to have her
'fling,' as Aunt Martha called it, with the man she'd met on the Boston & Maine. My mother was so calm, so unrattled by either criticism or slander, that she was quite comfortable with her sister Martha's use of the word' 'fling''-in truth, I heard Mother use the word fondly.
'My fling,' she would occasionally call me, with the greatest affection. 'My little fling!'
It was from my cousins that I first heard that my mother was thought to be 'a little simple'; it would have been from their mother-from Aunt Martha-that they would have heard this. By the time I heard these insinuations-'a little simple' -they were no longer fighting words; my mother had been dead for more than ten years. Yet my mother was more than a natural beauty with a beautiful voice and questionable reasoning powers; Aunt Martha had good grounds to suspect that my grandmother and grandfather spoiled my mother. It was not just that she was the baby, it was her temperament-she was never angry or sullen, she was not given to tantrums or to self-pity. She had such a sweet-tempered disposition, it was impossible to stay angry with her. As Aunt Martha said: 'She never appeared to be as assertive as she was.' She simply did what she wanted to do, and then said, in her engaging fashion, 'Oh! I feel terrible that what I've done has upset you, and I intend to shower you with such affection that you'll forgive me and love me as much as you would if I'd done the right thing!' And it workedl It worked, at least, until she was killed-and she couldn't promise to remedy how upsetting that was; there was no way she could make up for that. And even after she went ahead and had me, unexplained, and named me after the founding father of Gravesend-even after she managed to make all that acceptable to her mother and sister, and to the town (not to mention to the Congregational Church, where she continued to sing in the choir and was often a participant in various parish-house functions). . . even after she'd carried off my illegitimate birth (to everyone's satisfaction, or so it appeared), she still took the train to Boston every Wednesday, she still spent every Wednesday night in the dreaded city in order to be bright and early for her voice or singing lesson. When I got a little older, I resented it-sometimes. Once when I had the mumps, and another time when I had the chicken pox, she canceled the trip; she stayed with me. And there was another time, when Owen and I had been catching alewives in the tidewater culvert that ran into the Squamscott under the Swasey Parkway and I slipped and broke my wrist; she didn't take the Boston & Maine that week. But all the other tunes-until I was ten and she married the man who would legally adopt me and become like a father to me; until then-she kept going to Boston, overnight. Until then, she kept singing. No one ever told me if her voice improved. That's why I was born in my grandmother's house-a grand, brick, Federal monster of a house. When I was a child, the house was heated by a coal furnace; the coal chute was under the ell of the house where my bedroom was. Since the coal was always delivered very early in the morning, its rumbling down the chute was often the sound that woke me up. On the rare coincidence of a Thursday morning delivery (when my mother was in Boston), I used to wake up to the sound of the coal and imagine that, at that precise moment, my mother was starting to sing. In the summer, with the windows open, I woke up to the birds in my grandmother's rose garden. And there lies another of my grandmother's opinions, to take root alongside her opinions regarding rocks and trees: anyone could grow mere flowers or vegetables, but a gardener grew roses; Grandmother was a gardener. The Gravesend Inn was the only other brick building of comparable size to my grandmother's house on Front Street; indeed, Grandmother's house was often mistaken for the Gravesend Inn by travelers following the usual directions given in the center of town: 'Look for the big brick place on your left, after you pass the academy.'
My grandmother was peeved at this-she was not in the slightest flattered to have her house mistaken for an inn. 'This is not an inn,' she would inform the lost and bewildered travelers, who'd been expecting someone younger to greet them and fetch their luggage. 'This is my home,' Grandmother would announce. 'The inn is further along,' she would say, waving her hand in the general direction. 'Further along' is fairly specific compared to other New Hampshire forms of directions; we don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend to think that if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are. In Canada, we give directions more freely-to anywhere, to anyone who asks. In our Federal house on Front Street, there was also a secret passageway-a bookcase that was actually a door that led down a staircase to a dirt-floor basement that was entirely separate from the basement where the coal furnace was. That was just what it was: a bookcase that was a door that led to a place where absolutely nothing happened-it was simply a place to hide. From what used to wonder. That this secret passageway to nowhere existed in our house did not comfort me; rather, it provoked me to imagine what there might be that was sufficiently threatening to hide from-and it is never comforting to imagine that. I took little Owen Meany into that passageway once, and I got him lost in there, in the dark, and I frightened the hell out of him; I did this to all my friends, of course, but frightening Owen Meany was always more special than frightening anyone else. It was his voice, that ruined voice, that made his fear unique. I have been engaged in private imitations of Owen Meany's voice for more than thirty years, and that voice used to prevent me from imagining that I could ever write about Owen, because-on the page-the sound of his voice is impossible to convey. And I was prevented from imagining that I could even make Owen a part of oral history, because the thought of imitating his voice-in public-is so embarrassing. It has taken me more than thirty years to get up the nerve to share Owen's voice with strangers. My grandmother was so upset by the sound of Owen Meany's voice, protesting his abuse in the secret passageway, that she spoke to me, after Owen had gone home. 'I don't want you to describe to me-not ever-what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand,'' Grandmother said. 'You've seen the mice caught in the mousetraps?' she asked me. 'I mean caught-their little necks broken-I mean absolutely dead' Grandmother said. 'Well, that boy's voice,' my grandmother told me, 'that boy's voice could bring those mice back to life!'
