“Hate who?” I asked. “My stepfather? No—I love Dan!”
“Your best friend—at times, you hate him. Yes?” Dr. Dolder asked.
“No!” I said. “I love Owen—it was an accident.”
“Yes, I know,” Dr. Dolder said. “But nonetheless … your grandmother, perhaps, she is a most difficult reminder—yes?”
“A ‘reminder’?” I said. “I love my grandmother!”
“Yes, I know,” Dr. Dolder said. “But this baseball business—it’s most difficult, I imagine …”
“Yes!” I said. “I hate baseball.”
“Yes, for sure,” Dr. Dolder said. “I’ve never seen a game, so it’s hard for me to imagine exactly … perhaps we should take in a game together?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t play baseball, I don’t even watch it!”
“Yes, I see,” Dr. Dolder said. “You hate it that much—I see!”
“I can’t spell,” I said. “I’m a slow reader, I get tired—I have to keep my finger on the particular sentence, or I’ll lose my place …”
“It must be rather hard—a baseball,” Dr. Dolder said. “Yes?”
“Yes, it’s very hard,” I said; I sighed.
“Yes, I see,” Dr. Dolder said. “Are you tired now? Are you getting tired?”
“It’s the spelling,” I told him. “The spelling and the reading.”
There were photographs on the wall of his office in the Hubbard Infirmary—they were old black-and-white photographs of the clock-faces on the church spires in Zürich; and photographs of the water birds in the Limmat, and of the people feeding the birds from those funny, arched footbridges. Many of the people wore hats; you could almost hear those cathedral clocks sounding the hour.
Dr. Dolder had a quizzical expression on his long, goat-shaped face; his silver-white Vandyke beard was neatly trimmed, but the doctor often tugged its point.
“A baseball,” he said thoughtfully. “Next time, you will bring a baseball—yes?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“And this little baseball-hitter—The Voice, yes?—I would very much like to talk to him, too,” said Dr. Dolder.
“I’ll ask Owen if he’s free,” I said.
“NOT A CHANCE,” said Owen Meany, when I asked him. “THERE’S NOTHING THE MATTER WITH MY SPELLING!”
Toronto: May 11, 1987—I regret that I had the right change to get The Globe and Mail out of the street-corner box; I had three dimes in my pocket, and a sentence in a front-page article proved irresistible. “It was unclear how Mr. Reagan intended to have his Administration maintain support for the contras while remaining within the law.”
Since when did Mr. Reagan care about “remaining within the law”? I wish the president would spend a weekend with a Miami model; he could do a lot less harm that way. Think how relieved the Nicaraguans would be, if only for a weekend! We ought to find a model for the president to spend every weekend with! If we could tire the old geezer out, he wouldn’t be capable of more damaging mischief. Oh, what a nation of moralists the Americans are! With what fervor do they relish bringing their sexual misconduct to light! A pity that they do not bring their moral outrage to bear on their president’s arrogance above the law; a pity that they do not unleash their moral zest on an administration that runs guns to terrorists. But, of course, boudoir morality takes less imagination, and can be indulged in without the effort of keeping up with world affairs—or even bothering to know “the whole story” behind the sexual adventure.
It’s sunny again in Toronto today; the fruit trees are blossoming—especially the pears and apples and crab apples. There’s a chance of showers. Owen liked the rain. In the summer, in the bottom of a quarry, it could be brutally hot, and the dust was always a factor; the rain cooled the rock slabs, the rain held the dust down. “ALL QUARRYMEN LIKE RAIN,” said Owen Meany.
I told my Grade 12 English class that they should reread what Hardy called the first “phase” of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the part called “The Maiden”; although I had drawn their attention to Hardy’s fondness for foreshadowing, the class was especially sleepyheaded at spotting these devices. How could they have read over the death of the horse so carelessly? “Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself,” Hardy writes; he even says, “Her face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess.” And what did the class make of Tess’s physical appearance? “It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was.” They made nothing of it.
“Don’t some of you look like that—to yourselves?” I asked the class. “What do you think about when you see one of yourselves who looks like that?”
Silence.
And what did they think happened at the end of the first “phase”—was Tess seduced, or was she raped? “She was sleeping soundly,” Hardy writes. Does he mean that d’Urberville “did it” to her when she was asleep?
Silence.