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 Farnum—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 ’58, 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 master
ed 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 Gravesend 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 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 1958, 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 that 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 VIGOROUSNESS 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—ANY 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 DANCES!”
The Voice was our voice; he championed our causes; he made us proud of ourselves in an atmosphere that 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 1959, Hester arrived prepared. After all, Owen had sent h
er 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 80 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 80 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.