A prayer for Owen Meany Read Online Free Page A

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 workedl 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 tunes-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