That New Year’s Eve, which Owen and Hester and I celebrated at 80 Front Street—in the desultory manner that describes the partying habits of the late teen years (Hester was twenty), and in a relatively quiet manner (because Grandmother had gone to bed)—there were only 3,205 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.
Hester would usher in the New Year more emphatically than Owen or I could manage; she greeted the New Year on her knees—in the snow, in the rose garden, where Grandmother would not hear her retching up her rum and Coke (a concoction she had learned to fancy in the budding days of her romance in Tortola). I was less enthusiastic about the watershed changing of the year; I fell asleep watching Charlton Heston’s agonies in Ben-Hur—somewhere between the chariot race and the leper colony, I nodded off. Owen watched the whole movie; during the commercials, he turned his detached attention to the window that overlooked the rose garden, where Hester’s pale figure could be discerned in the ghostly glow of the moonlight against the snow. It is a wonder to me that the changing of the year had so little effect on Owen Meany—when I consider that he thought he “knew,” at the time, exactly how many years he had left. Yet he appeared content to watch Ben-Hur, and Hester throwing up; maybe that’s what faith is—exactly that contentment, even facing the future.
By our next New Year’s Eve together, in 1962, there would be 11,300 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. And once again, on the morning of New Year’s Day, my grandmother would notice the frozen splatter of Hester’s vomit in the snow—defacing that usually pristine area surrounding the birdbath in the center of the rose garden.
“Merciful Heavens!” Grandmother would say. “What’s all that mess around the birdbath?”
And just as he’d said the year before, Owen Meany said, “DIDN’T YOU HEAR THE BIRDS LAST NIGHT, MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT? I’D BETTER HAVE A LOOK AT WHAT ETHEL’S PUTTING IN YOUR BIRD FEEDERS.”
Owen would have respected a book I read only two years ago: Vietnam War Almanac, by Col. Harry G. Summers, Jr. Colonel Summers is a combat infantry veteran of Korea and Vietnam; he doesn’t beat around the bush, as we used to say in Gravesend. Here is the first sentence of his very fine book: “One of the great tragedies of the Vietnam war is that although American armed forces defeated the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in every major battle, the United States still suffered the greatest defeat in its history.” Imagine that! On the first page of his book, Colonel Summers tells a story about President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in 1945, when the Allied powers were trying to decide the composition of the postwar world. President Roosevelt wanted to give Indo-China to China’s leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, but the general knew a little Vietnamese history and tradition; Chiang Kai-shek understood that the Vietnamese were not Chinese, and that they would never allow themselves to be comfortably absorbed by the Chinese people. To Roosevelt’s generous offer—to give him Indo-China—Chiang replied: “We don’t want it.” Colonel Summers points out that it took the United States thirty years—and a war that cost them nearly fifty thousand American lives—to find out what Chiang Kai-shek explained to President Roosevelt in 1945. Imagine that!
Is it any surprise that President Reagan is promising “firmness” in the Persian Gulf, and that his “plans are unclear”?
Soon the school year will be over; soon the BSS girls will be gone. It is hot and humid in the summer in Toronto, but I like to watch the sprinklers wetting down the grass on the St. Clair Reservoir; they keep Winston Churchill Park as green as a jungle—all summer long. And the Rev. Katherine Keeling’s family owns an island in Georgian Bay; Katherine always invites me to visit her—I usually go there at least once every summer—and so I get my annual fix of swimming in fresh water and fooling around with someone else’s kids. Lots of wet life vests, lots of leaky canoes, and the smell of pine needles and wood preservative—a little of that lasts a long time for a fussy old bachelor like me.
And in the summers I go to Gravesend and visit with Dan, too. It would hurt Dan’s feelings if I didn’t come to see a theatrical performance of his Gravesend summer-school students; he understands why I decline to see the performances of The Gravesend Players. Mr. Fish is quite old, but still acting; many of the town’s older amateurs are still acting for Dan, but I’d just as soon not see them anymore. And I don’t care for the view of the audience that, for a period of time, more than twenty years ago, intrigued Owen Meany and me.
“IS HE OUT THERE TONIGHT?” Owen would whisper to me. “DO YOU SEE HIM?”
In 1961, Owen and I searched the audience for that special face in the bleacher seats—maybe a familiar face; and maybe not. We were looking for the man who responded—or did not respond—to my mother’s wave. It was a face, we were sure, that would have registered some expression—upon witnessing the results of Owen Meany making contact with that ball. It was a face, we suspected, that my mother would have seen in many audiences before—not just at Little League games, but staring out at her from the potted orange trees and the tanks full of tropical fish at The Orange Grove. We were looking for a face that “The Lady in Red” would have sung to … at least once, if not many times.
“Do you see him?” I would ask Owen Meany.
“NOT TONIGHT,” Owen would say. “EITHER HE’S NOT HERE, OR HE’S NOT THINKING ABOUT YOUR MOTHER,” he said one night.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“SUPPOSE DAN DIRECTED A PLAY ABOUT MIAMI?” said Owen Meany. “SUPPOSE THE GRAVESEND PLAYERS PUT ON A PLAY ABOUT A SUPPER CLUB IN MIAMI, AND IT WAS CALLED THE ORANGE GROVE, AND THERE WAS A SINGER CALLED ‘THE LADY IN RED,’ AND SHE SANG ONLY THE OLD SINATRA SONGS.”
“But there is no play like that,” I said.
“JUST SUPPOSE!” Owen said. “USE YOUR IMAGINATION. GOD CAN TELL YOU WHO YOUR FATHER IS, BUT YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IT— YOU’VE GOT TO GIVE GOD A LITTLE HELP! JUST SUPPOSE THERE WAS SUCH A PLAY!”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m supposing.”
“AND WE CALLED THE PLAY EITHER THE ORANGE GROVE OR THE LADY IN RED— DON’T YOU SUPPOSE THAT YOUR FATHER WOULD COME TO SEE THAT PLAY? AND DON’T YOU SUPPOSE WE COULD RECOGNIZE HIM THEN?” asked Owen Meany.
“I suppose so,” I said.
The problem was, Owen and I didn’t dare tell Dan about The Orange Grove and “The Lady in Red”; we weren’t sure that Dan didn’t already know. I thought it w
ould hurt Dan to know that he wasn’t enough of a father to me—for wouldn’t he interpret my curiosity regarding my biological father as an indication that he (Dan) was less than adequate in his adoptive role?
And if Dan didn’t know about The Orange Grove and “The Lady in Red,” wouldn’t that hurt him, too? It made my mother’s past—before Dan—appear more romantic than I ever thought it had been. Why would Dan Needham want to dwell on my mother’s romantic past?
Owen suggested that there was a way to get The Gravesend Players to perform a play about a female vocalist in a Miami supper club without involving Dan in our discovery.
“I COULD WRITE THE PLAY,” said Owen Meany. “I COULD SUBMIT IT TO DAN AS THE FIRST ORIGINAL PRODUCTION OF THE GRAVESEND PLAYERS. I COULD TELL IN ONE SECOND IF DAN ALREADY KNEW THE STORY.”
“But you don’t know the story,” I pointed out to Owen. “You don’t have a story, you just have a setting—and a very sketchy cast of characters.”
“IT CAN’T BE VERY HARD TO MAKE UP A GOOD STORY,” said Owen Meany. “CLEARLY, YOUR MOTHER HAD A TALENT FOR IT—AND SHE WASN’T EVEN A WRITER.”
“I suppose you’re a writer,” I said; Owen shrugged.
“IT CAN’T BE VERY HARD,” Owen repeated.
But I said I didn’t want him to try it and take a chance of hurting Dan; if Dan already knew the story—even if he knew only the “setting”—he would be hurt, I said.