“He thinks his voice is for a purpose; that there’s a reason for his voice being like that,” I said.
“What reason?” my grandmother asked.
Ethel had approached the kitchen door, but she seemed to be waiting, shifting her vast armload of dishes, wondering—possibly—if she should take them into the living room, instead. Germaine positioned herself directly behind Lydia’s chair, which made Lydia tense.
“Owen thinks his voice comes from God,” I said quietly, as Germaine—reaching for Lydia’s unused dessert spoon—dropped the peppermill into Lydia’s water glass.
“Merciful Heavens!” Lydia said; this was a pet phrase of my grandmother’s, and Grandmother eyed Lydia as if this thievery of her favorite language were another manifestation of Lydia’s senility being in advance of her own.
To everyone’s astonishment, Germaine spoke. “I think his voice comes from the Devil,” Germaine said.
“Nonsense!” my grandmother said. “Nonsense to it coming from God—or from the Devil! It comes from granite, that’s what it comes from. He breathed in all that dirt when he was a baby! It made his voice queer and it stunted his growth!”
Lydia, nodding, prevented Germaine from trying to extract the peppermill from her water glass; to be safe, she did it herself. Ethel stumbled into the kitchen door with a great crash; the door swung wide, and Germaine fled the dining room—with absolutely nothing in her hands.
My grandmother sighed deeply; even to Grandmother’s sighing, Lydia nodded—a more modest little nod. “From God,” my grandmother repeated contemptuously. And then she said: “The address and phone number of the voice and singing teacher … I don’t suppose your little friend would have kept it—not if he didn’t intend to use it, I mean?” To this artful question, my grandmother and Lydia exchanged their usual glances; but I considered the question carefully—its many levels of seriousness were apparent to me. I knew this was information that my grandmother had never known—and how it must have interested her! And, of course, I also knew that Owen would never have thrown this information away;
that he never intended to make use of the information was not the point. Owen rarely threw anything away; and something that my mother had given him would not only have been saved—it would have been enshrined!
I am indebted to my grandmother for many things—among them the use of an artful question. “Why would Owen have kept it?” I asked her innocently.
Again, Grandmother sighed; again, Lydia nodded. “Why indeed,” Lydia said sadly. It was my grandmother’s turn to nod. They were both getting old and frail, I observed, but what I was thinking was why I had decided to keep Owen’s probable possession of the singing teacher’s address and phone number to myself. I didn’t know why—not then. What I know now is that Owen Meany would have quickly said it was NO COINCIDENCE.
And what would he have said regarding our discovery that we were not alone in the Christmas use we made of the empty rooms in Waterhouse Hall? Would he have termed it NO COINCIDENCE, too, that we (one afternoon) were engaged in our usual investigations of a second-floor room when we heard another master key engage the lock on the door? I was into the closet in a hurry, fearful that the empty coat hangers would not entirely have stopped chiming together by the time the new intruder entered the room. Owen scooted under the bed; he lay on his back with his hands crossed upon his chest, like a soldier in a hasty grave. At first, we thought Dan had caught us—but Dan was rehearsing The Gravesend Players, unless (in despair) he had fired the lot of them and canceled the production. The only other person it could be was Mr. Brinker-Smith, the biologist—but he was a first-floor resident; Owen and I were so quiet, we didn’t believe our presence could have been detected from the first floor.
“Nap time!” we heard Mr. Brinker-Smith say; Mrs. Brinker-Smith giggled.
It was instantly apparent to Owen and me that Ginger Brinker-Smith had not brought her husband to this empty room in order to nurse him; the twins were not with them—it was “nap time” for the twins, too. It strikes me now that the Brinker-Smiths were blessed with good-spirited initiative, with an admirable and inventive sense of mischief—for how else could they have maintained one of the pleasures of conjugal relations without disturbing their demanding twins? At the time, of course, it struck Owen and me that the Brinker-Smiths were dangerously oversexed; that they should make such reckless use of the dormitory beds, including—as we later learned—systematic process through all the rooms of Waterhouse Hall … well, it was perverse behavior for parents, in Owen’s and my view. Day by day, nap by nap, bed by bed, the Brinker-Smiths were working their way to the fourth floor of the dorm. Since Owen and I were working our way to the first floor, it was perhaps inevitable—as Owen would have suggested—and NO COINCIDENCE that we should have encountered the Brinker-Smiths in a second-floor room.
I saw nothing, but heard much, through the closed closet door. (I had never heard Dan with my mother.) As usual, Owen Meany had a closer, more intense perception of this passionate event than I had: the Brinker-Smiths’ clothes fell on both sides of Owen; Ginger Brinker-Smith’s legendary nursing bra was tossed within inches of Owen’s face. He had to turn his face to the side, Owen told me, in order to avoid the sagging bedspring, which began to make violent, chafing contact with Owen’s nose. Even with his face sideways, the bedspring would occasionally plunge near enough to the floor to scrape against his cheek.
“IT WAS THE NOISE THAT WAS THE WORST OF IT,” he told me tearfully, after the Brinker-Smiths had returned to their twins. “I FELT LIKE I WAS UNDERNEATH THE FLYING YANKEE!”
That the Brinker-Smiths were engaged in a far more creative and original use of Waterhouse Hall than Owen and I could make of the old dormitory had a radical effect on the rest of our Christmas vacation. Shocked and battered, Owen suggested we return to the tamer investigations of 80 Front Street.
“Hardness! Hardness!” Ginger Brinker-Smith had screamed.
“Wetness! Wetness!” Mr. Brinker-Smith had answered her. And bang! bang! bang! beat the bedspring on Owen Meany’s head.
“STUPID ‘HARDNESS,’ STUPID ‘WETNESS,’” Owen complained. “SEX MAKES PEOPLE CRAZY.”
I had only to think of Hester to agree.
And so, because of Owen’s and my first contact with the act of love, we were at 80 Front Street—just hanging around—the day our mailman, Mr. Morrison, announced his resignation from the role of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
“Why are you telling me?” my grandmother asked. “I’m not the director.”
“Dan ain’t on my route,” the glum mailman said.
“I don’t relay messages of this kind—not even to Dan,” my grandmother told Mr. Morrison. “You should go to the next rehearsal and tell Dan yourself.”
Grandmother kept the storm door ajar, and the bitter December air must have been cold against her legs; it was plenty cold for Owen and me, and we were positioned deeper into the hall, behind my grandmother—and were both wearing wool-flannel trousers. We could feel the chill radiating off Mr. Morrison, who held my grandmother’s small bundle of mail in his mittened hand; he appeared reluctant to give her the mail, unless she agreed to carry his message to Dan.
“I ain’t settin’ foot in another of them rehearsals,” Mr. Morrison said, shuffling his high-topped boots, shifting his heavy, leather sack.
“If you were resigning from the post office, would you ask someone else to tell the postmaster?” my grandmother asked him.
Mr. Morrison considered this; his long face was alternately red and blue from the cold. “It ain’t the part I thought it was,” he said to Grandmother.