A Prayer for Owen Meany

“You tease Owen too much,” my mother used to say to me. But I don’t remember much teasing, not beyond the usual lifting him up—unless Mother meant that I failed to realize how serious Owen was; he was insulted by jokes of any kind. After all, he did read Wall’s History of Gravesend before he was ten; this was not lighthearted work, this was never reading that merely skipped along. And he also read the Bible—not by the time he was ten, of course; but he actually read the whole thing.

And then there was the question of Gravesend Academy; that was the question for every boy born in Gravesend—the academy did not admit girls in those days. I was a poor student; and even though my grandmother could well have afforded the tuition, I was destined to stay at Gravesend High School—until my mother married someone on the academy faculty and he legally adopted me. Faculty children—faculty brats, we were called—could automatically attend the academy.

What a relief this must have been to my grandmother; she’d always resented that her own children couldn’t go to Gravesend Academy—she’d had daughters. My mother and my Aunt Martha were high-school girls—what they saw of

Gravesend Academy was only at the dating end, although my Aunt Martha put this to good use: she married a Gravesend Academy boy (one of the few who didn’t prefer my mother), which made my cousins sons of alumni, which favored their admittance, too. (My only female cousin would not benefit from this alumni connection—as you shall see.)

But Owen Meany was a legitimate Gravesend Academy candidate; he was a brilliant student; he was the kind of student who was supposed to go to Gravesend. He could have applied and got in—and got a full scholarship, too, since the Meany Granite Company was never flourishing and his parents could not have afforded the tuition. But one day when my mother was driving Owen and me to the beach—Owen and I were ten—my mother said, “I hope you never stop helping Johnny with his homework, Owen, because when you’re both at the academy, the homework’s going to be much harder—especially for Johnny.”

“BUT I’M NOT GOING TO THE ACADEMY,” Owen said.

“Of course you are!” my mother said. “You’re the best student in New Hampshire—maybe, in the whole country!”

“THE ACADEMY’S NOT FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME,” Owen said. “THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME.”

I wondered for a moment if he meant, for small people—that public high schools were for people who were exceptionally small—but my mother was thinking far ahead of me, and she said, “You’ll get a full scholarship, Owen. I hope your parents know that. You’ll go to the academy absolutely free.”

“YOU HAVE TO WEAR A COAT AND TIE EVERY DAY,” Owen said. “THE SCHOLARSHIP DOESN’T BUY THE COATS AND TIES.”

“That can be arranged, Owen,” my mother said, and I could tell that she meant she’d arrange it—if no one else would, she’d buy him every coat and tie he could possibly have use for.

“THERE’S ALSO DRESS SHIRTS, AND SHOES,” Owen said. “IF YOU GO TO SCHOOL WITH RICH PEOPLE, YOU DON’T WANT TO LOOK LIKE THEIR SERVANTS.” I now suppose that my mother could hear Mr. Meany’s prickly, working-class politics behind this observation.

“Everything you need, Owen,” my mother said. “It will be taken care of.”

We were in Rye, passing the First Church, and the breeze from the ocean was already strong. A man with a great stack of roofing shingles in a wheelbarrow was having difficulty keeping the shingles from blowing away; the ladder, leaning against the vestry roof, was also in danger of being blown over. The man seemed in need of a co-worker—or, at least, of another pair of hands.

“WE SHOULD STOP AND HELP THAT MAN,” Owen observed, but my mother was pursuing a theme and, therefore, she’d noticed nothing unusual out the window.

“Would it help if I talked to your parents about it, Owen?” my mother asked.

“THERE’S ALSO THE MATTER OF THE BUS,” Owen said. “TO GO TO HIGH SCHOOL, YOU CAN TAKE A BUS. I DON’T LIVE RIGHT IN TOWN, YOU KNOW. HOW WOULD I GET TO THE ACADEMY? IF I WAS A DAY STUDENT, I MEAN—HOW WOULD I GET THERE? HOW WOULD I GET BACK HOME? BECAUSE MY PARENTS WOULD NEVER LET ME LIVE IN A DORMITORY. THEY NEED ME AT HOME. ALSO, DORMITORIES ARE EVIL. SO HOW DO THE DAY STUDENTS GET TO SCHOOL AND GET HOME?” he asked.

“Someone drives them,” my mother said. “I could drive you, Owen—at least until you got a driver’s license of your own.”

“NO, IT WON’T WORK,” Owen said. “MY FATHER’S TOO BUSY, AND MY MOTHER DOESN’T DRIVE.”

Mrs. Meany—both my mother and I knew—not only didn’t drive; she never left the house. And even in the summer, the windows in that house were never open; his mother was allergic to dust, Owen had explained. Every day of the year, Mrs. Meany sat indoors behind the windows bleared and streaked with grit from the quarry. She wore an old set of pilot’s headphones (the wires dangling, unattached) because the sound of the channeling machine—the channel bar, and the rock chisels—disturbed her. On blasting days, she played the phonograph very loudly—the big band sound, the needle skipping occasionally when the dynamite was especially nearby and percussive.

Mr. Meany did the shopping. He drove Owen to Sunday school, and picked him up—although he did not attend the Episcopal services himself. It was apparently enough revenge upon the Catholics to be sending Owen there; either the added defiance of his own attendance was unnecessary, or else Mr. Meany had suffered such an outrage at the hands of the Catholic authorities that he was rendered unreceptive to the teachings of any church.

He was, my mother knew, quite unreceptive on the subject of Gravesend Academy. “There is the interests of the town,” he once said in Town Meeting, “and then there is the interests of them!” This regarded the request of the academy to widen the saltwater river and dredge a deeper low-tide channel at a point in the Squamscott that would improve the racing course for the academy crew; several shells had become mired in the mud flats at low tide. The part of the river the academy wished to widen was a peninsula of tidewater marsh bordering the Meany Granite Quarry; it was totally unusable land, yet Mr. Meany owned it and he resented that the academy wanted to scoop it away—“for purposes of recreation!” he said.

“We’re talking about mud, not granite,” a representative of the academy had remarked.

“I’m talkin’ about us and them!” Mr. Meany had shouted, in what is now recorded as a famous Town Meeting. In order for a Town Meeting to be famous in Gravesend, it is only necessary that there be a good row. The Squamscott was widened; the channel was dredged. If it was just mud, the town decided, it didn’t matter whose mud it was.

“You’re going to the academy, Owen,” my mother told him. “That’s all there is to it. If any student ever belonged in a proper school, it’s you—that place was made with you in mind, or it was made for no one.”

“WE MISSED DOING A GOOD DEED,” Owen said morosely. “THAT MAN SHINGLING THE CHURCH—HE NEEDED HELP.”

“Don’t argue with me, Owen,” my mother said. “You’re going to the academy, if I have to adopt you. I’ll kidnap you, if I have to,” she said.

But no one on this earth was ever as stubborn as Owen Meany; he waited a mile before he said another word, and then he said, “NO. IT WON’T WORK.”

Gravesend Academy was founded in 1781 by the Rev. Emery Hurd, a follower of the original Wheelwright’s original beliefs, a childless Puritan with an ability—according to Wall—for “Oration on the advantages of Learning and its happy Tendency to promote Virtue and Piety.” What would the Rev. Mr. Hurd have thought of Owen Meany? Hurd conceived of an academy whereat “no vicious lad, who is liable to contaminate his associates, is allowed to remain an hour”; whereat “the student shall bear the laboring oar”—and learn heartily from his labor!

As for the rest of his money, Emery Hurd left it for “the education and christianization of the American Indians.” In his waning years—ever watchful that Gravesend Academy devote itself to “pious and charitable purposes”—the Rev. Mr. Hurd was known to patrol Water Street in downtown Gravesend, looking for youthful offenders: specifically, young men who would not doff their hats to him, and young ladies who would not curtsy. In payment for such offense, Emery Hurd was happy to give these young people a piece of his mind; near the end, only pieces were left.