That meant this information was important to him, that and the shamed way the word
"stepfather" sidled out of his mouth like a mud-spattered dog peeking from under the best couch. It also told Temple that this was not to be the romantic evening out that she might be inclined to hope for.
She wriggled her tootsies free of the confining toes of her shoes. Thanks to an old-fashioned floor-length tablecloth, no one could see her informality. No one could see her play footsie with Matt, either, because it wasn't going to happen, at least not tonight.
One thing that was going to happen tonight had her second-most-primitive urge polishing its pistons, though: curiosity. Matt was finally going to squeeze out some details about his family.
Temple slid her knife to line up with the tines of Matt's meticulously placed fork opposite her. ''Is he a good stepfather or a bad stepfather?'' she asked carefully.
Matt sighed again, a short, frustrated huff of air. ''Maybe okay by some people's lights. Bad by mine."
She nodded, not surprised.
Having gone this far, Matt must have decided to plunge in with both feet. His eyes and fingers fussed at the arrangement of the tableware while his voice and mouth rattled off a messy cornucopia of facts.
"My real father--odd expression, isn't it?--left my mother while I was still an infant. I don't know why, and she would never say. I knew her as a single mother, working all day and worrying all night. I guess finding a man to take care of her answered half of that unhappy equation. They got married, of course. I wish they hadn't; then he wouldn't have been real, my fake father. But they did. No big ceremony, but a church wedding. Marriage was it for women in St. Stanislaus parish, even as recently as the liberating sixties; that, the single life, or living in sin, which was as good as the streets for a Catholic woman. So she married him, and then we were all stuck. For eternity."
"You got away," Temple observed.
"Escaped, you mean. You're probably right. Into the neighborhood when I could, later into school. Finally into the seminary."
"What was wrong with him?"
"He drank. Just beer. Mom said at first, but 'just beer' can drown even a dry alcoholic, and he was a career beer-drinker. That's what men did in poor, working-class neighborhoods in Chicago. They drank. They still do. Only with him, the hard stuff came later."
"Did you have brothers or sisters?"
Matt's head shake was a gesture so abrupt and tight it resembled a tiny shudder. No, thank God, it seemed to say.
"After my real father left, there were no others. I think--"
Temple waited, beginning to understand what it must have been like for Catholic priests in the old days, behind their dark wooden confessional doors, listening and waiting and wondering when to speak, when not to speak.
Matt looked up, his expression both guarded and searing. "I think when my mother found out what my stepfather was really like, she made sure there were no more children." His eyes shut. ''It would have been a sin, of course. A mortal sin. She didn't go to confession much after he came along."
''Is your mother . . . still alive?"
"Sure." He seemed surprised by her question, which was natural, since everything he spoke of seemed steeped in the bitter dregs of days-gone-by. "She still lives in the parish. Retired.
Goes to confession now. He left, years ago, but after I did. She was a . . . beautiful woman."
"How many years ago did he leave? How old--"
"Was I?" Matt's mouth stretched clothesline tight before he spoke again. "When he left?
Sixteen. It was before I went into the seminary. I never would have left her alone with him."
"So . . . why do you want to find him now?"
Matt shook his head. "I was just a kid then. Maybe I'm still just a kid in a lot of ways. I don't .
. . understand. I need to understand that before I can understand"--his pale hands spread in the lamplight, over the empty place setting, as if offering an unconscious blessing on ...
nothingness--"this."
"Where you are today, you mean?" she prompted.
This time his smile was ironic, and personal, and quite charming. "Where I was before today.
But why I'm looking for him isn't the reason I asked you here. It's how. I've been trying in my own clumsy way to make inquiries, and nothing seems promising. I thought you might have an idea or two. You know how to get things done."
"Certain things." Temple sighed in her turn. How touching that Matt found her the Quintessential Organizer, the Fixer, the Solver. "Why do you think he's here in Las Vegas?"
Matt shrugged. "That was the only thing he cared about, cutting out on Mom and me and spending a few days--and half her paycheck--in Las Vegas. I came to regard the city as a kind of personal savior, after a while. For all its Sodom and Gomorrah reputation, it got him out of our house and our hair."
"But, Matt, that was--'' Temple was not adept at mental math, so there was a telling pause while she calculated and he hung on her every grimace.
"Seventeen years ago,'' he finally furnished for her.
''Seventeen years. So much has changed in Las Vegas since then, so many new places to gamble elsewhere in the country have cropped up since then. Your stepfather might have moved on to Atlantic City, or the new riverboat establishments near Chicago. He might be--''
''Dead,'' Matt finished for her, his tone as grim and final as this ultimate in four-letter words.
She nodded. "Maybe you'd be better off if he was."
"I'd be better off knowing that's for sure."
"Can I ask one . . . personal question?"
"You will anyway."
"Why not look for your . . . real father?"
Matt looked dumbfounded. "He's not real to me. He's not the one who--"
Temple hung on every word, recognizing the importance of this answer, above all the others.
Matt must have recognized it, too. He suddenly grew silent, leaving her to twist slowly in the weightless vacuum of his unfinished phrase. " The one who ..." Who what? Hung the moon?
Killed the goose that laid the golden egg? Made a priest out of young Matt Devine?
"Was your stepfather's last name Devine?" she asked,
"No. That was my birth father's name. Mom went back to it after he left. I had never taken his name."
"Then your mother must account for the Polish in you."
"Yeah. Kaczkowski. I swear to God," he added, smiling. "Devine, I don't know. Might be Gaelic."
Gaelic? Like Kinsella? Oh, no! "Hey," Temple said, recovering, "at least your real father left you a pronounceable last name; that's something."
He nodded, lost again in his quandary.
"As for your stepfather, from what I've seen of Las Vegas regulars, they stay pretty faithful to the old town. What are you doing, checking the casinos and hotels for his name?"
"Yeah." He hesitated. Temple suspected that he was coming to the issue that really troubled him, and that more was troubling him than his family history. ''And lying a lot." "Why?"
"Can you get information from unsuspecting people without lying a lot?"
While Temple considered that question, a cocktail waitress in a gathered skirt about a centimeter longer than the control-top line on her off-black pantyhose sauntered by to offer them menus and take drink orders.
Matt kept his nose in the eyebrow-tall menu and his eyes on the entrees, though Temple noticed that the waitress's skirt was just the right height to scratch his nose, were it or she so inclined.
Temple always wondered why the taller the woman, the shorter the skirt; on her this ebony ruffle would be nearly knee-length. Glancing around, she saw that the serving staff were all dressed in sophisticated black-and-white. Maybe Central Casting had sent them over from the nightclub set in a forties movie. The men wore tuxes and pencil-thin mustaches. The women wore lots of abbreviated black with pencil-thin white-lace ruffles in all the right places, from bustier to bustle, including the black satin pillbox hats tilted over their right eyebrows like vintage bellboy caps. Caaall for PhilUllip Moooor-ris the, Cat, perhaps? Hot-cha-cha. Where is Jimmy Durante when you really need him?