Larry's Party Read Online Free PDF Page A

that’s who.
     
    “The very image of his mother,” people used to say about Larry Weller. Same blue eyes. The freckled skin. Dot’s gestures. That mouth.
    Larry could not recall any mention of a resemblance to his father. He was his mother’s boy. Heir to her body, her intensity, and to her frantic private pleasures and glooms.
    But now, twenty-seven and a half years into his life, he found that his father had moved in beneath his bones. That nameless part of his face, the hinged area where the jaw approaches the lower ear - he could see now what his flowing hair had hidden: that his father’s genes were alive in his body. Even his earlobes, their fleshiness and color. What was that color? A hint of strawberry that spread from the ears up the veins to the cheeks, his father’s cheeks, curving and surprisingly soft in a man’s hard face.
    His father’s solid, ruddy presence. It arrived, sudden and shocking, and stayed with him throughout the two weeks of his and Dorrie’s honeymoon. He met it each morning in the shaving mirror of the various modest hotels where they stayed. What kind of trick was this? He’d turn his eyes slowly toward the mirror, creeping up on his face, and there the old guy would be, larger and more substantial than a simple genetic flicker. His father’s flexible loose skin pressed up against the glass, a fully formed image, yawning, hoisting up his sleepy lids, dressed in his work clothes with the bus factory’s insignia on the pocket, Air-Rider, his broad shoulders and back bunching forward under Larry’s pajamas, and his large red hands reaching out, every finger scarred in one way or another from the upholstery work he did at the plant. And Larry could hear the voice too, his father’s high, querulous voice, with the Lancashire notes still in place after twenty-seven years in Canada.
    Stu Weller. Master upholsterer. Husband of Dot, father of Midge and Larry.
    It was Stu, with Dot’s blessing, who had the idea of giving the young couple a package tour of England. A wedding present, gruffly, unceremoniously offered. “We did the same for your sister when she got herself married.”
    Never mind that Midge and her husband got divorced after two years. That Paul turned out to like men more than women.
    Dorrie would have preferred a honeymoon in Los Angeles or maybe Mexico, somewhere hot, a nice hotel on the beach, but how can a person say no to free tickets, everything paid for, the plane fare, plus a twelve-day bus trip, Sunbrite Tours, breakfast and dinner, all the way up to the Pennines, then down to Land’s End, the very south-west tip of England, then back to London for the final three days. Stu and Dot had taken a similar package tour a few years back, a twenty-fifth anniversary present to themselves, a “journey back to our roots,” as Dot put it, though the real roots for both of them were in the industrial northern town of Bolton, not the green sprawling English countryside.
    And when Larry and Dorrie got there it was green, unimaginably green - a bright variegated green that made Larry think of Brussels sprouts. Everyone back home had said: What? - you’re going to England in March? Are you crazy?
    But here they were, carried over England’s green hills, ferried down into narrow green valleys, pulling up in the parking lots of green medieval villages where thick-towered castles threw greenish shadows across their squat Sunbrite coach (they had got over their terror of riding along on the left side of the highway with the traffic thundering straight at them).
    The tour began in London and headed north-east. Rain, and then episodes of brilliant slanting sunshine accompanied them as they set off, then rain again, pelting the bare trees and hedges, bringing violent, pressing changes of light, as though the day itself was about to offer up an immense idea. They stopped at the picture-postcard town of Saffron Walden, where they were led on a quick march through the old twisted