“I’ll bet that’s him!” my mother said, getting up from the table to go to the door. She gave herself a quick and approving look in the mirror over the sideboard where the roast sat, growing cold, and she hurried into the hall.
“Then you did make a date?” my grandmother asked. “Did you invite him?”
“Not exactly!” my mother called. “But I told him where I lived!”
“Nothing is exactly with young people, I’ve noticed,” my grandmother said, more to Lydia than to me.
“It certainly isn’t,” said Lydia.
But I’d heard enough of them; I had heard them for years. I followed my mother to the door; my grandmother, pushing Lydia in her wheelchair in front of her, followed me. Curiosity, which—in New Hampshire, in those days—was often said to be responsible for the death of cats, had got the better of us all. We knew that my mother had no immediate plans to reveal to us a single clue regarding the first man she’d supposedly met on the Boston & Maine; but the second man—we could see him for ourselves. Dan Needham was on the doorstep of 80 Front Street, Gravesend.
Of course, my mother had had “dates” before, but she’d never said of one of them that she wanted us to meet him, or that she even liked him, or that she knew she’d see him again. And so we were aware that Dan Needham was special, from the start.
I suppose Aunt Martha would have said that one aspect of my mother being “a little simple” was her attraction to younger men; but in this habit my mother was simply ahead of her time—because it’s true, the men she dated were often a little younger than she was. She even went out with a few seniors from Gravesend Academy when—if she’d gone to college—she would have been a college senior herself; but she just “went out” with them. While they were only prep-school boys and she was in her twenties—with an illegitimate child—all she did with those boys was dance with them, or go to movies or plays with them, or to the sporting events.
I was used to seeing a few goons come calling, I will admit; and they never knew how to respond to me. They had no idea, for example, what a six-year-old was. They either brought me rubber ducks for the bath, or other toys for virtual infants—or else they brought me Fowler’s Modern English Usage: something every six-year-old should plunge into. And when they saw me—when they were confronted with my short, sturdy presence, and the fact that I was too old for bathtub toys and too young for Modern English Usage—they would become insanely restless to impress me with their sensitivity to a waist-high person like myself. They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby talk about showing them my favorite toy—so that they might know what kind of thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time. There was rarely a next time. Once one of them asked my mother if I was toilet-trained—I guess he found this a suitable question, prior to his inviting me to sit on his knees and play bucking bronco.
“YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID YES,” Owen Meany told me, “AND THEN PISSED IN HIS LAP.”
One thing about my mother’s “beaus”: they were all good-looking. So on that superficial level I was unprepared for Dan Needham, who was tall and gawky, with curly carrot-colored hair, and who wore eyeglasses that were too small for his egg-shaped face—the perfectly round lenses giving him the apprehensive, hunting expression of a large, mutant owl. My grandmother said, after he’d gone, that it must have been the first time in the history of Gravesend Academy that they had hired “someone who looks younger than the students.” Furthermore, his clothes didn’t fit him; the jacket was too tight—the sleeves too short—and the trousers were so baggy that the crotch flapped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and the only padded parts of his peculiar body.
But I was too young and cynical to spot his kindness. Even before he was introduced to my grandmother or to Lydia or to me, he looked straight at me and said, “You must be Johnny. I heard as much about you as anyone can hear in an hour and a half on the Boston and Maine, and I know you can be trusted with an important package.” It was a brown shopping bag with another brown paper bag stuffed inside it. Oh boy, here it comes, I thought: an inflatable camel—it floats and spits. But Dan Needham said, “It’s not for you, it’s not for anyone your age. But I’m trusting you to put it somewhere where it can’t be stepped on—and out of the way of any pets, if you have pets. You mustn’t let a pet near it. And whatever you do, don’t open it. Just tell me if it moves.”
Then he handed it to me; it didn’t weigh enough to be Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and if I was to keep it away from pets—and tell him if it moved—clearly it was alive. I put it quickly under the hall table—the telephone table, we called it—and I stood halfway in the hall and halfway in the living room, where I could watch Dan Needham taking a seat.
Taking a seat in my grandmother’s living room was never easy, because many of the available seats were not for sitting in—they were antiques, which my grandmother was preserving, for historical reasons; sitting in them was not good for them. Therefore, although the living room was
quite sumptuously arranged with upholstered chairs and couches, very little of this furniture was usable—and so a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, “Oh, for goodness sake, not there! You can’t sit there!” And the startled person would attempt to try the next chair or couch, which in my grandmother’s opinion would also collapse or burst into flames at the strain. And I suppose my grandmother noticed that Dan Needham was tall, and that he had a sizable bottom, and this no doubt meant to her that an even fewer-than-usual number of seats were available to him—while Lydia, not yet deft with her wheelchair, blocked the way here, and the way there, and neither my mother nor my grandmother had yet developed that necessary reflex to simply wheel her out of the way.
And so the living room was a scene of idiocy and confusion, with Dan Needham spiraling toward one vulnerable antique after another, and my mother and grandmother colliding with Lydia’s wheelchair while Grandmother barked this and that command regarding who should sit where. I hung back on the threshold of this awkwardness, keeping an eye on the ominous shopping bag, imagining that it had moved, a little—or that a mystery pet would suddenly materialize beside it and either eat, or be eaten by, the contents of the bag. We had never had a pet—my grandmother thought that people who kept pets were engaged in the basest form of self-mockery, intentionally putting themselves on a level with animals. Nevertheless, it made me extremely jumpy to observe the bag, awaiting its slightest twitch, and it made me even jumpier to observe the foolish nervousness of the adult ritual taking place in the living room. Gradually, I gave my whole attention to the bag; I slipped away from the threshold of the living room and retreated into the hall, sitting cross-legged on the scatter rug in front of the telephone table. The sides of the bag were almost breathing, and I thought I could detect an odor foreign to human experience. It was the suspicion of this odor that drew me nearer to the bag, until I crawled under the telephone table and put my ear to the bag and listened, and peered over the top of the bag—but the bag inside the bag blocked my view.
In the living room, they were talking about history—that was Dan Needham’s actual appointment: in the History Department. He had studied enough history at Harvard to be qualified to teach the conventional courses in that field at Gravesend. “Oh, you got the job!” my mother said. What was special in his approach was his use of the history of drama—and here he said something about the public entertainment of any period distinguishing the period as clearly as its so-called politics, but I drifted in and out of the sense of his remarks, so intent was I on the contents of the shopping bag in the hall. I picked up the bag and held it in my lap and waited for it to move.
In addition to his interview with the History Department members, and with the headmaster, Dan Needham was saying, he had requested some time to address those students interested in theater—and any faculty members who were interested, too—and in this session he had attempted to demonstrate how the development of certain techniques of the theatrical arts, how certain dramatic skills, can enhance our understanding of not only the characters on a stage but of a specific time and place as well. And for this session with the drama students, Dan Needham was saying, he always brought along a certain “prop”—something interesting, either to hold or focus the students’ attention, or to distract them from what he would, finally, make them see. He was rather long-winded, I thought.
“What props?” my grandmother asked.
“Yes, what props?” Lydia said.
And Dan Needham said that a “prop” could be anything; once he’d used a tennis ball—and once a live bird in a cage.
That was it! I thought, feeling that whatever it was in the bag was hard and lifeless and unmoving—and a birdcage would be all that. The bird, of course, I couldn’t touch. Still, I wanted to see it, and with trepidation—and as silently as possible, so that the bores in the living room would not hear the paper crinkling of the two bags—I opened just a little bit of the bag within the bag.
The face that stared intently into mine was not a bird’s face, and no cage prevented this creature from leaping out at me—and the creature appeared not only poised to leap out at me, but eager to do so. Its expression was fierce; its snout, as narrow as the nose of a fox, was pointed at my face like a gun; its wild, bright eyes winked with hatred and fearlessness, and the claws of its forepaws, which were reaching toward me, were long and prehistoric. It looked like a weasel in a shell—like a ferret with scales.
I screamed. I also forgot I was sitting under the telephone table, because I leaped up, knocking over the table and tangling my feet in the phone cord. I couldn’t get away; and when I lunged out of the hall and into the living room, the telephone, and the phone table, and the beast in the bag were all dragged—with considerable clamor—after me. And so I screamed again.
“Goodness gracious!” my grandmother cried.
But Dan Needham said cheerfully to my mother: “I told you he’d open the bag.”
At first I had thought Dan Needham was a fool like all the others, and that he didn’t know the first thing about six-year-olds—that to tell a six-year-old not to open a bag was an invitation to open it. But he knew very well what a six-year-old was like; to his credit, Dan Needham was always a little bit of a six-year-old himself.
“What in heaven’s name is in the bag?” my grandmother asked, as I finally freed myself from the phone cord and went crawling to my mother.
“My prop!” Dan Needham said.
It was some “prop,” all right, for in the bag was a stuffed armadillo. To a boy from New Hampshire, an armadillo resembled a small dinosaur—for who in New Hampshire ever heard of a two-foot-long rat with a shell on its back, and claws as distinguished as an anteater’s? Armadillos eat insects and earthworms and spiders and land snails, but I had no way of knowing that. It looked at least willing, if not able, to eat me.