Read Online Larry's Party by Carol Shields - Free Book Online Page B

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