A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

It was Thanksgiving, , before my cousins visited Gravesend and saw Grandmother's TV at Front Street for

themselves. Noah had started at the academy that fall, so he'd watched television with Owen and me on occasional weekends; but no judgment on the culture around us could ever be complete without Simon's automatic approval of every conceivable form of entertainment, and Hester's similarly automatic disapproval.

"Neat!" Simon said; he also thought that Liberace was "neat."

"It's shit, all of it," said Hester. "Until everything's in color, and the color's perfect, TV's not worth watching." But Hester was impressed by the energy of Grandmother's constant criticism of nearly everything she saw; that was a style Hester sought to imitate-for even "shit" was worth watching if it afforded one the opportunity to elaborate on what sort of shit it was. Everyone agreed that the movie reruns were more interesting than the actual TV programs; yet in Hester's view, the movies selected were "too old." Grandmother liked them old-"the older the better!"-but she disliked most movie stars. After watching Captain Blood, she announced that Errol Flynn was "no brains, all chest"; Hester thought that Olivia de Havilland was "cow-eyed." Owen suggested that pirate movies were all the same.

"STUPID SWORD FIGHTS!" he said. "AND LOOK AT THE CLOTHES THEY WEAR! IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE FIGHTING WITH SWORDS, IT'S STUPID TO WEAR LOOSE, BAGGY SHIRTS-OF COURSE YOUR SHIRTS ARE GOING TO GET ALL SLASHED TO PIECES!"

Grandmother complained that the choice of movies wasn't even "seasonal." What was the point of showing It Happens Every Spring in November? No one is thinking about baseball at Thanksgiving, and It Happens Every Spring is such a stupid baseball movie that I think I could watch it every night and even fail to be reminded of my mother's death. Ray Milland is a college professor who becomes a phenomenal baseball player after discovering a formula that repels wood; how could this remind anyone of anything real ?

"Honestly, who thinks up these things?" Grandmother asked.

"Peckerheads," said Hester, who was forever expanding her vocabulary. If Gravesend Academy had begun the process of saving Noah from himself, we could scarcely tell; it was Simon who seemed subdued, perhaps because he had missed Noah during the fall and was overwhelmed by the instant renewal of their athletic rivalry. Noah was experiencing considerable academic difficulties at the academy, and Dan Needham had several long heart-to-heart talks with Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha. The Eastmans decided that Noah was intellectually exhausted; the family would spend that Christmas holiday on some recuperative beach in the Caribbean.

"IN THE RELAXING SETTING OF CAPTAIN BLOOD!" Owen observed. Owen was disappointed that the Eastmans were spending Christmas in the Caribbean; another opportunity to go to Sawyer Depot had eluded him. After Thanksgiving, he was depressed; and-like me-he was thinking about Hester. We went to The Idaho for the usual fare at the Saturday matinee-a double feature: Treasure of the Golden Condor, wherein Cornel Wilde is a dashing eighteenth-century Frenchman seeking hidden Mayan riches in Guatemala; and Drum Beat, wherein Alan Ladd is a cowboy and Audrey Dalton is an Indian. Between tales of ancient treasure and scalping parties, it was repeatedly clear to Owen and me that we lived in a dull age-that adventure always happened elsewhere, and long ago. Tarzan fit this formula-and so did the dreaded biblical epics. These, in combination with his Christmas pageant experiences, contributed to the newly sullen and withdrawn persona that Owen presented to the world at Christ Church. That the Wiggins had actually liked' The Robe made up Owen's mind: whether he ever got to go to Sawyer Depot for Christmas or not, he would never participate in another Nativity. I'm sure his decision did not upset the Wiggins greatly, but Owen was unforgiving on the subject of biblical epics in general and The Robe in particular. Although he thought that Jean Simmons was "PRETTY, LIKE HESTER," he also thought that Audrey Dalton-in Drum Beat-was "LIKE HESTER IF HESTER HAD BEEN AN INDIAN." Beyond all three having dark hair, I failed to see any resemblance. The Robe, to be fair, had hit Owen and me one Saturday afternoon at The Idaho with special force; my mother had been dead less than a year, and Owen and I were not comforted to see Richard Burton and Jean Simmons walk off to their deaths quite so happily. Furthermore, they appeared to exit the movie

and life itself by walking up into the sky! This was especially offensive. Richard Burton is a Roman tribune who converts to Christianity after crucifying Christ; both Burton and Jean Simmons take turns clutching Christ's robe a lot.

"WHAT A BIG FUSS ABOUT A BLANKET!" Owen said. "THAT'S SO CATHOLIC," he added-"TO GET VERY RELIGIOUS ABOUT OBJECTS."

This was a theme of Owen's-the Catholics and their adoration of OBJECTS. Yet Owen's habit of collecting objects that he made (in his own way) RELIGIOUS was well known: I had only to remember my armadillo's claws. In all of Gravesend, the object that most attracted Owen's contempt was the stone statue of Mary Magdalene, the reformed prostitute who guarded the playground of St. Michael's-the parochial school. The life-sized statue stood in a meaningless cement archway-"meaningless" because the archway led nowhere; it was a gate without a place to be admitted to; it was an entrance without a house. The archway, and Mary Magdalene herself, overlooked the rutted macadam playground of the schoolyard-a surface too broken up to dribble a basketball on; the bent and rusted basket hoops had long ago been stripped of their nets, and the foul lines had been erased or worn away with sand. It was a forlornly unattended playground on weekends and school holidays; it was used strictly for recesses during school days, when the parochial students loitered mere-they were unmoved to play many games. The stern look of Mary Magdalene rebuked them; her former line of work and her harsh reformation shamed them. For although the playground reflected an obdurate disrepair, the statue itself was whitewashed every spring, and even on the dullest, grayest days- despite being dotted here and there with birdshit and occasional stains of human desecration-Mary Magdalene attracted and reflected more light than any other object or human presence at St. Michael's. Owen looked upon the school as a prison to which he was nearly sent; for had his parents not RENOUNCED the Catholics, St. Michael's would have been Owen's school. It had an altogether bleak, reformatory atmosphere; its life was punctuated by the sounds of an adjacent gas station-the bell that announced the arriving and departing vehicles, the accounting of the gas pumps themselves, and the multifarious din from the mechanics laboring in the pits. But over this unholy, unstudious, unsuitable ground the stone Mary Magdalene stood her guard; under her odd, cement archway, she at times appeared to be tending to an elaborate but crudely homemade barbecue; at other times, she seemed to be a goalie-poised in the goal. Of course, no Catholic would have fired a ball or a puck or any other missile at her; if the parochial students themselves were tempted, the grim, alert presence of the nuns would have discouraged them. And although the Gravesend Catholic Church was in another part of town, the shabby saltbox where the nuns and some other teachers at St. Michael's lived was positioned like a guardhouse at a corner of the playground-in full view of Mary Magdalene. If a passing Protestant felt inclined to show the statue some small gesture of disrespect, the vigilant nuns would exit their guardhouse on the fly-their black habits flapping with the defiant rancorousness of crows. Owen was afraid of nuns.

"THEY'RE UNNATURAL," he said; but what, I thought, could be more UNNATURAL than the squeaky falsetto of The Granite Mouse or his commanding presence, which was so out of proportion to his diminutive size? Every fall, the horse-chestnut trees between Tan Lane and Garfield Street produced many smooth, hard, dark-brown missiles; it was inevitable that Owen and I should pass by the statue of Mary Magdalene with our pockets full of chestnuts. Despite his fear of nuns, Owen could not resist the target that the holy goalie presented; I was a better shot, but Owen threw his chestnuts more fervently. We left scarcely any marks on Mary Magdalene's ground-length robe, on her bland, snowy face, or on her open hands-outstretched in apparent supplication. Yet the nuns, in a fury that only religious persecution can account for, would attack us; their pursuit was erratic, their shrieks like the cries of bats surprised by sunlight-Owen and I had no trouble outrunning them.

"PENGUINS!" Owen would cry as he ran; everyone called nuns "penguins." We'd run up Cass Street to the railroad tracks and follow the tracks out of town. Before we reached Maiden Hill, or the quarries, we would pass the Fort Rock Farm and throw what remained of our chestnuts at the black angus cattle grazing there; despite their threatening size and their blue lips and tongues, the black angus wouldn't chase us as enthusiastically as the penguins, who always gave up their pursuit before Cass Street.

And every spring, the swamp between Tan Lane and Garfield Street produced a pondful of tadpoles and toads. Who hasn't already told you that boys of a certain age are cruel? We filled a tennis-ball can with tadpoles and-under the cover of darkness-poured them over the feet of Mary Magdalene. The tadpoles-those that didn't turn quickly into toads-would dry up and die there. We even slaughtered toads and indelicately placed their mutilated bodies in the holy goalie's upturned palms, staining her with amphibian gore, God forgive us! We were such delinquents only in these few years of adolescence before Gravesend Academy could save us from ourselves. In the spring of ', Owen was especially destructive to the helpless swamplife of Gravesend, and to Mary Magdalene; just before Easter, we'd been to The Idaho, where we suffered through Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments-the life of Moses, represented by Charlton Heston undergoing various costume changes and radical hairstyles.

"IT'S ANOTHER MALE-NIPPLE MOVIE," Owen said; and, indeed, in addition to Charlton Heston's nipples, there is evidence of Yul Brynner and John Derek and even Edward G. Robinson having nipples, too. That The Idaho should show The Ten Commandments so close to Easter was another example of what my grandmother called the poor "seasonal" taste of nearly everyone in the entertainment business: that we should see the Exodus of the Chosen People on the eve of our Lord's Passion and Resurrection was outrageous-"ALL THAT OLD-TESTAMENT HARSHNESS WHEN WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT JESUS!" as Owen put it. The parting of the Red Sea especially offended him.

"YOU CAN'T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT!" he said indignantly. "YOU CAN'T PROVE A MIRACLE-YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE IT! IF THE RED SEA ACTUALLY PARTED, IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THAT," he said. "IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING- IT'S NOT A PICTURE ANYONE CAN EVEN IMAGINE!"

But there wasn't logic to his anger. If The Ten Commandments made him cross, why take it out on Mary Magdalene and a bunch of toads and tadpoles? In these years before we attended Gravesend Academy, Owen and I were educated-primarily-by what we saw at The Idaho and on my grandmother's television. Who hasn't been "educated" in this slovenly fashion? Who can blame Owen for his reaction to The Ten Commandments'? Almost any reaction would be preferable to believing it! But if a movie as stupid as The Ten Commandments could make Owen Meany murder toads by throwing them at Mary Magdalene, a performance as compelling as Bette Davis's in Dark Victory could convince Owen that he, too, had a brain tumor. At first, Bette Davis is dying and doesn't know it. Her doctor and her best friend won't tell her.

"THEY SHOULD TELL HER IMMEDIATELY!" Owen said anxiously. The doctor was played by George Brent.

"He could never do anything right, anyway," Grandmother observed. Humphrey Bogart is a stableman who speaks with an Irish accent. It was the Christmas of ' and we were watching a movie made in ; it was the first time Grandmother had permitted us to watch The Late Show-at least, I think it was The Late Show. After a certain evening hour-or whenever it was that my grandmother began to feel tired-she called everything The Late Show. She felt sorry for us because the Eastmans were spending another Christmas in the Caribbean; Sawyer Depot was a pleasure slipping into the past, for me-for Owen, it was becoming mere wishful thinking.

"You'd think that Humphrey Bogart could learn a better Irish accent than that," my grandmother complained. Dan Needham said that he wouldn't give George Brent a part in a production of The Gravesend Players; Owen added that Mr. Fish would have been a more convincing doctor to Bette Davis, but Grandmother argued that "Mr. Fish would have his hands full as Bette Davis's husband"-her doctor eventually gets to be her husband, too.

"Anyone would have his hands full as Bette Davis's husband," Dan observed. Owen thought it was cruel that Bette Davis had to find out she was dying all by herself; but Dark Victory is one of those movies that presumes to be instructive on the subject of how to die. We see Bette Davis accepting her fate gracefully; she moves to Vermont with George Brent and takes up gardening- cheerfully living with the fact that one day, suddenly, darkness will come.

"THIS IS VERY SAD!" Owen cried. "HOW CAN SHE NOT THINK ABOUT IT?"

Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk.

"She should have married him," Grandmother said. "She's dying and he's already dead."

Owen said that the symptoms of Bette Davis's terminal tumor were familiar to him.

"Owen, you don't have a brain tumor," Dan Needham told him.

"Bette Davis doesn't have one, either!" Grandmother said. "But I think Ronald Reagan has one."

"Maybe George Brent, too," Dan said.

"YOU KNOW THE PART ABOUT THE DIMMING VISION?" Owen asked. "WELL, SOMETIMES MY VISION DIMS-JUST LIKE BETTE DAVIS'S!"

"You should have your eyes examined, Owen," Grandmother said.

"You don't have a brain tumor!" Dan Needham repeated.

"I HAVE SOMETHING," said Owen Meany. In addition to watching television, Owen and I spent many nights backstage with The Gravesend Players, but we rarely watched the performances; we watched the audiences-we repopulated those bleacher seats at that Little League game in the summer of '; gradually, the stands were filling. We had no doubts about the exact placement of the Kenmores or the Dowlings; Owen disputed my notion that Maureen Early and Caroline O'Day were in the top row-he SAW them nearer the bottom. And we couldn't agree about the Brinker-Smiths.

"THE BRITISH NEVER WATCH BASEBALL!" Owen said. But I always had an eye for Ginger Blinker-Smith's fabled voluptuousness; I argued that she had been there, that I "saw" her.

"YOU WOULDN'T HAVE LOOKED TWICE IF SHE HAD BEEN THERE-NOT THAT SUMMER," Owen insisted. "YOU WERE TOO YOUNG, AND BESIDES- SHE'D JUST HAD THE TWINS, SHE WAS A MESS!"

I suggested that Owen was prejudiced against the Brinker-Smiths ever since their strenuous lovemaking had battered him under their bed; but, for the most part, we agreed about who had been at the game, and where they had been sitting. Morrison the mailman, we had no doubt, had never watched a game; and poor Mrs. Merrill-despite how fondly the baseball season must have reminded her of the perpetual weather of her native California-was never a fan, either. We were not sure about the Rev. Mr. Merrill; we decided against his being there on the grounds that we had rarely seen him anywhere without his wife. We were sure the Wiggins had not been there; they were often in attendance, but they displayed such a boorish enthusiasm for every pitch that if they'd been at that game, we would have noticed them. Since it had been a time when Barb Wiggin still thought of Owen as "cute," she would have rushed to console him for his unfortunate contact with the fated ball-and Rector Wiggin would have bungled some rites over my mother's prostrate form, or pounded my shaking shoulders with manly camaraderie. As Owen put it, "IF THE WIGGINS HAD BEEN THERE, THEY WOULD HAVE MADE A SPECTACLE OF THEMSELVES-WE WOULD NEVER HAVE FORGOTTEN FT!"

Despite how exciting is any search for a missing parent- however mindless the method-Owen and I had to admit that, so far, we'd discovered a rather sparse and uninteresting lot of baseball fans. It never occurred to us to question whether the town's ardent Little League followers were also steady patrons of The Gravesend Players.

' 'THERE'S ONE THING YOU MUST NEVER FORGET,'' Owen told me. "SHE WAS A GOOD MOTHER. IF SHE THOUGHT THE GUY COULD BE A GOOD FATHER TO YOU, YOU'D ALREADY KNOW HIM."

"You sound so sure," I said.

"I'M JUST WARNING YOU," he said. "IT'S EXCITING TO LOOK FOR YOUR FATHER, BUT DON'T EXPECT TO BE THRILLED WHEN YOU FIND HIM. I HOPE YOU KNOW WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR ANOTHER DAN I"

I didn't know; I thought Owen presumed too much. It was exciting to look for my father-that much I knew. THE LUST CONNECTION, as Owen called it, also contributed to our ongoing enthusiasm for THE FATHER HUNT-as Owen called our overall enterprise.

"EVERY TIME YOU GET A BONER, TRY TO THINK IF YOU REMIND YOURSELF OF ANYONE YOU KNOW"-that was Owen's interesting advice on the matter of my lust being my most traceable connection to my missing father. As for lust, I had hoped to see more of Hester-now that Noah and Simon were attending Gravesend Academy. But, in fact, I saw her less. Noah's academic difficulties had caused him to repeat a year; Simon's first year had been smoother,

probably because it thrilled Simon to have Noah demoted to his grade in school. Both boys, by the Christmas of ', were juniors at Gravesend-and so thoroughly involved in what Owen and I presumed to be the more sophisticated activities of private-school life that I saw only slightly more of them than I saw of Hester. It was rare that Noah and Simon were so bored at the academy that they visited Front Street-not even on weekends, which they increasingly spent with their doubtless more exotic classmates. Owen and I assumed that-in Noah's and Simon's eyes-we were too immature for them. Clearly, we were too immature for Hester, who-in response to Noah being forced to repeat a grade-had managed to have herself promoted. She encountered few academic difficulties at Sawyer Depot High School, where-Owen and I imagined- she was terrorizing faculty and students alike. She had probably gone to some effort to skip a grade, motivated-as she always was-to get the better of her brothers. Nonetheless, all three of my cousins were scheduled to graduate with the Class of '-when Owen and I would be completing our first and lowly ninth-grade year at the academy; we would graduate with the class of '. It was humiliating to me; I'd hoped that, one day, I would feel more equal to my exciting cousins, but I felt I was less equal to them than I'd ever been. Hester, in particular, seemed beyond my reach.

"WELL, SHE YOUR COUSIN-SHE SHOULD BE BEYOND YOUR REACH," Owen said. "ALSO, SHE'S DANGEROUS-YOU'RE PROBABLY LUCKY SHE'S BEYOND YOUR REACH. HOWEVER," Owen added, "IF YOU'RE REALLY CRAZY ABOUT HER, I THINK IT WILL WORK OUT-HESTER WOULD DO ANYTHING TO DRIVE HER PARENTS NUTS, SHE'D EVEN MARRY YOU!"

"Marry me!" I cried; the thought of marrying Hester gave me the shivers.

"WELL, THAT WOULD DRIVE HER PARENTS AROUND THE BEND," Owen said. "WOULDN'T IT?"

It would have; and Owen was right: Hester was obsessed with driving her parents-and her brothers-crazy. To drive them to madness was the penalty she exacted for all of them treating her "like a girl"; according to Hester, Sawyer Depot was "boys' heaven"-my Aunt Martha was a "fink of womanhood"; she bowed to Uncle Alfred's notion that the boys needed a private-school education, that the boys needed to "expand their horizons." Hester would expand her own horizons in directions conceived to educate her parents regarding the errors of their ways. As for Owen's idea that Hester would go to the extreme of marrying her own cousin, if that could provide Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred with an educational wallop ... it was inconceivable to me!

"I don't think that Hester even likes me," I told Owen; he shrugged.

"THE POINT IS," said Owen Meany, "HESTER WOULDN'T NECESSARILY MARRY YOU BECAUSE SHE LIKED YOU."

Meanwhile, we couldn't even manage to get ourselves invited to Sawyer Depot for Christmas. After their holidays in the Caribbean, the Eastmans had decided to stay at home for the Yuletide of '; Owen and I got our hopes up, but- alas!-they were quickly dashed; we were not invited to Sawyer Depot. The reason the Eastmans weren't going to the Caribbean was that Hester had been corresponding with a black boatman who had proposed a rendezvous in the British Virgin Islands; Hester had involved herself with this particular black boatman the previous Christmas, in Tortola-when she'd been only fifteen! Naturally, how she had "involved herself" was not made explicitly clear to Owen and me; we had to rely on those parts of the story that my Aunt Martha had reported to Dan-substantially more of the story than she had reported to my grandmother, who was of the opinion that a sailor had made a "pass" at poor Hester, an exercise in crudeness that had made Hester want to stay home. In fact, Hester was threatening to escape to Tortola. She was also not speaking to Noah and Simon, who had shown the black boatman's letters to Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha, and who had fiercely disappointed Hester by not introducing her to a single one of their Gravesend Academy friends. Dan Needham described the situation in the form of a headline: "Teenage Traumas Run Wild in Sawyer Depot!" Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling, real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

The closest that Owen Meany and I could get to love was a front-row seat at The Idaho. That Christmas of ', Owen and I were fifteen; we told each other that we had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn, the shy bookstore clerk in Funny Face; but we wanted Hester. What we were left with was a sense of how little, in the area of love, we must be worth; we felt more foolish than Fred Astaire, dancing with his own raincoat. And how worried we were that the sophisticated world of Graves-end Academy would esteem us even less than we esteemed ourselves. Toronto: April , -a rainy Palm Sunday. It is not a warm spring rain-not a "seasonal" rain, as my grandmother liked to say. It is a raw cold rain, a suitable day for the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At Grace Church on-the-Hill, the children and the acolytes stood huddled in the narthex; holding their palm fronds, they resembled tourists who'd landed in the tropics on an unseasonably cold day. The organist chose Brahms for the processional-"O Welt ich muss dich lassen"; "O world I must leave you."

Owen hated Palm Sunday: the treachery of Judas, the cowardice of Peter, the weakness of Pilate.

"IT'S BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY CRUCIFIED HIM," Owen said, "BUT THEY MADE FUN OF HIM, TOO!"

Canon Mackie read heavily from Matthew: how they mocked Jesus, how they spit on him, how he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished-I am terrified that, this year, it won't happen; that, that year, it didn't. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a believer.

"IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN EASTER," Owen Meany said, "DON'T KID YOURSELF-DON'T CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN."

For the Palm Sunday recessional, the organist chose the usual "Alleluias." In a chilling drizzle, I crossed Russell Hill Road and went in the service entrance of The Bishop Strachan School; I passed through the kitchen, where the working women and the boarders whose turn it was to help with the Sunday meal all spoke to me. The headmistress, the Rev. Mrs. Katharine Keeling, sat in her usual head-of-table position among the housemothers. About forty boarders-the poor girls who had no local friends to ask them home for the weekend, and the girls who were happy to stay at school-sat around the other tables. It is always a surprise to see the girls not in their uniforms; I know it's a great relief to them to wear their uniforms day in, day out-because they don't have to worry about what to wear. But they are so lazy about how they wear their uniforms-they don't have much experience in dressing themselves-that when they have a choice, when they're allowed to wear their own clothes, they appear wholly less sophisticated, less worldly, than they appear in their uniforms. In the twenty years that I have been a teacher at The Bishop Strachan School, the girls' uniforms haven't changed very significantly; I've grown rather fond of them. If I were a girl, of any age, I would wear a middie, a loosely tied necktie, a blazer (with my school crest), knee socks-which the Canadians used to call "knee highs"-and a pleated skirt; when they kneel, it used to be the rule that the skirt should just touch the floor. But for Sunday boarders' lunch, the girls wear their own clothes; some of them are so badly dressed, I fail to recognize them-they make fun of me for that, naturally. Some of them dress like boys-others, like their mothers or like the floozies they see in movies or on TV. As I am, routinely, the only man in the dining room for Sunday boarders' lunch, perhaps they dress for me. I've not seen my friend-and, technically, my boss- Katherine Keeling since she delivered her last baby. She has a large family-she's had so many children, I've lost count-but she makes an effort to sit at the housemothers' table on Sundays; and she chatters amiably to the weekend girls. I think Katherine is terrific; but she is too thin. And she always is embarrassed when I catch her not eating, although she should get over the surprise; I'm a more consistent fixture at the housemothers' table for Sunday boarders' lunch than she is-I don't take time off to have babies! But there she was on Palm Sunday, with mashed potatoes and stuffing and turkey heaped upon her plate.

"Turkey rather dry, is it?" I asked; the ladies, routinely, laughed-Katherine, typically, blushed. When she's wearing her clerical collar, she looks slightly more underweight than she actually is. She's my closest friend in Toronto, now that

Canon Campbell is gone; and even though she's my boss, I've been at Bishop Strachan longer than she has. Old Teddybear Kilgour, as we called him, was principal when I was hired. Canon Campbell introduced us. Canon Campbell had been the chaplain at Bishop Strachan before they made him rector of Grace Church on-the-Hill; I couldn't have had anyone recommend me for a job at Bishop Strachan who was more "connected" to the school than Canon Campbell- not even old Teddybear Kilgour himself. I still tease Katherine about those days. What if she'd been headmistress when I applied for a job? Would she have hired me? A young man from the States in those Vietnam years, a not unattractive young man, and without a wife; Bishop Strachan has never had many male teachers, and in my twenty years of teaching these young girls, I have occasionally been the only male teacher at the school. Canon Campbell and old Teddybear Kilgour don't count; they were not male in the threatening sense-they were not potentially dangerous to young girls. Although the canon taught Scripture and History, in addition to his duties as chaplain, he was an elderly man; and he and old Teddybear Kilgour were "married up to their ears," as Katherine Keeling likes to say. Old Teddybear did ask me if I was "attracted to young girls"; but I must have impressed him that I would take my faculty responsibilities seriously, and that I would concern myself with those young girls' minds and not their bodies.

"And have you?" Katherine Keeling likes to ask me. How the housemothers titter at the question-like Liberace's live audiences of long ago! Katherine is a much more jubilant soul than my grandmother, but she has a certain twinkling sarcasm-and the proper elocution, the good diction-that reminds me of Grandmother. They would have liked each other; Owen would have liked the Rev. Mrs. Keeling, too. I've misled you if I've conveyed an atmosphere of loneliness at Sunday boarders' lunch. Perhaps the boarders feel acutely lonely then, but I feel fine. Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness. On Palm Sunday, there was much talk about the weather. The week before, it had been so cold that everyone commented on the annual error of the birds. Every spring-at least, in Canada-some birds fly north too soon. Thousands are caught The Voice in the cold; they return south in a reverse migration. Most common were tales of woe concerning robins and starlings. Katherine had seen some killdeer flying south-I had a common-snipe story that impressed them all. We'd all read The Globe and Mail that week: we'd loved the story about the turkey vultures who "iced up" and couldn't fly; they were mistaken for hawks and taken to a humane society for thawing-out-there were nine of them and they threw up all over their handlers. The humane society could not have been expected to know that turkey vultures vomit when attacked. Who would guess that turkey vultures are so smart? I've also misled you if I've conveyed an atmosphere of trivia at Sunday boarders' lunch; these lunches are important to me. After the Palm Sunday lunch, Katherine and I walked over to Grace Church and signed up for the All Night Vigil on the notice board in the narthex. Every Maundy Thursday, the Vigil of Prayer and Quiet is kept from nine o'clock that evening until nine o'clock in the morning of Good Friday. Katherine and I always choose the hours no one else wants; we take the Vigil from three to five o'clock in the morning, when Katherine's husband and children are asleep and don't need her. This year she cautioned me: "I may be a little late-if the two-o'clock feeding is much later than two o'clock!" She laughs, and her endearingly stick-thin neck looks especially vulnerable in her clerical collar. I see many parents of the Bishop Strachan girls-they are so smartly dressed, they drive Jaguars, they never have time to talk. I know that they dismiss the Rev. Mrs. Katherine Keeling as a typical headmistress type-Katherine is not the sort of woman they would look at twice. But she is wise and kind and witty and articulate; and she does not bullshit herself about What Easter means.

"EASTER MEANS WHAT IT SAYS," said Owen Meany. At Christ Church on Easter Sunday, Rector Wiggin always said: "Alleluia. Christ is risen."

And we, the People-we said: "The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia."

Toronto: April , -a humid, summery Easter Sunday. It does not matter what prelude begins the service; I will always hear Handel's Messiah-and my mother's not-quite-trained soprano singing, "I know that my Redeemer liveth/' This morning, in Grace Church on-the-Hill, I sat very still, waiting for that passage in John; I knew what was coming. In

the old King James version, it was called a "sepulchre"; in the Revised Standard version, it is just a "tomb." Either way, I know the story by heart.

"Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.' "

I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear. "THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS."

After the service today, my fellow Torontonians and I stood in the sun on the church steps-and we lingered on the sidewalk along Lonsdale Road; the sun was so welcome, and so hot. We were childishly delighted by the heat, as if we'd spent years in an atmosphere as cold as the tomb where Mary Magdalene found Jesus missing. Leaning against me, and whispering into my ear-in a manner remindful of Owen Meany-Katherine Keeling said: "Those birds that flew north, and then south-today they're flying north again."

"Alleluia," I said. I was thinking of Owen when I added, "He is risen."

"Alleluia," said the Rev. Mrs. Keeling. That the television was always "on" at Front Street ceased to tempt Owen and me. We could hear Grandmother, talking either to herself or to Ethel-or directly commenting to the TV-and we heard the rise and fall of the studio-made laughter. It was a big house; for four years, Owen and I had the impression that there was always a forbidding gathering of grown-ups, chattering away in a distant room. My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously-for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive. Thus Owen Meany and I learned what crap television was, without ever thinking that we hadn't come to this opinion by ourselves; had my grandmother allowed us only two hours of TV a day, or not permitted us more than one hour on a "school night," we probably would have become as slavishly devoted to television as the rest of our generation. Owen started out loving only a few things he saw on television, but he saw everything-as much of everything as he could stand. After four years of television, though, he watched nothing but Liberace and the old movies. I did, or tried to do, everything Owen did. For example; in the summer of ' when we were both sixteen, Owen got his driver's license before I got mine-not only because he was a month older, but because he already knew how to drive. He'd taught himself with his father's various trucks-he'd been driving on those steep, loopy roads that ran around the quarries that pockmarked most of Maiden Hill. He took his driver's test on the day of his sixteenth birthday, using his father's tomato-red pickup truck; in those days, there was no driver education course in New Hampshire, and you took your test with a local policeman in the passenger seat-the policeman told you where to turn, when to stop or back up or park. The policeman, in Owen's case, was Chief Ben Pike himself; Chief Pike expressed concern regarding whether or not Owen could reach the pedals-or see over the steering wheel. But Owen had anticipated this: he was mechanically inclined, and he'd raised the seat of the pickup so high that Chief Pike hit his head on the roof; Owen had shd the seat so far forward that Chief Pike had considerable difficulty cramming his knees under the dashboard-in fact, Chief Pike was so physically uncomfortable in the cab of the pickup that he cut Owen's test fairly short.

"HE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE ME PARALLEL-PARK!" Owen said; he was disappointed that he was denied the opportunity to show off his parallel-parking abilities-Owen Meany could slip that tomato-red pickup into a parking space that would have been challenging for a Volkswagen Beetle. In retrospect, I'm surprised that Chief Pike didn't search the interior of the pickup for that "instrument of death" he was always looking for. Dan Needham taught me to drive; it was the summer Dan directed Julius Caesar in the Gravesend Academy summer school, and he would take me for lessons every morning before rehearsals. Dan would drive me out the Swasey Parkway and up Maiden Hill. I practiced on the back roads around the quarries-the roads on which Owen Meany learned to drive were good enough for me; and Dan judged it safer for me off

the public highways, although the Meany Granite Company vehicles flew around those roads with reckless abandon. The quarrymen were fearless drivers and they trucked the granite and their machinery at full throttle; but, in the summer, the trucks raised so much dust that Dan and I had warning when one was coming-I always had time to pull over, while Dan recited his favorite Shakespeare from Julius Caesar. Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Whereupon, Dan would grip the dashboard and tremble while a dynamite truck hurtled past us. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me the most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. Owen, too, was fond of that passage. When we saw Dan's production of Julius Caesar, later that summer, I had passed my driver's test;-yet, in the evenings, when Owen and I would drive down to the boardwalk and the casino at Hampton Beach together, we took the tomato-red pickup and Owen always drove. I paid for the gas. Those summer nights of were the first nights I remember feeling "grown up"; we'd drive half an hour from Gravesend for the fleeting privilege of inching along a crowded, gaudy strip of beachfront, looking at girls who rarely looked at us. Sometimes, they looked at the truck. We could drive along this strip only two or three times before a cop would motion us over to the side of the street, examine Owen's driver's license-in disbelief-and then suggest that we find a place to park the truck and resume our looking at girls on foot, on either the boardwalk or on the sidewalk that threaded the arcades. Walking with Owen Meany at Hampton Beach was ill-advised; he was so strikingly small, he was teased and roughed up by the delinquent young men who tilted the pinball machines and swaggered in the heated vicinity of the girls in their cotton-candy-colored clothes. And the girls, who rarely returned our glances when we were secure in the Meany Granite Company pickup, took very long (and giggling) looks at Owen when we were on foot. When he was walking, Owen didn't dare look at the girls. Therefore, when a cop would, inevitably, advise us to park the track and pursue our interests "on foot," Owen and I would drive back to Gravesend. Or we would drive to a popular daytime beach-Little Boar's Head, which was beautifully empty at night. We'd sit on the sea wall, and feel the cool air off the ocean, and watch the phosphorescence sparkle in the surf. Or we would drive to Rye Harbor and sit on the breakwater, and watch the small boats slapping on the ruffled, pondlike surface; the breakwater itself had been built with the slag-the broken slabs-from the Meany Granite Quarry.

"THEREFORE, I HAVE A RIGHT TO SIT HERE," Owen always said; no one, of course, ever challenged our being there. Even though the girls ignored us that summer, that was when I noticed that Owen was attractive to women-not only to my mother. It is difficult to say how he was attractive, or why; but even when he was sixteen, even when he was especially shy or awkward, he looked like someone who had earned what grasp of the world he had. I might have been particularly conscious of this aspect of him because he had truly earned so much more than / had. It was not just that he was a better student, or a better driver, or so philosophically sure of himself; here was someone I had grown up with, and had grown used to teasing-I had picked him up over my head and passed him back and forth, I had derided his smallness as surely as the other children had-and yet, suddenly, by the time he was sixteen, he appeared in command. He was more in command of himself than the rest of us, he was more in command of us than the rest of us-and with women, even with those girls who giggled when they looked at him, you sensed how compelled they were to touch him. And by the end of the summer of ', he had something astonishing for a sixteen-year-old-in those days before all this ardent and cosmetic weightlifting, he had muscles! To be sure, he was tiny, but he was fiercely strong, and his sinewy strength was as visible as the strength of a whippet; although he was frighteningly lean, there was already something very adult about his muscular development-and why not? After all, he'd spent the summer working with granite. I hadn't even been working. In June, he'd started as a stonecutter; he spent most of the working day in the monument shop, cutting with the grain,

WITH THE RIFT, as he called it-using the wedge and feathers. By the middle of the month, his father had taught him how to saw against the grain; the sawyers cut up the bigger slabs, and they finished the gravestones with what was called a diamond wheel-a circular blade, impregnated with diamonds. By July, he was working in the quarries-he was often the signalman, but his father apprenticed him to the other quarrymen: the channel bar drillers, the derrickman, the dynamiters. It seemed to me that he spent most of the month of August in a single, remote pit-one hundred and seventy-five feet deep, a football field in diameter. He and the other men were lowered to work in a grout bucket-"grout" is waste, the rubble of broken rock that is raised from the pit all day long. At the end of the day, they bring up the men in the bucket. Granite is a dense, heavy stone; it weighs close to two hundred pounds per cubic foot. Ironically-even though they worked with the diamond wheel-most of the sawyers had all their fingers; but none of the quarrymen had all their fingers; only Mr. Meany had all his.

"I'LL KEEP ALL MINE, TOO," Owen said. "YOU'VE GOT TO BE MORE THAN QUICK, YOU'VE GOT TO FEEL WHEN THE ROCK'S GOING TO MOVE BEFORE IT MOVES-YOU'VE GOT TO MOVE BEFORE THE ROCK MOVES."

Just the slightest fuzz grew on his upper lip; nowhere else did his face show traces of a beard, and the faint moustache was so downy and such a pale-gray color that I first mistook it for pulverized granite, the familiar rock dust that clung to him. Yet his face-his nose, the sockets for his eyes, his cheekbones, and the contours of his jaw-had the gaunt definition that one sees in the faces of sixteen-year-olds only when they are starving. By September, he was smoking a pack of Camels a day. In the yellow glow of the dashboard lights, when we went out driving in the pickup at night, I would catch a glimpse of his profile with the cigarette dangling from his lips; his face had a permanent adult quality. Those mothers' breasts he'd once unfavorably compared to my mother's breasts were beneath his interest now, although Barb Wiggin's were still TOO BIG, Mrs. Webster's were still TOO LOW, and Mrs. Merrill's only VERY FUNNY. While Ginger Brinker-Smith, as a younger mother, had claimed our attention, we now (for the most part) coolly assessed our peers. THE TWO CAROLINES-Caroline Perkins and Caroline O'Day-appealed to us, although the breasts of Caroline O'Day were devalued, in Owen's view, by her Catholicism. Maureen Early's bosom was judged to be PERKY; Hannah Abbot's breasts were SMALL BUT SHAPELY; Irene Babson, who had given Owen the shivers as long ago as when my mother's bosom was under review, was now so out of control as to be SIMPLY SCARY. Deborah Perry, Lucy Dearborn, Betsy Bickford, Sarah Tilton, Polly Famum-to their names, and to the contours of their young breasts, Owen Meany would inhale a Camel deeply. The summer wind rushed through the rolled-down window of the pickup; when he exhaled, slowly, through his nostrils, the cigarette smoke was swept away from his face-dramatically exposing him as if he were a man miraculously emerging from a fire.

"IT'S TOO SOON TO TELL-WITH MOST SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS," Owen said, sounding already worldly enough for any conversation he might encounter at Gravesend Academy-although we both knew that the problem with the sixteen-year-old girls who interested us was that they dated eighteen-year-olds. "BY THE TIME WE'RE EIGHTEEN, WE'LL GET THEM BACK," Owen said. "AND WE'LL GET ALL THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS, TOO-THE ONES WE WANT," he added, inhaling again and squinting into the oncoming headlights. By the fall of ', when we entered Gravesend Academy, Owen seemed very sophisticated to me; the wardrobe my grandmother had acquired for him was more stylish than anything you could buy in New Hampshire. My clothes all came from Gravesend, but Grandmother took Owen shopping in Boston; it was his first time on a train, and-since they were both smokers-they rode in the smoking coach together and shared their nearly constant (and critical) comments on the attire of their fellow passengers on the Boston & Maine, and on the comparative courtesy (or lack thereof) of the conductors. Grandmother outfitted Owen almost entirely at Filene's and Jordan Marsh, one of which had a Small Gentlemen's Department, which the other called A Small Man's Special Needs. Jordan Marsh and Filene's were pretty flashy labels by New Hampshire standards-"THIS IS NOT BARGAIN-BASEMENT STUFF!" Owen said proudly. For our first day of classes, Owen showed up looking like a small Harvard lawyer.

He was not intimidated by the bigger boys because he had always been smaller; and he was not intimidated by the older boys because he was smarter. He saw immediately a crucial difference between Gravesend, the town, and Gravesend, the academy: the town paper, The Gravesend News-Letter, reported all the news that was decent and believed that all things decent were important; the school newspaper, which was called The Grave, reported every indecency that could escape the censorship of the paper's faculty adviser and believed that all things decent were boring. Gravesend Academy embraced a cynical tone of voice, savored a criticism of everything that anyone took seriously; the students hallowed, above everyone else, that boy who saw himself as born to break the rules, as destined to change the laws. And to the students of Gravesend who thus chafed against their bonds, the only accepted tone was caustic-was biting, mordant, bitter, scathing sarcasm, the juicy vocabulary of which Owen Meany had already learned from my grandmother. He had mastered sarcasm in much the same way he had become a smoker; he was a pack-a-day man in a month. In his first fall term at Gravesend, the other boys nicknamed him "Sarcasm Master." In the lingo of those times, everyone was a something "master"; Dan Needham tells me that this is one of those examples of student language that endures-at Graves-end Academy, the term is still in use. I have never heard it at Bishop Strachan. But Owen Meany was Sarcasm Master in the way that big Buster York was Barf Master, that Skipper Hilton was Zit Master, that Morris West was Nose Master, that DufFy Swain (who was prematurely bald) was Hair Master, that George Fogg (the hockey player) was Ice Master, that Horace Brigham (a lady's man) was Snatch Master. No one found a name for me. Among the editors of The Grave, in which Owen published the first essay he was assigned in English class, Owen was known as "The Voice." His essay was a satire on the source of food in the school dining hall-"MYSTERY MEAT," Owen titled the essay and the unrecognizable, gray steaks we were served weekly; the essay, which was published as an editorial, described the slaughter and refrigeration of an unidentified, possibly prehistoric beast that was dragged to the underground kitchen of the school in chains, "IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT."

The Voice The editorial and the subsequent weekly essays that Owen published in The Grave were ascribed not to Owen Meany by name, but to "The Voice"; and the text was printed in uniform upper-case letters. "I'M ALWAYS GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN CAPITALS," Owen explained to Dan and me, "BECAUSE IT WILL INSTANTLY GRAB THE READER'S ATTENTION, ESPECIALLY AFTER 'THE VOICE' GETS TO BE A KIND OF INSTITUTION."

By the Christmas of , in our first year at the academy, that is what Owen Meany had become: The Voice-A KIND OF INSTITUTION. Even the Search Committee-appointed to find a new headmaster-was interested in what The Voice had to say. Applicants for the position were given a subscription to The Grave; the snide, sneering precocity of the student body was well represented in its pages-and best represented by the capitals mat commanded one's gaze to Owen Meany. There were some old curmudgeons on the faculty-and some young fuddy-duddies, too-who objected to Owen's style; and I don't mean that they objected only to his outrageous capitalization. Dan Needham told me that there'd been more than one heated debate in faculty meeting concerning the "marginal taste" of Owen's blanket criticism of the school; granted, it was well within a long-established tradition for Gravesend students to complain about the academy, but Owen's sarcasm suggested, to some, a total and threatening irreverence. Dan defended Owen; but The Voice was a proven irritant to many of the more insecure members of the Gravesend community- including those faraway but important subscribers to The Grave: "concerned" parents and alumni. The subject of "concerned" parents and alumni yielded an especially lively and controversial column for The Voice.

"WHAT ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' ABOUT?" Owen pondered. "ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' WITH OUR EDUCATION-THAT IT BE BOTH 'CLASSICAL' AND 'TIMELY'-OR ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' THAT WE MIGHT POSSIBLY LEARN MORE THAN THEY HAVE LEARNED; THAT WE MIGHT INFORM OURSELVES SUFFICIENTLY TO CHALLENGE A FEW OF THEIR MORE HARDENED AND IDIOTIC OPINIONS? ARE THEY 'CONCERNED' ABOUT THE QUALITY AND VIG-OROUSNESS OF OUR EDUCATION; OR ARE THEY MORE SUPERFICIALLY 'CONCERNED' THAT WE MIGHT FAIL TO GET INTO THE UNIVERSITY OR COLLEGE OF THEIR CHOICE?"

Then there was the column that challenged the coat-and-tie dress code, arguing that it was "INCONSISTENT TO DRESS US LIKE GROWN-UPS AND TREAT US LIKE CHILDREN." And there was the column about required church-attendance, arguing that "IT RUINS THE PROPER ATMOSPHERE FOR PRAYER AND WORSHIP TO HAVE THE CHURCH-AW CHURCH-FULL OF RESTLESS ADOLESCENTS WHO WOULD RATHER BE SLEEPING LATE OR INDULGING IN SEXUAL FANTASIES OR PLAYING SQUASH. FURTHERMORE, REQUIRING ATTENDANCE AT CHURCH-FORCING YOUNG PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE RITUALS OF A BELIEF THEY DON'T SHARE-SERVES MERELY TO PREJUDICE THOSE SAME YOUNG PEOPLE AGAINST ALL RELIGIONS, AND AGAINST SINCERELY RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS. I BELIEVE THAT IT IS NOT THE PURPOSE OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION TO BROADEN AND EXPAND OUR PREJUDICES."

And on and on. You should have heard him on the subject of required athletics: "BORN OF A BROWN-SHIRT MENTALITY, A CONCEPT EMBRACED BY THE HITLER YOUTH!" And on the regulation that boarders were not allowed to enjoy more than three weekends off-campus in a single term: "ARE WE SO SIMPLE, IN THE ADMINISTRATION'S VIEW, THAT WE ARE CHARACTERIZED AS CONTENT TO SPEND OUR WEEKENDS AS ATHLETIC HEROES OR FANS OF SPECTATOR SPORTS; IS IT NOT POSSIBLE THAT SOME OF US MIGHT FIND MORE STIMULATION AT HOME, OR AT THE HOME OF A FRIEND-OR (EVEN) AT A GIRLS' SCHOOL? AND I DON'T MEAN AT ONE OF THOSE OVERORGANIZED AND CHARMLESSLY CHAPERONED DANCESl"

The Voice was our voice; he championed our causes; he made us proud of ourselves in an atmosphere mat belittled and intimidated us. But his was also a voice that could criticize us. When a boy was thrown out of school for killing cats-he was ritualistically lynching cats that were pets of faculty families- we were quick to say how "sick" he was; it was Owen who reminded us that all boys (himself included) were touched by that same sickness. "WHO ARE WE TO BE RIGHTEOUS?" he asked us. "I HAVE MURDERED TADPOLES AND TOADS-I'VE BEEN A MASS-MURDERER OF INNOCENT WILDLIFE!" He described his mutilations in a self-condemnatory, regretful tone; although he also confessed his slight vandalism of the sainted Mary Magdalene, I was amused to see that he offered no apologies to the nuns of St. Michael's-it was the tadpoles and toads he was sorry about. "WHAT BOY HASN'T KILLED LIVE THINGS? OF COURSE, IT'S 'SICK' TO BE A HANGMAN OF POOR CATS-BUT HOW IS IT WORSE THAN WHAT MOST OF US HAVE DONE? I HOPE WE'VE OUTGROWN IT, BUT DOES THAT MEAN WE FORGET THAT WE WERE LIKE THAT? DO THE FACULTY REMEMBER BEING BOYS? HOW CAN THEY PRESUME TO TEACH US ABOUT OURSELVES IF THEY DON'T REMEMBER BEING LIKE US? IF THIS IS A PLACE WHERE WE THINK THE TEACHING IS SO GREAT, WHY NOT TEACH THE KID THAT KILLING CATS IS 'SICK'-WHY THROW HIM OUT?"

It would grow to be a theme of Owen's: "WHY THROW HIM OUT?" he would ask, repeatedly. When he agreed that someone should have been thrown out, he said so. Drinking was punishable by dismissal, but Owen argued that getting other students drunk should be a more punishable offense than solitary drinking; also, that most forms of drinking were' 'NOT AS DESTRUCTIVE AS THE ALMOST-ROUTINE HARASSMENT OF STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT 'COOL' BY STUDENTS WHO THINK IT IS 'COOL' TO BE HARSHLY ABUSIVE-BOTH VERBALLY ABUSIVE AND PHYSICALLY INTIMIDATING. CRUEL AND DELIBERATE MOCKERY IS WORSE THAN DRINKING; STUDENTS WHO BAIT AND MERCILESSLY TEASE THEIR FELLOW STUDENTS ARE GUILTY OF WHAT SHOULD BE A MORE 'PUNISHABLE OFFENSE' THAN GETTING DRUNK-ESPECIALLY IN THOSE INSTANCES WHEN YOUR DRUNKENNESS HURTS NO ONE BUT YOURSELF."

It was well known that The Voice didn't drink; he was "black-coffee Meany," and "pack-a-day Meany"; he believed in his own alertness-he was sharp, he wanted to stay sharp. His column on "THE PERILS OF DRINK AND DRUGS" must have appealed even to his critics; if he was not afraid of the faculty, he was also not afraid of his peers. It was still only our first, our ninth-grade year, when Owen invited Hester to

the Senior Dance-in Noah and Simon's graduating year, Owen Meany dared to invite their dreaded sister to their senior-class dance!

"She'll just use you to meet other guys," Noah warned him.

"She'll fuck our whole class and leave you looking at the chandelier," Simon told Owen. I was furious with him. I wished I'd had the nerve to ask Hester to be my date; but how do you ' 'date" your first cousin? Noah and Simon and I commiserated; as much as Owen had captured our admiration, he had risked embarrassing himself- and all of us-by being the instrument of Hester's debut at Gravesend Academy.

"Hester the Molester," Simon repeated and repeated.

"She's just a Sawyer Depot kind of girl," Noah said condescendingly. But Hester knew much more about Gravesend Academy than any of us knew she knew; on that balmy, spring weekend in , Hester arrived prepared. After all, Owen had sent her every issue of The Grave; if she had once regarded Owen with distaste-she had called him queer and crazy, and a creep- Hester was no fool. She could tell when a star had risen. And Hester was committed to irreverence; it should have been no surprise to Noah and Simon and me that The Voice had won her heart. Whatever had been her actual experience with the black boatman from Tortola, the encounter had lent to Hester's recklessly blooming young womanhood a measure of restraint that women gain from only the most tragic entanglements with love; in addition to her dark and primitive beauty, and a substantial loss of weight that drew one's attention to her full, imposing bosom and to the hardness of the bones in her somber face, Hester now held herself back just enough to make her dangerousness both more subtle and more absolute. Her wariness matured her; she had always known how to dress-I think it ran in the family. In Hester's case, she wore simple, expensive clothes-but more casually than the designer had intended, and the fit was never quite right; her body belonged in the jungle, covered only essentially, possibly with fur or grass. For the Senior Dance, she wore a short black dress with spaghetti straps as thin as string; the dress had a full skirt, a fitted waist, and a deeply plunging neckline that exposed a broad expanse of Hester's throat and chest-a fetching background for the necklace of rose-gray pearls my Aunt Martha had given her for her seventeenth birthday. She wore no stockings and danced barefoot; around one ankle was a black rawhide thong, from which a turquoise bauble dangled- touching the top of her foot. Its value could have been only sentimental; Noah implied that the Tortola boatman had given it to her. At the Senior Dance, the faculty chaperones-and their wives-never took their eyes off her. We were all enthralled. When Owen Meany danced with Hester, the sharp bridge of his nose fit perfectly in her cleavage; no one even "cut in."

There we were, in our rented tuxedos, boys more afraid of pimples than of war; but Owen's tux was not rented-my grandmother had bought it for him-and in its tailoring, in its lack of shine, in its touch of satin on its slim lapels, it eloquently spoke to the matter that was so obvious to us all: how The Voice expressed what we were unable to say. Like all dances at the academy, this one ended under extreme supervision; no one could leave the dance early; and when one left, and had escorted one's date to the visitor's dorm, one returned to one's own dorm and "checked in" precisely fifteen minutes after having "checked out" of the dance. But Hester was staying at Front Street. I was too mortified to spend that weekend at my grandmother's-with Hester as Owen's date-and so I returned to Dan's dorm with the other boys who marched to the school's rules. Owen, who had the day boy's standing permission to drive himself to and from the academy, drove Hester back to Front Street. Once in the cab of the tomato-red pickup, Hester and Owen were freed from the regulations of the Dance Committee; they lit up, the smoke from their cigarettes concealed the assumed complacency of their expressions, and each of them lolled an arm out a rolled-down window as Owen turned up the volume of the radio and drove artfully away. With his cigarette, with Hester beside him-in his tux, in the high cab of that tomato-red pickup-Owen Meany looked almost tall, Other boys claimed that they "did it" in the bushes- between leaving the dance and arriving at their dorms. Other boys displayed kissing techniques in lobbies, risked "copping a feel" in coat rooms, defied the chaperones' quick censure of anything as vulgar as sticking a tongue in a girl's ear. But beyond the indisputable fact of his nose embedded in Hester's cleavage, Owen and Hester did not resort to either common or

gross forms of public affection. And how he later rebuked our childishness by refusing to talk about her; if he "did it" with her, The Voice was not bragging about it. He took Hester back to Front Street and they watched The Late Show together; he drove himself back to the quarry-"IT WAS RATHER LATE," he admitted.

"What was the movie?" I asked.

"WHAT MOVIE?"

"On The Late Show!"

"OH, I FORGET ..."

"Hester must have fucked his brains out," Simon said morosely; Noah hit him. "Since when does Owen 'forget' a movie?" Simon cried; but Noah hit him again. "Owen even remembers The Robe I" Simon said; Noah hit him in the mouth, and Simon started swinging. "It doesn't matter!" Simon yelled. "Hester fucks everybody!"

Noah had his brother by the throat. "We don't know that," he said to Simon.

"We think it!" Simon cried.

"It's okay to think it," Noah told his brother; he rubbed his forearm back and forth across Simon's nose, which began to bleed. "But if we don't know it, we don't say it."

"Hester fucked Owen's brains out!" Simon screamed; Noah drove the point of his elbow into the hollow between Simon's eyes.

"We don't know that," he repeated; but I had grown accustomed to their savage fights-they no longer frightened me. Their brutality seemed plain and safe alongside my conflicted feelings for Hester, my crushing envy of Owen. Once again, The Voice put us in our places. "IT IS HARD TO KNOW, IN THE WAKE OF THE DISTURBING DANCE-WEEKEND, WHETHER OUR ESTEEMED PEERS OR OUR ESTEEMED FACULTY CHAPERONES SHOULD BE MORE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES. IT IS PUERILE FOR YOUNG MEN TO DISCUSS WHAT DEGREE OF ADVANTAGE THEY TOOK OF THEIR DATES; IT IS DISRESPECTFUL OF WOMEN-ALL THIS CHEAP BRAGGING-AND IT GIVES MEN A BAD REPUTATION. WHY SHOULD WOMEN TRUST US? BUT IT IS HARD TO SAY WHETHER THIS BOORISH BEHAVIOR IS WORSE OR BETTER THAN THE GESTAPO TACTICS OF OUR PURITAN CHAPERONES. THE DEAN'S OFFICE TELLS ME THAT TWO SENIORS HAVE RECEIVED NOTICE OF DISCIPLINARY PROBATION-FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TERM!-FOR THEIR ALLEGED 'OVERT INDISCRETIONS'; I BELIEVE THE TWO INCIDENTS FALL UNDER THE PUNISHABLE OFFENSE OF 'MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE CONDUCT WITH GIRLS,'

"AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING PRURIENT, I SHALL REVEAL THE SHOCKING NATURE OF THESE TWO SINS AGAINST THE SCHOOL AND WOMANKIND. ONE! A BOY WAS FOUND 'FONDLING' HIS DATE IN THE TROPHY ROOM OF THE GYM: AS THE COUPLE WAS FULLY DRESSED-AND STANDING-AT THE TIME, IT SEEMS UNLIKELY THAT A PREGNANCY COULD HAVE RESULTED FROM THEIR EXCHANGE; AND ALTHOUGH THE GYM IS NOTORIOUS FOR IT, I'M SURE THEY HADN'T EVEN EXPOSED THEMSELVES SUFFICIENTLY TO RISK AN ATHLETE'S FOOT INFECTION. TWO! A BOY WAS SEEN LEAVING THE BUTT ROOM IN BANCROFT HALL WITH HIS TONGUE IN HIS DATE'S EAR-AN ODD AND OSTENTATIOUS MANNER IN WHICH TO EXIT A SMOKING LOUNGE, I WILL AGREE, BUT THIS DEGREE OF PHYSICAL CONTACT IS ALSO NOT KNOWN TO RESULT IN A PREGNANCY. TO MY KNOWLEDGE, IT IS EVEN DIFFICULT TO COMMUNICATE THE COMMON COLD BY THIS METHOD."

After that one, it became customary for the applicants-for the position of headmaster-to request to meet him when they were interviewed. The Search Committee had a student subcommittee available to interview each candidate; but when the candidates asked to meet The Voice, Owen insisted that he be given A PRIVATE AUDIENCE. The issue of Owen being granted this privilege was the subject of a special faculty meeting where tempers flared; Dan said there was a movement to replace the faculty adviser to The Grave-there were those who said that the "pregnancy humor" in Owen's column about the Senior Dance should not have escaped the adviser's censorship. But the faculty adviser to The Grave was an Owen Meany supporter; Mr. Early-that deeply flawed thespian who brought to every role he was given in The Gravesend Players an overblown and befuddled sense of Learlike doom-cried that he would defend the "unsullied genius" of The Voice, if necessary, "to the death." That would not be necessary, Dan Needham was sure; but that

Owen was supported by such a boob as Mr. Early was conceivably worse than no defense at all. Several applicants for the headmaster position admitted that their interviews with The Voice had been ' 'daunting"; I'm sure that they were unprepared for his size, and when they heard him speak, I'm sure they got the shivers and were troubled by the absurdity of that voice communicating strictly in uppercase letters. One of the favored candidates withdrew his application; although there was no direct evidence that Owen had contributed to the candidate's retreat, the man admitted there was a certain quality of "accepted cynicism" among the students that had "depressed" him. The man added that these students demonstrated an "attitude of superiority''-and' 'such a degree of freedom of speech as to make their liberal education too liberal."

"Nonsense!" Dan Needham had cried in the faculty meeting. "Owen Meany isn't cynical! If this guy was referring to Owen, he was referring to him incorrectly. Good riddance!"

But not all the faculty felt that way. The Search Committee would need another year to satisfy their search; the present headmaster cheerfully agreed-for the good of the school-to stall his retirement. He was all "for the good of the school," the old headmaster; and it was his support of Owen Meany that-for a while-kept Owen's enemies from his throat.

"He's a delightful little fella!" the headmaster said. "I wouldn't miss reading The Voice-not for all the world!"

His name was Archibald Thorndike, and he'd been headmaster forever; he'd married the daughter of the headmaster before him, and he was about as "old school" as a headmaster could get. Although the newer, more progressive-minded faculty complained about Archie Thomdike's reluctance to change a single course requirement-not to mention his views of "the whole boy"-the headmaster had no enemies. Old "Thorny," as he was called-and he encouraged even the boys to address him as "Thorny"-was so headmasterly in every pleasing, comfortable, superficial way that no one could feel unfriendly toward him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired man with a face as serviceable as an oar; in fact, he was an oarsman, and an outdoorsman-a man who preferred soft, unironed trousers, maybe khakis or corduroys, and a tweed jacket with the elbow patches in need of a thread here or there. He went hatless in our New Hampshire winters, and was such a supporter of our teams-in the rawest weather-that he wore a scar from an errant hockey puck as proudly as a merit badge; the puck had struck him above the eye while he'd tended the goal during the annual Alumni-Varsity game. Thorny was an honorary member of several of Gravesend's graduating classes. He played every alumni game in the goal.

"Ice hockey's not a sissy sport!" he liked to say. In another vein, in defense of Owen Meany, he maintained: "It is the well educated who will improve society-and they will improve it, at first, by criticizing it, and we are giving them the tools to criticize it. Naturally, as students, the brighter of them will begin their improvements upon society by criticizing us." To Owen, old Archie Thorndike would sing a slightly different song: "It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change. I'm not going to change; I'm going to retire I Get the new headmaster to make the changes; that's when / made changes-when I was new."

"WHAT CHANGES DID YOU MAKE?" Owen Meany asked.

"That's another reason I'm retiring!" old Thorny told Owen amiably. "My memory's shot!"

Owen thought that Archibald Thorndike was a blithering, glad-handing fool; but everyone, even The Voice, thought that old Thorny was a nice guy. "NICE GUYS ARE THE TOUGHEST TO GET RID OF," Owen wrote for The Grave; but even Mr. Early was smart enough to censor that. Then it was summer; The Voice went back to work in the quarries-I don't think he said much down in the pits-and I had my first job. I was a guide for the Gravesend Academy Admissions Office; I showed the school to prospective students and their parents-it was boring, but it certainly wasn't hard. I had a ring of master keys, which amounted to the greatest responsibility anyone had given me, and I had freedom of choice regarding which typical classroom I would show, and which "typical" dormitory room. I chose rooms at random in Waterhouse Hall, in the vague hope that I might surprise Mr. and Mrs. Brinker-Smith at their game of musical beds; but the twins were older now, and maybe the Brinker-Smiths didn't "do it" with their former gusto. In the evenings, at Hampton Beach, Owen looked tired to me; I reported to the Admissions Office for my first guided tour at ten, but Owen was stepping into the grout bucket by seven every morning. His fingernails were cracked; his hands were cut and swollen; his arms were tanned and thin and hard. He

didn't talk about Hester. The summer of ' was the first summer that we met with any success in picking up girls; or, rather, Owen met with this success, and he introduced the girls he met to me. We didn't' 'do it'' that summer; at least, / didn't, and-to my knowledge-Owen never had a date alone.

"IT'S A DOUBLE DATE OR IT'S NOTHING," he'd tell one surprised girl after another. "ASK YOUR FRIEND OR FORGET IT."

And we were BO longer afraid to cruise the pinball arcades around the casino on foot; delinquent thugs would still pick on Owen, but he quickly established a reputation as an untouchable.

"YOU WANT TO BEAT ME UP?" he'd say to some punk. ' 'YOU WANT TO GO TO JAIL? YOU'RE SO UGLY-YOU THINK I'LL HAVE TROUBLE REMEMBERING YOUR FACE?'' Then he'd point to me. "YOU SEE HIM? ARE YOU SUCH AN ASSHOLE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT A WITNESS IS? GO AHEAD-BEAT ME UP!" Only one guy did-or tried. It was like watching a dog go after a raccoon; the dog does all the work, but the raccoon gets the better of it. Owen just covered up; he grabbed for hands and feet, he went for the fingers first, but he was content to tear off a sho&and go for the toes. He took a pounding but he wrapped himself into a ball; he left no extremities showing. He broke the guy's pinky-he bent it so sharply that after the fight the guy's little finger pointed straight up off the back of his hand. He tore one of the guy's shoes off and bit his toes; there was a lot of blood, but the guy was wearing a sock-I couldn't see the actual damage, only that he had trouble walking. The guy was pulled off Owen by a cotton-candy vendor-he was arrested shortly thereafter for screaming obscenities, and we heard he was sent to reform school because he turned out to be driving a stolen car. We never saw him on the beachfront again, and the word about Owen-on the strip, around the casino, and along the boardwalk-was that he was dangerous to pick a fight with; the rumor was that he'd bitten off someone's ear. Another summer, I heard that he'd blinded a guy with a Popsicle stick. That these reports weren't exactly true did not matter at Hampton Beach. He was "that little dude in the red pickup," he was "the quarry-worker-he carries some kind of tool on him.'' He was "a mean little fucker-watch out for him."

We were seventeen; we had a sullen summer. In the fall, Noah and Simon started college out on the West Coast; they went to one of those California universities that no one on the East Coast can ever remember the name of. And the Eastmans continued their folly of considering Hester as less of an investment; they sent her to the University of New Hampshire, where-as a resident-she merited in-state tuition. "They want to keep me in their own backyard," was how Hester put it.

"THEY PUT HER IN OUR BACKYARD," was how Owen put it; the state university was only a twenty-minute drive from Gravesend. That it was a better university than the tanning club that Noah and Simon attended in California was not an argument that impressed Hester; the boys got to travel, the boys got the more agreeable climate-she got to stay home. To New Hampshire natives, the state university-notwithstanding how basically solid an education it offered-was not exotic; to Gravesend Academy students, with their elitist eyes on the Ivy League schools, it was "a cow college," wholly beyond redemption. But in the fall of ', when Owen and I began our tenth-grade year at the academy, Owen was regarded as especially gifted-by our peers-because he was dating a college girl; that Hester was a cow-college girl did not tarnish Owen's reputation. He was Ladies' Man Meany, he was Older-Woman Master; and he was still and would always be The Voice. He demanded attention; and he got it. Toronto: May , -Gary Hart, a former U.S. senator from Colorado, quit his campaign for the presidency after some Washington reporters caught him shacked up for the weekend with a Miami model; although both the model and the candidate claimed that nothing "immoral" occurred-and Mrs. Hart said that she supported her husband, or maybe it was that she "understood" him-Mr. Hart decided that such intense scrutiny of his personal life created an "intolerable situation" for him and his family. He'll be back; want to bet? In the United States, no one like him disappears for long; remember Nixon? What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress-lie to the people and violate the people's constitution! What Mr. Hart should have said was

that nothing unusually immoral had occurred, or that what happened was only typically immoral; or that he was testing his abilities to deceive the American people by deceiving his wife first-and that he hoped the people would see by this example that he was immoral enough to be good presidential material! I can just hear what The Voice would have said about all this. A sunny day; my fellow Canadians in Winston Churchill Park have their bellies turned toward the sun. All the girls at Bishop Strachan are tugging up their middies and hiking up their pleated skirts; they are pushing their knee socks down around their ankles; the whole world wants a tan. But Owen hated the spring; the warm weather made him think that school was almost over, and Owen loved school. When school was over, Owen Meany went back to the quarries. When school began again-when we started the fall term of -I realized that The Voice had not been idle for the summer; Owen came back to school with a stack of columns ready for The Grave. He charged the Search Committee to find a new headmaster who was dedicated to serving the faculty and the students-"NOT A SERVANT OF THE ALUMNI AND THE TRUSTEES." Although he made fun of Thorny- particularly, of old Archie Thorndike's notion of "the wtiole boy''-Owen praised our departing headmaster for being "AN EDUCATOR FIRST, A FUND-RAISER SECOND." Owen cautioned the Search Committee to "BEWARE OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES-THEY'LL PICK A HEADMASTER WHO CARES MORE ABOUT FUND DRIVES THAN THE CURRICULUM OR THE FACULTY WHO TEACH IT. AND DON'T LISTEN TO THE ALUMNI!" warned The Voice; Owen had a low opinion of the alumni.' 'THEY CAN'T EVEN BE TRUSTED TO REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS REALLY LIKE TO BE HERE; THEY'RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT WHAT THE SCHOOL DID FOR THEM-OR HOW THE SCHOOL MADE SOMETHING OUT OF THEM, AS IF THEY WERE UNFORMED CLAY WHEN THEY CAME HERE. AS FOR HOW HARSH THE SCHOOL COULD BE, AS FOR HOW MISERABLE THEY WERE WHEN THEY WERE STUDENTS-THE ALUMNI HAVE CONVENIENTLY FORGOTTEN."

Someone in faculty meeting called Owen "that little turd"; Dan Needham argued that Owen truly adored the school, but that a Gravesend education did not and should not teach respect for uncritical love, for blind devotion. It became harder to defend Owen when he started the petition against fish on Fridays.

"WE HAVE A NONDENOMINATIONAL CHURCH," he stated. "WHY DO WE HAVE A CATHOLIC DINING HALL? IF CATHOLICS WANT TO EAT FISH ON FRIDAY, WHY MUST THE REST OF US JOIN THEM? MOST KIDS HATE FISH! SERVE FISH BUT SERVE SOMETHING ELSE, TOO-COLD CUTS, OR EVEN PEANUT-BUTTER-AND-JELLY SANDWICHES. WE ARE FREE TO LISTEN TO THE GUEST PREACHER AT KURD'S CHURCH, OR WE CAN ATTEND ANY OF THE TOWN CHURCHES OF OUR CHOICE; JEWS AREN'T FORCED TO TAKE COMMUNION, UNITARIANS AREN'T DRAGGED TO MASS- OR TO CONFESSION-BAPTISTS AREN'T ROUNDED UP ON SATURDAYS AND HERDED OFF TO SYNAGOGUE (OR TO THEIR OWN, UNWILLING CIRCUMCISIONS). YET NON-CATHOLICS MUST EAT FISH; ON FRIDAYS, IT'S EAT FISH OR GO HUNGRY. I THOUGHT THIS WAS A DEMOCRACY. ARE WE ALL FORCED TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE CATHOLIC VIEW OF BIRTH CONTROL? WHY ARE WE FORCED TO EAT CATHOLIC FOOD?"

He set up a chair and desk in the school post office to collect signatures for his petition-naturally, everyone signed it. "EVEN THE CATHOLICS SIGNED IT!" announced The Voice. Dan Needham said that the food service manager put on quite a show in faculty meeting.

"Next thing you know, that little turd will want a salad bar! He'll want an alternative to every menu-not just fish on Fridays!"

In his first column, The Voice had attacked MYSTERY MEAT; now it was fish. "THIS UNJUST IMPOSITION ENCOURAGES RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION," said The Voice; Owen saw signs of anti-Catholicism springing up everywhere. "THERE'S SOME BAD TALK GOING AROUND," he reported. "THE CLIMATE OF THE SCHOOL IS BECOMING DISCRIMINATORY. I HEAR THE OFFENSIVE SLUR, 'MACKEREL-SNAPPER'-AND YOU NEVER USED TO HEAR THAT KIND OF TALK AROUND HERE.'' Frankly, / never heard anyone use the term "mackerel-snapper"-except Owen! And we couldn't pass St. Michael's-not to mention the

sainted statue of Mary Magdalene-without his saying, "I WONDER WHAT THE PENGUINS ARE UP TO? DO YOU THINK THEY'RE ALL LESBIANS?"

It was the first Friday following Thanksgiving vacation when they served cold cuts and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the standard fish dish; you could also get a bowl of tomato soup, and potato salad. He had won. He got a standing ovation in the dining hall. As a scholarship boy, he had a job-he was a waiter at a faculty table; the serving tray was half Ms size and he stood at attention beside it, as if it were a shield, while the students applauded him and the faculty smiled a trifle stiffly. Old Thorny called him into his office. "You know, I like you, little fella," he told Owen. "You're a go-getter! But let me give you some advice. Your friends don't watch you as closely as your enemies-and you've got enemies. You've made more enemies in less than two years than I've made in more than twenty! Be careful you don't give your enemies a way to get you."

Thorny wanted Owen to cox the varsity crew; Owen was the perfect size for a coxswain, and-after all-he'd grown up on the Squamscott. But Owen said that the racing shells had always offended his father-"IT'S A MATTER OF BLOOD BEING THICKER THAN SCHOOL," he told the headmaster; furthermore, the river was polluted. In those days, the town didn't have a proper sewage system; the textile mill, my late grandfather's former shoe factory, and many private homes simply dumped their waste into the Squamscott. Owen said he had often seen "beetleskins" floating in the river; beetleskins still gave him the shivers. Besides, in the fall he liked soccer; of course, he wasn't on the varsity or the junior varsity-but he had fun playing soccer, even on the lowest club-level. He was fast and scrappy--although, from all his smoking, he was easily winded. And in the spring-the other season for crew-Owen liked to play tennis; he wasn't very good, he was just a beginner, but my grandmother bought him a good racquet and Owen appreciated the orderliness of the game. The straight white lines, the proper tension in the net at its exactly correct height, the precise scoring. In the winter-God knows why!-he liked basketball; perversely, perhaps, because it was a tall boy's game. He played only in pickup games, to be sure-he could never have played on any of the teams-but he played with enthusiasm; he was quite a leaper, he had a jump shot that elevated him almost to eye level with the other players, and he became obsessed with an impossible frill of the game ("impossible" for him): the slam-dunk. We didn't call it a "slam-dunk" then; we called it "stuffing" the ball, and there wasn't very much of it-most kids weren't tall enough. Of course, Owen could never leap high enough to be above the basket; to stuff the ball down into the basket was a nonsense idea he had-it was his absurd goal. He would devise an approach to the basket; dribbling at good speed, he would time his leap to coincide with a teammate's readiness to lift him higher-he would jump into a teammate's waiting arms, and the teammate would (occasionally) boost Owen above the basket's rim. I was the only one who was willing to practice the timing with him; it was such a ridiculous thing for him to want to do-for someone his size to set himself the challenge of soaring and reaching so high ... it was just silliness, and I tired of the mindless, repetitive choreography.

"Why are we doing this?" I'd ask him. "It would never work in a game. It's probably not even legal. I can't lift you up to the basket, I'm sure that's not allowed."

But Owen reminded me that I had once enjoyed lifting him up-at Sunday school. Now that it mattered to him, to get the timing of his leap adjusted to my lifting him even higher, why couldn't I simply indulge him without criticizing him?

"I TOLERATED YOU LIFTING ME UP-ALL THOSE YEARS WHEN I ASKED YOU NOT TO!" he said.

" 'All those years,' " I repeated. "It was only a few Sunday school classes, it was only for a couple of years-and we didn't do it every time."

But it was important to him now-this crazy lifting him up-and so we did it. It became a very well-rehearsed stunt with us; "Slam-Dunk Meany," some of the boys on the basketball team began to call him-Slam-Dunk Master, after he'd perfected the move. Even the basketball coach was appreciative. "I may use you in a game, Owen," the coach said, joking with him.

"IT'S NOT FOR A GAME," said Owen Meany, who had his own reasons for everything. That Christmas vacation of ', we were in the Gravesend gym for hours every day; we were alone, and undisturbed-all the boarders had gone home-and we were full of contempt for the Eastmans, who appeared to be making a point of not

inviting us to Sawyer Depot. Noah and Simon had brought a friend home from California; Hester was "in and out"; and some old friend of my Aunt Martha, from her university days, "might" be visiting. The real reason we were not invited, Owen and I were sure, was that Aunt Martha wanted to discourage the relationship between Owen and Hester. Hester had told Owen that her mother referred to him as "the boy who hit that ball," and as "that strange little friend of John's"- and "that boy my mother is dressing up like a little doll." But Hester thought so ill of her mother, and she was such a troublemaker, she might have made up all that and told Owen-chiefly so that Owen would dislike Aunt Martha, too. Owen didn't seem to care. I had been granted an extension to make up two late term papers over the vacation-so it wasn't much of a vacation, anyway; Owen helped me with the history paper and he wrote the English paper for me. "I PURPOSELY DIDN'T SPELL EVERYTHING CORRECTLY. I MADE A FEW GRAMMATICAL ERRORS-OF THE KIND YOU USUALLY MAKE," he told me. "I REPEATED MYSELF OCCASIONALLY, AND THERE'S NO MENTION OF THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK-AS IF YOU SKIPPED THAT PART. THAT'S THE PART YOU SKIPPED, RIGHT?"

It was a problem: how my in-class writing, my quizzes and examinations, were not at all as good as the work Owen helped me with. But we studied for all announced tests together, and I was-gradually-improving as a student. Because of my weak spelling I was enrolled in an extra, remedial course, which was marginally insulting, and-also because of my spelling, and my often erratic performance when I was called upon in the classroom-I was asked to see the school psychiatrist once a week. Gravesend Academy was used to good students; when someone struggled, academically-even when one simply couldn't spell properly!-it was assumed to be a matter for a shrink. The Voice had something to say about that, too. "IT SEEMS TO ME THAT PEOPLE WHO DON'T LEARN AS EASILY AS OTHERS SUFFER FROM A KIND OF LEARNING DISABILITY-THERE IS SOMETHING THAT INTERFERES WITH THE WAY THEY PERCEIVE NUMBERS AND LETTERS, THERE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT THE WAY THEY COMPREHEND UNFAMILIAR MATERIAL-BUT I FAIL TO SEE HOW THIS DISABILITY IS IMPROVED BY PSYCHIATRIC CONSULTATION. WHAT SEEMS TO BE LACKING IS A TECHNICAL ABILITY THAT THOSE OF US CALLED 'GOOD STUDENTS' ARE BORN WITH. SOMEONE SHOULD CONCRETELY STUDY THESE SKILLS AND TEACH THEM. WHAT DOES A SHRINK HAVE TO DO WITH THE PROCESS?"

These were the days before we'd heard about dyslexia and other "learning disabilities"; students like me were simply thought to be stupid, or slow. It was Owen who isolated my problem. "YOU'RE MAINLY SLOW," he said. "YOU'RE ALMOST AS SMART AS I AM, BUT YOU NEED TWICE THE TIME." The school psychiatrist-a retired Swiss gentleman who returned, every summer, to Zurich-was convinced that my difficulties as a student were the result of my best friend's "murder" of my mother, and the "tensions and conflicts" that he saw as the "inevitable result" of my dividing my life between my grandmother and my stepfather.

"At times, you must hate him-yes?" Dr. Dolder mused.

"Hate who?" I asked. "My stepfather? No-I love Dan!"

"Your best friend-at times, you hate him. Yes?" Dr. Dolder asked.

"No!" I said. "I love Owen-it was an accident."

"Yes, I know," Dr. Dolder said. "But nonetheless . . . your grandmother, perhaps, she is a most difficult reminder- yes?"

"A 'reminder'?" I said. "I love my grandmother!"

"Yes, I know," Dr. Dolder said. "But this baseball business-it's most difficult, I imagine ..."

"Yes!" I said. "I hate baseball."

"Yes, for sure," Dr. Dolder said. "I've never seen a game, so it's hard for me to imagine exactly . . . perhaps we should take in a game together?"

"No," I said. "I don't play baseball, I don't even watch it!"

"Yes, I see," Dr. Dolder said. "You hate it that much-I see!"

"I can't spell," I said. "I'm a slow reader, I get tired-I have to keep my finger on the particular sentence, or I'll lose my place . . ."

"It must be rather hard-a baseball," Dr. Dolder said "Yes?"

"Yes, it's very hard," I said; I sighed.

"Yes, I see," Dr. Dolder said. "Are you tired now? Are you getting tired?"

"It's the spelling," I told him. "The spelling and the reading."

There were photographs on the wall of his office in the Hubbard Infirmary-they were old black-and-white photographs of the clockfaces on the church spires in Zurich; and photographs of the water birds in the Limmat, and of the people feeding the birds from those funny, arched footbridges. Many of the people wore hats; you could almost hear those cathedral clocks sounding the hour. Dr. Dolder had a quizzical expression on his long, goat-shaped face; his silver-white Vandyke beard was neatly trimmed, but the doctor often tugged its point.

"A baseball," he said thoughtfully. "Next time, you will bring a baseball-yes?"

"Yes, of course," I said.

"And this little baseball-hitter-The Voice, yes?-I would very much like to talk to him, too," said Dr. Dolder.

"I'll ask Owen if he's free," I said.

"NOT A CHANCE," said Owen Meany, when I asked him. "THERE'S NOTHING THE MATTER WITH MY SPELLING!"

Toronto: May , -I regret that I had the right change to get The Globe and Mail out of the street-corner box; I had three dimes in my pocket, and a sentence in a front-page article proved irresistible. "It was unclear how Mr. Reagan intended to have his Administration maintain support for the contras while remaining within the law."

Since when did Mr. Reagan care about "remaining within the law"? I wish the president would spend a weekend with a Miami model; he could do a lot less harm that way. Think how relieved the Nicaraguans would be, if only for a weekend! We ought to find a model for the president to spend every weekend with! If we could tire the old geezer out, he wouldn't be capable of more damaging mischief. Oh, what a nation of moralists the Americans are! With what fervor do they relish bringing their sexual misconduct to light! A pity that they do not bring their moral outrage to bear on their president's arrogance above the law; a pity that they do not unleash their moral zest on an administration that runs guns to terrorists. But, of course, boudoir morality takes less imagination, and can be indulged in without the effort of keeping up with world affairs-or even bothering to know "the whole story" behind the sexual adventure. It's sunny again in Toronto today; the fruit trees are blossoming-especially the pears and apples and crab apples. There's a chance of showers. Owen liked the rain. In the summer, in the bottom of a quarry, it could be brutally hot, and the dust was always a factor; the rain cooled the rock slabs, the rain held the dust down. "ALL QUARRYMEN LIKE RAIN," said Owen Meany. I told my Grade English class that they should reread what Hardy called the first ' 'phase'' of Tess of the d' Urber-villes, the part called "The Maiden"; although I had drawn their attention to Hardy's fondness for foreshadowing, the class was especially sleepyheaded at spotting these devices. How could they have read over the death of the horse so carelessly? "Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself," Hardy writes; he even says, "Her face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess.'' And what did the class make of Tess's physical appearance? ' 'It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was." They made nothing of it.

"Don't some of you look like that-to yourselves?" I asked the class. "What do you think about when you see one of yourselves who looks like that?"

Silence. And what did they think happened at the end of the first "phase"-was Tess seduced, or was she raped? "She was sleeping soundly," Hardy writes. Does he mean that d'Urber-ville "did it" to her when she was asleep? Silence.

Before they trouble themselves to read the second "phase" of Tess, called "Maiden No More," I suggested that they trouble themselves to reread "The Maiden"-or, perhaps, read it for the first time, as the case may be!

"Pay attention," I warned them. "When Tess says, 'Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?'-pay attention! Pay attention to where Tess's child is buried-'in that shabby corner of God's allotment where he lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.' Ask yourself what Hardy thinks of 'God's allotment'-and what does he think of bad

luck, of coincidence, of so-called circumstances beyond our control? And does he imagine that being a virtuous character exposes you to greater or fewer liabilities as you roam the world?"

"Sir?" said Leslie Ann Grew. That was very old-fashioned of her; it's been years since anyone called me "Sir" at Bishop Strachan-unless it was a new kid. Leslie Ann Grew has been here for years. "If it's another nice day tomorrow," saidLeslie Ann, "can we have class outside?"

"No," I said; but I'm so slow-I feel so dull. I know what The Voice would have told her.

"ONLY IF IT RAINS," Owen would have said. "IF IT POURS, THEN WE CAN HAVE CLASS OUTSIDE."

At the start of the winter term of our tenth-grade year at Gravesend Academy, the school's gouty minister-the Rev. Mr. Scammon, the officiant of the academy's nondenomina-tional faith and the lackluster teacher of our Religion and Scripture classes-cracked his head on the icy steps of Kurd's Church and failed to regain consciousness. Owen was of the opinion that the Rev. Mr. Scammon never was fully conscious. For weeks after his demise, his vestments and his cane hung from the coat tree in the vestry office-as if old Mr. Scammon had journeyed no farther from this world than to the adjacent toilet. The Rev. Lewis Merrill was hired as his temporary replacement in our Religion and Scripture classes, and a Search Committee was formed to find a new school minister. Owen and I had suffered through Religion One together in our ninth-grade year: old Mr. Scammon's sweeping, Caesar-to-Eisenhower approach to the major religions of the world. We had been suffering Scammon's Scripture course-and his Religion Two-when the icy steps of Kurd's Church rose to meet him. The Rev. Mr. Merrill brought his familiar stutter and his almost-as-familiar doubts to both courses. In Scripture, he set us to work in our Bibles-to find plentiful examples of Isaiah :: "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil." In Religion Two-a heavy-reading course in "religion and literature"-we were instructed to divine Tolstoy's meaning: "There was no solution," Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, "but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day-that is forget oneself."

In both classes, Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy; it was a point of view that interested Owen more than it had once interested him. The apparent secret was "belief without miracles"; a faith that needed a miracle was not a faith at all. Don't ask for proof-that was Mr. Merrill's routine message.

"BUT EVERYONE NEEDS A LITTLE PROOF," said Owen Meany.

"Faith itself is a miracle, Owen," said Pastor Merrill. "The first miracle that I believe in is my own faith itself."

Owen looked doubtful, but he didn't speak. Our Religion Two class-and our Scripture class, too-was an atheistic mob; except for Owen Meany, we were such a negative, anti-everything bunch of morons that we thought Jack Kerouac and Alien Ginsberg were more interesting writers than Tolstoy. And so the Rev. Lewis Merrill, with his stutter and his well-worn case of doubt, had his hands full with us. He made us read Greene's The Power and the Glory-Owen wrote his term paper on "THE WHISKEY PRIEST: A SEEDY SAINT." We also read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lagerkvist's Barabbas and Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov-Owen wrote my term paper on "SIN AND SMERDYAKOV: A LETHAL COMBINATION." Poor Pastor Merrill! My old Congregationalist minister was suddenly cast in the role of Christianity's defender-and even Owen argued with the terms of Mr. Merrill's defense. The class loved Sartre and Camus-the concept of "the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation" was thrilling to us teenagers. The Rev. Mr. Merrill countered humbly with Kierkegaard:' 'What no person has a right to is to delude others into the belief that faith is something of no great significance, or that it is an easy matter, whereas it is the greatest and most difficult of all things."

Owen, who'd had his doubts about Pastor Merrill, found himself in the role of the minister's defender. "JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" he said crossly. "LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS- THEY'RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE-THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN

ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST!"

"Yes, but let's not say 'asshole' in class, Owen," Pastor Merrill said. And in our Scripture class, Owen said, "IT'S TRUE THAT THE DISCIPLES ARE STUPID-THEY NEVER UNDERSTAND WHAT JESUS MEANS, THEY'RE A BUNCH OF BUNGLERS, THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD AS MUCH AS THEY WANT TO BELIEVE, AND THEY EVEN BETRAY JESUS. THE POINT IS, GOD DOESN'T LOVE US BECAUSE WE'RE SMART OR BECAUSE WE'RE GOOD. WE'RE STUPID AND WE'RE BAD AND GOD LOVES US ANYWAY-JESUS ALREADY TOLD THE DUMB-SHIT DISCIPLES WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. 'THE SON OF MAN WILL BE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF MEN, AND THEY WILL KILL HIM . . .' REMEMBER? THAT WAS IN MARK-RIGHT?"

"Yes, but let's not say 'dumb-shit disciples' in class, Owen," Mr. Merrill said; but although he struggled to defend God's Holy Word, Lewis Merrill-for the first time, in my memory-appeared to be enjoying himself. To have his faith assailed perked him up; he was livelier and less meek.

"I DON'T THINK THE CQNGREGATIONALISTS EVER TALK TO HIM," Owen suggested. "I THINK HE'S LONELY FOR CONVERSATION; EVEN IF ALL HE GETS IS AN ARGUMENT, AT LEAST WE'RE TALKING TO HIM."

"I see no evidence that his wife ever talks to him," Dan Needham observed. And the monosyllabic utterances of Pastor MerriU's surly children were not of the engaging tones that invited conversation.

"WHY DOES THE SCHOOL WASTE ITS TIME WITH TWO SEARCH COMMITTEES?" asked The Voice in The Grave. "FIND A HEADMASTER-WE NEED A HEADMASTER-BUT WE DON'T NEED A SCHOOL MINISTER. WITH NO DISRESPECT FOR THE DEAD, THE REV. LEWIS MERRILL IS A MORE-THAN-ADEQUATE REPLACEMENT FOR THE LATE MR. SCAMMON: FRANKLY, MR. MERRILL IS AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE CLASSROOM. AND THE SCHOOL THINKS WELL ENOUGH OF HIS POWERS IN THE PULPIT TO HAVE ALREADY INVITED HIM TO BE THE GUEST PREACHER AT KURD'S CHURCH-ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. THE REV. MR. MERRILL WOULD BE A GOOD SCHOOL MINISTER. WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT THE CON-GREGATIONALISTS ARE PAYING HIM AND OFFER HIM MORE."

And so they hired him away from the Congregationalists; once more, The Voice did not go unheard. Toronto: May , -a sunny, cool day, a good day to mow a lawn. The smell of freshly cut grass all along Russell Hill Road reflects how widespread is my neighbors' interest in lawnmowing. Mrs. Brocklebank-whose daughter, Heather, is in my Grade English class-took a slightly different approach to her lawn; I found her ripping her dandelions out by their roots.

"You'd better do the same thing," she said to me. "Pull them out, don't mow them under. If you chop them up with the mower, you'll just make more of them."

"Like starfish," I said; I should have known better-it's never a good idea to introduce Mrs. Brocklebank to a new subject, not unless you have time to kill. If I'd assigned "The Maiden" to Mrs. Brocklebank, she would have gotten everything right-the first time.

"What do you know about starfish?" she asked.

"I grew up on the seacoast," I reminded her. It is occasionally necessary for me to tell Torontonians of the presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; they tend to think of the Great Lakes as the waters of the world.

"So what about starfish?" Mrs. Brocklebank asked.

"You cut them up, they grow more starfish," I said.

"Is that in a book?" asked Mrs. Brocklebank. I assured her that it was. I even have a book that describes the life of the starfish, although Owen and I knew not to chop them up long before we read about them; every kid in Gravesend learned all about starfish at the beach at Little Boar's Head. I remember my mother telling Owen and me not to cut them up; starfish are very destructive, and their powers of reproduction are not encouraged in New Hampshire. Mrs. Brocklebank is persistent regarding new information; she goes after everything as aggressively as she attacks her dandelions. "I'd like to see that book," she announced. And so I began again with what has become a fairly routine labor: discouraging Mrs. Brocklebank from reading another book-I work as hard at discouraging her, and with as little

success, as I sometimes latx>r to encourage those BSS girls to read their assignments.

"It's not a very good book," I said. "It's written by an amateur, it's published by a vanity press."

"So what's wrong with an amateur writing a book?" Mrs. Brocklebank wanted to know. She is probably writing one of her own, it occurs to me now. "So what's wrong with a 'vanity press'?" she asked. The book that tells the truth about the starfish is called The Life of the Tidepool by Archibald Thorndike. Old Thorny was an amateur naturalist and an amateur diarist, and after he retired from Gravesend Academy, he spent two years scrutinizing a tidepool in Rye Harbor; at his own expense, he published a book about it and sold autographed copies of the book every Alumni Day. He parked his station wagon by the tennis courts and sold his books off the tailgate, chatting with all the alumni who wanted to talk to him; since he was a very popular headmaster-and since he was replaced by a particularly unpopular headmaster-almost all the alumni wanted to talk to old Thorny. I suppose he sold a lot of copies of The Life of the Tidepool; he might even have made money. Maybe he wasn't such an amateur, after all. He knew how to handle The Voice-by not handling him. And The Voice would prove to be the undoing of the new headmaster, in the end. In the end, I yielded to Mrs. Brocklebank's frenzy to educate herself; I said I'd lend her my copy ofThe Life of the Tidepool.

"Be sure to remind Heather to reread the first 'phase' of Tess," I told Mrs. Brocklebank.

"Heather's not reading her assignments?" Mrs. Brocklebank asked in alarm.

"It's spring," I reminded her. "All the girls aren't reading their assignments. Heather's doing just fine." Indeed, Heather Brocklebank is one of my better students; she has inherited her mother's ardor-while, at the same time, her imagination ranges far beyond dandelions. In a flash, I think of giving my Grade English class a sneak quiz; if they gave the first "phase" of Tess such a sloppy reading, I'll bet they skipped the Introduction altogether-and I had assigned the Introduction, too; I don't always do that, but there's an Introduction by Robert B. Heilman that's especially helpful to first readers of Hardy. I know a really nasty quiz question! I think-looking at Mrs. Brocklebank, clutching her murdered dandelions.

"What was Thomas Hardy's earlier title for TessT' Ha! It's nothing they could ever guess; if they'd read the Introduction, they'd know it was Too Late Beloved-they'd at least remember the "too late" part. Then I remembered that Hardy had written a story-before Tess-called ' 'The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid"; I wondered if I could throw in that title, to confuse them. Then I remembered that Mrs. Brocklebank was standing on the sidewalk with her handful of dandelions, waiting for me to fetch her The Life of the Tidepool. And last of all I remembered that Owen Meany and I first read Tess of the d'Urbervilles in our tenth-grade year at Gravesend Academy; we were in Mr. Early's English class-it was the winter term of -and I was struggling with Thomas Hardy to the point of tears. Mr. Early was a fool to try Tess on tenth graders. At Bishop Strachan, I have long argued with my colleagues that we should teach Hardy in Grade -even Grade is too soon! Even The Brothers Karamazov is easier than Tess!

"I can't read this!" I remember saying to Owen. He tried to help me; he helped me with everything else, but Tess was simply too difficult. "I can't read about milking cows!" I screamed.

"IT'S NOT ABOUT MILKING COWS," Owen said crossly.

"I don't care what it's about; I hate it," I said.

"THAT'S A TRULY INTELLIGENT ATTITUDE," Owen said. "IF YOU CAN'T READ IT, DO YOU WANT ME TO READ IT ALOUD TO YOU?"

I am so ashamed of myself to remember this: that he would do even that for me-that he would read Tess of the d'Urbervilles aloud to me! At the time, the thought of hearing that whole novel in his voice was staggering.

"I can't read it and I can't listen to it, either," I said.

"FINE," Owen said. "THEN YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO. I CAN TELL YOU THE WHOLE STORY, I CAN WRITE YOUR TERM PAPER-AND IF THERE'S AN EXAM, YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO BULLSHIT AS WELL AS YOU CAN: IF I TELL YOU THE WHOLE STORY, MAYBE YOU'LL ACTUALLY REMEMBER SOME OF IT. THE POINT IS, I CAN DO YOUR HOMEWORK FOR YOU-IT'S NOT HARD FOR ME AND I DON'T MIND DOING IT-OR I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK. THAT WOULD BE A

LITTLE HARDER-FOR BOTH OF US-BUT IT MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE USEFUL FOR YOU TO BE ABLE TO DO YOUR OWN WORK. I MEAN, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO-AFTER I'M GONE?"

"What do you mean, after you're goneT' I asked him.

"LOOK AT IT ANOTHER WAY," he said patiently. "ARE YOU GOING TO GET A JOB? AFTER YOU'RE THROUGH WITH SCHOOL, I MEAN-ARE YOU GOING TO WORK? ARE YOU GOING TO A UNIVERSITY? ARE WE GOING TO GO TO THE SAME UNIVERSITY? AM I GOING TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK THERE, TOO? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO MAJOR IN?"

"What are you going to major in?" I asked him; my feelings were hurt-but I knew what he was driving at, and he was right.

"GEOLOGY," he said. "I'M IN THE GRANITE BUSINESS."

"That's crazy!" I said. "It's not your business. You can study anything you want, you don't have to study rocks!"

"ROCKS ARE INTERESTING," Owen said stubbornly. "GEOLOGY IS THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH."

"I can't read Tess of the d'Urbervillesl" I cried. "It's too hard!"

"YOU MEAN IT'S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF READ IT, YOU MEAN IT'S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF PAY ATTENTION," he said. "BUT IT'S NOT TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES THAT'S HARD. THOMAS HARDY MAY BORE YOU BUT HE'S VERY EASY TO UNDERSTAND- HE'S OBVIOUS, HE TELLS YOU EVERYTHING YOU HA VETO KNOW."

"He tells me more than I want to know!" I cried.

"YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING! MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRIT- TEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE I YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE-TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS."

"It's not easy for me!" I cried. "I hate reading this book!"

"DO YOU HATE TO READ MOST BOOKS?" Owen asked me.

"Yes!" I said.

"DO YOU SEE THAT THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESST' he asked me.

"Yes," I admitted.

"NOW WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE," said Owen Meany-my friend, my teacher. Standing on the sidewalk with Mrs. Brocklebank, I felt the tears start to come.

"Do you have allergies?" Mrs. Brocklebank asked me; I shook my head. I feel so ashamed of myself that-even for a moment-I could consider zapping my Grade girls with a nasty quiz on Tess of the d' Urbervilles. Remembering how I suffered as a student, remembering how much I needed Owen's help, how could I even think of being a sneaky teacher?

"I think you do have an allergy," Mrs. Brocklebank concluded from my tears. "Lots of people have allergies and don't even know; I've read about that."

"It must be the dandelions," I said; and Mrs. Brocklebank glared at the pestilential weeds with a fresh hatred. Every spring there are dandelions; they always remind me of the spring term of -the burgeoning of that old decade that once seemed so new to Owen Meany and me. That was the spring when the Search Committee found a new headmaster. That was the decade that would defeat us. Randolph White had been the headmaster of a small private day school in Lake Forest, Illinois; I'm told that is a super-rich and exclusively WASP community that does its utmost to pretend it is not a suburb of Chicago-but that may be unfair; I've never been there. Several Gravesend students came from there, and they unanimously groaned to hear the announcement of Randolph White's appointment as headmaster at the acad-

envy; apparently, the idea that anyone from Lake Forest had followed them to New Hampshire depressed them. At the time, Owen and I knew a kid from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and he told us that Bloomfield Hills was to Detroit what Lake Forest was to Chicago, and that-in his view- Bloomfield Hills "sucked"; he offered a story about Bloom-field Hills as an example of what he meant-it was a story about a black family that moved there, and they were forced to sell and move out because their neighbors kept burning crosses on their lawn. This shocked Owen and me; in New Hampshire, we thought such things happened only in the South-but a black kid from Atlanta informed us that we knew "shit" about the problem; they burned crosses all over the country, the black kid said, and we weren't exactly "overwhelmed by a sea of black faces" at Gravesend Academy, were we? No, Owen and I agreed; we were not. Then another kid from Michigan said that Grosse Pointe was more to Detroit what Lake Forest was to Chicago-that Bloomfield Hills wasn't a proper analogy-and some other kid argued that Shaker Heights was more to Cleveland what Lake Forest was to Chicago . . . and so forth. Owen and I were not very knowledgeable of the geography of the country's rich and exclusive; when a Jewish kid from Highland Park, Illinois, told us that there were "no Jews allowed" in Lake Forest, Owen and I began to wonder what ominous kind of small private day school in Lake Forest our new headmaster had come from. Owen had another reason to be suspicious of Randolph White. Of all the candidates whom the Search Committee dragged through the school in our tenth-grade year, only Randolph White had not accepted the invitation for A PRIVATE AUDIENCE with The Voice. Owen had met Mr. White outside Archie Thorndike's office; Thorny introduced the candidate to The Voice and told them he would, as usual, vacate his office in order for them to be alone for Owen's interview.

"What's this?" Randolph White asked. "I thought I already had the student interview,"

"Well," old Thorny said, "Owen, you know, is The Voice-you know our school newspaper, The Grave?"

"I know who he is," Mr. White said; he had still not shaken Owen's outstretched hand. "Why didn't he interview me when the other students interviewed me?"

"That was the student subcommittee," Archie Thorndike explained. "Owen has requested 'a private audience' ..."

"Request denied, Owen," said Randolph White, finally shaking Owen's small hand. "I want to have plenty of time to talk with the department heads," Mr. White explained; Owen rubbed his fingers, which were still throbbing from the candidate's handshake. Old Thorny tried to salvage the disaster. "Owen is almost a department head," he said cheerfully.

"Student opinion isn't a department, is it?" Mr. White asked Owen, who was speechless. White was a compact, trimly built man who played an aggressive, relentless game of squash-daily. His wife called him "Randy"; he called her "Sam"-from Samantha. She came from a "meat money" family in the Chicago area; his was a "meat family" background, too-although there was said to be more money in the meat she came from. One of the less-than-kind Chicago newspapers described their wedding as a "meat marriage." Owen remembered from the candidate's dossier that White had been credited with' 'revolutionizing packaging and distribution of meat products"; he'd left meat for education rather recently-when his own children (in his opinion) were in need of a better school; he'd started one up, from scratch, and the school had been quite a success in Lake Forest. Now White's children were in college and White was looking for a "bigger challenge in the education business." In Lake Forest, he'd had no "tradition" to work with; White said he liked the idea of "being a change-maker within a great tradition."

Randy White dressed like a businessman; he looked exceedingly sharp alongside old Archie Thorndike's more rumpled and wrinkled appearance. White wore a steel-gray, pin-striped suit with a crisp white shirt; he liked a thin, gold collar pin that pulled the unusually narrow points of his collar a little too closely together-the pin also thrust the perfectly tight knot of his necktie a little too far forward. He put his hand on top of Owen Meany's head and rumpled Owen's hair; before the famous Nativity of ', Barb Wiggin used to do that to Owen.

"I'll talk to Owen after I get the job!" White said to old Thorny. He smiled at his own joke. "I know what Owen wants, anyway," White said; he winked at Owen. " 'An educator first, a fund-raiser second'-isn't that it?" Owen nodded, but he couldn't speak. "Well, I'll tell you what a headmaster is, Owen-he's a decision-maker. He's both an educator and a fund-raiser, but-first and foremost-he makes

decisions." Then Randy White looked at his watch; he steered old Thorny back into the headmaster's office. "Remember, I've got that plane to catch," White said. "Let's get those department heads together." And just before old Archie Thomdike closed his office door, Owen heard what White said; in Owen's view, he was supposed to hear what White said. "I hope that kid hasn't stopped growing," said Randy White. Then the door to the headmaster's office was closed; The Voice was left speechless; the candidate had not heard a word from Owen Meany. Of course, the Ghost of the Future saw it coming; sometimes I think Owen saw everything that was coming. I remember how he predicted that the school would pick Randolph White. For The Grave, The Voice titled his column "WHITEWASH." He began: "THE TRUSTEES LIKE BUSINESSMEN-THE TRUSTEES ARE BUSINESSMEN! THE FACULTY ARE A BUNCH OF TYPICAL TEACHERS-INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY, THEY'RE ALWAYS SAYING 'ON THE OTHER HAND.' NOW ALONG COMES THIS GUY WHO SAYS HIS SPECIALTY IS MAKING DECISIONS. ONCE HE STARTS MAKING THOSE DECISIONS, HE'LL DRIVE EVERYONE CRAZY-WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE SEES WHAT BRILLIANT DECISIONS THE GUY COMES UP WITH! BUT RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE THINKS SOMEONE WHO MAKES DECISIONS IS JUST WHAT WE NEED. RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE'S A SUCKER FOR A DECISION-MAKER," Owen wrote. "WHAT GRAVESEND NEEDS IS A HEADMASTER WITH A STRONG EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND; MR. WHITE'S BACKGROUND IS MEAT." There was more, and it was worse. Owen suggested that someone check into the admissions policy at the small private day school in Lake Forest; were there any Jews or blacks in Mr. White's school? Mr. Early, in his capacity as faculty adviser to The Grave, killed the column; the part about the faculty being "TYPICAL TEACHERS-INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY" ... that was what forced Mr. Early's hand. Dan Needham agreed that the column should have been killed.

"You can't imply that someone is a racist or an anti-Semite, Owen," Dan told him. "You have to have proof."

Owen sulked about such a stern rejection from The Grave; but he took Dan's advice seriously. He talked to the Gravesend students who came from Lake Forest, Illinois; he encouraged them to write to their mothers and fathers and urge them to inquire about the admissions policy at Mr. White's school. The parents could pretend they were considering the school for their children; they could even ask directly if their children were going to be rubbing shoulders with blacks or Jews. The result-the unhappily second- and thirdhand information-was typically unclear; the parents were told that the school had "no specific admissions policy''; they were also told that the school had no blacks or Jews. Dan Needham had his own story about meeting Randy White; that was after White was offered the job. It was a beautiful spring day-the forsythia and the lilacs were in blossom-and Dan Needham was walking in the main quadrangle with Randy White and his wife, Sam; it was Sam's first visit to the school, and she was interested in the theater. Almost immediately upon the Whites' arrival, Mr. White made his decision to accept the headmastership. Dan said the school had never looked prettier. The grass was trim and a spring-green color, but it had not been mowed so recently that it looked shorn; the ivy was glossy against the red-brick buildings, and the arborvitae and the privet hedges that outlined the quadrangle paths stood in uniform, dark-green contrast to the few, bright-yellow dandelions. Dan let the new headmaster maul the fingers of his right hand; Dan looked into the pretty-blonde blandness of Sam's vacant, detached smile.

"Look at those dandelions, dear," said Randolph White.

' 'They should be ripped out by their roots,'' Mrs. White said decisively.

' 'They should, they should-and they will be!'' said the new headmaster. Dan confessed to Owen and me that the Whites had given him the shivers.

"YOU THINK THEY GIVE YOU THE SHIVERS NOW," Owen said. "JUST WAIT UNTIL HE STARTS MAKING

solved that I would not discuss the sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the diversion of the profits to the Nicaraguan rebels-or the gift from the sultan of Brunei that was supposed to help support the rebels but was instead transferred to the wrong account in a Swiss bank. A ten-million-dollar "mistake"! The Globe and Mail said: "Brunei was only one foreign country approached during the Reagan Administration's attempt to find financial support for the contras after Congress forbade any money's being spent on their behalf by the U.S. Government." But in my Grade English class, the ever-clever Claire Clooney read that sentence aloud to the class and then asked me if I didn't think it was "the awk-wardest sentence alive."