Bauer! Remember him? The card was printed in when Bauer was twenty-eight, in only his second full season as an outfielder for the Yankees. But he looked older; perhaps it was the war-he left baseball for World War Two, then he returned to the game. Not being a baseball fan, I nevertheless remembered Hank Bauer as a reliable, unfancy player-and, indeed, his slightly tired, tanned face reflected his solid work ethic. There was nothing of the hotshot in his patient smile, and he wasn't hiding his eyes under the visor of his baseball cap, which was pushed well back on his head, revealing his thoughtful, wrinkled brow. It was one of those old photographs wherein the color was optimistically added-his tan was too tan, the sky too blue, the clouds too uniformly white. The high, fluffy clouds and the brightness of the blue sky created such a strikingly unreal background for Mr. Bauer in his white, pin-striped uniform-it was as if he had died and gone to heaven.
Of course I knew then where Hester had hidden Owen Meany; he'd been under the couch cushions-and under her]-all the while we were searching. That explained why his appearance had been so rumpled, why his hair had looked slept on. The Hank Bauer card must have fallen out of his pocket. Discoveries like this-not to mention, Owen's voice 'speaking' to me in the secret passageway, and his hand (or something like a hand) seeming to take hold of me- occasionally make me afraid of Front Street. I know that Grandmother was afraid of the old house, near the end. 'Too many ghosts!' she would mutter. Finally, I think, she was happy not to be 'murdered by a maniac'-a condition she had once found favorable to being removed from Front Street. She left the old house rather quietly when she left; she was philosophic about her departure. 'Time to leave,' she said to Dan and me. 'Too many ghosts!'
At the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, her decline was fairly swift and painless. At first she forgot all about Owen, then she forgot me; nothing could remind her even of my mother-nothing except my fairly expert imitation of Owen's voice. That voice would jolt her memory; that voice caused her recollections to surface, almost every time. She died in her sleep, only two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She didn't like things that 'stood out'-as in: 'That hairdo stands out like a sore thumb!'
I imagine her contemplating her hundredth birthday; the family celebration that was planned to honor this event would surely have killed Grandmother-I suspect she knew this. Aunt Martha had already alerted the Today show; as you may know, the Today show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every hundred-year-old in the United States-provided that the Today show knows about it. Aunt Martha saw to it that they knew. Harriet Wheelwright would be one hundred years old on Halloween! My grandmother hated Halloween; it was one of her few quarrels with God-that He had allowed her to be born on this day. It was a day, in her view, that had been invented to create mayhem among the lower classes, a day when they were invited to abuse people of property-and my grandmother's house was always abused on Halloween. Eighty Front Street was feathered with toilet paper, the garage windows were dutifully soaped, the driveway lampposts were spray-painted (orange), and once someone inserted the greater half of a lamprey eel in Grandmother's letter slot. Owen had always suspected Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman. Upon her arrival in the old-age home, Grandmother considered that the remote-control device for switching television channels was a true child of Satan; it was television's final triumph, she said, that it could render you brain-dead without even allowing you to leave your chair. It was Dan who discovered Grandmother to be dead, when he visited her one evening in the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly. He visited her every evening, and he brought her a Sunday newspaper and read it aloud to her on Sunday mornings, too. The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels-looking for something good. How I wish that Owen Meany could have died as peacefully as that! Toronto: September , -rainy and cool; back-to-school weather, back-to-church weather. These familiar rituals of church and school are my greatest comfort. But Bishop Strachan has hired a new woman in the English Department; I could tell when she was interviewing, last spring, that she was someone to be endured-a woman who gives new meaning to that arresting first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, with which the fall term begins for my Grade girls: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'
I don't know if I quite qualify for Jane Austen's notion of 'a good fortune'; but my grandmother provided for me very generously. My new colleague's name is Eleanor Pribst, and I would love to read what Jane Austen might have written about her. I would be vastly happier to have read about Ms. Pribst than I am pleased to have met her. But I shall endure her; I will outlast her, in the end. She is alternately silly and aggressive, and in both methods of operation she is willfully insufferable- she is a Germanic bully. When she laughs, I am reminded of that wonderful sentence near the end of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: 'I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being killed: a mouse, a bird?''
In the case of the laughter of Eleanor Pribst, I could swear I hear the death rattle of a rat or a vulture. In department meeting, when I once again brought up the matter of my request to teach Giinter Grass's Cat and Mouse in Grade , Ms. Pribst went on the attack.
'Why would you want to teach that nasty book to girls?' she asked. 'That is a boys' book,' she said. 'The masturbation scene alone is offensive to women.'
Then she complained that I was ' 'using up'' both Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in the Canadian Literature course for my Grade s; there was nothing preventing Ms. Pribst from teaching either Atwood or Munro in another course-but she was out to make trouble. A man teaching those two women effectively 'used them up,' she said--so that women in the department could not teach them. I have her figured out. She's one of those who tells you
