Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  He and Dorrie separated back in 1983, and the divorce came through the following year. Marriage breakdown; the two of them had broken down, and it couldn’t be fixed. Total agreement there. Now he was married to his beautiful Beth; she had come skating into his amorous longing at just the right time. So what was the matter with him, why was his scalp twitching and burning like this at the suggestion of a romance in Dorrie’s life, and why was his heart banging like a spoon on a frypan? David Ellingwood, now that’s a decent name. Probably a decent-looking man too. But then Dorrie had kept her looks; why shouldn’t she attract the attention of a handsome man? A handsome Englishman who thought enough of her to invite her over to England for a holiday. Maybe he’d even sent her a plane ticket, he was so avid to be in her presence. So desirous of ... what? How long had this been going on?

  “Your mom phoned last night,” Larry told Ryan the morning after Dorrie’s call, “and said you could stay with us an extra week.”

  “Why?” Ryan said. He looked stricken. He bit back his lip.

  “She’s going to have a vacation with Mr. Ellingwood.”

  “Who?”

  “With David.” Larry floated the word innocently on the air, despising himself.

  “Oh, him.”

  “You know this David, then?”

  “He’s the guy who taught me how to play chess, but then he moved away.”

  “You know how to play chess?” asked Larry, who grew up playing chess with his friend Bill Herschel, but had never thought of teaching a kid Ryan’s age.

  “He taught Mom first, and then he taught me.”

  Larry tried to picture Dorrie hunched over a chess board; it was unimaginable. Not his Dorrie, who couldn’t even manage to keep her Scrabble tiles in line.

  “You mean your mother plays chess now?”

  “She’s real good. She even beats bim sometimes.”

  “Who?” He wanted to make Ryan say the name out loud. He wanted the name to enter his heart like an arrow tipped with poison.

  “David.”

  “Oh.”

  Larry and Beth had only been married a few months when Ryan made his first solo trip to Chicago. The early days were terrible for all three of them. Ryan stared hard at Beth, an only child’s rapt attention, his mouth slack, and his smoothly combed hair enclosed in a protective bubble of apprehension. His head turned stiffly on his neck. Larry could tell he’d heard of stepmothers and that he was wary.

  Beth was frightened too. This was a new role, and not one she’d expected to play in her life. “Just call me Beth,” she said when it became clear that Ryan intended to call her nothing at all. “We’re going to be good friends, I just know it.” Her self-consciousness was such that she seemed forever reaching for matched sets of quotation marks. “Neato,” she said about Ryan’s Batman kite. Or “Wow” about his Save-the-Endangered-Species T-shirt. Or “Excellent” when Ryan unexpectedly came up with the answer to a radio quiz on baseball statistics.

  Larry took Ryan to the Field Museum, which was a partial success, and to the Art Institute, which wasn’t. He took him to see the topiary animals at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. (“That’s supposed to be a giraffe,” he told Ryan, pointing to one of the foliage figures, and Ryan said, puzzlingly, “Why isn’t it?”) Another day he took him to see the Cubs play at Wrigley Field.

  Beth begged off these excursions. She was writing a paper about an obscure medieval nun who kissed the seats of chairs where people had been sitting and drank the water in which they washed their feet; religious fervor lies side by side with insanity, she’s decided, but she was carefully positioning the events in their historical context. It’s altogether too easy to laugh at extravagant piety. Or extravagant anything, for that matter.

  Both Beth and Larry have noticed that Ryan seldom laughs out loud. Surely he wasn’t this solemn when he was at home with his neighborhood friends. Was it homesickness or was he mildly depressed? He didn’t initiate conversations either, and answered Larry’s questions with monosyllables, yes, no, uh-huh. What did he think of the movie Superman? It was okay. (Soda cracker crumbs hang on around his mouth as he speaks.) Wasn’t that some catch! Yeah, great. So how about that octopus? He’s all right.

  Is it possible to love a kid this goofy and unresponsive? What does it mean to love your child?

  Of course Larry loves his kid. He adds up the obvious. Ryan is quiet, tidy, well behaved, responds to suggestions, does well in school, listens attentively, and shows signs of physical courage - that moment on the subway when a crazy, armed, half-nude guy charged down the aisle of the car they were on and demanded that everyone fall on their knees and pronounce him Lord of the Universe. “Lord of the Universe, Lord of the Universe,” Ryan had chanted, a smirking grin on his young face.

  Every day during the visits Larry pumps up his fatherly love afresh, creates it artificially by stirring love’s reasons into the dialogue and dust of his head - yes, I love this kid; of course I love him, what kind of a parent fails to love his child? In this manner and by means of his own cunning, he calls on a stubbornly vital nerve located next to his heart or lungs or spleen, somewhere in there, then moving the words for love up into the emptiness of his cranium, so that they buzz their insistence and occupy the available space.

  And occasionally - at least once during the course of each visit - a bright flare of authentic love bursts through and becomes for a moment or two an unstinting flow: the real thing. That time when Larry squeaked into a tight parking spot near North Beach, and Ryan, sitting next to him, had breathed, “Hey, great parking!” Or when he glimpses Ryan’s clean bent neck as he leans over the Trib’s comics page. (Oh, the power of a boy’s bent neck!) Or the day Ryan emerged from the Underwater Adventure film at the Aquarium, his eyes so clear, clean, and lit with amazement, so open to the intensity of the uncomprehending moment, that Larry knew it was going to be all right between them - no matter what happened in the future, no matter how they would fail each other. At moments like this, love with all its firecracker madness goes off in Larry’s heart. This child of his, this prize of his first passionate love. Flesh of his flesh. His dear son.

  Ryan at six was underweight. He was a picky eater. He had allergies. He was afraid of the dark and occasionally wet his bed. He was always coming down with a cold or else getting over an earache. He cried easily, and couldn’t bear to be scolded. He refused to look people in the eye, even the eyes of his father, especially the eyes of his father - the father who had left his wife and child, who’d packed a couple of suitcases late on a Winnipeg afternoon and moved out of the Lipton Street house, taking up residence in a crummy apartment over on Westminster Avenue.

  Naturally Larry blamed himself for his son’s various failures. Children of broken marriages get broken, it’s as simple as that.

  In the early days after the separation, when Larry was still living in Winnipeg, he phoned his son every evening, but what can you say to a kid that age? A child’s world isn’t conversation; it’s a boneless rocking back and forth between what’s allowed and what isn’t. You have to be right next to that child to feel what he’s feeling and keep track of what he’s scared of at any given moment and what he’s capable of bearing.

  Five-year-old Ryan said a strange thing to Larry. “I’ve got voices in my head,” he said, “and they’re talking all the time.”

  This worried Larry at first, until he figured out what the voices were. They were nothing more than his son’s interior thoughts. The beginning of self-consciousness. The start of that long, uncut, internal and endlessly repeated dialogue that would be with him for life.

  “I don’t believe in putting babies in daycare,” Dorrie said after Ryan was born, but a few months later she did just that. Money was short, although they could have managed on what Larry was making at the time. Manitoba Motors, where she worked before Ryan was born, offered her a job in sales. Women on the showroom floor - it was something new, and Dorrie discovered she was terrific at inspiring custom
er confidence, she had a gift for making her clients feel like winners. “I always call them clients, not customers,” she liked to say, “and I love to see them coming out of a deal happy.”

  Larry worried about daycare, he who’d grown up with a stay-at-home mother, but at age two, age three, Ryan gave the impression of being a reasonably contented child. In the evenings, after his bath, after Larry read him a story, he liked to run around and around the warm house in his pajamas. His squeals of glee and his brave toppling assurance mimed a happiness that Larry resisted. This can’t last, he said to himself, but was unable to identify the cause of his unease.

  Larry was with his wife at the hospital when Ryan was born. He’d gone to the birthing classes with her, and when the moment came he’d spent seven whole hours timing pains and helping her breathe, and then he watched as his son’s small, hot, urgent head emerged from that unrecognizably red and fluid-dribbling oval between Dorrie’s legs. After the head came the shoulders and then, with a wet rush, the tiny, wrapped-looking muscular body with its two dark stars at the centre - his son’s testicles; a boy. Who would believe those twin markings could be so prominent from the first moment of life. (The penis, on the other hand, was tiny and folded, a rosebud as yet, a gesture.)

  The doctor placed a pair of small silvery scissors in Larry’s hand and showed him exactly where to cut the cord. Larry remembers, even today, the precise meaty yielding of tissue against the pressure he exerted. Happiness rose in his throat like a song. His son’s few wet licks of hair were, he thought, a sign of perfection.

  Then he knew, suddenly, what being a father meant. That savage desire to protect. To watch out for danger.

  Dorrie Shaw got pregnant. This was back in 1978. She and Larry had been seeing each other for over a year - “seeing each other,” that’s what they called it - and during that time she’d gone off the pill and switched to a diaphragm. Her mother had had a slight stroke a few months earlier, and Dorrie was scared of the pill’s side effects. Everyone was in those days.

  At this time she had her own apartment, and wanted Larry to move in with her - he was still living at home, which was just a little bit nutty, she said, for someone his age. They mentioned marriage from time to time, but in a misty, abstract way, like a cozy fifties movie they put on for their own entertainment. “There’s no hurry,” Larry told Dorrie. He was frightened, but worked hard at keeping his voice steady and offhand.

  “I want to be sure,” Dorrie confided to Larry. “I don’t want the kind of marriage my folks have, all that yelling and mess and kids all over the place.”

  Then, there she was: pregnant. Two missed periods, then three. They didn’t even talk about an abortion, they’d come too far together for that, or else, not far enough. Neither of them knew the right words for the right kind of serious discussion or the right approach. And the ragged profile of acceptance - his folks, hers - kept them silent, fatalistic.

  Even when Ryan was a tiny baby Dorrie worried about what they were going to tell him when he got older. “Like why’s his birthday five months after our wedding anniversary? Kids ask those kinds of questions, you know. Kids notice.”

  “He’ll have to learn to count first.”

  “They learn to count early these days. That Sesame Street!”

  “He won’t be the first kid born out of -”

  “Don’t say it. I hate that word.”

  “Wedlock?”

  “You said it. I told you I hate that word, and you said it.”

  “No one uses it anymore. No one pays attention to that stuff.”

  “How about your sister Midge? She thinks I did it on purpose, trapped you, her darling baby brother, stuck a pin through my diaphragm or something. Well, I was the one that got trapped.”

  “Why worry about what Midge thinks?” “What about your parents. How come they’re always going around saying Ryan was premature, the darling wee little thing? Eight pounds. Uh-huh! Tell me about it.”

  “Because they don’t know what else to say.” “Well, we’re going to have to think of something to say to him, you and me. The day’s going to come.”

  “We’ll tell him,” Larry said, “that we were just a couple of crazy kids.”

  “More like stupid,” Dorrie said. She made a face. A suffering face.

  He’s probably known for years, Larry thinks. Ryan arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1991, having grown at least two inches since spring. A kid going on thirteen has got to know. Probably he’s come across an old wedding photo or else something more official, some paper with a date on it, or maybe someone’s said something to him, dropped a hint or even trotted out the whole story. And there was always the possibility that he’d just figured it out, letting a kind of slow logic drip into his veins, the whole picture coming together.

  But how is a kid supposed to absorb this kind of knowledge? What if Ryan believes he’s the sole reason his parents got married, that he was to blame for the whole fiasco?

  Of course, that’s what he must think, how the hell could he think anything else? Here he was, a little piece of protein in the wrong place at the wrong time, his cells multiplying day by day, and setting on course a stream of misery that ended in his parents’ disaster. How does a boy of twelve stand it, walking around the world and holding to his chest the toxic secret that lies at the well of his life? What’s he supposed to do? It isn’t as though he can join a support group for early-arrival babies, or sign up for a twelve-step program leading to forgiveness of parents and their acts of dumb carelessness.

  It worries Larry lately, it preys on his mind. Shouldn’t you try to talk to someone’s inner child while he still was a child? Larry’s taken the month of July off, and he, with Ryan helping, has been attacking the neglected garden of the old Oak Park house he and Beth have bought, building a new fence, starting an espalier against the stone foundation - eastern redbud - and a row of young dogwood by the garage.

  “So what’s am espalier?” Ryan asked.

  An espalier, Larry told him, is a plant that’s trained on a trellis or wire. It wants to grow in three dimensions, that’s its impulse, but you can force it to occupy a two-dimensional plane, flattening it out so it nicely covers a fence or a blank wall. “That sounds mean,” Ryan said, voicing a thought that was so spontaneous and natural and so precisely what Larry would have said at the same age, that the words hung in the air for an instant, unanswerable. Larry debated getting into the issue of whether or not plants “feel,” and decided against it. The day was too balmy and the moment too fragile. He shook his head and gazed at his son through softened eyes. “Maybe it is a little mean,” Larry said finally, and was rewarded by a shy, jubilant smile.

  Ryan’s taken a surprising interest in the work. He’s gone along with Larry to the plant nursery, he’s offered good suggestions about how to give the fence along the east of the yard a weathered look—first a coat of grey paint followed by a coat of white and then a rough sanding — to make it look like it’s “been there from day one.” There’s been plenty of opportunity for Larry to observe Ryan’s feats of concentration and his quick, quiet boyish courtesy — and interpret both, perversely, as a signal of pain.

  The time has come, he decides, to have a talk with this only son of his, and to relieve the boy of the pressure of his privately stored suspicions. This will be one of the important conversations of his own life, he thinks, and possibly his son’s life too; it thrills him a little to think of the truth spilling out and the clean space it will leave in its wake, though he knows that when the moment comes he’ll have to struggle to find words. He’ll manage, though. Where darkness and secrecy have hidden themselves, he’ll plant openness and explanation.

  But first he’ll have to consult with his ex-wife, Dorrie.

  He phones Winnipeg at eleven o’clock one night -- after Ryan has gone to sleep on the sun porch, and after Beth, exhausted from teaching a summer course at Rosary, has gone upstairs to bed. (Why is it that Ryan’s visits necessitate a double
life of tiptoeing and covert conversations? It’s always like this.)

  Dorrie answers the phone sounding sleepy. She was sitting at the kitchen table, she tells Larry, reviewing a sales report for an early morning breakfast meeting. She plans to get away later in the week to Trois Pistols in Quebec, where she’s signed up for a short French course. Rain’s been falling all evening in Winnipeg after weeks of drought. There’d been lightning around suppertime and a change in the wind. How was Ryan getting along?

  “I’m thinking of having a serious talk with him,” Larry says, cringing at the melodramatic shading of his voice.

  “About?” She’s instantly alert.

  “I think there are things he should know.”

  “He knows about sex, Larry, if that’s what you’re talking about. He’s known for years. I bought him a book, and then we had a long talk. This was when he was, maybe, nine.”

  “That’s great, Dorrie.” His fake flattery.

  “Not great.” She’s on to him. Is she ever! “Just necessary.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “But if you still want to have a talk with him -”

  “I want to - that is, I think we should tell him about us.”

  “What about us?”

  “About our getting married, about his birth. I keep thinking he’ll worry about it. That he’ll put two and two together, if he hasn’t already.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just wanted to know what you think.”

  A brief silence, then “I, oh -”

  She’s crying, he can tell. “Dorrie? Are you there?”

  “No,” she’s saying. “No, I don’t want you to tell him about that.”

  “But he’s probably figured it out already.”

  “‘Then there’s no need to -”

  “I think he’ll be lonely, that’s all. Knowing about it all alone, living inside a question mark, if you know what I mean.”