' 'I MEAN MY PARENTS CAN'T AFFORD THOSE KIND OF CLOTHES,' Owen said. We were watching an old Alan Ladd movie on The Early Show. It was called Appointment with Danger, and Owen thought it was ridiculous that all the men in Gary, Indiana, wore suits and hats.
'They used to wear them here,' my grandmother said; but, probably, they never wore them at the Meany Granite Quarry. Jack Webb, before he was the good cop in Dragnet, was a bad guy in Appointment with Danger; he was, among his other endeavors, attempting to murder a nun. This gave Owen the shivers. The movie gave my grandmother the shivers, too, because she recalled that she had seen it at The Idaho in -with my mother.
'The nun will be all right, Owen,' she told him.
'IT'S NOT THE IDEA OF MURDERING HER THAT GIVES ME THE SHIVERS,' Owen explained. 'IT'S THE IDEA OF NUNS-IN GENERAL.'
'I know what you mean,' my grandmother said; she harbored her own misgivings about the Catholics.
'WHAT WOULD IT COST TO HAVE A COUPLE OF SUITS AND A COUPLE OF JACKETS AND A COUPLE OF PAIRS OF DRESS PANTS, AND SHIRTS, AND TIES, AND SHOES-YOU KNOW, THE WORKS?' Owen asked.
'I'm going to take you shopping myself,' Grandmother told him. 'You let me worry about what it will cost. Nobody needs to know what it costs.'
'MAYBE, IN MY SIZE, IT'S NOT SO EXPENSIVE,' Owen said. And so-even without my mother alive to urge him-Owen Meany agreed that he was Gravesend Academy 'material.'' The academy agreed, too. Even without Dan Needham's recommendation, they would have admitted Owen with a full scholarship; he was obviously in need of a scholarship, and he had all A's at Gravesend Junior High School. The problem was-though Dan Needham had legally adopted me, and I therefore had the privileged status of a faculty son-the academy was reluctant to accept me. My junior-high-school performance was so undistinguished that the academy admissions officers advised Dan to have me attend the ninth grade at Gravesend High School; the academy would admit me to their ninth-grade class the following year-when, they said, it would be easier for me to make the adjustment because I would be repeating the ninth grade. I had always known I was a weak student; this was less a blow to my self-esteem than it was painful for me to think of Owen moving ahead of me-we wouldn't be in the same class, we wouldn't graduate together. There was another, more practical consideration: that, in my senior year, I wouldn't have Owen around to help me with my homework. That was a promise Owen had made to my motnen that he would always help me with my homework. And so, before Grandmother took Owen shopping for his academy clothes, Owen announced his decision to attend the ninth grade at Gravesend High School, too. He would stay wkh me; he would enter the academy the following year-he could have skipped a grade, yet he volunteered to repeat the ninth grade with me! Dan convinced the admissions officers that although Owen was academically quite advanced, it would also be good for him to repeat a grade, to be a year older as a ninth grader-'because of his physical immaturity,' Dan argued. When the admissions officers met Owen, of course they agreed with Dan-they didn't know that a year older, in Owen's case, didn't mean that he'd be a year bigger. Dan and my grandmother were quite touched by Owen's loyalty to me; Hester, naturally, denounced Owen's behavior as 'queer'; naturally, I loved him, and I thanked him for his sacrifice-but in my heart I resented his power over me.
'DON'T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT,' he said: 'WE'RE PALS, AREN'T WE? WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR? I'LL NEVER LEAVE YOU.'
Toronto: February , -Liberace died yesterday; he was sixty-seven. His fans had been maintaining a candlelit vigil outside his Palm Springs mansion, which was formerly a convent. Wouldn't that have given Owen the shivers? Liberace had revised his former opposition to homosexuality. 'If you swing with chickens, that is your perfect right,' he said. Yet he denied the allegations in a palimony suit that he had paid for the sexual services of a male employee-a former valet and live-in chauffeur. There was a settlement out of court. And Liberace's manager denied that the entertainer was a victim of AIDS; Liberace's recent weight loss was the result, the manager said, of a watermelon-only diet. What would my grandmother and Owen Meany have said about that ?
'LIBERACE!' Owen would have cried.'WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE? LIBERACE! KILLED BY WATERMELONS!'
It was Thanksgiving, , before my cousins visited Gravesend and saw Grandmother's TV at Front Street for
themselves. Noah had started at the academy that fall, so he'd watched television with Owen and me on occasional weekends; but no judgment on the culture around us could ever be complete without Simon's automatic approval of every conceivable form of entertainment, and Hester's similarly automatic disapproval.
'Neat!' Simon said; he also thought that Liberace was 'neat.'
'It's shit, all of it,' said Hester. 'Until everything's in color, and the color's perfect, TV's not worth watching.' But Hester was impressed by the energy of Grandmother's constant criticism of nearly everything she saw; that was a style Hester sought to imitate-for even 'shit' was worth watching if it afforded one the opportunity to elaborate on what sort of shit it was. Everyone agreed that the movie reruns were more interesting than the actual TV programs; yet in Hester's view, the movies selected were 'too old.' Grandmother liked them old-'the
