A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapter 5

He was the size of a small child, but his movements were uncannily adult; and his authority onstage was beyond “adult”—it was supernatural.

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.

“I’m just not sure when to genuflect, and all that nonsense!” Mr. Fish said, chuckling.
“NOT ALL EPISCOPALIANS GENUFLECT,” Owen announced.

Thus did our eclectic foursome arrive at Christ Church.

In the chilly vestibule of the parish house, Barb Wiggin proceeded to imprison Owen Meany in the swaddling clothes; but however tightly or loosely she bound him in the broad, cotton swathes, Owen complained.

The combination of being so roughly handled by Barb Wiggin and discovering that my grandmother had been free to attend the pageant—but had chosen not to attend—was deleterious to Owen’s mood; he grew cranky and petulant.

The combination of being so roughly handled by Barb Wiggin and discovering that my grandmother had been free to attend the pageant—but had chosen not to attend—was deleterious to Owen’s mood; he grew cranky and petulant.

Mary Beth Baird looked quite lush—like a slightly plump starlet—in her white raiment; but both the Holy Mother effect, and the Holy Virgin effect, were undermined by her long, rakish pigtail.

Mary Beth Baird looked quite lush—like a slightly plump starlet—in her white raiment; but both the Holy Mother effect, and the Holy Virgin effect, were undermined by her long, rakish pigtail.

Before she lifted the little Prince of Peace in her arms, Barb Wiggin bent over him and massaged his cheeks. There was a curious combination of the perfunctory and the erotic in her attentions to Owen Meany.

Naturally, I saw something so stewardesslike in her performance of these duties—as if she were dispatching with Owen in the manner that she might have changed a diaper; while at the same time there was something salacious in how close she put her face to his, as if she were intent on seducing him.

Barb Wiggin laid him in the manger; she smiled knowingly at him, and gave him one more saucy peck, on his rosy cheek—for good luck, no doubt.

There was a metallic clicking, like the teeth of a ratchet, as the mechanism for lowering the angel began its task; this was followed by a brief gasp, the panicked intake of Harold Crosby’s breath—as the choir began.

“Blow! Why won’t you blow?” she whispered plaintively.

When Owen caught her eye, she appeared to lose her confidence and her poise; the look he gave her was both challenging and lascivious.

He directed a most unbabylike, sardonic look at Barb Wiggin, who only then regained her control; she moved the “pillar of light” back to the Descending Angel, where it belonged.

Barb Wiggin, trying to prevent the angel from swinging, turned Harold Crosby away from the shepherds and the congregation—so that he continued to swing, but with his back toward everyone, as if he had decided to spurn the world, or retract his message.

Her face flopped first on the hay, then her cheek bumped the Baby Jesus’ hip; then she lunged further into prostration, actually putting her heavy head in Owen’s lap.

Owen looked ready to sneeze, or else the weight of Mary Beth’s head was restricting his breathing; his nose, unwiped and unblown, had dribbled two shiny rivulets across his upper lip.

“IT IS A SACRILEGE FOR YOU TO BE HERE!” Owen hollered. At least a dozen members of the congregation guiltily got up from the pews at the rear of the church—to leave.

Not even the gusto with which the choir—following frantic signals from the rector—sang “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” could spare the congregation the indelible image of how the Meanys had obeyed their only son.

Mary Beth Baird wanted to hold a part of him, too; whether his goosing her had deepened her infatuation, or had put her in her place without trampling an iota of her ardor, is uncertain—regardless, she was his slave, at his command.

I have no quarrel with the wine; it is ably served by our honorary assistants, the Rev. Mr. Larkin and the Rev. Mrs. Keeling—Mrs. Katherine Keeling; she’s the headmistress at The Bishop Strachan School, and my only qualm with her is when she’s pregnant.

Canon Mackie is a tall, stooped, bland-faced man, so plainly ugly that his ungainly size is unthreatening—and so plainly decent that even his stubbornness of mind is not generally offensive.

They don’t understand those years that brought you here; they wonder why—especially, when you defame the United States as vociferously as you do—why you aren’t more Canadian than you are!

Of course, Grandmother would have complained bitterly about the party revelers—and about such a “sundry” guest list, given the diverse personalities and social stations of a typical Dan Needham cast; but Grandmother would, at least, have been occupied.

From backstage I was uniquely positioned to search the audience for the acquiescent presence of Mr. and Mrs. Meany; they were not there.

My search was rewarded, however, by the discovery of a sanguinary Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman, his eyes darting daggers in all directions, and wringing his hands—as he might around a throat—in his lap. The look of a man who’s come to see What Might Have Been is full of both bloodshed and nostalgia; should Owen succumb to his fever, Mr. Morrison looked ready to play the part.

The tallish boy, the notorious cemetery vandal, sprawled his legs into the center aisle, indifferently creating a hazard for the elderly, the infirm, and the unwary.

She had sunk herself so low in her seat that her knees caused considerable discomfort to the back of the neck of the unfortunate citizen who sat in front of her. He was a plump, mild, middle-aged man who taught something in the sciences at Gravesend Academy; and when he turned round in his seat to reprove the girl with a scientific glance, she popped a bubble at him with her gum.

“‘Mankind was my business,’” Marley told Scrooge. “‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’”

She simultaneously worshiped and despised her father, who was a terrible snob and regaled Maureen with both undeserved praise and a staggering list of his expectations for her; at the very least, she would one day have her doctorate—and if she were to indulge her fantasy, and become a movie star, she would make her reputation on the silver screen only after numerous triumphs in “legitimate” theater.

It had not set well with Mr. Early that Caroline’s father, Larry O’Day, had secured the part of Bob Crachit; but Mr. O’Day was younger and handsomer than Mr. Early, and Dan Needham knew that a Chevy salesman’s derring-do was far preferable to Mr. Early’s attempting to turn Bob Crachit into King Lear.

Arthur Dowling was watching A Christmas Carol because his wife, the most officious member of the Town Library Board, was steering her humorless self through the chore of being the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Both her husband and Amanda were in favor of creating mayhem with sexual stereotypes, or reversing sexual roles as arduously and as self-consciously as possible—hence, he often wore an apron while shopping; hence, her hair was shorter than his, except on her legs and in her armpits, where she grew it long.

The Dowlings were tedious, their eccentricity was flawed and made small by the utter predictability of their highly selective passions; yet they were a fixture of The Gravesend Players that provided constant, if familiar, entertainment.

But the future was never quite clear enough for Scrooge to see it—until, at last, they came to the churchyard. “A worthy place!” Dickens called it...“overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation’s death, not life; choked up with too much burying, fat with repleted appetite.”

“Don’t you patronize me, Dan,” my grandmother said.

The sudden light in the kitchen sent a resident mouse into rapid abandonment of its investigations of the bread box; the light also surprised me, because it turned the myriad Colonial-style windowpanes into fragmented mirror images of myself—there instantly appeared to be many of me, standing outside the house, looking in at me.

Chief Pike had carried the fallen postal thespian into the bracing night air, where Mr. Morrison had revived with a vengeance—wrestling in the snow with Gravesend’s determined chief of police, until Mr. Morrison yielded to the strong arm of the law.