The Latchkey Kid (19 page)

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.”

He paused to gather up his self-control, which was slipping fast. “Well, I don’t want to be a drag on you any more,” he nearly shouted. “I’m going to New York and then to Europe and I doubt if I’ll ever come back.”

He felt for his wallet in his hip pocket, drew it out, sought through it for twenty-dollar bills. He flung the six that he had on to the table in front of her.

“I left school about a month ago. Here’s my rent. I’ll pay again before I go, and I’ll eat out.”

The sum was more than double that which she could have expected from a lodger in similar circumstances, and she sat staring at it, trying to be happy that she had crushed him, while he turned on his heel and went back to his room.

He flung himself on his rumpled bed. The pain inside him was so intense, he did not know how to bear it. In his calmer moments, he had long since realized that children in Tollemarche were more endured than loved, now that they were no longer needed as unskilled labour on the farms; and he had often said bitterly to his fellow sufferers in Grade 12 that rats nurtured their young better than Tollemarche mothers did.

He had, as a small boy, made excuses to himself for his mother’s neglect, and he had endowed her with feelings of affection which, he told himself, she had no time to express because she had a lot of work to do. As he matured, he realized that most of her activity was busywork, and to think that she loved anyone was just a dream on his part. He had become desperate to finish school, so that he might acquire financial independence, yet such was society’s indoctrination, he was convinced he could not function at all without that magical Grade 12.

Now he had disproved this fallacy and was financially well
launched. He had, too, a degree of emotional emancipation. And he hoped he had Isobel.

The knifelike pain eased and he became calmer. He told himself to stop being a fool. He had hit his mother with the aid of his book, and she had merely done the natural thing and hit him back. Fair enough. What he needed was a good breakfast – and tomorrow, a travel agent.

He found a faded car coat and some earmuffs, rescued his boots from the corner into which they had been tossed the previous night to drip mournfully on the rug, and carrying them in his hand, tiptoed to the front door.

A pile of letters addressed to him had been flung carelessly on the top of the boot shelves, and he gathered them up as he went out. He sifted through them in the privacy of his car. They were mostly congratulatory letters from his fellow students, but one was from his Ukrainian grandmother in her own language, with a scrawl from his uncle at the bottom of it. He said that he and Grandma and his young cousins all wanted to see his book, but most of all they wanted to see him, to tell him how proud they were of him. He was to come down to the farm as soon as he returned from Banff.

He decided that at this moment the smell of pigs and hens would be nicer than even the best breakfast, and he swung the car out of the garage and headed for the highway, hoping that the snow– ploughs would have cleared as far as the farm.

He wished wistfully that he had been born to Uncle Joe’s wife. She had died, of course, but his grandmother had a wonderful, primitive motherliness which permeated the whole contented existence of his cousins.

Grandma, he thought, had done her best to spare her daughter the intolerable work load which had turned her own hands into revolting claws. She and her silent peasant husband had decided the girl was smart, had sent her to Tollemarche to high school and then to college.

He smiled grimly to himself. Tollemarche must have seemed wonderfully sophisticated, with its college, schools and churches, its homes with bathrooms and its many small stores; a handsome Ukrainian girl would feel she could better herself there. And Boyd Stych, just graduated from the University of Toronto and about to join an enterprising firm of consulting geologists, would have looked like a film star to a girl from a Ukrainian pig farm.

He drove fast along the road, set high above the surrounding country. He could see for miles across the bleak, snowy land, unbrokenly smooth except for an occasional windbreak of trees sheltering a cowering farm-house.

Where a letterbox nailed to a post marked the entrance, he turned into a cart track leading to the farm. He wished he had Isobel with him; he felt she and Grandma would get along together very well; they were both of them honest and practical – and, yes, gentle.

As he drew up between the barn and the back door, he suddenly remembered that he had not seen his father that morning. He would never have gone to church without being dragged there by his mother, and yet he was sure he had not been in the house.

He dismissed the question from his mind, as the door opened and his cousins came tumbling out to greet him and to admire the Triumph, which they had not seen before.

Olga Stych heard the front door close after Hank, and her triumph at his humiliation slowly evaporated. Boyd had gone out early to see Mayor Murphy, immediately upon his return from Mass, about purchasing a lot in Vanier Heights. He expected that these negotiations would be protracted, since the demand for serviced land was heavy and Mayor Murphy could name his own price. Without the presence of either man, the house was so quiet that even the creaking of its wooden frame seemed unnaturally loud. The snow outside and the double windows muffled all sound from the road, and Mrs. Stych shivered and pulled her robe around her. Perhaps she should have gone to church and faced the supercilious stares of her erstwhile friends, rather than endure the emptiness of the house. The memory of the dislike in Hank’s eyes as he left her battled in her mind with earlier memories of him as a frightened child left uncomforted.

She told herself she must be getting old to feel sorry for a great hulking brute like him. Next week she would give a dinner party for Boyd’s more senior colleagues – that would keep her busy.

Making herself move briskly, she took a shower and made up her face. She tried on her new artificial eyelashes, sold to her by Monsieur de la Rue in his new Lady Fayre Beauty Boutique. He had sworn that they were just as becoming to mature beauties as to their daughters, and now, as she fluttered them cautiously in front of the mirror, she felt sure he was right. She added a further touch of blue eyeshadow and then put on her black dress, so that she would be ready to visit Grandma Stych in the afternoon.

Garbed in full visiting regalia, she felt much better, and began to consider that perhaps she had accepted her social eclipse too readily. Boyd had pointed out that they ought to cultivate some of the senior university staff, who were increasing rapidly in number and importance in the city. There were also one or two Canadian
Broadcasting Company staff now resident in Tollemarche, not to speak of several new businesses being established with their concommitant executives. Perhaps, she pondered, it would be possible to drop the old Tollemarche residents almost as fast as they had tried to drop her.

Boyd had said: “Those girls of yours don’t really care a hang about Hank’s book – or maybe the Reverend does – but nobody else. They are getting at us.”

Mrs. Stych had been incredulous. “Us?” she had squeaked.

“Yeah. Us. Y’know, the new pecking order in this town isn’t yet quite clear – and we have been doing a bit too well. Hank’s book is a good chance to put us back where we belong – way down.”

“Wotcha mean – pecking order?”

“Well, every town has a pecking order – like the hens in your Ma’s back yard. Ours was fixed for years – Scottish Presbyterians at the top, Métis Roman Catholics at the bottom, the Indians nowhere, and everybody else in strictly acceptable order in between.

“Now, since the oil wells were discovered, so many new people have come in that it is all upset. Ukrainians and Germans, like us, have more money than some of the old Scots who’ve been here two generations. You can see I’m right – we have an Irish Roman Catholic for Mayor, with money in his wallet. Where was he fifteen years ago? Or even five?”

“We been here two generations,” Olga had said stubbornly.

“It doesn’t mean the same thing. As far as the big people were concerned, we didn’t exist until the past ten years. I tell you – now, I own more real estate in this town than the chemical plant does – more’n Tyrrell or Murphy even.” Then he added in a rueful tone, “Except I don’t have a lot in Vanier Heights.”

Mrs. Stych ruminated over this conversation as she carved a store-cooked ham for Boyd’s and her lunch. Apart from any entertaining they might manage to do to re-establish themselves, there were a number of public functions which they could attend, where it might be productive to show themselves; there was the Amateur Ballet Show, a full-evening-dress affair, and public lectures at the university – quite big people went to those.

She had just poured a commercial dressing over a quartered lettuce to go with the ham, when there was a heavy banging at the back door, as if someone was kicking it.

She put the bottle of dressing down slowly, and considered
what the new yellow paint on the back door must be looking like after such treatment. Indignantly, she marched to the door, yanked it open and peered through the glass of the outer screen door.

A small head in a snow suit hood was leaning against it at the level of the lower ledge, and a small foot in a rubber overboot was systematically kicking it. She pushed the door open, nearly toppling the owner of the head and foot.

“Just waddya think you’re doing?”

She glared down at the peaceful face of a three-year old boy, who, finger in mouth, stared unafraidly back at her.

He pointed a finger towards the house next door. “Mummy says please come.”

“And who is Mummy?”

“She’s my Mummy,” said the low-pitched voice patiently.

“Well, who are you?”

A note of irritation was noticeable in the child’s voice, as he replied: “I’m Michael.”

The cold wind was penetrating Mrs. Stych’s dress.

“Well, what do you want?”

Exasperation at adult stupidity brought a sharp answer: “Mummy wants you!”

In an effort to stop the conversational circle being repeated, she asked him where he lived.

“Next door.” And he again pointed to the house of her immigrant neighbours, whose acquaintance, of course, she had never sought.

“And Mummy wants me?”

“Yeah, she burned herself and she can’t feed Henny and she wants you to come.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Stych was immediately attentive. “Is anything on fire?”

“Only Mummy,” was the tranquil response.

“For Heaven’s sakes!”

Mrs. Stych snatched from its hook on the back of the door the coat which she usually wore when emptying the garbage, and whipped it over her shoulders. Without waiting for the child, she ran across the back of the unfenced lots, her golden house-slippers filling with snow as she went. She flew up the steps of the next house, struggled with the springs of the screen door, and then burst into the kitchen.

There was nothing on fire in the spotless kitchen, but a woman
with one hand and arm wrapped in a tea towel and clutched to her chest, ceased her agonized walking up and down and turned to her thankfully. Her round, flat young face was tear-stained, and it was clear that she was in great pain.

“Dank you, dank you for coming so quick,” she exclaimed gratefully, her guttural pronunciation of the words not helped by her laboured breathing. “I haf burnt me.”

“Show me,” said Mrs. Stych abruptly, as Michael pushed slowly in through the back door. He carefully took off his boots and placed them in the boot tray.

“It was the kettle – I somehow drop it and try to catch and the boiling water spill.”

She slowly unwound the towel to reveal a badly scalded right forearm and hand, on which big blisters were already forming.

Mrs. Stych said tersely: “Better get a doctor.”

“We haf no doctor, and if they don’t know you doctors say go to the hospital.”

Mrs. Stych nodded agreement. Doctors were in such short supply that it was unlikely that even her own doctor would come to a new patient; he would just direct them to the emergency department of the nearest hospital.

“I’ll get out the car and take you up to the hospital.”

“Dank you – but I know not what to do with the children – I cannot leave them – my husband is in Toronto at a conference.” Despite her efforts at controlling them, she was nearly in tears again as she wrapped her arm once more in the tea towel.

“Lock ’em in a bedroom,” said Olga. “They’ll be all right.”

She looked quickly round the kitchen. Michael, his snowsuit half off, was watching his mother fearfully, and in a high-chair sat a slightly older child at which Mrs. Stych stared in astonishment. It must have been about four years old, but its head wobbled and rolled erratically and its eyes stared emptily at her. Its tongue protruded from its mouth and it slavered slightly.

The mother saw her look, and said defensively: “She is retarded. She cannot feed herself. She hungers.” She gave a faltering sigh. “How could I lock them in a bedroom – alone?”

Mrs. Stych felt physically sick at the sight of the retarded child. Since this immigrant woman seemed to think it was made of china, she would have to get more help from somewhere.

“Have you got a friend I could call?”

“Nobody close here – we are very new, you understand. In Toronto we know many people.” She moaned, and Michael ran to her with a whimper. She put her good arm round him lovingly and soothed him in a foreign tongue.

Mrs. Stych felt cornered.

“O.K.” she said. “Got any baking soda?”

“Ja,” and she indicated a cupboard.

Mrs. Stych was not sure that she was doing the right thing, but she made a solution of baking soda and cool water, soaked a soft cotton pillow-case in it and wrapped this round the injured arm.

The mother gave a sigh of relief.

“Better,” she said thankfully.

“Now,” said Mrs. Stych, with the firmness of desperation, “I’m going to call Mr. Frizzell, who lives over the other side of me, and ask him to take you to the hospital. I’ll stay with the kids.”

“Their dinner?”

Mrs. Stych looked at the little monster in the high-chair. “What do they eat?”

“Stew is in the oven. Will you feed my Henny?” The voice was imploring.

Mr. Stych licked her lips. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I can.” Her voice was full of reluctance.

She went to the telephone and called the Frizzells’ well-remembered number. Mrs. Frizzell answered.

In a lofty tone, Olga asked for Mr. Frizzell.

“That you, Olga?”

“It is.” Mrs. Stych sounded frigid, and Mrs. Frizzell was daunted as well as mystified. She called Maxie.

Mr. Frizzell might be fat, but in a crisis he proved a wonderful help. He was also thankful to escape from three wailing grandchildren. He had his car at the front door inside three minutes.

The harassed mother cuddled Michael to her, and told him in her own language to stay with Auntie from next door and she would return before the big hand of the clock had gone round once. She kissed Henny, told Mrs. Stych she was very kind, and, still in her pinafore, departed with Mr. Frizzell.

A perplexed Mrs. Stych was left with the slobbering little girl in the high-chair and with Michael, whose lips were trembling as he tried not to cry.

She found a casserole, ready for eating, in the gas oven. Aided
by Michael, she found the necessary utensils and poured out glasses of milk for the children. Her repulsion for Henny was so great that she decided that she would give Michael his meal first, in the hope that the mother would have returned by the time she was ready to feed Henny. Michael announced, however, that he could feed himself while she fed Henny.

He showed Mrs. Stych a small baby spoon with which he said his mother fed the child, so Mrs. Stych mashed up a small plateful of food, stuck a paper serviette under the child’s chin, and tried to stuff a spoonful of dinner onto the protruding tongue. It dribbled down Henny’s chin and she began to cry.

“She doesn’t like anyone to feed her, except Mummy and her lady at school,” announced Michael. He was managing to tuck his own dinner into himself, though a fair quantity was getting plastered down his front and on his hands.

Mrs. Stych did not answer. She was too busy holding down Henny’s wavering hands, while she tried to get another spoonful in. Henny continued to dribble and blubber at the same time, while Michael climbed down from his chair and came to stare at her.

He put his sticky hands on Mrs. Stych’s elegant black lap. “I’ll show,” he announced, and climbed up on her knee, completely ruining her dress. “Mummy showed me.”

He did manage to demonstrate roughly how to insert the spoon, and, without a word, Mrs. Stych made another attempt.

Henny swallowed.

As pleased as if she had won a lottery, she followed it with another spoonful, and said to Henny: “That’s good.”

Henny stopped crying, and slowly and wearily Mrs. Stych shovelled down most of the helping. At the end of half an hour, Henny refused to take any more, and Mrs. Stych assumed thankfully that she was full.

She was a little pleased at her success. She wiped Henny and Michael clean and did the best she could, with the aid of the dishcloth, to the front of her dress. Michael called her Auntie and began to chatter to her. He got out his toy box and showed her each tiny car and teddy bear that he owned, while she washed the dishes and put the casserole back into the oven, to keep warm for the mother.

“What’s your full name?” she asked Michael.

“Michael.”

“And what else?”

“Michael van der Schelden,” he said.

“Where does your father work?”

“University, ’course.” He ran a small truck round himself.

Mrs. Stych wiped her hands dry and looked around the kitchen.

Michael glanced up at his sister. “Henny wants a new diaper,” he said shrewdly, and Mrs. Stych nerved herself for another ordeal.

She felt very squeamish and thought at first she would wait until Mrs. van der Schelden returned. It wouldn’t hurt the kid to stay wet for a while, she reckoned.

Then Michael said: “She’ll get in an awful mess if you don’t hurry.”

With a sigh, she decided that probably Mrs. van der Schelden would not be able to do the job when she did come back, as she would be bandaged up, so she asked Michael to explain to her how his mother did it.

Michael took her into a bedroom, bare except for a chest of drawers and a double bed. The wooden floor had been polished to a high gloss, and, when she opened the chest of drawers, neat piles of children’s clothing and of diapers were revealed.

At Michael’s direction, she spread a plastic crib pad on the bed, took the child out of the high-chair and laid it down on it. Henny dribbled down the back of her dress during this operation, but Mrs. Stych was so absorbed in her efforts to get the child on the bed without dropping it that she did not notice this further spoiling of her new dress.