The Latchkey Kid (6 page)

Hank was not in when Mrs. Stych returned home from church. She made a cold lunch for herself and then left to visit her mother-in-law. Every Sunday afternoon she meticulously visited either her mother or her mother-in-law, these indications of filial affection being indispensable to anyone of her aspirations, with a public image to maintain. She never bothered to write to her husband while he was away, husbands being regarded as of very little importance, except as sources of money.

While Hank was, in his grandparents’ opinion, too small to be left alone, the two grandmothers had insisted that he accompany his mother, and he had enjoyed wandering round the Palichuk pig farm with his grandfather, or playing in a corner of the lounge of his Grandmother Stych’s more fashionable home. He was the youngest grandchild, however, and as he grew to be a hulking, noisy ten-year-old, his aging relatives found him very tiring. After the death of Grandfather Palichuk, the custom arose of frequently leaving him at home. Even now, he remembered with a shudder the appalling loneliness of Sunday afternoon, spent trailing noisily around the streets with a group of equally neglected youths, returning to the empty home to eat his supper, while the television set bawled commercials at him to fill the silence, until he heard the scrape of his mother’s key in the lock.

Occasionally, his father was at home during the weekend. But he also felt that he should visit his mother. He had, too, a lot of paper work to deal with while in Tollemarche, and only rarely shared his Sunday supper with his son. He was a taciturn man who found it difficult to talk to a boy; but he did sometimes spare time to tell him of his travels in the wilder parts of Alberta, of encounters with grizzly bears, white water rushing through narrow gorges, being lost in unexpected snowstorms, in an unconquered wilderness totally alien to his suburb-bred son.

When Hank was fifteen, his best friend, Tommy Moore, committed suicide by quietly dropping himself off the railway bridge into the icy waters of the North Saskatchewan. He had threatened to do it for some time, but only Hank had taken him seriously and tried to dissuade him. Hank felt stripped of the only person in whom he could confide, and, for a while, considered following his example. Perhaps it was fortunate that at that time he discovered girls, and a year later met the Dawsons, who always seemed to have time to stop and gossip with him. He had by now forgotten the faces of many of the girls he had run around with, and Peter Dawson was dead, but there was still Isobel, the one steadying influence in his life.

From watching Isobel and her husband he had discovered that there was much more to sex than just taking a girl to bed or being uneasily married to a frigid, grasping woman.

Peter Dawson had been considerably older than Isobel and since he had only a few more years to serve in the army, had decided to establish a permanent home in his native town. It had taken their combined savings to make the down payment on a house in overcrowded Tollemarche, and Isobel had declared that she could manage without a car. She therefore advertised the garage as being for rent, and at the same time got herself a job as a secretary to an insurance broker, to fill in the time until Peter should be at home permanently or a family should arrive.

When a younger and less sophisticated Hank had come quietly through the back gate in search of the garage, the couple had been busy planting a lilac tree. He had watched them silently as they lowered the little bush into the prepared hole, with considerable argument as to how the roots should be spread. It was a different kind of argument from any he had heard before; it was friendly and joking. When the earth had been finally pressed down round the tree roots, Peter Dawson had put his arm round his wife’s tiny waist and they had surveyed their handiwork with obvious satisfaction. He had kissed her on the nose, and then they had strolled around their small domain, debating what else they should do to the garden.

Hank had hastily retreated round the side of the garage, while they decided where to put a sand box for the child as yet unconceived, and then he had re-entered the gate, giving it a diplomatic slam behind him.

He had not had much hope that they would rent the garage to a teenager, since teenagers were regarded generally as being as reliable as something out of the zoo. Peter Dawson had, however, asked who his father was, and had then inquired if the family was any relation to Mr. Heinrich Stych, who used to teach in Tollemarche Public School.

“Yeah – sure,” replied Hank. “He was my grandfather.”

Captain Dawson was immediately more friendly.

“Well, that’s great! He taught me when I was a boy. Of course you can have the garage. I don’t think we’ll be needing it for a while.”

He asked what kind of a car Hank had, and was very encouraging when Hank told him that he and his friend Ian were going to rebuild one.

Hank paid five dollars from his paper money as the first month’s rent, and, later that day, he and several of his friends pushed a dowager of a car round from his back lane, where it had been dumped by a tow truck, into the Dawsons’ garage. The Dawsons themselves had enthusiastically helped to heave it over a rut and up the slope to the garage.

Ian MacDonald and he had stripped down the old wreck and searched junk yards for spare parts. Mr. Frizzell, before the unfortunate episode with Betty, had been prevailed upon to donate four old, though still serviceable, tires; and finally the great day arrived when he backed it slowly out of the garage and drove it round to his own home in the vague hope that his mother might like to see it.

“I won’t have that thing standing in front of the house,” she had said forcibly. “Take it away.”

Crestfallen, he and Ian had driven to Ian’s house, but Mrs. MacDonald had gone to an art exhibition and Mr. MacDonald to a service club meeting. Ian’s kid sister, who was playing mothers and fathers with her friends in the crawl space under the porch, said it was marvellous, so they had to be content with this infant praise and with taking her and her mud-covered friends for a ride round the block.

Wrathfully indignant at his mother’s lack of appreciation of his efforts as a mechanic, an idea which had long been in his mind, that of writing a novel, had crystallized. He would write a book which would cause a sufficient furore to upset both his parents
thoroughly, and make them realize that he was a person to be reckoned with. To do it, he had to have more privacy than his room allowed, and he had tentatively approached Captain Dawson, who was home on leave and was painting the porch, for permission to put a table and chair in the garage, so that he could work there.

Captain Dawson sensed that there was more behind the request than was readily apparent. He was used to handling a great variety of young men, and his piercing stare, as he considered the request, made Hank quail; he had a suspicion that Peter Dawson could make his wife quail at times, and in this he was right.

“Why can’t you work at home?”

Hank decided that, in this instance, honesty was the only policy possible and had said frankly that he wanted to try to write a book. He did not feel he could write freely if the typescript was readily accessible to his mother.

The Captain wiped the paint off his hands and carefully avoided showing his amusement. He agreed that a mother’s censorship would be very limiting, and, after consulting Isobel, who was enchanted with the idea, he said that the furniture could be brought in.

“You had better change the lock on the door,” she had teased, “because I might be tempted to peep at the manuscript.”

He had gravely changed the lock and kept both keys. She had, however, through the months of work, taken a real interest in what he was doing, and he found himself confiding in her more and more. It was she who, when the manuscript was ready, had given him an introduction to Alistair MacFee, a professor of English at the university. Professor MacFee had read it, had been startled by its undoubted merit, and had carefully discussed it chapter by chapter with him, suggesting how to improve it. Glowing with hope, Hank had gone back to the garage and pruned and polished. Then the professor and Isobel, both young and enthusiastic, had helped him to choose a likely publisher to whom to send it. The English firm which they first suggested returned the typescript. Undaunted, Hank sent it to a New York firm and they accepted it. He was so excited that he forgot about the revenge the book was supposed to wreak on his parents.

Now,
The Cheaper Sex
had been out in the States for some weeks, and it seemed as if everyone under the age of twenty-one wanted a copy. On the day of its publication, Hank had gone
jubilantly to Isobel’s back door, armed with an autographed copy for her and her husband.

He had found an ashen-faced Isobel, showing none of her usual gaiety or cordiality. She had written a receipt for the month’s rent for the garage, which he had proffered at the same time, and had received the book with a watery smile. She had then wished him good luck with the sale of his book and had quietly shut the door in his face.

Bewildered and hurt at her lack of interest, too shy to ask what the trouble was, he had gone back to the garage completely mystified, and had spent the rest of the evening painting his jalopy electric blue.

When he finally went home, he saw the
Tollemarche Advent
. It informed him in letters an inch high that Captain Peter Dawson had been murdered in Cyprus.

His first instinct was to rush back to Isobel. Then he told himself that he was just a nut who had written a book in her garage, and that he had no right to intrude.

As a way of showing sympathy, however, he had the following Saturday morning put on his best suit, which was far too tight for him, and gone to the memorial service for Captain Dawson in the nearby Anglican church. In total misery, he watched, from the back of the church, the stony-faced widow, flanked by her husband’s mother, a surprisingly elegant woman in smart black, and his father, a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, looking tired and grey, as they went through the formalities of the service. Absorbed as he was by the sight of a family in grief, a new phenomenon for him, he could not help observing, with some awe, the large number of military men present to testify to their friendship with the dead man. They sure looked smart, he thought, and from that moment he began to cultivate the straight, dignified bearing which was to be his hallmark in later life; only occasionally did he forget and relapse into his old North American droop.

His quick eye also registered with some interest that not one of the ladies present, as far as he could judge, belonged to his mother’s circle. This quiet group of people looked so simple and unassuming that at first he could not think what made them interesting to him, and then he realized that they gave every appearance of complete sincerity. Like Isobel, they were what they looked, quiet people doing very necessary jobs and at that moment grieving for one of their number who had left them.

He thought that he left the church unnoticed, but Isobel saw him as she stepped out of her pew, and, as far as anything could penetrate to her at such a time, she was touched by his solicitude.

It had been apparent to Hank for some time that, in spite of repeating Grade 12 at school, he was likely to fail his exams again. French and Ukrainian, mathematics and chemistry bored him to the point of insanity; only in music and English could he hope to get decent marks. On December 28 he would be twenty years old, and he wondered bitterly when he might be allowed to grow up. He decided to consult Mr. Dixon, his English teacher, who was also his counsellor and, therefore, knew more about him than did the other teachers.

Mr. Dixon, friend of Mrs. Murphy and conductor, in his spare time, of the amateur orchestra, had accidentally launched Hank on his writing career a few years earlier by encouraging him to enter an essay competition sponsored by a service club. The essay, on “The Dangers of Smoking”, had cost Hank a number of Sundays of hard work, and he estimated that he must have smoked at least eight packs of cigarettes while writing it, but to his astonishment it had won him a hundred dollars. He looked at Mr. Dixon with new respect and, to that gentleman’s delight, really began to work hard.

On the Monday morning after Isobel had advised him to accept his publisher’s invitation to go to New York, he went to see Mr. Dixon.

Mr. Dixon could hardly believe his ears as Hank poured into them the story of the book and its apparent success. He immediately insisted that Hank should tell his parents, and warned him of the evils of leaving school without succeeding in obtaining the magical Grade 12, without which there was no hope, he insisted, of leading a normal life. Hank already had the feeling that his life was going to be anything but normal and was adamant about leaving school, but agreed reluctantly to tell his father when next he came home. The clinching argument that Mr. Dixon made about informing his father of his literary success was that probably Hank would need help in investing discreetly the earnings of the book, and it was well known that Mr. Stych was an astute businessman. Hank was the product of a boom town and knew that money earned money extremely fast; with luck, he could double and treble his capital by investment in Tollemarche.

Mr. Dixon heaved a sigh of relief at having gained at least one point, and decided that the question of leaving school could be left to the parents and the Principal. Hank was grateful to him for his promise not to discuss either matter with anybody.

Hank went home to lunch.

His mother was in, seated at her kitchen desk and gloomily going over the month’s bills – her Persian lamb coat made the Hudson’s Bay bill look enormous, and, at the rate she was paying it off, it would take until next Easter to clear it.

“Like a bologna sandwich?” he asked her, as he made one for himself.

She grunted assent, and he filled the coffee percolator, set it on on the stove and then rooted around in the refrigerator for the ketchup, while he wondered how to approach the subject of his going to New York.