The Latchkey Kid (13 page)

When Boyd was a child of eight, he and his father had had to sit out a tornado while visiting a German friend who had settled in Kansas. Boyd was reminded of the howling noise of that fearful storm by his wife’s tantrum.

He and Hank were upbraided, reviled and screamed at, until, without uttering a word in retaliation, Hank took his jacket out of the hall alcove and strode silently out of the front door, followed by a shriek from his mother that he was as disgusting as his father; like father, like son.

Gone to his widow, ruminated Boyd enviously, and wished he had a friendly widow, too.

It had taken him only a few moments to discover, from his wife’s tirade, that Hank’s book was not quite so innocent as he had imagined; however, any book that made so much money was a good book, in his opinion, and he had defended Hank hotly.

Hank had made no attempt to defend himself. He had stood quietly swaying himself on his heels, an almost derisive expression in the curl of his lips as he smoked a cigarette, his very silence provoking her to further abuse.

He used to do that when he was small, remembered Boyd; it had been unnerving, wondering what he was thinking about while you shouted at him. He had never cried when he was struck, and Boyd felt with a desolate pang that probably the boy was wiser and braver than he was. It was only too apparent, as Olga tore into him about the disgrace she would suffer, that like a hippie, he cared nothing for the kind of life his parents led; he did not share their values or ambitions. His quiet retreat through the front door had somehow emphasized his scorn.

The crack about his being disgusting, like his father, had hurt Boyd. It was apparent from his wife’s continuing rampage that much pent-up animosity against her husband was coming out,
and the crash of a glass ornament warned him that there was probably more to come.

He knew that she had not enjoyed his homecoming or the renewal of a sexual life; throughout their married life he had been at home for only a few weeks at a time, and she had been free to make her life as she chose. She had chosen, he reflected aggrievedly, to ignore him as far as possible.

The directorship, for which he had struggled for years, represented to her only a house in Vanier Heights. Didn’t she care a damn about anything except social success? Didn’t he or Hank matter to her at all? He stroked his beard and then scratched irritably through it. He knew the answers to his questions very well; all too many men were relegated to the position of drone – and they resented it; they showed their resentment all too often by despising women and taking the attitude that such inept creatures should be allowed to play, while men ran the world and did anything in it which was worth doing. He had taken this attitude himself, but was finding it very uncomfortable to maintain, after his long years of quiet in the bush, untroubled by anything worse than wind or weather. He laughed ruefully, and his wife whipped round at him.

“You laughing at me?” she demanded belligerently.

He looked up at her, as she swooped towards him like a sparrow hawk. Her face was distorted with rage, a horrible clown’s face painted red and white, her body a red tub supported by nyloned legs.

He jumped up, and shouted at her sharply: “Oh, shut up!”

“I won’t!” she yelled.

He slapped her soundly across the face twice.

She shrieked at the sting of the blows, which left a red mark down one side of her face. Then she was silent, staring at him with horrified eyes. He had never struck her before. The horror gave way slowly to self-pity, the blue eyes filled with tears and she began to weep, the tears making runnels down her heavy makeup.

“For Pete’s sake!” he muttered moodily, and shoved his hands in his pockets and went to stare into the empty fireplace.

“You don’t understand,” she sobbed. “You never did understand anything.” She fumbled feverishly in a fancy box on the table for a paper handkerchief. “How am I going to face the girls at the ball tomorrow? It’s all right for a man; men are used to smutty books and vulgar jokes – women don’t go for things like that.”

She collapsed on the chesterfield, and tried to bury her face in one of the stony little cushions that decorated it.

Boyd frowned down on her. “Don’t you tell me that! Bet that Pascall sells more of Hank’s book to women than he ever will to men.”

He hoped that he was right in this belief. For the first time, he considered seriously his own situation with regard to his son’s career, both present and future, and he felt uneasy. He could visualise the sniggers of his subordinates. A new director, responsible for a large section of the company’s business for the first time, was not in a particularly enviable position; there were men equally as bright and considerably younger, poised ready to pull the mat from under him as soon as they saw an opportunity; Hank could be their chance. He picked up the piece of ornamental driftwood from the mantelpiece and tried to stand it upside down, while he considered this, and his wife’s sobs slowly diminished. He felt miserably lonely.

He became aware that Olga was quiet at last, exhausted beyond words. He turned and looked down at her.

Her face was still turned into the cushion, her dress twisted tightly round her generous curves, the skirt hitched up and exposing her plump, well-shaped legs. He smiled suddenly at her tiny feet encased in shiny, high-heeled pumps. Olga had always loved clothes, and he wondered for whose benefit she dressed; probably for that godforsaken bunch of old hags, the girls. His face clouded again at the thought. This was not the way he had hoped life would be when he had married her. He had believed that a country girl like her would find him wonderful, a college man with great ambitions. Their life was going to be different from those of the married couples around them, he had promised himself.

He wanted badly to creep into her arms and be told he had done marvellously well, that she had put on her red dress and her new pumps specially for him, for his seduction. His loneliness, far worse than anything suffered in the empty north country, overwhelmed him and became intolerable.

He took a hesitant step towards the chesterfield. She did not move, though she must have heard him, so he sat down tentatively beside her. She whimpered and wriggled further into the chesterfield’s cushiony depths. If he was to get anywhere, he told himself reluctantly, he would have to do the comforting.

“What are you going to wear tomorrow night?” he asked, with a burst of sheer genius.

She slowly looked round at him, her eyes wide with surprise and doubt, the wretched book forgotten. “Oh, Boyd,” she breathed, “just wait till you see it!”

He half turned and put his arm round her recumbent form.

“Is it real pretty?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, still eyeing him distrustfully, “it’s real nice.”

Boyd began to feel better and not a little smug. It was just like the books said – all a man needed was a good technique. He let his hand wander a little, and got it petulantly pushed away as she heaved herself out of the clutches of the chesterfield’s upholstery, and sat up on the edge of it. Her face was still sulky and she still sniffed occasionally as she put her feet to the ground.

Patiently, he tried another tack: “Like a snack?” he asked.

Something of the sulkiness vanished and she wiggled her feet down more firmly into her shoes. There was a suggestion of enthusiasm in her voice when she replied: “Yeah. I would.”

She rose and tottered, like a child still uncertain of its balance, to the refrigerator and swung open its massive door. Merely viewing its contents made her feel better. A barbecued chicken and a ham, both provided ready to serve by the local supermarket, made her mouth water. She opened the small freezer at the top, and four different types of ice cream, some frozen cream cakes and some ready-to-bake cookie mixes promised further consolation.

Boyd followed her out and, without being told, put some coffee on to percolate. He also got out rye bread and mustard. She always wanted the same things after a fight – ham on rye with mustard, followed by vanilla ice cream with walnut topping, a large slab of cake and coffee. Well topped up with these, thought Boyd as he hunted for the bread knife, she would be in a much more amicable mood, and then he might get somewhere with her.

Hank breathed with relief the icy, sweet air outside his parents’ house. The night was beautiful, with a clean-swept sky filled with newly polished stars. Low on the skyline, just above the housetops, a red glow marked the reflection of neon signs in the centre of the city and he could hear the steady roar of traffic crossing the old river bridge towards it. The road in which he stood was, however, deserted, its avenue of leafless trees eerily quiet under the high street lamps. His mother’s voice came faintly to him through the double doors of the house. He pitied his father, though he knew him to be physically and mentally tough and well able to take care of himself.

He stood shivering on the step, uncertain what to do. He smiled wryly to himself.
The Cheaper Sex
had already done very well what he had originally intended it to do – draw his parents’ attention to his existence. It was obvious that during the next few weeks they were going to waste a lot of their valuable time thinking about him. But now he was older he did not care very much whether they were interested or not. He was far more concerned with consolidating his new-born reputation as a writer by producing another book of equal merit as fast as he could. He knew that, like a canoeist, he must ride the current while he could, finding a way through the rapids of life and somehow transforming his experiences into a story that rang with the honesty of his first book. Standing in the cold in front of the house, he realized suddenly that this was his ambition, to mirror life truly, so that people laughed when they saw their own image through his eyes.

His ears were getting numb, warning of frostbite, and he clapped his hands over them. He could not go far without mittens or earmuffs. His first idea on coming out had been to go and see Isobel and Dorothy, and then he had been overcome by unaccustomed shyness. Now he decided he would go and get the car out and possibly call on his old friend, Ian MacDonald, now in his
second year at the university; it seemed a long time since they had so light-heartedly rebuilt his jalopy in Isobel’s garage.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets and, to keep himself warm, jogged the short distance to the garage.

The curtains had not been drawn over the back windows of Isobel’s house, and he stood looking into the lighted rooms for a moment before unlocking the garage door. He chuckled as he saw Dorothy in her bedroom carefully pressing her hair to a fashionable straightness, on the ironing board with the electric iron; her contortions in an effort to reach up as far as possible were as complex as those of a cat trying to reach its middle back. Two students were seated in the kitchen, drinking coffee and laughing over some joke. He waited, hoping to see Isobel, but she must have been in the front part of the house. Finally, he unlocked the garage and went in.

The white Triumph, its hood up, awaited his command; the gas stove in the corner roared in its usual muffled fashion. The typewriter on the desk seemed to float like an iceberg in a sea of paper, but he felt too tired to work. He opened the doors of the garage and then got into the car preparatory to backing it out. He sat for a moment, however, slumped in the driver’s seat with the ignition key in his hand and no lights switched on, while he went over his mother’s bitter words.

His fatigue was overwhelming. He told himself ruefully that too much had happened to him in the previous few weeks. He felt as if he had been blasted, in that time, right out of boyhood into manhood, as if he had been called up for the army and sent to war. And he had not done badly, he felt, especially as he had had to manage in New York without a lawyer or an agent to help him. “You had nothing to lose but your chains,” he muttered and laughed a little.

What should he do in the immediate future? he asked himself.

Home was becoming untenable, but he dismissed the idea of taking an apartment on his own; living with his mother had been lonely enough. He toyed with the idea of going to stay with Grandmother Palichuk and his uncle, then realized that, once they understood the tenor of his writings, they would try to persuade him not to produce another book. And the new book was growing healthily; soon he would like Isobel to read it, and confirm his opinion that it was as good as his first one, or better.

Isobel! He swung the key ring fretfully round on his finger. Hell! Isobel was going home to that weirdo place in the U.K. from which she came. It struck him suddenly that he did not know how he was going to live without her. He stared blankly through the windshield at his piled-up desk. He knew that even if he had been able to finish his first book, he would never have had the courage to submit it to a publisher; the only other person to whom he might have turned for advice, Mr. Dixon, the English teacher, would never have condoned its content. Captain Dawson was gone, and now Isobel was going. He heaved his huge shoulders against the seat back as he considered, rather hopelessly, the emptiness of his life in the near future.

He told himself not to be a fool. He had friends like John MacDonald, Ian’s cousin, who was still plodding through high school, and Ian himself, of course; and there was Brett Hill, who had left school to become a flower child and now lived in comfortable squalor in a hut by the river, spending most of his life in a haze of marihuana. The majority of the boys with whom he had gone through school had left last year, and had been either at work or in university for some months past. He had got left behind to do this crazy Grade 12 again, left in a limbo of those really too old for school, too unqualified for work.

God, what a world!

Well, he did not have John’s sticking power or Brett’s enjoyment of drugs. What he wanted was to work amongst men, strong-minded men who knew where they were going, like his publishers in New York. My, they were tough, but so had he managed to be. All he needed was experience, he decided, and to get out of this goddam town, away from nagging schoolmarms, hysterical mothers and browbeaten fathers. He could try getting a job with a newspaper or magazine in Toronto or, maybe, Montreal – his French could be worse. He could afford to start at the bottom and do anything, just anything to enable him to be an adult.

Tomorrow he would go into action. And tomorrow he was certainly going to attend the ball with Isobel. His first intention had been simply to spite his mother by showing her that he could circulate alone in her world; now he wanted to give Isobel a good time. It would give him, he realized, great satisfaction to show her off in that old cats’ paradise. Do her good to have a whirl for once; being Peter Dawson’s wife must have been pretty boring and
being a widow must be even worse.

As he turned on the car lights, the side door of the garage opened and Isobel entered carrying a table lamp.

He rolled down the car window, and she said, with surprise: “Hello, I didn’t expect to find you here.” Then she lifted the lamp to give him a better view of it. “Do you think this would give you a better working light?”

“It’ll do just fine,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

She put the lamp down on the desk, after carefully clearing a space amongst the papers. She wrapped her cardigan closely round her; she was shivering. “Gosh, it’s cold in here.”

Her voice quavered with the chill, and he opened the car door. “Get in,” he said. “You’ll freeze.”

“It’s O.K. Just came with the lamp. I must go back to the house,”

“Aw, come on,” he wheedled, “stay a minute. I wanna ask you sumpin’.” He looked so like a small boy asking a favour that she complied, easing herself round the car to the opposite side and climbing in, her teeth chattering. He leaned over her and shut the door and rolled up the window. She looked very small and frail beside his huge bulk, and he heaved a rug from the back of the car and cautiously tucked it round her, then turned on the car heater and the headlights.

“That better?” he asked.

Her smile was impish above the plaid blanket as she nodded.

They were very close together in the tiny car, and Hank found himself unexpectedly scared. He was not sure what kind of behaviour she would expect from him, and hastily advised himself to play it cool, even if she was insulted because he made no advances to her. For her part, Isobel had been used, like most English women, to working in close proximity to men, and had crawled in beside him with as much thought as if he were a child of ten. Now, with the warmth of his body slowly penetrating the blanket, and his face half turned towards her so that he could see her, she was not so sure of herself. His face, in the faint light penetrating the interior of the car from the garage’s ceiling light, looked sad, like the faces of Red Indians who hung about the centre of the town; they, too, had a Mongolian cast of feature, and the hardness of their lives gave them an air of grim melancholy. Her eyes moved compassionately over his face; he had their quiet dignity, too, she ruminated, in spite of his hunched-up carriage.

His heart was beating like a tomtom, but he asked her with a grin: “What you thinking about?”

The golden eyelashes immediately came down to veil her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was her usual quiet, distant self. “Tomorrow’s dinner,” she said flippantly.

“You’re having it with me,” he reminded her.

Her eyes twinkled. “So I am,” she said. “That will be very nice – though I don’t know what my in-laws will think of me, gallivanting round the town.”

“Let ’em rot,” said Hank with heat. “You can’t stay locked up all your life.” Then, to change the subject, he asked: “What do you think of my beard?” He fingered the wild scrub which, like most Tollemarche men, he had been nursing along for the past ten days.

“It looks ghastly,” said Isobel frankly. “Perhaps the barber, when he does your hair for the ball, could trim it into some sort of naval shape – show him the picture I gave you of the man you are supposed to be. I think, if you add an artificial moustache, it would help.”

Hank felt deflated. He was proud of the amount of beard he had been able to cultivate in so short a time. Isobel sensed this, and said comfortingly: “I am sure the barber could make a beautiful job out of it.”

He sighed with mock resignation: “O.K., I’ll go see him. I have to have an English-style haircut anyway.”

Her eager face with its small, pointed chin was turned up towards him. Could a widow woman be so innocent as to expect him to be unmoved when she was so close to him that he could smell her perfume? he wondered. Sure, he was scared of her, but that was because he did not want to offend her; it did not stop him wanting to kiss her.

His sudden silence bothered Isobel. She asked: “What did you want to ask me?”

“Waal, I wanted to ask you sumpin’ – and, oh yeah, I wanted to tell you sumpin’, too.” His Canadian accent sounded to her almost like a Midwest American accent, and yet it had small nuances of sound that made it different. Although Alberta was too young to have acquired an accent of its own, its beginnings could be detected among those born in the province – a certain harshness of voice, a certain slowness of articulation not unpleasant to the ear, which
mirrored the calm doggedness of people used to living in a climate which would daunt the bravest at times.

“You did?” Isobel’s voice was gently encouraging.

“Yeah, the
Advent
sent a man tonight to see me – and Ma nearly hit the roof.” He chuckled. “She’d read a bit of my book somewhere, when she didn’t know I had written it – and she sure was mad at me!”

He produced two crumpled cigarettes out of the change pocket in the front of his jeans, and handed her one. He leaned over her and lit it with a lighter retrieved from the same pocket. For a moment after the cigarette was alight he held the flaming lighter still before her face, examining her with doubting, narrowed black eyes. She regarded him steadily through the flame, her expression anticipatory, waiting to hear what he had to say. Her calmness irritated him, and he snapped the lighter shut and slumped back into his seat again.

A little sulkily, he went on: “When we go to the Pre-Edwardian Supper tomorrow, you know its O.K. to wear your costume? People wander round town all week in bustles and fancy waistcoats – and they will all next week.”

“Thanks, I intended to do so. The town really looked Edwardian when I was down there this morning – all trailing skirts, bonnets and beards.” She stopped and then said shyly: “Are you quite sure you want to take me? I – I – er – I’m a bit older than you are, you know.”

“Waddya mean? What’s age got to do with it? I’ve asked you, haven’t I?” The black brows knitted together, and Isobel was amused to see something of Mrs. Stych’s well-known hot temper flash out of his eyes. “I want
you
!” he added passionately.

She was pleased, and said: “Well, thank you. I would enjoy it very much. My brother-in-law expects to be at the ball – he was a bit shaken when I said I thought I would be going – he wasn’t very keen about it.” She hesitated and twirled the wedding ring on her finger. “You know, this will be the first time I have been anywhere, except to work, since – since Peter was killed.” Her voice failed her.

A twinge of jealousy ripped through him, but he managed to address her very gently while he stared through the windshield, his whole body tensed as he hoped that she would not change her mind.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot that – I guess you haven’t. If you feel you
shouldn’t come, it’s O.K. by me.” He turned towards her and said earnestly: “I can understand about it.” Inside, he was promising himself furiously that if the old biddies at the ball said anything to hurt her, he’d kill them, just kill them.

Her gratitude showed in her face. “Thank you, Hank, you’re a dear. I do want to come.” She stopped, feeling that this was a turning-point in her widowhood, a modest launching into a new life, a point which had to be reached sooner or later. She had not expected that the invitation to the ball would include dinner with Hank, but she told herself firmly that Peter had no need to be jealous, and then added, with sudden insight, that whatever feelings she might have for Hank were immaterial, since she was so much older than he was. That Hank might have any feeling other than gratitude to her did not suggest itself to her.