no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often-as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned. There was much on television that Owen and I were unprepared for; but what we were most unprepared for was my grandmother's active participation in almost everything we saw. On those rare occasions when we watched television without my grandmother, we were disappointed; without Grandmother's running, scathing commentary, there were few programs that could sustain our interest. When we watched TV alone, Owen would always say, 'I CAN JUST HEAR WHAT YOUR GRANDMOTHER WOULD MAKE OF THIS.'
Of course, there is no heart-however serious-that finds the death of culture entirely lacking in entertainment; even my grandmother enjoyed one particular television show. To my surprise, Grandmother and Owen were devoted viewers of the same show-in my grandmother's case, it was the only show for which she felt uncritical love; in Owen's case, it was his favorite among the few shows he at first adored. The unlikely figure who captured the rarely uncritical hearts of my grandmother and Owen Meany was a shameless crowd pleaser, a musical panderer who chopped up Chopin and Mozart and Debussy into two- and three-minute exaggerated flourishes on a piano he played with diamond-studded hands. He at times played a see-through, glass-topped piano, and he was proud of mentioning the hundreds of thousands of dollars that his pianos cost; one of his diamond rings was piano-shaped, and he never played any piano that was not adorned with an ornate candelabrum. In the childhood of television, he was an idol-largely to women older than my grandmother, and of less than half her education; yet my grandmother and Owen Meany loved him. He'd once appeared as a soloist for the Chicago Symphony, when he was only fourteen, but now-in his wavy-haired thirties-he was a man who was more dedicated to the visual than to the acoustic. He wore floor-length furs and sequined suits; he crammed sixty thousand dollars' worth of chinchilla onto one coat; he had a jacket of twenty-four-karat gold braid; he wore a tuxedo with diamond buttons that spelled out his name.
'LIBERACE!' Owen cried, every time he saw the man; his TV show appeared ten times a week. He was a ridiculous peacock of a man with a honey-coated, feminine voice and dimples so deep that they might have been the handiwork of a ball peen hammer.
'Why don't I slip out and get into something more spectacular?' he would coo; each time, my grandmother and Owen would roar with approval, and Liberace would return to his piano, having changed his sequins for feathers. Liberace was an androgynous pioneer, I suppose-preparing the society for freaks like Elton John and Boy George-but I could never understand why Owen and Grandmother liked him. It certainly wasn't his music, for he edited Mozart in such
a jaunty fashion that you thought he was playing 'Mack the Knife'; now and then he played 'Mack the Knife,' too.
'He loves his mother,' my grandmother would say, in Liberace's defense-and, in truth, it seemed to be true; not only did he ooh and aah about his mother on TV, but it was reported that he actually lived with the old lady until she died-in !
'HE GAVE HIS BROTHER A JOB,' Owen pointed out, 'AND I DON'T THINK GEORGE IS ESPECIALLY TALENTED.' ' Indeed, George, the silent brother, played a straight-man's violin until he left the act to become the curator of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, where he died-in . But where did Owen get the idea that Liberace was ESPECIALLY TALENTED? To me, his principal gift was how unselfconsciously he amused himself-and he was capable of making fun of himself, too. But my grandmother and Owen Meany twittered over him as hysterically as the blue-haired ladies in Liberace's TV audience did-especially when the famous fool skipped into the audience to dance with them!
'He actually likes old people!' my grandmother said in wonder.
'HE WOULD NEVER HURT ANYONE!' said Owen Meany admiringly. At the time, I thought he was a fruitcake, but a London columnist who made a similar slur regarding Liberace's sexual preferences lost a libel judgment to him. (That was in ; on the witness stand, Liberace testified that he was opposed to homosexuality. I remember how Owen and my grandmother cheered!) And so, in , my excitement over the new television at Front Street was tempered by the baffling love of my grandmother and Owen Meany for Liberace. I felt quite excluded from their mindless worship of such a kitschy phenomenon-my mother would never have sung along with Liberace!-and I expressed my criticism, as always, to Dan. Dan Needham took a creative, often a positive view of misfortune; many faculty members in even the better secondary schools are failures-in-hiding-lazy men and women whose marginal authority can be exercised only over adolescents; but Dan was never one of these. Whether he hoped to retire at Gravesend Academy when he first fell in love and married my mother, I'll never know; but her loss, and his reaction to that injustice, caused him to devote himself to the development of the education of 'the whole boy' in ways that surpassed even the loftily expressed goals in Gravesend's curriculum-where 'the whole boy' was the proposed result of the four-year program of study. Dan became the best of those faculty found at a prep school: he was not only a spirited, good teacher, but he believed that it was a hardship to be young, that it was more difficult to be a teenager than a grown-up-an opinion not widely held among grown-ups, and rarely held among the faculty members at a private school (who more frequently look upon their charges as the privileged louts of the luxury class-spoiled brats in need of discipline). Dan Needham, although he encountered at Gravesend Academy many spoiled brats in need of discipline, simply had more sympathy for people under twenty than he had for people his own age, and older-although he increased his sympathy for the elderly, who (he believed) were suffering a second adolescence
