A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

John’s mother’s name was Tabitha, but everyone called her Tabby. Only her mother refused to call her Tabby, although Rev. Lewis Merrill once called her Tabitha when he was trying to convince her not to leave his church. Tabby was a popular name for pet cats at the time, and John says that his mother was feline in many respects—not sly, but sleek and touchable. Everyone wanted to touch her, and like a cat, she could both repel and welcome being touched.

Owen once told John, “YOUR MOTHER IS SO SEXY, I KEEP FORGETTING SHE’S ANYBODY’S MOTHER.” Indeed, Tabitha’s sex appeal gave most people the wrong idea about her. Everyone assumed she was all body and no brain, but she was never as simple or as eager to please as she appeared. She was a wonderful mother, and a woman whose pure happiness provoked envy in others, for she was perfectly content with very little. She seemed to need nothing but her son and the right man to be happy, and she had them both for the last few years of her life. Tabitha’s sister, Martha, was a warm and kind woman who loved Tabitha, but never understood her.

Tabitha mostly dressed modestly, never exposing much flesh or wearing dresses tight around the hips, but she liked to wear things that flattered her ample chest and small waist. John wonders if she was a flirt, or if she just discarded her inhibitions on the train, since she met both of her lovers there. Owen tells him he’s being absurd, and nothing happens to his mother on trains. The story behind his mother’s first liaison on the train is her own secret to keep, but she readily tells John the story of how she met his stepfather, Dan Needham, on the same train. Dan loves telling the story with equal enthusiasm, and John badly wishes Dan were his real father.

The Wheelwrights and Lydia were eating dinner one evening after Tabitha returned from her weekly overnight stay in Boston when Tabitha announced that she had met another man on the train. At first they all assumed she meant that she was pregnant again, with a different man. But she realized what they were thinking and corrected herself, saying she had just met a man whom she really liked. Harriet and Lydia are skeptical that she could already know how strongly she felt about this man, but Tabitha is sure.

Harriet is horrified to hear that the man Tabitha met is an actor. Tabitha explains that he was coming to town to interview for a job teaching drama at the academy, which is somewhat more acceptable to her mother. He also graduated from Harvard, which pleases Harriet. When she learns that his name is Daniel Needham, a fine old New England name, she finally relaxes. Just then, Dan himself arrives at the house.

All of Tabitha’s past dates were young men who didn’t have a clue about what to do with a six-year-old. Dan was unlike the other men because he was gawky and far from handsome; he also knew just how to kindle John’s curiosity with a mysterious package. John peeks into the package when he isn’t supposed to, and finds a terrifying creature inside: a stuffed armadillo. Dan brought it to the academy as a dramatic prop, and he gave it to John as a present. John and Owen both loved it, and liked to scare each other with it.

Before the armadillo, all the excitement in John’s life came from visits with his cousins up north, in the rural country. His cousins Noah, Simon, and Hester Eastman, all older than him, were daredevils and wildly competitive. He always lost their violent contests, which was a nice change for Hester, who always lost to her two older brothers. Hyper-masculine Uncle Alfred was equally wild, while conventionally feminine Aunt Martha was perfectly mild.

John’s cousin Hester was more drawn to her father’s robust role model, and disdained the constraints of womanhood. Being constantly disparaged by her brothers for being a girl must have also formed her attitude about gender, but Noah and Simon refuse to believe they pushed their sister to become such a radical feminist later in life. Instead they blame Hester’s ambition to defy propriety and scandalize her family as much as possible on an innate “overdose of sexual aggression and family animosity.”

John now sees the societal forces at work in Hester’s later sexual rebellion, observing that she must have been affected by being constantly told that her sexuality was a detriment and a punishment, like when her brothers repeatedly forced her and John to kiss whenever John lost a race. John eventually started to lose on purpose, and even got a hard-on.

Even after John tells Owen about how “physically damaging and psychologically upsetting” his visits to his cousins are, Owen seems to be jealous of John having fun with his cousins. He wants John to invite him up to Sawyer Depot, where the Eastmans live, but John fears that his cousins would absolutely destroy Owen. Owen is hurt that John would think him too wimpy to keep up with his cousins, but John insists that they’re simply too wild. Owen asks John if he can meet his cousins when they come to Gravesend for Thanksgiving, but John says his grandmother gets upset having so many kids in the house. To make Owen feel better, John invites him to stay the night, which Owen does so frequently that he keeps a toothbrush and pajamas at the Wheelwrights’.

Owen becomes very attached to John’s stuffed armadillo, and asks if he can take care of it when John is with his rough cousins. John agrees that Owen should take the armadillo to protect it. Over Thanksgiving, Owen comes over to the Wheelwrights’ to finally meet John’s cousins.

The night before Owen comes over, he calls John to check in. One more time, they go over everything about the Eastmans: Noah is the oldest, Simon is next, but no smaller or less wild than his brother, and Hester is the youngest, “PRETTY, BUT NOT THAT PRETTY.” She has the same masculine traits that look so handsome on her brothers—broad shoulders, big bones, heavy jaw—but she’s also dark and hairy, with her father’s large hands. She has almost no traits of her mother’s, who was blonde and aristocratic. Nonetheless, her tough appearance and attitude created a certain sex appeal, combined with her clear skin, solid curves, flashing healthy teeth, thick hair, and taunting, sharp eyes. She would struggle with her weight in her teens, but she was still sexy.

When Owen arrives, he is reluctant to announce himself and give a bad first impression with his freak voice. So he waits quietly to be noticed by John and the Eastmans, who are naturally making as much of a ruckus as one can possibly make in an old attic. They finally spot him when the sun blazing through the attic skylight strikes him from above and illuminates him like a descending angel, posed with his arms clasped behind his back like an armless Watahantowet. His face is blood red from his bitterly cold bike ride down the hill. He looks so inhuman that Hester screams, startling Owen into screaming back at her in his singular, high-pitched voice.

 The Eastmans are so unsettled that they don’t think of harming Owen, as John had feared. They don’t want Owen to catch cold outside, so they decide to play a game indoors where Hester hides inside a dark closet and someone has to find her. Simon goes inside, and she yanks his “doink” to get back at him for ruining her blouse. Owen goes next, and Hester grabs him and tickles him. But he’s so surprised—and scared she’s going to yank his “doink”—that he wets his pants. Poor Owen immediately sprints out of the house and launches himself on his bike to ride home. Instead of making fun of him, John’s cousins feel bad about frightening him.

John and Tabitha drive after Owen, and find him pushing his bike up the hill, wet and cold and embarrassed. He’s stubborn but anxious about getting in trouble with his dad, who is mad at Owen for struggling to outgrow his pants-wetting. John’s mother promises to wash and dry Owen’s clothes, and give him a bath and some of John’s old clothes to wear. In the car, Owen says he’s upset he didn’t make a good impression on the Eastmans to win an invitation to Sawyer Depot. John explains again that he thought his cousins were too rough for Owen—which they just proved, he thinks—but Owen shouts that he doesn’t care what they would do to him. He just wants to ride on a train, and see the mountains. He only gets out of his house when he goes to school, church, or John’s house.

Tabitha stops driving to give Owen a hug and a kiss, and she promises him that he can always come with them anywhere. John puts his arm around Owen until he’s ready to go back to the house. Owen marches up to John’s bathroom and takes a bath before rejoining John and the Eastmans. He proposes a new game, where one of the others gets to hide him around the house and the others search for him. Hester goes first, and they search everywhere for Owen until giving up. He never tells where she hid him.

Owen stays the night at John’s, and remarks how it’s difficult to go to sleep without the armadillo, now that he’s gotten used to it. John would think back to this moment, and to the earlier image of Owen struggling to ride his bike up the hill, at a later date, on the night his mother died. He knew that he and Owen would be thinking about the same things while trying to fall asleep after that awful tragedy: Tabitha, Dan, and Dan’s armadillo. And he knew what poor Owen must have looked like while riding his bike home alone after the fateful baseball game, preparing to face his parents and tell them what he had done.

The morning after Tabitha died, Owen deposits a few big boxes at their door. The boxes contain Owen’s entire baseball card collection, his most prized possession. Dan says that Owen gave the beloved cards to John as a gesture of apology, trust, and love, and that Owen surely wishes for John to return the cards to him as a gesture of forgiveness. John needs to give the cards back, and give Owen a prized possession of his own. John gives him the armadillo. The boys exchange these objects because they cannot yet express their feelings about the tragedy.

Owen returns the armadillo to John after removing its front claws so that it can no longer hold itself upright. John is quite upset that Owen has mutilated the animal, until Dan explains that the amputation is a symbol of how Owen feels, having accidentally killed Tabitha with his own two hands and ripped John’s mother away from him. He and John have lost a part of themselves with Tabitha’s death, and he would cut off his hands to bring her back. John realizes that the armadillo also resembles Watahantowet’s armless totem. Owen told him that Watanhantowet believed that animals had souls, along with rivers, rocks, trees, and other living and non-living natural things. Giving up his land therefore cost him more than the buyer could have imagined.

Later, Owen would tell John what else he meant to communicate through the armless armadillo: “GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD’S INSTRUMENT.” John could not have conceived of such a thought at eleven years old, and he would not even have believed in divine appointments. He did not know at the time that Owen had other evidence to convince him that God had selected him for a mission.

John steps back into the present: January 1987, where he’s walking his dog in the snow in Toronto. He tries to avoid American news and television, as well as other Americans in Toronto, but even Canada’s news features too much coverage of American politics, and he finds it difficult to look away.

In recent news, President Ronald Reagan is militantly determined to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing a “beachhead” in Central America from which to spread Communism in the Western Hemisphere. John criticizes Americans and their leaders for forgetting recent history: for example, the massive antiwar demonstrations in the late 1960s following the disastrous escalation of the war earlier in the decade, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Owen had strong doubts all along about the rationale behind going to war in Vietnam. He questioned whether America was supporting the right Vietnamese leaders in the lead-up to war: “[NGO DINH] DIEM IS A CATHOLIC […] WHAT’S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?” He questioned the dubious authority on which the United States went to war: “DOES THAT MEAN THE PRESIDENT CAN DECLARE A WAR WITHOUT DECLARING IT?” And he quickly perceived the fatal strategic flaw at the heart of the war: “THERE’S NO END TO THIS […] THERE’S NO GOOD WAY TO END IT.”

John asks if people today remember the Tet Offensive, a fierce North Vietnamese offensive during the Vietnamese New Year celebration in January 1968 that struck a heavy blow to morale late in the war. Later that year Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and Richard Nixon was elected. Over 500,000 American soldiers were still in Vietnam a year later. Over 30,000 Canadian soldiers served, too, and a similar number of Americans moved to Canada during the war, including John. In 1971, Lt. William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder in the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians, and John was applying for Canadian citizenship.

John says that Owen kept him out of Vietnam, which he’s very grateful for. In fact, John believes that everything Owen did for him more than outweighs everything Owen took from him—even John’s mother.