I was born in the Wheelwright house on Front Street; and I used to wonder why my mother decided to have me and to never explain a word about me—either to me or to her own mother and sister. My mother was not a brazen character. Her pregnancy, and her refusal to discuss it, must have struck the Wheelwrights with all the more severity because my mother had such a tranquil, modest nature.
She’d met a man on the Boston & Maine Railroad: that was all she’d say.
My Aunt Martha was a senior in college, and already engaged to be married, when my mother announced that she wasn’t even going to apply for college entrance. My grandfather was dying, and perhaps this focusing of my grandmother’s attention distracted her from demanding of my mother what the family had demanded of Aunt Martha: a college education. Besides, my mother argued, she could be of help at home, with her dying father—and with the strain and burden that his dying put upon her mother. And the Rev. Lewis Merrill, the pastor at the Congregational Church, and my mother’s choirmaster, had convinced my grandparents that my mother’s singing voice was truly worthy of professional training. For her to engage in serious voice and singing lessons, the Rev. Mr. Merrill said, was as sensible an “investment,” in my mother’s case, as a college education.
At this point in my mother’s life, I used to feel there was a conflict of motives. If singing and voice lessons were so important and serious to her, why did she arrange to have them only once a week? And if my grandparents accepted Mr. Merrill’s assessment of my mother’s voice, why did they object so bitterly to her spending one night a week in Boston? It seemed to me that she should have moved to Boston and taken lessons every day! But I supposed the source of the conflict was my grandfather’s terminal illness—my mother’s desire to be of help at home, and my grandmother’s need to have her there.
It was an early-morning voice or singing lesson; that was why she had to spend the previous night in Boston, which was an hour and a half from Gravesend—by train. Her singing and voice teacher was very popular; early morning was the only time he had for my mother. She was fortunate he would see her at all, the Rev. Lewis Merrill had said, because he normally saw only professionals; although my mother, and my Aunt Martha, had clocked many singing hours in the Congregational Church Choir, Mother was not a “professional.” She simply had a lovely voice, and she was engaged—in her entirely unrebellious, even timid way—in training it.
My mother’s decision to curtail her education was more acceptable to her parents than to her sister; Aunt Martha not only disapproved—my aunt (who is a lovely woman) resented my mother, if only slightly. My mother had the better voice, she was the prettier. When they’d been growing up in the big house on Front Street, it was my Aunt Martha who brought the boys from Gravesend Academy home to meet my grandmother and grandfather—Martha was the older, and the first to bring home “beaus,” as my mother called them. But once the boys saw my mother—even before she was old enough to date—that was usually the end of their interest in Aunt Martha.
And now this: an unexplained pregnancy! According to my Aunt Martha, my grandfather was “already out of it”—he was so very nearly dead that he never knew my mother was pregnant, “although she took few pains to hide it,” Aunt Martha said. My poor grandfather, in Aunt Martha’s words to me, “died worrying why your mother was overweight.”
In my Aunt Martha’s day, to grow up in Gravesend was to understand that Boston was a city of sin. And even though my mother had stayed in a highly approved and chaperoned women’s residential hotel, she had managed to have her “fling,” as Aunt Martha called it, with the man she’d met on the Boston & Maine.
My mother was so calm, so unrattled by either criticism or slander, that she was quite comfortable with her sister Martha’s use of the word “fling”—in truth, I heard Mother use the word fondly.
“My fling,” she would occasionally call me, with the greatest affection. “My little fling!”
It was from my cousins that I first heard that my mother was thought to be “a little simple”; it would have been from their mother—from Aunt Martha—that they would have heard this. By the time I heard these insinuations—“a little simple”—they were no longer fighting words; my mother had been dead for more than ten years.
Yet my mother was more than a natural beauty with a beautiful voice and questionable reasoning powers; Aunt Martha had good grounds to suspect that my grandmother and grandfather spoiled my mother. It was not just that she was the baby, it was her temperament—she was never angry or sullen, she was not given to tantrums or to self-pity. She had such a sweet-tempered disposition, it was impossible to stay angry with her. As Aunt Martha said: “She never appeared to be as assertive as she was.” She simply did what she wanted to do, and then said, in her engaging fashion, “Oh! I feel terrible that what I’ve done has upset you, and I intend to shower you with such affection that you’ll forgive me and love me as much as you would if I’d done the right thing!” And it worked!
It worked, at least, until she was killed—and she couldn’t promise to remedy how upsetting that was; there was no way she could make up for that.
And even after she went ahead and had me, unexplained, and named me after the founding father of Gravesend—even after she managed to make all that acceptable to her mother and sister, and to the town (not to mention to the Congregational Church, where she continued to sing in the choir and was often a participant in various parish-house functions) … even after she’d carried off my illegitimate birth (to everyone’s satisfaction, or so it appeared), she still took the train to Boston every Wednesday, she still spent every Wednesday night in the dreaded city in order to be bright and early for her voice or singing lesson.
When I got a little older, I resented it—sometimes. Once when I had the mumps, and another time when I had the chicken pox, she canceled the trip; she stayed with me. And there was another time, when Owen and I had been catching alewives in the tidewater culvert that ran into the Squamscott under the Swasey Parkway and
I slipped and broke my wrist; she didn’t take the Boston & Maine that week. But all the other times—until I was ten and she married the man who would legally adopt me and become like a father to me; until then—she kept going to Boston, overnight. Until then, she kept singing. No one ever told me if her voice improved.
That’s why I was born in my grandmother’s house—a grand, brick, Federal monster of a house. When I was a child, the house was heated by a coal furnace; the coal chute was under the ell of the house where my bedroom was. Since the coal was always delivered very early in the morning, its rumbling down the chute was often the sound that woke me up. On the rare coincidence of a Thursday morning delivery (when my mother was in Boston), I used to wake up to the sound of the coal and imagine that, at that precise moment, my mother was starting to sing. In the summer, with the windows open, I woke up to the birds in my grandmother’s rose garden. And there lies another of my grandmother’s opinions, to take root alongside her opinions regarding rocks and trees: anyone could grow mere flowers or vegetables, but a gardener grew roses; Grandmother was a gardener.
The Gravesend Inn was the only other brick building of comparable size to my grandmother’s house on Front Street; indeed, Grandmother’s house was often mistaken for the Gravesend Inn by travelers following the usual directions given in the center of town: “Look for the big brick place on your left, after you pass the academy.”
My grandmother was peeved at this—she was not in the slightest flattered to have her house mistaken for an inn. “This is not an inn,” she would inform the lost and bewildered travelers, who’d been expecting someone younger to greet them and fetch their luggage. “This is my home,” Grandmother would announce. “The inn is further along,” she would say, waving her hand in the general direction. “Further along” is fairly specific compared to other New Hampshire forms of directions; we don’t enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire—we tend to think that if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t belong where you are. In Canada, we give directions more freely—to anywhere, to anyone who asks.
In our Federal house on Front Street, there was also a secret passageway—a bookcase that was actually a door that led down a staircase to a dirt-floor basement that was entirely separate from the basement where the coal furnace was. That was just what it was: a bookcase that was a door that led to a place where absolutely nothing happened—it was simply a place to hide. From what? I used to wonder. That this secret passageway to nowhere existed in our house did not comfort me; rather, it provoked me to imagine what there might be that was sufficiently threatening to hide from—and it is never comforting to imagine that.
I took little Owen Meany into that passageway once, and I got him lost in there, in the dark, and I frightened the hell out of him; I did this to all my friends, of course, but frightening Owen Meany was always more special than frightening anyone else. It was his voice, that ruined voice, that made his fear unique. I have been engaged in private imitations of Owen Meany’s voice for more than thirty years, and that voice used to prevent me from imagining that I could ever write about Owen, because—on the page—the sound of his voice is impossible to convey. And I was prevented from imagining that I could even make Owen a part of oral history, because the thought of imitating his voice—in public—is so embarrassing. It has taken me more than thirty years to get up the nerve to share Owen’s voice with strangers.
My grandmother was so upset by the sound of Owen Meany’s voice, protesting his abuse in the secret passageway, that she spoke to me, after Owen had gone home. “I don’t want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand,” Grandmother said. “You’ve seen the mice caught in the mousetraps?” she asked me. “I mean caught—their little necks broken—I mean absolutely dead,” Grandmother said. “Well, that boy’s voice,” my grandmother told me, “that boy’s voice could bring those mice back to life!”
And it occurs to me now that Owen’s voice was the voice of all those murdered mice, coming back to life—with a vengeance.
I don’t mean to make my grandmother sound insensitive. She had a maid named Lydia, a Prince Edward Islander, who was our cook and housekeeper for years and years. When Lydia developed a cancer and her right leg was amputated, my grandmother hired two other maids—one to look after Lydia. Lydia never worked again. She had her own room, and her favorite wheelchair routes through the huge house, and she became the entirely served invalid that, one day, my grandmother had imagined she herself might become—with someone like Lydia looking after her. Delivery boys and guests in our house frequently mistook Lydia for my grandmother, because Lydia looked quite regal in her wheelchair and she was about my grandmother’s age; she had tea with my grandmother every afternoon, and she played cards with my grandmother’s bridge club—with those very same ladies whose tea she had once fetched. Shortly before Lydia died, even my Aunt Martha was struck by the resemblance Lydia bore to my grandmother. Yet to various guests and delivery boys, Lydia would always say—with a certain indignation of tone that was borrowed from my grandmother—“I am not Missus Wheelwright, I am Missus Wheelwright’s former maid.” It was exactly in the manner that Grandmother would claim that her house was not the Gravesend Inn.
So my grandmother was not without humanity. And if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. Even in her rose garden, she did not want to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, “What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?”
From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative.
But this story really is about Owen Meany, about how I have apprenticed myself to his voice. His cartoon voice has made an even stronger impression on me than has my grandmother’s imperious wisdom.
Grandmother’s memory began to elude her near the end. Like many old people, she had a firmer grasp of her own childhood than she had of the lives of her own children, or her grandchildren, or her great-grandchildren. The more recent the memory was, the more poorly remembered. “I remember you as a little boy,” she told me, not long ago, “but when I look at you now, I don’t know who you are.” I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself. And in one conversation about her memory, I asked her if she remembered little Owen Meany.
“The labor man?” she said. “The unionist!”
“No, Owen Meany,” I said.