My mother’s name was Tabitha, although no one but my grandmother actually called her that. Grandmother hated nicknames—with the exception that she never called me John; I was always Johnny to her, even long after I’d become just plain John to everyone else. To everyone else, my mother was Tabby. I recall one occasion when the Rev. Lewis Merrill said “Tabitha,” but that was spoken in front of my mother and grandmother—and the occasion was an argument, or at least a plea. The issue was my mother’s decision to leave the Congregational Church for the Episcopal, and the Rev. Mr. Merrill—speaking to my grandmother, as if my mother weren’t in the room—said, “Tabitha Wheelwright is the one truly angelic voice in our choir, and we shall be a choir without a soul if she leaves us.” I must add, in Pastor Merrill’s defense, that he didn’t always speak with such Byzantine muddiness, but he was sufficiently worked up about my mother’s and my own departure from his church to offer his opinions as if he were speaking from the pulpit.
In New Hampshire, when I was a boy, Tabby was a common name for house cats, and there was undeniably a feline quality to my mother—never in the sly or stealthy sense of that word, but in the word’s other catlike qualities: a clean, sleek, self-possessed, strokable quality. In quite a different way from Owen Meany, my mother looked touchable; I was always aware of how much people wanted, or needed, to touch her. I’m not talking only about men, although—even at my age—I was aware of how restlessly men moved their hands in her company. I mean that everyone liked to touch her—and depending on her attitude toward her toucher, my mother’s responses to being touched were feline, too. She could be so chillingly indifferent that the touching would instantly stop; she was well coordinated and surprisingly quick and, like a cat, she could retreat from being touched—she could duck under or dart away from someone’s hand as instinctively as the rest of us can shiver. And she could respond in that other way that cats can respond, too; she could luxuriate in being touched—she could contort her body quite shamelessly, putting more and more pressure against the toucher’s hand, until (I used to imagine) anyone near enough to her could hear her purr.
Owen Meany, who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water … remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain, untouchable … Owen said to me once, “YOUR MOTHER IS SO SEXY, I KEEP FORGETTING SHE’S ANYBODY’S MOTHER.”
As for my Aunt Martha’s insinuations, leaked to my cousins, who dribbled the suggestion, more than ten years late, to me—that my mother was “a little simple”—I believe this is the result of a jealous elder sister’s misunderstanding. My Aunt Martha failed to understand the most basic thing about my mother: that she was born into the entirely wrong body. Tabby Wheelwright looked like a starlet—lush, whimsical, easy to talk into anything; she looked eager to please, or “a little simple,” as my Aunt Martha observed; she looked touchable. But I firmly believe that my mother was of an entirely different character than her appearance would suggest; as her son, I know, she was almost perfect as a mother—her sole imperfection being that she died before she could
tell me who my father was. And in addition to being an almost perfect mother, I also know that she was a happy woman—and a truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy. If her body looked restless, she wasn’t. She was content—she was feline in that respect, too. She appeared to want nothing from life but a child and a loving husband; it is important to note these singulars—she did not want children, she wanted me, just me, and she got me; she did not want men in her life, she wanted a man, the right man, and shortly before she died, she found him.
I have said that my Aunt Martha is a “lovely woman,” and I mean it: she is warm, she is attractive, she is decent and kind and honorably intentioned—and she has always been loving to me. She loved my mother, too; she just never understood her—and when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is going to be trouble.
I have said that my mother was a sweater girl, and that is a contradiction to the general modesty with which she dressed; she did show off her bosom—but never her flesh, except for her athletic, almost-innocent shoulders. She did like to bare her shoulders. And her dress was never slatternly, never wanton, never garish; she was so conservative in her choice of colors that I remember little in her wardrobe that wasn’t black or white, except for some accessories—she had a fondness for red (in scarves, in hats, in shoes, in mittens and gloves). She wore nothing that was tight around her hips, but she did like her small waist and her good bosom to show—she did have THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS, as Owen observed.
I do not think that she flirted; she did not “come on” to men—but how much of that would I have seen, up to the age of eleven? So maybe she did flirt—a little. I used to imagine that her flirting was reserved for the Boston & Maine, that she was absolutely and properly my mother in every location upon this earth—even in Boston, the dreaded city—but that on the train she might have looked for men. What else could explain her having met the man who fathered me there? And some six years later—on the same train—she met the man who would marry her! Did the rhythm of the train on the tracks somehow unravel her and make her behave out of character? Was she altered in transit, when her feet were not upon the ground?
I expressed this absurd fear only once, and only to Owen. He was shocked.
“HOW COULD YOU THINK SUCH A THING ABOUT YOUR OWN MOTHER?” he asked me.
“But you say she’s sexy, you’re the one who raves about her breasts,” I told him.
“I DON’T RAVE,” Owen told me.
“Well, okay—I mean, you like her,” I said. “Men, and boys—they like her.”
“FORGET THAT ABOUT THE TRAIN,” Owen said. “YOUR MOTHER IS A PERFECT WOMAN. NOTHING HAPPENS TO HER ON THE TRAIN.”
Well, although she said she “met” my father on the Boston & Maine, I never imagined that my conception occurred there; it is a fact, however, that she met the man she would marry on that train. That story was neither a lie nor a secret. How many times I asked her to tell me that story! And she never hesitated, she never lacked enthusiasm for telling that story—which she told the same way, every time. And after she was dead, how many times I asked him to tell me the story—and he would tell it, with enthusiasm, and the same way, every time.
His name was Dan Needham. How many times I have prayed to God that he was my real father!
My mother and my grandmother and I—and Lydia, minus one of her legs—were eating dinner on a Thursday evening in the spring of 1948. Thursdays were the days my mother returned from Boston, and we always had a better-than-average dinner those nights. I remember that it was shortly after Lydia’s leg had been amputated, because it was still a little strange to have her eating with us at the table (in her wheelchair), and to have the two new maids doing the serving and the clearing that only recently Lydia had done. And the wheelchair was still new enough to Lydia so that she wouldn’t allow me to push her around in it; only my grandmother and my mother—and one of the two new maids—were allowed to. I don’t remember all the trivial intricacies of Lydia’s wheelchair rules—just that the four of us were finishing our dinner, and Lydia’s presence at the dinner table was as new and noticeable as fresh paint.
And my mother said, “I’ve met another man on the good old Boston and Maine.”
It was not intended, I think, as an entirely mischievous remark, but the remark took instant and astonishing hold of Lydia and my grandmother and me. Lydia’s wheelchair surged in reverse away from the table, dragging the tablecloth after her, so that all the dishes and glasses and silverware jumped—and the candlesticks wobbled. My grandmother seized the large brooch at the throat of her dress—she appeared to have suddenly choked on it—and I snapped so substantial a piece of my lower lip between my teeth that I could taste my blood.
We all thought that my mother was speaking euphemistically. I wasn’t present when she’d announced the particulars of the case of the first man she claimed she’d met on the train. Maybe she’d said, “I met a man on the good old Boston and Maine—and now I’m pregnant!” Maybe she said, “I’m going to have a baby as a result of a fling I had with a total stranger I met on the good old Boston and Maine—someone I never expect to see again!”
Well, anyway, if I can’t re-create the first announcement, the second announcement was spectacular enough. We all thought that she was telling us that she was pregnant again—by a different man!
And as an example of how wrong my Aunt Martha was, concerning her point of view that my mother was “a little simple,” my mother instantly saw what we were thinking, and laughed at us, very quickly, and said, “No, no! I’m not going to have a baby. I’m never going to have another baby—I have my baby. I’m just telling you that I’ve met a man. Someone I like.”
“A different man, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked, still holding her brooch.
“Oh, not that man! Don’t be silly,” my mother said, and she laughed again—her laughter drawing Lydia’s wheelchair, ever so cautiously, back toward the table.
“A man you like, you mean, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked.
“I wouldn’t mention him if I didn’t like him,” my mother said. “I want you to meet him,” she said to us all.
“You’ve dated him?” my grandmother asked.
“No! I just met him—just today, on today’s train!” my mother said.
“And already you like him?” Lydia asked, in a tone of voice so perfectly copied from my grandmother that I had to look to see which one of them was speaking.
“Well, yes,” my mother said seriously. “You know such things. You don’t need that much time.”