2Golden garland

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Kit spoke first. "I could use ... a better grade of perfume. Quick! Where are the tissues?"

  "On the kitchen counter where you keep them."

  "Golly, Temple, you look silly with your nose all shiny." Kit slumped against the countertop. "I hate to admit it, but I've never been inside a morgue before. It's a trip."

  "This is my first time too, and we barely penetrated the facility."

  "You, a newbie? Can't believe it. Where'd you get that lip-balm trick?"

  "I read somewhere that police officers use it when they have to visit the morgue."

  "Yeah. Even those big, burly pros like Ciampi. I don't feel like such a wimp."

  " Those big, burly pros' include Lieutenant Hansen. I wish you could have met her."

  "Why should I want to? From what you've said she's Sonja Henie on acid-etching skates."

  "You should see Lieutenant C. R. Molina of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. She's almost six feet tall."

  "No! I guess women go to all lengths nowadays when it comes to career choices."

  Temple giggled, and leaned against the counter alongside her aunt. "It wasn't as totally horrible as I feared. When Matt did it, he seemed really torn up."

  "Men! They can't take the realities of life, like death. We women are tougher. Men don't have menstrual cramps. Speaking of which, I feel a figurative siege coming on. You want some brandy before bedtime?"

  Temple nodded, now ready for an early retirement. "So that was Rudy?"

  "Unfortunately, yes. Why do you think I need the brandy?" Kit kicked off her ankle boots and hopped atop the counter, and then she stood on it to open the highest cupboard.

  Temple babied the bottle of Courvoisier Kit handed down until her aunt jumped to the floor again.

  "Damn!" Kit hopped from one stinging sole to the other. "I wish they wouldn't design kitchens for giants, or men. Yup. It was Rudy, all right."

  Temple nodded, accepting the juice glass of brandy her aunt poured without comment. Kit was really shaken up if she was serving brandy in juice glasses.

  "I think I recognized him too."

  "You? How?"

  "The eyes. Not that the corpse's had any expression, but they were the right color. He recognized me from your place the earlier night, and wanted to say hello, but didn't want to blow his act. That's why he seemed surprised to see me. Why should your niece be at the site of his next job? Wild coincidence, huh?"

  "Happens all the time in New York City. You get this many millions of people together, and the coincidences will knock your socks off. It's uncanny. I noticed it when I first moved here. In fact, not noticing any coincidences is the exception to the rule."

  They repaired to the living room, where Midnight Louie had beat them to the prow-facing leather couch. He was sprawled full-length, slantwise, so no human could sit comfortably on either side of him.

  "Greedy guts," Temple said.

  "Oh, but he's tired out. All those hard hours of work at the advertising agency, and then we drag him out to the seamier side of the city. Let him rest."

  "Louie has dragged himself to the seamier side of the city many a time, believe me." Temple shook her head.

  Before she could rearrange the big oaf, Kit had sat happily on the area rug and leaned her head against the couch seat.

  "Let the big guy rest, Temple. I don't feel like sitting up straight right now anyway"

  "I suppose sitting on the floor with a juice glass full of brandy reminds you of those wild parties you went to when you first came to New York."

  Temple imitated her aunt in stretching out her legs and leaning against the couch seat. Between them, on the couch itself, Louie stirred. A big black tail slapped across Temple's face, then was still.

  "There's somebody who's feeling no pain," Kit said.

  Temple brushed his tail aside. Of course it didn't stay swept aside, but swung back to tickle her cheek.

  "I don't know how cats can relax so completely," Temple said, moving away. "When it's people who could use a break. Especially after this afternoon."

  "Indeed. Between visiting Rudy's flat and seeing Rudy himself flat at the medical examiner's, I feel like I've got apple jelly for joints."

  "You do sound tired. It must be awful to see someone you knew pretty well laid out like that."

  "That's the rub. I saw Rudy fairly often, but I didn't really know him well. None of us did. In fact, none of us knew him at all after he came back from Vietnam in . . . oh, must have been sixty-five."

  "I wasn't even in preschool yet."

  "Preschool! How baby boomer of you, Temple. We didn't have such decadences in my youth."

  "Apparently you made up for it later."

  Kit frowned. "What everybody remembers from my salad days is Hair, the musical, and hair, shoulder-length or more, on guys, and psychedelic Volkswagen vans. That's the funny, freaky stuff. The rest of it was pretty bad. Race riots and war protests. I guess we were a wild bunch because we really thought it was 'eat, drink and be hairy, for tomorrow we die.' "

  "So how was Rudy different when he came back from Vietnam?"

  "Addicted to everything in sight, for one thing. Cigarettes, booze, pot, whatever they were smoking or sniffing or injecting in Alice's Restaurant, or is it Alice's Wonderland magical-mushroom medicine cabinet?"

  "But wasn't everybody into changing consciousness then?"

  "No! I never used drugs. Didn't like what I saw it did to people. I had plenty of imagination on my own. All the Vietnam vets were pretty wasted. It made you feel guilty for not having been there, even if you were a girl and couldn't get drafted. So you provided a shoulder for some sad war stories. Most of the vets stabilized and disappeared into real life, but Rudy never made the transition."

  "So he leaned on you and your friends for thirty years?"

  Kit nodded. "You had to have been there. We were all in the sixties together, no matter what role we played. They were violent, unsettling times that turned our values upside down. There hasn't been a watershed generation like ours since the Depression. We're all vets, in a way."

  "But . . . here you are, perched in your cozy condominium, and there was Rudy, down in that rat hole."

  "I didn't know. We knew he had a 'place,' and that's comfort enough in New York City. So the guys bailed him out when he got picked up for drinking and I found him jobs. He didn't strike you as an unhappy man, did he?"

  "No. Quite the contrary. When I ran into him in the conference room, he seemed quite cheerful, like it was our little secret. Of course, to him the secret was bigger than finding Santa in the wings before his 'surprise' appearance. He knew who I was, and that made it even funnier."

  "Rudy was great at getting into character, as long as he didn't have to keep it up too long. And he was so good with kids."

  "I saw that."

  "Maybe that's not such a bad way to die, playing Santa Claus."

  "I've seen worse. A lot worse."

  For a moment Temple saw Darren Cooke, a gun poised at his temple, and a forefinger laid over his on the trigger.

  Louie lashed out with his tail, striking her face again, and she jumped as if shot.

  This was it. No more messing with murder. It was invariably messier than it looked.

  Chapter 28

  Mother and Child Reunion

  Strings of exterior Christmas bulbs outlined the eaves and many doors and windows on the street in southeast Chicago where Matt had lived as a boy.

  The thousand points of lights emphasized the gridwork sameness of these nineteen-twenties remnants, four-square two- and three story flats with basements, the upper stories for rental residents. The interiors would offer cramped bedrooms with odd angles, inconvenient doors and windows that broke up any wail space that had a prayer of hosting a couch or a bed, furniture jammed against long ranks of radiators painted in an attempt to disguise their homeliness. Dry heat would bake nosebleeds, split ends, static hair and cracked fingernails into your very DNA.

 
And outside during the winter, wet cold creeping up your sleeves and down your jacket neck.

  Matt sat in the idling truck, reluctant to leave Bo's rough warmth. His kids were lucky.

  "Thanks for the ride," Matt said.

  "See you at my house Christmas Eve." Bo ripped off a glove in the

  now-heated interior, seized Matt's hand in his hot pink fingers, shook it. "Nice seeing you again. Shoulda been sooner. Can't wait for you to see those little hellions of mine. You're looking to be the only priest in this and the next generation of the family."

  Bo's last words helped spur Matt to depress the door latch and tumble into the subzero chill. Wind whipped a few flakes of snow into a pseudostorm around him.

  "Thanks," he muttered into the frigid north wind, feeling his nostrils pinch shut on every icy inhalation. He slammed the door quickly to preserve the truck's hard-won interior heat.

  "Say hi to Aunt Mira--!" Bo shouted in farewell.

  The closing door cut off her name. Matt stuffed his right hand back into its inadequate glove. Acrylic-lined leather didn't cut it in this climate.

  He stared at the two-story house, dark among its brighter brethren, lightless, only a faintly perceived glow warming the first-floor windows behind the drawn curtains. Still shuttered, still secret in a hushed, unspoken way.

  "Holy Mother, be with us now ..."

  For some reason, he pictured a blue mermaid.

  ". . . and at the hour of our death."

  The shoveled walk made a crooked, narrow, slovenly path, fit for playing a kid's game like "Pie," not for walking on. Snow pressed past the feeble mod-acrylic barrier of J. C. Penney pants and thin Sun Belt socks into the sides of Matt's suede shoes, encasing his feet in ice packs. Motorcycle boots. That was the way to come home to Chicago in winter. Ready to kick aspirations in the behind.

  Matt mounted the five steps to the porch door. Screens had been exchanged for glass storm windows, and fine, dry snow had drifted against their corners, erecting lattices of frost.

  Matt tried the aluminum storm door. Locked, as he had expected. Security was important to Chicagoans, worth a trek through the Small porch's icy air to inspect the caller. Matt punched the old button-model doorbell, wondering if it still worked, or if he'd have to bang on the glass and metal door like a tramp.

  Near the front door on the left (a second door led to the upstairs tenants' quarters), a light switched on, pouring through the square porthole of glass.

  The brass lock and knob shook, then turned as the front door opened. Someone stood silhouetted by the warm interior light, eyeing his snow-swirled figure, deciding.

  She minced across the indoor-outdoor carpet like an old lady in her heavy, lined slippers.

  Matt felt panic attack. Why had he come? Who was this stranger? He had found Effinger, hadn't he? Who else mattered?

  Rose of Memory, Mother of Forgetfulness . . . now and at the hour of our birth . . .

  Now!

  She unlocked the door, told him to watch the last, high step up (as if his muscles hadn't memorized it decades ago), led him into the light and the warmth, suggested he take his shoes off and leave them by the radiator.

  Matt didn't want his shoes off in this house. Not yet. He did wrestle off the gloves and the sheepskin jacket. A Midwestern winter made sure that when you weren't fighting the weather outside, you were fighting free of your outerwear inside.

  "What do you think this is, the Riviera?" she was asking, lecturing. "Those things wouldn't keep a polar bear warm. Here. Put your gloves and jacket on the radiator. They'll be warm when you leave, remember?"

  "I've just gotten here and you're already thinking of when I'll be leaving?" he joked. Maybe.

  "No! I thought you'd forgotten, that's all. Haven't been anywhere with a decent wind-chill factor for years."

  "That's true. My assignments since the seminary have all been below the Sun Belt."

  "Somebody up there must like you. In the seminary in Indiana, I mean."

  He smiled at his mother's conciliatory joke and sat in the first nearby chair. It had always been there by the door, the sprawling, square forties maroon-mohair model.

  "Coffee?" his mother asked.

  "Not this late."

  "You? Getting older? Cocoa, then."

  Cocoa. That cup of chocolate haven/heaven in a cruelly cold world. Matt nodded, relaxing suddenly. Mothers made things, tended things, made people comfortable. Sometimes even their own children.

  She came back from putting on the makings and sat opposite him on the slightly sagging cocoa-brown sofa he remembered. His mother wore no makeup but a little lipstick. In winter it was colorless lip balm. Her monotone skin deadened the delicate color of her blue eyes and turned her hair, a compromise between blond and silver, into dingy yellow-gray. She wore it straight back from her face, in a clip at the nape, as she always had. It was just long enough to flare into pale barbed tufts, like porcupine bristles.

  "Plain" would be the word to describe her, yet it was that untouchable plainness of Wyeth's Helga paintings. Frankly middle-aged and Old World, and still a girl hidden there somewhere.

  Matt wondered how scandalous anyone would consider it if a senile painter from the Chicago School of Art painted his mother nude, in all her pleated, fading plainness. Compared to the glimpses of the pornographic film in Cliff Effinger's room, the Helga paintings were Madonnas of the Old School. He'd never looked at his mother as simply a woman before.

  "Your ears and nose are as red as when you were in fifth grade," she noted, pleased. Something about him had not changed, some autonomic reflexes even he could not control.

  "Fair Polish skin," Matt said. "But I got a little tan in Las Vegas."

  "That'll be bad for you."

  Eternal policewoman, Our Lady of Perpetual Health and Hygiene . . .

  "Not too bad."

  Something tinged in the kitchen.

  Matt let her go for it. He wasn't ready to see how little the kitchen had changed. But he studied the room when she was gone, as he had studied her when she was present.

  First he saw the usual picture of the Black Madonna, that Polish icon, that iron doll in gilt and lace, in inadvertent blackface. A Valentine Barbie with a soul of steel.

  The same brown and yellow floral wallpaper climbed the little wall space nor covered by wide oak woodwork. Yuppie couples would kill for this unspoiled house, he suspected, as they flocked to old Catholic neighborhoods to rehab two- and three-flats into spacious single-family homes and enroll their precious few children in the few remaining Catholic grade schools. Safer, you know. Fewer drugs and gangs. An ethical commitment. Not perfect, but better. Not as good as prep schools, of course, and still dear, but perhaps more democratic for the twenty-first century . . .

  "Here." His mother wafted the mug of cocoa before him like a domestic magician. Miniature marshmallows floated, pure-sugar icebergs, in a cinnamon-brown sea. Soon the heat would melt them into a super sweet, gooey cream that would coat his wind-chapped lips.

  Food was the eternal panacea in dysfunctional families. Eat. Swallow whatever must be. Say nothing. Eat.

  Matt sipped the hot chocolate.

  "Divine," he said.

  And she stiffened.

  They were sparring partners, trapped in a ring from long ago, never daring to reveal weaknesses or strengths, fated only to keep dancing, dancing away from one another . . .

  "Why did you come back, Matt? This year in particular?"

  "Maybe I wanted a pat on the head. A 'thanks' for bringing Effinger to some kind of justice."

  "He's been out of our lives for years, thanks to you. Maybe I didn't pat you on the head for that." Her hands were empty. She had made nothing for herself. That was the problem. "It scared me. The violence in you."

  "Violence? Mine? All those years absorbing his violence ..."

  She waved a hand, dismissing the past. "I was glad to have the house to myself again. To ourselves again. In a couple years you were off to semi
nary, and I was alone. You won, and then you left me alone."

  "You can't mean that Effinger was better than loneliness?"

  "Not at the end. But, in the beginning ... why do you think I married him?"

  "I can't imagine why. Is loneliness why you put up with . . . that for so long?"

  "No." She folded plain hands, no rings, undecorated by anything but the more prominent veins of middle age. "You're why I put up with it."

  "Me!"

  She refolded her hands, to keep them warm. "I didn't like your pursuing Effinger at this late date because he was the effect, not the cause. But I didn't want to go into all the old whys."

  "Why not?"

  She smiled. "Still asking like a child. Because some of them are inexplicable, even to me now, and will be inexplicable to you now as well. A mother doesn't like looking like a fool to her child. She's supposed to know everything. I knew nothing. You've always known Effinger wasn't your father, Matt. I don't understand why he was so important to you."

  "Because he was the only father I knew. Because he was this stranger who had appeared out of nowhere when I had lived quite contentedly without a father, because he brought noise and fear and pain to you and us and to this house." Matt looked around, sure the walls and floors would creak in agreement with him. "I never knew why one day he wasn't there, and the next he was."

  "He was not your father. He never acted as a father to you, certainly not a good one. He was my husband, that's all. He was a necessary evil."

  "Why? Why on earth was a lazy, ill-tempered, ultimately violent man who wasn't worth the bones in your little finger necessary to us? To you?"

  "Because he would marry me."

  "That's it? Everyone knew about us. It's not like we weren't news. I was about to enter kindergarten. We were stable, until he came."

  She shook her head. "We were not. You thought we were, but we were not. We were nothing. We were a blot on the parish, a stain on the family, an embarrassment, and as you went through school, fatherless, the shame would have been rubbed in worse and worse.