A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapters 7–8

At nineteen, to experience lust—even in its shabbiest forms at Old Freddy’s—was at least to experience something; and if Owen and I had at first imagined what love was at The Idaho, I saw nothing wrong in lusting at a burlesque show.

“Poppa, these young men want to talk to ‘Jerrold’ about some fire,” the son said; he spoke laconically and with a more virulent Boston accent than his father’s.

That New Year’s Eve, which Owen and Hester and I celebrated at 80 Front Street—in the desultory manner that describes the partying habits of the late teen years (Hester was twenty), and in a relatively quiet manner (because Grandmother had gone to bed)—there were only 3,205 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.

Someone should tell Mrs. Reagan that young people—even young people on drugs—are not the ones responsible for the major problems besetting the world!

I doubt that Owen ever would have become “sophisticated” enough to make that separation—not even today, when it seems that the only people who are adamant in their claim that public and private morality are inseparable are those creep-evangelists who profess to “know” that God prefers capitalists to communists, and nuclear power to long hair.

Even Larry Lish, when questioned, couldn’t remember anything in Owen’s remarks that could be construed as anti-Semitic; Larry, in fact, admitted that his mother had a habit of labeling everyone who treated her with less than complete reverence as an anti-Semite—as if, in Mrs. Lish’s view, the only possible reason to dislike her was that she was Jewish.

And now we get to listen to the senators and the representatives who are running for office again; they tell the colonel all he doesn’t know about the U.S. Constitution; they point out to him that patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda—and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American. They might add that God is not a proven right-winger! Why are they pontificating the obvious to Colonel North?

Whenever Dr. Dolder’s VW was parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, everyone knew that the doctor was simply exercising his especially Swiss prudence; he was not a drunk, and the few small roads he might have traveled on to drive himself from dinner at the Whites’ to Quincy Hall would not have given him much opportunity to maim many of the sober and innocent residents of Gravesend.

The students would be arriving for morning meeting in another ten or fifteen minutes; a smashed Volkswagen sitting on its rear end in the front of The Great Hall might very well produce a louder and longer laugh than a natty, well-cared-for car facing them, undamaged, onstage.

One of the faculty wives—one especially prolific with progeny, and one whose maternal girth was more substantial than well coordinated—slipped under the Volkswagen as it was being returned to its wheels; although she was not hurt, she was wedged quite securely under the stubborn automobile.

One of the faculty wives—one especially prolific with progeny, and one whose maternal girth was more substantial than well coordinated—slipped under the Volkswagen as it was being returned to its wheels; although she was not hurt, she was wedged quite securely under the stubborn automobile.

Someone suggested getting Dr. Dolder; if the doctor unlocked the car, the stalwart vehicle could be rolled, if not driven, to the head of the broad and sweeping marble stairway.

Dan Needham, who said to Owen that he didn’t want to hear a word about what Owen did or didn’t know about Dr. Dolder’s car, told us that the headmaster was screaming to the faculty about “disrespect for personal property” and “vandalism”; both categories of crimes fell under the rubric of “punishable by dismissal.”

Surely the heavy equipment that Hester had seen would have included some kind of hydraulic hoist or crane, although that wouldn’t have helped him get Mary Magdalene up the long staircase in the Main Academy Building—or up on the stage of The Great Hall. He would have had to use a hand dolly for that; and it wouldn’t have been easy.

How frustrated and powerless Randy White would appear at our commencement, when he threatened to withhold our diplomas if we didn’t stop our uproar; he must have known then that he had lost...because Dan Needham and Mr. Early, and a solid one third or one half of the faculty stood up to applaud our riotous support of Owen...

My aunt manifests only the most occasional vestige of her old interest in who my actual father is or was; last Christmas, in Sawyer Depot, she managed to get me alone for a second and she said, “Do you still not know? You can tell me. I’ll bet you know! How could you not have found out something in all this time?”

I would not have wanted to visit the Keelings—or the Gibsons, or the Ormsbys—on their island before the septic system was installed; but that period of unlighted encounters with spiders in outhouses, and various late-night frights in the privy-world, is another favorite topic of discussion among the families who share the island each summer.

Uncle Bulwer was pecked on top of his head during a fortunate hiatus in what should have been a most private action, and he was so fearful of the attacking owl that he fled the privy with his pants down at his ankles, and did even greater injury to himself—greater than the owl's injury—by running headfirst into a pine tree.

He was lascivious, depraved—our much-appreciated holiday in the emergency room had taken a nasty turn.

“Have you heard? You mean, you haven’t heard!” The rapture of so much amateur conjecturing and surmising would flush their faces as irrepressibly as blood!

I saw a mink run under the boathouse today; it had such a slender body, it was only slightly larger than a weasel—with a weasel’s undulating movement.

And the typical Gravesend families were plain and dour in the face of death; we had few calls for elaborate coping, even fewer for archways with dosserets, and not one for angels sliding down barber poles.

After my summer in the monument shop, I could appreciate what might have appealed to Owen Meany about the quiet of churches, the peace of prayer, the easy cadence of hymns and litanies—and even the simplistic, athletic ritual of practicing the shot.

It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime—and of all holy-seeming innocents—that television achieves its deplorable greatness.

Not even five years later, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Hester would say, “Television gives good disaster.” I suppose this was nothing but a more vernacular version of my grandmother’s observation of the effect of TV on old people: that watching it would hasten their deaths.

“I’m going to be an incontinent idiot,” my grandmother said; she looked directly at Owen Meany.

Her face, like her color, was slightly downcast, almost apologetic; and her arms were not outstretched in obvious supplication—rather, she clasped her hands together at her slight breast, her hands just barely emerging from the sleeves of her robe, which shapelessly draped her body to her small, bare, plain-gray feet. She seemed altogether too demure for a former prostitute—and too withholding of any gesture for a saint.

It was an uninspired year for Hester, too; here she was, a college graduate, still living in her squalid apartment in her old college town, still waitressing in the lobster-house restaurant in Kittery or Portsmouth.

I had never eaten there, but Owen said it was nice enough—on the harbor, a little overquaint with the seafood theme (lobster pots and buoys and anchors and mooring ropes were prevalent in the decor).

They didn’t have an opening in their English Department, but they assured me that my vitae was “most laudable” and that I’d have no trouble finding a job.

These Grace Church on-the-Hill Anglicans were conservative; “conservative”—about certain matters of propriety, especially—is perfectly all right with us Wheelwrights.

On Christmas Eve, 1964, two American servicemen were killed in Saigon when Viet Cong terrorists bombed the U S. billets; one week later, on New Year’s Eve, Hester threw up—perhaps she upchucked with special verve, because Owen Meany was prompted to take the power of Hester’s puking as a sign.

In February, the U.S. Air Force conducted Operation Flaming Dart—a “tactical air reprisal.”

In March, the U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder—“to interdict the flow of supplies to the south.”

That fall he was told he was Adjutant General’s Corps “material”; that was not what he wanted to hear—the Adjutant General’s Corps was not a combat branch.

DO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE PEOPLE EVEN LIKE THE MILITARY JUNTA OF MARSHAL KY?

I FIGURE IF I COULD BE LATOAD’S AIDE-DE-CAMP—IF I COULD SWING IT—THE MAJOR GENERAL WOULD LOOK KINDLY UPON MY REQUEST FOR TRANSFER.

On his left sleeve was a patch indicating his post, and on each shoulder epaulet was a brass bar signifying that he was a second lieutenant; on each collar was the brass U.S. insignia and the red-and-blue-striped silver shield of his branch: the Adjutant General’s Corps.

He was dribbling the basketball, his head nodding almost imperceptibly to the rhythm of the ball bouncing on the floor, his eyes always on the rim of the basket.

THE MORTUARY SECTIONS BACK AT THE COMMAND POSTS IN VIETNAM ARE NOT KNOWN FOR THEIR ATTENTION TO VERISIMILITUDE. IS THAT FAMILY GOING TO BELIEVE IT’S EVEN HIM? BUT IF YOU TELL THE FAMILY THAT THE BODY ISN’T ‘SUITABLE FOR VIEWING,’ HOW MUCH WORSE IS IT GOING TO BE FOR THEM?