'LOOK AT IT,' Owen said. It occurs to me now that most of the seniors at Gravesend Academy had grown up looking at the nice parts of towns; but quite apart from stronger motives, Owen Meany was interested in what that was like. That was how we ended up on Newbury Street-one Wednesday afternoon in the fall of '. know now that it was NO ACCIDENT that we ended up there. There were some art galleries on Newbury Street-and some very posh stores selling pricey antiques, and some very fancy clothing stores. There was a movie theater around the corner, on Exeter Street, where they were showing a foreign film-not the kind of thing that was regularly shown in the vicinity of Old Freddy's; at The Exeter, they were showing movies you had to read, the kind with subtitles.
'Jesus!' I said. 'What are we going to do here?'
'YOU'RE SO UNOBSERVANT,' Owen said. He was looking at a mannequin in a storefront window-a disturbingly faceless mannequin, severely modern for the period in that she was bald. The mannequin wore a hip-length, silky blouse; the blouse was fire-engine red and it was cut along the sexy lines of a camisole. The mannequin wore nothing else; Owen stared at her.
A PRAYER FOR OWEN ME ANY
'This is really great,' I said to him. 'We come two hours on the train - we're going to ride two more hours to get back - and here you are, staring at another dressmaker's dummy! If that's all you want to do, you don't even have to leave your own bedroom'
'NOTICE ANYTHING FAMILIAR?' he asked me. The name of the store, 'Jerrold's,' was painted in vivid-red letters across the window - in a flourishing, handwritten style.
'Jerrold's,' I said. 'So what's 'familiar'?' He put his little hand in his pocket and brought out the label he had removed from my mother's old red dress; it was the dummy's red dress, really, because my mother had hated it. It was FAMILIAR - what the label said. Everything I could see in the store's interior was the same vivid shade of fire-engine noinsettia red.
'She said the store burned down, didn't she?' I asked Owen.
'SHE ALSO SAID SHE COULDN'T REMEMBER THE STORE'S NAME, THAT SHE HAD TO ASK PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD,' Owen said. 'BUT THE NAME WAS ON THE LABEL-IT WAS ALWAYS ON THE BACK OF THE DRESS.'
With a shudder, I thought again about my Aunt Martha's assertion that my mother was a little simple; no one had ever said she was a liar.
'She said there was a lawyer who told her she could keep the dress,' I said. 'She said that everything burned, didn't she?'
'BILLS OF SALE WERE BURNED, INVENTORY WAS BURNED, STOCK WAS BURNED-THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID,' Owen said.
'The telephone melted-remember that part?' I asked him.
'THE CASH REGISTER MELTED-REMEMBER THAT!' he asked me.
'Maybe they rebuilt the place-after the fire,' I said. 'Maybe there was another store-maybe there's a chain of stores.'
He didn't say anything; we both knew it was unlikely that the public's interest in the color red would support a chain of stores like Jerrold's.
'How'd you know the store was here?' I asked Owen.
'I SAW AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THE SUNDAY BOSTON HERALD,' he said. 'I WAS LOOKING FOR THE FUNNIES AND I RECOGNIZED THE HANDWRITING- IT WAS THE SAME STYLE AS THE LABEL.'
Leave it to Owen to recognize the handwriting; he had probably studied the label in my mother's red dress for so many years that he could have written 'Jerrold's' in the exact same style himself!
'WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?' Owen asked me. 'WHY DON'T WE GO INSIDE AND ASK THEM IF THEY EVER HAD A FIRE?'
Inside the place, we were confronted by a spareness as eccentric as the glaring color of every article of clothing in sight; if Jerrold's could be said to have a theme, it appeared to be-stated, and overstated-that there was only one of everything: one bra, one nightgown, one half-slip, one little cocktail dress, one long evening dress, one long skirt, one short skirt, the one blouse on the one mannequin we had seen in the window, and one counter of four-sided glass that contained a single pair of red leather gloves, a pair of red high heels, a garnet necklace (with a matching pair of earrings), and one very thin belt (also red, and probably alligator or lizard). The walls were white, the hoods of the indirect lights were black, and the one man behind the one counter was about the age my mother would have been if she'd been alive. The man regarded Owen and me disdainfully: he saw two teenage boys, not dressed for Newbury Street, possibly (if so, pathetically) shopping for a mother or for a girlfriend; I doubt that we could have afforded even the cheapest version of the color red available in Jerrold's.
'DID YOU EVER HAVE A FIRE?' Owen asked the man. Now
