The Latchkey Kid (18 page)

Olga arrived home from church earlier than she usually did because she had not stopped to talk on the church steps, and she could hear Boyd in the basement, chatting with a neighbour as they played pool. Boyd had installed the table on an earlier visit home, mostly as a status symbol, and had then discovered that he enjoyed the game.

It was symptomatic of Olga’s distressed state of mind that the Persian lamb coat was dumped with hat, gloves and handbag on the living-room chesterfield, and not immediately hung up in her clothes closet.

The telephone rang just as she was patting her hair back into place in front of the hall mirror. She could clearly hear Boyd swearing in the basement, and she called that she would answer it.

An excited Ruthenian babble greeted her. Grandma and Uncle were pleased Hank had written a book. Had she seen the paper? Was she coming out to visit them today? Please bring a copy of the book, so one of Joe’s kids could read it to her and translate it for her. The newspaper picture was nice; could she have another copy of it? Who had been on their phone all morning? She had not been able to get through until now.

Olga forced herself to think. Of course, the grandmothers would want to read the book, and she felt she had reached the end of her stamina when she realized this. She determined to make Hank face his grandparents – she had enough battles of her own to fight.

“We haven’t got any copies yet, Ma,” she stalled. “Hank will have some soon, and he’ll give you a copy.”

“Where’s Hank?” demanded the cracked voice in the telephone receiver. “Put him on. I want to tell him I’m proud of him.”

“He’s gone to Banff,” said Olga thankfully.

The babble at the other end dwindled in disappointment.

Olga made a valiant effort to sound normal. “I’ll come and see you next week, Ma.”

“Well, bring Hank and bring his book.”

Mrs. Stych made her farewells, and leaned her head against the wall, as she dropped the receiver on its cradle. The telephone immediately rang again.

“Mrs. Stych?”

“Yeah?”

An eager young feminine voice said: “I just wanna tell Hank I think his book is real sharp, Mrs. Stych. Is he home?”

“No,” said Olga shortly. With a voice like that, the girl could not be more than fifteen.

“Oh,” the voice was deflated, forlorn. “When he comes in, just tell him Betsy called.”

“I will.” Olga put down the receiver quickly. The Reverend Bruce Mackay’s remarks about influencing a whole generation began to have some meaning for her. “But it’s not fair to blame us,” she thought defiantly. “We didn’t write it.”

The telephone rang again. This time the voice was male and belonged to Tom in Grade 12, but the tenor of the conversation was similar. Mrs. Stych began to feel sick.

She could hear Boyd showing his visitor out of the back door and promising that they would have another game next Sunday. He came slowly back in, looking pleased with himself, and saw her with her hand still on the telephone.

“That damned thing has rung all morning,” he said irritably. “Hank this and Hank that – I couldn’t sleep – I took the receiver off for a while – the kid must know the whole darn town. And where is Hank, anyway? He must have got up real early.”

“Gone to Banff,” said Olga briefly. “Musta gone for skiing.”

“Better get some dinner,” said Boyd, opening the refrigerator. “Suppose you’ll be going to see Mother this afternoon?”

Olga was reviewing this engagement with Grandma Stych with trepidation; she was not sure how much the old lady would know about Hank’s book. She attended a different church, but she would have read the
Tollemarche Advent
– everybody did.

She said dully to her husband, “I suppose I’d better go – she’ll be expecting me. Get out that cold roast beef and some tomatoes.”

Silently they prepared and ate their meal, interrupted only once by another telephone call, this time from the local radio station’s
morning commentator, who said she would telephone again when Hank returned.

“Might as well come with you to see Ma,” said Boyd, wiping his mouth on his paper table napkin. “Have to look through some papers tonight – might as well get out this afternoon.”

Normally Mrs. Stych would have disliked this intrusion into a feminine visit, but today she was so dismal that she was grateful for any human interest.

“O.K.,” she muttered. “We’ll go right away.”

The visit was uneventful. The old lady was interested that Hank had published a book, but why, she asked, had he chosen such a vulgar name for it?

Olga’s heart sank. This was it. This would be where Grandma would blow up.

Boyd was lighting a cigarette. Without a flicker of an eyelid, he said calmly: “You have to have names like that nowadays for books, otherwise they don’t sell.”

Olga looked at him in silent admiration.

Mrs. Stych Senior tut-tutted and said she didn’t know what the world was coming to. Olga hastily agreed, and equally hastily asked if Grandma had planted any tulip bulbs this year.

Grandma Stych was launched safely on a new subject, and Olga leaned back to listen, too wrapped in depression to talk much more. The old lady’s English was almost perfect, her grammar painstakingly correct. She had a slightly Scottish burr to her accent, learned from the Scottish woman recruited to teach her by her father when they had first landed in Tollemarche; and Olga, remembering the hours when Hank had sat at her feet playing with toy cars, wondered if this was where he had learned English well enough to enable him to write.

Olga watched her husband as he talked about getting their lot fenced. He, too, had tried to get away from the Old World ties of his parents – he was more aggressively Canadian than a Nova Scotian – and she could see that some of his mannerisms still offended his mother.

They had trouble getting the car to move when they were ready to go home; the back wheels spun and dug hollows in the packed snow of the driveway. A fuming Boyd had to push, while Olga turned the ignition key and accelerated. A friendly passerby lent his shoulder to that of Boyd and between the two of them they
got it rolling down the slope to the road. Since Olga was in the driver’s seat, she continued in it and drove them home. Boyd put down her unusual silence to the need to concentrate on driving over such treacherously ice-covered streets.

After supper, he retired to his den to look at the work he had brought home from the office. He assumed that, as usual, Olga would go to practise with her Sacred Song Chorus Group, but, later on, he was surprised to notice that she was still moving about overhead.

Mrs. Stych had intended to go to her practice, but, as the time for it drew near, her courage began to ebb. Most of the members would have been in church and would have heard the Reverend Bruce Mackay deliver his harangue, and Olga wanted to find out first what position the girls would take, after they had had time to talk the scandal over amongst themselves, before she laid herself open to snubs.

She stood in the middle of her sitting-room, which looked just like a picture in Eaton’s catalogue, and wondered how to occupy herself. She was shocked to find herself chewing at her long scarlet fingernails, and hastily decided to tidy up the cupboards and drawers in Hank’s room. She had not done this for years and was motivated by a sneaking curiosity to know what he had in them.

The girls made their decision sooner than she had expected. Soon after the chorus could reasonably have been expected to finish its practice, the telephone rang. Olga extricated herself with difficulty from the back of Hank’s clothes closet, which she had found cluttered with several different sizes of ice hockey armour, indicating the different ages at which he had attempted to play the game. Provoked by yet another telephone call, she clicked her tongue irritably as she trotted down the passage and lifted the receiver.

It was Mrs. Jones, the secretary of the chorus, a lady whom Mrs. Stych did not know intimately. She was a pompous, narrow-minded woman, whose children were left to run wild and unattended in the streets as soon as they could stand, a lawless rabble dreaded by smaller children and cursed by shopkeepers. She did not ask Mrs. Stych to resign; she ordered her to do so.

The chorus, she said, was united in feeling that Mrs. Stych could not be considered a suitable person to assist in singing sacred songs, since she must have assented to her son’s writing that dreadful,
obscene book. And, if Mrs. Jones might say so, it showed a shocking state of affairs in the Stych home.

Mrs. Stych was stung into retort by the gross injustice of Mrs. Jones’s remarks.

“I suppose,” she said, her face aflame and her voice icy, “you will also be asking Mrs. Braun to resign, because her son stole a car recently, and Mrs. Donohue, because of that bond scandal her husband was involved in?”

Mrs. Jones gasped, and Olga slammed down the receiver in the hope that it would hurt her ears.

She stamped back to Hank’s room and continued her rummaging. She had a morbid desire to see if she could exhume anything of his writings from it, but there was nothing – not a slip of paper, not even a book with a sexy looking cover; just his usual collection of classics in sober bindings. Two of them were
A Thousand and One
Nights
and
The Decameron,
but Mrs. Stych had never read these and knew only that they were very old books, so she dusted them and put them back unopened. The dust was thick on a few of the volumes, because she had always left this room to the mercies of her cleaning lady, who had not been very thorough.

Hank was expected to make his bed and keep the place tidy himself; this he had failed to do, and his shelves and drawers were in a chaotic mess. Mrs. Stych decided that this was something else to take up sharply with Hank on his return.

Finally she shook out her duster and dropped it down the laundry chute. Because she could not think of anything else to do, she went to bed.

This, she reflected, as she lay in the dark, had been one of the most miserable days of her life. None of the girls, she recollected dismally, had telephoned, and she wondered if they all felt as Mrs. Jones did. She also wondered bleakly what she was going to do in the future, if they all did take the same attitude.

The next week was a frantic and unhappy one for Mrs. Stych.

Mr. Dixon, the English teacher, telephoned on Monday morning and asked if he could speak to Hank.

“He’s up at Banff, skiing,” said Mrs. Stych shortly, for the twenty-second time. She was tired of Hank, sick of the disturbance he had caused her. In a moment of startled self-revelation, she was aware that she had regarded him as nothing but a trial and impediment to her since the day he had been conceived; she had made every effort not to have any more children, so that she could give all her attention to her own ambitions. Her sudden sense of guilt increased her irritation.

Mr. Dixon’s faded voice became a trifle more enthusiastic.

“I wanted to congratulate him, Mrs. Stych. His choice of subject was unfortunate, but it is not every young man who can write so well. I feel that I have had some success with him, if I may venture to say so.”

“Mr. Dixon!” exclaimed Olga, her voice quivering. “Wotcha sayin’? You shoulda stopped him. You musta known what he was doin’. Why didn’t you stop him?” She snorted. “The school should do sumpin’ about boys like him.”

Mr. Dixon’s resentment of lazy parents flared up. He remembered that when he had advised Hank to tell his parents what he was writing about, the boy had refused. Mr. Dixon had been aware for some time that Hank was writing a book of which his elders might not approve. He had got wind of it through stray remarks of Hank’s and his friends’, and it had worried him very much. No amount of kindly counselling had been able to break through Hank’s pig-headed hatred of his parents, thought Mr. Dixon, or make him try harder to study his other school subjects. Now this woman was trying to tell him he was responsible for her son’s behaviour.

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?