“Yes!” I said.
“DO YOU SEE THAT THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESS?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE,” said Owen Meany—my friend, my teacher.
Standing on the sidewalk with Mrs. Brocklebank, I felt the tears start to come.
“Do you have allergies?” Mrs. Brocklebank asked me; I shook my head. I feel so ashamed of myself that—even for a moment—I could consider zapping my Grade 12 girls with a nasty quiz on Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Remembering how I suffered as a student, remembering how much I needed Owen’s help, how could I even think of being a sneaky teacher?
“I think you do have an allergy,” Mrs. Brocklebank concluded from my tears. “Lots of people have allergies and don’t even know; I’ve read about that.”
“It must be the dandelions,” I said; and Mrs. Brocklebank glared at the pestilential weeds with a fresh hatred.
Every spring there are dandelions; they always remind me of the spring term of 1960—the burgeoning of that old decade that once seemed so new to Owen Meany and me. That was the spring when the Search Committee found a new headmaster. That was the decade that would defeat us.
Randolph White had been the headmaster of a small private day school in Lake Forest, Illinois; I’m told that is a super-rich and exclusively WASP community that does its utmost to pretend it is not a suburb of Chicago—but that may be unfair; I’ve never been there. Several Gravesend students came from there, and they unanimously groaned to hear the announcement of Randolph White’s appointment as headmaster at the academy; apparently, the idea that anyone from Lake Forest had followed them to New Hampshire depressed them.
At the time, Owen and I knew a kid from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and he told us that Bloomfield Hills was to Detroit what Lake Forest was to Chicago, and that—in his view—Bloomfield Hills “sucked”; he offered a story about Bloomfield Hills as an example of what he meant—it was a story about a black family that moved there, and they were forced to sell and move out because their neighbors kept burning crosses on their lawn. This shocked Owen and me; in New Hampshire, we thought such things happened only in the South—but a black kid from Atlanta informed us that we knew “shit” about the problem; they burned crosses all over the country, the black kid said, and we weren’t exactly “overwhelmed by a sea of black faces” at Gravesend Academy, were we? No, Owen and I agreed; we were not.
Then another kid from Michigan said that Grosse Pointe was more to Detroit what Lake Forest was to Chicago—that Bloomfield Hills wasn’t a proper analogy—and some other kid argued that Shaker Heights was more to Cleveland what Lake Forest was to Chicago … and so forth. Owen and I were not very knowledgeable of the geography of the country’s rich and exclusive; when a Jewish kid from Highland Park, Illinois, told us that there were “no Jews allowed” in Lake Forest, Owen and I began to wonder what ominous kind of small private day school in Lake Forest our new headmaster had come from.
Owen had another reason to be suspicious of Randolph White. Of all the candidates whom the Search Committee dragged through the school in our tenth-grade year, only Randolph White had not accepted the invitation for A PRIVATE AUDIENCE with The Voice. Owen had met Mr. White outside Archie Thorndike’s office; Thorny introduced the candidate to The Voice and told them he would, as usual, vacate his office in order for them to be alone for Owen’s interview.
“What’s this?” Randolph White asked. “I thought I already had the student interview.”
“Well,” old Thorny said, “Owen, you know, is The Voice—you know our school newspaper, The Grave?”
“I know who he is,” Mr. White said; he had still not shaken Owen’s outstretched hand. “Why didn’t he interview me when the other students interviewed me?”
“That was the student subcommittee,” Archie Thorndike explained. “Owen has requested ‘a private audience’…”
“Request denied, Owen,” said Randolph White, finally shaking Owen’s small hand. “I want to have plenty of time to talk with the department heads,” Mr. White explained; Owen rubbed his fingers, which were still throbbing from the candidate’s handshake.
Old Thorny tried to salvage the disaster. “Owen is almost a department head,” he said cheerfully.
“Student opinion isn’t a department, is it?” Mr. White asked Owen, who was speechless. White was a compact, trimly built man who played an aggressive, relentless game of squash—daily. His wife called him “Randy”; he called her “Sam”—from Samantha. She came from a “meat money” family in the Chicago area; his was a “meat family” background, too—although there was said to be more money in the meat she came from. One of the less-than-kind Chicago newspapers described their wedding as a “meat marriage.” Owen remember
ed from the candidate’s dossier that White had been credited with “revolutionizing packaging and distribution of meat products”; he’d left meat for education rather recently—when his own children (in his opinion) were in need of a better school; he’d started one up, from scratch, and the school had been quite a success in Lake Forest. Now White’s children were in college and White was looking for a “bigger challenge in the education business.” In Lake Forest, he’d had no “tradition” to work with; White said he liked the idea of “being a change-maker within a great tradition.”
Randy White dressed like a businessman; he looked exceedingly sharp alongside old Archie Thorndike’s more rumpled and wrinkled appearance. White wore a steel-gray, pin-striped suit with a crisp white shirt; he liked a thin, gold collar pin that pulled the unusually narrow points of his collar a little too closely together—the pin also thrust the perfectly tight knot of his necktie a little too far forward. He put his hand on top of Owen Meany’s head and rumpled Owen’s hair; before the famous Nativity of ’53, Barb Wiggin used to do that to Owen.
“I’ll talk to Owen after I get the job!” White said to old Thorny. He smiled at his own joke. “I know what Owen wants, anyway,” White said; he winked at Owen. “‘An educator first, a fund-raiser second’—isn’t that it?” Owen nodded, but he couldn’t speak. “Well, I’ll tell you what a headmaster is, Owen—he’s a decision-maker. He’s both an educator and a fund-raiser, but—first and foremost—he makes decisions.” Then Randy White looked at his watch; he steered old Thorny back into the headmaster’s office. “Remember, I’ve got that plane to catch,” White said. “Let’s get those department heads together.” And just before old Archie Thorndike closed his office door, Owen heard what White said; in Owen’s view, he was supposed to hear what White said. “I hope that kid hasn’t stopped growing,” said Randy White. Then the door to the headmaster’s office was closed; The Voice was left speechless; the candidate had not heard a word from Owen Meany.
Of course, the Ghost of the Future saw it coming; sometimes I think Owen saw everything that was coming. I remember how he predicted that the school would pick Randolph White. For The Grave, The Voice titled his column “WHITEWASH.” He began: “THE TRUSTEES LIKE BUSINESSMEN—THE TRUSTEES ARE BUSINESSMEN! THE FACULTY ARE A BUNCH OF TYPICAL TEACHERS—INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY, THEY’RE ALWAYS SAYING ‘ON THE OTHER HAND.’ NOW ALONG COMES THIS GUY WHO SAYS HIS SPECIALTY IS MAKING DECISIONS. ONCE HE STARTS MAKING THOSE DECISIONS, HE’LL DRIVE EVERYONE CRAZY—WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE SEES WHAT BRILLIANT DECISIONS THE GUY COMES UP WITH! BUT RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE THINKS SOMEONE WHO MAKES DECISIONS IS JUST WHAT WE NEED. RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE’S A SUCKER FOR A DECISION-MAKER,” Owen wrote. “WHAT GRAVESEND NEEDS IS A HEADMASTER WITH A STRONG EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND; MR. WHITE’S BACKGROUND IS MEAT.” There was more, and it was worse. Owen suggested that someone check into the admissions policy at the small private day school in Lake Forest; were there any Jews or blacks in Mr. White’s school? Mr. Early, in his capacity as faculty adviser to The Grave, killed the column; the part about the faculty being “TYPICAL TEACHERS—INDECISIVE, WISHY-WASHY” … that was what forced Mr. Early’s hand. Dan Needham agreed that the column should have been killed.
“You can’t imply that someone is a racist or an anti-Semite, Owen,” Dan told him. “You have to have proof.”
Owen sulked about such a stern rejection from The Grave; but he took Dan’s advice seriously. He talked to the Gravesend students who came from Lake Forest, Illinois; he encouraged them to write to their mothers and fathers and urge them to inquire about the admissions policy at Mr. White’s school. The parents could pretend they were considering the school for their children; they could even ask directly if their children were going to be rubbing shoulders with blacks or Jews. The result—the unhappily second- and thirdhand information—was typically unclear; the parents were told that the school had “no specific admissions policy”; they were also told that the school had no blacks or Jews.
Dan Needham had his own story about meeting Randy White; that was after White was offered the job. It was a beautiful spring day—the forsythia and the lilacs were in blossom—and Dan Needham was walking in the main quadrangle with Randy White and his wife, Sam; it was Sam’s first visit to the school, and she was interested in the theater. Almost immediately upon the Whites’ arrival, Mr. White made his decision to accept the headmastership. Dan said the school had never looked prettier. The grass was trim and a spring-green color, but it had not been mowed so recently that it looked shorn; the ivy was glossy against the red-brick buildings, and the arborvitae and the privet hedges that outlined the quadrangle paths stood in uniform, dark-green contrast to the few, bright-yellow dandelions. Dan let the new headmaster maul the fingers of his right hand; Dan looked into the pretty-blonde blandness of Sam’s vacant, detached smile.
“Look at those dandelions, dear,” said Randolph White.
“They should be ripped out by their roots,” Mrs. White said decisively.
“They should, they should—and they will be!” said the new headmaster.