The Robe, to be fair, had hit Owen and me one Saturday afternoon at The Idaho with special force; my mother had been dead less than a year, and Owen and I were not comforted to see Richard Burton and Jean Simmons walk off to their deaths quite so happily. Furthermore, they appeared to exit the movie and life itself by walking up into the sky! This was especially offensive. Richard Burton is a Roman tribune who converts to Christianity after crucifying Christ; both Burton and Jean Simmons take turns clutching Christ’s robe a lot.
“WHAT A BIG FUSS ABOUT A BLANKET!” Owen said. “THAT’S SO CATHOLIC,” he added—“TO GET VERY RELIGIOUS ABOUT OBJECTS.”
This was a theme of Owen’s—the Catholics and their adoration of OBJECTS. Yet Owen’s habit of collecting objects that he made (in his own way) RELIGIOUS was well known: I had only to remember my armadillo’s claws. In all of Gravesend, the object that most attracted Owen’s contempt was the stone statue of Mary Magdalene, the reformed prostitute who guarded the playground of St. Michael’s—the parochial school. The life-sized statue stood in a meaningless cement archway—“meaningless” because the archway led nowhere; it was a gate without a place to be admitted to; it was an entrance without a house. The archway, and Mary Magdalene herself, overlooked the rutted macadam playground of the schoolyard—a surface too broken up to dribble a basketball on; the bent and rusted basket hoops had long ago been stripped of their nets, and the foul lines had been erased or worn away with sand.
It was a forlornly unattended playground on weekends and school holidays; it was used strictly for recesses during school days, when the parochial students loitered there—they were unmoved to play many games. The stern look of Mary Magdalene rebuked them; her former line of work and her harsh reformation shamed them. For although the playground reflected an obdurate disrepair, the statue itself was whitewashed every spring, and even on the dullest, grayest days—despite being dotted here and there with birdshit and occasional stains of human desecration—Mary Magdalene attracted and reflected more light than any other object or human presence at St. Michael’s.
Owen looked upon the school as a prison to which he was nearly sent; for had his parents not RENOUNCED the Catholics, St. Michael’s would have been Owen’s school. 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.
But over this unholy, unstudious, unsuitable ground the stone Mary Magdalene stood her guard; under her odd, cement archway, she at times appeared to be tending to an elaborate but crudely homemade barbecue; at other times, she seemed to be a goalie—poised in the goal.
Of course, no Catholic would have fired a ball or a puck or any other missile at her; if the parochial students themselves were tempted, the grim, alert presence of the nuns would have discouraged them. And although the Gravesend Catholic Church was in another part of town, the shabby saltbox where the nuns and some other teachers at St. Michael’s lived was positioned like a guardhouse at a corner of the playground—in full view of Mary Magdalene. If a passing Protestant felt inclined to show the statue some small gesture of disrespect, the vigilant nuns would exit their guardhouse on the fly—their black habits flapping with the defiant rancorousness of crows.
Owen was afraid of nuns.
“THEY’RE UNNATURAL,” he said; but what, I thought, could be more UNNATURAL than the squeaky falsetto of The Granite Mouse or his commanding presence, which was so out of proportion to his diminutive size?
Every fall, the horse-chestnut trees between Tan Lane and Garfield Street produced many smooth, hard, dark-brown missiles; it was inevitable that Owen and I should pass by the statue of Mary Magdalene with our pockets full of chestnuts. Despite his fear of nuns, Owen could not resist the target that the holy goalie presented; I was a better shot, but Owen threw his chestnuts more fervently. We left scarcely any marks on Mary Magdalene’s ground-length robe, on her bland, snowy face, or on her open hands—outstretched in apparent supplication. 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.
“PENGUINS!” Owen would cry as he ran; everyone called nuns “penguins.” We’d run up Cass Street to the railroad tracks and follow the tracks out of town. Before we reached Maiden Hill, or the quarries, we would pass the Fort Rock Farm and throw what remained of our chestnuts at the black angus cattle grazing there; despite their threatening size and their blue lips and tongues, the black angus wouldn’t chase us as enthusiastically as the pen
guins, who always gave up their pursuit before Cass Street.
And every spring, the swamp between Tan Lane and Garfield Street produced a pondful of tadpoles and toads. Who hasn’t already told you that boys of a certain age are cruel? We filled a tennis-ball can with tadpoles and—under the cover of darkness—poured them over the feet of Mary Magdalene. The tadpoles—those that didn’t turn quickly into toads—would dry up and die there. We even slaughtered toads and indelicately placed their mutilated bodies in the holy goalie’s upturned palms, staining her with amphibian gore. God forgive us! We were such delinquents only in these few years of adolescence before Gravesend Academy could save us from ourselves.
In the spring of ’57, Owen was especially destructive to the helpless swamplife of Gravesend, and to Mary Magdalene; just before Easter, we’d been to The Idaho, where we suffered through Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments—the life of Moses, represented by Charlton Heston undergoing various costume changes and radical hairstyles.
“IT’S ANOTHER MALE-NIPPLE MOVIE,” Owen said; and, indeed, in addition to Charlton Heston’s nipples, there is evidence of Yul Brynner and John Derek and even Edward G. Robinson having nipples, too.
That The Idaho should show The Ten Commandments so close to Easter was another example of what my grandmother called the poor “seasonal” taste of nearly everyone in the entertainment business: that we should see the Exodus of the Chosen People on the eve of our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection was outrageous—“ALL THAT OLD-TESTAMENT HARSHNESS WHEN WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT JESUS!” as Owen put it. The parting of the Red Sea especially offended him.
“YOU CAN’T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT!” he said indignantly. “YOU CAN’T PROVE A MIRACLE—YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE IT! IF THE RED SEA ACTUALLY PARTED, IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THAT,” he said. “IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING—IT’S NOT A PICTURE ANYONE CAN EVEN IMAGINE!”
But there wasn’t logic to his anger. If The Ten Commandments made him cross, why take it out on Mary Magdalene and a bunch of toads and tadpoles?
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? Who can blame Owen for his reaction to The Ten Commandments? Almost any reaction would be preferable to believing it! But if a movie as stupid as The Ten Commandments could make Owen Meany murder toads by throwing them at Mary Magdalene, a performance as compelling as Bette Davis’s in Dark Victory could convince Owen that he, too, had a brain tumor.
At first, Bette Davis is dying and doesn’t know it. Her doctor and her best friend won’t tell her.
“THEY SHOULD TELL HER IMMEDIATELY!” Owen said anxiously. The doctor was played by George Brent.
“He could never do anything right, anyway,” Grandmother observed.
Humphrey Bogart is a stableman who speaks with an Irish accent. It was the Christmas of ’56 and we were watching a movie made in 1939; it was the first time Grandmother had permitted us to watch The Late Show—at least, I think it was The Late Show. After a certain evening hour—or whenever it was that my grandmother began to feel tired—she called everything The Late Show. She felt sorry for us because the Eastmans were spending another Christmas in the Caribbean; Sawyer Depot was a pleasure slipping into the past, for me—for Owen, it was becoming mere wishful thinking.
“You’d think that Humphrey Bogart could learn a better Irish accent than that,” my grandmother complained.
Dan Needham said that he wouldn’t give George Brent a part in a production of The Gravesend Players; Owen added that Mr. Fish would have been a more convincing doctor to Bette Davis, but Grandmother argued that “Mr. Fish would have his hands full as Bette Davis’s husband”—her doctor eventually gets to be her husband, too.
“Anyone would have his hands full as Bette Davis’s husband,” Dan observed.
Owen thought it was cruel that Bette Davis had to find out she was dying all by herself; but Dark Victory is one of those movies that presumes to be instructive on the subject of how to die. We see Bette Davis accepting her fate gracefully; she moves to Vermont with George Brent and takes up gardening—cheerfully living with the fact that one day, suddenly, darkness will come.
“THIS IS VERY SAD!” Owen cried. “HOW CAN SHE NOT THINK ABOUT IT?”
Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk.
“She should have married him,” Grandmother said. “She’s dying and he’s already dead.”