“YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING FOR ME, DAN,” Owen said.
“I can try to keep you out of jail,” Dan said. “I want you to get into college—and to have a scholarship. But, at the very least, I can try to keep you from getting charged with theft and vandalism,” Dan said.
“What did you do, Owen?” the Rev. Mr. Merrill asked him.
Owen bowed his head; for a moment, I thought he was going to cry—but then he shrugged off this moment, too. He looked directly into the Rev. Lewis Merrill’s eyes.
“I WANT YOU TO SAY A PRAYER FOR ME,” said Owen Meany.
“A p-p-p-prayer—for you?” the Rev. Mr. Merrill stuttered.
“JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING—IF IT’S NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK,” Owen said. “IT’S YOUR BUSINESS, ISN’T IT?”
The Rev. Mr. Merrill considered this. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “At morning meeting?” he asked.
“TODAY—IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY,” said Owen Meany.
“Yes, all right,” the Rev. Lewis Merrill said; but he looked as if he might panic.
Dan took my arm and steered me toward the door of the vestry office.
“We’ll leave you alone, if you want to talk,” Dan said to Mr. Merrill and Owen.
“Was there anything else you wanted?” Mr. Merrill asked Dan.
“No, just Father Findley—his name,” Dan said.
“And was that all you wanted to see me about—the prayer?” Mr. Merrill asked Owen, who appeared to consider the question very carefully—or else he was waiting for Dan and me to leave.
We were outside the vestry office, in the dark corridor where two rows of wooden pegs—for coats—extended for the entire length of two walls; off in the darkness, several lost or left-behind overcoats hung there, like old churchgoers who had loitered so long that they had fallen asleep, slumped against the walls. And there were a few pairs of galoshes in the corridor; but they were not directly beneath the abandoned overcoats, so that the churchgoers in the darkness appeared to have been separated from their feet. On the wooden peg nearest the door to the vestry office was the Rev. Mr. Merrill’s double-breasted and oddly youthful Navy pea jacket—and, on the peg next to it, his seaman’s watch cap. Dan and I, passing these, heard Pastor Merrill say: “Owen? Is it the dream? Have you had that dream again?”
“YES,” said Owen Meany, who began to cry—he started to sob, like a child. I had not heard him sound like that since the Thanksgiving vacation when he’d peed in his pants—when he’d peed on Hester.
“Owen? Owen, listen to me,” Mr. Merrill said. “Owen? It’s just a dream—do you hear me? It’s just a dream.”
“NO!” said Owen Meany.
Then Dan and I were outside in the February cold and gray; the old footprints in the rutted slush were frozen—fossils of the many souls who had traveled to and from Hurd’s Church. It was still early morning; although Dan and I had seen the sun rise, the sun had been absorbed by the low, uniformly ice-gray sky.
“What dream?” Dan Needham asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Owen hadn’t told me about the dream; not yet. He would tell me—and I would tell him what the Rev. Mr. Merrill had told him: that it was “just a dream.”
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye. But not then; at that moment, Dan and I were not imagining very much beyond Randy White’s reaction to the headless, armless Mary Magdalene—whose steely embrace of the podium on the stage of The Great Hall would force the headmaster to address the school from a new and more naked position.
Directly opposite the Main Academy Building, the headmaster was getting into his camelhair overcoat; his wife, Sam, was brushing the nap of that pretty coat for him, and kissing her husband good-bye for the day. It would be a bad day for the headmaster—a FATED day, Owen Meany might have called it—but I’m sure Randy White didn’t have his eyes on the future that morning. He thought he was finished with Owen Meany. He didn’t know that, in the end, Owen Meany would defeat him; he didn’t know about the vote of “no confidence” the faculty would give him—or the decision of the Board of Trustees to not renew his appointment as headmaster. He couldn’t have imagined what a travesty Owen Meany’s absence would make of the commencement exercises that year—how such a timid, rather plain, and much-ignored student, who was the replacement valedictorian of our class, would find the courage to offer as a valedictory only these words: “I am not the head of this class. The head of this class is Owen Meany; he is The Voice of our class—and the only voice we want to listen to.” Then that good, frightened boy would sit down—to tumultuous pandemonium: our classmates raising their voices for The Voice, bedsheets and more artful banners displaying his name in capital letters (of course), and the chanting that drowned out the headmaster’s attempts to bring us to order.
“Owen Meany! Owen Meany! Owen Meany!” cried the Class of ’62.
But that February morning when the headmaster was outfitting himself in his camelhair coat, he couldn’t have known that Owen Meany would be his undoing. How frustrated and powerless Randy White would appear at our commencement, when he threatened to withhold our diplomas if we didn’t stop our uproar; he must have known then that he had lost … because Dan Needham and Mr. Early, and a solid one third or one half of the faculty stood up to applaud our riotous support of Owen; and we were joined by several informed members of the Board of Trustees as well, not to mention all those parents who had written angry letters to the headmaster regarding that illiberal business of confiscating our wallets. I wish Owen could have been there to see the headmaster then; but, of course, Owen wasn’t there—he wasn’t graduating.
And he was not at morning meeting on that February day, just before spring vacation; but the surrogate he had left onstage was grotesquely capable of holding our attention. It was a packed house—so many of the faculty had turned out for the occasion. And Mary Magdalene was there to greet us: armless, but reaching out to us; headless, but eloquent—with the clean-cut stump of her neck, which was slashed at her Adam’s apple, expressing so dramatically that she had much to say to us. We sat in a hush in The Great Hall, waiting for the headmaster.
What a horrible man Randy White was! There is a tradition among “good” schools: when you throw out a senior—only months before he’s scheduled to graduate—you make as little trouble for that student’s college admission as you have to. Yes, you tell the colleges what they need to know; but you have already done your damage—you’ve fired the kid, you don’t try to keep him out of college, too! But not Randy White; the headmaster would do his damnedest to put an end to Owen Meany’s university life before it began!
Owen was accepted at Harvard; he was accepted at Yale—and he was offered full scholarships by both. But in addition to what Owen’s record said: that he was expelled from Gravesend Academy for printing fake draft cards, and selling them to other students … in addition to that, the headmaster told Harvard and Yale (and the University of New Hampshire) much more. He said that Owen Meany was “so virulently antireligious” that he had “desecrated the statue of a saint at a Roman Catholic school”; that he had launched a “deeply anti-Catholic campaign” on the Gravesend campus, under the demand of not wanting a fish-only menu in the school dining hall on Fridays; and that there were “charges against him for being anti-Semitic, too.”