THE ANGEL
IN HER BEDROOM at Front Street, my mother kept a .dressmaker's dummy; it stood at attention next to her bed, like a servant about to awaken her, like a sentry guarding her while she slept-like a lover about to get into bed beside her. My mother was good at sewing; in another life, she could have been a seamstress. Her taste was quite uncomplicated, and she made her own clothes. Her sewing machine, which she also kept in her bedroom, was a far cry from the antique that we children abused in the attic; Mother's machine was a strikingly modem piece of equipment, and it got a lot of use. For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked money-because my grandmother was generous to her-she was clever at keeping her personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her dressmaker's dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she'd return the originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same thing, and they never got angry at her-instead, they felt sorry for her, and took the clothes back without an argument.
'My husband doesn't like it,' she'd tell them. She would laugh to my grandmother and me about it. 'They must think I'm married to a real tyrant! He doesn't like anything]' My grandmother, keenly aware that my mother wasn't married at all, would laugh uncomfortably at this, but it seemed such a solitary and innocent piece of mischief that I'm sure Harriet Wheelwright did not object to her daughter having a little fun. And Mother made beautiful clothes: simple, as I've described-most of them were white or black, but they were made of the best material and they fitted her perfectly. The dresses and blouses and skirts she brought home were multicolored, and multipatterned, but my mother would expertly imitate the cut of the clothes in basic black and white. As in many things, my mother could be extremely accomplished without being in the least original or even inventive. The game she acted out upon the perfect body of the dressmaker's dummy must have pleased the frugal, Yankee part of her-the Wheelwright in her. My mother hated darkness. There could never be enough light to suit her. I saw the dummy as a kind of accomplice to my mother in her war against the night. She would close her curtains only when she was undressing for bed; when she had her nightgown and her robe on, she would open the curtains. When she turned out the lamp on her bedside table, whatever light there was in the night flooded into her room-and there was always some light. There were streetlights on Front Street, Mr. Fish left lights on in his house all night, and my grandmother left a light on-it pointlessly illuminated the garage doors. In addition to this neighborhood light, there was starlight, or moonlight, or that unnameable light that comes from the eastern horizon whenever you live near the Atlantic Coast. There was not a night when my mother lay in her bed unable to see the comforting figure of the dressmaker's dummy; it was not only her confederate against the darkness, it was her double. It was never naked. I don't mean that my mother was so crazy about sewing that there was always a dress-in-progress upon the dummy; whether out of a sense of decency, or a certain playfulness that my mother had not outgrown-from whenever it was that she used to dress up her dolls-the dummy was always dressed. And I don't mean casually; Mother would never allow the dummy to stand around in a slip. I mean that the dummy was always completely dressed-and well dressed, too.
I remember waking up from a nightmare, or waking up and feeling sick, and going down the dark hall from my room to hers-feeling my way to her doorknob. Once in her room, I sensed that I had traveled to another time zone; after the darkness of my room and the black hall, my mother's room glowed-by comparison to the rest of the house, it was always just before dawn in my mother's room. And there would be the dummy, dressed for real life, dressed for the world. Sometimes I would think the dummy was my mother, that she was already out of bed and on her way to my room-possibly she'd heard me coughing, or crying out in my sleep; perhaps she got up early; or maybe she was just coming home, very late. Other times, the dummy would startle me; I would have forgotten all about it, and in the gray half-light of that room I would think it was an assailant-for a figure standing so still beside a sleeping body could as easily be an attacker as a guard. The point is, it was my mother's body-exactly. 'It can make you look twice,' Dan Needham used to say. Dan told some stories about the dummy, after he married my mother. When we moved into Dan's dormitory apartment at Gravesend Academy, the dummy-and my mother's sewing machine-became permanent residents of the dining room, which we never once ate in. We ate most of our meals in the school dining hall; and when we did eat at home, we ate in the kitchen. Dan tried sleeping with the dummy in the bedroom only a few times. 'Tabby, what's wrong?' he asked it the first night, thinking my mother was up. 'Come back to bed,' he said another time. And once he asked the dummy, 'Are you ill?' And my mother, not quite asleep beside him, murmured, 'No. AreyoM?'
Of course, it was Owen Meany who experienced the most poignant encounters with my mother's dummy. Long before Dan Needham's armadillo changed Owen's and my life, a game that Owen enjoyed at Front Street involved dressing and undressing my mother's dummy. My grandmother frowned upon this game-on the basis that we were boys. My mother, in turn, was wary-at first, she feared for her clothes. But she trusted us: we had clean hands, we returned dresses and blouses and skirts to their proper hangers-and her lingerie, properly folded, to its correct drawers. My mother grew so tolerant of our game that she even complimented us-on occasion-for the creation of an outfit she hadn't thought of. And several times, Owen was so excited by our creation that he begged my mother to model the unusual combination herself. Only Owen Meany could make my mother blush.
'I've had this old blouse and this old skirt for years,' she would say. 'I just never thought of wearing them with this belt! You're a genius, Owen!' she'd tell him.
'BUT EVERYTHING LOOKS GOOD ON YOU,' Owen would tell
