A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapter 9

She telephoned Dominic Poggio almost daily, and she upbraided him that his delivery service was going to the dogs.

In the first place, she reproached him, the delivery boys were “total strangers.”

I’D BEGIN WITH HIS NOTES, HIS DIARIES—HE NEVER MINCED WORDS THERE.

SINCE I DISCOVERED SEVERAL YEARS AGO, THAT I WAS LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY, I HAVE TROUBLED MYSELF VERY LITTLE ABOUT THEORIES.

For students the age of my Bishop Strachan girls to spend seven weeks of the summer memorizing The Medea and The Trojan Women must have been an exercise in tedium—and one that risked disabusing the youngsters of their infatuation with the stage.

Indeed, those boys looked mightily overworked as it was; a particularly pallid young man had to be Creon in one play and Poseidon in the other.

I was quite taken by the dolorous girl Dan picked to play Hecuba; in addition to the sorrows of her role, she had to physically remain on the stage for the entirety of The Trojan Women.

She was quite concerned at how many Canadian authors were on our reading lists; because she’d not read them, she suspected them of the gravest parochialism.

“I detest the term ‘Can Lit,’” I told Ms. Pribst. “We do not call American Literature ‘Am Lit,’ I see no reason to shrivel this country’s most interesting literature to a derogatory abbreviation. Furthermore,” I said, “I consider Mister Davies an author of such universal importance that I choose not to teach what is ‘Canadian’ about his books, but what is wonderful about them.”

“‘Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgment,’” said the sorrowful girl. “‘What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contrives.’”

This is a subject—my return—that Dan broaches every August, always on an evening when it is clear to him that I am enjoying the atmosphere of 80 Front Street, and his friendship.

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out; her voice now sounded merely habitual—or as if she were imparting a prerecorded message.

I couldn’t imagine what my mother’s sad red dress, her dummy, and Mary Magdalene’s stolen arms, could ever possibly be for—and I said so, a little more tersely than I meant to.

“It is obvious that Owen Meany was g-g-g-gifted with certain precognitive p-p-p-powers—visions of the f-f-f-future are not unheard of, you know,” he said.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes—toward an infinity of unsatisfying and disagreeable endings.

It’s no wonder it was such a tribulation for Mr. Merrill to know what he was going to say about Owen—at Owen’s funeral. How could a man like him know what to say about Owen Meany?

“Of the Rev. Mr. Slope’s parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he added an ‘e’ to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him.”

“The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy,” the note says. “It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised. The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy...” the note goes on.

Then Pastor Merrill exhorted us through that familiar psalm: “‘The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth for evermore.’”

Then he once more turned to The Book of Common Prayer; it was unusual for a Congregationalist—especially, in a nondenominational church—to be using the prayer book so scrupulously, but I was sure that my father respected that Owen had been an Episcopalian.

How it must have disappointed Owen...to discover that my father was such an insipid soup of a man.

Lewis Merrill was so innocuous, how could I have remembered seeing him in those bleacher seats?

It was more than a year after I came to Canada, when the town churches of Gravesend—and Hurd’s Church, upon the urging of Lewis Merrill—organized a so-called Vietnam Moratorium.

He was a wild, hairy young man in a purple caftan—oblivious to how the girls stared at him and seemingly held together by wires and cords that entangled him in his cumbersome recording equipment.

Grandmother suffered ambivalent feelings every Fourth of July; she was patriotic enough to stand on her doorstep waving a small American flag—the flag itself was not any larger than the palm of her hand—but at the same time, she frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool barking.

Although, at dusk, the sun had lost its intensity, the dry heat shimmered above the tarmac; despite a breeze, the heat persisted with furnacelike generation.

The family itself was inscrutable—except for the clear possession of a shared but unequal rage, which appeared to manifest itself the least in a slope-shouldered, slow-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie.

“MAYBE THE DATE IS JUST A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! BUT IT WAS WRITTEN IN STONE—IT IS ‘WRITTEN IN STONE’!” he added; he meant, of course, that he’d already carved the date of his death on his own gravestone.

They stood paralyzed by their anger; but the major stepped smartly forward to greet Owen; the chauffeur opened the tailgate of the long, silver-gray hearse; and the mortician became the unctuous delegate of death—the busybody it was his nature to be.

The towering boy carried some authentic-looking Army equipment: an entrenching tool, a machete, a bayonet—although the sheath for the bayonet did not look like Army issue, not to me; it was made of a shiny material in a Day-Glo-green color, and embossed upon it was the traditional skull and crossbones in Day-Glo orange.

...a cacophony of dogs malingered in the vicinity of each outdoor barbecue-in-progress, and an occasional flash of heat-lightning, lit up the night, casting into silhouette the tangled maze of television antennas that towered over the low-level houses—as if a vast network of giant spider webs threatened the smaller, human community below.

Clustered in their own groups, according to age or marriage or divorce or degree of pregnancy, most of the women were inside the sweltering house, where the ovenlike temperature appeared to have wilted them, like the limp raw vegetables that were plunked in assorted bowls alongside the assorted “dips” that were now in their third day of exposure to this fetid air.

She was drinking what smelled like bourbon out of a highball glass—this one was etched with a poor likeness of a pheasant or a grouse or a quail.

The walls of the room were festooned with hanging cartridge belts and an assortment of fatigues and unmatching parts of uniforms.

ONE DAY THERE WILL COME AN EPIDEMIC—I’LL BET ON SOME HUMDINGER OF A SEXUAL DISEASE.

Once in the United States, the orphans would be met by social workers from the archdiocese or diocese of the particular city of their arrival.

Occasionally, he would glance above him, sizing up the deep window ledge below the casement window.

The window was blown out, and there was an instant, acrid, burning stink.

Another nun kneeled in the bomb litter on the floor; she settled back on her haunches and spread her habit smoothly across her thighs, and the nun who held Owen in her arms rested his head in the lap of the sister who’d thus arranged herself on the floor.

The tissue that hung from the stumps of his arms was as filmy and delicate as gossamer—as fine and intricate as old lace.