classmates. Owen and I assumed that-in Noah's and Simon's eyes-we were too immature for them. Clearly, we were too immature for Hester, who-in response to Noah being forced to repeat a grade-had managed to have herself promoted. She encountered few academic difficulties at Sawyer Depot High School, where-Owen and I imagined- she was terrorizing faculty and students alike. She had probably gone to some effort to skip a grade, motivated-as she always was-to get the better of her brothers. Nonetheless, all three of my cousins were scheduled to graduate with the Class of '-when Owen and I would be completing our first and lowly ninth-grade year at the academy; we would graduate with the class of '. It was humiliating to me; I'd hoped that, one day, I would feel more equal to my exciting cousins, but I felt I was less equal to them than I'd ever been. Hester, in particular, seemed beyond my reach.
'WELL, SHE YOUR COUSIN-SHE SHOULD BE BEYOND YOUR REACH,' Owen said. 'ALSO, SHE'S DANGEROUS-YOU'RE PROBABLY LUCKY SHE'S BEYOND YOUR REACH. HOWEVER,' Owen added, 'IF YOU'RE REALLY CRAZY ABOUT HER, I THINK IT WILL WORK OUT-HESTER WOULD DO ANYTHING TO DRIVE HER PARENTS NUTS, SHE'D EVEN MARRY YOU!'
'Marry me!' I cried; the thought of marrying Hester gave me the shivers.
'WELL, THAT WOULD DRIVE HER PARENTS AROUND THE BEND,' Owen said. 'WOULDN'T IT?'
It would have; and Owen was right: Hester was obsessed with driving her parents-and her brothers-crazy. To drive them to madness was the penalty she exacted for all of them treating her 'like a girl'; according to Hester, Sawyer Depot was 'boys' heaven'-my Aunt Martha was a 'fink of womanhood'; she bowed to Uncle Alfred's notion that the boys needed a private-school education, that the boys needed to 'expand their horizons.' Hester would expand her own horizons in directions conceived to educate her parents regarding the errors of their ways. As for Owen's idea that Hester would go to the extreme of marrying her own cousin, if that could provide Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred with an educational wallop ... it was inconceivable to me!
'I don't think that Hester even likes me,' I told Owen; he shrugged.
'THE POINT IS,' said Owen Meany, 'HESTER WOULDN'T NECESSARILY MARRY YOU BECAUSE SHE LIKED YOU.'
Meanwhile, we couldn't even manage to get ourselves invited to Sawyer Depot for Christmas. After their holidays in the Caribbean, the Eastmans had decided to stay at home for the Yuletide of '; Owen and I got our hopes up, but- alas!-they were quickly dashed; we were not invited to Sawyer Depot. The reason the Eastmans weren't going to the Caribbean was that Hester had been corresponding with a black boatman who had proposed a rendezvous in the British Virgin Islands; Hester had involved herself with this particular black boatman the previous Christmas, in Tortola-when she'd been only fifteen! Naturally, how she had 'involved herself' was not made explicitly clear to Owen and me; we had to rely on those parts of the story that my Aunt Martha had reported to Dan-substantially more of the story than she had reported to my grandmother, who was of the opinion that a sailor had made a 'pass' at poor Hester, an exercise in crudeness that had made Hester want to stay home. In fact, Hester was threatening to escape to Tortola. She was also not speaking to Noah and Simon, who had shown the black boatman's letters to Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha, and who had fiercely disappointed Hester by not introducing her to a single one of their Gravesend Academy friends. Dan Needham described the situation in the form of a headline: 'Teenage Traumas Run Wild in Sawyer Depot!' Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling, real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
The closest that Owen Meany and I could get to love was a front-row seat at The Idaho. That Christmas of ', Owen and I were fifteen; we told each other that we had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn, the shy bookstore clerk in Funny Face; but we wanted Hester. What we were left with was a sense of how little, in the area of love, we must be worth; we felt more foolish than Fred Astaire, dancing with his own raincoat. And how worried we were that the sophisticated world of Graves-end Academy would esteem us even less than we esteemed ourselves. Toronto: April , -a rainy Palm Sunday. It is not a warm spring rain-not a 'seasonal' rain, as my grandmother liked to say. It is a raw cold rain, a suitable day for the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. At Grace Church on-the-Hill, the children and the acolytes stood huddled in the narthex; holding their palm fronds, they resembled tourists who'd landed in the tropics on an unseasonably cold day. The organist chose Brahms for the processional-'O Welt ich muss dich lassen'; 'O world I must leave you.'
Owen hated Palm Sunday: the treachery of Judas, the cowardice of Peter, the weakness of Pilate.
'IT'S BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY CRUCIFIED HIM,' Owen said, 'BUT THEY MADE FUN OF HIM, TOO!'
Canon Mackie read heavily from Matthew: how they mocked Jesus, how they spit on him, how he cried, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'
I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished-I am terrified that, this year, it won't happen; that, that year, it didn't. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like
