Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 26

Polishing Off the Past

Matt pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of his down jacket. He felt like he had alighted from a time machine instead of a taxicab. The scene before him proved his problems were half a continent away. He savored the view: a snow-whited sepulcher of night in a city that counted wind chill factors instead of chips. Chicago. Safe at home. Kathleen O’Connor left behind in a lukewarm land of neon nightmares.

He dodged dirty mounds of slush, giant steps taking him from the cab to the restaurant’s huge wooden double doors. His bare palm grasped icy wrought iron and pulled one door open. Outside, the weather was cold enough that the hot, rushed atmosphere inside Polandski’s felt as welcome as a warming house on a January ice rink.

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.”

“Did it? Maybe you just thought so. Or I did. I’m traveling too much to settle down now anyway.” He hoped that didn’t sound as much like an excuse to his mother as it did to him.

Her face had sobered, reading what he wasn’t saying. “Well, she wasn’t Catholic anyway.”

As if that would make him feel better about losing Temple.

His mother was leaning over to one of the vacant chairs and lifted a smart new navy purse off it. Looked expensive. She unclasped the gilt catch and brought out an oversized business envelope stuffed with papers.

“These are copies of the legal papers on the purchase of the two-flat. You know, from your father’s family’s lawyers. It’s got the firm name on it, and a lawyer signed for them. I thought if you had time to look into things—”

“You could do it more easily from here, Mom.”

She hesitated. “But I’m a woman. They never take a woman as seriously as a man at these big law firms. And you’re famous. Sort of. And…I can’t do it, Matt.” She looked away.

She meant that she was ashamed.

“It’s fine. I’ll do it.” He put his hand over hers, was surprised when her other hand suddenly clasped it, as warm and dry as hot-water-bottle-heated sheets in winter. They had never been demonstrative at home under Cliff Effinger’s despotic rule. Had never showed emotion so as not to trigger his rages.

Yet there had been comforts in that cold home, and Matt found himself wanting to go take final photographs of the old place before it was sold, even as part of him wanted to see it torn down board by shingle by rafter.

“You sure you want to find out who my real father was?” he asked. “He died in Vietnam, after all. The family lawyers made plain you would get that two-flat and that was all. There’s no advantage in it.”

“A photo maybe, huh? A name. I don’t want money. Never did. I want a memory.”

He looked away.

He was the product of a one-night stand between innocents on the brink of war. How many others like him lived in forgotten, bitter corners of the world? He was lucky he had been born in America of ethnically similar parents, that his mother’s unwed status had only resulted in an abusive stepfather and social discomfort, not utter ostracization.

“You deserve to know,” he told her at last. “I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded, and started asking him about the radio show, so he entertained her with anecdotes until the food came. He didn’t mention Elvis. It wasn’t nice to make fun of the dead, only of the living. But maybe Elvis was a little of both.

The food was hot, heavy, and delicious.

“I’m amazed that tourists eat up this old-style Polish stuff,” Matt commented after sampling the beets and dumplings.

“Ethnic is in. Speaking Polish actually comes in handy here. Too bad you and your cousins never learned anything but silly phrases.”

“We wanted to be mistaken for a more upscale group than the Poles,” Matt said. “The Irish.”

“Those Irish! They’ve got Chicago in their back pockets, that’s for sure, but they had a rougher time than the Poles a couple generations earlier. I imagine you worked with a lot of Irish priests.”

“That I did,” Matt said in a faint brogue, “and nuns too.”

“Now, that’s another thing! The nuns are literally dying out. Sometimes I don’t recognize this world.”

“And sometimes,” Matt reminded her gently, “we should be glad we don’t.”

She winced slightly as she nodded. They would never discuss her disastrous marriage with Cliff Effinger. Unlike the mixed feelings Matt still had about his childhood house, his feelings toward Effinger had evaporated after his successful search for the man. He had been like a devil who could be exorcized.

A house, though, being inanimate—being transcendent, as places always are—was an anonymous witness to the past with all its pain and survival. It was a shell you left behind as you moved on, and with it a record of how you’d grown.

He’d ask Krys, privately, to take some photos of the place.

Their plates were already cleared away when his mother looked up, beaming.

“Just in time for dessert! Krys!” She half stood to wave.

Matt felt a foreign pang, astounded to recognize it as a flutter of jealousy, a usually alien emotion.

Krys, his just-twenty cousin, came charging across the restaurant, booted to the knee, skirted to mid-thigh, her bare knees windburned in between, her spiky punk haircut grown out to shoulder-brushing Botticelli Venus tendrils, and her cheeks flushed with cold and probably a post-class beer or two.

Trailing her was loping young guy with hair half-shaved and half-moussed, wearing weathered jeans, a battered black leather jacket and a plaid flannel shirt so out it was in.

“Sit down,” his mother half ordered, half invited, like the hostess she was. “Doesn’t Matt look good?” So much for him looking tired.

“Yeah.” Krys flashed him a nod of intense recognition. “This is Zeke. He’s a sculpture major.”

“What do you sculpt, Zeke?” his mother asked politely. “I’ve been doing some clay models and it’s really fun.”

“Body parts. Out of rusted automobile pieces. It’s a statement.”

“You mean…auto body parts?” She was trying to comprehend.

“Naw. Body parts. Like hands. Hips. Boobs.”

Matt’s mother glanced quickly at Krys. Whose body parts, she wanted to ask, but knew better not to.

Probably his girlfriend’s, Mother, Matt wanted to answer the unspoken speculation. It’s a stage.

Krys was rearranging her silverware after shrugging out of a heavy wool jacket. “Your mother’s been taking some adult-ed art classes, and she’s really good.”

“I’m not surprised,” Matt said.

“Are you taking the drawing-from-life class, Mira?” Krys asked.

“Not this semester,” his mother answered blushing at the idea of sketching nude models. “I don’t have time with the new job.”

Zeke looked up at Matt from the menus a waiter had delivered to all four of them. “Krys says you used to be a priest. Like a Catholic priest. You sure don’t look like it.”

Matt detected a smidge of antagonism. “Sorry about that. Maybe I should get some bifocals or something.”

“No, man. I mean, wasn’t it heavy telling people what to do?”

“Priests don’t tell anyone what to do. They just try to ask more pointed questions about life, God, the universe and all that than we ordinarily do.”

Krys hissed her impatience. “Cruise for calories, Zeke. They have some wild desserts here. Matt wasn’t that kind of know-it-all priest, anyway.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I just do.” Her eyes fell to the menu. “I’m going to have the plum dumplings. Anyone want to share?”

Zeke made a discreet retching sound. His mother raised her eyebrows, then frowned across the room. “One of my best customers just came in. I’d better seat him personally. Matt, order me a sherbet, please.”

Stingers and sherbet? His mother was evolving all right.

Matt watched her rise and head for a steel-gray-haired man in a cashmere camel-hair coat.

Zeke announced, “I gotta split for the little boys’s room,” then lurched up and off.

“Have we been…deserted?,” Matt asked Krys.

She looked at him, blinked, then laughed. “‘Deserted’? Did you say it! Zeke can be such a dork, but he’s all right, really.”

“Glad to hear it, but I didn’t need to know it.”

“Not interested in my boyfriends? I’m crushed.”

“You don’t look crushable.”

In fact, Krys looked just like his mother. Like a new woman since Christmas. Only she was a new young woman.

He watched his mother guide her charge to a table for one against the wall. Was she flirting with the old geezer?

“She’s doing fine,” Krys said suddenly. “Took to the new job like Cinderella to a glass slipper. Mira was like some new kid at school, all awkward and apologizing, but I’ve got her thinking like a Chicago girl now.”

“I bet you have.” Matt put his attention where she wanted it: on her. “You seem a lot happier than at Christmas. Can I credit the avant-garde Zeke?”

“Oh, he’s okay, really. Underneath it all. Young guys aren’t worth much these days, but they’re all I have at my age.”

“They grow out of it.”

“That’s why I put in the time. Besides, I need an ally against my family, and you’re not here.”

“I was only here for a couple of days before.”

“Seemed longer.” She smiled at him, fairly tremulously for a Chicago girl. He glimpsed the pressured teenager from Christmas ready to commit crushes with an older cousin she’d never seen before. She’d been unhappy about her family not allowing her to go to art school in California, but settling for art school in Chicago had done her good, despite Zeke, and in Matt’s absence, she’d taken his mother under her wing.

They were good for each other, the older and younger woman. Matt suddenly understood that spasm of jealousy. Krys was having the kind of almost-adult relationship with his mother that he never would have. Or maybe he would someday, thanks to Krys. So get over it.

“You’ve done so much for my mother, Krys. Thanks.”

“Oh, she needed some prodding to get out of the old ruts. And it’s not for charity. She backs me up with my folks about art school.”

“And about Zeke?”

“No. Nobody would back me up about Zeke.”

“Then I will.”

“You that eager to get rid of me?”

“I don’t think I ever had you.”

“Oh, yes, you did.” She tossed her tangled locks. “But I was an impressionable kid then. Thanks for being nice to me, though.”

“Not hard. So do you think…Mira will go for the life drawing class?”

“Maybe. In a couple of years. She’s got quite a flair for color and line. You should see if you’ve inherited an artistic streak.”

“Not me.”

She glanced at his jacket. “Maybe the girlfriend who picked out your jacket is the artist.”

“Maybe.”

Krys’s fingers flicked across his sleeve. “Nice. She is still your girlfriend?”

“Friend.”

“Still?”

“Still.” He felt the hesitation flicker over his face. Dare he be friends with anyone, any woman, with Kitty O’Connor hovering in the wings? And was he right to feel safe here? What about Temple back in Vegas? Kitty the Cutter might be angry he’d slipped her leash. She might decide to teach him a lesson, and no one was nearer at hand for that than Temple….

Krys’s smile was probing, hopeful. “You don’t look so sure.”

He threw lame excuses, flailing to get back in the here and now. “I work midnights. I travel a lot. Hard to keep up friendships.”

“Poor guy. If you’re ever in Chicago on short notice—”

“I’ll let my mother know. That new apartment your idea? Like the job?”

“She needed to escape the family thumb, like me. It’s handy to have a chaperon sometimes, you know?”

He nodded.

“And sometimes not.” Krys nodded toward the end of the room.

His mother and Zeke had intersected on their way back to the table. His mother was obviously asking Zeke a few too many questions.

“Looks like you two will look out for each other.”

“Yeah. It’s cool. She’s not my mother, and she’s not my generation. But in some ways, she’s almost my age. It’s like she didn’t live twenty years of her life. I’m dragging her kicking and screaming back into her twenties.”

Matt smiled. Mira and Zeke were bearing down on them, and Mira was dusting off the shoulders of Zeke’s carefully battered jacket.