Read Online A prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

the better of us all. We knew that
my mother had no immediate plans to reveal to us a single clue regarding the
first man she'd supposedly met on the Boston & Maine; but the second man-we
could see him for ourselves. Dan Needham was on the doorstep of  Front
Street, Gravesend. Of course, my mother had had "dates" before, but
she'd never said of one of them that she wanted us to meet him, or that she
even liked him, or that she knew she'd see him again. And so we were aware that
Dan Needham was special, from the start. I suppose Aunt Martha would have said
that one aspect of my mother being "a little simple" was her
attraction to younger men; but in this habit my mother was simply ahead of her
time-because it's true, the men she dated were often a little younger than she
was. She even went out with a few seniors from Gravesend Academy when-if she'd
gone to college-she would have been a college senior herself; but she just
"went out" with them. While they were only prep-school boys and she
was in her twenties-with an illegitimate child-all she did with those boys was
dance with them, or go to movies or plays with them, or to the sporting events.
I was used to seeing a few goons come calling, I will admit; and they never
knew how to respond to me. They had no idea, for example, what a six-year-old
was. They either brought me rubber ducks for the bath, or other toys for
virtual infants-or else they brought me Fowler's Modern English Usage:
something every six-year-old should plunge into. And when they saw me-when they
were confronted with my short, sturdy presence, and the fact that I was too old
for bathtub toys and too young far Modern English Usage-they would become
insanely restless to impress me with their sensitivity to a waist-high person
like myself. They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle
an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby
talk about showing them my favorite toy-so that they might know what kind of
thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time. There was rarely a next
time. Once one of them asked my mother if I was toilet-trained-I guess he found
this a suitable question, prior to his inviting me to sit on his knees and play
bucking bronco.
    "YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID YES," Owen Meany told me,
"AND THEN PISSED IN HIS LAP."
    One thing about my mother's "beaus": they were all
good-looking. So on that superficial level I was unprepared for Dan Needham,
who was tall and gawky, with curly carrot-
        colored hair, and
who wore eyeglasses that were too small for his egg-shaped face-the perfectly
round lenses giving him the apprehensive, hunting expression of a large, mutant
owl. My grandmother said, after he'd gone, that it must have been the first
time in the history of Gravesend Academy that they had hired "someone who
looks younger than the students." Furthermore, his clothes didn't fit him;
the jacket was too tight-the sleeves too short-and the trousers were so baggy
that the crotch napped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and
the only padded pans of his peculiar body. But I was too young and cynical to
spot his kindness. Even before he was introduced to my grandmother or to Lydia
or to me, he looked straight at me and said, "You must be Johnny. I heard
as much about you as anyone can hear in an hour and a half on the Boston and
Maine, and I know you can be trusted with an important package." It was a
brown shopping bag with another brown paper bag stuffed inside it. Oh boy, here
it comes, I thought: an inflatable camel-it floats and spits. But Dan Needham
said, "It's not for you, it's not for anyone your age. But I'm trusting
you to put it somewhere where it can't be stepped on-and out of the way of any
pets, if you have pets. You mustn't let a pet near it. And whatever you do,
don't open it. Just tell me if it moves."
    Then he handed it to me; it didn't weigh enough to be Fowler's