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 ’53; 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 Brinker-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 IT!”
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 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 ’57, 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 80 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 ’59—when Owen and I would be completing our first and lowly ninth-grade year at the academy; we would graduate with the class of ’62. 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 IS 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.”