And it was already March in Chicago.
He watched waiters dressed in embroidered vests over white shirts careen to and fro, overloaded serving trays hoisted above their heads like little islands of pottery perched on the crack of a tectonic plate.
The constant balancing act was unnerving as the waitstaff sailed between tables crowded together, and crowded with customers. The noise level was a roar. To his chilled nostrils, the mingling scents of discreet sweat, hot sausage, and cold beer was narcotic.
“Sir?”
“I’m meeting someone.” Matt’s eyes panned the overpopulated room once more. It was embarrassing not to spot your own mother. “Mira—” What last name was she using now? He didn’t have the vaguest idea, even more embarrassing. He’d have to ask sometime.
“Oh, you’re Mira’s son!” The woman hostess was as rosy cheeked as a grade-schooler in December, despite being in her sixties. “Right this way.”
Her broad, embroidery-vested form tunneled a path through the chaos to a rear table for four.
His mother sat there fiddling with her silverware and keeping an eagle eye on the service transpiring at adjoining tables.
“Matt!” She leaped up when she belatedly saw him, smiling.
“Mom.”
They hugged over an intervening wooden captain’s chair.
“You look great,” Matt told her, pulling a heavy chair over the rough-tiled floor to sit at right angles to her. She had posted herself to see the door, but the intervening traffic had made him invisible.
“It’s these fancy clothes.” She modestly touched her fingertips to the shoulders of the aqua blue blouse he had bought her for Christmas.
But it wasn’t just the blouse, or the blue topaz earrings, also a gift from Matt. Her hair had been cut and fluffed into a cloud of blond intermixed with gray, a totally natural effect that somehow seemed expensively colored. God was still the best hair stylist around.
She looked at least ten years younger than her fifty-three years. Matt noticed that adjoining diners were still eyeing them speculatively after overhearing their greeting. He didn’t look over thirty himself, so mental math was being frantically done at all the surrounding tables, much to Matt’s amusement. If they only knew his history, and hers.
“You look,” he said, sincerely amazed, “like a new woman. Is it the new job?”
“Partly.” Her expression as she glanced around mixed caution and pride. Her voice lowered. “Serving as hostess at a famous place like this requires a little more maintenance than I needed at Thaddeus’s Café in the old neighborhood. The Polandsky is a big tourist attraction. We even get movie stars in. Kevin Costner.”
“Well, you look fit to escort a movie star, Mom.”
She settled back to study him as only mothers can while a waiter brought menus and filled their heavy, stemmed water glasses.
“You look a little tired, Matt. Is it those late hours at that radio job of yours?”
“No, Mom, it’s traveling for these speaking engagements. The luncheon address I did today was over at two P.M. but I was there until four answering questions and meeting underwriters.”
“What group was it again?”
“The supporters of Wendy’s Way, a group of national shelters for runaway girls.”
She shook her head, which only improved her hair-do. “Poor girls. They don’t have family support like in the old days. Now it has to be all out in the open.”
Matt held himself back from pointing out that her family didn’t support her much in the old days, other than making her feel ashamed. His mother might look like a modern woman, but a lot of old assumptions still lingered beneath the flashy renovation.
“A table for four?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Your cousin Krystyna is coming along later. I hope that’s all right? She has a late class. Studio arts, she said.” Mira sipped her water, then eyed him over the reading glasses, framed in indigo metallic, she had slipped on to skim the menu. “Boyfriend, too,” she mouthed, rolling her eyes.
“You don’t like Krys’s boyfriend?”
“He’s like all the young men these days. Odd.” Then she took off the glasses and smiled. “I’ll tell you what to order. I know the chef’s best dishes. I like your jacket.” She eyed him while he shrugged out of the bulky down jacket to reveal an amber velvet blazer.
“I wore it at Christmas at Uncle Stash’s, remember? After living in a desert climate, this cold calls for clothes with a warm feeling.”
“Cold! It’s spring here.”
“In Las Vegas, it’s summer practically.”
“Are you going to keep living in that awful city?”
“It’s no more awful than Chicago.”
“It’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of the U.S.”
Matt laughed. “The city’s reputation is exaggerated. It’s only like…Ninevah.”
“So the speech went well.”
He nodded. They always went well. “And I was well paid.”
“Shouldn’t you be donating your services, if it’s for charity?”
“The point is these are fund-raisers. They expect to pay for a well-known speaker to get donors to contribute.”
“A lot different from your last job.”
“Not really. I just talk to a larger audience than I ever did at the crisis hotline, and I get paid a lot more.”
“Hmmm.”
Earning money for what looked like doing nothing was as suspect a notion as living in Las Vegas to his mother’s generation and place.
“So what should I eat?” he asked, bewildered by creamed herring appetizers, kielbasa and borscht, varieties of knedle, or dumplings. He hadn’t eaten “Polish” since he had entered the seminary.
She happily took him on a verbal tour of the menu before recommending the cucumber salad and chicken Polonaise. And she urged him to try the beer sampler, a specialty of the house for tourists. She would have a Stinger cocktail.
Matt supposed he was a tourist here with his own mother as much as any out-of-towner. His head began to spin from the noise and the heat and the long day, not to mention his mother’s whip-lashing values: old-school Roman Catholic Polish Chicago with glittering bits of rez biz grafted on. She’d be ready for Sin City yet.
After they ordered, the waiter soon brought a tipsy tray of miniature glass beer steins filled with an array of ales colored like precious topaz from shades of palest yellow to dark amber. There were twelve in all, but each only offered about four swallows.
Matt decided to work his way from dark to light, picking up one of the silly steins. His mother looked sophisticated behind the sleek sculpture of her martini glass while Matt played with baby steins.
“To Chicago,” he said, raising his Lilliputian lager.
“Chicago.” She set down her glass after a genteel sip and rearranged her silverware. “I’m thinking of selling the two-flat.”
Matt felt ambushed by a slap of raw emotion. He had a love-hate relationship with the old duplex he had grown up in, he realized in an instant of confused emotion. Its beloved, old-fashioned familiarity was forever married to his stepfather’s brutality.
“Where would you live?” he wondered.
“A small apartment. Between the old neighborhood and here. There’s plenty of public transportation, and Krys keeps pushing me to drive more in the city. It’d be easier to keep up, and I could use the retirement investment money.”
“Makes sense to me.”
Her lips tightened. “The family can’t see it. But it’s time to move on.”
“I have,” he pointed out.
She grinned shyly at him. “Have you ever! I hate to say it, but ever since you left the priesthood, your life seems to be on a magic carpet ride…speeches, radio shows. What about that girl you mentioned?”
“Girl?”
“You know. In Las Vegas. The one you liked a lot.”
Matt downed a small stein of slightly red beer. “She’s still there. We’re still friends.”
“Nothing more?”
“No.”
“But when you were here at Christmas it sounded more serious than that.”