Jack Webb, before he was the good cop in Dragnet, was a bad guy in Appointment with Danger; he was, among his other endeavors, attempting to murder a nun. This gave Owen the shivers.
The movie gave my grandmother the shivers, too, because she recalled that she had seen it at The Idaho in 1951—with my mother.
“The nun will be all right, Owen,” she told him.
“IT’S NOT THE IDEA OF MURDERING HER THAT GIVES ME THE SHIVERS,” Owen explained. “IT’S THE IDEA OF NUNS—IN GENERAL.”
“I know what you mean,” my grandmother said; she harbored her own misgivings about the Catholics.
“WHAT WOULD IT COST TO HAVE A COUPLE OF SUITS AND A COUPLE OF JACKETS AND A COUPLE OF PAIRS OF DRESS PANTS, AND SHIRTS, AND TIES, AND SHOES—YOU KNOW, THE WORKS?” Owen asked.
“I’m going to take you shopping myself,” Grandmother told him. “You let me worry about what it will cost. Nobody needs to know what it costs.”
“MAYBE, IN MY SIZE, IT’S NOT SO EXPENSIVE,” Owen said.
And so—even without my mother alive to urge him—Owen Meany agreed that he was Gravesend Academy “material.” The academy agreed, too. Even without Dan Needham’s recommendation, they would have admitted Owen with a full scholarship; he was obviously in need of a scholarship, and he had all A’s at Gravesend Junior High School. The problem was—though Dan Needham had legally adopted me, and I therefore had the privileged status of a faculty son—the academy was reluctant to accept me. My junior-high-school performance was so undistinguished that the academy admissions officers advised Dan to have me attend the ninth grade at Gravesend High School; the academy would admit me to their ninth-grade class the following year—when, they said, it would be easier for me to make the adjustment because I would be repeating the ninth grade.
I had always known I was a weak student; this was less a blow to my self-esteem than it was painful for me to think of Owen moving ahead of me—we wouldn’t be in the same class, we wouldn’t graduate together. There was another, more practical consideration: that, in my senior year, I wouldn’t have Owen around to help me with my homework. That was a promise Owen had made to my mother: that he would always help me with my homework.
And so, before Grandmother took Owen shopping for his academy clothes, Owen announced his decision to attend the ninth grade at Gravesend High School, too. He would stay with me; he would enter the academy the following year—he could have skipped a grade, yet he volunteered to repeat the ninth grade with me! Dan convinced the admissions officers that although Owen was academically quite advanced, it would also be good for him to repeat a grade, to be a year older as a ninth grader—“because of his physical immaturit
y,” Dan argued. When the admissions officers met Owen, of course they agreed with Dan—they didn’t know that a year older, in Owen’s case, didn’t mean that he’d be a year bigger.
Dan and my grandmother were quite touched by Owen’s loyalty to me; Hester, naturally, denounced Owen’s behavior as “queer”; naturally, I loved him, and I thanked him for his sacrifice—but in my heart I resented his power over me.
“DON’T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT,” he said. “WE’RE PALS, AREN’T WE? WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR? I’LL NEVER LEAVE YOU.”
Toronto: February 5, 1987—Liberace died yesterday; he was sixty-seven. His fans had been maintaining a candlelit vigil outside his Palm Springs mansion, which was formerly a convent. Wouldn’t that have given Owen the shivers? Liberace had revised his former opposition to homosexuality. “If you swing with chickens, that is your perfect right,” he said. Yet he denied the allegations in a 1982 palimony suit that he had paid for the sexual services of a male employee—a former valet and live-in chauffeur. There was a settlement out of court. And Liberace’s manager denied that the entertainer was a victim of AIDS; Liberace’s recent weight loss was the result, the manager said, of a watermelon-only diet.
What would my grandmother and Owen Meany have said about that?
“LIBERACE!” Owen would have cried. “WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE? LIBERACE! KILLED BY WATERMELONS!”
It was Thanksgiving, 1954, before my cousins visited Gravesend and saw Grandmother’s TV at 80 Front Street for themselves. Noah had started at the academy that fall, so he’d watched television with Owen and me on occasional weekends; but no judgment on the culture around us could ever be complete without Simon’s automatic approval of every conceivable form of entertainment, and Hester’s similarly automatic disapproval.
“Neat!” Simon said; he also thought that Liberace was “neat.”
“It’s shit, all of it,” said Hester. “Until everything’s in color, and the color’s perfect, TV’s not worth watching.” But Hester was impressed by the energy of Grandmother’s constant criticism of nearly everything she saw; that was a style Hester sought to imitate—for even “shit” was worth watching if it afforded one the opportunity to elaborate on what sort of shit it was.
Everyone agreed that the movie reruns were more interesting than the actual TV programs; yet in Hester’s view, the movies selected were “too old.” Grandmother liked them old—“the older the better!”—but she disliked most movie stars. After watching Captain Blood, she announced that Errol Flynn was “no brains, all chest”; Hester thought that Olivia de Havilland was “cow-eyed.” Owen suggested that pirate movies were all the same.
“STUPID SWORD FIGHTS!” he said. “AND LOOK AT THE CLOTHES THEY WEAR! IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE FIGHTING WITH SWORDS, IT’S STUPID TO WEAR LOOSE, BAGGY SHIRTS—OF COURSE YOUR SHIRTS ARE GOING TO GET ALL SLASHED TO PIECES!”
Grandmother complained that the choice of movies wasn’t even “seasonal.” What was the point of showing It Happens Every Spring in November? No one is thinking about baseball at Thanksgiving, and It Happens Every Spring is such a stupid baseball movie that I think I could watch it every night and even fail to be reminded of my mother’s death. Ray Milland is a college professor who becomes a phenomenal baseball player after discovering a formula that repels wood; how could this remind anyone of anything real?
“Honestly, who thinks up these things?” Grandmother asked.
“Peckerheads,” said Hester, who was forever expanding her vocabulary.
If Gravesend Academy had begun the process of saving Noah from himself, we could scarcely tell; it was Simon who seemed subdued, perhaps because he had missed Noah during the fall and was overwhelmed by the instant renewal of their athletic rivalry. Noah was experiencing considerable academic difficulties at the academy, and Dan Needham had several long heart-to-heart talks with Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha. The Eastmans decided that Noah was intellectually exhausted; the family would spend that Christmas holiday on some recuperative beach in the Caribbean.
“IN THE RELAXING SETTING OF CAPTAIN BLOOD!” Owen observed.
Owen was disappointed that the Eastmans were spending Christmas in the Caribbean; another opportunity to go to Sawyer Depot had eluded him.
After Thanksgiving, he was depressed; and—like me—he was thinking about Hester. We went to The Idaho for the usual fare at the Saturday matinee—a double feature: Treasure of the Golden Condor, wherein Cornel Wilde is a dashing eighteenth-century Frenchman seeking hidden Mayan riches in Guatemala; and Drum Beat, wherein Alan Ladd is a cowboy and Audrey Dalton is an Indian. Between tales of ancient treasure and scalping parties, it was repeatedly clear to Owen and me that we lived in a dull age—that adventure always happened elsewhere, and long ago. Tarzan fit this formula—and so did the dreaded biblical epics. These, in combination with his Christmas pageant experiences, contributed to the newly sullen and withdrawn persona that Owen presented to the world at Christ Church.
That the Wiggins had actually liked The Robe made up Owen’s mind: whether he ever got to go to Sawyer Depot for Christmas or not, he would never participate in another Nativity. I’m sure his decision did not upset the Wiggins greatly, but Owen was unforgiving on the subject of biblical epics in general and The Robe in particular. Although he thought that Jean Simmons was “PRETTY, LIKE HESTER,” he also thought that Audrey Dalton—in Drum Beat—was “LIKE HESTER IF HESTER HAD BEEN AN INDIAN.” Beyond all three having dark hair, I failed to see any resemblance.