A Prayer for Owen Meany

But he was not content to spend his time in the dreaded city in the manner that most Gravesend seniors spent their time. Many Graves-end graduates attended Harvard. A typical outing for a Gravesend senior began with a subway ride to Harvard Square; there—with the use of a fake draft card, or with the assistance of an older Gravesend graduate (now attending Harvard)—booze was purchased in abundance and consumed with abandon. Sometimes—albeit, rarely—girls were met. Fortified by the former (and never in the company of the latter), our senior class then rode the subway back to Boston, where—once again, falsifying our age—we gained admission to the striptease performances that were much admired by our age group at an establishment known as Old Freddy’s.

I saw nothing that was morally offensive in this rite of passage. At nineteen, I was a virgin. Caroline O’Day had not permitted the advance of even so much as my hand—at least not more than an inch or so above the hem of her pleated skirt or her matching burgundy knee socks. And although Owen had told me that it was only Caroline’s Catholicism that prevented me access to her favors—“ESPECIALLY IN HER SAINT MICHAEL’S UNIFORM!”—I had been no more successful with Police Chief Ben Pike’s daughter, Lorna, who was not Catholic, and not wearing a uniform of any kind when I snagged my lip on her braces. Apparently, it was either my blood or my pain—or both—that disgusted her with me. At nineteen, to experience lust—even in its shabbiest forms at Old Freddy’s—was at least to experience something; and if Owen and I had at first imagined what love was at The Idaho, I saw nothing wrong in lusting at a burlesque show. Owen, I imagined, was not a virgin; how could he have remained a virgin with Hester? So I found it sheer hypocrisy for him to label Old Freddy’s DISGUSTING and DEGRADING.

At nineteen, I drank infrequently—and entirely for the maturing thrill of becoming drunk. But Owen Meany didn’t drink; he disapproved of losing control. Furthermore, he had interpreted Kennedy’s inaugural charge—to do something for his country—in a typically single-minded and literal fashion. He would falsify no more draft cards; he would produce no more fake identification to assist the illegal drinking and burlesque-show attendance of his peers—and he was loudly self-righteous about his decision, too. Fake draft cards were WRONG, he had decided.

Therefore, we walked soberly around Harvard Square—a part of Cambridge that is not necessarily enhanced by sobriety. Soberly, we looked up our former Gravesend schoolmates—and, soberly, I imagined the Harvard community (and how it might be morally altered) with Owen Meany in residence. One of our former schoolmates even told us that Harvard was a depressing experience—when sober. But Owen insisted that our journeys to the dreaded city be conducted as joyless research; and so they were.

To maintain sobriety and to attend the striptease performances at Old Freddy’s was a form of unusual torture; the women at Old Freddy’s were only watchable to the blind drunk. Since Owen had made fake draft cards for himself and me before his lofty, Kennedy-inspired resolution not to break the law, we used the cards to be admitted to Old Freddy’s.

“THIS IS DISGUSTING!” Owen said.

We watched a heavy-breasted woman in her forties remove her pasties with her teeth; she then spat them into the eager audience.

“THIS IS DEGRADING!” Owen said.

We watched another unfortunate pick up a tangerine from the dirty floor of the stage; she lifted the tangerine almost to knee level by picking it up from the floor with the labia of her vulva—but she could raise it no higher. She lost her grip on the tangerine, and it rolled off the stage and into the crowd—where two or three of our schoolmates fought over it. Of course it was DISGUSTING and DEGRADING—we were sober!

“LET’S FIND A NICE PART OF TOWN,” Owen said.

“And do what?” I asked him.

“LOOK AT IT,” Owen said.

It occurs to me now that most of the seniors at Gravesend Academy had grown up looking at the nice parts of towns; but quite apart from stronger motives, Owen Meany was interested in what that was like.

That was how we ended up on Newbury Street—one Wednesday afternoon in the fall of ’61. I know now that it was NO ACCIDENT t

hat we ended up there.

There were some art galleries on Newbury Street—and some very posh stores selling pricey antiques, and some very fancy clothing stores. There was a movie theater around the corner, on Exeter Street, where they were showing a foreign film—not the kind of thing that was regularly shown in the vicinity of Old Freddy’s; at The Exeter, they were showing movies you had to read, the kind with subtitles.

“Jesus!” I said. “What are we going to do here?”

“YOU’RE SO UNOBSERVANT,” Owen said.

He was looking at a mannequin in a storefront window—a disturbingly faceless mannequin, severely modern for the period in that she was bald. The mannequin wore a hip-length, silky blouse; the blouse was fire-engine red and it was cut along the sexy lines of a camisole. The mannequin wore nothing else; Owen stared at her.

“This is really great,” I said to him. “We come two hours on the train—we’re going to ride two more hours to get back—and here you are, staring at another dressmaker’s dummy! If that’s all you want to do, you don’t even have to leave your own bedroom!”

“NOTICE ANYTHING FAMILIAR?” he asked me.

The name of the store, “Jerrold’s,” was painted in vivid-red letters across the window—in a flourishing, handwritten style.

“Jerrold’s,” I said. “So what’s ‘familiar’?”

He put his little hand in his pocket and brought out the label he had removed from my mother’s old red dress; it was the dummy’s red dress, really, because my mother had hated it. It was FAMILIAR—what the label said.

Everything I could see in the store’s interior was the same vivid shade of fire-engine poinsettia red.

“She said the store burned down, didn’t she?” I asked Owen.

“SHE ALSO SAID SHE COULDN’T REMEMBER THE STORE’S NAME, THAT SHE HAD TO ASK PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD,” Owen said. “BUT THE NAME WAS ON THE LABEL—IT WAS ALWAYS ON THE BACK OF THE DRESS.”

With a shudder, I thought again about my Aunt Martha’s assertion that my mother was a little simple; no one had ever said she was a liar.

“She said there was a lawyer who told her she could keep the dress,” I said. “She said that everything burned, didn’t she?”

“BILLS OF SALE WERE BURNED, INVENTORY WAS BURNED, STOCK WAS BURNED—THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID,” Owen said.