That is for her to say and me to gnash my fangs over.
Chapter 57
The Past Is Prologue
Supposedly Matt had people skills.
Sixteen years as a parish priest and one as a hotline and radio counselor should qualify him for anything.
He sat at a table in the Drake Hotel bar, all wood paneling and leather. His hotel would be the neutral ground. He felt like an anxious diplomat arranging for a secret meeting between Bush and Osama bin Ladin. The situation was explosive. So much could go wrong.
His mother arrived first, as arranged. She was wearing the Virgin Mary blue blouse and blue topaz earrings he’d bought her for Christmas with a gauzy black and silver skirt that had the Krys influence all over it.
She was a knockout.
She scanned the room expertly. Confidently. Serving as hostess at a popular tourist restaurant had given her a new social poise. Dating again must have helped. Matt remembered the distinguished man in the camel-hair coatshe’d seated so graciously when he’d dined alone in “her” restaurant last Christmas.
Finding him, her dark eyes sparkled with greeting. She rushed over on her low-heeled pumps. Another symptom of the hostess job. Easy Spirit shoes for tired feet: neat, attractive, but not showy. The phrase could describe his mother’s overall impact.
He stood to seat her. Bars always had such heavy chairs that women found hard to sling around. Maybe to promote male chivalry. Maybe to anchor tipsy customers for another round or two.
“Matt.” Her lips brushed his cheek before she sat.
No one would call this woman beaten down but that would have described her just months ago, before she moved out of the old two-flat filled with bad memories in the Polish section of Chicago and into a new apartment, job, and the strange cross-generational alliance with her punkish art student niece Krystyna.
Somehow, they were good for each other, so good they sometimes scared the heck out of him, between Krys’s obvious interest in him and his mother’s simultaneous emotional unthawing after years of repression and guilt.
She knew that she was to meet someone important to her quest to find out about the man who’d fathered him, the boy who’d gone off to combat after meeting her in the St. Stan’s church the night before Christmas.
“I can’t believe you’ve found something out,” she told him, ignoring the waitress who hovered behind her. Matt had been out of the priesthood long enough to know that cocktail waitresses at your table side were a boon in most bars, a boon that might not be repeated for too long.
“Have something, Mom.”
She glanced at the lowball glass in front of him. “A .. . scotch on the rocks.”
“House brand okay?”
She expertly eyed the bottles behind the bar, another new talent. “No. Johnny Walker Black.”
Go, Mom, go! You’ll need it.
“Who is this? One of the lawyers who offered me the deal back then?”
“I met him at the lawyers’ offices.” Temporizing. “Thank you for doing this. I know they just would have blown me off.”
Blown me off? Krys again.
She sat back as the drink was wafted onto a napkin before her.
“I can’t believe you got somewhere. Cheers.” She lifted the glass. Their rims clicked. She seemed excited and happy.
“It wasn’t easy. They blew me off too on the first visit. So I came back and hung around the floor, watched who came and went.”
“Just like a detective. Like that young lady friend of yours you say isn’t a serious girlfriend. Tamara, was it?”
“Temple.”
“Odd name for a girl.” She sipped again, and sighed. “But they’re doing that these days.”
“It suits her.”
“That’s just because you’re used to it. Because you like her. A lot. Don’t try to duck that. A mother knows. Maybe you can bring her up here for next Christmas.”
“Maybe. Mother—”
“I thought we’d gotten past that formal stuff. Krys doesn’t even call me ‘aunt’ anymore. In fact, we were out shopping and someone mistook us for sisters. Can you imagine?”
“Yeah. You look … really great, Mom. Someone would probably mistake us for siblings too.”
“I’d be honored to have such a handsome brother. Your uncles have all let beer bellies have their way with them. Don’t you do that.”
“No chance. Uh, Mom, this person we’re going to meet, he didn’t know anything about what the lawyers arranged.”
“You mean he was taken in the way I was?”
“Well, he was pretty young back then too. That’s how I connected to him; he had no idea that they’d offered you the two-flat as a bribe to keep me and you out of the family. He was pretty shocked. And angry.”
“Anyone decent would be. It’s not that I would have wanted anything more than some legitimate child support. The two-flat did help but it wasn’t a substitute for a simple acknowledgment. So how did you find this man with a conscience?”
“A paralegal dropped a name she shouldn’t have.”
“What would that have to do with it?”
“It was my father’s name.”
“Why would that mean anything to you?”
“Because I saw a man who had that name. And he looked like me.”
“Oh, Matt.” Her celebratory air crumbled. “That must have been so … shocking for you. I didn’t think that might happen. That any relatives would still be associated with that law firm. What … was he? To you.” She bit her lip, reached out a hand to his. “I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t think what sending you there might mean. I was so selfish.”
The old apologizing-for-existing Mira was back. As much as her concern touched him, her regression chilled him. Maybe this was a very bad idea, even though it had been hers. He could still head this off.
“It was rough. I was way angrier than I thought I’d be. Then I found out that … members of the … other family had been duped too. It was the parents. Your parents. His parents. They took over and managed their errant kids, the hell with what the ones actually involved needed or wanted. Or what it would mean to me.”
“You shouldn’t swear,” old Mira said primly, falling back on the party line.
“I should do a lot more than that. I should dig up all those dead grandparents who decided what was best for my parents and hit them.”
She looked shocked, then smiled nervously. “Berating the dead is a waste of time. You know that. If they’d have known you, they’d have been proud of you. My parents couldn’t quite get past your … manner of birth but they didn’t dislike you.”
“Not a positive relationship, Mom. I was tolerated but I don’t remember them much.”
She sighed and sipped her drink.
“So,” he said, “given what a shock it was for me to meet a … relative, I’m thinking maybe you don’t need to go back like this. Maybe it’s enough to know not everybody in the family would have disowned us. That it was a Romeo and Juliet thing, where the older generation controlled the younger at a horrible cost.”
“Romeo and Juliet.” Her smile softened her features to a girl’s dewy promise. “That’s right. That was the way it was. Have you ever glimpsed that connection so right the whole world fades away?”
He wanted to temporize, as he always did on this one thorny subject but … his mother needed the truth, from everyone.
“Yes.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Someday you’ll tell me more about that. Or maybe not. Someday maybe I’ll meet her.”
“Mom, I’ve met yours.”
“My what.”
“Your person who made the world fade.”
“You can’t have.”
“I did.”
“Someone close … a brother? Is that who we’re meeting here? I don’t know if I can stand to meet a brother.”
“Mom.” He stretched both his hands across the table to cover hers, which were fanning and fidgeting with panic. “I’ve met him.”
“He’s dead. Are you crazy?”