She knew more than he did, but he smiled anyway.
"My family's so stuffy! We don't even put up a mistletoe sprig for Christmas at our house."
"I remember. But I also remember your family having a beautifully carved, old-country creche scene."
She made a disparaging face. "I'm going to get a mistletoe sprig this year and nail it up and then I'm gonna catch you under it." She had a glob of ketchup on her chin.
"I don't think so."
"Can I have a sip of your beer?"
"No."
"Come on. It's not like I've never drunk it before."
"I'm sure you have, and I'm sure you will again, but it's illegal here."
She finished her fries and finally wiped her mouth, inadvertently fixing the ketchup chin. "I want to find something for a friend of mine. Have we got time?"
"Sure. You're the one who's giving up her Christmas break."
She shrugged modestly and looked pleased.
This time they wandered into the anchor department stores' menswear sections. Matt, used to shopping discount chains for the cheapest of everything, was amazed again by the profusion of unusual and costly things. Suede silk flight jackets, leather vests and dusters, designer suits.
"I know ten guys who would wear this," he noted, indicating an iridescent sharkskin suit that retailed for close to a thousand dollars.
"How do you know guys like that?"
"They're brothers, sharp dressers, and good Italian Roman Catholics except at confession time, and they live in Las Vegas."
"Wow. What are you going to wear for Christmas at my house?"
"What I brought." He glanced around the crowded area. "Maybe I could use a heavier sweater. It's colder here than I remembered, and I didn't have much notice that I was coming up."
But the sweaters were close to two hundred dollars a pop, and all had pictures woven into their patterns, ski chalets or St. Bernards or something Matt didn't care for.
Krys appeared from behind a rack of London Fog raincoats, apparently a perennial gift item.
"Look at this!"
She held up a brown velvet blazer.
"Depends who you're getting it for."
"You!"
"I'd never wear a thing like that. And you don't have the money."
"But you do. And I'm a personal shopper, right? You're giving your mother all that fancy stuff. She might go for it more if you were dressed for the occasion."
"A velvet coat? I'm not a . . . huntsman or whatever."
"Listen. Brown is the new neutral and velvet is very In. And it's on special. Only one forty-eight. What's your size?"
"Not one forty-eight. Put it back."
"Oh, please. I think it'd look divine on you."
"Where would I wear a thing like that?"
"Las Vegas? Use your imagination."
A salesman had overheard the classic male/female fashion debate and had scuttled over faster than a sharkskin leech.
"Marvelous new fabric, sir. Stain-resistant. The young lady is correct; brown is the must-have neutral of the year for both genders. A forty regular, I see. It also comes in eggplant, navy and moss green."
All versions were produced and before Matt knew it he was forced before a full-length mirror in the brown one, eggplant having turned out to be purple, navy too "harsh" and moss green too "decadent," by which Matt thought the salesman meant it reminded him of a fungus.
The brandy-colored brown velvet one, however, had subtle golden highlights, and even Matt could see it was sinfully flattering. First a red suede sofa, then a brandy velvet coat. These women were exactly as the church had represented them for centuries: seductive, frivolous creatures who knew the meaning of self-acceptance and emotional expression, not repression. He liked them very much.
And he had a cream turtleneck sweater that would go nicely underneath.
"Done," he said, producing the credit card again. The jacket didn't even need alteration.
"We're through here," Krys said as they moved briskly through the mall.
"What about your present for a friend?"
"He already got it for himself." Her eyelashes batted flirtatiously at Matt. "But I am definitely still in the market for mistletoe."
"Dream on. Where's the . . . vehicle."
"In the Wooki lot, why?"
"You've had your way. Now I have mine. I drive on the return trip."
"You don't like my driving?"
"It stinks. But your shopping is A-plus."
Chapter 31
CATNYP for Literary Lions
What is the sleuth out of water, the investigator out of time, the snoop out of suppositions to do when she, or he, hits a brick wall?
Hie thyself, not to a nunnery or a monastery, but to a public library.
Haven owed to rare Ben Franklin, a free retreat to which Emma Lazarus's poor, homeless and huddled tempest-tossed immigrants could turn in illiterate masses yearning to breathe free, to read all about it. In due time they did, unto the Washington Star and the National Enquirer.
Now, it was time that Temple caught up on her reading.
The cab dropped her off right in front of the place. (A Christmas miracle.)
Surely the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue resided eternally in some national racial-memory data bank.
Temple had seen these ranks of serious gray stone steps, with the gigantic and lordly lions on either side, in magazines, books and probably cyberspace. But here and now, for Christmas, they wore bow ties! Red bow ties. If only Midnight Louie could see them now!
Perhaps he would be less uppity about the simple red velvet collar Temple had bought with the holidays in mind.
Of course, the library lions' red bow ties were affixed to the bottoms of huge Christmas wreaths. The entire arrangement gave their fiercely feline meins (manes?) a humorous, holiday air, like seeing Charlton Heston wearing a beanie with a propeller on top.
Temple tripped up the stairs (in the light, airy sense of the verb, not as in tangling in her own feet) and entered a large interior as substantial as she had imagined--light gray limestone, marble and granite combining into a basso choir of stones and surfaces. She chose to walk up the wide staircase suitable for the entrance of a Cleopatra instead of taking the discreet elevator tucked down a corridor.
On the third floor, wood was added to the architectural orchestration, shining, smooth wood, a choir of coloratura sopranos in counterpoint to the solid stone basses of the building's ribs.
A mural-swathed rotunda awaited outside the book section. Temple gravitated to the Public Catalog Room. She was a member of the public. She had a cat, and perhaps even a log, if her diary counted.
First she had to scour the catalog. She discovered that the New York Public Library computerized catalog was called CATNYR a good sign. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. The subject matter of the Vietnam War scattered far and wide, and she wanted more recent summaries, summations written in the distant third person, overviews that might serve as a map.
Finally, after whole quarter hours of grazing, Temple brought her blue and white call slips to the reference desk.
Now the stern, substantial environment went to war with itself. She was to hie to the South Hall Main Reading Room to wait for her number to appear on a lighted board.
Was this hypertext heaven, or automated hell? She felt as if she were in an intellectual cafeteria, a fast-food-for-the-mind McDonald's. Except that the ceilings were so soaring she thought of cathedrals and shrines and the magical, mystical elevations of the Himalayas. Was anything as satisfying as knowledge? Maybe chocolate. And (shhhh, this is a library) sex with the proper not-stranger.
The Delivery Desk brought her babies to her with twenty-first-century efficiency. Temple finally settled down at a mundane table with her books and notes. She was trying to absorb ugliness in the midst of beauty. She read about officer fraggings and the freak-show talents of Vietnamese prostitutes and the treatment of napalm bums. She read about pot an
d Pol Pot, and how the world had delved into an adolescent self-mutilating phase before she could speak or walk. She read about CIA schemes and Asian immigrant dreams and an endless cycle of cynicism and self-indulgence and sin in Saigon and San Francisco.
All of which led to motives for murder. Two themes struck her innocent post-sixties mind: the Vietnam War's unprecedented divisive dissension at home: flag-burners versus flag-wavers, American against American, citizen against soldier, and how that ended in veterans coming home to be reviled, rather than honored. The Gulf War, comparatively brief as it was, hadn't been like that, though veteran charges of exposure to chemical weaponry were eerily similar in both wars, a PR ballet of accusation, denial, suspicion and investigation.
The other thing that struck her was drugs, how pervasive they were both at home and abroad, a unifying factor among protesters and protested, both the nihilist's and the idealist's painkiller of preference. Drugs that made dealing death bearable, drugs that made fighting death something one could deal with day after day.
Everyone worried about kids using drugs, in her own generation and the ones before and after it, but she had never seen anything like the drug-nirvana of that part of the sixties that she had lived as an infant, toddler and child.
People--young adults--who had lived through that intense period, that paroxysm of flirtation and fatal engagement with death and drugs, here and abroad, could be capable of anything. Any time. Any where.
Chapter 32
Christmas Party
"I don't know what to say," Matt's mother said in the car on the way to Bo and Mary Margaret's house in the suburbs.
"Now, or later?"
Matt had left the slushy freeway at the proper exit and now drove carefully through the early-dim, snow-packed streets. His mother's older model Honda Civic might be as unpredictable as she.
"Are you going to tell them?" she asked.
"Unless you want to do it."
"Do they have to know?"
"No, but I have to tell them."
"They really were proud of you."
"And won't be any more, because I'm not a priest anymore? How have I changed? Really?"
"Oh, Matt." Like a lot of women, she thought that sufficed.
"Oh, Mother."
"When did it become so terrible?"
"When having a baby was a price a woman paid. And only a woman. You tell me."
"If I'd given you up, we wouldn't have this agony."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I've counseled adoptive children who were sexually abused in their new homes."
"Oh, God! I didn't think it could be worse."
"It can. It is. We really didn't have it that bad; you're right about that, if I put it in context. But I can't put it in context when it's a secret. Secrets kill. They kill love, and hope, and family unity. That's why victims of sexual abuse are advised to admit the abuse, to name the abuser. Frankness frees. Secrets imprison."
"If you say so."
His mother had withdrawn to that inner world that was defined by her own worries and shrunken sense of self-worth. Matt sighed as he drove, wearing the brandy velvet blazer under his sheepskin jacket. It felt tight and confining, unlike the casual clothes he wore in Las Vegas.
Cold climates encouraged confinement and withdrawal. He ached for the wide-open warmth of Sin City. For snow-clear streets, and sun-god days. For neon nights. For Temple and Electra and the Circle Ritz. For Midnight Louie. For Bennie and Sheila. Even for George and Verle. But he was with his mother, and he ached most of all for her.
Thinking of the presents wrapped and tucked into a shopping bag in the backseat gave him colder feet than the poor heat circulation this old car could manage. Thinking of telling the extended family about his new status brought the cold to the level of his heart. This was the most difficult thing he had ever done, except for leaving the priesthood.
"The young people nowadays," his mother said, as if answering his unsaid thought, "don't go into the religious life like they used to. Now the church recruits old, used-up people like me; widows and widowers, people whose children are gone, who can become lay assistants."
"Wouldn't it be simpler to just let women be priests? They're eager to do it, like all of those excluded from something for centuries."
"Women priests? I don't know if women . . ."
"Mom, you are one. You ought to know."
"I've never liked being one. It's brought nothing but heartache. You can hunt Cliff and track him down. What can I do for revenge?
I never want to see him again. I never wanted to hear of him again. Your salvation comes at my cost."
"Your solution is self-abrogating avoidance."
"Your solution is confrontation and violence, just as his was."
"There must be a middle ground."
"It isn't here, in Chicago, at Bo and Mary Margaret's house."
He was silent for a bit. "I think I remember the way. That's pretty remarkable. Maybe what I should do is just enjoy myself. Celebrate Christmas. Would that make you happy?"
"Oh, yes, Matt. No more pain and accusation. I've had enough to last a lifetime."
And it had, Matt thought.
The Belofski house was bigger, higher, peakier than Matt's mother's old southside place in town, which had been bought with the secret wages of sin and guilt. Unshuttered windows brimmed with light and shadow figures moving on the accidental stage of a well-illuminated house on a dark December evening.
The broad walks had been scraped clean to the concrete. Matt helped his mother navigate the frost-slicked path, but she didn't really need assistance in her loafer shoes. He carried the shopping bag overflowing with presents: hers for her family, his for her.
Moving from the ear-crisping cold outside onto the steamy front porch and then through the thronging main rooms felt like a spiritual journey, each step meditated upon many times before being taken in real life.
Matt smelled cinnamon and apples, strongly spiced sausage, beer and eggnog.
The Christmas tree, seven feet tall, commandeered a hall corner. Bo came to collect their coats, then directed Matt and his mother into the living room.
They had just passed under the oaken arch when Krys materialized before them like a rather large elf in a short red velvet skirt, a black leather vest dangling hardware, a white blouse dripping ruffles and the cross earring, among others much less refined. Tonight her lips were painted purple to match her nails.
"Goodness, Krystyna!" Mira Devine said. "You've grown so much this last year; you've grown right out of that skirt."
"No, ma'am, I haven't." Krys grinned and pointed up at the center of the archway.
Matt turned to bump into a cluster of white berries hanging there. No way, he thought. Not with the family politics here tonight. He was a walking catalyst for a lot of people's unacknowledged crises; he understood that.
Bo came back, jovial as a jelly-bellied Santa, his face florid. He clapped Matt on the brandy velvet shoulder and drew him away from the two women. "Let me introduce you around, cousin. Lots of folks here haven't seen you since you were a little shaver or your . .. ah, induction."
"Fine. But don't introduce me as Father anything. I've left the priesthood."
Bo froze in amazement. "You didn't say that at the airport."
"It didn't seem the right time."
"What'll I say here, like to relatives and neighbors?"
"Say I'm your cousin, Mira's boy. Matt Devine."
"They know what you were."
"I want them to know what I am."
"What is that now, if you're not a priest anymore?"
"I'm a hot-line counselor. A mostly honest man. A good neighbor. A bad enemy. A friend. A son. A cousin. A reluctant motorcycle rider. A pretty good martial-arts expert. And, lately, a natty dresser. I could be a ladies' man, but I haven't got the heart for it. Ask your daughter. And I'm a Don Quixote, looking for answers where there are only questions. This family is one of the hideouts."
Bo had
paled with every new description on Matt's list. Now he said numbly, "My daughter?"
Matt pointed at the mistletoe drooping from the arch's central post. "She's a great kid. You have to show her that you trust her before she needs to prove to you that you can't. Let her go where she wants to college. She'll learn. That's what it's all about."
"Matt, I ... I don't know what to say."
"Say nothing, then. Just think about it all."
"Jeez. Mary Margaret. . ." Shaking his head, Bo went in search of his better half to share his shock.
Matt retreated to the appetizer table near the fireplace and poured himself a cup of punch. He watched the dynamic of the rooms alter as guest arrived. Couples came in, bundled to the eyeteeth in mufflers and turned-up collars. Coats went upstairs to a bedroom depository. The guests, stripped down to their wannest festive clothes, gravitated to their separate spheres.
Men gathered at the fireplace or the informal bar, talking duck-and deer-hunting, sports and stocks.
Women, dressed in their best and looking their most attractive, clustered around the younger children or hied to the kitchen to "help."
Matt circulated, eavesdropping as only an outsider can. Women discussed recipes and infant care, although a younger cadre gathered in front of the blank TV set and dissected workplace politics with a will. Krys and her age group met in corners to whisper and snicker, unlikely objects gleaming at their ears in symbolic rebellion. He smiled to see Krys sporting his gift cross like it was a tattoo from a punk-rock band.
His mother, he noticed, drifted unnoticed from women's group to women's group. As the only woman among them unaccompanied by a husband, and as once the most beautiful, he could imagine what a threat she had been in her youth. And he had begun to see beauty as a force to be acknowledged, as well as reckoned with. His mother's current drabness, her cultivated invisibility, were the result of decades of abuse, not just from a man named Cliff Effinger, but from her own family and culture and church.
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