A prayer for Owen Meany Read Online Free Page B

compared to other New Hampshire
forms of directions; we don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend
to think that if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you
are. In Canada, we give directions more freely-to anywhere, to anyone who asks.
In our Federal house on Front Street, there was also a secret passageway-a
bookcase that was actually a door that led down a staircase to a dirt-floor
basement that was entirely separate from the basement where the coal furnace
was. That was just what it was: a bookcase that was a door that led to a place
where absolutely nothing happened-it was simply a place to hide. From
what  used to wonder. That this secret passageway to nowhere existed in
our house did not comfort me; rather, it provoked me to imagine what there
might be that was sufficiently threatening to hide from-and it is never
comforting to imagine that. I took little Owen Meany into that passageway once,
and I got him lost in there, in the dark, and I frightened the hell out of him;
I did this to all my friends, of course, but frightening Owen Meany was always
more special than frightening anyone else. It was his voice, that ruined voice,
that made his fear unique. I have been engaged in private imitations of Owen
Meany's voice for more than thirty years, and that voice used to prevent me
from imagining that I could ever write about Owen, because-on the page-the
sound of his voice is impossible to convey. And I was prevented from imagining
that I could even make Owen a part of oral history, because the thought of
imitating his voice-in public-is so embarrassing. It has taken me more than
thirty years to get up the nerve to share Owen's voice with strangers. My
grandmother was so upset by the sound of Owen Meany's voice, protesting his
abuse in the secret passageway, that she spoke to me, after Owen had gone home.
"I don't want you to describe to me-not ever-what you were doing to that
poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover
his mouth with your hand,'' Grandmother said. "You've seen the mice caught
in the mousetraps?" she asked me. "I mean caught-their little necks
broken-I mean absolutely dead" Grandmother said. "Well, that boy's
voice," my grandmother told me, "that boy's voice could bring those
mice back to life!"
    And it occurs to me now that Owen's voice was the voice of all
those murdered mice, coming back to life-with a vengeance. I don't mean to make
my grandmother sound insensitive. She had a maid named Lydia, a Prince Edward
Islander, who was our cook and housekeeper for years and years. When Lydia
developed a cancer and her right leg was amputated, my grandmother hired two
other maids-one to look after Lydia. Lydia never worked again. She had her own
room, and her favorite wheel-chair routes through the huge house, and she
became the entirely served invalid that, one day, my grandmother had imagined
she herself might become-with someone like Lydia looking after her. Delivery
boys and guests in our house frequently mistook Lydia for my grandmother,
because Lydia looked quite regal in her wheelchair and she was about my
grandmother's age; she had tea with my grandmother every afternoon, and she
played cards with my grandmother's bridge club-with those very same ladies
whose tea she had once fetched. Shortly before Lydia died, even my Aunt Martha
was struck by the resemblance Lydia bore to my grandmother. Yet to various
guests and delivery boys, Lydia would always say-with a certain indignation of
tone that was borrowed from my grandmother-"I am not Missus Wheelwright, I
am Missus Wheelwright's former maid." It was exactly in the manner that
Grandmother would claim that her house was not the Gravesend Inn. So my
grandmother was not without humanity. And if she wore cocktail dresses when she
labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer
intended to wear to cocktail parties.