And it occurs to me now that Owen's voice was the voice of all those murdered mice, coming back to life-with a vengeance. I don't mean to make my grandmother sound insensitive. She had a maid named Lydia, a Prince Edward Islander, who was our cook and housekeeper for years and years. When Lydia developed a cancer and her right leg was amputated, my grandmother hired two other maids-one to look after Lydia. Lydia never worked again. She had her own room, and her favorite wheel-chair routes through the huge house, and she became the entirely served invalid that, one day, my grandmother had imagined she herself might become-with someone like Lydia looking after her. Delivery boys and guests in our house frequently mistook Lydia for my grandmother, because Lydia looked quite regal in her wheelchair and she was about my grandmother's age; she had tea with my grandmother every afternoon, and she played cards with my grandmother's bridge club-with those very same ladies whose tea she had once fetched. Shortly before Lydia died, even my Aunt Martha was struck by the resemblance Lydia bore to my grandmother. Yet to various guests and delivery boys, Lydia would always say-with a certain indignation of tone that was borrowed from my grandmother-'I am not Missus Wheelwright, I am Missus Wheelwright's former maid.' It was exactly in the manner that Grandmother would claim that her house was not the Gravesend Inn. So my grandmother was not without humanity. And if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. Even in her rose garden, she did not want to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, 'What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?'
From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative. But this story really is about Owen Meany, about how I have apprenticed myself to his voice. His cartoon voice has made an even stronger impression on me than has my grandmother's imperious wisdom. Grandmother's memory began to elude her near the end. Like many old people, she had a firmer grasp of her own childhood than she had of the lives of her own children, or her grandchildren, or her great-grandchildren. The more recent the memory was, the more poorly remembered. 'I remember you as a little boy,' she told me, not long ago, 'but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are.' I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself. And in one conversation about her memory, I asked her if she remembered little Owen Meany.
'The labor man?' she said. 'The unionist!'
'No, Owen Meany,' I said.
'No,' she said. 'Certainly not.'
'The granite family?' I said. 'The Meany Granite Quarry. Remember?'
'Granite,' she said with distaste. 'Certainly not!'
'Maybe you remember his voice?' I said to my grandmother, when she was almost a hundred years old. But she was impatient with me; she shook her head. I was getting up the nerve to imitate Owen's voice.
'I turned out the lights in the secret passageway, and scared him,' I reminded Grandmother.
'You were always doing that,' she said indifferently. 'You even did that to Lydia-when she still had both her legs.'
'TURN ON THE LIGHT!' said Owen Meany. 'SOMETHING IS TOUCHING MY FACE! TURN ON THE LIGHT! IT'S SOMETHING WITH A TONGUE! SOMETHING IS LICKING ME!' Owen Meany cried.
'It's just a cobweb, Owen,' I remember telling him.
'IT'S TOO WET FOR A COBWEB! IT'S A TONGUE I TURN ON THE LIGHT!'
'Stop it!' my grandmother told me. 'I remember, I remember-for God's sake,' she said. 'Don't ever do that again!' she told me. But it was from my grandmother that I gained the confidence that I could imitate Owen Meany's voice at all. Even when her memory was shot, Grandmother remembered Owen's voice; if she remembered him as the instrument of her daughter's death, she didn't say. Near the end, Grandmother didn't remember that I had become an Anglican-and a Canadian. The Meanys, in my grandmother's lexicon, were not Mayflower stock. They were not descended from the founding fathers; you could not trace a Meany back to John Adams. They were descended from later immigrants; they were Boston Irish. The Meanys made their move to New Hampshire from Boston, which was never England; they'd also lived in Concord, New Hampshire, and in Barre, Vermont-those were much more working-class places than Gravesend. Those were New England's true granite kingdoms. My grandmother believed that mining and quarrying, of all kinds, was groveling work-and that quarriers and miners were more closely related to moles than to men. As for the Meanys: none of the family was especially small, except for Owen. And for all the dirty tricks we played on him, he tricked us only once. We were allowed to swim in one of his father's quarries only if we entered and left the water one at a time and with a stout rope tied around our waists. One did not actually swim in those quarry lakes, which were rumored to be as deep as the ocean; they were as cold as the ocean, even in late summer; they were as black and still as pools of oil. It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you'd jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth-our fear of what was on the bottom, and how far below us the bottom was. Owen's father, Mr. Meany, insisted on the rope-insisted on one-at-a-time, in-and-out. It was one of the few parental rules from my childhood that remained unbroken, except once-by Owen. It was never a rule that any of us cared to challenge; no one wanted to untie the rope
