They were childless—Dan Needham suggested that their sexual roles might be so “reversed” as to make childbearing difficult—and their attendance at Little League games was marked by a constant disapproval of the sport: that little girls were not allowed to play in the Little League was an example of sexual stereotyping that exercised the Dowlings’ humorlessness and fury. Should they have a daughter, they warned, she would play in the Little League. They were a couple with a theme—sadly, it was their only theme, and a small theme, and they overplayed it, but a young couple with such a burning mission was quite interesting to the generally slow, accepting types who were more typical in Gravesend. Mr. Chickering, our fat coach and manager, lived in dread of the day the Dowlings might produce a daughter. Mr. Chickering was of the old school—he believed that only boys should play baseball, and that girls should watch them play, or else play soft-ball.
Like many small-town world-changers, the Dowlings were independently wealthy; he, in fact, did nothing—except he was a ceaseless interior decorator of his own well-appointed house and a manicure artist when the subject was his lawn. In his early thirties, Arthur Dowling had developed the habit of puttering to a level of frenzy quite beyond the capacities of the retired, who are conventionally supposed to be the putterers. Amanda Dowling didn’t work, either, but she was tireless in her pursuit of the board-member life. She was a trustee of everything, and the Town Library was not the only board she served; it was simply the board she was most often associated with, because it was a board she served with special vengeance.
Among the methods she preferred for changing the world, banning books was high on her list. Sexual stereotypes did not fall, she liked to say, from the clear blue sky; books were the major influences upon children—and books that had boys being boys, and girls being girls, were among the worst offenders! Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, for example; they were an education in condescension to women—all by themselves, they created sexual stereotypes! Wuthering Heights, for example: how that book taught a woman to submit to a man made Amanda Dowling “see red,” as she would say.
As for the Dowlings’ participation in The Gravesend Players: they took turns. Their campaign was relentless, but minor; she tried out for parts conventionally bestowed upon men; he went after the lesser women’s roles—preferably nonspeaking. She was more ambitious than he was, befitting a woman determined to reverse sexual stereotypes; she thought that speaking parts for males were perfect for her.
Dan Needham gave them what he could; to deny them outright would risk the charge they relished to make, and made often—that so-and-so was “discriminatory.” A patterned absurdity marked each Dowling’s role onstage; Amanda was terrible as a man—but she would have been just as terrible as a woman, Dan was quick to point out—and Arthur was simply terrible. The townspeople enjoyed them in the manner that only people from small towns—who know how everyone’s apron is tied, and by whom—can enjoy tedious eccentrics. The Dowlings were tedious, their eccentricity was flawed and made small by the utter predictability of their highly selective passions; yet they were a fixture of The Gravesend Players that provided constant, if familiar, entertainment. Dan Needham knew better than to tamper with them.
How I astonished myself that Christmas Eve! With diligence, with months—even years—backstage in the Gravesend Town Hall, I knew I could find the face my mother had waved to in the stands. Why not at the baseball games themselves? you might wonder. Why not observe the actual fans in the actual bleachers? People tend to take the same seats. But at Dan’s theater I had an advantage; I could watch the audience unseen—and I would not be drawing attention to myself by putting myself between the field of play and them. Backstage, and all that this implies, is invisible. You can see more in faces that can’t see you. If I was looking for my father, shouldn’t I look for him unobserved?
“‘Spirit!’” said Scrooge to the Ghost of Christmas Past. “‘Remove me from this place.’”
And I watched Mr. Arthur Dowling watching his wife, who said: “‘I told you these were shadows of the things that had been. That they are what they are,’” Amanda Dowling said, “‘do not blame me!’” I watched my fellow townspeople snicker—all but Mr. Arthur Dowling, who remained seriously impressed by the reversed sexual role he saw before him.
That the Dowlings “took turns” at The Gravesend Players—that they never took roles in the same play—was a great source of mirth to Dan, who enjoyed joking with Mr. Fish.
“I wonder if the Dowlings ‘take turns’ sexually!” Dan would say.
“It’s most unpleasant to imagine,” Mr. Fish would say.
What daydreams I accomplished backstage on Christmas Eve! How I fed myself memories from the faces of my fellow townspeople! When Mr. Fish asked the Ghost of Christmas Present if the poor, wretched children were his, the Spirit told him, “‘They are Man’s.’” How proud Mrs. Kenmore was of Mr. Kenmore, the butcher; how the rheumatic heart of their son Donny jumped for joy to see his father with words i
nstead of meat at his fingertips! “‘This boy is Ignorance,’” the butcher said. “‘This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be encased.’” He meant “‘erased’”; but Mr. Kenmore was probably thinking of sausages. On the trusting faces of my fellow townspeople there was no more awareness of Mr. Kenmore’s error than Mr. Kenmore himself possessed; of the faces I surveyed, only Harriet Wheelwright—who had seen almost as many versions of A Christmas Carol as Dan Needham had directed—winced to hear the butcher butcher his line. My grandmother, a born critic, briefly closed her eyes and sighed.
Such was my interest in the audience, I did not turn to face the stage until Owen Meany made his appearance.
I did not need to see him to know he was there. A hush fell over the audience. The faces of my fellow townspeople—so amused, so curious, so various—were rendered shockingly similar; each face became the model of each other’s fear. Even my grandmother—so detached, so superior—drew her fur closer around her shoulders and shivered: an apparent draft had touched the necks of my fellow townspeople; the shiver that passed through my grandmother appeared to pass through them all. Donny Kenmore clutched his rheumatic heart; Maureen Early, determined not to pee in her pants again, shut her eyes. The look of dread upon the face of Mr. Arthur Dowling surpassed even his interest in sexual role-reversal—for neither the sex nor the identity of Owen Meany was clear; what was clear was that he was a ghost.
“‘Ghost of the Future!’” Mr. Fish exclaimed. “‘I fear you more than any specter I have seen.’” To observe the terror upon my fellow townspeople’s faces was entirely convincing; it was obvious that they agreed with Mr. Fish’s assessment of this ghost’s fearful qualities. “‘Will you not speak to me?’” Scrooge pleaded.
Owen coughed. It was not, as Dan had hoped, a “humanizing” sound; it was a rattle so deep, and so deeply associated with death, that the audience was startled—people twitched in their seats; Maureen Early, abandoning all hope of containing her urine, opened her eyes wide and stared at the source of such an unearthly bark. That was when I turned to look at him, too—at the instant his baby-powdered hand shot out of the black folds of his cowl, and he pointed. A fever chill sent a spasm down his trembling arm, and his hand responded to the jolt as to electricity. Mr. Fish flinched.
“‘Lead on!’” cried Scrooge. “‘Lead on!’” Gliding across the stage, Owen Meany led him. But the future was never quite clear enough for Scrooge to see it—until, at last, they came to the churchyard. “A worthy place!” Dickens called it … “overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation’s death, not life; choked up with too much burying, fat with repleted appetite.”
“‘Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,’” Scrooge began to say. Among the papier-mâché gravestones, where Mr. Fish was standing, one stone loomed larger than the others; it was this stone that Owen pointed to—again and again, he pointed and pointed. So that Mr. Fish would stop stalling—and get to the part where he reads his own name on that grave—Owen stepped closer to the gravestone himself.
Scrooge began to babble.
“‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But,’” Mr. Fish said to Owen, “‘if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!’”
Owen Meany, not moved to speak, bent over the gravestone; appearing to read the name he saw there to himself, he directly fainted.
“Owen!” Mr. Fish said crossly, but Owen was as committed to not answering as the Ghost of the Future. “Owen?” Mr. Fish asked, more sympathetically; the audience appeared to sympathize with Mr. Fish’s reluctance to touch the slumped, hooded figure.
It would be just like Owen, I thought, to regain consciousness by jumping to his feet and screaming; this was exactly what Owen did—before Dan Needham could call for the curtain. Mr. Fish fell over what was meant to be his grave, and the sheer terror in Owen’s cry was matched by a corresponding terror in the audience. There were screams, there were gasps; I knew that Maureen Early’s pants were wet again. Just what had the Ghost of the Future actually seen?
Mr. Fish, a veteran at making the best of a mess, found himself sprawled on the stage in a perfect position to “read” his own name on the papier-mâché gravestone—which he had half-crushed, in falling over it. “‘Ebenezer Scrooge! Am I that man?’” he asked Owen, but something was wrong with Owen, who appeared to be more frightened of the papier-mâché gravestone than Scrooge was afraid of it; Owen kept backing away. He retreated across the stage, with Mr. Fish imploring him for an answer. Without a word, without so much as pointing again at the gravestone that had the power to frighten even the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Owen Meany retreated offstage.
In the dressing room, he sobbed upon the makeup table, coating his hair with baby powder, the black eyeliner streaking his face. Dan Needham felt his forehead. “You’re burning up, Owen!” Dan said. “I’m getting you straight home, and straight to bed.”
“What is it? What happened?” I asked Owen, but he shook his head and cried harder.
“He fainted, that’s what happened!” Dan said; Owen shook his head.
“Is he all right?” Mr. Fish asked from the door; Dan had called for a curtain before Mr. Fish’s last scene. “Are you all right, Owen?” Mr. Fish asked. “My God, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost!”
“I’ve seen everything now,” Dan said. “I’ve seen Scrooge upstaged, I’ve seen the Ghost of the Future scare himself!”