The Latchkey Kid (12 page)

While his mother and Donna Frizzell sparred in front of their respective homes, Hank laboured in Isobel Dawson’s garage. The day was overcast and it was becoming difficult to see what he was typing, so, about noon, when imagination began to fail him, he walked up to the house to inquire from Dorothy whether Isobel would mind if he had better lighting installed in the garage, provided he paid for it. The door was opened unexpectedly by Isobel herself. She was in a housedress and held a duster in her hand. She greeted Hank cheerily.

Hank looked nonplussed, and than asked, rather foolishly: “Aren’t you at work?”

“No. The boss went to Calgary and gave me the day off.” Hospitably, she opened the door wider. “You’d better come in, it’s cold out there.”

He entered gratefully. A strong smell of floor polish pervaded the house and the kitchen was in chaos, its furniture piled in the middle and a vacuum cleaner cord snaking round it to a hidden plug.

She apologized for the muddle and ushered him into the living-room. She gestured towards the chesterfield. “Sit down. What can I do for you?”

He sat down, feeling somewhat shy in the midst of so much domestic activity, while she knelt and lit the gas fire. “Canadians are always cold in this house,” she remarked in explanation. “I don’t keep it so hot as they keep theirs.

“Well?” she asked, as she got up off her knees.

Pretty legs, thought Hank, as he explained about the lighting in the garage.

Instead of giving the immediate agreement which he had expected, she said: “Let’s have some coffee. We’d better talk the whole thing over.”

Though he was a little surprised, he smiled and said with alacrity that he could just use a cup of coffee, and he lounged after her as she bustled around the kitchen. She was unlike anybody else he had ever met and secretly he found her intriguing. Today, dressed like a housewife, she looked more human than usual, less distantly dignified. He wondered how he had found sufficient courage to ask her to the Edwardian Ball, and then remembered that it was her air of calm dignity which had made him anxious to take her, to impress his parents.

“Where’s Dorothy?” he asked.

“She’s gone for a skiing lesson – she wants to learn before going home.” She wondered idly if Hank was interested in Dorothy, and the idea made her feel a little forlorn.

She lifted a cup and saucer in each hand, and he took one from her. His fingers touched hers and his heart gave a jolt, but she seemed perfectly in command of herself and had apparently felt nothing, so he told himself not to be a dope, and carried his coffee back to the chesterfield. He stirred it silently, as she settled herself in a rocking-chair opposite to him.

When he looked up at her, he found her regarding him with a troubled frown over the rim of her coffee cup. It seemed to him that in her gentle gaze there was more than a hint of despair, and it grieved him.

“The thing is,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation, “that I am going to sell this house.”

Hank nearly dropped his cup, as his brand-new writing world splintered into pieces around him. “S-sell?” he stuttered.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice trembling a little. “I’m going home.”

Hank was thoroughly disquieted. He was still young enough to feel that the present was permanent. Shut up in her garage, his work approved of and praised by her, comforted by Captain Dawson’s and her advice,which had in all respects proved reliable, he had felt a safety and confidence unknown to him before. Even now that his father was aware of his activities, it would not be the same; only she knew the appalling effort he had made, only she had read the manuscript through and appreciated the clarity of his prose and the honesty of his outlook. He had expected that any change in his routine would have been of his own making, not hers.

She was waiting for him to make some reply, and he said slowly: “I guess you must be homesick, now Captain Dawson isn’t here.”

“Well, yes. He wasn’t here very much, as you know, but we were looking forward to the end of his army service and then we would have settled here.” She looked sober, and then added: “I might as well go home – there’s nothing to keep me here. My in-laws have other children, and it’s always easier in one’s own country.”

“I guess your parents will be glad to see you,” he remarked.

“They’re dead. They were killed in an accident just before I was married – Peter was my father’s friend.”

“Peter must have been a lot older than you?” ventured Hank.

She was not offended at the personal question, but her voice held a trace of surprise in it as she said: “Yes, he was. He was at school with my father. You see, Father was actually born in Alberta – his parents came here from Wales – but when he was a young man he went back on a visit, and fell in love with my mother and with Wales as well, and stayed there.” She smiled and ran her finger around the top of her coffee cup. “Father always kept in touch with Peter and he planned to come and see us when he got leave from France, where he was stationed. As it turned out, he only came for the funeral.”

Hank was interested. He had heard of girls marrying a father substitute, but he had not met one before. He did not wish to make her unhappy by any further probing after such a flow of confidences, so he just asked her which city in England she came from, this being a question all immigrants were accustomed to.

“I don’t come from England – I’m Welsh, from Caernarvon.”

He failed to realize the difference and his blank expression made her smile. “Wales and the Welsh are quite different from England and the English,” she said. “Being Welsh is a bit like – well, like being a French Canadian. I’m going back to my old employers in London, though.”

“I suppose I’d better find another garage,” he said rather hopelessly. Without asking if he could smoke, he quickly took out a cigarette and lit it, and then belatedly offered her one. She was amused at his blunder, but took one from him. He remembered to offer her a light.

He put his coffee cup down on a pile of English magazines, got up and stretched himself. His T-shirt was too small for him and came out of the waist of his pants. The pants themselves were too tight and too short, exhibiting a generous stretch of hairy legs. Isobel stifled a strong desire to laugh.

“I presume you’re dressed officially for school,” she said.

He looked down at himself. “Yep.”

“Does your mother know about the book yet?”

“No!” he snapped. “Dad does.”

Isobel asked cautiously: “Has he read it?”

“Jeepers, no. He don’t even know what it’s called. Never even asked me.”

He wandered towards the piano, and very gently turned the picture of Captain Dawson face down on the top of the instrument. “Goodbye, fella,” he muttered, but Isobel fortunately did not hear him.

“Do you think he’ll mind that it is a rather controversial book?”

Hank sat down on the piano stool and struck a chord. “It’s too late to mind,” he said. “He should have done a bit of minding years ago.”

“I think you ought to tell your mother.” Isobel’s voice was almost imploring. “She has a right to know, before anybody else tells her.”

Hank broke into the “Cornish Rhapsody”, playing with such savagery that the little room was flooded with the storm of it. For the first time, Isobel felt a little afraid of him, as all the suppressed fury of a rejected child came pouring out in the music. She sat quietly, however, until the music found its way into calmer waters and then came to an end.

He spun round on the stool so that he could face her. “Not bad, eh?” he asked, some of the tension gone from his face.

“You are very good,” she said, some of the nervousness receding from her. “Do you practise much?”

“Most days. Used to practise in the school.” He grinned. “That left the evenings free to go out, except near exam times.” It dawned on him that he had not had a date for weeks, and his first one would be with her at the Edwardian Ball. Must be going senile, he decided.

“Say,” he said, “you’d better tell me more precisely about what I am to wear at this ball. We gotta make a hit – let ’em know we’ve arrived.”

Isobel’s face looked suddenly young and animated. “I’ll get the book with the picture in it. I think it’ll be fun. I haven’t been to a ball since I came to Canada.”

Hank looked at her aghast. “Honey,” he said, without thinking, “it’s time you started to live it up a bit.”

Boyd Stych, looking strangely civilized in a dark business suit and neatly clipped beard, was informed by his wife, when he came home, that the
Advent
was sending a photographer and a reporter to see him this evening, and he was not to litter up the lounge – she’d just tidied it.

He grunted guardedly, as he heaved off his overshoes. Though he knew the press would be sending a photographer to take a picture of him for the financial pages of the newspaper, he suspected that their main interest was in Hank. It was not going to be possible to keep from Olga the information that her son had suddenly become quite a well-to-do youngster, though he had warned Hank on no account to tell her how much he had made out of his book. Boyd believed firmly that all women were incurably avaricious and was certain that, once Olga knew about the book, she would try to squeeze most of the proceeds of it out of Hank; and, to his credit, he was determined that this should not happen.

He dropped his briefcase on the chesterfield, and Mrs. Stych snatched it up crossly and took it into his den, while he went to the refrigerator in search of ice cubes for a drink. Should he talk to her now, he wondered, or let Hank do it?

“Where’s the rye?” he shouted.

“In the bar in the basement – where else?” came the sharp reply.

He went downstairs to the rumpus room and rummaged behind the tiny bar, and, after digging through a seemingly endless collection of empty pop bottles, came up with half a bottle of rye and some ginger ale. He felt he needed a drink – this could be quite a trying evening. Perhaps it was fortunate that he had no inkling of how trying it was going to be.

As he took an eager gulp from his glass, he decided that Hank ought to tell his mother what he had been doing. He rationalized
his cowardice by telling himself that, after all, it was Hank’s headache, not his.

He wondered idly what sort of tripe Hank had written. Some sort of adventure story, he supposed, which would film well. He must ask him.

Hank drifted silently in through the back door and deposited a pile of school-books on the kitchen table and a fair amount of snow on the kitchen floor from his moccasins. He quickly got a corn broom, went out to the back porch again and brushed his footwear clean; then he used the same broom to sweep the snow from the kitchen floor into a safe hiding-place under a scatter rug. No point in drawing fire, he argued, as he put the broom back into the closet.

As he took up his school-books again and moved them into his bedroom, he wondered if his father had told his mother about his leaving school. Boyd had not promised to do this, though he had said he would go to see the principal to straighten out the question of his leaving. This promised visit to the school, mused Hank, would be his father’s first since he had graduated from it twenty-five years earlier. He had had to ask Hank the name of the principal and what courses he had been taking, since he had never bothered to inquire about these before. So much for parental interest in education, Hank muttered.

He went to the hall table, where the postman usually deposited any mail, in the hope that there might be a letter for him, though most of his mail came via Isobel. He was agreeably surprised to find one from a friend who had joined the Mounties a couple of years previously. It was full of amusing anecdotes about his life as a policeman. For the first time, Hank did not feel a pang of envy at his friend’s being already at work; he felt he was doing better than any young policeman could hope to do.

Olga heard him singing in the bathroom and shouted that supper would be ready in a few minutes.

“Put a clean shirt on and comb your hair,” she called. “Somebody’s coming this evening from the
Advent
to see your father.”

Hank stopped singing in mid-bar. Almost certainly, they’d be coming to see him, too. Jeeze, the balloon was about to go up!

“D’yer hear me, Hank?”

“Yeah, Ma.” And he began to hum a funeral march.

The terrible bitterness against his parents that had led to his
writing a book meant to shock them had faded into indifference; yet there lingered in him an understandable vindictiveness. He knew he would be happy if, in some way, it taught his mother a salutary lesson, but he could still quail, like a little boy, in anticipation of the violence of her wrath.

At dinner, the hastily prepared steak was tough, and Boyd complained about it. Next time Olga bought steak, he said, he would cook it.

Olga Stych was immediately biting about men who dressed up in aprons and fancy hats, and thought they could cook over a smelly barbecue.

“I suppose all the months I was up North you reckoned I had a chef along with me,” snarled Boyd.

Hank hastily finished the store-bought cake which followed the steak, and went to his room. He thought he might as well look over his skiing equipment, instead of listening to his parents snapping at each other. If his mother was already as irritated as she sounded, he decided that the evening would be full of squalls.

He sat down on his bed while he threaded new laces into his boots, and then paused, one lace suspended in his hand, as he wondered suddenly why the wire service had not given the
Advent
any news about him. Then he realized that any such news would be about “Ben MacLean” and that they would not connect it with him. He chuckled to himself. Probably the paper didn’t even have wire service, and if it did, he’d bet a dime that anything which had come in about the book’s author had simply been buried in the chaos then reigning in the newspaper office.

The
Advent
had survived for years with a staff of four, plus occasional help from the owner’s wife with the reporting of weddings and similar social occasions. Its circulation had grown enormously as immigrants flooded into Tollemarche, and it had expanded into the shops which flanked it on either side. Now, new offices were being built for it on the other side of the road, but they were not quite ready, and meantime, the new publisher from the East and his editors functioned in an atmosphere of such utter confusion that it is doubtful if an efficiency expert could even have fought his way in through the door. Donny O’Brien, the ancient typesetter inherited from the original
Advent,
swore each day that it was only by the grace of God that the paper ever got launched in the taxi which delivered it to the newspaper boys.

Only the queen of the social columns, recruited a couple of years previously from Calgary, sat calmly at her desk, her silver-tipped fingers delicately feeling the pulse of the city’s social life. Other editors might make a slip, but let her so much as spell a name wrong and her telephone would blare, and some outraged lady would correct her with withering sarcasm.

She was delighted when the story of Hank fell into her lap; an interview with his mother would fill half a column nicely. Her pleasure was, however, short lived. Like all good stories unearthed by such lady editors, it was snatched away from her, and, barring wars and acts of God, as Donny O’Brien reported to Mr. Pascall, the bookseller, it would be a front-page headline on Monday. It was, therefore, no quiet lady columnist to whom Mrs. Stych opened the door that evening, but an eager male reporter keen on a front-page story.

He shot through the door almost as soon as it was opened, closely followed by a small, bald-headed individual carrying what looked like a suitcase.

“Hank Stych!” he hailed a startled Boyd, who had half risen from an easy chair, scattering the papers on which he had been working. He wrung Boyd’s hand. “Say, this is great for Tollemarche – really put us on the map.” Then, turning to his companion, he said: “Pose him against these drapes, Tom.”

Tom hastily opened his case, took out a tripod and set his camera up in the middle of the lounge, while Mrs. Stych watched, open-mouthed. Neither visitor had taken the slightest notice of her.

The reporter was saying to Boyd: “Say, let’s have a picture with you reading the manuscript.”

Mrs. Stych felt a sudden constriction in her stomach.

The reporter consulted his notes. “We hafta have a picture of a Mr. Boyd Stych as well.”

Tom nodded agreement, and went on rapidly assembling his camera.

Boyd found his voice. “I’m Boyd Stych.”

The reporter looked up quickly, took in the fact that Boyd’s Edwardian Days beard was streaked with grey, and said: “Say, I am sorry. I sure thought there was a writer hidden behind that beard of yours.”

Boyd hastily bent down to rescue his papers from being trampled, “The beard is for Edwardian Days,” he said primly.

“Oh, sure, it’s a beaut. All ready for tomorrow, eh? You just might win the prize for the best one, at that,” the reporter replied, fingering his own scanty side whiskers.

Mrs. Stych listened to this conversation with slowly growing horror. The cold feeling she had experienced that morning crept over her; she remembered the library book, and, with a feeling of panic, recollected Hank’s trip to New York. Behind them, she envisaged the faces of the Committee for the Preservation of Morals, as she had last seen them, glistening with almost sadistic anticipation of the crushing of the young author and of giving Mr. Pascall and the cigar-store merchants their proper comeuppances.

“I think I’m going to vomit,” she muttered to no one in particular, and sat down with a plop on a new imitation Italian chair, which received her with a reedy groan.

Boyd was calling up the stairs for Hank to come down, and she watched silently, as if at the movies, while he emerged from his ground-floor bedroom, walked past her without looking at her, and held out his hand to the reporter, who winced as he felt its grip.

“Hi,” said the reporter, wondering if his hand would ever recover.

“Hi,” said Hank. He stared with some scorn at his would-be interviewers, who were some inches shorter than he was. He seemed to fill the room with his contempt for the people present.

“Say, that sure was some book you wrote,” remarked the reporter, to fill the silence. “Haven’t read it myself yet, but I’ll get around to it – I sure will.”

Hank’s expression was cynical, as he gestured to the man to be seated.

Mrs. Stych was thankful for the chair under her, as she felt the colour drain from her face. The lounge rocked in front of her. How could he write such things? she wondered dumbly; how could he know so much about sex, so much about sin? Sin was sex; pride, avarice, gluttony had no place as far as her life was concerned. Only sex was really wrong, only fallen women really burned.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hank could see her stricken face. He felt no pity. When had she ever shown him pity? This was really going to rock her and it would do her good.

“Yes,” he told the reporter, “it is called
The Cheaper Sex
.” In response to a further query, he added irritably: “Sure it’s about sex – what else would it be about with a title like that?”

The reporter said soothingly that their reviewer, Professor Shrimp, had given it a lotta praise, and the review would probably be in the arts section, next to the film shows, on Monday.

Mrs. Stych whimpered softly and the reporter glanced at her curiously. Queer old bag. What did she think of it?

Mentally, Mrs. Stych felt as if she were writhing in her death agonies. The Subcommittee appointed by the Morals girls! How could she face it? And worse, how was she going to face the whole organization when it met? Some of the Morals group were also Queen Bees, some were Daughters of Scotland and strict Presbyterians; the United Church itself – how could she attend it now? It would be all over town that her son wrote pornography. She would never, never, she cried inwardly, as she clutched her handkerchief to her mouth, be able to face the girls again.

Boyd was surprised at the name of his son’s book, but, unlike his wife, he had not read any of it, and he supposed that Hank had deliberately chosen a titillating title to help sales. He, therefore, continued a subdued conversation with the photographer, not feeling it in the least necessary to introduce his wife to either visitor.

The reporter snapped a rubber band over his notebook, told Hank he would have rung him about the details of the book but he had not been able to get through. Hank said that was O.K., and the photographer surged forward. The photographs were taken, while Mrs. Stych leaned back in her chair, her eyes closed, and chewed her handkerchief savagely; and the camera was quickly returned to its case.

“Must be proud of Hank and Boyd,” said the reporter, pausing on his way to the front door to speak to Mrs. Stych for the first time.

Mrs. Stych opened her eyes slowly and looked at him as if he had gone mad. Then, with a great effort, she managed to nod her head in vague agreement.

Proud? Mrs. Stych wrung her hands behind the reporter’s back, and wished passionately that she could run home to Mother on the pig farm; she longed suddenly for the smell of hens and milk, for a place where nobody had to keep up appearances or be other than what they were. Why had she ever come to town to get herself an education? Why had she married a dirty type like Boyd, to spawn a boy like Hank, who had never been anything but a damned nuisance to her?

She glared at Hank as he stood by the front door ready to open it for the paper’s representatives, and tried not to scream while these gentlemen put on their boots again.

In twenty seconds more they were gone, to the sound of spinning wheels on the ice and grinding gears. And she was left with the shattered remains of all that she had found dear in her life, and two extraordinarily sheepish-looking men.

She suddenly regained the initiative of which shock had left her temporarily bereft, and shot from her chair like a well-punted football. Arms akimbo, her face still white under her heavy makeup, she snarled: “Will one of your please explain what’s been going on behind my back?”

The silence was painful.

She rounded on Hank and screamed: “You great, dirty slob – wotcha done?”