing that whole novel in his voice was staggering.
"I can't read it and I can't listen to it, either," I said.
"FINE," Owen said. "THEN YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO. I CAN TELL YOU THE WHOLE STORY, I CAN WRITE YOUR TERM PAPER--AND IF THERE'S AN EXAM, YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO BULLSHIT AS WELL AS YOU CAN: IF I TELL YOU THE WHOLE STORY, MAYBE YOU'LL ACTUALLY REMEMBER SOME OF IT. THE POINT IS, I CAN DO YOUR HOMEWORK FOR YOU--IT'S NOT HARD FOR ME AND I DON'T MIND DOING IT--OR I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK. THAT WOULD BE A LITTLE HARDER--FOR BOTH OF US--BUT IT MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE USEFUL FOR YOU TO BE ABLE TO DO YOUR OWN WORK. I MEAN, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO--AFTER I'M GONE?"
"What do you mean, after you're gone?" I asked him.
"LOOK AT IT ANOTHER WAY," he said patiently. "ARE YOU GOING TO GET A JOB? AFTER YOU'RE THROUGH WITH SCHOOL, I MEAN--ARE YOU GOING TO WORK? ARE YOU GOING TO A UNIVERSITY? ARE WE GOING TO GO TO THE SAME UNIVERSITY? AM I GOING TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK THERE, TOO? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO MAJOR IN?"
"What are you going to major in?" I asked him; my feelings were hurt--but I knew what he was driving at, and he was right.
"GEOLOGY," he said. "I'M IN THE GRANITE BUSINESS."
"That's crazy!" I said. "It's not your business. You can study anything you want, you don't have to study rocks!"
"ROCKS ARE INTERESTING," Owen said stubbornly. "GEOLOGY IS THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH."
"I can't read Tess of the d'Urbervilles!" I cried. "It's too hard!"
"YOU MEAN IT'S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF READ IT, YOU MEAN IT'S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF PAY ATTENTION," he said. "BUT IT'S NOT TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES THAT'S HARD. THOMAS HARDY MAY BORE YOU BUT HE'S VERY EASY TO UNDERSTAND--HE'S OBVIOUS, HE TELLS YOU EVERYTHING YOU HAVE TO KNOW."
"He tells me more than I want to know!" I cried.
"YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING! MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE A
N ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE--TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS."
"It's not easy for me!" I cried. "I hate reading this book!"
"DO YOU HATE TO READ MOST BOOKS?" Owen asked me.
"Yes!" I said.
"DO YOU SEE THAT THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESS?" he asked me.
"Yes," I admitted.
"NOW WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE," said Owen Meany--my friend, my teacher.
Standing on the sidewalk with Mrs. Brocklebank, I felt the tears start to come.
"Do you have allergies?" Mrs. Brocklebank asked me; I shook my head. I feel so ashamed of myself that--even for a moment--I could consider zapping my Grade 12 girls with a nasty quiz on Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Remembering how I suffered as a student, remembering how much I needed Owen's help, how could I even think of being a sneaky teacher?
"I think you do have an allergy," Mrs. Brocklebank concluded from my tears. "Lots of people have allergies and don't even know; I've read about that."
"It must be the dandelions," I said; and Mrs. Brocklebank glared at the pestilential weeds with a fresh hatred.
Every spring there are dandelions; they always remind me of the spring term of 1960--the burgeoning of that old decade that once seemed so new to Owen Meany and me. That was the spring when the Search Committee found a new headmaster. That was the decade that would defeat us.
Randolph White had been the headmaster of a small private day school in Lake Forest, Illinois; I'm told that is a super-rich and exclusively WASP community that does its utmost to pretend it is not a suburb of Chicago--but that may be unfair; I've never been there. Several Gravesend students came from there, and they unanimously groaned to hear the announcement of Randolph White's appointment as headmaster at the academy; apparently, the idea that anyone from Lake Forest had followed them to New Hampshire depressed them.
At the time, Owen and I knew a kid from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and he told us that Bloomfield Hills was to Detroit what Lake Forest was to Chicago, and that--in his view--Bloomfield Hills "sucked"; he offered a story about Bloomfield Hills as an example of what he meant--it was a story about a black family that moved there, and they were forced to sell and move out because their neighbors kept burning crosses on their lawn. This shocked Owen and me; in New Hampshire, we thought such things happened only in the South--but a black kid from Atlanta informed us that we knew "shit" about the problem; they burned crosses all over the country, the black kid said, and we weren't exactly "overwhelmed by a sea of black faces" at Gravesend Academy, were we? No, Owen and I agreed; we were not.
Then another kid from Michigan said that Grosse Pointe was more to Detroit what Lake Forest was to Chicago--that Bloomfield Hills wasn't a proper analogy--and some other kid argued that Shaker Heights was more to Cleveland what Lake Forest was to Chicago ... and so forth. Owen and I were not very knowledgeable of the geography of the country's rich and exclusive; when a Jewish kid from Highland Park, Illinois, told us that there were "no Jews allowed" in Lake Forest, Owen and I began to wonder what ominous kind of small private day school in Lake Forest our new headmaster had come from.
Owen had another reason to be suspicious of Randolph White. Of all the candidates whom the Search Committee dragged through the school in our tenth-grade year, only Randolph White had not accepted the invitation for A PRIVATE AUDIENCE with The Voice. Owen had met Mr. White outside Archie Thorndike's office; Thorny introduced the candidate to The Voice and told them he would, as usual, vacate his office in order for them to be alone for Owen's interview.
"What's this?" Randolph White asked. "I thought I already had the student interview."
"Well," old Thorny said, "Owen, you know, is The Voice--you know our school newspaper, The Grave?"
"I know who he is," Mr. White said; he had still not shaken Owen's outstretched hand. "Why didn't he interview me when the other students interviewed me?"
"That was the student subcommittee," Archie Thorndike explained. "Owen has requested 'a private audience'..."
"Request denied, Owen," said Randolph White, finally shaking Owen's small hand. "I want to have plenty of time to talk with the department heads," Mr. White explained; Owen rubbed his fingers, which were still throbbing from the candidate's handshake.
Old Thorny tried to salvage the disaster. "Owen is almost a department head," he said cheerfully.
"Student opinion isn't a department, is it?" Mr. White asked Owen, who was speechless. White was a compact, trimly built man who played an aggressive, relentless game of squash--daily. His wife called him "Randy"; he called her "Sam"--from Samantha. She came from a "meat money" family in the Chicago area; his was a "meat family" background, too--although there was said to be more money in the meat she came from. One of the less-than-kind Chicago newspapers described their wedding as a "meat marriage." Owen remembered from the candidate's dossier that White had been credited with "revolutionizing packaging and distribution of meat products"; he'd left meat for education rather recently--when his own children (in his opinion) were in need of a better school; he'd started one up, from scratch, and the school had been quite a success in Lake Forest. Now White's children were in college and White was looking for a "bigger challenge in the education business." In Lake Forest, he'd had no "tradition" to work with; White said he liked the idea of "being a change-maker within a great tradition."
Randy White dressed like a businessman; he looked exceedingly sharp alongside old Archie Thorndike's more rumpled and wrinkled appearance. White wore a steel-gray, pin-striped suit with a crisp white shirt; he liked a thin, gold collar pin that pulled the unusually narrow points of his collar a little too closely together--the pin also thrust the perfectly tight knot of his necktie a little too far forward. He put his hand on top of Owen Meany's head and rumpled Owen's hair; before the famous Nativity of '53, Barb Wiggin used to do that to Owen.
"I'll talk to Owen after I get the job!" White said to old Thorny. He smiled at his own joke. "I know what Owen wants, anyway," White said; he winked at Owen. "'An educator first, a fund-raiser second'--isn't that it?" Owen nodded, but he couldn't speak. "Well, I'll tell you what a headmaster is, Owen--he's a decision-maker. He's both an educator and a fund-raiser, but--first and foremost--he makes decisions." Then Randy White looked at his watch; he steered old Thorny back into the headmaster's office. "Remember, I've got that plane to catch," White said. "Let's get those department heads together." And just before old Archie Thorndike closed his office door, Owen heard what White said; in Owen's view, he was supposed to hear what White said. "I hope that kid hasn't stopped growing," said Randy White. Then the door to the headmaster's office was closed; The Voice was left speechless; the candidate had not heard a word from Owen Meany.
Of course, the Ghost of the Future saw it coming; sometimes I think Owen saw everything that was coming. I remember how he predicted that the school would pick Randolph White. For The Grave, The Voice titled his column "WHITEWASH." He began: "THE TRUSTEES LIKE BUSINESSMEN--THE TRUSTEES ARE BUSINESSMEN! THE FACULTY ARE A BUNCH OF TYPICAL TEACHERS--INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY, THEY'RE ALWAYS SAYING 'ON THE OTHER HAND.' NOW ALONG COMES THIS GUY WHO SAYS HIS SPECIALTY IS MAKING DECISIONS. ONCE HE STARTS MAKING THOSE DECISIONS, HE'LL DRIVE EVERYONE CRAZY--WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE SEES WHAT BRILLIANT DECISIONS THE GUY COMES UP WITH! BUT RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE THINKS SOMEONE WHO MAKES DECISIONS IS JUST WHAT WE NEED. RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE'S A SUCKER FOR A DECISION-MAKER," Owen wrote. "WHAT GRAVESEND NEEDS IS A HEADMASTER WITH A STRONG EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND; MR. WHITE'S BACKGROUND IS MEAT." There was more, and it was worse. Owen suggested that someone check into the admissions policy at the small private day school in Lake Forest; were there any Jews or blacks in Mr. White's school? Mr. Early, in his capacity as faculty advise
r to The Grave, killed the column; the part about the faculty being "TYPICAL TEACHERS--INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY" ... that was what forced Mr. Early's hand. Dan Needham agreed that the column should have been killed.
"You can't imply that someone is a racist or an anti-Semite, Owen," Dan told him. "You have to have proof."
Owen sulked about such a stern rejection from The Grave; but he took Dan's advice seriously. He talked to the Gravesend students who came from Lake Forest, Illinois; he encouraged them to write to their mothers and fathers and urge them to inquire about the admissions policy at Mr. White's school. The parents could pretend they were considering the school for their children; they could even ask directly if their children were going to be rubbing shoulders with blacks or Jews. The result--the unhappily second-and thirdhand information--was typically unclear; the parents were told that the school had "no specific admissions policy"; they were also told that the school had no blacks or Jews.
Dan Needham had his own story about meeting Randy White; that was after White was offered the job. It was a beautiful spring day--the forsythia and the lilacs were in blossom--and Dan Needham was walking in the main quadrangle with Randy White and his wife, Sam; it was Sam's first visit to the school, and she was interested in the theater. Almost immediately upon the Whites' arrival, Mr. White made his decision to accept the headmastership. Dan said the school had never looked prettier. The grass was trim and a spring-green color, but it had not been mowed so recently that it looked shorn; the ivy was glossy against the red-brick buildings, and the arborvitae and the privet hedges that outlined the quadrangle paths stood in uniform, dark-green contrast to the few, bright-yellow dandelions. Dan let the new headmaster maul the fingers of his right hand; Dan looked into the pretty-blonde blandness of Sam's vacant, detached smile.