Carol Shields - Larry’s Party

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.