Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Larry had copied the overall plan for that first effort out of a book of mazes he’d borrowed from the library, a design created by a sixteenth-century Italian architect named Serlio. Of course, he’d had to simplify the center of the plan, where his and Dorrie’s two-bedroom house stood with its wooden siding and concrete block foundation. According to the diagram, the hedge corners were supposed to be crisply squared, but Larry, in those days, was always behind on the pruning, and his second-hand gasoline-powered hedge-trimmer was awkward to hold. “It’s like living in a leaf pile,” Dorrie said. “I’m ashamed for people to know I live here.”

  After supper on summer evenings Larry loved to take his small son, Ryan, by the hand and lead him from the maze “opening” at the front gate of his house to the “goal,” which was next to the side door, a small grassy square where in the future he hoped to install a mechanical fountain. (When he had the time. When he’d saved up enough dough.) Ryan, already bathed for the night and in his pajamas, toddled by Larry’s side, running his free hand across the top of the growing hedges, singing as he went and learning by heart, even at the age of three or four, the secrets of the various turnings. Turn on the first right, take the next two lefts, then right from then on. A classic formulation.

  It may be that Larry has romanticized this particular memory. The soft kiss of the evening sun, the dizzy, unalarming purr of mosquitoes in his ear, his little boy’s hand in his, Dorrie wearing shorts and a T-shirt glancing up from the front steps where she sat with the newspaper spread on her lap, the fragrance of grass and leaf, color and calm, an occasional car drifting by. He can scarcely believe, looking back today, that such innocence ever existed. And he can’t imagine why he hadn’t felt himself the happiest man in the world.

  One day back in Winnipeg when Larry was still working in a florist’s shop, he got a phone call from a man called Bruce Sztuwark, who said he wanted to build a garden maze out on his West Kildonan property. He’d heard about Larry through the grapevine, a mutual friend actually, and he’d heard good things. Was Larry interested in a commission? Great!

  Larry, remembering how hard it had been to keep his own hedge corners in trim, especially the ferny caragana, designed a maze for Bruce and Erleen Sztuwark that was mostly circular lines and which employed as its principal planting stock the hedge maple (Acer campestre), which requires only light pruning. He worked the Sztuwark maze up from the ancient plan - another library book — of a man named Androuet du Cerceau, who was Catherine de Medici’s architect, but added a few extra curves and teasing half-circles, his own invention, so that the whole plan undulated before the eye. There were beguiling shadows, or at least there would be when the plantings had had a chance to grow, but there were no long views, no allées— something most landscape architects feel is vital in maze design; Certainly Eric Eisner, the granddaddy of America’s great landscape artists, believes the allée to be the essence of the formal labyrinth.

  But the rich Sztuwarks were not formal people. They liked the relaxed circular plan. Larry did try to explain to them, taking his time, that every classical maze contains at its heart a “goal.” This is the prize, the final destination, what the puzzling, branching path is all about. The goal can be a small mound or an ornamental tree or a topiary figure, or it can be a modest statue or fountain or even a reflecting pool. The famous Hampton Court maze has at the center two bench seats, each shaded by a tree. The choices are limitless, but there is always something to reward the patience of those who have picked their way through the maze’s path and arrived at the chosen place.

  Bruce, a lawyer and owner of a local radio station, and his silent, sullen wife, Erleen, listened carefully to what Larry had to tell them, and then they announced, or rather Bruce announced, that they had already decided on a “goal.” It was to be a barbecue pit large enough to accommodate the big outdoor gatherings they liked to throw in the summertime.

  Well, why not, Larry was able to say after a minute, after he’d sucked in his breath and got a grip on the situation.

  Whatever the client wants. It was part of the deal, and Larry Weller, Mr. Maze himself, learned that lesson early.

  The Sztuwark maze caught the attention of a local journalist-photographer, Mark Mosley, who tracked its construction from first plowing to the third year of growth. An exhibition of the Mosley photographs was held in Winnipeg’s ACE Gallery, and Maclean’s Magazine picked it up, running a feature article titled, not very accurately, BALD PRAIRIE, TRANSFORMED TO QUAINT ELIZABETHAN GARDEN. There was a photo of Larry, too, looking taller and leaner than he was in real life, standing under a tree and poring over a set of plans. And no doubt about it, it was the Maclean’s coverage that brought in his next client, the Saskatchewan Provincial Fair Board.

  The Saskatchewan maze, dismantled at the end of the fair season, was constructed entirely from bales of hay stacked one on one to a height of seven feet and forming a meandering hay-fragrant tunnel that drew over one hundred and fifty thousand tourists toward its center, which was a wheel of earth tilted slightly forward and planted with prairie wildflowers, vibrant pie-shaped sections of blooming color.

  Larry’s own feelings about the Saskatchewan maze were mixed. On one hand, its carnival popularity was reassuring, though one visitor, an elderly farmer, became so hopelessly disoriented that he suffered an anxiety attack and had to be hospitalized overnight in Regina. Children loved it. Dogs and cats loved it. Cyclists found its tight corners a challenge, and a new sport, cycle-mazing, briefly, illegally, flourished in the small hours of the night. But the deadness of the maze material depressed Larry. Straw was tan. Straw was dusty and static. And what he loved about mazes was their greenness and growth, the vital plant tissue when it had been coaxed into new shapes, so that it offered up one surprise after another, confounding human perception - and presenting the opportunity to locate one’s self in the living world. (Years later, working on the Great Snow Maze in Ulan Ude in Siberia, a structure composed of solid ice walls, he thought affectionately of the Saskatchewan project, its pervasive fragrance, its sweet heat and muffled embrace.)

  At the beginning, while working on his early mazes, Larry kept his day job as manager of a small florist franchise in Winnipeg’s West End. In those days mazes were his hobby so to speak, though, in fact, he never once pronounced the word hobby aloud — men and women of his generation, the so-called baby boomers, seldom employed that knobbly old-fashioned locution, speaking instead of their passions or pursuits or obsessions or sometimes, more guardedly, of their leisure activities.

  His mother’s cream jug collection, the ceramic cow she bought in London on her twenty-fifth anniversary trip back to the old country, the china shepherdess whose stiff skirt flipped sideways to reveal a spout — now that was a hobby. As was his father’s corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, without a doubt one of the largest in the southern part of the province, 2000 specimens in total. Hobby people collected, mounted, displayed, and charted their finds. They were always, wherever they went, “looking out” for something, so that their weekend junkets or wider travels acquired a concentrated purpose and brightness.

  “My husband is maze mad,” said Dorrie, his first wife. Or, “He’s got the bug.”

  The “bug” bit first when Larry and Dorrie visited Hampton Court during their 1978 English honeymoon. There the combination of arch formality and plotted chaos hummed to his young heart, and so did the notion that seedlings could be teased into dense, leafy, living walls so thick they baffled those who entered their midst. It caught him by surprise; it still does. When he looks into a set of garden specifications or rests his eyes on someone else’s inventiveness, he becomes aware of a gentle snowstorm in his head - floating flakes on a blue sky, that take him out of his solitude and convince him he’s a man like any other.

  What a wonder, he thinks, that the long, bitter, heart-wrenching history of the planet should allow curious breathing spaces for the likes of mere toys and riddles; he sees them everywhere. Games,
glyphs, symbols, allegories, puns and anagrams, masquerades, the magician’s sleight-of-hand, the clown’s wink, the comic shrug, the somersault, the cryptogram in all its forms, and especially, at least to Laurence J. Weller’s mind, the teasing elegance and circularity of the labyrinthine structure, a snail, a scribble, a doodle on the earth’s skin with no other directed purpose but to wind its sinuous way around itself.

  Something else: the path to a maze’s goal is always shortened by turning away from the goal, and this perversity, every time he thinks of it, brings a shiver of pleasure. He also loves the secret knowledge that a maze can never be truly symmetrical. These small oddities keep him reverent, awe-struck, faithful.

  He plans, he constructs, he hires and subcontracts, and mourns - but only occasionally - the fact that he no longer gets his hands dirty.

  He has come to the point where he can glance at a maze diagram and his eye at once picks out the most economical path. He has a feel for intricacy and the clarity that cuts through it, “reading” maze design in the same way other people “read” machinery parts or the rumpled topographical folds of relief maps. This maze foolishness he’s accidentally tumbled into gives him a privileged corner in the world, he knows that - his unique bird’s-eye view, his only, only offering.

  The Barnes maze in River Forest, Illinois (boxwood, inkberry holly), was Larry’s professional breakthrough, a triumph in contemporary maze design - or at least “triumph” was the word used by the architectural critic in the Chicago Tribune.

  Confined to a relatively small Augusta Avenue lot - but backing on to a forest preserve - it was both “classical in its suggestions and contemporary in its small postmodern gestures.” (Larry had thought at first of placing a fountain at the center, but then remembered how noisy fountains could be. It was essential that those threading their way through shrub-lined paths be boxed in by barriers to their vision and enclosed, too, by silence. In a maze you had to feel doubly lost, with exterior sensation cut so cleanly away that nothing remained except for the sound of one’s own breath and the teasing sense of willful abandonment.)

  The half-blocked avenues of the Barnes maze, reminiscent of speed bumps, and a number of sudden intrusions - an iron gate with an electric eye, a near-vertical rockery - led straight toward a chevron-row repeat pattern (Euonymus japonicus) full of rhythmic Celtic echoes. “A triumph of integrated space,” the Tribune review concluded. “This young designer understands that optical illusion is less about trickery than it is about the optics of the spirit.”

  It was at Rosie and Sumner Barnes’ house that Larry first met Beth, his wife-to-be. He had arrived in the Chicago area a week earlier, having said goodbye, at last, to his florist’s job in Winnipeg, emboldened by the Barnes commission and buoyed up by the hope that it might lead to others. “So,” Beth had said, raising a glass of peach cooler to her lips, “you’re the man who leads people astray.”

  He was unused to irony. He must have blinked or blown a puff of air up out of his throat.

  “Professionally, I mean,” she explained carefully, releasing the syllables like drops of mercury. “Leading people down the wrong path.”

  “Oh.” He got it. Too late. She was turning to talk to someone else or else she was reaching sideways for another caviar on toast, the first caviar Larry Weller had ever seen. He took in the clean way her left ear lay against the darkness of her cropped hair. “And you?” he said quickly. “What do you do?”

  “I’m unemployed,” she said. Her finger touched a dull pewter disc that lay at her throat, suspended on a leather thong. “A sponge on society.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Sorry I asked, I mean. These days, in these economic times, we shouldn’t go around asking people what they do -” He was blathering.

  A pitying look shot in his direction, and he wondered how this pity had been secured. “I’m a student,” she told him. “At Rosary, just down the road.”

  Her tone had changed. She’d had mercy on him. Her name was Beth Prior, and she was finishing her doctoral work on women saints and the nature of feminine goodness. Her parents were old friends of the Barneses. She’d grown up on this same street.

  “Oh,” he said. “So you live with your parents?” He was prying, but it seemed important to get the facts straight.

  “No,” she said, and now her tone was frosting over again. “They finally pitched me out on my twenty-fifth birthday. That is, they sold their house and moved to a condo in Hawaii. I sort of, you might say, got the message.”

  “I lived at home until I was twenty-six,” he told her. Why? To spare her? To show her she wasn’t the only one with infantile attachments?

  “Really!” Now she did look into his eyes.

  “Yes, really.”

  “In Winnipeg? That’s what I was told. You’re from Winnipeg up in Canada.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “No.”

  Winnipeg was still his here and now, the black sphere that enclosed the pellet of his self, even though he now stood in a living room in suburban Chicago talking to this woman. She stood still as a deer with a look of mock innocence on her face. Now she was opening her mouth.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why’d you live at home so long?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. Why did you stay home until you were twenty-five?”

  “I was happy, I guess.”

  “So was I,” he said. “Or happy enough anyway.”

  “How funny you should say that. That’s what I’m going to call my thesis, if it ever gets finished.”

  “What?”

  “Just what you said — ‘Happy Enough.”’

  “Why?”

  “Because, oh I don’t know. I’ve come to believe, I guess, that that’s why so many people are good. They’re good despite themselves. They’re too lazy to be wicked. It’s as if they can’t be bothered. They may not be ecstatically happy or even moderately content, but they’ve got enough happiness to keep them from toppling over into the abyss.”

  He didn’t know what abyss she was talking about. He wasn’t sure he believed in an abyss.

  A bead of caviar clung to her little finger and she sucked it off neatly. “Twenty-six years old when you left home,” Beth Prior repeated. She seemed to be mulling this fact over. This was serious business and needed clearing up. “So what was it that finally made you move out?”

  She and her small silver earring awaited a response.

  “I got married.”

  “Oh.”

  “And your wife? Is she here with you?” A feathery rise at the end of this question.

  “We’re divorced. She lives in Winnipeg.”

  “Oh.” She twisted the pewter disc back and forth and dropped her eyelids. “Any children?” She had a smile that snapped with attention.

  “A little boy, Ryan. Eight years old. He lives with his mother.”

  “That must be hard for you. I mean, you must find it terribly lonely.”

  “I do,” Larry said, staring at her beautiful munching mouth. “I am.” He was thinking how conversations just like this must be flashing all over the switchboard of North America, across the tilted rotating planet. Social interviews. The extracting of necessary information. The weighing of possibilities. Married or not? And you? Openings. Understandings. Bursts of confidence and reckless declarations. “I am,” he heard himself say to Beth Prior, “I’m terribly lonely,” and their eyes met. A direct hit.

  Could he love a woman like this? A woman who, with her crispness, her cropped hair, and her direct straight mouth, was staring straight at him? Yes, of course he could. He shook his head in wonder at the thought.

  “You look as though you’re about to say something,” she said. (Later, she confided that she had loved him on sight, his smooth, non-agenda face.)

  He nodded, then glanced around the crowded room. The wall paintings with their little lights. The grand piano in the corner. The soft noise of conversation. “Why don’t we leave?” he said. He wanted to b
ury his face in her white neck, and yet this suggestion of his to leave the party seemed lifted out of a bad old movie.

  “Yes, why not?” she breathed through her surprised mouth. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  He remembered later just how she pronounced the word hell — as though it were a real place full of breath, flame, and wonder, and crammed with exotic creatures and strange beguiling flowers, but a place not to be tolerated for one minute when the untested, unmapped world beckoned.

  Their honeymoon (Larry’s and Beth’s) was spent outside Memphis, Tennessee, where Larry went to survey the site that Johnny Q. Questly, the retired country-and-western singer, had selected for his monster hedge maze. The design was to be unicursal, a simple winding snail without alternate routes - a sea shell, a coiled snake, the birthing journey - in whose center would be placed, once the plantings were installed, the marble Q-shaped tomb of Johnny’s beloved late wife, Queenie. His darling, his dear heart.

  To entertain the eye while the feet marched round and round, Larry had mingled pale spirea (once he had scorned spirea) with dark holly, and he had clipped the tops of those hedges into ruffs, turrets, spurs, a running travelogue of shapes and colors and an invitation to reach out the hand and touch.

  “My Queenie was one of God’s own marching angels,” Johnny told them both over a vegetarian lunch on his immense, shaded, flagged-with-marble veranda. A solidly built man, he took a gulp of ice tea (“ass tea,” he pronounced it) and wiped a tear from his eye. “Never took herself one look at another man in forty years of married life. Never a word of complaint when I was on the road, and I was on the road a helluva lot. If I took a drink too many, and I can’t say it didn’t happen on occasion, she’d look the other way. Forgiveness - she was a woman who knew the meaning of forgiveness. I messed up a coupla times, real bad. Well! On our wedding anniversary one year I bought her a necklace. Diamonds, all diamonds. Like the fella says, diamonds are forever, but she only wore the damn thing - ’scuse my French - once or twice and then she got the cancer and passed away. She knew her Bible straight through. A simple life, that’s what she liked, just the two of us out here at this place we bought after the kids grew up, watching the sun go down, a little TV after supper. That’s all I need, she used to tell me, just the two of us loving each other. Hanging on to each other. Well, that’s what our life was like.”