The Latchkey Kid

by Helen Forrester

  Mr. Stych stopped his perambulation and regarded his son with a puzzled frown. What was the kid getting at? He looked all right; in fact, he had improved. He was definitely tidier, and he had an oddly adult air of authority for a kid still at school. Of course, he was growing up a bit. Mr. Stych sat down again and drained his glass.

  “All right,” he said with an air of resigned patience. “What is it?”

  He nearly fainted when Hank began: “You know I rent a garage from a young widow lady.”

  Not a young widow at his age, for heaven’s sake. Why hadn’t he stuck to Grade 12 girls? Hastily, he reached for another bottle of beer and opened it, while Hank droned on: “So I entered an essay for the No Smoking essay competition…”

  With agitated fingers, his father felt in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, but he had forgotten to bring them from the kitchen. Hank tossed a packet over to him, and he had lit one before he realized that he had not known that his son smoked.

  “… Isobel read it and sent me to Professor MacFee – an English Professor – with it, and they both helped me to send it to a publisher in London. I did – and it came back. So I sent it to another in New York, and he took it.”

  “Who’s Isobel?” asked Mr. Stych, trying to catch up with the tale.

  “The widow,” replied Hank, with more than a trace of impatience in his voice, and then continued: “And it’s selling so fast that I don’t know what to do with the money. We’re getting forty thousand dollars for the movie rights, and the serial rights – the first ones – are already sold in the States.”

  Mr. Stych looked as if someone had struck him. Forty thousand dollars! His no-good slob of a kid was talking of having forty thousand dollars. His heavy black eyebrows made him look fearsome as he glared unbelievingly at Hank. “You’re kidding?” he said finally.

  “I’m not, Dad. Ask Mr. Hnatiuk at the bank if I haven’t got real money. He’s been real good. Dealt with me himself, and never told anybody so far as I know.” He took a nervous sip from his glass. “You can see the letters from New York, if you come over to Isobel’s. I been to New York only a short while back.”

  Boyd ground out his cigarette. “Christ!” “he said, some of the anger evaporating. For the first time in his life, he really looked at his son, weighing up this product of the first six months of marriage before disillusionment set in.

  Hank said earnestly: “So you see, I sure need advice. I mean, I want to spend some, but I want to invest some, too. And you know about these things, that’s for sure.”

  His father was looking at him keenly now. Mellowed by two bottles of beer, he was convinced that Hank was telling the truth; his mind was already going to work considering how to double that forty thousand. Money fascinated him. Like a great many others in Tollemarche, he had made it his goal and his God. People who made money demanded respect; people who had none were just trash to be trampled underfoot, no matter what other gifts they had. He licked his lips.

  “Sure, Son, you do need advice. You can lose money pretty fast by bad investment.”

  Though his face showed nothing of his amusement, Hank laughed inwardly. Money and talk of money got you attention. He sighed with relief.

  Boyd was silent for a moment. Then he asked: “Have you told your mother?”

  Hank went cold right down his back and into his feet. “No,” he said. “She don’t even know I quit school.”

  Boyd approved of this, and nodded his head in agreement.

  “You’re right not to tell her,” he said dryly.

  A log in the fire broke and fell, sending out a shower of sparks. Hank silently drank down his beer, and hoped he had made the right move in telling his father. Anyway, Isobel had been keen for him to tell both his parents, and her advice had been sound all through. He knew his father had a fair reputation as an astute businessman as well as an able geologist, and he hoped uneasily that they could deal honestly together over the money.

  “If I had that much money and it was the first real money I had ever made,” said the businessman at last, “I’d put a quarter of it in government savings bonds, and with the rest of it I’d buy as much land or property in and around Tollemarche and Edmonton as I could lay hands on.” He looked at his son’s face illuminated by the firelight. The boy was watching him anxiously. “Do you expect to make any more like this?”

  “Sure,” said Hank, with all the confidence of youth. “I’m writing another.”

  “Well, if you do, you could buy a business, or you could buy growth shares on the stock market. Myself, I’d buy a business.”

  “Not me,” said Hank firmly. “I’m gonna write. And I want to travel a bit. Maybe get a job on a newspaper or a magazine for a while. Feel my way around. Get some experience.”

  Boyd leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette. He had much to think about. In a place like Alberta, with that much capital and a good deal of know-how, which he himself had, the boy could be quite wealthy before he was forty. And amazingly enough, he expected to earn more. For years, he and Hank had exchanged only a few words, but now they began to talk, drawn together by the magic of money; and Hank was surprised and flattered to find that the elder man was entranced by his sudden success.

  To Hank’s intense relief, at no point did it occur to Boyd to inquire what the book was about. He did not even ask its name.

  Mrs. Stych came in at half past one, her wings bedraggled from the weight of her coat. She had gone on from the Noble Order of Lady Queen Bees’ meeting to a party given by one of the members, and was by now tired, cross and a little tipsy. On the way home, the car had had a tendency to wander from one lane to another on the road. And now Mrs. Stych stood rather dazedly inside the front door and wondered if she was in the right house.

  The lounge was a mess. The coffee table had taken flight to one side of the room, and two chairs had been drawn up close to the fireplace with their backs to the chesterfield. The fireplace itself was filled with grey ash and cigarette butts. On every side table were empty beer bottles sitting sadly in rings of beer; two empty glasses decorated the mantelpiece, and the piece of petrified driftwood which usually graced it had been shoved to the back, to make way for some empty plates which looked as if they had held meat and cheese.

  Mrs. Stych’s senses reeled. This was what happened when a man was loose in the house. He must have had some friends in. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of beer, and she kicked off her mink–trimmed bootees as if she were kicking Boyd.

  She trailed around the room picking up beer bottles, looking oddly like a bee with broken wings. She removed eleven bottles, and then felt sick. The Ladies of Scotland’s cookies, followed by meat loaf, succeeded by the Lady Queen Bees’ angel cake buried under cheese dips and rye on the rocks at the party, would daunt the strongest stomach. She fled upstairs to the bathroom.

  Her Dutch cleaning lady would be coming in the morning – let her do it, thought an exhausted Olga a few minutes later, as she shakily bathed her face under the cold tap; Boyd could darn well pay her more housekeeping to cover the extra hours of work.

  With some difficulty, she unzipped her gold and black dress in the bathroom and then trailed into the bedroom, self-pity and too much to drink tending to make her weep.

  Boyd, with most of the bedding rolled tightly round him, was snoring contentedly. Rather than wake him by pulling the clothes off him and having to face the likely consequences, Mrs. Stych put her housecoat over her nightgown, got a spare blanket out of her old hope chest, and eased herself down beside the chrysalis which was her husband. She slept immediately.

  In his dreams, Boyd Stych made a million for his son out of forty-storey apartment blocks, and was chased by a flying book the name of which he could not see.

  CHAPTER 10

  When Mrs. Frizzell arrived home from the tea, Maxie Frizzell was already in, since it was early-closing day. He was sitting in the breakfast nook, a copy of the Tollemarche Advent, open at a page of advertisements dealing with
cars, spread out in front of him, a cup of instant coffee in his hand. His overcoat and fur hat were neatly hung up in the hall and his overboots reposed on the boot tray in the back sunroom. Maxie was no believer in courting trouble – his wife nagged enough without adding to it.

  He looked up when Donna Frizzell came in through the back door, and was startled to see that her hat was awry and her makeup smudged beyond repair. Unbelievable as it seemed to him, she almost looked as if she had been crying.

  He got up as quickly as the tight fit of the table in the breakfast nook would allow. He’d bet twenty dollars she’d had a fender bender and that the car looked like a concertina.

  “Had an accident, Donna?”

  “No. Only another parking ticket.” She sniffed as she put down the parcel of books and took off her gloves, and sniffed again as Maxie sank back on his bench, relieved that his beautiful black Cadillac was intact. He looked at her uneasily, however. Something had happened. Donna was far too tough to cry, he reckoned, and yet it looked suspiciously as if that was what she was about to do.

  He turned the page of the newspaper and then asked carefully: “Anything wrong?”

  She sat down on the bench opposite to him and looked at his fat baby face, which was now showing some concern. Then she put her head down on the little table and wept unrestrainedly, the feathers of her hat dipping unnoticed into his coffee.

  He was bewildered and did not know what to do. “For heaven’s sakes!” he exclaimed, shocked to find that his wife, usually acidly in command of herself and of anyone else who came near her, could possibly be reduced to tears.

  “What happened?” he asked warily.

  He was answered by another loud sob and a gesture towards the untidy parcel which she had brought in. He again eased himself out of the narrow space of the breakfast nook and went over to the kitchen counter, looked at the parcel and looked at his wife, who was now almost hysterical. He decided that he must be courageous and investigate, so he unwound the paper towels, picked up the books one by one and read their titles. He guessed they were for the morals group, since neither he nor Mrs. Frizzell ever really read a book, and he put them down again, still mystified.

  He was fond of his wife in an absent-minded way, especially when she was not nagging at him, so he took a Kleenex out of the kitchen box and went back to her, saying rather hopelessly: “Here, have a Kleenex.”

  The sobs lessened and a hand was extended, into which he pressed the tissue. She sat up with a gasp and blew her nose hard; then, since he was close, she rested her aching head against his ample stomach. He put his arm round her shoulders, as he had not done for many years.

  “Oh, Maxie,” she said, “it was real bad.” For once her voice was faint.

  She took off her hat and laid it on the table, and he saw with a sense of shock that that her hair was white down the line of the parting where the tinting had grown out. She lifted a lined face to him, and he reached over for another Kleenex and smoothed the wetness away, so that she was almost without makeup. He could not remember how long it was since his wife had leaned on him, and he found it pleasant to be the one in charge of the situation.

  In a rallying tone of voice, usually reserved for meetings with his salesmen, he said: “Here, I’ll make you some coffee and you tell me what happened.”

  He busied himself with the electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee, and in a moment or two put the hot drink in front of her. She was grateful to him for his solicitude, and the tale came slowly out.

  He listened anxiously because, in such an isolated community, any slur on his wife’s character could have its effect on his business. The eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out,” was all-important.

  When she had finished and was stirring a saccharine tablet into her coffee, he sat silent for a while, his little eyes half closed, his pursed lips showing that he was thinking hard. The refrigerator hummed its usual little tune to break the silence, and Donna drank her coffee.

  Finally, he said: “What you need is publicity.”

  Donna looked at him, aghast. “Publicity! My goodness! Publicity! I’ve had enough of that! I’ve never been so shamed in my life.” Her voice was hoarse with indignation.

  “Yeah, I mean it. Listen, why don’t you ring up the social editor of the Advent, and tell her about your meeting tomorrow. Complain that the Committee is not getting the coverage it ought to have for the work it’s doing. Just tell her the names of those books, and I tell you she’ll be right over.” He glanced at the offending literature. “Seems to me you’ve got a man-sized job on, judging by that lot.”

  Mrs. Frizzell immediately saw the relevance of his advice and began to look more like her normal self. “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully, “we do work hard.”

  Maxie went on: “Y’ see, everyone who was at the tea will keep reading the social pages for the next day or two to see that their names are in the report of it; and, with luck, inside that time, on the same pages there’ll be a report about your Morals Committee – then they’ll know why you had the books, and old Miss Angus will be put in her place.” He, too, had suffered under Miss Angus’s overbearing rule when he was at school, and he did not mind trying to make her look foolish.

  Mrs. Frizzell’s face brightened. “I’ll have to ask Margaret first,” she said. “She’s the secretary and does the publicity.”

  “Let her ask the Advent. It’ll sound more official.” He said this in his firm business voice, not his usually listless home voice, and she accepted his direction as readily as one of his mechanics would have done.

  Mrs. Frizzell felt a reluctant admiration for her husband swelling up in her. He was not quite such a dumbhead as one would think. Her name would probably appear in the newspaper twice within two days, since she was to deliver the main report to the Morals Committee; and that should really impress both friends and enemies.

  The feathers of her hat were again sitting in the dregs of Maxie’s coffee, so she hastily retrieved it and looked mournfully at the damaged plumage. “I sure need a new outfit,” she said absently and without hope.

  “Well, go and buy one,” Maxie said expansively. “We’re going to hafta give a big coffee party for the auto buyer from Henderson and Company, so make it a nice one.”

  Mrs. Frizzell swivelled round to face him. “How much?” she asked distrustfully.

  “What about a hundred dollars?”

  Mrs. Frizzell was immediately suspicious. To get so much sympathy, and then to get a handout as soon as she asked for it, was unnerving. What had he been doing?

  She regarded him steadily for a minute with eyes still bloodshot from crying. But he was beaming at her innocently, glad to see that she was feeling better.

  “O.K.,” she said, a note of doubt in her voice. “Is the garage doing all right?”

  “Sure. That’s why you can have a hundred dollars.”

  She breathed a little more easily. He needn’t think he was going to be allowed to wander. He had married her and he was going to stay married, and no nonsense about other women and buying her off with unexpected handouts.

  She clicked her false teeth together, and announced with something of the normal snap in her voice that she was going to call Margaret right now. Then she would glance through the books she had bought, because she had to make a report on them. And would she ever roast that bookseller, old Mr. Pascall!

  The telephone call was made, and Margaret, heard amid the distant screams of children quarrelling, gushed that it was a darling idea and she would telephone the Advent herself, since she knew the women’s editor well. Mrs. Frizzell had carefully cultivated her, too, but she let it pass, while Margaret complained that all four children had the measles and that she was going to have to leave them alone if the babysitter did not come soon; she was not going to miss the dance at the Pinetree Club for worlds, and was dear Donna coming?

  Dear Donna said virtuously that she had to write her report, and disentangled herself from the con
versation before she was asked to babysit.

  She disinterred two frozen TV dinners from the big freezer in the basement and put them into the oven to heat. Then she settled down at the dining-room table with her book purchases, which she had picked at random from the shelves of Tollemarche’s only book store and from the racks of one of the cigar stores. She had also a sheet of paper and a ball pen, ready for action.

  Before looking at the books, she wrote: “The teenagers of Tollemarche must be protected from obscenity and smut.” That should shake the audience to attention, she thought, as she picked up the first book.

  She ran through the first few pages of each of the paperbacks, her mouth falling open as she read. Really, the ideas that some people had! Sex and sin were, to her, synonymous, and she wondered how on earth she was going to convey tastefully to her audience how much sin was in these volumes.

  She pushed her glasses back up her nose, clamped her mouth shut firmly, and picked up the hard-backed novel, which had cost six dollars and fifty cents of the Committee’s small funds.

  On the front of the jacket a naked young girl was spread languidly on her stomach on a seashore, nothing of her anatomy being left to the imagination. Embarrassed, Mrs. Frizzell turned hastily to the back, where rave notices from several New York papers greeted her. She opened the back of the book, and found a heading on the fold-in part of the jacket which announced that this section was “About the Author”. This time her mouth fell open so fast that she nearly lost her top dentures. It was unbelievable, yet there it was, clearly printed: “The author, aged nineteen, was born in Tollemarche, Alberta, where he still resides…” This was followed by four or five lines about the book being a miraculous first novel, etc., most of which Mrs. Frizzell failed to take in.

  She leaned back in her chair whistling softly under her breath, then remembered that it was vulgar for a woman to whistle. She drummed her fingers on the Canadian maple table instead. It surprised her that Mr. Pascall had not used for publicity purposes the fact that the author was from Tollemarche. Then she realized that books were really only a sideline to his stationery business; he sold more birthday cards than books. Even the advent of the university had not done much to increase his sales, she considered shrewdly, since she could not recall seeing a single bookshelf in any of the homes of university staff which she had visited. Probably the old man would announce in his window the book’s importance to Tollemarche, next time he changed the display. Or perhaps he wouldn’t, she amended, since the exhibition of the jacket itself would be enough to send Tollemarche into an uproar of complaints.