the

KEY

by John Paul Tegner

"Hintonville," I wrote in my diary at an early age, "an ugly name for an ugly town."

A tourist might have found it neat and charming. An artist might have called it picturesque, with its shady streets and its old-fashioned brick storefronts. But to me it had an ugly, twisted soul. I was born in Hintonville. For the first eighteen years of my life I was trapped there.

Our house was a gingerbreaded monstrosity on the proper side of the tracks. Father worked in the local bank. Mother was an invalid. She had never been well. after I was born.

She spent her days sitting up in bed, a colorless wisp of a woman with her hair in a long, thick braid. Sometimes she sang to me. There was a pathetic air of gaiety about her.

Alone with my mother, I was allowed to make as much noise as I liked. With my father at home, it was understood that the house must be quiet. "We mustn't disturb your father, Jimmie," my mother would say. "He works so hard."

I think she was afraid of him, as I was. He was a big man, tall and very straight, with a curiously rasping voice and piercing eyes. I felt that he could see through me and that he despised what he saw.

The first time he ever punished me I must have been six or thereabouts. He had just come from the bank one evening, when the telephone rang. Dropping his keys on the hall table, he hurried to answer.

I had the keys in my hand when he returned. He gave me a box on the ear that sent me reeling.

"Don't ever touch my keys again!” he said.

Screaming with pain and fright, I ran upstairs. Mother tried to comfort me. "Was there a little brass key on the ring?" she asked.

I nodded.

"That's why he was so upset," she said, her voice darkly bitter. "He was afraid you might take it and get into his precious secret drawer."

"What secret drawer?" I asked.

"The one in his desk. He doesn't know I know about it, but I do." "What's in the secret drawer?"

She shook her head. "Stocks and bonds, I suppose. Something I'm too stupid to know about. Sometimes I think I might as well be-" She stopped.

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