d the view of branches against the sky--that was a first impression that lasted for me; it was a model of purity and no-nonsense, against which the Episcopal gloom of stone and tapestry and stained glass could pose no serious competition. And Pastor Merrill was also good-looking--in an intense, pale, slightly undernourished way. He had a boyish face--a sudden, winning, embarrassed smile that contradicted a fairly constant look of worry that more usually gave him the expression of an anxious child. An errant lock of hair flopped on his forehead when he looked down upon his sermon, or bent over his Bible--his hair problem was the unruly result of a pronounced widow's peak, which further contributed to his boyishness. And he was always misplacing his glasses, which he didn't seem to need--that is, he could read without them, he could look out upon his congregation without them (at least not appearing to be blind); then, all of a sudden, he would commence a frantic search for them. It was endearing; so was his slight stutter, because it made us nervous for him--afraid for him, should he have his eloquence snatched from him and be struck down with a crippling speech impediment. He was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless; on the contrary, he exhibited what hard work it was--to make his faith, in tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter.
And then, to add to Mr. Merrill's appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes--a perfectly wholesome type, but entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had told her that health and energy and the Lord's work are harder to come by in bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire.
She suffered visibly. Her blondness turned to dry straw; her cheeks and nose turned a raw salmon color, her eyes watered--she caught every flu, every common cold there was; no epidemic missed her. Aghast at the loss of her California color, she tried makeup; but this turned her skin to clay. Even in summer, she couldn't tan; she turned so dead white in the winter, there was nothing for her to do in the sun but burn. She was sick all the time, and this cost her her energy; she grew listless; she developed a matronly spread, and the vague, unfocused look of someone over forty who might be sixty--or would be, tomorrow.
All this happened to Mrs. Merrill while her children were still small; they were sickly, too. Although they were successful scholars, they were so often ill and missed so many school days that they had to repeat whole grades. Two of them were older than I was, but not a lot older; one of them was even demoted to my grade--I don't remember which one; I don't even remember which sex. That was another problem that the Merrill children suffered: they were utterly forgettable. If you didn't see the Merrill children for weeks at a time, when you saw them again, they appeared to have been replaced by different children.
The Rev. Lewis Merrill had the appearance of a plain man who, with education and intensity, had risen above his ordinariness; and his rise manifested itself in his gift of speech. 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.
It was said that Mrs. Merrill had a drinking problem--or, at least, that her modest intake of alcohol was in terrible conflict with her long list of prescription drugs. One of the children once swallowed all the drugs in the house and had to have its stomach pumped. And following a kind of pep talk that Mr. Merrill gave to the youngest Sunday school class, one of his own children pulled the minister's hair and spit in his face. When the Merrill children were growing up, one of them vandalized a cemetery.
Here was our pastor, clearly bright, clearly grappling with all the most thoughtful elements of religious faith, and doubt; yet, clearly, God had cursed his family.
There was simply no comparable sympathy for the Rev. Dudley Wiggin--Captain Wiggin, some of his harsher critics called him. He was a hale and hearty type, he had a grin like a gash in his face; his smile was the smirk of a restless survivor. He looked like a former downed pilot, a veteran of crash landings, or shoot-outs in the sky--Dan Needham told me that Captain Wiggin had been a bomber pilot in the war, and Dan would know: he was a sergeant himself, in Italy and in Brazil, where he was a cryptographic technician. And even Dan was appalled at the crassness with which Dudley Wiggin directed the Christmas Pageant--and Dan was more tolerant of amateur theatrical performances than the average Gravesend citizen. Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was--if properly understood--threatening.
And his wife, clearly, had not suffered. A former stewardess, Barbara Wiggin was a brash, backslapping redhead; Mr. Wiggin called her "Barb," which was how she introduced herself in various charity-inspired phone calls.
"Hi! It's Barb Wiggin! Is your mommy or your daddy home?"
She was very much a barb, if not a nail, in Owen's side, because she enjoyed picking him up by his pants--she would grab him by his belt, her fist in his belly, and lift him to her stewardess's face: a frankly handsome, healthy, efficient face. "Oh, you're a cute-y!" she'd tell Owen. "Don't you ever dare grow!"
Owen hated her; he always begged Dan to cast her as a prostitute or a child-molester, but The Gravesend Players did not offer many roles of that kind, and Dan admitted to thinking of no other good use for her. Her own children were huge, oafish athletes, irritatingly "well rounded." All the Wiggins played in touch-football games, which they organized, every Sunday afternoon, on the parish-house lawn. Yet--incredibly!--we moved to the Episcopal Church. It was not for the touch football, which Dan and my mother and I despised. I could only guess that Dan and my mother had discussed having children of their own, and Dan had wanted his children to be baptized as Episcopalians--although, as I've said, the whole church business didn't appear to matter very much to him. Perhaps my mother took Dan's Episcopalianism more seriously than Dan took it. All that my mother said to me was that it was better if we were all in one church, and that Dan cared more about his church than she cared about hers--and wasn't it fun for me to be where Owen was? Yes, it was.
Thank Heavens for Hurd's Church; that was the unfortunate name of the nondenominational church at Gravesend Academy--it was named after the academy's founder, that childless Puritan, the Rev. Emery Hurd himself. Without the neutral territory of Hurd's Church, my mother might have started an interdenominational war--because where would she have been married? Grandmother wanted the Rev. Lewis Merrill to perform the ceremony, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had every reason to expect that he would get to officiate.
Fortunately, there was some middle ground. As a faculty member at Gravesend Academy, Dan Needham had a right to use Hurd's Church--especially for the all-important wedding and the quick-to-follow funeral--and Hurd's Church was a masterpiece of inoffensiveness. 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. His role in Hurd's Church was usually that of a bland master of ceremonies, for he rarely delivered a sermon himself; he introduced one guest preacher after another, each one more flamboyant or controversial than himself. The Rev. "Pinky" Scammon also taught Religion at Gravesend Academy, where his courses were known to begin and end with apologies for Kierkegaard; but old Pinky Scammon cleverly delegated much of the teaching of his Religion classes to guest preachers, too. He would invariably entice Sunday's minister to stay through the day Monday, and teach his Monday class; the rest of the week, Mr. Scammon devoted to discussing with his students what the interesting guest had said.
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. Hurd's was dark and shabby, but it was comfy--the pews were wide and worn so smooth that they invited instant dozing; the light, which was absorbed by so much stone, was gray but soft; the acoustics, which may have been Hurd's only miracle, were unmuddied and deep. Every preacher sounded better than he was there; every hymn was distinct; each prayer was resonant; the organ had a cathedral tone. If you shut your eyes--and you were inclined to shut your eyes in Hurd's Church--you could imagine you were in Europe.
Generations of Gravesend Academy boys had carved up the racks for the hymnals with the names of their girlfriends and the scores of football games; generations of academy maintenance men had sanded away the more flagrant obscenities, although an occasional "dork-brain" or "cunt-face" was freshly etched in the wooden slats that secured the tattered copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal. Given the darkness of the place, Hurd's was better suited for a funeral than for a wedding; but my mother had both her wedding and her funeral there.
The wedding service at Hurd's was shared by Pastor Merrill and Rector Wiggin, who managed to avoid any awkwardness--or any open demonstration of the competition between them. Old Pinky Scammon nodded peaceably to what both ministers had to say. Those elements of the celebration that allow the impromptu were the responsibility of Mr. Merrill, who was brief and charming--his nervousness was manifest, as usual, only by his slight stutter. Pastor Merrill also got to deliver the "Dearly beloved" part. "'We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony,'" he began, and I noticed that Hurd's was packed--there was standing-room only. The academy faculty had turned out in droves, and there were the usual droves of women of my grandmother's generation who turned out whenever there was a public opportunity to observe my grandmother, who was--to women her age--the closest that the Gravesend community came to royalty; and there was something special about her having a "fallen" daughter who was choosing this moment to haul herself back into the ranks of the respectable. That Tabby Wheelwright has some nerve to wear white, I'm sure some of these old crones from my grandmother's bridge club were thinking. But this sense of the richness of gossip that permeated Gravesend society is, on my part, largely hindsight. At the time, I chiefly thought it was a splendid turnout.
The Ministry of the Word was muttered by Captain Wiggin, who had no understanding of punctuation; he either trampled over it entirely, or he paused and held his breath so long that you were sure someone was pointing a gun at his head. "'O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with your grace,'" he gasped.
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 back to Ephesians for the rector, who intoned that we should pay close attention to "The Father from whom every family is named"; then he switched to Colossians and that bit about "Love which binds everything together in harmony"; and, at last, he concluded with Mark--"They are no longer two but one."
Pastor Merrill started us off with the Song of Solomon--"'Many waters cannot quench love,'" he read. Then he hit us with Corinthians ("Love is patient and kind"), and finished us off with John--"Love one another as I have loved you." 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.
There then followed a reception at 80 Front Street. 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. Yet the bar and the buffet tables were set out upon the lawn; the men took off their suit jackets and rolled up their sleeves and loosened their ties and sweated through their shirts--my grandmother particularly disapproved of the men for draping their jackets on the privet hedges, which gave the usually immaculate, dark-green border of the rose garden the appearance of being strewn with litter that had blown in from another part of town. Several of the women fanned themselves; some of them kicked off their high heels and walked barefoot on the lawn.
There had been a brief and abandoned plan to have a dance floor put on the brick terrace, but this plan withered in a disagreement concerning the proper music--and a good thing, too, my grandmother concluded; she meant it was a good thing that there was no dancing in such humid weather.
But it was what a summer wedding should be--sultry, something momentarily pretty, giving way to a heat that is unrestrained. Uncle Alfred showed off for me and my cousins by chugging a beer. A stray beagle, belonging to some new people on Pine Street, made off with several cupcakes from the coffee and dessert table. Mr. Meany, standing so stiffly in-waiting at the receiving line that he appeared to have granite in his pockets, blushed when it was his turn to kiss the bride. "Owen's got the weddin' present," he said, turning away. "We got just one present, from the both of us." Mr. Meany and Owen wore the only dark suits at the wedding, and Simon commented to Owen on the inappropriateness of his solemn, Sunday school appearance.
"You look like you're at a funeral, Owen," Simon said.
Owen was hurt and looked cross.
"I was just kidding," Simon said.
But Owen was still cross and made a point of rearranging all the wedding presents on the terrace so that his and his father's gift was the centerpiece. The wrapping paper had Christmas trees all over it and the present, which Owen needed both hands to lift, was the size and shape of a brick. I was sure it was granite.
"That's probably Owen's only suit, you asshole," Hester told Simon; they quarreled. It was the first time I'd ever seen Hester in a dress; she looked very pretty. It was a yellow dress; Hester was tan; her black hair was as tangled as a briar patch in the heat, but her reflexes seemed especially primed for the social challenge of an outdoor wedding. When Noah tried to surprise her with a captured toad, Hester got the toad away from him and slapped Simon in the face with it.
"I think you've killed it, Hester," Noah said, bending over the stunned toad and exhibiting much more concern for it than for his brother's face.
"It's not my fault," Hester said. "You started it."
My grandmother had declared the upstairs bathrooms "off-limits" to wedding guests, so there got to be quite long lines at the downstairs bathrooms--there were only two. Lydia had hand-painted two shirt cardboards, "Gentlemen" and "Ladies"; the "Ladies" had the much longer of the lines.
When Hester tried to use an upstairs bathroom--she felt that she was "family," and therefore not bound by the rules governing the guests--her mother told her that she should wait in line like everyone else. My Aunt Martha--like many Americans--could become quite tyrannical in the defense of democracy. Noah and Simon and Owen and I bragged that we could pee in the bushes, and Hester begged only our slightest cooperation--in order that she could follow us in that pursuit. She asked that one of us stand guard--so that other boys and men, with an urge to pee in the denser sections of the privet hedges, would not surprise her midsquat; and she requested that one of us keep her panties safe for her. Her brothers predictably balked at this and made derisive comments regarding the desirability of holding Hester's panties--under any circumstances. I was, typically, slow to respond. Hester simply stepped out of her underwear and handed her white cotton briefs to Owen Meany.
You would have thought she had handed him a live armadillo; his little face reflected his devout curiosity and his extreme anxiety. But Noah snatched Hester's panties out of Owen's hands and Simon snatched them away from his brother, pulling them over Owen's head--they fit over his head rather easily, with his face peering through the hole for one of Hester's ample thighs. He snatched then off his head, blushing; but when he tried to stuff them into his suit-jacket pocket, he discovered that the side pockets were still sewn shut. Although he'd worn this suit to Sunday school for several years, no one had unsewn the pockets for him; or perhaps he thought they were meant to be closed. He recovered, however, and stuffed the panties into the inside breast pocket of the jacket, where they made quite a lump. At least he was not wearing the panties on his head when his father walked up to him, and Noah and Simon began to scuff their feet in the rough grass and loose twigs at the foot of the privet hedge; by so doing, they managed to conceal the sound of Hester pissing.
Mr. Meany was stirring a glass of champagne with a dill pickle the size of this thick forefinger. He had not drunk a drop of champagne, but he appeared to enjoy using it as a dip for his pickle.
"Are you comin' home with me, Owen?" Mr. Meany asked. He had announced, from the moment he arrived at the reception, that he couldn't stay long; my mother and grandmother were most impressed that he'd come at all. He was uncomfortable going out. His simple navy-blue suit was from the same family of cheap material as Owen's--since Owen was often up in the air in his suit, perhaps Mr. Meany's suit had been better treated; I could not tell if Mr. Meany had unsewn his side pockets. Owen's suit was creased--just above the cuffs of his trousers and at the wrists of his jacket sleeves, indicating that his suit had been let down; but the sleeves and trousers had been "let down" so little, Owen appeared to be growing at the rate of an underfed tree.
"I WANT TO STAY," Owen said.
"Tabby won't be bringin' you up the hill on her weddin' day," Mr. Meany told him.
"My father or mother will bring Owen home, sir," Noah said. My cousins--as rough as they could be with other children--had been brought up to be friendly and polite to adults, and Noah's cheerfulness seemed to surprise Mr. Meany. I introduced him to my cousins, but I could tell that Owen wanted to walk his father away from us, immediately--perhaps fearing that Hester would at any moment emerge from th