Other boys claimed that they “did it” in the bushes—between leaving the dance and arriving at their dorms. Other boys displayed kissing techniques in lobbies, risked “copping a feel” in coat rooms, defied the chaperones’ quick censure of anything as vulgar as sticking a tongue in a girl’s ear. But beyond the indisputable fact of his nose embedded in Hester’s cleavage, Owen and Hester did not resort to either common or gross forms of public affection. And how he later rebuked our childishness by refusing to talk about her; if he “did it” with her, The Voice was not bragging about it. He took Hester back to 80 Front Street and they watched The Late Show together; he drove himself back to the quarry—“IT WAS RATHER LATE,” he admitted.
“What was the movie?” I asked.
“WHAT MOVIE?”
“On The Late Show!”
“OH, I FORGET …”
“Hester must have fucked his brains out,” Simon said morosely; Noah hit him. “Since when does Owen ‘forget’ a movie?” Simon cried; but Noah hit him again. “Owen even remembers The Robe!” Simon said; Noah hit him in the mouth, and Simon started swinging. “It doesn’t matter!” Simon yelled. “Hester fucks everybody!”
Noah had his brother by the throat. “We don’t know that,” he said to Simon.
“We think it!” Simon cried.
“It’s okay to think it,” Noah told his brother; he rubbed his forearm back and forth across Simon’s nose, which began to bleed. “But if we don’t know it, we don’t say it.”
“Hester fucked Owen’s brains out!” Simon screamed; Noah drove the point of his elbow into the hollow between Simon’s eyes.
“We don’t know that,” he repeated; but I had grown accustomed to their savage fights—they no longer frightened me. Their brutality seemed plain and safe alongside my conflicted feelings for Hester, my crushing envy of Owen.
Once again, The Voice put us in our places. “IT IS HARD TO KNOW, IN THE WAKE OF THE DISTURBING DANCE-WEEKEND, WHETHER OUR ESTEEMED PEERS OR OUR ESTEEMED FACULTY CHAPERONES SHOULD BE MORE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES. IT IS PUERILE FOR YOUNG MEN TO DISCUSS WHAT DEGREE OF ADVANTAGE THEY TOOK OF THEIR DATES; IT IS DISRESPECTFUL OF WOMEN—ALL THIS CHEAP BRAGGING—AND IT GIVES MEN A BAD REPUTATION. WHY SHOULD WOMEN TRUST US? BUT IT IS HARD TO SAY WHETHER THIS BOORISH BEHAVIOR IS WORSE OR BETTER THAN THE GESTAPO TACTICS OF OUR PURITAN CHAPERONES. THE DEAN’S OFFICE TELLS ME THAT TWO SENIORS HAVE RECEIVED NOTICE OF DISCIPLINARY PROBATION—FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TERM!—FOR THEIR ALLEGED ‘OVERT INDISCRETIONS’; I BELIEVE THE TWO INCIDENTS FALL UNDER THE PUNISHABLE OFFENSE OF ‘MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE CONDUCT WITH GIRLS.’
“AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING PRURIENT, I SHALL REVEAL THE SHOCKING NATURE OF THESE TWO SINS AGAINST THE SCHOOL AND WOMANKIND. ONE! A BOY WAS FOUND ‘FONDLING’ HIS DATE IN THE TROPHY ROOM OF THE GYM: AS THE COUPLE WAS FULLY DRESSED—AND STANDING—AT THE TIME, IT SEEMS UNLIKELY THAT A PREGNANCY COULD HAVE RESULTED FROM THEIR EXCHANGE; AND ALTHOUGH THE GYM IS NOTORIOUS FOR IT, I’M SURE THEY HADN’T EVEN EXPOSED THEMSELVES SUFFICIENTLY TO RISK AN ATHLETE’S FOOT INFECTION. TWO! A BOY WAS SEEN LEAVING THE BUTT ROOM IN BANCROFT HALL WITH HIS TONGUE IN HIS DATE’S EAR—AN ODD AND OSTENTATIOUS MANNER IN WHICH TO EXIT A SMOKING LOUNGE, I WILL AGREE, BUT THIS DEGREE OF PHYSICAL CONTACT IS ALSO NOT KNOWN TO RESULT IN A PREGNANCY. TO MY KNOWLEDGE, IT IS EVEN DIFFICULT TO COMMUNICATE THE COMMON COLD BY THIS METHOD.”
After that one, it became customary for the applicants—for the position of headmaster—to request to meet him when they were interviewed. The Search Committee had a student subcommittee available to interview each candidate; but when the candidates asked to meet The Voice, Owen insisted that he be given A PRIVATE AUDIENCE. The issue of Owen being granted this privilege was the subject of a special faculty meeting where tempers flared; Dan said there was a movement to replace the faculty adviser to The Grave—there were those who said that the “pregnancy humor” in Owen’s column about the Senior Dance should not have escaped the adviser’s censorship. But the faculty adviser to The Grave was an Owen Meany supporter; Mr. Early—that deeply flawed thespian who brought to every role he was given in The Gravesend Players an overblown and befuddled sense of Learlike doom—cried that he would defend the “unsullied genius” of The Voice, if necessary, “to the death.” That would not be necessary, Dan Needham was sure; but that Owen was supported by such a boob as Mr. Early was conceivably worse than no defense at all.
Several applicants for the headmaster position admitted that their interviews with The Voice had been “daunting”; I’m sure that they were unprepared for his size, and when they heard him speak, I’m sure they got the shivers and were troubled by the absurdity of that voice communicating strictly in upper-case letters. One of the favored candidates withdrew his application; although there was no direct evidence that Owen had contributed to the candidate’s retreat, the man admitted there was a certain quality of “accepted cynicism” among the students that had “depressed” him. The man added that these students demonstrated an “attitude of superiority”—and “such a degree of freedom of speech as to make their liberal education too liberal.”
“Nonsense!” Dan Needham had cried in the faculty meeting. “Owen Meany isn’t cynical! If this guy was referring to Owen, he was referring to him incorrectly. Good riddance!”
But not all the faculty felt that way. The Search Committee would need another year to satisfy their search; the present headmaster cheerfully agreed—for the good of the school—to stall his retirement. He was all “for the good of the school,” the old headmaster; and it was his support of Owen Meany that—for a while—kept Owen’s enemies from his throat.
“He’s a delightful little fella!” the headmaster said. “I wouldn’t miss reading The Voice—not for all the world!”
His name was Archibald Thorndike, and he’d been headmaster forever; he’d married the daughter of the headmaster before him, and he was about as “old school” as a headmaster could get. Although the newer, more progressive-minded faculty complained about Archie Thorndike’s reluctance to change a single course requirement—not to mention his views of “the whole boy”—the headmaster had no enemies. Old “Thorny,” as he was called—and he encouraged even the boys to address him as “Thorny”—was so headmasterly in every pleasing, comfortable, superficial way that no one could feel unfriendly toward him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired man with a face as serviceable as an oar; in fact, he was an oarsman, and an outdoorsman—a man who preferred soft, unironed trousers, maybe khakis or corduroys, and a tweed jacket with the elbow patches in need of a thread here or there. He went hatless in our New Hampshire winter
s, and was such a supporter of our teams—in the rawest weather—that he wore a scar from an errant hockey puck as proudly as a merit badge; the puck had struck him above the eye while he’d tended the goal during the annual Alumni-Varsity game. Thorny was an honorary member of several of Gravesend’s graduating classes. He played every alumni game in the goal.
“Ice hockey’s not a sissy sport!” he liked to say. In another vein, in defense of Owen Meany, he maintained: “It is the well educated who will improve society—and they will improve it, at first, by criticizing it, and we are giving them the tools to criticize it. Naturally, as students, the brighter of them will begin their improvements upon society by criticizing us.” To Owen, old Archie Thorndike would sing a slightly different song: “It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change. I’m not going to change; I’m going to retire! Get the new headmaster to make the changes; that’s when I made changes—when I was new.”
“WHAT CHANGES DID YOU MAKE?” Owen Meany asked.
“That’s another reason I’m retiring!” old Thorny told Owen amiably. “My memory’s shot!”
Owen thought that Archibald Thorndike was a blithering, glad-handing fool; but everyone, even The Voice, thought that old Thorny was a nice guy. “NICE GUYS ARE THE TOUGHEST TO GET RID OF,” Owen wrote for The Grave; but even Mr. Early was smart enough to censor that.
Then it was summer; The Voice went back to work in the quarries—I don’t think he said much down in the pits—and I had my first job. I was a guide for the Gravesend Academy Admissions Office; I showed the school to prospective students and their parents—it was boring, but it certainly wasn’t hard. I had a ring of master keys, which amounted to the greatest responsibility anyone had given me, and I had freedom of choice regarding which typical classroom I would show, and which “typical” dormitory room. I chose rooms at random in Waterhouse Hall, in the vague hope that I might surprise Mr. and Mrs. Brinker-Smith at their game of musical beds; but the twins were older now, and maybe the Brinker-Smiths didn’t “do it” with their former gusto.
In the evenings, at Hampton Beach, Owen looked tired to me; I reported to the Admissions Office for my first guided tour at ten, but Owen was stepping into the grout bucket by seven every morning. His fingernails were cracked; his hands were cut and swollen; his arms were tanned and thin and hard. He didn’t talk about Hester. The summer of ’59 was the first summer that we met with any success in picking up girls; or, rather, Owen met with this success, and he introduced the girls he met to me. We didn’t “do it” that summer; at least, I didn’t, and—to my knowledge—Owen never had a date alone.
“IT’S A DOUBLE DATE OR IT’S NOTHING,” he’d tell one surprised girl after another. “ASK YOUR FRIEND OR FORGET IT.”
And we were no longer afraid to cruise the pinball arcades around the casino on foot; delinquent thugs would still pick on Owen, but he quickly established a reputation as an untouchable.
“YOU WANT TO BEAT ME UP?” he’d say to some punk. “YOU WANT TO GO TO JAIL? YOU’RE SO UGLY—YOU THINK I’LL HAVE TROUBLE REMEMBERING YOUR FACE?” Then he’d point to me. “YOU SEE HIM? ARE YOU SUCH AN ASSHOLE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A WITNESS IS? GO AHEAD—BEAT ME UP!” Only one guy did—or tried. It was like watching a dog go after a raccoon; the dog does all the work, but the raccoon gets the better of it. Owen just covered up; he grabbed for hands and feet, he went for the fingers first, but he was content to tear off a shoe and go for the toes. He took a pounding but he wrapped himself into a ball; he left no extremities showing. He broke the guy’s pinky—he bent it so sharply that after the fight the guy’s little finger pointed straight up off the back of his hand. He tore one of the guy’s shoes off and bit his toes; there was a lot of blood, but the guy was wearing a sock—I couldn’t see the actual damage, only that he had trouble walking. The guy was pulled off Owen by a cotton-candy vendor—he was arrested shortly thereafter for screaming obscenities, and we heard he was sent to reform school because he turned out to be driving a stolen car. We never saw him on the beachfront again, and the word about Owen—on the strip, around the casino, and along the boardwalk—was that he was dangerous to pick a fight with; the rumor was that he’d bitten off someone’s ear. Another summer, I heard that he’d blinded a guy with a Popsicle stick. That these reports weren’t exactly true did not matter at Hampton Beach. He was “that little dude in the red pickup,” he was “the quarry-worker—he carries some kind of tool on him.” He was “a mean little fucker—watch out for him.”
We were seventeen; we had a sullen summer. In the fall, Noah and Simon started college out on the West Coast; they went to one of those California universities that no one on the East Coast can ever remember the name of. And the Eastmans continued their folly of considering Hester as less of an investment; they sent her to the University of New Hampshire, where—as a resident—she merited instate tuition. “They want to keep me in their own backyard,” was how Hester put it.