The ladies were united in expressing their horror at such sentiments. Men, they said, had no culture, they were all sex mad and all they read were girlie magazines in the cigar store.
These were old bones of contention being dug up again, and, as the men all did read girlie magazines in the cigar store, they all clapped their mouths shut like well-sprung screen doors.
Mrs. Stych was a few minutes late for church, owing to her detailed perusal of the newspaper, and she slipped into her usual pew near the front of the church, under cover of the first hymn. The florid female with two children, who usually shared it with the Stych family, was already seated, and she turned to stare at Olga with her mouth open as she braced herself for a top note. Mrs. Stych hastily found her place in the hymn-book and joined in the final verse.
There was a rustle of closing books, and Mrs. Stych smiled brightly at Margaret Tyrrell, the secretary of the Committee for the Preservation of Morals, who, with her husband and mother-in-law, was in the pew across the aisle. Margaret looked embarrassed and gave close attention to the arrangement of her skirt as she sat down. She did not seem to see Mrs. Stych.
Puzzled, Mrs. Stych turned her gaze upon the Reverend Bruce Mackay, who, strangely, proved to be looking straight at her. Did she imagine it or did he really mean to look so malevolent? She wondered if he disapproved of her hat, which was an expensive creation of Persian lamb and violets, to match her coat.
There was an abrupt quietness amongst the congregation, and Mrs. Stych felt as if every eye was upon her. Then, to her relief, the Reverend Bruce Mackay cleared his throat preparatory to addressing the Lord, and Mrs. Stych relaxed.
She was totally unprepared for the blow when it came some three-quarters of an hour later. The minister mounted to the pulpit and put down his notes before him. He paused dramatically and then brought his fist down on the edge of the pulpit with a thwack which gave him the immediate attention of his audience. The published title of his address that morning had been “Work in the Mission Field”, so they were unprepared for such an assault on their nervous systems.
Mrs. Stych was jolted, too. This tirade had nothing to do with foreign missions, but at first she did not connect what he had to say with herself. Then his outraged comments began to penetrate. She and Boyd were being preached at in a fashion which had gone out fifty years before. They were being held responsible for the work of their son – as if anyone could be responsible for what one’s children did! They were being held up as people who had allowed their son such licence that he was now in a position to damage minds younger than his and create a society of loose-living reprobates. Parents who filled their lives with empty social events to the detriment of their children’s training were more of a menace to society than the delinquent child himself. The angry minister did not name the particular parents he had in mind for, indeed, he was saying to a whole group what he had been longing to say for years. However, not a single worshipper was in doubt about whom he spoke, and all eyes were turned again upon Olga Stych, and it seemed as if even the artificial violets on her hat were beginning to wilt under the collective glare.
Some of the eyes gleamed with satisfaction. Olga could be insufferable, and she was getting a good old-fashioned talking-to. Mrs. Frizzell, her face inscrutable, was inwardly rejoicing, and promised herself the satisfaction of cutting Olga dead as soon as they got out of church. That two of the Stych family had won prizes at the ball rankled like a festering wound.
Mrs. Stych had patronized the Reverend Bruce Mackay casually for a number of years, and had thought him a dumb, acquiescent mouse. Now it was as if the mouse had clawed her like a cougar. She could feel the colour go from her face, while the two children in the pew sucked their sweets noisily and regarded her with cold eyes; their mother’s eyes, a quick glance told her, were equally icy.
She was too shocked to feel anger at Hank – she had for the moment forgotten that he was the instrument of her destruction. She knew only that her life was collapsing around her; the carefully built façade of importance and prestige, of money and influence, came tumbling down. All that she had striven for – to improve herself, to get away as far as she could from her father’s pig farm, to become a leader of Tollemarche society – was swept away as if by an avalanche. She could feel the animosity which flowed around her like a cold fog. The silence, except for the accusing voice from the pulpit, was profound; not a handbag clicked, not a shoe shuffled.
At the end of twenty minutes he had finished. With firm fingers he folded his notes and put them back into his pocket. As he stared out over the congregation, he knew that they were with him, and he was thankful for it. A bitter lesson had had to be taught, and he felt himself to be God’s instrument to teach it. He hoped sincerely that many of the women facing him would realize that his sermon had applied to their vapid lives, too.
He announced the final hymn, and dumbly Mrs. Stych stood up. She did not sing, however; her throat was too dry. For the first time in years, she wished passionately that Boyd had been with her to sustain her with his masculine strength. She had no hope that he would sympathize or understand what she was going through, but he might at least have felt some indignation at the clerical condemnation of his lack of parental responsibility; it would have put him on her side.
The service was soon over. Mrs. Stych sat down suddenly, fearing she was going to faint, and the florid woman and her two sticky children pushed past her to get out, without even her usual smile and “Hiya?” The minister raced round to the front door in order to be in time to shake hands with each member of his flock, and only when the great building was practically empty did Mrs. Stych rise and go out by the side door. Being a late arrival, she had had to park her car down a side street, and now she was glad of it. She crept home through snowy streets under skies as leaden as her spirits.
Not one woman, she realized with a pang, had slipped into her pew to sit with her and comfort her. Presumably this was going to be the time for paying off old scores, and Olga quailed as she realized how many old scores there were.
CHAPTER 23
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.
CHAPTER 24
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.
The Latchkey Kid Page 18
