But she’d turned it into a church. And the thing was, she wasn’t of that generation. You know, you see them at mass all the time, those generations of Irish and Czech and Hispanic women for whom it was common to turn houses into shrines or grottos. Framed religious pictures everywhere. Palm drooping from behind the pictures. Crucifixes large and small throughout the house. Three or four Bibles scattered around. Holy cards on end tables. Even, on certain occasions, the scent of incense.
Incense, Matt associated with covering up the smell of grass in his college dorm room.
The funny thing was, his mother had been a regular normal human being all the time he was growing up. There was even the family suspicion that she’d had an affair or two back in the seventies when it seemed everybody was having affairs. She walked around in halter tops and Levi cut-offs. She liked Clint Eastwood movies. She and his father put away a goodly amount of wine most weekends, and could frequently be heard banging around on their bed upstairs while he and Don were downstairs watching sci-fi on the tube.
But then his father got a brain tumor, forty-one years old and a fucking brain tumor, and his death was so agonizing, so prolonged that Cassie just flipped out. Couldn’t deal with it. Was drunk a lot. Threw up a lot. Stayed in bed and slept a lot. Anything to escape the fact that her beloved husband — and even if she had had those affairs, it was clear that she loved Rick above all others — was dying. And then he was dead and she went even more to shit, it was her college-age boys carrying her instead of the other way around, and then one day, they were never sure why, she got religion, maybe some minister she saw on TV or something, and started wearing dowdy dresses and telling the boys to watch their language and admonishing them not to practice “free love” or to use drugs. She was living in the old house at the time, the big Tudor that had been lawyer Rick’s pride-and-joy, but it was too much house as the realtors liked to say, and so she sold it and put the profits in the hands of stockbroker Matt, who saw to it that she’d never have to worry about money. This being the end of the eighties, Matt was hauling ass financially, making so much in fact that he could afford to make the grand gesture of setting Mom up in her own little tract house.
The house that was now a religious shrine.
The house Matt stood in now, warmed by late afternoon May sunlight.
His mom was on the couch. She’d aged, many long years past her halter and cut-offs stage. She wore a faded house-dress, prim little white anklets, and brown — if-you-could-believe-it — oxfords. She’d gone all the way, mom, fifty-one years old, a child of the upper middle-class, now looking like a cleaning woman in somewhat ill health.
“Do you ever watch Channel 28?” she said.
His smile. “You always ask me that, Mom.”
“I just think Sandy and you and the boys should make a point of watching it. You know, as a family.” Channel 28 was the religious channel.
“We’re pretty busy.”
“You should never be too busy for God.”
And just how are you supposed to respond to that?
“You’re right, Mom,” he said, “we should never be too busy for God.”
“I just wish Sandy was more religious.”
Another running battle. “She’s religious in her way, Mom. She really is.”
“She doesn’t go to church.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s not religious.”
“She doesn’t take the boys to mass. And you don’t either.”
“Sandy’s Jewish, mom. If she attended any kind of services, she’d go to synagogue, not to mass.”
“Then why doesn’t she go to synagogue? There’s nothing wrong with being Jewish.” Mom’s first major love affair had been with a Jewish kid.
“I’ll talk to her about it.”
“People should go to church. If they’re truly good people, I mean.” How could the college girl who’d spent many, many long hours smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin possibly have turned out this way?
“I brought you something,” he said. He reached in the suit coat pocket of his gray Armani and brought forth a small white jeweler’s box. “I got your necklace fixed.”
For her thirty-fifth birthday, Dad had given Mom a beautiful old chain necklace. But it had gotten broken and Mom had never gotten around to getting it fixed. She held it now, smiling. “I can still feel your father putting this on my neck. It was the first time he’d ever been able to afford anything really nice. He had such big fingers.”
“I thought you’d like it.” He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. She was getting older, the texture and feel of her flesh was changing, and it startled him a moment. She was getting older, and just now that realization scared and saddened him. “Say, would you let me use your bathroom if I gave you a dollar?”
This was an old gag between the two of them. “Dollar-and a-half.”
“Dollar-and-a-half it is,” he said. Then, as he started back toward the bathroom, “You hear from Jim lately?”
“Just the other day.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He says he likes his new job. I just hope he can last at this one.”
Matt and Jim Shea were as different as brothers could be. Matt, handsome, self-confident, family man. Jim, pale, nervous, luckless. He’d worked sales in the computer department of a number of different local department stores. He was running out of stores. He always got fired and for reasons that were at best vague. He always seemed vaguely relieved, too. He didn’t mind living in his drab little apartment on unemployment insurance. Matt was always suggesting motivational speakers Jim go see but Jim always just grinned and shook his head. Though Matt thought of himself as a major player in the world of the local establishment, Jim saw him as a just one more Mercedes-driving Nazi. Jim called a lot of people Nazis.
Matt came back after a few minutes. He’d freshened up. He had a meeting at the club with some potential investors for a small shopping mall he was trying to develop. Time for a little hairspray, a little breath spray, a few eyedrops to take the red out.
Mom was still holding the necklace when he came back. “Say hi to that brother of mine.”
“I just wish you two boys got together more often.”
“Oh, that’ll happen as we get older, Mom. I’m sure it will.”
“Why don’t you take that box of paperbacks in the closet to Sandy? They’re Harlequins. She reads almost as much as I do.”
He smiled. “You two and your Harlequins.” He said it not with contempt but with a kind of awe. He had, in his life, finished reading exactly two novels, The Great Gatsby and Ethan Frome. Gatsby he liked — even though the narrator sounded sort of fruity — because of the love story, which he had to admit made him tear up a time or two, him having had a terrible love affair once himself; and Frome he liked simply because it was short and because of the irony of the ending. Every other novel he’d “read” had come in the yellow-and-black form of Cliff Notes. He’d been a 4-point student. He just preferred non-fiction was all. He got the box from the closet, kissed his mom once again as she opened the front door for him, and was then out the door.
He liked the way the new Mercedes four-door sedan stood so proudly in Mom’s driveway. He liked the way the men and women driving home from work to their little housing development here glanced at it. Envy. That, not imitation, was the sincerest form of flattery. Envy. I want what you have. He couldn’t think of a higher accolade, and hell, he’d be the first to admit he felt it, too, the way Giff McBride, ass-bandit of all ass-bandits out at the club, wheeled around in that little Brit classic car of his, Austin-Healy it was called, wheeled around and got 20 % of the married women at the club to spend time with him, not to mention an even higher percentage of the waitresses, even, it was rumored, a few of the college gals who worked there during the summers. College gals, sleek and slender and sun-brown. Now that was something to really envy, Giff McBride being in his early fifties.