“I see quite enough of Mister Fish, too,” Grandmother remarked.
The rave review that Owen received from The Gravesend News-Letter appeared to drive Mr. Fish into a silent depression; when he came to 80 Front Street after dinner, he sighed often and said nothing. As for our morose mailman, Mr. Morrison, it is incalculable how much he suffered to hear of Owen’s success. He stooped under his leather sack as if he shouldered a burden much more demanding than the excess of Christmas mail. How did it make him feel to deliver all those copies of The Gravesend News-Letter, wherein Mr. Morrison’s former role was described as “not only pivotal but principal”—and Owen Meany was showered with the kind of praise Mr. Morrison might have imagined for himself?
In the first week, Dan told me, Mr. Morrison did not come to watch the production. To Dan’s surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Meany had not made an appearance, either.
“Don’t they read The News-Letter?” Dan asked me.
I could not imagine Mrs. Meany reading; the demands on her time were too severe. With all her staring—at walls, into corners, not quite out the window, into the dying fire, at my mother’s dummy—when would Mrs. Meany have the time to read a newspaper? And Mr. Meany was not even one of those men who read about sports. I imagined, too, that the Meanys would never have heard about A Christmas Carol from Owen; after all, he hadn’t wanted them to know about the pageant.
Perhaps one of the quarrymen would say something about the play to Mr. Meany; maybe a stonecutter or the derrickman’s wife had seen it, or at least read about it in The News-Letter.
“Hear your boy’s the star of the theater,” someone might say.
But I could hear, too, how Owen would dismiss it.
“I’M JUST HELPING DAN OUT. HE GOT IN A FIX—ONE OF THE GHOSTS QUIT. YOU KNOW MORRISON, THE COWARDLY MAILMAN? WELL, IT WAS A CASE OF STAGE FRIGHT. IT’S A VERY SMALL PART—NOT EVEN A SPEAKING PART. I WOULDN’T RECOMMEND THE PLAY, EITHER—IT’S NOT VERY BELIEVABLE. AND BESIDES, YOU NEVER GET TO SEE MY FACE. I DON’T THINK I’M ONSTAGE FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES....”
I was sure that was how Owen would have handled it. I thought he was excessively proud of himself—and that he treated his parents harshly. We all go through a phase—it lasts a lifetime, for some of us—when we’re embarrassed by our parents; we don’t want them hanging around us because we’re afraid they’ll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them. But Owen seemed to me to suffer this embarrassment more than most; that’s why I thought he held his parents at such a great distance from himself. And he was, in my opinion, exceedingly bossy toward his father. At an age when most of our peers were enduring how much their parents bossed them around, Owen was always telling his father what to do.
My sympathy for Owen’s embarrassment was slight. After all, I missed my mother; I would have enjoyed her hanging around me. Because Dan wasn’t my real father, I had never developed any resentment toward Dan; I always loved having Dan around—my grandmother, although she was a loving grandmother, was aloof.
“Owen,” Dan said one evening. “Would you like me to invite your parents to see the play? Maybe for our last performance—on Christmas Eve?”
“I THINK THEY’RE BUSY ON CHRISTMAS EVE,” Owen said.
“How about one of the earlier evenings, then?” Dan asked. “Some evening soon—shall I invite them? Any evening would be fine.”
“THEY’RE NOT EXACTLY THEATERGOING TYPES,” Owen said. “I DON’T MEAN TO INSULT YOU, DAN, BUT I’M AFRAID MY PARENTS WOULD BE BORED.”
“But surely they’d enjoy seeing you, Owen,” Dan said.
“Wouldn’t they like your performance?”
“THE ONLY STORIES THEY LIKE ARE TRUE STORIES,” Owen said. “THEY’RE RATHER REALISTIC, THEY DON’T GET TOO EXCITED ABOUT MADE-UP STORIES. ANYTHING THAT’S SORT OF MAKE-BELIEVE—THAT’S NOT FOR THEM. AND ANYTHING WITH GHOSTS—THAT’S OUT.”
“Ghosts are out?” Dan asked.
“ALL THAT KIND OF STUFF IS OUT—WITH THEM,” Owen said. But—listening to him—I found I had just the opposite impression of his parents. I thought that Owen Meany’s mother and father believed only in the so-called make-believe; that ghosts were all they believed in—that spirits were all they listened to. “WHAT I MEAN IS, DAN,” Owen said, “IS THAT I’D RATHER NOT INVITE MY PARENTS. IF THEY COME, OKAY; BUT I THINK THEY WON’T.”
“Sure, sure,” Dan said. “Anything you say, Owen.”
Dan Needham suffered from my mother’s affliction: he, too, couldn’t keep his hands off Owen Meany. Dan was not a hair-messer, not a patter of butts or shoulders. Dan grabbed your hands and mashed them, sometimes until your knuckles and his cracked together. But Dan’s manifestations of physical affection for Owen exceeded, even, his fondness for me; Dan had the good instincts to keep his distance from me—to be like a father to me, but not to assert himself too exactly in the role. Because of a physical caution that Dan expressed when he touched me, he was less restrained with Owen, whose father never once (at least, not in my presence) touched him. I think Dan Needham knew, too, that Owen was not ever handled at home.
There was a fourth curtain call on Saturday night, and Dan sent Owen out onstage alone. It was apparent that the audience wanted Owen alone; Mr. Fish had already been out onstage with Owen, and by himself—it was clearly Owen whom the crowd adored.
The audience rose to greet him. The peak of his death-black hood was a trifle pointy, and too tall for Owen’s small head; it had flopped over to one side, giving Owen a gnomish appearance and a slightly cocky, puckish attitude. When he flipped the hood back and showed the audience his beaming face, a young girl in one of the front rows fainted; she was about our age—maybe twelve or thirteen—and she dropped down like a sack of grain.
“It was quite warm where we were sitting,” the girl’s mother said, after Dan made sure the girl had recovered.
“STUPID GIRL!” Owen said, backstage. He was his own makeup man. Even though his face remained concealed throughout his performance by the overlarge, floppy hood, he whitened his face with baby powder and blackened the already-dark sockets under his eyes with eyeliner. He wanted even the merest glimpse that the audience might get of him to be properly ghostly; that his cold was worsening enhanced the pallor he desired.
He was coughing pretty regularly by the time Dan drove him home. The last Sunday before Christmas—the day of our pageant—was tomorrow.
“He sounds a little sicker than I had in mind,” Dan told me on our way back to town. “I may have to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come myself. Or maybe—if Owen’s too sick—maybe you can take the part.”
But I was just a Joseph; I felt that Owen Meany had already chosen me for the only part I could play.
It snowed overnight, not a major storm; then the temperature kept dropping, until it was too cold to snow. A new coat of flat-white, flatter than church-white, lay spread over Gravesend that Sunday morning; the wind, which is the cruelest kind of cold, kicked up wisps and kite tails of the dry powder and made the empty rain gutters at 80 Front Street rattle and moan; the gutters were empty because the new snow was too cold to cling.