I remember—it was at my mother’s funeral—when the Rev. Lewis Merrill told my grandmother that he’d lost my mother’s voice twice. The first time was when Martha got married, because that was when both girls started spending Christmas vacations in Sawyer Depot—my mother would still practice singing carols with the choir, but she was gone to visit her sister by the Sunday of Christmas Vespers. The second time that Pastor Merrill lost my mother’s voice was when she moved to Christ Church—when he lost it forever. But I had not lost her voice until Christmas Eve, 1953, when the town I was born in and grew up in felt so unfamiliar to me; Gravesend just never was my Christmas Eve town.
Of course, I was grateful to have something to do. Although I’d seen every production of A Christmas Carol—including the dress rehearsal—I was especially glad that the final production was available to take up the time on Christmas Eve; I think both Dan and I wanted our time taken up. After the play, Dan had scheduled a cast party—and I understood why he’d done that: to take up every minute until midnight, and even past midnight, so that he wouldn’t be thinking of riding the train to Sawyer Depot (and my mother in the Eastmans’ warm house, waiting for him). I could picture the Eastmans having a hard time on Christmas Eve, too; after the first verse, Aunt Martha would be struggling with each carol.
Dan had wanted to have the cast party at 80 Front Street—and I understood that, too: he wanted my grandmother to be just as busy as he was. Of course, Grandmother would have complained bitterly about the party revelers—and about such a “sundry” guest list, given the diverse personalities and social stations of a typical Dan Needham cast; but Grandmother would, at least, have been occupied. As it was, she refused; Dan had to beg her to get her to see the play.
At first, she gave him every excuse—she couldn’t possibly leave Lydia alone, Lydia was sick, there was some congestion in her lungs or bronchial tubes, and it was out of the question that Lydia could go out to a p
lay; furthermore, Grandmother argued, it being Christmas Eve, she had allowed Ethel to visit her next of kin (Ethel would be gone for Christmas Day, and the next day, too), and surely Dan knew how Lydia hated to be left alone with Germaine.
Dan pointed out that he thought Germaine had been hired, specifically, to look after Lydia. Yes, Grandmother nodded, that was certainly true—nevertheless, the girl was dismal, superstitious company, and what Lydia needed on Christmas Eve was company. It was, Dan politely reasoned, “strictly for company’s sake” that he wanted my grandmother to see A Christmas Carol, and even spend a short time enjoying the festive atmosphere of the cast party. Since my grandmother had refused him the use of 80 Front Street, Dan had decorated the entire third floor of Waterhouse Hall—opening a few of the less-cluttered boys’ rooms, and the common room on that floor, for the cast; his own tiny apartment just wouldn’t suffice. He’d alerted the Brinker-Smiths that there might be a rumpus two floors above them; they were welcome to join the festivities, or plug up the twins’ ears with cotton, as they saw fit.
Grandmother did not see fit to do a damn thing, but she enjoyed Dan’s efforts to cajole her out of her veteran, antisocial cantankerousness, and she agreed to attend the play; as for the cast party, she would see how she felt after the performance. And so it fell to me: the task of escorting Grandmother to the closing-night enactment of A Christmas Carol in the Gravesend Town Hall. I took many precautions along the way, to protect Grandmother from fracturing her hip—although the sidewalks were safely sanded, there’d been no new snowfall, and the well-oiled wood of the old Town Meeting place was slipperier than any surface Grandmother was likely to encounter outdoors.
The hinges of the ancient folding chairs creaked in unison as I led Harriet Wheelwright to a favored center-aisle seat in the third row, our townspeople’s heads turning in the manner that a congregation turns to view a bride—for my grandmother entered the theater as if she were still responding to a curtain call, following her long-ago performance in Maugham’s The Constant Wife. Harriet Wheelwright had a gift for making a regal entry. There was even some scattered applause, which Grandmother quieted with a well-aimed glower; respect, in the form of awe—preferably, silent awe—was something she courted, but hand-clapping was, under the circumstances, vulgar.
It took a full five minutes for her to be comfortably seated—her mink off, but positioned over her shoulders; her scarf loosened, but covering the back of her neck from drafts (which were known to approach from the rear); her hat on, despite the fact that no one seated behind her could see over it (graciously, the gentleman so seated moved). At last, I was free to venture backstage, where I had grown used to the aura of spiritual calm surrounding Owen Meany at the makeup mirror.
The trauma of the Christmas Pageant shone in his eyes like a death in the family; his cold had settled deep in his chest, and a fever drove him to alternate states—first he burned, then he sweated, then he shivered. He needed very little eyeliner to deepen the darkness entombing his eyes, and his nightly, excessive applications of baby powder to his face—which was already as white as the face of a china doll—had covered the makeup table with a silt as fine as plaster dust, in which Owen wrote his name with his finger in square, block letters, the style of lettering favored in the Meany Monument Shop.
Owen had offered no explanation regarding the offense he took at his parents’ attendance at the Christ Church Nativity. When I suggested that his response to their presence in the congregation had been radical and severe, he dismissed me in a fashion he’d perfected—by forgiving me for what I couldn’t be expected to know, and what he would never explain to me: that old UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that the Catholics had perpetrated, and his parents’ inability to rise above what amounted to the RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION they had suffered; yet it was my opinion that Owen was persecuting his parents. Why they accepted such persecution was a mystery to me.
From backstage I was uniquely positioned to search the audience for the acquiescent presence of Mr. and Mrs. Meany; they were not there. My search was rewarded, however, by the discovery of a sanguinary Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman, his eyes darting daggers in all directions, and wringing his hands—as he might around a throat—in his lap. The look of a man who’s come to see What Might Have Been is full of both bloodshed and nostalgia; should Owen succumb to his fever, Mr. Morrison looked ready to play the part.
It was a full house; to my surprise, I’d seen many of the audience at earlier performances. The Rev. Lewis Merrill, for example, was back for a second, maybe even a third time! He always came to dress rehearsals, and often to a later performance; he told Dan he enjoyed watching the actors “settle into” their parts. Being a minister, he must have especially enjoyed A Christmas Carol; it was such a heartfelt rendering of a conversion—not just a lesson in Christian charity, but an example of man’s humbleness before the spiritual world. Even so, I could not find Rector Wiggin in the audience; I had no expectations of finding Barb, either—I would guess their exposure to Owen Meany’s interpretations of the spiritual world was sufficient to inspire them, until next Christmas.
Lewis Merrill, forever in the company of the sour stamina that radiated from his wife, was also in the company of his troubled children; often rebellious, almost always unruly, uniformly sullen, the Merrill children acted out their displeasure at being dragged to an amateur theatrical. The tallish boy, the notorious cemetery vandal, sprawled his legs into the center aisle, indifferently creating a hazard for the elderly, the infirm, and the unwary. The middle child, a girl—her hair so brutally short, in keeping with her square, shapeless body, that she might have been a boy—brooded loudly over her bubble gum. She had sunk herself so low in her seat that her knees caused considerable discomfort to the back of the neck of the unfortunate citizen who sat in front of her. He was a plump, mild, middle-aged man who taught something in the sciences at Gravesend Academy; and when he turned round in his seat to reprove the girl with a scientific glance, she popped a bubble at him with her gum. The third and youngest child, of undetermined sex, crawled under the seats, disturbing the ankles of several surprised theatergoers and coating itself with a film of grime and ashes—and all manner of muck that the patrons had brought in upon their winter boots.
Through all the unpleasantness created by her children, Mrs. Merrill suffered silently. Although they caused her obvious pain, she was unprotesting—since nearly everything caused her pain, she thought it would be unfair to single them out for special distinction. Mr. Merrill gazed undistracted toward center stage, apparently transfixed by the crack where the curtain would part; he appeared to believe that by his special scrutiny of this opening, by a supreme act of concentration, he might inspire the curtains to open. Why, then, was he so surprised when they did?
Why was I so surprised by the applause that greeted old Scrooge in his countinghouse? It was the way the play had opened every night; but it wasn’t until Christmas Eve that it occurred to me how many of these same townspeople must have been present in those bleacher seats that summer day—applauding, or on the verge of applauding, the force with which Owen Meany struck that ball.
And, yes, there was fat Mr. Chickering, whose warm-up jacket had kept me from too close a view of the mortal injury; yes, there was Police Chief Pike. As always, he was stationed by the door, his suspicious eyes roaming the audience as much as they toured the stage, as if Chief Pike suspected that the culprit might have brought the stolen baseball to the play!
“‘If I could work my will,’” said Mr. Fish indignantly, “‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.’”
I saw Mr. Morrison silently move his mouth to every word—in the absence of any lines to learn (as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come), he had learned all of Scrooge’s lines by heart. What had he made of the foul ball that so spectacularly spun my mother around? Had he been there to see Mr. Chickering pinch her splayed knees together, for modesty’s sake?
Just before Owen made contact, my mother had noticed someone in the bleachers; as I remembered it, she was waving to someone just before she was struck. She had not been waving to Mr. Morrison, I was sure; his cynical presence didn’t inspire a greeting as unselfconscious as a wave—that lugubrious mailman did not invite so much as a nod of recognition.
Yet who was that someone my mother had been waving to, whose was the last face she’d seen, the face she’d singled out in the crowd, the face she’d found there and had closed her eyes upon at the moment of her death? With a shudder, I tried to imagine who it could have been—if not my grandmother, if not Dan …
“‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’” Marley’s Ghost told Scrooge; with my attention fixed upon the audience, I had known where I was in the play by the clanking of Marley’s chains.
“‘Mankind was my business,’” Marley told Scrooge. “‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’”
With a shudder, I imagined that it had been my father in the bleachers—it had been my father she’d waved to the instant she was killed! With no idea how I might hope to recognize him, I began with the front row, left-center; I went through the audience, face by face. From my perspective, backstage, the faces in the audience were almost uniformly still, and the attention upon them was not directed toward me; the faces were, at least in part, strangers to me, and—especially in the back rows—smaller than the faces on baseball cards.
It was a futile search; but it was then and there that I started to remember. From backstage, watching the Christmas Eve faces of my fellow townspeople, I could begin to populate those bleacher seats on that summer day—row by row, I could remember a few of the baseball fans who had been there. Mrs. Kenmore, the butcher’s wife, and their son Donny, a rheumatic-fever baby who was not allowed to play baseball; they attended every game. They were in attendance at A Christmas Carol to watch Mr. Kenmore slaughter the part of the Ghost of Christmas Present; but I could see them in their short-sleeved summer garb, with their identically sunburned noses—they always sat down low in the bleachers, because Donny was not agile
and Mrs. Kenmore feared he would fall through the slats.
And there was Mr. Early’s daughter, Maureen—reputed to have wet her pants when Owen Meany tried out for the part of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. She was here tonight, and had been present every night, to watch her father’s vain attempts to make Marley’s Ghost resemble King Lear. She simultaneously worshiped and despised her father, who was a terrible snob and regaled Maureen with both undeserved praise and a staggering list of his expectations for her; at the very least, she would one day have her doctorate—and if she were to indulge her fantasy, and become a movie star, she would make her reputation on the silver screen only after numerous triumphs in “legitimate” theater. Maureen Early was a dreamer who squirmed in her seat—whether she was watching her father overact or watching Owen Meany approach home plate. I remembered that she had been sitting in the top row, squirming beside Caroline O’Day, whose father ran the Chevy dealership. Caroline O’Day was one of those rare parochial-school girls who managed to wear her St. Michael’s uniform—her pleated flannel skirt and matching burgundy knee socks—as if she were a cocktail waitress in a lounge of questionable repute. With boys, Caroline O’Day was as aggressive as a Corvette, and Maureen Early enjoyed her company because Mr. Early thought the O’Days were vulgar. It had not set well with Mr. Early that Caroline’s father, Larry O’Day, had secured the part of Bob Crachit; but Mr. O’Day was younger and handsomer than Mr. Early, and Dan Needham knew that a Chevy salesman’s derring-do was far preferable to Mr. Early’s attempting to turn Bob Crachit into King Lear.
How I remembered them on that summer day—Maureen Early and Caroline O’Day—how they had laughed and squirmed in their seats together when Owen Meany came to bat.
What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats—one day, I was sure, I could “see” everyone who’d been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.
Mr. Arthur Dowling had been there; I could see him shade his eyes with one hand, his other hand shading his wife’s eyes—he was that sort of servant to her. Arthur Dowling was watching A Christmas Carol because his wife, the most officious member of the Town Library Board, was steering her humorless self through the chore of being the Ghost of Christmas Past. Amanda Dowling was a pioneer in challenging sexual stereotypes; she wore men’s clothes—fancy dress, for her, meant a coat and tie—and when she smoked, she blew smoke in men’s faces, this being at the heart of her opinions regarding how men behaved toward women. Both her husband and Amanda were in favor of creating mayhem with sexual stereotypes, or reversing sexual roles as arduously and as self-consciously as possible—hence, he often wore an apron while shopping; hence, her hair was shorter than his, except on her legs and in her armpits, where she grew it long. There were certain positive words in their vocabulary—“European,” among them; women who didn’t shave their armpits or their legs were more “European” than American women, to their undoubted advantage.