A prayer for Owen Meany Read Online Free

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