’Twas not the season to be jolly—although dear Dan Needham tried. Dan drank too much, and he filled the empty, echoing dormitory with his strident caroling; his rendition of the Christmas carols was quite painfully a far cry from my mother’s singing. And whenever Owen would join Dan for a verse of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” or—worse—“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” the old stone stairwells of Dan’s dorm resounded with a dirgeful music that was not at all Christmasy but strictly mournful; they were the voices of the ghosts of those Gravesend boys unable to go home for Christmas, singing to their faraway families.
The Gravesend dormitories were named after the long-ago, dead-and-buried faculty and headmasters of the school: Abbot, Amen, Bancroft, Dunbar, Gilman, Gorham, Hooper, Lambert, Perkins, Porter, Quincy, Scott. Dan Needham lived in Waterhouse Hall, so named for some deceased curmudgeon of a classicist, a Latin teacher named Amos Waterhouse, whose rendering of Christmas carols in Latin—I was sure—could not have been worse than the gloomy muddle made of them by Dan and Owen Meany.
Grandmother’s response to my mother being dead for Christmas was to refuse to participate in the seasonal decoration of 80 Front Street; the wreaths were nailed too low on the doors, and the bottom half of the Christmas tree was overhung with tinsel and ornaments—the result of Lydia applying her heavy-handed touch at wheelchair level.
“We’d all have been better off in Sawyer Depot,” Dan Needham announced, in his cups.
Owen sighed. “I GUESS I’LL NEVER GET TO GO TO SAWYER DEPOT,” he said morosely.
Where Owen and I went instead was into every room of every boy who’d gone home for Christmas from Waterhouse Hall; Dan Needham had a master key. Almost every afternoon, Dan rehearsed The Gravesend Players for their annual version of A Christmas Carol; it was becoming old hat for many of the players, but—to freshen their performances—Dan made them change roles from one Christmas to the next. Hence, Mr. Fish, who one year had been Marley’s Ghost—and another year, the Ghost of Christmas Past—was now Scrooge himself. After years of using conventionally adorable children who muffed their lines, Dan had begged Owen to be Tiny Tim, but Owen said that everyone would laugh at him—if not on sight, at least when he first spoke—and besides: Mrs. Walker was playing Tiny Tim’s mother. That, Owen claimed, would give him THE SHIVERS.
It was bad enough, Owen maintained, that he was subject to seasonal ridicule for the role he played in the Christ Church Christmas Pageant. “JUST YOU WAIT,” he said darkly to me. “THE WIGGINS ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE ME THE STUPID ANGEL AGAIN!”
It would be my first Christmas pageant, since I was usually in Sawyer Depot for the last Sunday before Christmas; but Owen repeatedly complained that he was always cast as the Announcing Angel—a role forced upon him by the Rev. Captain Wiggin and his stewardess wife, Barbara, who maintained that there was “no one cuter” for the part than Owen, whose chore it was to descend—in a “pillar of light” (with the substantial assistance of a cranelike apparatus to which he was attached, with wires, like a puppet). Owen was supposed to announce the wondrous new presence that lay in the manger in Bethlehem, all the while flapping his arms (to draw attention to the giant wings glued to his choir robe, and to attempt to quiet the giggles of the congregation).
Every year, a grim group of shepherds huddled at the communion railing and displayed their cowardice to God’s Holy Messenger; a motley crew, they tripped on their robes and knocked off each other’s turbans and false beards with their staffs and shepherding crooks. Barb Wiggin had difficulty locating them in the “pillar of light,” while simultaneously illuminating the Descending Angel, Owen Meany.
Reading from Luke, the rector said, “‘And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear.’” Whereupon, Mr. Wiggin paused for the full effect of the shepherds cringing at the sight of Owen struggling to get his feet on the floor—Barb Wiggin operated the creaky apparatus that lowered Owen, too, placing him dangerously near the lit candles that simulated the campfires around which the shepherds watched their flock.
“‘BE NOT AFRAID,’” Owen announced, while still struggling in the air; “‘FOR BEHOLD, I BRING YOU GOOD NEWS OF A GREAT JOY WHICH WILL COME TO ALL THE PEOPLE; FOR TO YOU IS BORN THIS DAY IN THE CITY OF DAVID A SAVIOR, WHO IS CHRIST THE LORD. AND THIS WILL BE A SIGN FOR YOU: YOU WILL FIND A BABE WRAPPED IN SWADDLING CLOTHES AND LYING IN A MANGER.’” Whereupon, the dazzling, if jerky, “pillar of light” flashed, like lightning, or perhaps Christ Church suffered an electrical surge, and Owen was raised into darkness—sometimes, yanked into darkness; and once, so quickly that one of his wings was torn from his back and fell among the confused shepherds.
The worst of it was that Owen had to remain in the air for the rest of the pageant—there being no method of lowering him out of the light. If he was to be concealed in darkness, he had to stay suspended from the wires—above the babe lying in the manger, above the clumsy, nodding donkeys, the stumbling shepherds, and the unbalanced kings staggering under the weight of their crowns.
An additional evil, Owen claimed, was that whoever played Joseph was always smirking—as if Joseph had anything to smirk about. “WHAT DOES JOSEPH HAVE TO DO WITH ANY OF IT?” Owen asked crossly. “I SUPPOSE HE HAS TO STAND AROUND THE MANGER, BUT HE SHOULDN’T SMIRK!” And always the prettiest girl got to play Mary. “WHAT DOES PRETTY HAVE TO DO WITH IT?” Owen asked. “WHO SAYS MARY WAS PRETTY?”
And the individual touches that the Wiggins brought to the Christmas Pageant reduced Owen to incoherent fuming—for example, the smaller children disguised as turtledoves. The costumes were so absurd that no one knew what these children were supposed to be; they resembled science-fiction angels, spectacular life-forms from another galaxy, as if the Wiggins had decided that the Holy Nativity had been attended by beings from faraway planets (or should have been so attended). “NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE STUPID TURTLEDOVES ARE!” Owen complained.
As for the Christ Child himself, Owen was outraged. The Wiggins insisted that the Baby Jesus not shed a tear, and in this pursuit they were relentless in gathering dozens of babies backstage; they substituted babies so freely that the Christ Child was whisked from the manger at the first unholy croak or gurgle—instantly replaced by a mute baby, or at least a stuporous one. For this chore of supplying a fresh, silent baby to the manger—in an instant—an extended line of ominous-looking grown-ups reached into the shadows beyond the pulpit, behind the purple-a
nd-maroon curtains, under the cross. These large and sure-handed adults, deft at baby-handling, or at least certain not to drop a quickly moving Christ Child, were strangely out of place at the Nativity. Were they kings or shepherds—and why were they so much bigger than the other kings and shepherds, if not exactly larger than life? Their costumes were childish, although some of their beards were real, and they appeared less to relish the spirit of Christmas than they seemed resigned to their task—like a bucket brigade of volunteer firemen.
Backstage, the mothers fretted; the competition for the most properly behaved Christ Child was keen. Every Christmas, in addition to the Baby Jesus, the Wiggins’ pageant gave birth to many new members of that most monstrous sorority: stage mothers. I told Owen that perhaps he was better off to be “above” these proceedings, but Owen hinted that I and other members of our Sunday school class were at least partially responsible for his humiliating elevation—for hadn’t we been the first to lift Owen into the air? Mrs. Walker, Owen suggested, might have given Barb Wiggin the idea of using Owen as the airborne angel.
It’s no wonder that Owen was not tickled by Dan’s notion of casting him as Tiny Tim. “WHEN I SAY, ‘BE NOT AFRAID; FOR BEHOLD, I BRING YOU GOOD NEWS,’ ALL THE BABIES CRY AND EVERYONE ELSE LAUGHS. WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY’LL DO IF I SAY, ‘GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE!’?”
It was his voice, of course; he could have said, “HERE COMES THE END OF THE WORLD!” People still would have fallen down, laughing. It was torture to Owen that he was without much humor—he was only serious—while at the same time he had a chiefly comic effect on the multitude.
No wonder he commenced worrying about the Christmas Pageant as early as the end of November, for in the service bulletin of the Last Sunday After Pentecost there was already an announcement, “How to Participate in the Christmas Pageant.” The first rehearsal was scheduled after the Annual Parish Meeting and the Vestry elections—almost at the beginning of our Christmas vacation. “What would you like to be?” the sappy bulletin asked. “We need kings, angels, shepherds, donkeys, turtledoves, Mary, Joseph, babies, and more!”
“‘FATHER, FORGIVE THEM; FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO,’” Owen said.
Grandmother was testy about our playing at 80 Front Street; it’s no wonder that Owen and I sought the solitude of Waterhouse Hall. With Dan out of the dorm in the afternoons, Owen and I had the place almost to ourselves. There were four floors of boys’ rooms, the communal showers and urinals and crapper stalls on every floor, and one faculty apartment at the end of the hall on each floor, too. Dan’s apartment was on the third floor. The second-floor faculty occupant had gone home for Christmas—like one of the boys himself, young Mr. Peabody, a fledgling Math instructor, and a bachelor not likely to improve upon his single status, was what my mother had called a “Nervous Nelly.” He was fastidious and timid and easily teased by the boys on his floor; on the nights he was given dorm duty—for the entire four floors—Waterhouse Hall seethed with revolution. It was during an evening of Mr. Peabody’s duty that a first-year boy was dangled by his heels from the yawning portal of the fourth-floor laundry chute; his muffled howls echoed through the dorm, and Mr. Peabody, opening the laundry portal on the second floor, was shocked to peer two floors up and see the youngster’s screaming face looking down at him.
Mr. Peabody reacted in a fashion that could have been imitated from Mrs. Walker. “Van Arsdale!” he shouted upward. “Get out of the laundry chute! Get a grip on yourself, man! Get your feet on the floor!”
He never dreamed, poor Mr. Peabody, that Van Arsdale was held fast at both ankles by two brutal linemen from the Gravesend football team; they tortured Van Arsdale daily.
So Mr. Peabody had gone home to his parents, which left the second floor free of faculty; and the Physical Education fanatic on the fourth floor—the track-and-field coach, Mr. Tubulari—was also away for Christmas. He was also a bachelor, and he had insisted on the fourth floor—for his health; he claimed to relish running upstairs. He had many female visitors; when they wore dresses or skirts, the boys loved to watch them ascending and descending the stairwell from one of the lower floors. The nights that Waterhouse Hall suffered his turn at dorm duty, the boys were very well behaved. Mr. Tubulari was fast and silent and thrived on catching boys “in the act”—in the act of anything: shaving-cream fights, smoking in their rooms, even masturbation. Each floor had a designated common room, a butt room, so-called, for the smokers; but smoking in the dorm rooms was forbidden—as was sex in any form, alcohol in any form, and drugs that had not been prescribed by the school physician. Mr. Tubulari even had reservations about aspirin. According to Dan, Mr. Tubulari was off competing in some grueling athletic event over Christmas—actually, a pentathlon of the harshest-possible wintertime activities; a “winterthon,” Mr. Tubulari had called it. Dan Needham hated made-up words, and he became quite boisterous on the subject of what wintertime events Mr. Tubulari was competing in; the fanatic had gone to Alaska, or maybe Minnesota.
Dan would entertain Owen and me by describing Mr. Tubulari’s pentathlon, his “winterthon.”
“The first event,” Dan Needham said, “is something wholesome, like splitting a cord of wood—points off, if you break your ax. Then you have to run ten miles in deep snow, or snowshoe for thirty. Then you chop a hole in the ice, and—carrying your ax—swim a mile under a frozen lake, chopping your way out at the opposite shore. Then you build an igloo—to get warm. Then comes the dogsledding. You have to mush a team of dogs—from Anchorage to Chicago. Then you build another igloo—to rest.”
“THAT’S SIX EVENTS,” Owen said. “A PENTATHLON IS ONLY FIVE.”
“So forget the second igloo,” Dan Needham said.
“I WONDER WHAT MISTER TUBULARI DOES FOR NEW YEAR’S EVE,” Owen said.