me? Only once; I called him only once. Graham McSwiney told me to forget about who my father was; I was willing.
Mr. McSwiney said: “Buster Freebody—if he’s alive, if you find him—would be so old that he wouldn’t even remember your mother—not to mention who her boyfriend was!” Mr. McSwiney was much more interested in Owen Meany—in why Owen’s voice hadn’t changed. “He should see a doctor—there’s really no good reason for a voice like his,” Graham McSwiney said.
But, of course, there was a reason. When I learned what the reason was, I never called Mr. McSwiney to tell him; I doubt it would have been a scientific enough explanation for Mr. McSwiney. I tried to tell Hester, but Hester said she didn’t want to know. “I’d believe what you’d tell me,” Hester said, “so please spare me the details.”
As for the purpose of Owen Meany’s voice, and everything that happened to him, I told only Dan and the Rev. Lewis Merrill. “I suppose it’s possible,” Dan said. “I suppose stranger things have happened—although I can’t, off the top of my head, think of an example. The important thing is that you believe it, and I would never challenge your right to believe what you want.”
“But do you believe it?” I asked him.
“Well, I believe you,” Dan said.
“How can you not believe it?” I asked Pastor Merrill. “You of all people,” I told him. “A man of faith—how can you not believe it?”
“To believe it—I mean all of it,” the Rev. Lewis Merrill said, “—to believe everything … well, that calls upon more faith than I have.”
“But you of all people!” I said to him. “Look at me—I never was a believer, not until this happened. If I can believe it, why can’t you?” I asked Mr. Merrill. He began to stutter.
“It’s easier for you to j-j-j-just accept it. Belief is not something you have felt, and then not felt; you haven’t l-l-l-lived with belief, and with unbelief. It’s easier f-f-f-for you,” the Rev. Mr. Merrill repeated. “You haven’t ever been f-f-f-full of faith, and full of d-d-d-doubt. Something j-j-j-just strikes you as a miracle, and you believe it. For me, it’s not that s-s-s-simple,” said Pastor Merrill.
“But it is a miracle!” I cried. “He told you that dream—I know he did! And you were there—when he saw his name, and the date of his death, on Scrooge’s grave. You were there!” I cried. “How can you doubt that he knew?” I asked Mr. Merrill. “He knew—he knew everything! What do you call that—if you don’t call it a miracle?”
“You’ve witnessed what you c-c-c-call a miracle and now you believe—you believe everything,” Pastor Merrill said. “But miracles don’t c-c-c-cause belief—real miracles don’t m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles. I believe that Owen was extraordinarily g-g-g-gifted—yes, gifted and powerfully sure of himself. No doubt he suffered some powerfully disturbing visions, too—and he was certainly emotional, he was very emotional. But as to knowing what he appeared to ‘know’—there are other examples of p-p-p-precognition; not every example is necessarily ascribed to God. Look at you—you never even believed in G-G-G-God; you’ve said so, and here you are ascribing to the h-h-h-hand of God everything that happened to Owen M-M-M-Meany!”
This August, at 80 Front Street, a dog woke me up. In the deepest part of my sleep, I heard the dog and thought it was Sagamore; then I thought it was my dog—I used to have a dog, in Toronto—and only when I was wide awake did I catch up to myself, in the present time, and realize that both Sagamore and my dog were dead. It used to be nice to have a dog to walk in Winston Churchill Park; perhaps I should get another.
Out on Front Street, the strange dog barked and barked. I got out of bed; I took the familiar walk along the dark hall to my mother’s room—where it is always lighter, where the curtains are never drawn. Dan sleeps in my grandmother’s former bedroom—the official master bedroom of 80 Front Street, I suppose.
I looked out my mother’s window but I couldn’t see the dog. Then I went into the den—or so it had been called when my grandfather had been alive. Later, it was a kind of children’s playroom, the room where my mother had played the old Victrola, where she had sung along with Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It was on the couch in that room where Hester had spread herself out, and waited, while Noah and Simon and I searched all of 80 Front Street, in vain, for Owen Meany. We’d never learned where she’d hidden him, or where he’d hidden himself. I lay down on that old couch and remembered all of that. I must have fallen asleep there; it was a vastly historical couch, upon which—I also remembered—my mother had first whispered into my ear: “My little fling!”
When I woke up, my right hand had drifted under one of the deep couch cushions; my wrist detected something there—it felt like a playing card, but when I extracted it from under the cushion, I saw that it was a relic from Owen Meany’s long-ago collection: a very old and bent baseball card. Hank Bauer! Remember him? The card was printed in 1950 when Bauer was twenty-eight, in only his second full season as an outfielder for the Yankees. But he looked older; perhaps it was the war—he left baseball for World War Two, then he returned to the game. Not being a baseball fan, I nevertheless remembered Hank Bauer as a reliable, unfancy player—and, indeed, his slightly tired, tanned face reflected his solid work ethic. There was nothing of the hotshot in his patient smile, and he wasn’t hiding his eyes under the visor of his baseball cap, which was pushed well back on his head, revealing his thoughtful, wrinkled brow. It was one of those old photographs wherein the color was optimistically added—his tan was too tan, the sky too blue, the clouds too uniformly white. The high, fluffy clouds and the brightness of the blue sky created such a strikingly unreal background for Mr. Bauer in his white, pin-striped uniform—it was as if he had died and gone to heaven.
Of course I knew then where Hester had hidden Owen Meany; he’d been under the couch cushions—and under her!—all the while we were searching. That explained why his appearance had been so rumpled, why his hair had looked slept on. The Hank Bauer card must have fallen out of his pocket. Discoveries like this—not to mention, Owen’s voice “speaking” to me in the secret passageway, and his hand (or something like a hand) seeming to take hold of me—occasionally make me afraid of 80 Front Street.
I know that Grandmother was afraid of the old house, near the end. “Too many ghosts!” she would mutter. Finally, I think, she was happy not to be “murdered by a maniac”—a condition she had once found favorable to being removed from 80 Front Street. She left the old house rather quietly when she left; she was philosophic about her departure. “Time to leave,” she said to Dan and me. “Too many ghosts!”
At the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, her decline was fairly swift and painless. At first she forgot all about Owen, then she forgot me; nothing could remind her even of my mother—nothing except my fairly expert imitation of Owen’s voice. That voice would jolt her memory; that voice caused her recollections to surface, almost every time. She died in her sleep, only two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She didn’t like things that “stood out”—as in: “That hairdo stands out like a sore thumb!”
I imagine her contemplating her hundredth birthday; the family celebration that was planned to honor this event would surely have killed Grandmother—I suspect she knew this. Aunt Martha had already alerted the Today show; as you may know, the Today show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every hundred-year-old in the United States—provided that the Today show knows about it. Aunt Martha saw to it that they knew. Harriet Wheelwright would be one hundred years old on Halloween! My grandmother hated Halloween; it was one of her few quarrels with God—that He had allowed her to be born on this day. It was a day, in her view, that had been invented to create mayhem among the lower classes, a day when they were invited to abuse people of property—and my grandmother’s house was always abused on Halloween. Eighty Front Street was feathered with toilet paper, the garage windows were dutifully soaped, the driveway lampposts were spray-painted (orange), and once someone inserted the greater half of a lamprey eel in Grandmother’s letter slot. Owen had always suspected Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman.
Upon her arrival in the old-age home, Grandmother considered that the remote-control device for switching television channels was a true child of Satan; it was television’s final triumph, she said, that it could render you brain-dead without even allowing you to leave your chair. It was Dan who discovered Grandmother to be dead, when he visited her one evening in the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly. He visited her every evening, and he brought her a Sunday newspaper and read it aloud to her on Sunday mornings, too.
The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels—looking for something good.
How I wish that Owen Meany could have died as peacefully as that!
Toronto: September 17, 1987—rainy and cool; back-to-school weather, back-to-church weather. These familiar rituals of church and school are my greatest comfort. But Bishop Strachan has hired a new woman in the English Department; I could tell when she was interviewing, last spring, that she was someone to be endured—a woman who gives new meaning to that arresting first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, with which the fall term begins for my Grade 9 girls: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
I don’t know if I quite qualify for Jane Austen’s notion of “a good fortune”; but my grandmother provided for me very generously.
My new colleague’s name is Eleanor Pribst, and I would love to read what Jane Austen might have written about her. I would be vastly happier to have read about Ms. Pribst than I am pleased to have met her. But I shall endure her; I will outlast her, in the end. She is alternately silly and aggressive, and in both methods of operation she is willfully insufferable—she is a Germanic bully.
When she laughs, I
am reminded of that wonderful sentence near the end of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: “I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being killed: a mouse, a bird?” In the case of the laughter of Eleanor Pribst, I could swear I hear the death rattle of a rat or a vulture. In department meeting, when I once again brought up the matter of my request to teach Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse in Grade 13, Ms. Pribst went on the attack.
“Why would you want to teach that nasty book to girls?” she asked. “That is a boys’ book,” she said. “The masturbation scene alone is offensive to women.”
Then she complained that I was “using up” both Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in the Canadian Literature course for my Grade 13s; there was nothing preventing Ms. Pribst from teaching either Atwood or Munro in another course—but she was out to make trouble. A man teaching those two women effectively “used them up,” she said—so that women in the department could not teach them. I have her figured out. She’s one of those who tells you that if you teach a Canadian author in the Canadian Literature course, you’re condescending to Canadians—by not teaching them in another literature course. And if you “use them up” in another literature course, then she’ll ask you what you think is “wrong” with Canadian Literature; she’ll say you’re being condescending to Canadians. It’s all because I’m a former American, and she doesn’t like Americans; this is so obvious—that and the fact that I am a bachelor, I live alone, and I have not fallen all over myself to ask her (as they say) “out.” She’s one of those pushy women who will readily humiliate you if you do ask her “out”; and if you don’t ask her, she’ll attempt to humiliate you more.