mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his 'love' of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his 'belief' was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing. But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death. And when she met and became engaged to Dan Needham, how that must have threatened to put an end to his conjecturing; and when she married Dan, how that must have threatened to put an end to the self-inflicted pain of which he had grown so fond. That for all his sourness, her disposition remained sunny-that she even cheerfully sought the bleacher seats for him, and waved to him only a split second before she died-how insubstantial that must have made her in his eyes! The closest that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had come to God was in his remorse for his 'sin' with my mother. And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith-his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his meanspirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother-that she'd had the good sense to shrug him off. It's no wonder it was such a tribulation for Mr. Merrill to know what he was going to say about Owen-at Owen's funeral. How could a man like him know what to say about Owen Meany? He called Owen's parents 'monstrous,' while he outrageously presumed that God had actually 'listened' to his ardent, narrow prayer that my mother drop dead; and he arrogantly presumed further that God was now silent, and wouldn't listen to him-as if the Rev. Mr. Merrill, all by himself, possessed the power both to make God pay attention to him and to harden God's heart against him. What a hypocrite he was-to agree with me that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were 'monsters of superstition'! In the vestry office, where we were supposed to be preparing ourselves for Owen Meany's funeral, I said-very sarcastically -to my father: 'How I wish I could help restore your faith.' Then I left him there-possibly imagining how such a restoration could ever be possible. I have never been angrier; that was when I felt' 'moved to do evil''-and when I remembered how Owen Meany had tried to prepare me for what a disappointment my father was going to be. Toronto: September , -overcast, with rain inevitable by the end of the day. Katherine says that the least Christian thing about me is my lack of forgiveness, which I know is true and is hand-in-hand with my constantly resurfacing desire for revenge. I sat in Grace Church on-the-Hill; I sat there all alone, in the dim light-as overcast as the outdoor weather. To make matters worse: the Toronto Blue Jays are involved in a pennant race; if the Blue Jays make it to the World Series, the talk of the town will be baseball. There are times when I need to read the Thirty-seventh Psalm, over and over again. Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:
fret not thyself, else shall thou be moved to do evil. I've had a hard week at Bishop Strachan. Every fall, I start out demanding too much of my students; then I become unreasonably disappointed in them-and in myself. I have been too sarcastic with them. And my new colleague-Ms. Eleanor Pribst-truly moves me to do evil! This week I was reading my Grade girls a ghost story by Robertson Davies-'The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees.' In the middle of the story, which I adore, I began to think: What do Grade girls know about graduate students or Ph.D. theses or the kind of academic posturing that Mr. Davies makes such great, good fun of? The students looked sleepy-headed to me; they were paying, at best, faltering attention. I felt cross with them, and therefore I read badly, not doing the story justice; then I felt cross with myself for choosing this particular story and not considering the age and inexperience of my audience. God, what a situation! It is in this story where Davies says that 'the wit of a graduate student is like champagne-Canadian champagne ...' That's absolutely priceless, as Grandmother used to say; I think I'll try that one on Eleanor Pribst the next time she tries to be witty with me! I think I'll stick the stump of my right index finger into the right nostril of my nose-
thereby giving her the impression that I have managed to insert the first two joints of my finger so far into my nose that the tip must be lodged between my eyes; thus catching her attention, I'm sure, I will then deliver to her that priceless line about the wit of graduate students. In Grace Church on-the-Hill, I bowed my head and tried to let my anger go. There is no way to be more alone in church than to linger there, after a Sunday service. This week I was haranguing my Canadian Literature students on the subject of 'bold beginnings.' I said that if the books I asked them to read began half as lazily as their papers on Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words, they would never have managed to plow through a single one of them! I used Mr. Findley's novel as an example of what I meant by a bold beginning-that shocking scene when the father takes his twelve-year-old son up on the roof of the Arlington Hotel to show him the view of Boston and Cambridge and Harvard and the Charles, and then leaps fifteen stories to his death in front of his son; imagine that. That ranks right up there with the opening chapter to The Mayor ofCasterbridge, wherein Michael Hen-chard gets so drunk that he loses his wife and daughter in a bet; imagine that! Hardy knew what he was doing; he always knew. What did it mean, I asked my sloppy students, that their papers generally ' 'began' after four or five pages of wandering around in a soup of ideas for beginnings? If it took them four or five pages to find the right beginning, didn't they think they should consider revising their papers and beginning them on page four or five? Oh, young people, young people, young people-where is your taste for wit? I weep to teach Trollope to these BSS girls; I care less that they appear to weep because they're forced to read him. I especially worship the pleasures of Bar Chester Towers; but it is pearls before swine to teach Trollope to this television generation of girls! Their hips, their heads, and even their hearts are moved by those relentlessly mindless rock videos; yet the opening of Chapter IV does not extract from them even so much as a titter.
'Of the Rev. Mr. Slope's parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he
