Larry’s Party

This my mother, Larry thinks, my sad soft mother. Most of her life has involved the absorbing of her grievous history, of trying to go forward when all this heaviness lies inside. One ancient mistake, one hour gone wrong, and now she pays and pays.

She’s a housewife, Larry’s mother, a maker of custard sauce, a knitter of scarves, a fervent keeper of baby pictures and family scrapbooks, but this is her real work: sorrowing, remembering. The loose shuttle of her pain flies back and forth so that sometimes she seems just fine, just like anyone else’s mother. Today she’s made Larry a lemon meringue pie for his birthday instead of a cake; she could have made it yesterday and kept it on the top shelf of the fridge just under the freezer section, but with her history she wouldn’t dream of taking a chance like that, and who could blame her? Her anxieties about food are built into the Weller family chronicle – as is Larry’s passion for lemon meringue pie. Dot makes her son a big one every year on his birthday, with a circle of birthday candles poking up through the golden-tipped meringue. A sight to behold.

There’ll be Lancashire hotpot too, that’s what’s bubbling away in the oven right now. It’s a simple oldtime recipe that Dot’s mother used to make on Saturday nights back in England: chunks of stewing lamb arranged across the bottom of a Pyrex casserole, then a layer of sliced potatoes, another of carrots, then more lamb, and all this topped with a handful of finely diced onions. Next you add plenty of salt, pepper, and parsley flakes, and a cup of Oxo, and bake covered for an hour and a half. Larry’s crazy about Lancashire hotpot, or at least he pretends he is, for the sake of his sad and perpetually grieving and remembering mother. Mum, he calls her; he always has. Americans say Mom or Ma. People in movies and books say Mother.

She’s set the dropleaf table in the living room for six, her best damask cloth and the good cutlery and china. There’ll be just the family, her loved ones, as she likes to call them, as though they were characters out of an obituary – her husband Stu, Larry, Dorrie, and little Ryan in his booster seat. Her daughter Midge is coming too, but here it is, almost time to sit down at the table, and she hasn’t turned up yet. Three years ago Midge kicked her husband out after receiving an anonymous note saying that Paul frequented a certain gay bar, and now she swears she’s never going to get married again. She says, with her eyes rolling upward, that she knew something was funny-bunny about him from day one.

Larry worries about his mum. She’s not getting out enough lately, hardly at all in fact, unless you call a trip to Sears’ mattress sale “getting out.” It also worries Larry that his mother frets so much about other people. She worries about Midge, that at the age of thirty-two she’s starting to get bitter, always sounding off like a regular women’s libber, and going on marches and so forth. She also worries about Larry and Dorrie, the way they’re half the time bickering, and Dorrie working full-time for Manitoba Motors instead of staying home with Ryan, who’s still in diapers at twenty-three months, and she worries about her husband who right this minute is in the bedroom putting on a clean sports shirt because she nagged him into it, and is in a bad mood. As a matter of fact, he’s done nothing but grumble all day, the heat, the mosquitoes, his lower back pain, not enough sugar in his afternoon coffee, the mess in the backyard because of the compost pile Larry’s talked him into, and now having to eat at the dropleaf table in the living room instead of the kitchen nook. So far he hasn’t even said happy birthday to Larry, to his own son.

She checks the oven, looks at the clock, glances out the kitchen window to see if Midge’s car is coming down the back lane. Where is that girl? Next she pours boiling water over the silver pie server in case of lurking germs, then sets it on a paper towel to dry. Immaculate. So’s the speckled linoleum. So is Dot’s cutlery drawer. In this house you would never see a tea-bag tossed wet and leaking into the sink, or a pile of coffee grounds. People who let a skin of mold accumulate on the hem of their shower curtain are not her kind of people. This is a woman who carries her meat home from the butcher’s and washes it at the sink. Larry is watching her rinse her hands under the tap, and at the same time he’s kicking his foot against the table leg the way he used to do when he was little. The upholstered breakfast nook where he sits has the wiped hygienic smell of on old marriage. He’s blowing a little tune into his empty beer bottle.

Is there room in the tilting, rotating world for a thirty-year-old man who sits blowing into a bottle? He thinks this, and so does his mother, who reaches over and takes it from him, not so much with an air of rebuke as with resolution, and places it under the counter. What deprivation, her expression asks, what injury has stalled her son at the age of thirty? Something’s been subtracted too soon, but what? And is it her fault?

Of course it’s her fault.

Worry, worry, a circle of worry. And these are her loved ones, these five. Her grumbling husband, her errant daughter, her baffling son, and in the living room her daughter-in-law Dorrie, whose neatness of body, whose sharpness of eye and chin and shoulder, is bent over the weekend paper, scouting the ads and cutting out dollars-off coupons, while little Ryan sits on the floor and plays with the paper scraps, tearing them into tiny flakes. This small and insufficient family. This is all Larry’s mother’s got to cushion her against the damage of her own life.

The history of Dot Weller, and how she killed her mother-in-law, came to Larry in small pieces, by installments as it were. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t know at least part of the story, and he’s not sure, in fact, if he’s ever been presented with a full account, start to finish, all at once.

In one of his mother’s albums there’s an old photograph of Larry himself taken at nine months. Little Larry wearing a white smocked nightgown is wedged into an old-fashioned wooden highchair which for some reason has been carried out of doors. Blurred trees and a suggestion of lawn fill in a background lit with a glare of ominous light that falls across the infant’s fine frizz of hair and on to the glossy wood of the chair. Can a head think when it’s that size? Can a baby’s face be this wise and unfoolable? His hands, which look like nothing so much as a pair of crimped shells, grip the edge of the highchair’s tray, and his expression is pulled into a knit of absorbed anguish. He can’t possibly know at this age, or can he, that a calamity has occurred in his mother’s life? And yet, the comprehending orbits of his soft eyes, the small roundness of his mouth, already hold a full level of bruising knowledge. He has a mother who cries in her sleep. A mother who’s missing the kind of cold, saving curiosity that would hold her steady after a tragic event and whose contagion of grief has spread to him. Through her milk, through her skin and fingertips.

Or it may have been, in the beginning, no more than a series of silences that accrued around certain topics, which in the life of his mother could not be approached openly. Looking back, Larry seems almost certain that the story, when it came, was presented through the agency of intense whispering toneless voices – but whose? his father’s? his sister’s? – and that behind the recital of events lay a sense of driving urgency: this was information that he was going to need in order to live in the Weller family, in order to walk around in the world. The calamity that occurred in the autumn of 1949, one year before he was born, was inescapable, housed as it was in the walls like a layer of formaldehyde insulation, an always present, tightly lashed narrative embracing everyone who lived under the family roof. And so Larry knows his mother’s suffering. He’s always known it, filling in around the known bits with his imagination. He would like to put his arms around her, and she would like this too. But he doesn’t know where to begin, doesn’t know if she knows that he knows or how much he knows or what weight he attaches to it. So he’s silent and she’s silent. He sits fiddling with his beer bottle, until it’s firmly taken from him, and she checks the clock for the umpteenth time, as if each ticking minute places an extra weight on her sadness.

Dot Weller was twenty-five years old at the time of the accident and married to young Stu Weller who worked as an upholsterer for British Railways in the northern town of Bolton. Their infant daughter Midge, short for Marjorie, had just taken her first steps, a happy little kid tottering from chair to chair, and chortling in tune with her acrobatic daring. The most contented baby in the world, everyone said. A perfect sweetie.

The family lived in a newish council house, four airy rooms and a tiny garden where in the summer Dot grew lettuce, radishes, carrots, blackcurrants, and a wavy row of runner beans. She would have preferred a patch of fine lawn and a bed of flowers – she was partial to lupines – but an anxious, learned frugality kept her concentration on what she and Stu and baby Midge could consume. The blackcurrants she made into a rather sour jam, since sugar was still rationed and hard to come by, and the runner beans she stewed up and preserved in sealed jars. This made her happy, gazing at her row of bottled fruit and vegetables, twelve pints in all, the beans blue-green in colour, gleaming from the pantry shelf.

Stu was down at the Works six days a week, but on Sundays he stayed at home and made morning tea for his pretty young wife and himself. The least he could do, he liked to say. He tossed little Midge in the air, read the Sunday Mirror straight through, and cleaned out the grates, and just before noon went up the road to the pub for a quick gin and tonic, which he fancied in those days to be a gentleman’s drink. After that he and Dot and their little dumpling of a daughter boarded a bus and crossed town to where his mother and dad lived in their two-up, two-down, and where a Sunday joint awaited them. These were happy days. Each of them felt the privilege of it. “But they ought to come to us for Sunday dinner the odd time,” Dot said. “It isn’t right, your mother doing all the work.”

She prevailed on them, and at last they agreed. The Sunday journey was reversed, Mum and Dad Weller crossing town one late October morning on the number 16 bus and arriving at the door drenched from cold rain, but cheerful, and ready for a hot meal. There was roast beef and mash and gravy, and a choice of Brussels sprouts or runner beans. There was horseradish sauce served in a little sweet-dish, a wedding gift. And for pudding a homemade sponge topped with Golden Syrup.

It was a blessing, people said afterward, that they didn’t all choose beans over sprouts. Only Mum Weller helped herself, and rather generously, to the beans. “And Dot here’s the one who bottled them,” said Stu, the proud young husband. “Have a little more, Mum, you haven’t made but half a dent.”

An hour later, drinking a cup of tea, the old woman complained of double vision, of having trouble swallowing. Nevertheless, Stu and his father bundled a sleepy Midge into her pram and wandered off to the stretch of waste ground by the railway yards, leaving Dot alone with her distressed mother-in-law. Dot offered more tea, but it was waved away. She produced a hot-water bottle and a blanket to fold over her mother-in-law’s trunky knees. Mum Weller rocked back and forth a few times, then groaned suddenly, and fell forward with a crash on to the hearth rug, her head missing by an inch the metal fender. Dot ran to her side, kneeling on the rug. Mother Weller’s head was twisted grotesquely to one side, and her face held a look of throttled purple. Dot remembers crying out, but doesn’t know what she said. (Probably help, help, but who was there to help?) And then she passed her hand back and forth before the dead woman’s eyes.

She was indeed dead. The young Dot had never seen a dead person, but she knew this bulky presence on her floor had passed to the other side, as folks said back then. There she lay, face down on the ash-strewn carpet, a heavy woman, stiffly corseted, and padded with layer upon layer of woolen clothes, her checked skirt immense across her buttocks and her knitted jumper rucked up. Her hips and calves were bunched clumsy and lifeless as meat beneath her, and the pink edge of her knickers obscenely revealed. A queerish smell of rubbish rose from the body. It can’t be, it can‘t be, Dot remembers thinking as she tugged at the inert figure, its solid, unmovable heft. Then a thought occurred to her: heart attack. The words formed in her head, bringing a rush of relief – so this is what happened! – and, even in the midst of her comprehension, she experienced a whiff, no more, of shameful self-congratulations, for she had recognized and named the phantom before her. She had been witness, moreover, to one of the body’s great dramas.

But it wasn’t a heart attack that brought on her mother-in-law’s cataclysmic end. Oh, if only it had been, if only! Mum Weller’s death – as was revealed later through laboratory testing – was caused by severe type C botulism. The source of the botulism was Dot’s stewed runner beans, inadequately sealed, insufficiently heated – the same beans that had been standing in their pretty glass jar for the last two months, as purely green and sweet as innocence itself.

Dot Weller is fifty-six now, and her husband Stu fifty-eight. Stu’s parents died in their mid-fifties, his mother from the botulism, and his father, two years later, from rage – though the death notice specified a massive stroke. His rage, closer to biblical wrath, had bloomed into existence on that terrible Sunday when his wife fell dead on the hearth rug, poisoned by her stupid imbecile of a daughter-in-law. Murder was the word Dad Weller used. Even, deliberate murder. He said as much to the reporter from the Manchester Evening News who sent a photographer to take a picture of the Wellers’ garden, catching in one corner the dark row of beans that had been the agent of evil. There was no reasoning with him, although he’d been all his life a reasonable man. His world had been cleft in two by calamity, and he refused to put down the finger of blame.

In the end that blaming finger drove Stu straight to the immigration office in Stockport, and soon after he brought his pregnant wife and child to Canada where, in fact, thousands of other English workers headed in the late forties. There were factory jobs to be had in Winnipeg. It was possible to aspire to a house and garden of one’s own, to buy a car in time, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to make a better life for the kids. And to escape the sourness of ugly scenes and family angers. When news came that the old man had died of a stroke, Stu didn’t trouble himself to go home for the funeral.

Larry knows the poison episode in all its tragic rhythms and reverberations. This is what it’s like to grow up with a bad chapter of someone else’s story, in the toxic glow of someone else’s guilt, a guilt that became a rooted sorrow. He’s had his fingers in the mouth of his mother’s sick grief and now it’s his; every crease and fold belong to him. He knows about the offered cup of tea and the hot-water bottle; his ears can hear the precise sound of the body thudding on the hearth rug; he sees the inky photograph in the newspaper and its headline: “Bolton Woman Poisons Mother-in-Law.” All this has entered the doors and windows of his childhood, without his really noticing. It was simply – there. Like the oxygen he breathed. Like a banked fire. And he can imagine even his mother’s most covert thoughts, that which could never be said: thank God little Midge refused the beans. And even: thank God I passed them up myself.

And for Larry, who was born just two months after his parents settled in Winnipeg, the flight from the home country has the flavor of Old Testament exodus. He finds it hard to believe. He looks at his solid, slow-moving parents and tries to imagine the force that urged them to gather up their possessions and voyage, sight unseen, to a new country. They were eight days on a rusty Greek liner, then three days by train to Manitoba. Dot Weller was sick every mile of the way, and she must have looked back over her shoulder more than once and wondered what she’d left behind and why. Catastrophe drove them out, catastrophe coupled with guilt that was cut like an incision on his mother’s brain. How were they to survive in the heat of a parent’s punishing anger?

When Larry thinks about his folks, this is the piece of their life he can never quite take in: that his father, out of love, out of the wish to protect his wife, would uproot himself, and turn his back on a guaranteed job, a snug house, his weekly gin and tonic, and all that was familiar, that he might have elected freedom or forgetfulness, but instead chose to witness his wife’s plodding, painful, affectless search for that thing that would pass as forgiveness. Larry glimpses something heroic at the heart of his obstinate and embarrassing father, who rescued his young wife, who stood by her. Stu Weller is a man who, without a gobbet of doubt, believes in bringing back the death penalty. He rattles on about welfare bums, and sometimes refers to blacks as nig-nogs, and maintains, somewhat illogically, that queers ought to be sterilized, the whole lot of them. Which is why it surprises Larry that his father has committed so manly and self-sacrificing an act, and he asks himself whether he could do the same for his wife Dorrie. Probably not. He admits his love will never be as pure as his father’s, and certainly not as good as the scripted golden love in his head.

Not that his parents, Stu and Dot, managed to blot out all recollection of the tragedy, far from it. Anything, even after all these years, will trip a switch in Dot’s head: the mention of Bolton, of food poisoning, of home preserving, of sponge cake, a reference to mothers-in-law, to hearth rugs, the specter of sudden death, the word beans – above all, the word beans, a substance banned from the Weller household and never, never spoken of. In all Larry’s thirty years he has not once tasted that treasonous vegetable.

Stu Weller loves his job. For thirty years now he’s worked as an upholsterer for a custom coach company in south Winnipeg, the largest of its kind in North America. He left school at fourteen, as soon as he legally could, and went straight on to the railways where he learned his trade. Right away he took to it, and it’s served him well. Switching from trains to buses, when coming to Canada, was easier than falling off a log, and he’s worked on some real beauties. A custom coach is a handmade object, that’s something most people don’t appreciate. You take a few basic sheets of metal, cut them, bend them, twist them, apply bracing and rivets, and there you’ve got something entirely different. Everything but the motor is built right on the Air-Rider factory floor, even the fuel tanks, even the decorative touches, which is where Stu Weller comes in.

It’s a fact that some of North America’s biggest and brightest names in the entertainment industry have ordered customized vehicles from Air-Rider, wondrous rolling homes and offices with white carpeting on the walls and Italian marble for flooring. A country-and-western singer – after a beer or two Stu Weller will drop the odd hint about who exactly this singer is – custom ordered a model with a bathroom floor that dropped open, bingo, to reveal a hot tub where the luggage compartment generally goes. A cool half-million dollars for that package. This same coach possessed a full kitchen with oak inlay cupboards and a hidden berth for the traveling cook. Last year Stu did the upholstery for a hospital coach, a traveling clinic for rural areas, and now he’s working on a coach for relocating prisoners, each seat transformed into a separate little jail cell with bars going right up to the ceiling. Slash-proof vinyl is what he’s installing at the moment, and the barest minimum of padding. Every order brings a new challenge. The floor supervisor always takes him aside and says, “Look, Stu, you’re the one with the experience. We need to have your particular expertise on this design.”

On weekends Stu Weller naps or creeps around the house, waiting for Monday morning to come. His hands understand the secrets of foam and spring and frame, how to make the under-structure invisible and at the same time strong. There’s a wide range of fabrics at his disposal, your velvets, your brocades, your suedes and leathers. For the president of an American television network he covered the coach walls with a shimmering mauve satin, and received a personal handwritten letter of thanks and appreciation. Next in the works is a special chapel coach for a well-known TV evangelist, and Stu’s planning to go heavy on plum-colored velour and white leather for the doors that separate the public part of the unit from the private. He’s learned that people are willing to spend money for quality; they want the best materials and they’re looking for top-notch workmanship. Over the years he’s been offered jobs in a number of Winnipeg’s better upholstery houses, but he’s never considered them for a minute. He knows the custom coach business inside and out, and can’t imagine working all day on mere furniture, on simple sofas or chairs.

Of course, he’s not above a weekend project at home. The breakfast nook in the kitchen, built in the early seventies, is his own design, a curving red vinyl bench with bright brass tacking. Smart, modern, comfortable. And last summer he took apart the living-room couch, reglued the frame and reupholstered it in a midnight-blue textured nylon. Visitors to the house think they’re seeing a brand-new piece of furniture. His wedding gift to Larry and Dorrie was a trip to England plus a first-class upholstery job on an old Hide-a-bed Larry had picked up at a garage sale. It looks good, too, done up in one of those abstract prints that’re all the rage now, and it’s Scotchguarded so that when Dorrie leaves one of Ryan’s messed diapers lying around, as she tends to do, there’s not too much damage.

He’s offered to do another upholstery job for Larry’s thirtieth. He could do a padded headboard, he suggested, in artificial leather, but Larry said no, he’d rather have a couple of loads of good topsoil for the yard. Well, if that’s what the kid wants, that’s what he gets. Christ Jesus. Dirt.

From the way Stu’s scratching his shirt-collar you can tell he can’t quite believe he’s got a son who’s thirty years old today. He doesn’t, it seems, know what to make of his son and his slapdash wife (Dorrie, Dor, Dorable) and Larry’s funny-bunny ideas about hiking and the environment and planting shrub “arrangements” in his yard and working in a florist shop year after year, fussing with little leaves and flowers all day long. But he keeps his mouth shut. The last thing Stu wants is a fight.

His son calls him Dad or Da; in return he calls Larry nothing, just you. Neither of them can remember when this started, but Larry recognizes his no-name status as a temporary form of shyness on his father’s part; ha! temporary for life. But shyness is all it amounts to. After all, his dad lent him money for his down payment, didn’t he? And he had a load of top-quality topsoil delivered to Larry’s house yesterday morning before Larry and Dorrie were even out of bed.

Six o’clock. Larry’s folks always sit down for supper at six sharp, even when it’s a special occasion like today, and even though Midge hasn’t turned up or had the courtesy to telephone. The drapes have been pulled shut all day to keep the heat down, and the light seeping into the living room is the color of dusty amber. It’s crowded with the table pulled out and with having to squeeze in extra chairs and the hot dishes lined up on the sideboard. Little Ryan starts making a fuss, grabbing at the tablecloth, and Dot frets about him knocking over the glass dish of pickled onions. She’s really worried about death, that her table of carefully prepared food will bring damage, not nourishment, to those she loves best in the world. “Sit down, Mum,” Larry says, as he pulls out her chair – a rare gesture in this house, an unbelievable gesture – and helps her to settle comfortably. He’d like to lean over and touch his cheek to the top of her freshly combed hair. “Well,” she says looking around, “pick up your forks, everyone.”