A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

THE ANGEL

IN HER BEDROOM at Front Street, my mother kept a .dressmaker's dummy; it stood at attention next to her bed, like a servant about to awaken her, like a sentry guarding her while she slept-like a lover about to get into bed beside her. My mother was good at sewing; in another life, she could have been a seamstress. Her taste was quite uncomplicated, and she made her own clothes. Her sewing machine, which she also kept in her bedroom, was a far cry from the antique that we children abused in the attic; Mother's machine was a strikingly modem piece of equipment, and it got a lot of use. For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked money-because my grandmother was generous to her-she was clever at keeping her personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her dressmaker's dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she'd return the originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same thing, and they never got angry at her-instead, they felt sorry for her, and took the clothes back without an argument.

"My husband doesn't like it," she'd tell them. She would laugh to my grandmother and me about it. "They must think I'm married to a real tyrant! He doesn't like anything]" My grandmother, keenly aware that my mother wasn't married at all, would laugh uncomfortably at this, but it seemed such a solitary and innocent piece of mischief that I'm sure Harriet Wheelwright did not object to her daughter having a little fun. And Mother made beautiful clothes: simple, as I've described-most of them were white or black, but they were made of the best material and they fitted her perfectly. The dresses and blouses and skirts she brought home were multicolored, and multipatterned, but my mother would expertly imitate the cut of the clothes in basic black and white. As in many things, my mother could be extremely accomplished without being in the least original or even inventive. The game she acted out upon the perfect body of the dressmaker's dummy must have pleased the frugal, Yankee part of her-the Wheelwright in her. My mother hated darkness. There could never be enough light to suit her. I saw the dummy as a kind of accomplice to my mother in her war against the night. She would close her curtains only when she was undressing for bed; when she had her nightgown and her robe on, she would open the curtains. When she turned out the lamp on her bedside table, whatever light there was in the night flooded into her room-and there was always some light. There were streetlights on Front Street, Mr. Fish left lights on in his house all night, and my grandmother left a light on-it pointlessly illuminated the garage doors. In addition to this neighborhood light, there was starlight, or moonlight, or that unnameable light that comes from the eastern horizon whenever you live near the Atlantic Coast. There was not a night when my mother lay in her bed unable to see the comforting figure of the dressmaker's dummy; it was not only her confederate against the darkness, it was her double. It was never naked. I don't mean that my mother was so crazy about sewing that there was always a dress-in-progress upon the dummy; whether out of a sense of decency, or a certain playfulness that my mother had not outgrown-from whenever it was that she used to dress up her dolls-the dummy was always dressed. And I don't mean casually; Mother would never allow the dummy to stand around in a slip. I mean that the dummy was always completely dressed-and well dressed, too.

I remember waking up from a nightmare, or waking up and feeling sick, and going down the dark hall from my room to hers-feeling my way to her doorknob. Once in her room, I sensed that I had traveled to another time zone; after the darkness of my room and the black hall, my mother's room glowed-by comparison to the rest of the house, it was always just before dawn in my mother's room. And there would be the dummy, dressed for real life, dressed for the world. Sometimes I would think the dummy was my mother, that she was already out of bed and on her way to my room-possibly she'd heard me coughing, or crying out in my sleep; perhaps she got up early; or maybe she was just coming home, very late. Other times, the dummy would startle me; I would have forgotten all about it, and in the gray half-light of that room I would think it was an assailant-for a figure standing so still beside a sleeping body could as easily be an attacker as a guard. The point is, it was my mother's body-exactly. "It can make you look twice," Dan Needham used to say. Dan told some stories about the dummy, after he married my mother. When we moved into Dan's dormitory apartment at Gravesend Academy, the dummy-and my mother's sewing machine-became permanent residents of the dining room, which we never once ate in. We ate most of our meals in the school dining hall; and when we did eat at home, we ate in the kitchen. Dan tried sleeping with the dummy in the bedroom only a few times. "Tabby, what's wrong?" he asked it the first night, thinking my mother was up. "Come back to bed," he said another time. And once he asked the dummy, "Are you ill?" And my mother, not quite asleep beside him, murmured, "No. AreyoM?"

Of course, it was Owen Meany who experienced the most poignant encounters with my mother's dummy. Long before Dan Needham's armadillo changed Owen's and my life, a game that Owen enjoyed at Front Street involved dressing and undressing my mother's dummy. My grandmother frowned upon this game-on the basis that we were boys. My mother, in turn, was wary-at first, she feared for her clothes. But she trusted us: we had clean hands, we returned dresses and blouses and skirts to their proper hangers-and her lingerie, properly folded, to its correct drawers. My mother grew so tolerant of our game that she even complimented us-on occasion-for the creation of an outfit she hadn't thought of. And several times, Owen was so excited by our creation that he begged my mother to model the unusual combination herself. Only Owen Meany could make my mother blush.

"I've had this old blouse and this old skirt for years," she would say. "I just never thought of wearing them with this belt! You're a genius, Owen!" she'd tell him.

"BUT EVERYTHING LOOKS GOOD ON YOU," Owen would tell her, and she'd blush. If Owen had wanted to be less flattering, he might have remarked that it was easy to dress my mother, or her dummy, because all her clothes were black and white; everything went with everything else. There was that one red dress, and we could never find a way to make her like it; it was never meant to be a part of her wardrobe, but I believed the Wheelwright in my mother made it impossible for her to give or throw the dress away. She'd found it in an exceptionally posh Boston store; she loved the clingy material, its scooped back, its fitted waist and full skirt, but she hated the color-a scarlet red, a poinsettia red. She'd meant to copy it-in white or in black-like all the others, but she liked the cut of the dress so much that she copied it in white and in black. "White for a tan," she said, "and black in the winter.'' When she went to Boston to return the red dress, she said she discovered the store had burned to the ground. For a while, she couldn't remember the store's name; but she asked people in the neighborhood, she wrote to the former address. There was some crisis with insurance and it was months before she finally got to talk with someone, and then it was only a lawyer. "But I never paid for the dress!" my mother said. "It was very expensive-I was just trying it out. And I don't want it. I don't want to be billed for it, months later. It was very expensive," she repeated; but the lawyer said it didn't matter. Everything was burned. Bills of sale were burned. Inventory was burned. Stock was burned. "The telephone melted," he said. "The cash register melted," he added. "That dress is the least of their problems. It's your dress," the lawyer said. "You got lucky," he told her, in a way that made her feel guilty.

"Good Heavens," my grandmother said, "it's so easy to make Wheelwrights feel guilty. Get hold of yourself, Tabitha, and stop complaining. It's a lovely dress-it's a Christmas color," my grandmother decided. "There are always Christmas parties. It will be perfect." But I never saw my mother

take the dress out of her closet; the only way that dress ever found its way to the dressmaker's dummy-after my mother had copied it-was when Owen dressed the dummy in it. Not even Owen could find a way to make my mother like that red dress.

"It may t>e a Christmas color," she said, "but I'm the wrong color-especially at Christmastime-in that dress." She meant she looked sallow in red when she didn't have a tan, and who in New Hampshire has a tan for Christmas?

"THEN WEAR IT IN THE SUMMER!" Owen suggested. But it was a show-off thing to wear such a bright red color in the summer; that was making too much of a tan, in my mother's opinion. Dan suggested that my mother donate the red dress to his seedy collection of stage costumes. But my mother thought this was wasteful, and besides: none of the Gravesend Academy boys, and certainly no other woman from our town, had the figure to do that dress justice. Dan Needham not only took over the dramatic performances of the Gravesend Academy boys, he revitalized the amateur theatrical company of our small town, the formerly lackluster Gravesend Players. Dan talked everyone into The Gravesend Players; he got half the faculty at the academy to bring out the hams in themselves, and he roused the histrionic natures of half the townspeople by inviting them to try out for his productions. He even got my mother to be his leading lady-if only once. As much as my mother liked to sing, she was extremely shy about acting. She agreed to be in only one play under Dan's direction, and I think she agreed only as an indication of her commitment to their prolonged courtship, and only if Dan was cast opposite her-if he was the leading man-and if he was not cast as her lover. She didn't want the town imagining all sorts of things about their courtship, she said. After they were married, my mother wouldn't act again; neither would Dan. He was always the director; she was always the prompter. My mother had a good voice for a prompter: quiet but clear. All those singing lessons were good for that, I guess. Her one role, and it was a starring role, was in Angel Street. It was so long ago, I can't remember the names of the characters, or anything about the actual sets for the play. The Gravesend Players used the Town Hall, and sets were never very specially attended to there. What I remember is the movie that was made from Angel Street; it was called Gaslight, and I've seen it several times. My mother had the Ingrid Bergman part; she was the wife who was being driven insane by her villainous husband. And Dan was the villain-he was the Charles Boyer character. If you know the story, although Dan and my mother were cast as husband and wife, there is little love evidenced between them onstage; it was the only time or place I ever saw Dan be hateful to my mother. Dan tells me that there are still people in Gravesend who give him "evil looks" because of that Charles Boyer role he played; they look at him as if he hit that long-ago foul ball-and as if he meant to. And only once in that production-it was actually in dress rehearsal-did my mother wear the red dress. It might have been the evening when she is all dressed up to go to the theater (or somewhere) with her awful husband, but he has hidden the painting and accuses her of hiding it, and he makes her believe that she's hidden it, too-and then he banishes her to her room and doesn't let her go out at all. Or maybe it was when they go out to a concert and he finds his watch in her purse-he has put it there, but he makes her break down and plead with him to believe her, in front of all those snooty people. Anyway, my mother was supposed to wear the red dress in just one scene, and it was the only scene in the play where she was simply terrible. She couldn't leave the dress alone-she plucked imaginary lint off it; she kept staring at herself, as if the cleavage of the dress, all by itself, had suddenly plunged a foot; she never stopped itching around, as if the material of the dress made her skin crawl. Owen and I saw every production of Angel Street; we saw all of Dan's plays-both the academy plays and the amateur theatricals of The Gravesend Players-but Angel Street was one of the few productions that we saw every showing of. To watch my mother onstage, and to watch Dan being awful to her, was such a riveting lie. It was not the play that interested us-it was what a lie it was: that Dan was awful to my mother, that he meant her harm. That was fascinating. Owen and I always knew everyone in all the productions of The Gravesend Players. Mrs. Walker, the ogre of our Episcopal Sunday school, played the flirtatious maid in Angel Street-the Angela Lansbury character, if you can believe it. Owen and I couldn't. Mrs. Walker acting like a tart! Mrs. Walker being vulgar! We kept expecting her to shout: "Owen Meany, you get down from up there! You get back to your seat!" And she wore a French maid's costume, with a very tight skirt and

black, patterned stockings, so that every Sunday thereafter, Owen and I would search in vain for her legs-it was such a surprise to see Mrs. Walker's legs; and even more of a surprise to discover that she had pretty legs! The good guy role in Angel Street-the Joseph Cotten part, I call it-was played by our neighbor Mr. Fish. Owen and I knew that he was still in mourning over the untimely death of Sagamore; the horror of the diaper truck disaster on Front Street was still visible in the pained expression with which he followed my mother's every movement onstage. Mr. Fish was not exactly Owen's and my idea of a hero; but Dan Needham, with his talent for casting and directing the rankest amateurs, must have been inspired, in the case of Mr. Fish, to tap our neighbor's sorrow and anger over Sagamore's encounter with the diaper truck. Anyway, after the dress rehearsal of Angel Street, it was back to the closet with the red dress-except for those many occasions when Owen put it on the dummy. He must have felt especially challenged by my mother's dislike of that dress. It always looked terrific on the dummy. I tell all this only to demonstrate that Owen was as familiar with that dummy as I was; but he was not familiar with it at night. He was not accustomed to the semidarkness of my mother's room when she was sleeping, when the dummy stood over her-that unmistakable body, in profile, in perfect silhouette. That dummy stood so still, it appeared to be counting my mother's breaths. One night at Front Street, when Owen lay hi the other twin bed in my room, we were a long while falling asleep because-down the hall-Lydia had a cough. Just when we thought she was over a particular fit, or she had died, she would start up again. When Owen woke me up, I had not been asleep for very long; I was in the grips of such a deep and recent sleep that I couldn't make myself move-I felt as if I were lying in an extremely plush coffin and my pallbearers were holding me down, although I was doing my best to rise from the dead.

"I FEEL SICK," Owen was saying.

"Are you going to throw up?" I asked him, but I couldn't move; I couldn't even open my eyes.

"I DON'T KNOW," he said. "I THINK I HAVE A FEVER."

"Go tell my mother," I said.

"IT FEELS LIKE A RARE DISEASE," Owen said.

"Go tell my mother," I repeated. I listened to him bump into the desk chair. I heard my door open, and close. I could hear his hands brushing against the wall of the hall. I heard him pause with his hand trembling on my mother's doorknob; he seemed to wait there for the longest time. Then I thought: He's going to be surprised by the dummy. I thought of calling out, "Don't be startled by the dummy standing there; it looks weird in that funny light." But I was sunk in my coffin of sleep and my mouth was clamped shut. I waited for him to scream. That's what Owen would do, I was sure; there would be a bloodcurdling wail-"AAAAAAA-HHHHHHf"-•and the entire household would be awake for hours. Or else, in a fit of bravery, Owen would tackle the dummy and wrestle it to the floor. But while I was imagining the worst of Owen's encounter with the dummy, I realized he was back in my room, beside my bed, pulling my hair.

"WAKE UP! BUT BE QUIET!" he whispered. "YOUR MOTHER IS NOT ALONE. SOMEONE STRANGE IS IN HER ROOM. COME SEE! I THINK IT'S AN ANGEL!"

"An angel?" I said.

"SSSSSSHHHHHH!"

Now I was wide awake and eager to see him make a fool of himself, and so I said nothing about the dummy; I held his hand and went with him through the hall to my mother's room. Owen was shivering.

"How do you know it's an angel?" I whispered.

"SSSSSSHHHHHH!"

So we stealthily crept into my mother's room, crawling on our bellies like snipers in search of cover, until the whole picture of her bed-her body in an inverted question mark, and the dummy standing beside her-was visible. After a while, Owen said, "IT'S GONE. IT MUST HAVE SEEN ME THE FIRST TIME."

I pointed innocently at the dummy. "What's that?" I whispered.

"THAT'S THE DUMMY, YOU IDIOT!" Owen said. "WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BED."

I touched his forehead; he was burning up. "You have a fever, Owen," I said.

"I SAW AN ANGEL," he said.

"Is that you, boys?" my mother asked sleepily.

"Owen has a fever," I said. "He feels sick."

"Come here, Owen," my mother said, sitting up in bed. He went to her and she felt his forehead and told me to get him an aspirin and a glass of water.

"Owen saw an angel," I said.

"Did you have a nightmare, Owen?" my mother asked him, as he crawled into bed beside her. Owen's voice was muffled in the pillows. "NOT EXACTLY," he said. When I returned with the water and the aspirin, my mother had fallen asleep with her arm around Owen; with his protrusive ears spread on the pillow, and my mother's arm across his chest, he looked like a butterfly trapped by a cat. He managed to take the aspirin and drink the water without disturbing my mother, and he handed the glass back to me with a stoical expression.

"I'M GOING TO STAY HERE," he said bravely. "IN CASE IT COMES BACK."

He looked so absurd, I couldn't look at him. "I thought you said it was an angel," I whispered. "What harm would an angel do?"

"I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF ANGEL IT WAS," he whispered, and my mother stirred in her sleep; she tightened her grip around Owen, which must have simultaneously frightened and thrilled him, and I went back to my room alone. From what nonsense did Owen Meany discern what he would later call a PATTERN? From his feverish imagination? Years later, when he would refer to THAT FATED BASEBALL, I corrected him too impatiently.

"That accident, you mean," I said. It made him furious when I suggested that anything was an "accident"-especially anything that had happened to him; on the subject of predestination, Owen Meany would accuse Calvin of bad faith. There were no accidents; there was a reason for that baseball-just as there was a reason for Owen being small, and a reason for his voice. In Owen's opinion, he had INTERRUPTED AN ANGEL, he had DISTURBED AN ANGEL AT WORK, he had UPSET THE SCHEME OF THINGS. I realize now that he never thought he saw a guardian angel; he was quite convinced, especially after THAT FATED BASEBALL, that he had interrupted of Death. Although he did not (at the time) delineate the plot of this Divine Narrative to me, I know that's what he believed: he, Owen Meany, had interrupted of Death at her holy work; she had reassigned the task-she gave it to him. How could these fantasies become so monstrous, and so convincing to him? My mother was too sleepy to take his temperature, but it's a fact that he had a fever, and that his fever led him to a night in my mother's bed-in her arms. And wouldn't his excitement to find himself there, with her-not to mention his fever-have contributed to his readiness to remain wide-eyed and wide awake, alert for the next intruder, be it angel or ghost or hapless family member? I think so. Several hours later, there came to my mother's room the second fearful apparition. I say "fearful" because Owen was, at that time, afraid of my grandmother; he must have sensed her distaste for the granite business. I had left the light on in my mother's bathroom and the door to her bathroom open-into the hall-and worse, I had left the cold-water tap running (when I'd fixed Owen a glass of water for his aspirin). My grandmother always claimed she could hear the electric meter counting each kilowatt; as soon as it was dark, she followed my mother through the house, turning off the lights that my mother had turned on. And this night, in addition to her sensing that a light had been left on, Grandmother heard the water running- either the pump in the basement, or the cold-water tap itself. Finding my mother's bathroom in such reckless abandon, Grandmother proceeded to my mother's room-anxious that my mother was ill or else indignant with budget-mindedness and determined to point out my mother's carelessness, even if she had to wake her up. Grandmother might have just turned out the light, turned off the water, and gone back to bed, if she hadn't made the mistake of turning the cold-water tap the wrong way-she turned it much more forcefully on, dousing herself in a spray of the coldest possible water; the tap had been left running for hours. Thus was her nightgown soaked; she would have to change it. This must have inspired her to wake my mother; not only had electricity and water been awasting, but here Grandmother was-soaked to the skin in her efforts to put a stop to all this escaping energy. I would guess, therefore, that her manner, upon entering my mother's room, was not calm. And although

Owen was prepared for an angel, he might have expected that even of Death would reappear in a serene fashion. My grandmother, dripping wet-her usually flowing nightgown plastered to her gaunt, hunched body, her hair arrayed in its nightly curlers, her face thickly creamed the lifeless color of the moon-burst into my mother's room. It was days before Owen could tell me what he thought: when you scare off of Death, the Divine Plan calls for the kind of angels you can't scare away; they even call you by name.

"Tabitha!" my grandmother said.

' 'AAAAAAHHHHHH!'' Owen Meany screamed so terribly that my grandmother could not catch her breath. Beside my mother on the bed, she saw a tiny demon spring bolt upright-propelled by such a sudden and unreal force that my grandmother imagined the little creature was preparing to fly. My mother appeared to levitate beside him. Lydia, who still had both her legs, leaped from her bed and ran straight into her dresser drawers; for days, she would display her bruised nose. Sagamore, who was a short time away from his appointment with the diaper truck, woke up Mr. Fish with his barking. Throughout the neighborhood, the lids of trash cans clattered-as cats and raccoons made good their escape from Owen Meany's alarm. A small segment of Gravesend must have rolled over in their beds, imagining that of Death had clearly come for someone.

"Tabitha," my grandmother said the next day. "I think it is most strange and improper that you should allow that little devil to sleep in your bed."

"He had a fever," my mother said. "And I was very sleepy."

"He has something more serious than a fever, all the time," my grandmother said. "He acts and sounds as if he's possessed."

"You find fault with everyone who isn't absolutely perfect," my mother said.

"Owen thought he saw an angel," I explained to Grandmother.

"He thought was an angel?" Grandmother asked. "I told you he was possessed."

"Owen is an angel," my mother said.

"He is no such thing," my grandmother said. "He is a mouse. The Granite Mouse!"

When Mr. Fish saw Owen and rne on our bicycles, he waved us over to him; he was pretending to mend a loose picket on his fence, but he was really just watching our house-waiting for someone to come down the driveway.

"Hello, boys!" he said. "That was some hullabaloo last night. I suppose you heard it?" Owen shook his head.

"I heard Sagamore barking," I said.

"No, no-before that!" Mr. Fish said. "I mean, did you hear what made him bark? Such cries! Such a yell! A real hullabaloo!"

Sometime after she'd managed to catch her breath, Grandmother had cried out, too, and of course Lydia had cried out as well-after she'd collided with her dresser drawers. Owen said later that my grandmother had been WAILING LIKE A BANSHEE, but there had been nothing of a caliber comparable to Owen's scream.

"Owen thought he saw an angel," I explained to Mr. Fish.

"It didn't sound like a very nice angel, Owen," Mr. Fish said.

"WELL, ACTUALLY," Owen admitted, "I THOUGHT MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT WAS A GHOST."

"Ah, that explains everything!" Mr. Fish said sympathetically. Mr. Fish was as afraid of my grandmother as Owen was; at least, regarding all matters concerning the zoning laws and the traffic on Front Street, he was always extremely deferential to her. What a phrase that is: "that explains everything!" I know better than to think that anything "explains everything" today. Later, of course, I would tell Dan Needham the whole story-including Owen's belief regarding his interruption of of Death and how he was assigned that angel's task. But one of the things I failed to notice about Owen was how exact he was-how he meant everything literally, which is not a usual feature of the language of children. For years he would say, "I WILL NEVER FORGET YOUR GRANDMOTHER, WAILING LIKE A BANSHEE." But I paid no attention; I could hardly remember Grandmother making much of a ruckus-what I remembered was Owen's scream. Also, I thought it was just an expression-"wailing like a banshee''- and I couldn't imagine why Owen remembered my grandmother's commotion with such importance, I must have repeated what Owen said to Dan Needham, because years later Dan asked me, "Did Owen say your grandmother was a banshee T'

"He said she was 'wailing like a banshee,' " I explained. Dan got out the dictionary, then; he was clucking his tongue and shaking his head, and laughing to himself, saying, "That boy! What a boy! Brilliant but preposterous!'' And that was the first time I learned, literally, what a banshee was-a banshee, in Irish folklore, is a female spirit whose wailing is a sign that a loved one will soon die. Dan Needham was right, as usual: "brilliant but preposterous"-that was such an apt description of The Granite Mouse; that was exactly what I thought Owen Meany was, "brilliant but preposterous." As time went on-as you shall see-maybe not so preposterous. It appeared to our town, and to us Wheelwrights ourselves, a strange reversal in my mother's character that she should conduct a four-year courtship with Dan Needham before consenting to marry him. As my Aunt Martha would say, my mother hadn't waited five minutes to have the "fling" that led to me! But perhaps that was the reason: if her own family, and all of Gravesend, had suspicions regarding my mother's morals-regarding the general ease with which, they might assume, she could be talked into anything-my mother's lengthy engagement to Dan Needham certainly showed them all a thing or two. Because it was obvious, from the start, that Dan and Mother were in love. He was devoted, she dated no one else, they were "engaged" within a few months-and it was clear to everyone how much I liked Dan. Even my grandmother, who was ever alert for what she feared was her wayward daughter's proclivity to jump into things, was impatient with my mother to set a date for the wedding. Dan Needham's personal charm, not to mention the speed with which he became a favorite in the Gravesend Academy community, had quickly won my grandmother over. Grandmother was not won over quickly, as a rule-not by anyone. Yet she became infatuated with the magic Dan wrought upon the amateurs at The Gravesend Players, so much so that she accepted a part in Maugham's The Constant Wife; she was the regal mother of the deceived wife, and she proved to have the perfect, frivolous touch for drawing-room comedy-she was a model of the kind of sophistication we could all do well without. She even discovered a British accent, with no prodding from Dan, who was no fool and fully realized that a British accent lay never very deeply concealed in the bosom of Harriet Wheelwright-it simply wanted an occasion to bring it out.

" 'I hate giving straight answers to a straight question,' " Grandmother, as Mrs. Culver, said imperiously-and completely in character. And at another memorable moment, commenting on her son-in-law's affair with her daughter's " 'greatest friend,' " she rationalized: " 'If John is going to deceive Constance, it's nice it should be somebody we all know.' " Well, Grandmother was so marvelous she brought the house down; it was a grand performance, rather wasted-in my opinion-on poor John and Constance, who were drearily played by a somewhat sheepish Mr. Fish, our dog-loving neighbor (and a regular choice of Dan's), and by the tyrannical Mrs. Walker, whose legs were her sexiest feature-and they were almost completely covered in the long dresses appropriate to this drawing-room comedy. Grandmother, who was rendered coy with false modesty, said simply that she had always had a special understanding of -and I don't doubt it: she would have been a beautiful young woman then; "and your mother," Grandmother told me, "would have been younger than you."

So why did Dan and my mother wait four years? If there were arguments, if they were sorting out some differences of opinion, I never saw or heard them. Having been so improper as to have me, and never explain me, was Mother simply being overly proper the second time around? Was Dan wary of her? He never seemed wary. Was the problem? I used to wonder. But I loved Dan-and he gave me every reason to feel that he loved me. I know he loved me; he still does.

"Is it about children, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked one evening at dinner, and Lydia and I sat at attention to hear the answer. "I mean, does he want them-do you not want another? Or is it the other way around? I don't think you should trouble yourself about having or not having children, Tabitha- not if it costs you such a lovely, devoted man."

"We're just waiting, to be sure," my mother said.

"Good Heavens, you must be sure, by now," Grandmother said impatiently. "Even I'm sure, and Johnny's sure. Aren't you sure, Lydia?" Grandmother asked.

"Sure, I'm sure," Lydia said.

"Children are not the issue," my mother said. "There is no issue."

"People have joined the priesthood in less time than it takes you to get married," Grandmother said to my mother. As for joining the priesthood, that was a favorite expression of Harriet Wheelwright's; it was always made in connection with some insupportable foolishness, some self-created difficulty, some action as inhuman as it was bizarre. Grandmother meant the Catholic priesthood; yet I know that one of the things that upset her about the possibility of Mother's moving herself and me to the Episcopal Church was that Episcopalians had priests and bishops-and even "low" Episcopalians were much more like Catholics than like Congregationalists, in her opinion. A good thing: Grandmother never knew much about Anglicans. In their long courtship, Dan and my mother attended both the Congregational and the Episcopal services, as if they were conducting a four-year theological seminar, in private-and my introduction to the Episcopal Sunday school was also gradual; at my mother's prompting, I attended several classes before Dan and my mother were married, as if Mother already knew where we were headed. What was also gradual was how my mother finally stopped going to Boston for her singing lessons. I never had a hint that Dan was the slightest bothered by this ritual, although I recall my grandmother asking my mother if Dan objected to her spending one night a week in Boston.

"Why should he?" my mother asked. The answer, which was not forthcoming, was as obvious to my grandmother as it was to me: that the most likely candidate for the unclaimed position of my father, and my mother's mystery lover, was that "famous" singing teacher. But neither my grandmother nor I dared to postulate this theory to my mother, and Dan Needham was clearly untroubled by the ongoing singing lessons, and the ongoing one night away; or else Dan possessed some reassuring piece of knowledge that remained a secret from my grandmother and me.

"YOUR FATHER IS NOT THE SINGING TEACHER," Owen Meany told me matter-of-factiy. "THAT WOULD BE TOO OBVIOUS."

"This is a real-life story, Owen," I said. "It's not a mystery novel." In real life, I meant, there was nothing written that the missing father couldn't be OBVIOUS-but I didn't really think it was the singing teacher, either. He was only the most likely candidate because he was the only candidate my grandmother and I could think of.

"IF IT'S HIM, WHY MAKE IT A SECRET?" Owen asked. "IF IT'S HIM, WOULDN'T YOUR MOTHER SEE HIM MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK-OR NOT AT ALL?"

Anyway, it was farfetched to think that the singing teacher was the reason my mother and Dan didn't get married for four years. And so I concluded what Owen Meany would call TOO OBVIOUS: that Dan was holding out for more information, concerning me, and that my mother wasn't providing it. For wouldn't it be reasonable of Dan to want to know the story of who my father was? And I know that is a story my mother wouldn't have yielded to Dan. But Owen rebuked me for this idea, too. "DON'T YOU SEE HOW MUCH DAN LOVES YOUR MOTHER?" he asked me. "HE LOVES HER AS MUCH AS WE DO! HE WOULD NEVER FORCE HER TO TELL HIM ANYTHING'."

I believe that now. Owen was right. It was something else: that four-year delay of the obvious. Dan came from a very high-powered family; they were doctors and lawyers, and they disapproved of Dan for not completing a more serious education. To have started out at Harvard and not gone on to law school, not gone on to medical school-this was criminal laziness; Dan came from a family very keen about going on. They disapproved of him ending up as a mere prep-school teacher, and of his indulging his hobby of amateur theatrical performances-they believed these frivolities were unworthy of a grown-up's interest! They disapproved of my mother, too-and that was the end of Dan having any more to do with them. They called her "the divorcee"; I guess no one in the Needham family had ever been divorced, and so that was the worst thing you could say about a woman-even worse than calling my mother what she really was: an unwed mother. Perhaps an unwed mother sounded merely hapless; whereas a divorcee implied intent-a woman who was out to snare their dear underachiever, Dan. I don't remember much about meeting Dan's family: at the wedding, they chose not to mingle. My grandmother was outraged that there were people who actually dared to condescend to her-to treat her like some provincial fussbudget. I recall that Dan's mother had an acid tongue, and that, when introduced to me, she said, "So this is the child." And then

there followed a period of time in which she scrutinized my face-for any telltale indication of the race of my missing male ancestor, I would guess. But that's all I remember. Dan refused to have anything further to do with them. I cannot think that they played any role at all in the four-year "engagement."

And what with all the comparing and contrasting of a theological nature, there was no end of religious approval for matching Dan and my mother; there was, in fact, double approval-the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians appeared to be competing for the privilege of having Dan and my mother come worship with them. In my opinion, it should have been no contest; granted, I was happy to have the opportunity to lift Owen up in the air at Sunday school, but that was the beginning and the end to any advantage the Episcopalians had over the Congregationalists. There were not only those differences I've already mentioned-of an atmospheric and architectural nature, together with those ecclesiastical differences that made the Episcopal service much more Catholic than the Congregational service-CATHOLIC, WITH A BIG C, as Owen would say. But there were also vast differences between the Rev. Lewis Merrill, whom I liked, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin-the rector of the Episcopal Church-who was a bumpkin of boredom. To compare these two ministers as dismissively as I did, I confess I was drawing on no small amount of snobbery inherited from Grandmother Wheelwright. The Congregationalists had pastors-the Rev. Lewis Merrill was our pastor. If you grow up with that comforting word, it's hard to accept rectors-the Episcopal Church had rectors; the Rev. Dudley Wiggin was the rector of Christ Church, Gravesend. I shared my grandmother's distaste for the word rector-it sounded too much like rectum to be taken seriously. But it would have been hard to take the Rev. Dudley Wiggin seriously if he'd been a pastor. Whereas the Rev. Mr. Merrill had heeded his calling as a young man-he had always been in, and of, the church-the Rev. Mr. Wiggin was a former airline pilot; some difficulty with his eyesight had forced his early retirement from the skies, and he had descended to our wary town with a newfound fervor-the zeal of the convert giving him the healthy but frantic appearance of one of those "elder" citizens who persist in entering vigorous sporting competitions in the over-fifty category. Whereas Pastor Merrill spoke an educated language-he'd been an English major at Princeton; he'd heard Niebuhr and Tillich lecture at Union Theological- Rector Wiggin spoke in ex-pilot homilies; he was a pulpit-thumper who had no doubt. What made Mr. Merrill infinitely more attractive was that he was/w// of doubt; he expressed our doubt in the most eloquent and sympathetic ways. In his completely lucid and convincing view, the Bible is a book with a troubling plot, but a plot that can be understood: God creates us out of love, but we don't want God, or we don't believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us-at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless universe. Although he knew all the best-or, at least, the least boring-stories in the Bible, Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith's opposite. By comparison, whatever the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had seen to make him believe in God, he had seen absolutely-possibly by flying an airplane too close to the sun. The rector was not gifted with language, and he was blind to doubt or worry in any form; perhaps the problem with his "eyesight" that had forced his early retirement from the airlines was really a euphemism for the blinding power of his total religious conversion-because Mr. Wiggin was fearless to an extent that would have made him an unsafe pilot, and to an extent that made him a madman as a preacher. Even his Bible selections were outlandish; a satirist could not have selected them better. The Rev. Mr. Wiggin was especially fond of the word "firmament"; there was always a firmament in his Bible selections. And he loved all allusions to faith as a battle to be savagely fought and won; faith was a war waged against faith's adversaries. "Take the whole armor of God!" he would rave. We were instructed to wear "the breastplate of righteousness"; our faith was a "shield"- against "all the flaming darts of the evil one." The rector said he wore a "helmet of salvation." That's from Ephesians; Mr. Wiggin was a big fan of Ephesians. He also whooped it up about Isaiah-especially the part when "the Lord is sitting upon a throne"; the rector was big on the Lord upon a throne. The Lord is surrounded by seraphim. One of the seraphim flies

to Isaiah, who is complaining that he's "a man of unclean lips." Not for long; not according to Isaiah. The seraphim touches Isaiah's mouth with "a burning coal" and Isaiah is as good as new. That was what we heard from the Rev. Dudley Wiggin: all the unlikeliest miracles.

"I DON'T LIKE THE SERAPHIM," Owen complained. "WHAT'S THE POINT OF BEING SCARY?"

But although Owen agreed with me that the rector was a moron who messed up the Bible for tentative believers by assaulting us with the worst of God the Almighty and God the Terrible-and although Owen acknowledged that the Rev. Mr. Wiggin's sermons were about as entertaining and convincing as a pilot's voice in the intercom, explaining technical difficulties while the plane plummets toward the earth and the stewardesses are screaming-Owen actually preferred Wiggin to what little he knew of Pastor Merrill. Owen didn't know much about Mr. Merrill, I should add; Owen was never a Congregationalist. But Merrill was such a popular preacher that parishioners from the other Gravesend churches would frequently skip a service of their own to attend his sermons. Owen did so, on occasion, but Owen was always critical. Even when Gravesend Academy bestowed the intellectual honor upon Pastor Merrill-of inviting him to be a frequent guest preacher in the academy's nondenominational church-Owen was critical.

"BELIEF IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL MATTER," he complained. "IF HE'S GOT SO MUCH DOUBT, HE'S IN THE WRONG BUSINESS."

But who, besides Owen Meany and Rector Wiggin, had so little doubt? Owen was a natural in the belief business, but my appreciation of Mr. Merrill and my contempt for Mr. Wiggin were based on common sense. I took a particularly Yankee view of them; the Wheelwright in me was all in favor of Lewis Merrill, all opposed to Dudley Wiggin. We Wheelwrights do not scoff at the appearance of things. Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter. That clean, well-lit place of worship, which was the Congregational Church-its pristine white clapboards, its tall, clear windows that welcomed the view of branches against the sky-that was a first impression that lasted for me; it was a model of purity and no-nonsense, against which the Episcopal gloom of stone and tapestry and stained glass could pose no serious competition. And Pastor Merrill was also good-looking-in an intense, pale, slightly undernourished way. He had a boyish face-a sudden, winning, embarrassed smile that contradicted a fairly constant look of worry that more usually gave him the expression of an anxious child. An errant lock of hair flopped on his forehead when he looked down upon his sermon, or bent over his Bible-his hair problem was the unruly result of a pronounced widow's peak, which further contributed to his boyishness. And he was always misplacing his glasses, which he didn't seem to need-that is, he could read without them, he could look out upon his congregation without them (at least not appearing to be blind); then, all of a sudden, he would commence a frantic search for them. It was endearing; so was his slight stutter, because it made us nervous for him-afraid for him, should he have his eloquence snatched from him and be struck down with a crippling speech impediment. He was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless; on the contrary, he exhibited what hard work it was-to make his faith, in tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter. And then, to add to Mr. Merrill's appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes-a perfectly wholesome type, but entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had told her that health and energy and the Lord's work are harder to come by in bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire. She suffered visibly. Her blondness turned to dry straw; her cheeks and nose turned a raw salmon color, her eyes watered- she caught every flu, every common cold there was; no epidemic missed her. Aghast at the loss of her California color, she tried makeup; but this turned her skin to clay. Even in summer, she couldn't tan; she turned so dead white in the winter, there was nothing for her to do in the sun but burn. She was sick all the time, and this cost her her energy; she grew listless; she developed a matronly spread, and the vague, unfocused look of someone over forty who might be sixty-or would be, tomorrow. All this happened to Mrs. Merrill while her children were still small; they were sickly, too. Although they were successful scholars, they were so often ill and missed so many school

days that they had to repeat whole grades. Two of them were older than I was, but not a lot older; one of them was even demoted to my grade-I don't remember which one; I don't even remember which sex. That was another problem that the Merrill children suffered: they were utterly forgettable. If you didn't see the Merrill children for weeks at a time, when you saw them again, they appeared to have been replaced by different children. The Rev. Lewis Merrill had the appearance of a plain man who, with education and intensity, had risen above his ordinariness; and his rise manifested itself in his gift of speech. But his family labored under a plainness so virulent that the dullness of his wife and children outshone even their proneness to illness, which was remarkable. It was said that Mrs. Merrill had a drinking problem-?*r, at least, that her modest intake of alcohol was in terrible conflict with her long list of prescription drugs. One of the children once swallowed all the drugs in the house and had to have its stomach pumped. And following a kind of pep talk that Mr. Merrill gave to the youngest Sunday school class, one of his own children pulled the minister's hair and spit in his face. When the Merrill children were growing up, one of them vandalized a cemetery. Here was our pastor, clearly bright, clearly grappling with all the most thoughtful elements of religious faith, and doubt; yet, clearly, God had cursed his family. There was simply no comparable sympathy for the Rev. Dudley Wiggin-Captain Wiggin, some of his harsher critics called him. He was a hale and hearty type, he had a grin like a gash in his face; his smile was the smirk of a restless survivor. He looked like a former downed pilot, a veteran of crash landings, or shoot-outs in the sky-Dan Needham told me that Captain Wiggin had been a bomber pilot in the war, and Dan would know: he was a sergeant himself, in Italy and in Brazil, where he was a cryptographic technician. And even Dan was appalled at the crassness with which Dudley Wiggin directed the Christmas Pageant-and Dan was more tolerant of amateur theatrical performances than the average Gravesend citizen. Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening. And his wife, clearly, had not suffered. A former stewardess, Barbara Wiggin was a brash, backslapping redhead; Mr. Wiggin called her "Barb," which was how she introduced herself in various charity-inspired phone calls.

"Hi! It's Barb Wiggin! Is your mommy or your daddy home?"

She was very much a barb, if not a nail, in Owen's side, because she enjoyed picking him up by his pants-she would grab him by his belt, her fist in his belly, and lift him to her stewardess's face: a frankly handsome, healthy, efficient face. "Oh, you're a cute-y!" she'd tell Owen. "Don't you ever dare grow!"

Owen hated her; he always begged Dan to cast her as a prostitute or a child-molester, but The Gravesend Players did not offer many roles of that kind, and Dan admitted to thinking of no other good use for her. Her own children were huge, oafish athletes, irritatingly "well rounded." AW the Wiggins played in touch-football games, which they organized, every Sunday afternoon, on the parish-house lawn. Yet-incredibly!-we moved to the Episcopal Church. It was not for the touch football, which Dan and my mother and I despised. I could only guess that Dan and my mother had discussed having children of their own, and Dan had wanted his children to be baptized as Episcopalians-although, as I've said, the whole church business didn't appear to matter very much to him. Perhaps my mother took Dan's Episcopalianism more seriously than Dan took it. All that my mother said to me was that it was better if we were all in one church, and that Dan cared more about his church than she cared about hers-and wasn't it fun for me to be where Owen was? Yes, it was. Thank Heavens for Hurd's Church; that was the unfortunate name of the nondenominational church at Gravesend Academy-it was named after the academy's founder, that childless Puritan, the Rev. Emery Kurd himself. Without the neutral territory of Hurd's Church, my mother might have started an interdenominational war-because where would she have been married? Grandmother wanted the Rev. Lewis Merrill to perform the ceremony, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had every reason to expect that he would get to officiate. Fortunately, there was some middle ground. As a faculty member at Gravesend Academy, Dan Needham had a right to use Hurd's Church-especially for the all-important wedding and the quick-to-follow funeral-and Hurd's Church was a

masterpiece of inoffensiveness. No one could remember the denomination of the school minister, a sepulchral old gentleman who favored bow ties and had the habit of pinning his vestment to the floor with an errant stab of his cane; he suffered from gout. His role in Hurd's Church was usually that of a bland master of ceremonies, for he rarely delivered a sermon himself; he introduced one guest preacher after another, each one more flamboyant or controversial than himself. The Rev. "Pinky" Scammon also taught Religion at Gravesend Academy, where his courses were known to begin and end with apologies for Kierkegaard; but old Pinky Scammon cleverly delegated much of the teaching of his Religion classes to guest preachers, too. He would invariably entice Sunday's minister to stay through the day Monday, and teach his Monday class; the rest of the week, Mr. Scammon devoted to discussing with his students what the interesting guest had said. The gray granite edifice of Hurd's Church, which was so plain it might have been a Registry of Deeds or a Town Library or a Public Water Works, seemed to have composed itself around old Mr. Scammon's gouty limp and his sepulchral features. Hurd's was dark and shabby, but it was comfy-the pews were wide and worn so smooth that they invited instant dozing; the light, which was absorbed by so much stone, was gray but soft; the acoustics, which may have been Hurd's only miracle, were unmuddied and deep. Every preacher sounded better than he was there; every hymn was distinct; each prayer was resonant; the organ had a cathedral tone. If you shut your eyes-and you were inclined to shut your eyes in Hurd's Church-you could imagine you were in Europe. Generations of Gravesend Academy boys had carved up the racks for the hymnals with the names of their girlfriends and the scores of football games; generations of academy maintenance men had sanded away the more flagrant obscenities, although an occasional "dork-brain" or "cunt-face" was freshly etched in the wooden slats that secured the tattered copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal. Given the darkness of the place, Hurd's was better suited for a funeral than for a wedding; but my mother had both her wedding and her funeral there. The wedding service at Hurd's was shared by Pastor Merrill and Rector Wiggin, who managed to avoid any awkwardness- or any open demonstration of the competition between them. ?

Old Pinky Scammon nodded peaceably to what both ministers had to say. Those elements of the celebration that allow the impromptu were the responsibility of Mr. Merrill, who was brief and charming-his nervousness was manifest, as usual, only by his slight stutter. Pastor Merrill also got to deliver the "Dearly beloved" part. " 'We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony/ '' he began, and I noticed that Kurd's was packed-there was standing-room only. The academy faculty had turned out in droves, and there were the usual droves of women of my grandmother's generation who turned out whenever there was a public opportunity to observe my grandmother, who was-to women her age-the closest that the Gravesend community came to royalty; and there was something special about her having a "fallen" daughter who was choosing this moment to haul herself back into the ranks of the respectable. That Tabby Wheelwright has some nerve to wear white, I'm sure some of these old crones from my grandmother's bridge club were thinking. But this sense of the richness of gossip that permeated Gravesend society is, on my part, largely hindsight. At the time, I chiefly thought it was a splendid turnout. The Ministry of the Word was muttered by Captain Wiggin, who had no understanding of punctuation; he either trampled over it entirely, or he paused and held his breath so long that you were sure someone was pointing a gun at his head. " 'O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with your grace,' " he gasped. Then Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wiggin indulged in a kind of face-off, with each of them demonstrating his particular notion of pertinent passages from the Bible-Mr. Merrill's passages being more "pertinent," Mr. Wiggin's more flowery. It was back to Ephesians for the rector, who intoned that we should pay close attention to "The Father from whom every family is named"; then he switched to Colossians and that bit about "Love which binds everything together in harmony"; and, at last, he concluded with Mark-"They are no longer two but one."

Pastor Merrill started us off with the Song of Solomon- " 'Many waters cannot quench love,' " he read. Then he hit us with Corinthians ("Love is patient and kind"), and finished

us off with John-"Love one another as I have loved you." It was Owen Meany who then blew his nose, which drew my attention to his pew, where Owen sat on a precarious stack of hymnals-in order to see over the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular. There then followed a reception at Front Street. It was a muggy day with a hot, hazy sun, and my grandmother complained that her rose garden was not flattered by the weather; indeed, the roses looked wilted by the heat. It was the kind of day that produces a torpor that can be refreshed by nothing less than a violent thunderstorm; my grandmother complained of the likelihood of a thunderstorm, too. Yet the bar and the buffet tables were set out upon the lawn; the men took off their suit jackets and rolled up their sleeves and loosened their ties and sweated through their shirts-my grandmother particularly disapproved of the men for draping their jackets on the privet hedges, which gave the usually immaculate, dark-green border of the rose garden the appearance of being strewn with litter that had blown in from another part of town. Several of the women fanned themselves; some of them kicked off their high heels and walked barefoot on the lawn. There had been a brief and abandoned plan to have a dance floor put on the brick terrace, but this plan withered in a disagreement concerning the proper music-and a good thing, too, my grandmother concluded; she meant it was a good thing that there was no dancing in such humid weather. But it was what a summer wedding should be-sultry, something momentarily pretty, giving way to a heat that is unrestrained. Uncle Alfred showed off for me and my cousins by chugging a beer. A stray beagle, belonging to some new people on Pine Street, made off with several cupcakes from the coffee and dessert table. Mr. Meany, standing so stiffly in-waiting at the receiving line that he appeared to have granite in his pockets, blushed when it was his turn to kiss the bride. "Owen's got the weddin' present," he said, turning away. "We got just one present, from the both of us." Mr. Meany and Owen wore the only dark suits at the wedding, and Simon commented to Owen on the inappropriateness of his solemn, Sunday school appearance.

"You look like you're at a funeral, Owen," Simon said. Owen was hurt and looked cross.

"I was just kidding," Simon said. But Owen was still cross and made a point of rearranging all the wedding presents on the terrace so that his and his father's gift was the centerpiece. The wrapping paper had Christmas trees all over it and the present, which Owen needed both hands to lift, was the size and shape of a brick. I was sure it was granite.

"That's probably Owen's only suit, you asshole," Hester told Simon; they quarreled. It was the first time I'd ever seen Hester in a dress; she looked very pretty. It was a yellow dress; Hester was tan; her black hair was as tangled as a briar patch in the heat, but her reflexes seemed especially primed for the social challenge of an outdoor wedding. When Noah tried to surprise her with a captured toad, Hester got the toad away from him and slapped Simon in the face with it.

"I think you've killed it, Hester," Noah said, bending over the stunned toad and exhibiting much more concern for it than for his brother's face.

"It's not my fault," Hester said. "You started it."

My grandmother had declared the upstairs bathrooms- "off-limits" to wedding guests, so there got to be quite long lines at the downstairs bathrooms-there were only two. Lydia had hand-painted two shirt cardboards, "Gentlemen" and "Ladies"; the "Ladies" had the much longer of the lines. When Hester tried to use an upstairs bathroom-she feh that she was "family," and therefore not bound by the rules governing the guests-her mother told her that she would wait in line like everyone else. My Aunt Martha-like many Americans-could become quite tyrannical in the defense of democracy. Noah and Simon and Owen and I bragged that we could pee in the bushes, and Hester begged only our slightest cooperation-in order that she could follow us in that pursuit. She asked that one of us stand guard-so that other boys and men, with an urge to pee in the denser sections of the privet hedges, would not surprise her midsquat; and she requested that one of us keep her panties safe for her. Her brothers predictably balked at this and made derisive comments regarding the desirability of holding Hester's panties-under any circumstances. I was, typically, slow to respond. Hester simply stepped out of her underwear and handed her white cotton briefs to Owen Meany. You would have thought she had handed him a live armadillo; his little face reflected his devout curiosity and his extreme anxiety. But Noah snatched Hester's panties out of

Owen's hands and Simon snatched them away from his brother, pulling them over Owen's head-they fit over his head rather easily, with his face peering through the hole for one of Hester's ample thighs. He snatched them off his head, blushing; but when he tried to stuff them into his suit-jacket pocket, he discovered that the side pockets were still sewn shut. Although he'd worn this suit to Sunday school for several years, no one had unsewn the pockets for him; or perhaps he thought they were meant to be closed. He recovered, however, and stuffed the panties into the inside breast pocket of the jacket, where they made quite a lump. At least he was not wearing the panties on his head when his father walked up to him, and Noah and Simon began to scuff their feet in the rough grass and loose twigs at the foot of the privet hedge; by so doing, they managed to conceal the sound of Hester pissing. Mr. Meany was stirring a glass of champagne with a dill pickle the size of this thick forefinger. He had not drunk a drop of champagne, but he appeared to enjoy using it as a dip for his pickle.

"Are you comin' home with me, Owen?" Mr. Meany asked. He had announced, from the moment he arrived at the reception, that he couldn't stay long; my mother and grandmother were most impressed that he'd come at all. He was uncomfortable going out. His simple navy-blue suit was from the same family of cheap material as Owen's-since Owen was often up in the air in his suit, perhaps Mr. Meany's suit had been better treated; I could not tell if Mr. Meany had unsewn his side pockets. Owen's suit was creased--just above the cuffs of his trousers and at the wrists of his jacket sleeves, indicating that his suit had been let down; but the sleeves and trousers had been "let down" so little, Owen appeared to be growing at the rate of an underfed tree.

"I WANT TO STAY," Owen said.

"Tabby won't be bringin' you up the hill on her weddin' day," Mr. Meany told him.

"My father or mother will bring Owen home, sir," Noah said. My cousins-as rough as they could be with other children-had been brought up to be friendly and polite to adults, and Noah's cheerfulness seemed to surprise Mr. Meany. I introduced him to my cousins, but I could tell that Owen wanted to walk his father away from us, immediately-perhaps fearing that Hester would at any moment emerge from the privet hedge and demand her panties back. Mr. Meany had come in his pickup, and several of the guests had blocked it in our driveway, so I went with him and Owen to help identify the cars. We were well across the lawn, and quite far from the hedges, when I saw Hester's bare arm protrude from the dark-green privet. "Just hand them over!" she was saying, and Noah and Simon began to tease her.

"Hand what over?" Simon was saying. Owen and I wrote down the license-plate numbers of the cars blocking Mr. Meany's pickup, and then I presented the list to my grandmother, who enjoyed making announcements in a voice based on Maugham's Mrs. Culver from The Constant Wife. It took us a while to free Mr. Meany from the driveway; Owen was visibly more relaxed after his father had departed. He was left holding his father's nearly full glass of champagne, which I advised him not to drink; I was sure it tasted heavily of pickle. We went and stared at the wedding presents, until I acknowledged the propitious placement of the present from Owen and his father.

"I MADE IT MYSELF," he said. At first I thought he meant the Christmas wrapping paper, but then I realized that he had made the actual present. "MY FATHER HELPED ME SELECT THE PROPER STONE," Owen admitted. Good God, so it is granite! I thought. Owen was upset that the newlyweds would not open their presents until after their honeymoon, but he restrained himself from describing the present to me. I would have many years to see it for myself, he explained. Indeed, I would. It was a brick-shaped piece of the finest granite- "MONUMENT QUALITY, AS GOOD AS THEY GET OUT OF BARRE," Owen would say. Owen had cut it himself, polished it himself; he had designed and chiseled the border himself, and the engraving was all his, too. He had worked on it after school in the monument shop, and on weekends. It looked like a tombstone for a cherished pet-at best, a marker for a stillborn child; but more appropriate for a cat or a hamster. It was meant to lie lengthwise, like a loaf of bread, and it was engraved with the approximate date of my mother's marriage to Dan:

JULY Whether Owen was unsure of the exact date, or whether it would have meant hours more of engraving-or ruined his

concept of the aesthetics of the stone-I don't know. It was too big and heavy for a paperweight. Although Owen later suggested this use for it, he admitted it was more practical as a doorstop. For years-before he gave it to me-Dan Needham dutifully used it as a doorstop and frequently bashed his toes against it. But whatever it would become, it had to be left in the open where Owen would be sure to see it when he visited; he was proud of it, and my mother adored it. Well, my mother adored Owen; if he'd given her a gravestone with the date of death left blank-to be filled in at the appropriate time-she would have loved that, too. As it was, in my opinion-and in Dan's-Owen did give her a gravestone. It had been made in a monument shop, with grave-marking tools; it may have had her wedding date on it, but it was a miniature tombstone. And although there was much mirth in evidence at my mother's wedding, and even my grandmother exhibited an unusual tolerance for the many young and not-so-young adults who were cavorting and jolly with drink, the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a funeral. Owen became quite playful regarding his possession of Hester's panties. He was not one to be bold with girls, and only a fool-or Noah or Simon-would be bold with Hester; but Owen managed to surround himself with the crowd, thus making it embarrassing for Hester to take back her panties. "Give them over, Owen," she would hiss at him.

"OKAY, SURE, DO YOU WANT THEM?" he would say, reaching for his pocket while standing firmly between Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred.

"Not here I" Hester would say threateningly.

"OH, SO YOU DON'T WANT THEM? CAN I KEEP THEM?" he would say. Hester stalked him through the party; she was only mildly angry, I thought-or she was mildly enjoying herself. It was a flirtation that made me the slightest bit jealous, and it went on so long that Noah and Simon got bored and began to arm themselves with confetti for my mother and Dan's eventual departure. That came sooner than expected, because they had only begun to cut up the wedding cake when the storm started. It had been growing darker and darker, and the wind now carried some light rain in it; but when the thunder and lightning began, the wind dropped and the rain fell heavily and straight down-in sheets. Guests bolted for the cover of the house; my grandmother quickly tired of telling people to wipe their feet. The caterers straggled with the bar and the tables of food; they had set up a tent that extended over only half the terrace, like an awning, but there was not enough room under it for the wedding presents and for all the food and drink; Owen and I helped move the presents inside. My mother and Dan raced upstairs to change their clothes and grab their bags. Uncle Alfred was summoned to fetch the Buick, which he had not vandalized too badly in the usual "Just Married" fashion. "Just Married" was written, with chalk, across the tailgate, but the lettering was almost washed away by the time my mother and Dan came downstairs in their traveling clothes, carrying their luggage. The wedding guests crowded in the many windows that faced the driveway, to see the honeymooners leave; but they had a confused departure. The rain was pelting down as they tried to put the luggage in the car; Uncle Alfred, in the role of their valet, was soaking wet-and since Simon and Noah had hoarded all the confetti for themselves, they were the only throwers. They threw most of it on their father, on Uncle Alfred, because he was so wet that the confetti stuck to him, instantly turning him into a clown. People were cheering from the windows of Front Street, but my grandmother was frowning. Chaos disturbed her; mayhem was mayhem, even if people were having a good time; bad weather was bad weather, even if no one seemed to mind. And some of her old crones were watching her, too. (How does royalty react to rain at a wedding? It's what that Tabby Wheelwright deserves-her in her white dress.) My Aunt Martha risked the rain to hug and kiss my mother and Dan; Simon and Noah plastered her with confetti, too. Then, as suddenly as the wind had dropped and the rain had fallen, the rain changed to hail. In New Hampshire, you can't even count on July. Hailstones bounced off the Buick like machine-gun fire, and Dan and my mother jumped into the car; Aunt Martha shrieked and covered her head-she and Uncle Alfred ran to the house. Even Noah and Simon felt the hailstones' sting; they retreated, too. Someone shouted that a hailstone had broken a champagne glass, left on the terrace. The hailstones struck with such force that the people crowded close to the windows stepped back, away from the glass. Then my mother rolled down the car windows; I thought she was waving good-bye but she was calling for me. I held my jacket

over my head, but the hailstones were still painful. One of them, the size of a robin's egg, struck the bony knob of my elbow and made me wince.

"Good-bye, darling!" my mother said, pulling my head inside the car window and kissing me. "Your grandmother knows where we're going, but she won't tell you unless there's an emergency."

"Have a good time!" I said. When I looked at Front Street, every downstairs window was a portrait-faces looking at me, and at the honeymooners. Well, almost everyone-not Gravesend's two holy men; they weren't watching me, or the newlyweds. At opposite ends of the house, alone in their own little windows, the Rev. Lewis Merrill and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin were watching the sky. Were they taking a religious view of the hailstorm? I wondered. In Rector Wiggin's case, I imagined he was seeing the weather from the point of view of an ex-pilot-that he was simply observing that it would be a shitty day to fly. But Pastor Merrill was searching the heavens for the source of such a violent storm. Was there anything in the Holy Scriptures that tipped him off about the meaning of hailstones? In their zeal to demonstrate their knowledge of appropriate passages from the Bible, neither minister had offered my mother and Dan that most reassuring blessing from Tobit-the one that goes, "That she and I may grow old together."

Too bad neither of the ministers thought of that one, but the books of the Apocrypha are usually omitted from Protestant editions of the Bible. There would be no growing old together for Dan Needham and my mother, whose appointment with the ball that Owen hit was only a year away. I was nearly back inside the house when my mother called me again. "Where's Owen?" she asked. It took me a while to locate him in the windows, because he was upstairs, in my mother's bedroom; the figure of the woman in the red dress was standing beside him, my mother's double, her dressmaker's dummy. I know now that there were three holy men at Front Street that day-three guys with their eyes on the weather. Owen wasn't watching the departing honeymooners, either. Owen was also watching the skies, with one arm around the dummy's waist, sagging on her hip, his troubled face peering upward. I should have known then what angel he was watching for; but it was a busy day, my mother was asking for Owen-I just ran upstairs and brought him to her. He didn't seem to mind the hail; the pellets clattered off the car all around him, but I didn't see one hit him. He stuck his face in the window and my mother kissed him. Then she asked him how he was getting home. "You're not walking home, or taking your bike, Owen-not in this weather," she said. "Do you want a ride?"

"ON YOUR HONEYMOON?" he asked.

"Get in," she said. "Dan and I will drop you."

He looked awfully pleased; thai he should get to go on my mother's honeymoon-even for a little bit of the way! He tried to slide into the car, past her, but his trousers were wet and they stuck against my mother's skirt.

"Wait a minute," she said. "Let me out. You get in first." She meant that he was small enough to straddle the drive-shaft hump, in the middle of the seat, between her and Dan, but when she stepped outside the Buick-even for just a second-a hailstone ricocheted off the roof of the car and smacked her right between the eyes.

"Ow!" she cried, holding her head.

"I'M SORRY!" Owen said quickly.

"Get in, get in," Mother said, laughing. They started to drive away. It was then Hester realized that Owen had successfully made off with her panties. She ran out in the driveway and stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the slowly moving car; Dan and my mother, facing forward, stuck their hands out the windows, risking the hailstones, and waved. Owen turned around in the seat between them and faced backward; his grin took up his whole face, and it was very clear, from the flash of white, what he was waving to Hester.

"Hey! You little creep!" Hester called. But the hail was turning back to rain; Hester was instantly soaked as she stood there in the driveway-and her yellow dress clung to her so tenaciously that it was easy to see what she was missing. She bolted for the house.

"Young lady," my Aunt Martha said to her, "where on earth are your ..."

"Merciful Heavens, Hester!" my grandmother said. But the heavens did not look merciful, not at the moment. And my grandmother's crones, observing Hester, must have been thinking: That may be Martha's girl but she's got more of Tabby's kind of trouble in her. Simon and Noah were gathering hailstones before they could

melt in the returning rain. I ran outside to join them. They let fly at me with a few of the bigger ones; I gathered my own supply and fired back. I was surprised by the hailstones' coldness-as if they had traveled to earth from another, much icier universe. Squeezing a hailstone the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball. Mr. Chickering, our fat and friendly Little League coach and manager-the man who decided, that day, to have Owen bat for me, the man who instructed Owen to "Swing away!"- Mr. Chickering is spending his last days in the Soldiers' Home on Court Street. The wrecked images that his bout with Alzheimer's hurl at him from time to time have left him jumpy and dazed, but curiously alert. Like a man sitting under a tree full of children pelting him with acorns, he seems to expect he'll be hit at any moment, he even appears to be looking forward to it, but he has no notion where the acorns come from (despite what must be the firm feeling of the trunk of the tree against his back). When I visit him-when the acorns fly at him, and hit him just the right way-he perks up instantly. "You're on deck, Johnny!" he says cheerfully. And once he said, "Owen's batting for you, Johnny!" But, at other times, he is far away; perhaps he is turning my mother's face to the ground, but taking care to close her eyes first-or else he is pulling down the skirt of her dress, for decency's sake, and pinching her splayed knees together. Once, when he appeared to fail to recognize me-when I could establish no coherent communication with him-he spoke up as I was leaving; it was a sad, reflective voice that said, "You don't want to see her, Johnny."

At my mother's funeral, in Kurd's Church, Mr. Chickering was visibly moved. I'm certain that his rearranging of my mother's body in its repose had been the only time he had ever touched her; both the memory of that, and of Police Chief Pike's inquiries regarding the "instrument of death," the "murder weapon," had clearly rattled Mr. Chickering, who wept openly at the funeral, as if he were mourning the death of baseball itself. Indeed, not only had Owen and I quit the team-and that infernal game-forever; other members of our Little League team had used the upsetting incident as a means to get out of a tedious obligation that had been much more their parents' notion of something that was "good for them" than it had ever been their sport of choice. Mr. Chickering, who was completely good-hearted, had always told us that when we won, we won as a team, and when we lost, we lost as a team. Now-in his view-we had killed as a team; but he wept in his pew as if he bore more than his share of team responsibility. He had encouraged some of my other teammates and their families to sit with him-among them, the hapless Harry Hoyt, who'd received a base on balls with two outs, who'd made his own, small contribution to Owen Meany coming to the plate. After all, Harry could have been the last out-in which case, my mother would have taken Owen and me home from the game, as usual. But Harry had walked. He sat in Kurd's, quite riveted by Mr. Chickering's tears. Harry was almost innocent. We had been so many runs behind, and there were already two outs in our last inning; it made no sense for Harry Hoyt to walk. What possible good could a base on balls have done us? Harry should have been swinging away. He was an otherwise harmless creature, although he would cause his mother no little grief. His father was dead, his mother was-for years-the receptionist at the Gas Works; she got all the calls about the billing errors, and the leaks. Harry would never be Gravesend Academy material. He dutifully finished Gravesend High School and enlisted in the Navy-the Navy was popular around Gravesend. His mother tried to get Harry out of the service, claiming she was a widow who needed his support; but-in the first place-she had a job, and in the second place, Harry wanted to go in the Navy. He was embarrassed by his mother's lack of patriotic zeal; it may have been the only time he argued with anyone, but he won the argument-he got to go to Vietnam, where he was killed by one of the poisonous snakes of that region. It was a Russell's viper and it bit him while he was peeing under a tree; a later revelation was that the tree stood outside a whorehouse, where Harry had been waiting his turn. He was like that; he was a walker-when there was no good reason to walk. His death made his mother quite political-or at least "quite political" for Gravesend. She called herself a war resister and she advertised that in her home she would give free counsel on how to evade the draft; it was never very accurately demonstrated that her evening draft-counseling sessions so exhausted her that she became an inadequate receptionist at the Gas Works-yet the Gas Works let her go. Several patriots from the town were apprehended in the act of vandalizing her car

and garage; she didn't press charges, but she was gossiped about as a corrupter of the morals of youth. Although she was a plain, even dowdy woman, she was accused of seducing several of her young draft counselees, and she eventually moved away from Gravesend-I think she moved to Portsmouth; that was far enough away. I remember her at my mother's funeral; she didn't sit with her son Harry, where Mr. Chickering had gathered the team in adjacent pews. She was never a team player, Mrs. Hoyt; but Harry was. Mrs. Hoyt was the first person I remember who said that to criticize a specific American president was not anti-American; that to criticize a specific American policy was not antipatri-otic; and that to disapprove of our involvement in a particular war against the communists was not the same as taking the communists' side. But these distinctions were lost on most of the citizens of Gravesend; they are lost on many of my former fellow Americans today. I don't remember seeing Buzzy Thurston at my mother's funeral. He should have been there. After Harry Hoyt walked, Buzzy Thurston should have been the last out. He hit such an easy grounder-it was as sure an out as I've ever seen-but somehow the shortstop bobbled the ball. Buzzy Thurston reached base on an error. Who was that shortstop? He should have been in Kurd's Church, too. Possibly Buzzy wasn't there because he was Catholic; Owen suggested this, but there were other Catholics in attendance- Owen was simply expressing his particular prejudice. And I may be doing Buzzy an injustice; maybe he was there-after all, Kurd's was packed; it was as full as it had been for my mother's wedding. All those same crones of my grandmother were there. I know what they came to see. How does royalty react to this! How will Harriet Wheelwright respond to Fate with a capital F-to a Freak Accident (with a capital F, too), or to an Act of God (if that's what you believe it was)? All those same crones, as black and hunchbacked as crows gathered around some road kill-they came to the service as if to say: We acknowledge, O God, that Tabby Wheelwright was not allowed to get off scot-free. Getting off "scot-free" was a cardinal crime in New Hampshire. And by the birdy alertness visible in the darting eyes of my grandmother's crones, I could tell that-in then-view-my mother had not escaped her just reward. Buzzy Thurston, there or not there, would not get off scot-free, either. I really didn't dislike Buzzy-especially after he spoke up for Owen, when Owen and I got ourselves in hot water with some of Buzzy's Catholic classmates because of a little incident at St. Michael's, the parochial school. But Buzzy was judged harshly for his role in reaching base and bringing Owen Meany up to bat (if judgment is what you believe it was). He was not Gravesend Academy material, either; yet he did a postgraduate year at the academy, because he was a fair athlete-your standard outdoor New England variety: a football, hockey, and baseball man. He did not always need to reach base on an error. He was not outstanding, not at anything, but he was good enough to go to the state university, and he lettered in three sports there. He missed a year of competition with a knee injury, and managed to finagle a fifth year of college- retaining his student draft deferment for the extra year. After that, he was "draft material," but he rather desperately strove to miss the trip to Vietnam by poisoning himself for his physical. He drank a fifth of bourbon a day for two weeks; he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano; he started a fire in his parents' oven, baking peyote; he was hospitalized with a colon disorder, following an LSD experience wherein he became convinced that his own Hawaiian sports shirt was edible, and he consumed some of it-including the buttons and the contents of the pocket: a book of matches, a package of cigarette papers, and a paper clip. Given the provincialism of the Gravesend draft board, Buzzy was declared psychologically unfit to serve, which had been his crafty intention. Unfortunately, he had grown to like the bourbon, the marijuana, the peyote, and the LSD; in fact, he so worshiped their excesses that he was killed one night on the Maiden Hill Road by the steering column of his Plymouth, when he drove head-on into the abutment of the railroad bridge that was only a few hundred yards downhill from the Meany Granite Quarry. It was Mr. Meany who called the police. Owen and I knew that bridge well; it followed an especially sharp turn at the bottom of a steep downhill run-it called for caution, even on our bicycles. It was the ill-treated Mrs. Hoyt who observed that Buzzy Thurston was simply another victim of the Vietnam War; although no one listened to her, she maintained that the war was the cause of the many abuses Buzzy had practiced upon

himself-just as surely as the war had axed her Harry. To Mrs. Hoyt, these things were symptomatic of the Vietnam years: the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the suicidally fast driving, and the whorehouses in Southeast Asia, where many American virgins were treated to their first and last sexual experiences- not to mention the Russell's vipers, waiting under the trees! Mr. Chickering should have wept-not only for the whimsy with which he'd instructed Owen Meany to "Swing away!" Had he known everything that would follow, he would have bathed his chubby face in even more tears than he produced that day in Kurd's when he was grieving for and as a team. Naturally, Police Chief Pike sat apart; policemen like to sit by the door. And Chief Pike wasn't weeping. To him, my mother was still a "case"; for him, the service was an opportunity to look over the suspects-because we were all suspects in Chief Pike's eyes. Among the mourners, Chief Pike suspected the ball-thief lurked. He was always "by the door," Chief Pike. When I dated his daughter, I always thought he would be bursting through a door-or a window-at any moment. It was doubtless a result of my anxiety concerning his sudden entrance that I once tangled my tower lip in his daughter's braces, retreating too quickly from her kiss-certain I had heard the chief's boots creaking in my near vicinity. That day at Kurd's, you could almost hear those boots creaking by the door, as if he expected the stolen baseball to loose itself from the culprit's pocket and roll across the dark crimson carpeting with incriminating authority. For Chief Pike, the theft of the ball that killed my mother was an offense of a far graver character than a mere misdemeanor; at the very least, it was the work of a felon. That my poor mother had been killed by the ball seemed not to concern Chief Pike; that poor Owen Meany had hit the ball was of slightly more interest to our chief of police-but only because it established a motive for Owen to possess the baseball in question. Therefore, it was not upon my mother's closed coffin that our chief of police fixed his stare; nor did Chief Pike pay particular attention to the formerly airborne Captain Wiggin-nor did he show much interest in the slight stutter of the shaken Pastor Merrill. Rather, the intent gaze of our chief of police bore into the back of the head of Owen Meany, who sat precariously upon six or seven copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal; Owen tottered on the stack of hymnals, as if the police chief's gaze unbalanced him. He sat as near to our family pews as possible; he sat where he'd sat for my mother's wedding-behind the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular. This time there would be no jokes from Simon about the inappropriateness of Owen's navy-blue Sunday school suit-such a little clone of the suit his father wore. The granitic Mr. Meany sat heavily beside Owen.

" 'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,' " said the Rev. Dudley Wiggin. " 'Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.' "

" 'O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered,' " said the Rev. Lewis Merrill. " 'Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Tabby, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints.' "

In the dull light of Kurd's Church, only Lydia's wheelchair gleamed-in the aisle beside my grandmother's pew, where Harriet Wheelwright sat alone. Dan and I sat in the pew behind her. The Eastmans sat behind us. The Rev. Captain Wiggin called upon the Book of Revelation-"God shall wipe away all tears"-whereupon, Dan began to cry. The rector, eager as ever to represent belief as a battle, brought up Isaiah-"He will swallow up death in victory." Now I heard my Aunt Martha join Dan; but the two of mem were no match for Mr. Chickering, who had started weeping even before the ministers began their readings of the Old and the New Testament. Pastor Merrill stuttered his way into Lamentations-"The Lord is good unto them that wait for him."

Then we were led through the Twenty-third Psalm, as if there were a soul in Gravesend who didn't know it by heart: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want"-and so forth. When we got to the part that goes, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," that was when I began to hear Owen's voice above all the others. When the rector said, " 'Give courage to those who are bereaved,' " I was already dreading how loud Owen's voice would be during the final hymn; I knew it was one he liked. When the pastor said, " 'Help us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand," " I was already humming the hymn, trying to drown out Owen's voice-in advance. And when Mr. Wiggin and Mr. Merrill struggled to say, in unison, " 'Grant us to entrust Tabitha to thy never-failing love,' " I knew it was time; I almost covered my ears.

What else do we sing at an untimely death, what else but that catchy number that is categorized in The Pilgrim Hymnal as a favorite hymn of "ascension and reign"-the popular "Crown Him with Many Crowns," a real organ-breaker? For when else, if not at the death of a loved one, do we most need to hear about the resurrection, about eternal life-about him who has risen! Crown him with man-y crowns, The Lamb up-on his throne; Hark! how the heaven-ly an-them drowns All mu-sic but its own;

A-wake, my soul, and sing Of him who died for thee, And hail him as thy match-less king Through all e-ter-ni-ty. Crown him the Lord of love; Be-hold his hands and side, Rich wounds, yet vis-i-ble above, In beau-ty glo-ri-fied; No an-gel in the sky Can ful-ly bear that sight, But down-ward bends his burn-ing eye At mys-ter-ies so bright.

But it was the third verse that especially inspired Owen. CROWN HIM THE LORD OF LIFE, WHO TRI-UMPHED O'ER THE GRAVE, AND ROSE VIC-TO-RIOUS IN THE STRIFE FOR THOSE HE CAME TO SAVE; HIS GLO-RIES NOW WE SING WHO DIED AND ROSE ON HIGH, WHO DIED, E-TER-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE. Even later, at the committal, I could hear Owen's awful voice ringing, when Mr. Wiggin said, " 'In the midst of life we are in death.' " But it was as if Owen were still humming the tune to "Crown Him with Many Crowns," because I seemed to hear nothing else; I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them, and repeat them; they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable. Certainly, the burial is unacceptable; doubly so, in my mother's case, because-after the reassuring numbness of Kurd's Church-we were standing exposed, outside, on a typical Gravesend summer day, muggy and hot, with the inappropriate sounds of children's voices coming from the nearby high-school athletic fields. The cemetery, at the end of Linden Street, was within sight of the high school and the junior high school. I would attend the latter for only two years, but that was long enough to hear-many times-the remarks most frequently made by those students who were trapped in the study hall and seated nearest the windows that faced the cemetery: something to the effect that they would be less bored out there, in the graveyard.

"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister Tabitha, and we commit her body to the ground," Pastor Merrill said. That was when I noticed that Mr. Merrill's wife was holding her ears. She was terribly pale, except for the plump backs of her upper arms, which were painful to look at because her sunburn there was so intense; she wore a loose, sleeveless dress, more gray than black-but maybe she didn't have a proper black dress that was sleeveless, and she could not have been expected to force such a sunburn into sleeves. She swayed slightly, squinting her eyes. At first I thought that she held her ears due to some near-blinding pain inside her head; her dry blond hair looked ready to burst into flames, and one of her feet had strayed out of the straps of her sandals. One of her sickly children leaned against her hip. " 'Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' " said her husband, but Mrs. Merrill couldn't have heard him; she not only held her ears, she appeared to be pressing them into her skull. Hester had noticed. She stared at Mrs. Merrill as intently as I stared at her; all at once Hester's tough face was constricted by pain-or by some sudden, painful memory-and she, too, covered her ears. But the tune to "Crown Him with Many Crowns" was still in my head; I didn't hear what Mrs. Merrill and Hester heard. I thought they were both guilty of extraordinary rudeness toward Pastor Merrill, who was doing his best with the benediction-although he was rushing now, and even the usually unflappable Captain Wiggin was shaking his head, as if to rid his ears of water or an unpleasant sound.

" 'The Lord bless her and keep her,' " Lewis Merrill said. That was when I looked at Owen. His eyes were shut, his lips were moving; he appeared to be growling, but it was the best he could do at humming-it was "Crown Him with Many Crowns" that I heard; it was not my imagination. But Owen held his hands over his ears, too. Then I saw Simon raise his hands; Noah's hands were already in place-and my Uncle Alfred and my Aunt Martha:

they held their ears, too. Even Lydia held her ears in her hands. My grandmother glowered, but she would not raise her hands; she made herself listen, although I could tell it was painful for her to hear it-and that was when / heard it: the children on the high-school athletic fields. They were playing baseball. There were the usual shouts, the occasional arguments, the voices coming all at once; and then the quiet, or almost quiet, was punctuated-as baseball games always are--by the crack of the bat. There it went, a pretty solid-sounding hit, and I watched even the rocklike face of Mr. Meany wince, his fingers close on Owen's shoulders. And Mr. Merrill, stuttering worse than usual, said, " 'The Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her, the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen.' "

He immediately bent down and took some loose dirt in his hand; he was the first to cast earth upon my mother's coffin, where I knew she wore a black dress-the one she'd copied from the red dress, which she'd hated. The white copy, Dan had said, did not look so good on her; I guessed that her death had ill-affected her tan. I'd already been told that the swelling at her temple, and the surrounding discoloration, had made an open coffin inadvisable-not that we Wheelwrights were much for open coffins, under any circumstances; Yankees believe in closed doors. One by one, the mourners threw dirt on the coffin; then it was awkward to return their hands to their ears-although Hester did, before she thought better of it. The heel of her dirty hand put a smudge on her ear and on the side of her face. Owen would not throw a handful of dirt; I also saw that he would not take his hands from his ears. He would not open his eyes, either, and his father had to walk him out of the cemetery. Twice, I heard him say, "I'M SORRY!"

I heard a few more cracks of the bat before Dan Needham took me to Front Street. At Grandmother's, there was just "family." My Aunt Martha led me up to my old room and we sat on my old bed together. She told me that I could come live with her and Uncle Alfred and Noah and Simon and Hester, "up north," where I would always be welcome; she hugged me and kissed me and told me to never forget that there was always that option. Then my grandmother came to my room: she shooed Aunt Martha away and she sat beside me. She told me that if I didn't mind living with an old woman, I was certainly welcome to have my room back-that it would always be my room, that no one else would ever have any claim to it. She hugged me and kissed me, too; she said that we both had to be sure that we gave a lot of love and attention to Dan. Dan was next. He sat on my bed, too. He reminded me that he had legally adopted me; that although I was Johnny Wheelwright to everyone in Gravesend, I was as good as a Johnny Needham, to the school, and that meant that I could go to Graveseriti Academy-when the time came, and just as my mother had wanted me to-as a legitimate faculty child, just as if I were Dan's actual son. Dan said he thought of me as his son, anyway, and he would never take a job that took him away from Gravesend Academy until I'd had the chance to graduate. He said he'd understand if I found Front Street more comfortable than his dormitory apartment, but that he liked having me live in his apartment, with him, if I wasn't too bored with the confinement of the place. Maybe I'd prefer to spend some nights every week with him, and some nights at Front Street-any nights I wished, in either place. I said I thought that would be fine, and I asked him to tell Aunt Martha-in a way that wouldn't hurt her feelings-that I really was a Gravesend boy and I didn't want to move "up north." Actually, the very thought of living with my cousins exhausted and terrified me, and I was convinced I should be consumed by sinful longing for unnatural acts with Hester if I permitted myself to move in with the Eastmans. (I did not tell Dan that he should tell Aunt Martha that.) When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time-the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes-when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part. The evening after her funeral, I felt she was gone when it was time for Dan to go home to the dorm. I realized that Dan had choices-he could return to his dormitory apartment, alone, or I could offer to go back with him; or he could stay at Front Street, he could even stay in the other twin bed in my room because I'd already told my grandmother that I didn't want Noah or Simon sleeping there that night. But as soon as I realized what Dan's choices were, I also knew they were-

each of them-imperfect in their own way. I realized that the choices available to Dan, regarding where he would sleep, would be imperfect, forever; and that, forever, there would be something unsatisfying about thinking of him alone-and something also incomplete about him being with me.

"Do you want me to come back to the dorm with you?" I asked him.

"Would you like me to stay with you?" he asked me. But what did it matter? I watched him walk down Front Street toward the lights of the academy buildings. It was a warm night, with the frequent banging of screen doors and the sounds of rocking chairs on the screened-in porches. The neighborhood kids were playing some game with a flashlight; fortunately, it was too dark for even the most American of kids to be hitting a baseball. My cousins were uncharacteristically subdued by the tragedy. Noah kept saying "I can't believe it!" Then he'd put his hand on my shoulder. And Simon rather tactlessly, but innocently, added: "Who would have thought he could hit a ball hard enough?"

My Aunt Martha curled up on the living-room couch with her head in Uncle Alfred's lap; she lay there not moving, like a little girl with an earache. My grandmother sat in her usual thronelike chair in the same room; she and Alfred would occasionally exchange glances and shake their heads. Once Aunt Martha sat up with her hair a mess and pounded her fist on the coffee table. "It doesn't make any sense I" she shouted; then she put her head back down in Uncle Alfred's lap, and cried for a while. To this outburst, my grandmother neither shook nor nodded her head; she looked at the ceiling, ambiguously-either seeking restraint or patience there, or seeking some possible sense, which Martha had found to be lacking. Hester had not changed out of her funeral dress; it was black linen, of a simplicity and good fit that my mother might have favored, and Hester looked especially grown-up in it, although it was badly wrinkled. She kept pinning her hair up on top of her head, because of the heat, but wild strands of it would fall down on her face and neck until, exasperated, she would let it all down again. The fine beads of sweat on her upper lip gave her skin the smoothness and the shine of glass.

"Want to take a walk?" she asked me.

"Sure," I said.

"Want Noah and me to go with you?" Simon asked.

"No," Hester said. Most of the houses on Front Street still had their downstairs lights on; dogs were still outside, and barking; but the kids who'd been playing the flashlight game had been called inside. The heat off the sidewalk still radiated up at you; on hot summer nights, in Gravesend, the heat hit your crotch first. Hester took my hand as we walked.

"It's only the second time I've seen you in a dress," I said.

"I know," she said. It was an especially dark night, cloudy and starless; the moon was just an opaque sliver in the fog.

"Just remember," she said, "your friend Owen feels worse than you."

"I know," I said; but I felt no small surge of jealousy at my admission-and at the knowledge that Hester was thinking about Owen, too. We left Front Street at the Gravesend Inn; I hesitated before crossing Pine Street, but Hester seemed to know our destination-her hand tugged me along. Once we were on Linden Street, passing the dark high school, it was clear to both of us where we were going. There was a police car in the high-school parking lot-on the lookout for vandals, I suppose, or else to prevent the high-school students from using the parking lot and the athletic fields for illicit purposes at night. We could hear a motor running; it seemed too deep and throaty a motor to be the squad car, and after we passed the high school, the engine noise grew louder. I didn't believe that a motor was required to run the cemetery, but that's where the sound was coming from. I think now that I must have wanted to see her grave at night, knowing how she hated the darkness; I believe I wanted to reassure myself that some light penetrated even the cemetery at night. The streetlights on Linden Street shone some distance into the cemetery and clearly illuminated the Meany Granite Company truck, which was parked and idling at the main gate; Hester and I could observe Mr. Meany's solemn face behind the steering wheel, his face illuminated by the long drags he took from his cigarette. He was alone in the cab of the truck, but I knew where Owen was. Mr. Meany seemed unsurprised to see me, although Hester made him nervous. Hester made everyone nervous: in good light, in close-up, she looked her age-like a large, overly

mature twelve-year-old. But from any distance, with any assistance from the shadows, she looked eighteen-and like a lot of trouble, too.

"Owen had some more to say," Mr. Meany confided to us. "But he's been at it a while. I'm sure he's about finished."

I felt another rush of jealousy, to think that Owen's concerns for my mother's first night underground had preceded my own. In the humid air, the diesel exhaust was heavy and foul, but I was sure that Mr. Meany could not be prevailed upon to turn the engine off; probably he was keeping the engine running in an effort to hurry up Owen's prayers.

"I want you to know somethin'," Mr. Meany said. "I'm gonna listen to what your mother said. She told me not to interfere if Owen wanted to go to the academy. And I won't," he said. "I promised her," he added. It would take me years to realize that from the moment Owen hit that ball, Mr. Meany wouldn't "interfere" with anything Owen wanted.

"She told me not to worry about the money, too," Mr. Meany said. "I don't know what happens about that-now," he added.

"Owen will get a full scholarship," I said.

"I don't know about that," Mr. Meany said. "I guess so, if he wants one," he added. "Your mother was speakin' about his clothes," Mr. Meany said. "All them coats and ties."

"Don't worry," I told him.

"Oh, I ain't worryin'!" he said. "I'm just promisin' you I ain't interferin'-that's the point."

A light blinked from the cemetery, and Mr. Meany saw Hester and me look in its direction.

"He's got a light with him," Mr. Meany said. "I don't know what's takin' him so long," he said. "He's been in there long enough." He stepped on the accelerator then, as if a little rev would hurry Owen along. But after a while, he said, "Maybe you better go see what's keepin' him."

The light in the cemetery was faint and Hester and I walked toward it cautiously, not wanting to tread on other people's flowers or bark our shins on one of the smaller graves. The farther we walked from the Meany Granite Company truck, the more the engine noise receded-but it seemed deeper, too, as if it were the motor at the core of the earth, the one that turned the earth and changed day to night. We could hear snatches of Owen's prayers; I thought he must have brought the flashlight so he could read The Book of Common Prayer-perhaps he was reading every prayer in it.

" 'INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU,' " he read. Hester and I stopped; she stood behind me and locked her arms around my waist. I could feel her breasts against my shoulder blades, and-because she was a little taller-I could feel her throat against the back of my head; her chin pushed my head down.

" 'FATHER OF ALL,' " Owen read. " 'WE PRAY TO YOU FOR THOSE WE LOVE, BUT SEE NO LONGER.' " Hester squeezed me, she kissed my ears. Mr. Meany revved the truck, but Owen did not appear to notice; he knelt in front of the first bank of flowers, at the foot of the mound of new earth, in front of my mother's gravestone. He had the prayer book flat upon the ground in front of him, the flashlight pinched between his knees.

"Owen?" I said, but he didn't hear me. "Owen!" I said more loudly. He looked up, but not at me; I mean, he looked up-he'd heard his name called, but he hadn't recognized my voice.

"I HEAR YOU!" he shouted angrily. "WHAT DO YOU WANT? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME?"

"Owen, it's me," I said; I felt Hester gasp behind me. It had suddenly occurred to her-Whom Owen thought he was speaking to.

"It's me, and Hester," I added, because it occurred to me that the figure of Hester standing behind me, and appearing to loom over me, might also be misunderstood by Owen Meany, who was ever-watchful for that angel he had frightened from my mother's room.

"OH, IT'S YOU," Owen said; he sounded disappointed. "HELLO, HESTER. I DIDN'T RECOGNIZE YOU-YOU LOOK SO GROWN-UP IN A DRESS. I'M SORRY," Owen said.

"It's okay, Owen," I said.

"HOW'S DAN?" he asked. I told him that Dan was okay, but that he'd gone to his dormitory, alone, for the night; this news made Owen very businesslike.

"I SUPPOSE THE DUMMY'S STILL THERE? IN THE DINING ROOM?" he asked.

"Of course," I said.

"WELL, THAT'S VERY BAD," Owen said. "DAN SHOULDN'T BE ALONE WITH THAT DUMMY. WHAT IF HE JUST SITS AROUND AND STARES AT IT? WHAT IF HE WAKES UP IN THE NIGHT AND HE SEES IT STANDING THERE ON HIS WAY TO THE REFRIGERATOR? WE SHOULD GO GET IT-RIGHT NOW."

He arranged his flashlight in the flowers, so that the shiny body of the light was completely blanketed by the flowers and the light itself shone upon the mound. Then he stood up and brushed the dirt off the knees of his pants. He closed his prayer book and looked at how the light fell over my mother's grave; he seemed pleased. I was not the only one who knew how my mother had hated the darkness. We couldn't all fit in the cab of the granite truck, so Owen sat with Hester and me on the dusty floor of the flatbed trailer while Mr. Meany drove us to Dan's dorm. The senior students were up; we passed them on the stairwell and in the hall-some of them were in their pajamas, and all of them ogled Hester. I could hear the ice cubes rattling in Dan's glass before he opened the door.

"WE'VE COME FOR THE DUMMY, DAN," Owen said, immediately taking charge.

"The dummy?" Dan said.

"YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SIT AROUND AND STARE AT FT," Owen told him. He marched into the dining room where the dressmaker's dummy maintained its sentinel position over my mother's sewing machine; a few dressmaking materials were still spread out on the dining-room table; a drawing of a new pattern was pinned down flat on the table by a pair of shears. The dummy, however, was not newly attired. The dummy wore my mother's hated red dress. Owen had been the last person to dress the dummy; this time, he had tried a wide, black belt-one of Mother's favorites-to try to make the dress more tempting. He took the belt off and put it on the table-as if Dan might have use for the belt!-and he picked the dummy up by her hips. When they were standing side by side, Owen came up only to the dummy's breasts; when he lifted her, her breasts were above his head-pointing the way.

"YOU DO WHAT YOU WANT, DAN," Owen told him, "BUT YOU'RE NOT GOING TO STARE AT THIS DUMMY AND MAKE YOURSELF MORE UNHAPPY "

"Okay," Dan said; he took another drink of his whiskey. "Thank you, Owen," he added, but Owen was already marching out.

"COME ON," he said to Hester and me, and we followed him. We drove out Court Street, and the entire length of Pine Street, with the trees blowing overhead and the granite dust stinging our faces on the flatbed. Owen whacked the truck cab once. "FASTER!" he shouted to his father, and Mr. Meany drove faster. On Front Street, just as Mr. Meany was slowing down, Hester said, "I could drive like this all night. I could drive to the beach and back. It feels so good. It's the only way to feel cool."

Owen whacked the truck cab again. "DRIVE TO THE BEACH!" he said. "DRIVE TO LITTLE BOAR'S HEAD AND BACK!"

We were off. "FASTER!" Owen shouted once, out on the empty road to Rye. It was a fast eight or ten miles; soon the granite dust was gone from the floor of the flatbed, and the only thing to sting our faces was an occasional insect, pelting by. Hester's hair was wild. The wind rushed around us too forcefully for us to talk. Sweat instantly dried; tears, too. The red dress on my mother's dummy clung and flapped in the wind; Owen sat with his back against the cab of the truck, the dummy outstretched in his lap-as if the two of them were engaged in a half-successful levitation experiment. At the beach, at Little Boar's Head, we took off our shoes and walked in the surf, while Mr. Meany dutifully waited-the engine still idling. Owen carried the dummy the whole time, careful not to go very far into the waves; the red dress never got wet.

"I'LL KEEP THE DUMMY WITH ME," he said. "YOUR GRANDMOTHER SHOULDN'T HAVE THIS AROUND TO LOOK AT, EITHER-NOT TO MENTION, YOU," he added.

"Not to mention, you," Hester said, but Owen ignored this, high-stepping through the surf. When Mr. Meany dropped Hester and me at Front Street, the downstairs lights in the houses along the street were off-except for the lights in Grandmother's house-but a few people were still upstairs, in their beds, reading. On very hot nights, Mr. Fish slept in the hammock on his screened-in

porch, so Hester and I kept our voices down, saying good night to Owen and his father; Owen told his father to not turn around in our driveway. Because the dressmaker's dummy wouldn't fit in the cab-because it couldn't bend-Owen stood on the flatbed with his arm around the hips of the red dress as the truck pulled away. With his free hand, he held fast to one of the loading chains-they were the chains for fastening down the curbstones or the monuments. If Mr. Fish had been in his hammock, and if he had woken up, he would have seen something unforgettable passing under the Front Street lamplights. The dark and massive truck, lumbering into the night, and the woman in the red dress-a headless woman with a stunning figure, but with no arms- held around her hips by a child attached to a chain, or a dwarf.

"I hope you know he's crazy," said Hester tiredly. But I looked at Owen's departing image with wonder: he had managed to orchestrate my mourning on the evening of my mother's funeral. And, like my armadillo's claws, he'd taken what he wanted-in this case, my mother's double, her shy dressmaker's dummy in that unloved dress. Later, I thought that Owen must have known the dummy was important; he must have foreseen that even that unwanted dress would have a use-that it had a purpose. But then, that night, I was inclined to agree with Hester; I thought the red dress was merely Owen's idea of a talisman-an amulet, to ward off the evil powers of that "angel" Owen thought he'd seen. I didn't believe in angels then. Toronto: February ,-the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany. I believe in angels now. I don't necessarily claim that this is an advantage; for example, it was of no particular help to me during last night's Vestry elections-I wasn't even nominated. I've been a parish officer so many times, for so many years, I shouldn't complain; perhaps my fellow parishioners thought they were being kind to me-to give me a year off. Indeed, had I been nominated for warden or deputy warden, I might have declined to accept the nomination. I admit, I'm tired of it; I've done more than my share for Grace Church on-the-Hill. Still, I was surprised I wasn't nominated for a single office; out of politeness-if not out of recognition of my faithfulness and my devotion-I thought I should have been nominated for something. I shouldn't have let the insult-if it even is an insult- distract me from the Sunday service; that was not good. Once I was rector's warden to Canon Campbell-back when Canon Campbell was our rector; when he was alive, I admit I felt a little better-treated. But since Canon Mackie has been rector, I've been deputy rector's warden once-and people's warden, too. And one year I was chairman of sidesmen; I've also been parish council chairman. It's not the fault of Canon Mackie that he'll never replace Canon Campbell in my heart; Canon Mackie is warm and kind-and his loquaciousness doesn't offend me. It is simply that Canon Campbell was special, and those early days were special, too. I shouldn't brood about such a silly business as the annual installation of parish officers; especially, I shouldn't allow such thoughts to distract me from the choral Eucharist and the sermon. I confess to a certain childishness. The visiting preacher distracted me, too. Canon Mackie is keen on having guest ministers deliver the sermon-which does spare us the canon's loquacity-but whoever the preacher was today, he was some sort of "reformed" Anglican, and his thesis seemed to be that everything that first appears to be different is actually the same. I couldn't help thinking what Owen Meany would say about that. In the Protestant tradition, we turn to the Bible; when we want an answer, that's where we look. But even the Bible distracted me today. For the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany, Canon Mackie chose Matthew-those troublesome Beatitudes; at least, they always troubled Owen and me. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's just so hard to imagine "the poor in spirit" achieving very much. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. I was eleven years old when my mother was killed; I mourn her still. I mourn for more than her, too. I don't feel "comforted"; not yet. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

"BUT THERE'S NO EVIDENCE FOR THAT," Owen told Mrs. Walker in Sunday school.

And on and on:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

"BUT WILL IT HELP THEM-TO SEE GOD?" Owen Meany asked Mrs. Walker. Did it help Owen-to see God?

"Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account," Jesus says. "Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you."

That was always something Owen and I found hard to take-a reward in heaven.

"GOODNESS AS BRIBERY," Owen called it-an argument that eluded Mrs. Walker. And then-after the Beatitudes, and the sermon by the stranger-the Nicene Creed felt forced to me. Canon Campbell used to explain everything to me-the part about believing in "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church" bothered me; Canon Campbell helped me see beyond the words, he made me see in what sense "Catholic," in what way "Apostolic." Canon Mackie says I worry about "mere words" too much. Mere words? And then there was the business about "all nations," and-specifically-"our Queen"; I'm not an American anymore, but I still have trouble with the part mat goes "grant unto thy servant ELIZABETH our Queen"; and to think that it is possible "to lead all nations in the way of righteousness" is utterly ridiculous! And before I received Holy Communion, I balked at the general Confession.

"We acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness." Some Sundays, this is so hard to say; Canon Campbell indulged me when I confessed to him that this confession was difficult for me, but Canon Mackie employs the "mere words" thesis with me until I am seeing him in a most unforgiving light. And when Canon Mackie proceeded with the Holy Eucharist, to the Thanksgiving and Consecration, which he sang, I even judged him unfairly for his singing voice, which is not and never will be the equal of Canon Campbell's- God Rest His Soul. In the entire service, only the psalm struck me as true, and properly shamed me. It was the Thirty-seventh Psalm, and the choir appeared to sing it directly to me:

Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:

fret not thyself, else shall thou be moved to do evil. Yes, it's true: I should "leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure." What good is anger? I have been angry before. I have been "moved to do evil," too-as you shall see. THE