The Adventures of a Latchkey Kid

by Robert Hodum

  Always in one another’s hair in a drafty, three bedroom two story house, childhood alliances and difficulties followed the Cross siblings into their adult lives. Apparently sometime during the last evening of Grandma Louise’s wake at Jacobson’s Funeral Parlor in Huntington, Mom and her sister, Jean got into a fistfight. They had a run-in two days before at the Huntington house, arguing over the distribution of mementos and photos, and family heirlooms. I never heard who separated them, but I always assumed it was Uncle Eddie. The account of Mom decking one of her sisters formed part of the Cross family history. These two adults that in their early adulthood squared off frequently in a shared bedroom, would never see one another again.

  We saw Grandpa John with more regularity after Grandma’s death. He traveled with us to visit Fran at Notre Dame Catholic Women’s College, which was outside of Baltimore, and on our frequent visits to D.C. He’d sit in the back of Dad’s new Pontiac and smoke his cigars. Mom would always remind him to lower his backseat window.

  I’d lower mine and stick my head out as we traveled breakneck speed along those highways. Of course, Dad had license to smoke his stogies and Mom, her cigarettes. Ours was a smoking family, a habit I never embraced, and frankly, particularly on those long road trips, one which I barely survived.

  Grandpa John passed in 1967. He was waked in Jacobson’s, now a Cross family tradition. The last session before his burial, I sat in the back of the room with my cousin Mike. It was a much more tranquil event than Grandma’s. All the Cross relatives except Aunt Jean who Mom had punched out, attended the party back at our home after his burial. I was sent over to a neighbor’s house for ice cubes. I can remember that the music in our living room was loud, and we danced and laughed. That was how the Irish said their goodbyes.

  The following night we all gathered at Aunt Dot and Uncle Warren’s house in Kings Park for evening tea. John and Louise had spent their Sundays between our home and the Delph’s. He had sat at their table hundreds of times, smoking away as always. That night we sat around the Delph’s kitchen table in their finished basement, telling stories about John and Louise. Mike and I listened and laughed at the stories we’d heard many times before. It was the family’s time to relive and laugh about my grandparent’s antics. It struck me that no one was smoking. An evening tea spent with the Cross sisters was always accompanied by smoking cigarettes, but not that night.

  Suddenly, Aunt Dot stopped talking and looked up. Everyone at the table went silent. We instinctively looked over to the doorway between the kitchen and the playroom. There was no one there, but the heavy smell of a lighted cigar advanced into the kitchen, approached our table, and slowly and very noticeably circled behind each of us.

  “It’s Daddy!” Aunt Dot, seated nearest the doorway, whispered.

  Sure enough, each of us smelled his cigar smoke approach from behind and slowly dissipate as we sensed him walking around behind us. Uncle Warren was the last to smell the telltale scent of Grandpa Cross’ stogie. As the odor traced off, each of us said our goodbyes to him. Mom and Aunt Dot were crying. I said, “Goodbye grandpa, and thanks for that day!”

  No one knew what I was talking about.

  One summer afternoon several years before, Grandpa John was driving the Cross cousins and me to Uncle Eddie’s house in East Northport, off of Elwood Road. Eddie Jr., Loretta and I were crammed in the backseat and Greg sat next to Pops, a term he tolerated only from the mouth of our cousin Dennis. Grandpa was in his glory, smoking and driving, his two most favorite activities outside of sitting in his easy chair watching ballgames. He seemed not to be bothered by our shouting, singing, and general roughhousing in the backseat.

  At first we didn’t notice how the car in the opposite lane started to drift over the yellow line into ours, heading straight for us. For kids as noisy as we were, we didn’t say a word, just held our collective breath as we realized what was about to happen. It all transpired in seconds, but seemed like a slow-motion scene that we had seen on TV.

  I watched the car approach us, thinking that we were all going to be killed. In the foreground was Grandpa John’s sweaty, bald head, encircled by the familiar haze of cigar smoke. And in the blink of our eyes, certainly not his, he swerved to the right onto the grassy shoulder and avoided a head-on collision. As calmly as possible, not a word said, he turned back onto the road surface and continued along, taking puffs on his cigar, held tightly between his lips.

  We kids erupted in cheers and applause, kissing him on his head, and patting his shoulders. We cheered him and celebrated his driving prowess all the way to the Cross home. We pushed through the screen door, cheering, “Grandpa John, saved us all! Grandpa John is our hero!” He said nothing, sat at the kitchen table, asked for a cold beer and inquired about the score of the Yankee’s game. Just another day in the life of a grandpa, he might have thought.

  So, I thanked him for the day he saved us, the night he came back to say goodbye and share a smoke with his family one more time.

  This Too Will Pass

  It was all about the closet.

  Whether ajar or completely closed, there was something in there, someone in there. Hollow wood sliding doors covered this dark pit. Conceived as a utilitarian space, it now became an absolutely terrifying, timeless vortex. Ostensibly housing my clothes and the larger toys that might not have fit in my toy chest, the shadowy sliver of black lurking behind its parted doors, haunted my nightly battles with exhaustion and my need to be vigilant, ever alert to the slightest movements or whispers behind them. Eyes never leaving the closet doors, I would fall asleep with sheets clasped tightly, drawn up below my nose. I was six when I met what hid behind my closet doors.

  My first visit to our new house off of Pulaski Road in this Suffolk County community was during a Saturday drive. Mom and Dad coaxed me into the car with the promise of ice cream and some trinket if I behaved during the long car ride. I watched our Glen Cove house disappear as I hunkered down in the backseat of Dad’s Dodge. I fell into sleep’s time machine and we arrived in minutes.

  Adjacent to an expanse of furrowed fields full of butterflies, bumble bees lopping between flowers and mounds of rotting potatoes, the wood framed homes like pages in a child’s coloring book, were in various stages of completion. As we slowed down, I noticed a shuttered, ramshackle farmhouse partially hidden behind the overgrowth of vines and wild Cherry trees in the woods across from the corner of the new development. An old woman watched from the shadows of her collapsing front porch of her three-story farmhouse as we turned down what I’d come to call “my street”.

  Dad turned down the unpaved dirt roadway demarcated by newly poured cement curbs. Dump trucks and cement mixers made their way past work crews who dangled from scaffolding and hammered in the recesses of my future neighbors’ homes. We pulled into the rain-puddle, rutted entrance that would become our asphalted driveway.

  As the final touches to our three-story house were being made, my folks had decided to do this walk-through, surely hoping that his $13,000 investment in our family’s happiness was justified. Ours was to be the first finished and first occupied on the block. The construction site appeared closed to the public, but we walked through the door-less garage into what would be a playroom and up to the first floor. My folks got distracted in the kitchen. I wandered around the shell, smelling the freshly cut wood.

  Several of the workmen who were heading off to their lunch break advised me to be careful. The last worker, coveralls stained with some kind of shiny grease, cautioned, gesturing up to the second floor, that some of the rooms had yet to be sheet-rocked and nails and 2x4 wood scraps littered the floor. And whatever I did, he made very clear; I was to stay out of the unfinished bathroom. Turned out, he said, that a stray dog had given birth to a litter of puppies in the bathtub and dragged her afterbirth over the edge of the tub when she exited.

  I made a beeline up the stairs in the chance th
at there’d be a puppy left over … had no idea what afterbirth was, didn’t much care. Running past the carpenters’ bibs, buckets of nails, and cigarette buts, I poked my head into a small room. Pipes stuck out of the wall and there was a hole for a toilet. A bathtub, partially covered with cardboard and flakes of dust and small globs of spackle, had a smear of dried and flaking crimson dragged down its side, from lip to floor. Wads of crumpled up newspaper piled in the corner had been used to scoop something up. I tiptoed in, no puppies.

  Stepping out into the hall, my steps sounded hard on the exposed plywood floor, echoing up through the rafters. So, this was to be our family’s new home.

  My brother and sister, on the third floor, shared a landing that led to ample rooms. He would soon discover the easy access his solitary window gave him to the slanting roof, a crow’s nest for surveilling the neighborhood, and a hideout for late night smokes. A few years later when he went off to the Navy, we kept that room clean and unused, waiting for his return. Sister had a wall full of easterly facing windows and a walk-in closet, lighted by a pull chain from a single light socket.

  Being the baby of the family, I was given the smallest bedroom down the hall from my parent’s and adjacent to the bathroom. Its two windows overlooked the farm fields that led the rising moon’s light directly to my pillow. A large framed-out closet space where sliding doors would close and hide things away filled the corner. The first days in the house I’d sit in my closet and close the door, pretending that I was in a submarine.

  At first glance, that rectangular alcove seemed harmless. Not yet outfitted with its sliding doors, it was simply an uninspiring nook, its wicked nature still undiscerned. After moving in, we accommodated ourselves to this newly constructed home in this model neighborhood, off the potato fields of East Northport.

  And then I heard the noises.

  They seemed to come from the trap door to the attic in the ceiling of my closet. Light framed the opening. I didn’t understand why there was light. There couldn’t be anyone up there. Maybe it was the sunlight poking though the vents in the sides of the house, all the way over to the center, right to the entry door, drawn down into my closet. Sitting in that darkened space, I heard movement and saw the light that filtered down through the cracks of the trap door shimmer. I stepped out and quietly closed the sliding door.

  I never went in there again, at least not alone.

  My room had to be kept clean of toys, definitely no clothes on the floor, everything put away and hung on hangers. This was part of the responsibility of having my own room, I was told. Simple, straight lined furniture pieces filled the space; a dresser sandwiched between the entry and the closet’s left sliding door, a desk off near the corner windows, a single bed positioned directly across from the closet and a toy chest off to the far wall that adjoined my parents room. With my pillows bunched up, I’d lean on my elbows and see the moon rise directly over the distant tree line; its cold, reflected light pouring across the potato field.

  But it was the closet that soon became my focus.

  At first, I heard a shifting sound somewhere from behind my clothes, very subtle, almost like a whisper of leaves running down a street. Under a hushed rustling of clothes being moved aside, I could hear a movement of metal hangars being slowly pulled along the closet’s wood clothes bar. And then it’d stop, teasing me to believe that it wasn’t real. Couldn’t be in this new neighborhood, this new house. Certainly this closet was just that, a new closet. With eyes and ears focused on those closet doors, I waited. Nothing.

  Every night I heard the barely perceptible shuffling of clothes and rasping of hangers. At least until the Thursday of the second week, when through the shadows the left closet door closest to me appeared to slightly shift open. I didn’t move, keeping my body as rigid as a board. Like flicking my finger over an open flame, I focused on the dark pitch between the door and the closet’s molding, trying to penetrate the blackness and hoping not to see anything, but almost wishing I would. There had to be something, someone there.

  That night I knew I had to move, but couldn’t bring myself to make the slightest movement. It might rush me if I did. Yet if I didn’t move, the door might continue to open. I couldn’t have that. I jumped from the bed to the light switch and instantly there was light. The closet door was closed. The house was dark, my family asleep. I sat on the floor near the hallway door, leaned against the wall and fell asleep.

  The next day after dinner, I insisted that the bed be moved with the head of my bed against the wall I shared with my parent’s room. So, with my door open, I could see into the hallway illuminated by the bathroom’s nightlight, all the way up to the 3rd floor. It was a short run out my door and a quick turn to the left into my parent’s room.

  The toy chest, hinged and sharply rectangular, contained only the select few of my toys that helped make falling asleep easier. Placed to the right of the head of my bed parallel to the wall, it’s location provided easy access for clandestine playtime at night. Sometimes it proved invaluable in distracting me from those closet doors. There was the occasional night when I’d fall asleep holding my stuffed monkey or some handful of plastic cowboys and Indians pulled from that chest. Those nights the closet was simply part of the wall.

  During the second month, my parents awoke to my screams. They said that I must have turned in my sleep and fallen out of bed, splitting open my eyelid and forehead on one of its corners. I remember waking up on the floor, feeling the sting of a hot poker on my right eye, and tasting warm liquid in my mouth. Mom and Dad bundled me up and rushed me off to Huntington Hospital. They cursed the toy chest with its sharp corners and would later move it under my corner window. I remember the trip in my car’s dark backseat, clutching my blanket and wondering how I could tell them that it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t roll out of bed. She had cut me.

  That night I remember falling asleep and dreamed that a wooden lady had pulled the door open and sat across from my bed, tapping her nails on the floor, watching me sleep. She’d be standing in a blink and drift over to the foot of my bed where she’d weave back and forth, stretching out her fingers and those long pointed nails. I could see her well now. Dressed in a shadow, a form hidden in black, her face was that of a wooden mannequin, black eyes and nose, a mouth painted lipstick-red, articulated arms like a hideous marionette and her hands with sharpened knuckles, pulsing wooden fingers that flexed and enormous splinter-like finger nails.

  And then I was on the floor and there was blood.

  They couldn’t use anesthesia for some reason that night. As the surgeon leaned over me and pushed the needle through the skin above the tear in the flesh under my eyebrow, I stared to kick and push up. The attending nurses didn’t seem to expect me to be so strong, so intent on going home, even if it meant going back to the room with the closet.

  “Doctor, help us please!” a voice came from what I thought was the corner of the operating table. I saw bright, green lights, white coats and gloved hands that cupped my face as I shook back and forth and screamed for my parents. I remember the nurse insisted that the second doctor help hold me down as the surgeon continued to stitch me up like some kind of child puppet. The needle started to push through easier, quicker. I didn’t stop kicking until the white masked face, whose eyes squinted, angry with my resistance, had pulled back. I heard the snap of rubber gloves. He announced that he was done as he moved past me and out the door.

  I stayed the night in a room with another boy whose head I saw poking above the sheets as they rolled me in past his bed. The lighted hall’s shadows flickered with the passing of the nurse on duty, an electric tinkle-bell sound broke the quiet, a doctor was paged, a child was crying down the hall. There were no closets in this room. I fell asleep.

  My parents knew of my fears, knew that I felt something else lived in their new home, my new home. They never dismissed my concerns, and, of course, commiserated with me
, but explaining away this inexplicable reality stymied them. I suspected that they suffered at the hands of unrelenting jobs and schedules and their requisite weekday absence. I’m sure they felt trapped by all of that. The best they could do was reassure and hope that I grew out of it.

  When I turned seven, they asked me if I thought I still needed my babysitter. I didn’t say no. It was the closet; you know. When we moved in, they asked our only neighbor at the time, Macey, to watch over me for the duration. Her son had become my first friend on the block. So, through the first grade, she sent me off in the morning with a “Be good today, Bobby” and was there when I put the key in the door in the afternoon. Macey was with me all that school year and through the summer, keeping my closet’s occupant at bay.

  It was the end of that summer and I was going into the second grade when my parents sat me down me in the kitchen one August evening. I knew the question was coming: Did I want Macey to watch over me for another school year? I told them no, that I’d be fine, knowing that in the darkest corner of that closet … she chuckled mutedly.

  I would be alone to face her.

  The house was a chameleon that changed its semblance as soon as my parents went off to work. I stayed home alone, making my breakfast, getting ready for the day and locking up as I headed out to 5th Avenue Elementary School. The house seemed to know just when to let its wood whimper, an upstairs tread creak, a shade rustle or a door slowly close. It was a house that wore a mask. For the holidays, on weekends or parents’ days off, when family and friends came over, its hands, warm and supportive, held us all. But this house’s presence intuited when they were gone; parents back to work, visiting relatives and friends returned to their homes and me … alone.