Gravesend Catholic Church was in another part of town, the shabby saltbox where the nuns and some other teachers at St. Michael's lived was positioned like a guardhouse at a corner of the playground-in full view of Mary Magdalene. If a passing Protestant felt inclined to show the statue some small gesture of disrespect, the vigilant nuns would exit their guardhouse on the fly-their black habits flapping with the defiant rancorousness of crows. Owen was afraid of nuns.
'THEY'RE UNNATURAL,' he said; but what, I thought, could be more UNNATURAL than the squeaky falsetto of The Granite Mouse or his commanding presence, which was so out of proportion to his diminutive size? Every fall, the horse-chestnut trees between Tan Lane and Garfield Street produced many smooth, hard, dark-brown missiles; it was inevitable that Owen and I should pass by the statue of Mary Magdalene with our pockets full of chestnuts. Despite his fear of nuns, Owen could not resist the target that the holy goalie presented; I was a better shot, but Owen threw his chestnuts more fervently. We left scarcely any marks on Mary Magdalene's ground-length robe, on her bland, snowy face, or on her open hands-outstretched in apparent supplication. Yet the nuns, in a fury that only religious persecution can account for, would attack us; their pursuit was erratic, their shrieks like the cries of bats surprised by sunlight-Owen and I had no trouble outrunning them.
'PENGUINS!' Owen would cry as he ran; everyone called nuns 'penguins.' We'd run up Cass Street to the railroad tracks and follow the tracks out of town. Before we reached Maiden Hill, or the quarries, we would pass the Fort Rock Farm and throw what remained of our chestnuts at the black angus cattle grazing there; despite their threatening size and their blue lips and tongues, the black angus wouldn't chase us as enthusiastically as the penguins, who always gave up their pursuit before Cass Street.
And every spring, the swamp between Tan Lane and Garfield Street produced a pondful of tadpoles and toads. Who hasn't already told you that boys of a certain age are cruel? We filled a tennis-ball can with tadpoles and-under the cover of darkness-poured them over the feet of Mary Magdalene. The tadpoles-those that didn't turn quickly into toads-would dry up and die there. We even slaughtered toads and indelicately placed their mutilated bodies in the holy goalie's upturned palms, staining her with amphibian gore, God forgive us! We were such delinquents only in these few years of adolescence before Gravesend Academy could save us from ourselves. In the spring of ', Owen was especially destructive to the helpless swamplife of Gravesend, and to Mary Magdalene; just before Easter, we'd been to The Idaho, where we suffered through Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments-the life of Moses, represented by Charlton Heston undergoing various costume changes and radical hairstyles.
'IT'S ANOTHER MALE-NIPPLE MOVIE,' Owen said; and, indeed, in addition to Charlton Heston's nipples, there is evidence of Yul Brynner and John Derek and even Edward G. Robinson having nipples, too. That The Idaho should show The Ten Commandments so close to Easter was another example of what my grandmother called the poor 'seasonal' taste of nearly everyone in the entertainment business: that we should see the Exodus of the Chosen People on the eve of our Lord's Passion and Resurrection was outrageous-'ALL THAT OLD-TESTAMENT HARSHNESS WHEN WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT JESUS!' as Owen put it. The parting of the Red Sea especially offended him.
'YOU CAN'T TAKE A MIRACLE AND JUST SHOW IT!' he said indignantly. 'YOU CAN'T PROVE A MIRACLE-YOU JUST HAVE TO BELIEVE IT! IF THE RED SEA ACTUALLY PARTED, IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THAT,' he said. 'IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING- IT'S NOT A PICTURE ANYONE CAN EVEN IMAGINE!'
But there wasn't logic to his anger. If The Ten Commandments made him cross, why take it out on Mary Magdalene and a bunch of toads and tadpoles? In these years before we attended Gravesend Academy, Owen and I were educated-primarily-by what we saw at The Idaho and on my grandmother's television. Who hasn't been 'educated' in this slovenly fashion? Who can blame Owen for his reaction to The Ten Commandments'? Almost any reaction would be preferable to believing it! But if a movie as stupid as The Ten Commandments could make Owen Meany murder toads by throwing them at Mary Magdalene, a performance as compelling as Bette Davis's in Dark Victory could convince Owen that he, too, had a brain tumor. At first, Bette Davis is dying and doesn't know it. Her doctor and her best friend won't tell her.
'THEY SHOULD TELL HER IMMEDIATELY!' Owen said anxiously. The doctor was played by George Brent.
'He could never do anything right, anyway,' Grandmother observed. Humphrey Bogart is a stableman who speaks with an Irish accent. It was the Christmas of ' and we were watching a movie made in ; it was the first time Grandmother had permitted us to watch The Late Show-at least, I think it was The Late Show. After a certain evening hour-or whenever it was that my grandmother began to feel tired-she called everything The Late Show. She felt sorry for us because the Eastmans were spending another Christmas in the Caribbean; Sawyer Depot was a pleasure slipping into the past, for me-for Owen, it was becoming mere wishful thinking.
'You'd think that Humphrey Bogart could learn a better Irish accent than that,' my grandmother complained. Dan Needham said that he wouldn't give George Brent a part in a production of The Gravesend Players; Owen added that Mr. Fish would have been a more convincing doctor to Bette Davis, but Grandmother argued that 'Mr. Fish would have his hands full as Bette Davis's husband'-her doctor eventually gets to be her husband, too.
'Anyone would have his hands full as Bette Davis's husband,' Dan observed. Owen thought it was cruel that Bette Davis had to find out she was dying all by herself; but Dark Victory is one of those movies that presumes to be instructive on the subject of how to die. We see Bette Davis accepting her fate gracefully; she moves to Vermont with George Brent and takes up gardening- cheerfully living with the fact that one day, suddenly,
