A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapter 6

Nevertheless, in my grandmother’s view, it required nearly constant effort to keep track of the world—both our own world and the world outside the sphere of Gravesend—and it required effort and intelligence to make nearly constant comment on one’s observations; in these efforts, Grandmother was rigorous and unswerving.

She saw very old, infirm people with their mouths agape; although they were, at best, only partially alert, they gave their stuporous attention to images that my grandmother described as “too surpassing in banality to recall.”

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation’s decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence.

On those rare occasions when we watched television without my grandmother, we were disappointed; without Grandmother’s running, scathing commentary, there were few programs that could sustain our interest.

The unlikely figure who captured the rarely uncritical hearts of my grandmother and Owen Meany was a shameless crowd pleaser, a musical panderer who chopped up Chopin and Mozart and Debussy into two- and three-minute exaggerated flourishes on a piano he played with diamond-studded hands.

It certainly wasn’t his music, for he edited Mozart in such a jaunty fashion that you thought he was playing “Mack the Knife”; now and then he played “Mack the Knife,” too.

Whether he hoped to retire at Gravesend Academy when he first fell in love and married my mother, I’ll never know; but her loss, and his reaction to that injustice, caused him to devote himself to the development of the education of “the whole boy” in ways that surpassed even the loftily expressed goals in Gravesend’s curriculum—where “the whole boy” was the proposed result of the four-year program of study.

Dan became the best of those faculty found at a prep school: he was not only a spirited, good teacher, but he believed that it was a hardship to be young, that it was more difficult to be a teenager than a grown-up—an opinion not widely held among grown-ups, and rarely held among the faculty members at a private school (who more frequently look upon their charges as the privileged louts of the luxury class—spoiled brats in need of discipline).

But if it was tolerable to be Grandmother’s age and adore Liberace, it was intolerable that Owen Meany should also love that simpering, piano-key smile.

It had an altogether bleak, reformatory atmosphere; its life was punctuated by the sounds of an adjacent gas station—the bell that announced the arriving and departing vehicles, the accounting of the gas pumps themselves, and the multifarious din from the mechanics laboring in the pits.

Yet the nuns, in a fury that only religious persecution can account for, would attack us; their pursuit was erratic, their shrieks like the cries of bats surprised by sunlight—Owen and I had no trouble outrunning them.

In these years before we attended Gravesend Academy, Owen and I were educated—primarily—by what we saw at The Idaho and on my grandmother’s television. Who hasn’t been “educated” in this slovenly fashion?

Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk.

We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously.

At Grace Church on-the-Hill, the children and the acolytes stood huddled in the narthex; holding their palm fronds, they resembled tourists who’d landed in the tropics on an unseasonably cold day.

When she’s wearing her clerical collar, she looks slightly more underweight than she actually is.

Katherine is a much more jubilant soul than my grandmother, but she has a certain twinkling sarcasm—and the proper elocution, the good diction—that reminds me of Grandmother.

My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously—for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive.

My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously—for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive.

To be sure, he was tiny, but he was fiercely strong, and his sinewy strength was as visible as the strength of a whippet; although he was frighteningly lean, there was already something very adult about his muscular development—and why not?

Gravesend Academy embraced a cynical tone of voice, savored a criticism of everything that anyone took seriously; the students hallowed, above everyone else, that boy who saw himself as born to break the rules, as destined to change the laws.

And to the students of Gravesend who thus chafed against their bonds, the only accepted tone was caustic—was biting, mordant, bitter, scathing sarcasm, the juicy vocabulary of which Owen Meany had already learned from my grandmother.

And to the students of Gravesend who thus chafed against their bonds, the only accepted tone was caustic—was biting, mordant, bitter, scathing sarcasm, the juicy vocabulary of which Owen Meany had already learned from my grandmother.

Applicants for the position were given a subscription to The Grave, the snide, sneering precocity of the student body was well represented in its pages—and best represented by the capitals that commanded one’s gaze to Owen Meany.

Noah and Simon and I commiserated; as much as Owen had captured our admiration, he had risked embarrassing himself—and all of us—by being the instrument of Hester’s debut at Gravesend Academy.

Once in the cab of the tomato-red pickup, Hester and Owen were freed from the regulations of the Dance Committee; they lit up, the smoke from their cigarettes concealed the assumed complacency of their expressions, and each of them lolled an arm out a rolled-down window as Owen turned up the volume of the radio and drove artfully away.

Other boys displayed kissing techniques in lobbies, risked “copping a feel” in coat rooms, defied the chaperones’ quick censure of anything as vulgar as sticking a tongue in a girl’s ear.

IT IS PUERILE FOR YOUNG MEN TO DISCUSS WHAT DEGREE OF ADVANTAGE THEY TOOK OF THEIR DATES; IT IS DISRESPECTFUL OF WOMEN—ALL THIS CHEAP BRAGGING—AND IT GIVES MEN A BAD REPUTATION.

THE DEAN’S OFFICE TELLS ME THAT TWO SENIORS HAVE RECEIVED NOTICE OF DISCIPLINARY PROBATION—FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TERM!—FOR THEIR ALLEGED ‘OVERT INDISCRETIONS’; I BELIEVE THE TWO INCIDENTS FALL UNDER THE PUNISHABLE OFFENSE OF ‘MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE CONDUCT WITH GIRLS.’

AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING PRURIENT, I SHALL REVEAL THE SHOCKING NATURE OF THESE TWO SINS AGAINST THE SCHOOL AND WOMANKIND.

A BOY WAS SEEN LEAVING THE BUTT ROOM IN BANCROFT HALL WITH HIS TONGUE IN HIS DATE’S EAR—AN ODD AND OSTENTATIOUS MANNER IN WHICH TO EXIT A SMOKING LOUNGE, I WILL AGREE, BUT THIS DEGREE OF PHYSICAL CONTACT IS ALSO NOT KNOWN TO RESULT IN A PREGNANCY.

Owen just covered up; he grabbed for hands and feet, he went for the fingers first, but he was content to tear off a shoe and go for the toes. He took a pounding but he wrapped himself into a ball; he left no extremities showing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I asked them to consider the coincidence of Nick’s thirtieth birthday; the meaning of the sentence “Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade” might give our class as much trouble as the meaning of “an urban distaste for the concrete.”

That got quite a few laughs from my colleagues, who were expecting a diatribe from me; on the one hand, they complain about my “predictable politics,” but they are just like the students—they enjoy getting me riled up.

Although the morning light was more evident there and the room had a high-ceilinged loftiness to it, it was, at the same time, austere—the towering portraits of former headmasters and faculty frowned grimly down upon us in their deep-black academic regalia.

In addition, Owen felt that “THE ELEVATION OF THE STAGE AND THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE MORNING LIGHT PROVIDE THE HEADMASTER WITH SUCH AN EXAGGERATED PLATFORM FROM WHICH TO SPEAK; AND OFTEN, THERE’S A KIND OF SPOTLIGHT, PROVIDED BY THE SUN, THAT GIVES US ALL THE FEELING THAT WE’RE IN THE PRESENCE OF AN EXALTED PERSONAGE. I WONDER IF THIS IS THE INTENDED EFFECT,” wrote The Voice.