He himself had been inclined to carry on that tradition. And now look at him: tracking a man down on the mean streets of Vegas, flirting with underage semi-cousins in big-city malls, trying to do unto his mother as Temple had done unto him, trying to awaken the sleeping beauty in everyone, including himself, for without self-love, there was only self-hate, and self-hate always looked outward for others to share the burden.
"Matt! I remember you!"
A guy Matt didn't remember had come by, flushed with good cheer and Polish beer.
"Larry. Aunt Marya's boy. Bo said you've rejoined us poor sinners 'washing and sweeping' in this vale of tears, as my four-year-old says. I don't blame you for leaving. The church is pretty messed up these days. I tell you, I'll think twice before I let my little Ashley become an altar girl someday after all the admissions that have come down. No wonder you left."
"Your little Ashley is pretty smart. Washing and sweeping is better than 'wailing and weeping in this vale of tears, 'but its still women's work. Maybe your little Ashley should skip parish work and go straight to seminary after high school. She'll find a lot of women there."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not. Women really want to learn theology. They respect it more because it's been denied them. Maybe they're latecomers, but they're better ministry candidates than most men nowadays."
"But the Pope--"
"There'll be another Pope. And another. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying counseling work."
"Oh, good. You're in California now?"
"Close. Las Vegas."
"Say, what about that place? I'm taking the family there for Easter. I'll look you up. Gotta see that New York-New York skyline hotel. And there's a water park, I'm told by the three water spaniels the fairies switched for my real kids."
"What are you doing?"
"Not much. Wage slave. The economy keeps dipping every time I get a little ahead. Wife's working now. Hey, the kids are almost all in grade school--Catholic grade school--and there isn't enough for her to do at home, now that she's got me and the boys on her chore-doing list." He shrugged. "I thought we'd be traditional, like the old folks." He glanced to Bo and his compatriots across the room. "But things change, huh? Hope you like life in civvies. You know, you could get a job as a model. The family's never been a slouch on good looks, especially the women."
"Thanks. I owe it all to my mother."
"Your mother? Oh, yeah. You're Mira's kid." He nodded. "A nice lady. Kinda quiet."
That was just it. His mother had no reason to be a nice lady. He considered her confession: he had resulted from one night of unconsidered youthful infatuation. Maybe that was more than most people had in their whole lives. Maybe human passion had its own reason and right for being. But was the price always a denial of any passion, then? Or work, for what was right, for each other?
Finally the crowded kitchen countertops were fully loaded, covered with turkey and ham, hot dishes and creamed vegetables (which seemed a contradiction in nutrition), and potatoes of every variety in every form: whipped, mashed, stuffed and sliced.
People shuffled past to fill their plates and settled on any available seat to chow down.
Matt spotted a figure dressed in black like an aging gunfighter, and wasn't surprised when the corner of his eye caught it settling near him, wearing the twin to the formal black suit Matt still kept in his closet at the Circle Ritz.
The old man's eyes were the color of water, faded by age to near translucency, but his handshake was as punishing as ever. Matt recognized that grip as common priestly compensation: an intensity born of little physical contact with others except through these social rituals. Celibacy could be a lonely avocation, spreading beyond the avoidance of one gender to an alienation from everyone.
"Good to see you again, Father Slowik. Do you need anything more? Silverware? Napkins?"
"Only a memory update. But I recall you, Matthias. Quite a squaller at your baptism."
"Maybe I had something to protest."
Father Slowik might be losing his short-term memory, but his instincts were as honed as ever.
"I know you've left, young man. They told me just now. I grieve for you, whatever your reasons. It's hard to get in, hell to get out, and sheer purgatory to have been, and be no more. You haven't left the church, though?"
"Left the church? No. I was released from my vows, that's all."
"That was enough in my day." Father Slowik pushed his ebbing glasses back against the bridge of his nose. "From what I've heard you were a good enough priest, Michael. I hope you'll be a good whatever-else you choose. Your mother's glad to see you, I'm sure."
Matt wasn't sure, but he didn't say that, any more than he would point out the old man's mistake with his name. Matt had switched to coffee, and studied the brown liquid staining the inside of Mary Margaret's best china cups. The old habits had broken down with the old neighborhoods. Bo had married Irish.
"I'd like to visit you at the rectory, Father, before I leave."
"Me? No one wants to see me any more."
"I do. I have some questions about, oh, the old days. You might remember some things. About my . . . origins."
"Old days." He nodded almost happily. "Those I remember, and, believe me, Matthias, skirts were never as short as that, not even in the sixties, and I do remember them quite clearly."
Matt turned to catch Krys watching them. "Short skirts won't destroy the world; shortsightedness might."
"I've got that too. Well, ring me up. I'm almost always there, unless they let me out to give extreme unction. Don't trust me with the words and music any more, boy. Not even at mass."
"After Christmas Day, I will," Matt said. He stood to shake hands with the old man again, despite the risk of instant carpel-tunnel problems.
The priest's stiff, wrinkled hand brushed the forearm of Matt's sleeve. "Nice fabric."
So much nicer than a lifetime sentence of black serge. For a few moments, Matt watched the old man move stiffly from group to group, mangling names and hands, always welcomed but then ignored, like an aging family dog, a black Labrador retriever.
Finally it was time to begin the Christmas Eve present exchange.
Matt found memories of this event as blank as Father Slowik's mental notebook. Had he ever enjoyed Christmases here? He sat quietly on the sidelines as gifts were handed out and exclaimed over.
He and his mother were invisible, mere onlookers to the others' connections and interactions. He felt his anger growing like a cancer. Had his illegitimacy relegated them to the family fringes? He had always blamed Cliff Effinger for everything wrong with their lives, but now he saw a more benign enemy at work. Simple denial. A tacit group resolve to ignore the unsavory facts of Matt's birth that incidentally added up to ignoring Matt and his mother.
Matt vaguely remembered being in this house at Christmas, but the memories weren't vivid, weren't warm. The rage that had refused to tear Effinger limb from limb was building here, on this supposedly safe ground of family. He felt like Samson, eager to pull the pillars down on the Belofskis and Zabinskis and all their houses, not a blinded Samson seeking blind revenge, but a Samson blinded by an ugly truth he suddenly could see.
Then, his own name was called. Startled, he accepted a wrapped package.
Inside were a Chicago-warm muffler and gloves, and a card from Bo and Mary Margaret He nodded his thanks across the room, saw them mellow and beaming. Maybe keeping up traditions was a kind of safety net. Maybe they accepted him and wanted him back. Maybe they'd bought too many muffler/glove sets for too many children.
When his last name was called again, it was for his mother. Matt watched the blouse box pass from hand to hand to her lap. It caused quite a buzz. Apparently, she was seldom in attendance, and seldom remembered.
She opened the box delicately, ribbon and tape dismantled, not torn. When the lid lifted, everyone strained forward to see, even Matt, and he knew what was inside.
The color converte
d them all on first sight. Women sighed and men nodded. His mother actually held it up to her shoulders and stroked a silky sleeve. But would she ever wear it? There was no question about the earrings, which, being much smaller, were presented unheralded, although Krys hovered to make sure they worked.
"These are ... so expensive," his mother whispered. They lay in one open palm like Christmas candies too decorative to eat.
'Try them on," Krys urged. "I want to see. I helped pick them out.
"Oh, you did?" Mira glanced with open alarm at the pewter implements dangling from Krys's ears, but clipped first one, then the other earring on.
"I'm not used to having something stuck on my ears," she said.
Matt noticed that her every comment was an objection or a subtle criticism. This house reeked with people telling other people what to do, even if the only victim was themselves.
"You'll get used to that," Krys said. "And they look gorgeous with your eyes."
His mother cast those eyes down. Compliments were anathema, and "gorgeous" wasn't in her vocabulary. "Too expensive," she murmured.
But she didn't take them off.
Halfway through the present-opening, the giant box of Ethel M chocolates Matt had brought as a hostess gift was passed to them, half of the brown frilled paper cups empty. Too expensive, Matt thought ironically, mentally toting up his holiday spending spree.
His gift from his mother arrived in a medium-size jewelry box. Inside was a dress watch, department-store designer brand, with a sleek, fashionably unreadable dial and a black leather band.
"You talk about 'too expensive.' "His gentle chiding made her smile at their role reversal. Matt swiftly exchanged the new watch for the clunky twenty-dollar model he wore. "Looks much better than my old one. Thanks, Mom."
He put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. She smiled as shyly as a teenager, or as a teenager should in olden days, before purple lipstick made shy smiles an impossibility.
Matt wondered if the watch represented Christmases past, and time lost, or Christmases future and time yet to be squandered or savored.
Somehow, with the present-passing ritual, the news about him had become common species too. More people approached him, fascinated as much by what he would do now as by what he had done before.
Matt recognized so many facial types, even in the younger generation. His old neighborhood was inbred, static. But it wasn't just that he was of the rare younger generation who had become a priest, he realized, he was of interest because he had left. Left the neighborhood, the city, the state. And now he had left again, left the priesthood.
Then people he had almost forgotten, puzzle people whose adult faces hid traces of the familiar childish ones, came up to shake his hand and remind him who they were and who he had been in their memories and to ask how he was doing now.
"Phone counseling, huh? Must be tense work, especially in Las Vegas," said an overweight woman with coarse gray hair corkscrewing to her shoulders.
He was horrified to recall her as a grade-school classmate. Time was already sorting people into parodies of their childhood selves, and his generation was only in their early thirties.
"Like endless confessions," she went on, "but with more interesting sins than in your ordinary parish."
"Sins are the same everywhere. What's your line?" Matt had recognized the hearty, no-nonsense manner of a working woman.
"I got a law degree after the kids were in school, and now I run a low-cost legal aid pool for anybody that really needs it--the poor, the handicapped, single mothers, anybody the system is used to stomping all over."
"Now you're the one with a hundred stories to tell, I bet."
"Sure can tell you live in Las Vegas, Matt, but I won't take that bet."
He was amazed by how they remembered him from school: good on the swim team, always studious. Several said they had been surprised when he entered the seminary. They sounded so benign in retrospect, his school days. These people had seen the surface he had wanted them to see. He had always been successful at misrepresenting himself, even to himself.
When the crowd had dwindled to immediate family, Matt checked his new watch, surprised to find it was after eleven.
Mary Margaret, Bo's Irish wife, paused in picking up empty dessert plates and glasses. "We always go to midnight mass at St. Stan's. Want to join us?"
He turned to consult his mother, but she wasn't in the chair she had occupied all evening.
"Kitchen." Mary Margaret's graying head nodded in that direction.
Matt grabbed some empty plates--he knew from several rectory housekeepers that a man entering a women-at-work zone had better bear a token gesture of pitching in--and wended through disarranged chairs to the house's crisis center.
Now the countertops were piled with the disorderly remains of the feast; there was hardly a place to put more plates. The women's duties were winding down; dishes would be done in the morning. So they clustered around the battered kitchen table. Matt was surprised to see his mother there, the new blue topaz earrings twinkling like the exotic eyes of some hidden persona just behind her everyday self.
They were talking hairstyles.
Matt interrupted long enough to find out if she wanted to attend midnight mass, while the other women gazed on him with the fond, interrupted attention he was used to evoking from older women.
She did, and he left, bemused. He had a feeling that she had never been swept into female holiday circles before, that she had been like him, the utter outsider.
Returning to the now-deserted living room, he was waylaid by a purple-lipped vixen.
"You've been ducking that archway all night," she said.
"Darn right. Did you trap anybody else?"
"Only Uncle Stach. This family may eat like the Russian army, but otherwise it's very repressed."
"Maybe that's why everybody eats like the Russian army. Thanks for your help at the mall. Your gift ideas were a hit."
"I had no idea your mother was so . . . shy."
It wasn't shyness, but he saw no need to correct her. She herself was shy, under that brash exterior. Everybody developed a second skin in high school, to keep the first one from being flayed to shreds, he decided.
"You going to come back?" she asked, leaning against the heavy oaken post at the end of the archway.
"My mother lives here."
"She's always lived here, and you didn't come back."
"I will more often now that I have a personal shopper here."
"Hey, that's what I'm good at. I guess I should major in nursing, or something that pays well, but I'd really like to do art."
"Do both."
"That's a tough load."
"It'll pay off when you graduate and can go either way. The time to bear down is when you're young and have the energy. It doesn't last forever"
"Does never knowing what you should do last forever?"
He laughed. "Yeah. That does. Forever."
"I bet this was hard for you. Tonight, I mean."
He nodded. "But easier than I thought. Things we fear are always like that."
"Like the super big roller coaster at a theme park?"
"Roller coasters aren't on my Ten Worst Things list."
"No, you're all grown-up."
She sounded despondent, so mired in Jekyll/Hyde indecision about who she was and what everybody else was. Matt felt a wave of tenderness for her, for himself too, when he had been there.
He put his hands on her arms and kissed the black lips that wanted so desperately to he recognized without being betrayed. It was a high school kiss, sweet and utterly unsexual on his part, just deeply affectionate.
Her eyes were shining. She was bedazzled by her own power in making what she wanted to happen more than by the kiss. An older guy had recognized her. A man who wasn't supposed to like girls that much.
"Can I write you?" The words blurted out, unpremeditated.
He hesitated, not wanting to turn a fle
eting moment into an unhealthy obsession.
"Never mind." Her eyes were shifting away, thinking about becoming ashamed.
Matt hated that look more than anything in the world, his mother's look, which he had grown up with.
"Sure you can write me. I just haven't been at my place long enough to remember the address right off. I live at the Circle Ritz."
"That sounds like a dude ranch."
"It's this wild four-story apartment building with condominiums too. Built in the fifties. Round. There's a wedding chapel out front."
"That is wild."
"That's Las Vegas." He gave her the address. "Don't you want to write this down?"
"I'll remember it." Her eyes were shining again.
The women started drifting in from the kitchen.
Chapter: Letter to Louise; Part 3
Being the Meditations of Midnight Louie in New York City
"I am about to impart to you some priceless wisdom, just in case you are my daughter and could use some guidance. Being priceless, wisdom is no doubt undervalued, but here I go anyway: the best place to be on Christmas Eve, I have discovered, is the kitchen. That is where all the eats are, and where the noise level is the least.
"I have unwittingly spent many a Christmas holiday out of doors, aware only that there were a good many more turkey leavings outside my favorite restaurants during the season to be merry. Also, the handouts came with a tad more mercy, but not noticeably so.
"Now I have seen the light. Or, rather, I have seen lots of lights. It is fitting that I am spending my first indoor Christmas in Manhattan, which becomes an island of illumination for the period. The small twinkling lights Miss Temple Barr adores (perhaps because she is more than somewhat small and twinkling herself) bedeck the city's stern gray-granite face like electrified fleas on a dignified Russian Blue grand champion. (I pity these purebreds; they are never allowed to have any fun. There is something to be said for being relatively worthless in the scheme of things.)
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