'THEY CALLED ME 'LITTLE,' THEY CALLED ME 'DIMINUTIVE,' THEY CALLED ME 'MINIATURE'!' Owen cried.
'It's a good thing it wasn't a speaking part,' I reminded him.
'VERY FUNNY,' Owen said. In the case of this particular production, Dan wasn't bothered by the local press; what troubled Dan was what Charles Dickens might have thought of Owen Meany. Dan was sure that Dickens would have disapproved.
'Something's not right,' Dan said. 'Small children burst into tears-they have to be removed from the audience before they get to the happy ending. We've started warning mothers with small children at the door. It's not quite the family entertainment it's supposed to be. Kids leave the theater looking like they've seen Dracula!'
Dan was relieved to observe, however, that Owen appeared to be coming down with a cold. Owen was susceptible to colds; and now he was overtired all the time-rehearsing the Holy Nativity in the mornings, performing as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come at night. Some afternoons Owen was so exhausted that he fell asleep at my grandmother's house; he would drop off to sleep on the rug in the den, lying under the big couch, or on a stack of the couch pillows, where he'd been gunning down my metal soldiers with my toy cannon. I would go to the kitchen to get us some cookies; and when I came back to the den, Owen would be fast asleep. 'He's getting to be like Lydia,' my grandmother observed-because Lydia could not stay awake in the afternoons, either; she would nod off to sleep in her wheelchair, wherever Germaine had left her, sometimes facing into a corner. This was a further indication to my grandmother that Lydia's senility was in advance of her own. But as Owen began to manifest the early signs of the common cold-a sneeze or a cough now and then, and a runny nose-Dan Needham imagined that his production of A Christmas Carol might be the beneficiary of Owen getting sick. Dan didn't want Owen to be ill; it was just a small cough and a sneeze-and maybe even Owen having to blow his nose-that Dan was wishing for. Such a human noise from under the dark hood would surely put the audience at ease; Owen sneezing and snorting might even draw a laugh or two. In Dan's opinion, a laugh or two wouldn't hurt.
'It might hurt Owen,' I pointed out. 'I don't think Owen would appreciate any laughter.'
'I don't mean that I want to make the Ghost of the Future a comic character,' Dan maintained. 'I would just like to humanize him, a little.' For that was the problem, in Dan's view: Owen did not look human. He was the size of a small child, but his movements were uncannily adult; and his authority onstage was beyond 'adult'-it was supernatural.
'Look at it this way,' Dan said to me. 'A ghost who sneezes, a ghost who coughs-a ghost who has to blow his nose-he's just not quite so scary.'
But what about a Christ Child who sneezes and coughs, and has to blow his nose? I thought. If the Wiggins insisted that the Baby Jesus couldn't cry, what would they think of a sick Prince of Peace? Everyone was sick that Christmas: Dan got over bronchitis only to discover he had pinkeye; Lydia had such a violent
cough that she would occasionally propel herself backward in her wheelchair. When Mr. Early, who was Marley's Ghost, began to hack and sniffle, Dan confided to me that it would be perfect symmetry-for the play-if all the ghosts came down with something. Mr. Fish, who had by far the most lines, pampered himself so that he wouldn't catch anyone else's cold; thus Scrooge retreated from Marley's Ghost in an even more exaggerated fashion. Grandmother complained that the weather was too slippery for her to go out; she was not worried about colds, but she dreaded falling on the ice. 'At my age,' she told me, 'it's one fall, one broken hip, and then a long, slow death-from pneumonia.' Lydia coughed and nodded, nodded and coughed, but neither woman would share her elderly wisdom with me ... concerning why a broken hip produced pneumonia; not to mention, 'a long, slow death.'
'But you have to see Owen in A Christmas Carol,' I said.
'I see quite enough of Owen,' Grandmother told me.
'Mister Fish is also quite good,' I said.
'I see quite enough of Mister Fish, too,' Grandmother remarked. The rave review that Owen received from The Gravesend News-Letter appeared to drive Mr. Fish into a silent depression; when he came to Front Street after dinner, he sigtied often and said nothing. As for our morose mailman, Mr. Morrison, it is incalculable how much he suffered to hear of Owen's success. He stooped under his leather sack as if he shouldered a burden much more demanding than the excess of Christmas mail. How did it make him feel to deliver all those copies of The Gravesend News-Letter, wherein Mr. Morrison's former role was described as 'not only pivotal but principal'-and Owen Meany was showered with the kind of praise Mr. Morrison might have imagined for himself? In the first week, Dan told me, Mr. Morrison did not come to watch the production. To Dan's surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Meany had not made an appearance, either.
'Don't they read The News-LetterT' Dan asked me. I could not imagine Mrs. Meany reading; the demands on her time were too severe. With all her staring-at walls, into corners, not quite out the window, into the dying fire, at my mother's dummy-when would Mrs. Meany have the time to read a newspaper? And Mr. Meany was not even one of those men who read about sports. I imagined, too, that the Meanys would never have heard about A Christmas Carol
