The Latchkey Kid

by Helen Forrester

  He spoke coldly. “Parents do not seem to realize, Mrs. Stych, that the schools have little hope of curbing young people if their teaching is not reinforced by the home.” He paused, and then added: “A novel is an effort to show some order in life and find meaning in it. Judging by Hank’s novel, his experience of life cannot have been very happy, Mrs. Stych. We should perhaps remind ourselves that the whole of Hank’s young life has been spent in his home at Tollemarche.”

  “Mr. Dixon!” cried Olga indignantly. “Are you suggesting that he learned those things in his home?”

  She was still speaking when Mr. Dixon said: “Good-bye, Mrs. Stych. I will speak to Hank another time.” The receiver went dead.

  Mr. Dixon was not without courage, and he grieved for many of his pupils, some of whom got into far deeper trouble than Hank would ever do. He sat for a while after his conversation with Olga Stych, his hands folded on his desk, wondering what one unimportant bachelor school-teacher could do to help. Even some of the women teachers on the staff, he knew, had children who were not adequately cared for – apparently two pay cheques were more important than caring for one’s children.

  There was a small knock on his door, so he closed the books he was using to prepare a lesson, and said resignedly: “Come in.”

  A tall, lank-haired girl entered. Her eyes were black-rimmed in her white face. She clutched her books for her next class to her stomach, and looked at him entreatingly.

  “Mr. Dixon, could I talk to you about something? I don’t think my counsellor, Miss Simpson, will understand – a man might understand better.”

  “Oh, good grief,” he thought to himself, “not another pregnancy!” And even as he said: “Sure, come in,” he was thinking that the tart-tongued Miss Simpson would think he was trespassing on her ground if he dealt with this girl and would demand an explanation. Miss Simpson could be very trying.

  Still, he could lend an ear. He could give a little time to these youngsters, time that nobody else seemed able to spare.

  Mrs. Stych, that redoubtable socialite, that ardent hostess to the socially prominent, had time to spare. It began to hang very heavy on her hands, and every day seemed to make matters worse.

  The secretary of the Committee for the Preservation of Morals telephoned to say, in her girlish, gushing voice: “Olga, you must understand. It just won’t do to have you on the committee. I mean to say …”

  Mrs. Stych resigned; and Margaret Tyrrell got rid of a dangerous competitor for the post of vice-president next year.

  The Lady Queen Bees were even more crushing. The chairman wrote and demanded her precious Queen Bee medal back within three days. The Queen Bees could not tolerate even the merest breath of scandal, she stated peremptorily.

  Boiling with rage, yet feeling that she had no alternative, Mrs. Stych dropped the medal into an envelope and got Boyd to post it for her.

  She had been president of the Community Centre; and two members of the executive committee, both sauve real-estate salesmen who found the Community Centre a convenient source of information about houses likely to come up for sale, called upon her and smoothly explained that many members were uneasy at her continuing in the presidency; there was a general feeling that she and Boyd must have condoned the publication of Hank’s book. Neither man had seen a copy of the book, but they both assured her that neither of them had any special feelings about it; they were just unfortunate that they had been given the unenviable task of explaining the Community Centre’s quandary to her. They hoped that she would not take it amiss, and that she would not hesitate to call upon them to sell her home when she moved to Vanier Heights.

  Mrs. Stych ventured to argue that the responsibility was not hers, but she was no match for two salesmen, so eventually she agreed to resign.

  Mrs. Frizzell, who was the vice-president, rejoiced, as she was immediately installed as president.

  The Ladies of Scotland did not communicate with her, and, remembering Miss Angus’s denunciation of Donna Frizzell’s taste in literature at the last tea, Mrs. Stych kept out of their way, feeling that her fate would be much the same there.

  Usually the Stychs gave an at-home at Christmas. They announced the date and time of it on the Christmas cards they sent out, and could usually expect about a hundred guests to flow through their living-room in the course of the evening. This year, Mrs. Stych decided, they would not hold it. She also decided that she and Boyd would not attend two coffee parties to which they had earlier been invited. Boyd received this information with relief, as he was very busy at work.

  Despite the cold-shouldering from which she was suffering, all those ladies connected with charities in the city sent special appeals to her, to Boyd and to Hank. Money was money, after all, they told each other.

  Boyd remained untouched by the general disapprobation. His long absences from the city meant that he could not conveniently hold any office in service club or other community endeavours, and his friends were old ones who had gone to school with him.

  None of his colleagues had read a book since they left university, and, though they had heard of Hank’s book through their wives, the only thing they remembered about it was the mighty sum paid for the film rights, and this was enough to reconcile them to anything.

  Only in the emerging world of polite society in Tollemarche, a world ruled by women, a tooth-and-claw world, was its impact felt, just as Hank had originally planned that it should be. Mrs. Stych’s rivals found it a priceless opportunity to displace a woman who had been rapidly becoming a very influential lady in the city.

  During her fortnightly visit to the supermarket, the shoppers she knew seemed suddenly blind and had a tendency to vanish down the other end of the aisle just as she entered it. Even Mrs. Stein of Dawne’s Dresse Shoppe, where her charge account was one of the largest, left her to a young, careless girl who did not understand the needs of a forty bust.

  Feverishly she checked her engagement diary. The church tea and bake sale was to be held on the following Saturday, and she had promised to contribute two cakes to it. With her finger on the entry, she considered whether she should prepare the cakes. The Reverend Bruce Mackay loomed before her, shaking a menacing forefinger, and she cringed. A report of his attack on obscene literature had been featured in Monday’s Tollemarche Advent, and Mrs. Stych’s double chin quivered with horror at the thought of facing him again. The Lord would have to do without cake.

  The diary showed that she was due to go curling the following day with some of the girls; it was a good team and they had done well the previous winter.

  Mrs. Stych loved curling and felt she could not forgo this pleasure without putting up a fight. She dialled the captain of the team.

  The telephone was answered by the captain’s six-year-old daughter, who said her mother was out and she did not know when she would be back.

  Mrs. Stych inquired where Chrissie and Donald, her elder brother and sister, were.

  “Gone skating,” said the small voice laconically.

  Mrs. Stych asked the child to request her mother to telephone back about curling the following day.

  “Oh, Mother doesn’t want you on the team any more,” said the child with devastating honesty. “She’s asked Mrs. Simpkins to play instead.” There was a sound of munching, and then the child continued, “She says Mrs. Simpkins doesn’t play so well, but she has to ’tain the moral character of the team. What’s moral character, Mrs. Stych?”

  Mrs. Stych was rocking unsteadily on her high heels. Her face was pale. She swallowed and said quite kindly: “I’m not sure, honey. I guess…” She sought for words. “I guess it means being truthful like you are.”

  “Am I truthful? Say, thank you for saying so, Mrs. Stych.”

  “Is your baby-sitter with you?”

  “I don’t need a sitter. I just come in from school. I’m big enough to manage now.” She sighed. “I gotta a door key hanging round my neck. And I’m eating a cookie – listen!” And there was a crunch as
small teeth went through a cookie.

  Mrs. Stych, never very good with children, felt out of her depth, so she said: “It’s been nice talking to you, honey. See you.” She rang off.

  She went and sat down by her picture window, and thought about the little girl to whom she had been speaking. She had left Hank like that, with a key hung round his neck, as she tore from one social event to another, assuring herself that she was the busiest woman alive and that one must keep up one’s interests; otherwise, what would one do when one was widowed?

  Now look where she was! She wondered what the little six-year-old would be doing in the empty hours after school ten years hence – and she shuddered. Hank had written in uncomprising terms about what they did.

  She watched idly as a taxi drew up outside Mrs. Frizzell’s house. Betty from Vancouver had evidently come on a visit with the new baby. Her eldest boy, a three-year-old, stood in the wind, waiting for his mother to pay the cabbie. His parka was unzipped and his hood thrown back, despite the cold. He turned and clumped up the path to his grandmother’s front door, and Mrs. Stych nearly passed out. It could not be – it couldn’t! A tiny, wooden-faced replica of Hank! She opened her eyes and looked again. A second look only confirmed her horrid suspicions.

  Olga Stych closed her eyes and prayed fervently that Donna Frizzel would not see the likeness. A feeling of consternation swept through her. What else had Hank embroiled himself in?

  CHAPTER 25

  Hank fought his way back from Banff in a near blizzard, spending fifteen hours on the road in a determined effort to return before Isobel left. He arrived about midnight, having telephoned from Edmonton to say that he was on his way.

  Sandwiches, cake and a warm welcome from both Isobel and Dorothy awaited him. In the privacy of the porch he kissed Isobel good-bye, leaving her pale and shaken, and promised himself privately that his tour of Europe would be short, so that he could spend a lot of time in London or Llan-whatever-it-was with Isobel. Without her, he knew after stern self-examination in the silence of the Rockies, he might as well be dead.

  He had no desire to meet his parents that night, so he ploughed through the snow round the side of the house to the window of his room, which his experienced fingers quickly forced open. He pushed his bag in first, then clambered in himself, bringing enough snow with him to ruin the wall-to-wall broadloom.

  His parents upstairs did not hear him, but Mrs. Frizzell saw him through her bathroom window and, with a smug smile, promised herself the pleasure of spreading the news around Tollemarche in the morning that Hank Stych had been out so late that he had had to climb through his bedroom window to avoid his father.

  She saw herself telling the story to Mrs. Macdonald, with appropriately significant pauses, to suggest with whom she thought Hank had spent the evening. That young Mrs. Dawson, thought Mrs. Frizzell sourly, might queen it at the ball, but she was no better than the rest of them in leading Hank astray. The widow of Tollemarche’s hero had no right to go out with any other man, never mind a boy. How Mrs. Dawson Senior could endure her as a daughter-in-law was beyond Mrs. Frizzell’s comprehension.

  Her malevolent contemplation of the probable relationship between Hank and Isobel was broken by the return of Mr. Frizzell, aggressively drunk, from the Bonnie Scots’ Men’s Association. He had just missed hitting another car, on turning into their street, and was raging about careless young drivers.

  Mrs. Frizzell agreed that teenagers were plain crazy.

  A cry from one of the bedrooms made it necessary for her to break the news to Maxie that Betty had brought the three children for a visit.

  He cursed, and she was glad she had not told him how a nearly hysterical Betty had dumped them on her, with the news that her patient, law-abiding husband had left her and had gone to the United States to join the army. He had expressed the hope that he would be killed in Vietnam, and Betty had now returned to Vancouver, ostensibly to consult a lawyer friend. Mrs. Frizzell had a horrid sinking feeling that the lawyer might be more than a friend, and that the children might be with her for some time.

  She shut the door so that she would not hear the baby’s howls and went to bed. Tomorrow she would get a baby-sitter. No child was going to stand between her and the gratifying number of offices opened up to her by the fall of Olga Stych.

  Unaware of the gaze of the witchlike female next door, Hank divested himself of his wet clothes and went to bed, still throbbing with the strength of feeling roused in him by Isobel. She was perfect; and he smiled as he remembered his farewell to her – he hoped she would remember it until he could see her again.

  The scratched recording of bells, which served to call the faithful to the Tollemarche United Church, woke Hank on Sunday morning.

  He lay in bed listening to it, while he recollected painfully that Isobel would be on the plane going eastward, having been seen off by her in-laws. He was back where he had started years ago – alone.

  He told himself scornfully that he had a host of girl friends – and realized emptily that he had not called any of them for weeks. He knew every fellow in the neighbourhood, too, but mentally dismissed the lot of them as a pack of immature nincompoops; he had been through so much in the past few months that he felt old beside them.

  He turned on his transistor radio and flicked hopelessly from station to station; every one had a preacher on it, busy saying how fast the world was travelling to either extinction or eternal damnation.

  The Bible Belt, my God! It was time he got out of it.

  He went through his mail, which had been delivered to Isobel’s house. From an epistle from his publisher, he realized that he would need to go to Europe via New York.

  He trailed off to the bathroom, turned the shower to cold, and stepped under it. The water was icy and he yelped and hastily turned on the hot tap as well.

  Through the roar of the water, he heard his mother’s sharp voice call: “That you, Hank?”

  He stopped scrubbing. He had imagined that she would be at church.

  “Yeah, Ma,” he shouted.

  She realized the impossibility of carrying on a conversation over the noise of the shower, which sounded like a miniature Niagara, so she went back to her breakfast coffee and buns, fuming silently.

  On realizing that his mother was at home, Hank’s first instinct had been to take refuge in bed again. But he was very hungry, so he put on a pair of jeans and a battered T-shirt, and, still drying his head with a towel, proceeded to the kitchen, from whence came the welcome odour of coffee.

  “Don’t dry your hair in the kitchen,” snapped Olga promptly. It was easier to squash people if you started by catching them in a geniune wrongdoing. She shifted her chair round to get a better view of him, and glared at him distastefully.

  “Why don’t you get a better haircut – you look real foreign like that.”

  He hastily plastered down his George V haircut with his hands, and looked at her speculatively. She had not yet dressed or made up, and she looked untidy and haggard, her face hard and unfriendly.

  Silently he returned to the bathroom and replaced the offending towel. He stood for a moment, his hand on the towel rail, considering how to deal with his mother.

  He thought of taking an apartment. An apartment home, based on seventy thousand dollars carefully invested, was a different proposition from a single room maintained by a schoolboy out of his earnings as a part-time grocery market clerk. If ever he came back from Europe – and he was beginning to wonder if he ever would – he would take one of the new apartments being built in the city, and, if his second book was a success, he would find a Japanese servant to look after him. He decided that he would pack up all his personal possessions before he went away, and store them in a corner of the basement.

  Cheered up, he returned to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door and was just taking out two eggs, when his mother put down Saturday’s Advent, which she had been reading, and addressed him.

  “And just how long do you
think you’re going to live here for free?”

  He was paralyzed with shock, the two eggs in his hand, and the refrigerator starting to hum because he still held its door open. The unexpectedness of this angle of attack had caught him unawares, and he did not know how to deal with it. He had been ready for upbraidings, but not this.

  He had always taken the same attitude as his fellow students, that if his father insisted upon his staying in high school he could not earn much, and his parents must, therefore, be prepared to maintain him in food and lodging. He had managed to provide his own pocket money and clothes by doing odd jobs after school and, more recently, by his writing, since his fifteenth birthday. Now his mother was challenging this basic assumption.

  He swallowed and carefully closed the refrigerator, after replacing the eggs. He turned guiltily towards her. The fact that the situation had changed on his leaving school and having money in plenty had honestly escaped him.

  She saw that she had hit him on a tender spot, and she was glad. She would teach him that if he thought he was adult enough to attend the ball, he was adult enough to maintain himself entirely. She would wear him ragged, she vowed.

  Her smile was thin and sneering as she waited for his reply.

  Hank sought for words. He was dreadfully hurt. The merest reminder would have been sufficient to make him produce his pocket book. This was tit-for-tat with a vengeance.

  Finally, he stuttered: “Of course I’ll shell out for keep. I just forgot, that’s all.”

  “I should think so,” she said sourly.

  He hadn’t finished speaking to her. He drew himself up straight, till his six feet of height towered over her, and she flinched at the totally disillusioned, sad eyes he turned upon her. Mr. Dixon’s remark that his life could not have been a very happy one flashed through her mind.

  “Look here,” he said in a dangerously quiet voice, “you and Father wanted me to make Grade 12, not for my own sake, but because it would be a disgrace to you both if I didn’t. I had no choice but to take my board from you.” He took a long breath, and years of pent-up resentment poured out. “Neither of you cared what happened to me. You were so busy with your stupid teas and bake sales, and Dad with his trips to the North to get away from you. The cars got more care than I ever did! I’m sorry I didn’t go years ago – I would have gone if it hadn’t been for Grandma Palichuk, I think.”