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

remember him best when he stood level to my mother's
girlish waist; the top of his head, if he stood on his toes, would brush
against her breasts. When she was sitting down and he would go over to her, to
receive his usual touches and hugs, his face would be dead-even with her
breasts. My mother was a sweater girl; she had a lovely figure, and she knew
it, and she wore those sweaters of the period that showed it. A measure of
Owen's seriousness was that we could talk about the mothers of all our friends,
and Owen could be extremely frank in his appraisal of my mother to me; he could
get away with it, because I knew he wasn't joking. Owen never joked.
    "YOUR MOTHER HAS THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS."
No other friend could have said this to me without starting a fight.
    'You really think so?" I asked him.
    'ABSOLUTELY, THE BEST," he said.
    'What about Missus Wiggin?" I asked him.
    'TOO BIG," Owen said.
    'Missus Webster?" I asked him.
    'TOO LOW," Owen said.
    'Missus Merrill?" I asked.
    'VERY FUNNY," Owen said.
    'Miss Judkins?" I said.
    'I DON'T KNOW," he said. "I CAN'T REMEMBER THEM. BUT
SHE'S NOT A MOTHER "
     
    "Miss Farnum!" I said.
    "YOU'RE JUST FOOLING AROUND," Owen said peevishly.
    "Caroline Perkins!" I said.
    "MAYBE ONE DAY," he said seriously. "BUT SHE'S
NOT A MOTHER, EITHER."
    "Irene Babson!" I said.
    "DON'T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS," Owen said. "YOUR
MOTHER'S THE ONE," he said worshipfully. "AND SHE SMELLS BETTER THAN
ANYONE ELSE, TOO," he added. I agreed with him about this; my mother
always smelted wonderful. Your own mother's bosom is a strange topic of
conversation in which to indulge a friend, but my mother was an acknowledged
beauty, and Owen possessed a completely reliable frankness; you could trust
him, absolutely. My mother was often our driver. She drove me out to the quarry
to play with Owen; she picked Owen up to come play with me-and she drove him
home. The Meany Granite Quarry was about three miles out of the center of town,
not too far for a bike ride-except that the ride was all uphill. Mother would
often drive me out there with my bike in the car, and then I could ride my bike
home; or Owen would ride his bike to town, and she'd take him and his bike
back. The point is, she was so often our chauffeur that he might have seemed to
her like a second son. And to the extent that mothers are the chauffeurs of
small-town life, Owen had reason to identify her as more his mother than his
own mother was. When we played at Owen's, we rarely went inside. We played in
the rock piles, in and around the pits, or down by the river, and on Sundays we
sat in or on the silent machinery, imagining ourselves in charge of the
quarry-or in a war. Owen seemed to find the inside of his house as strange and
oppressive as I did. When the weather was inclement, we played at my house-and
since the weather in New Hampshire is inclement most of the time, we played
most of the time at my house. And play is all we did, it seems to me now. We
were both eleven the summer my mother died. It was our last year in Little
League, which we were already bored with. Baseball, in my opinion, is boring;
one's last year in Little League is only a preview of the boring moments in
baseball that lie ahead for many Americans. Unfortunately, Canadians play and
watch baseball, too. It is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game
with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action. At
least, Little Leaguers play the game more quickly than grown-ups-thank God! We
never devoted the attention to spitting, or to tugging at our armpits and
crotches, that is the essential expression of nervousness in the adult sport.
But you still have to wait between pitches, and wait for the catcher and umpire
to examine the ball after the pitch-and wait for the catcher to trot out to the
mound to say something to the pitcher about how to throw the ball, and wait for
the manager to waddle onto the field