Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 25

Angst à la Carte

Temple appreciated one advantage of living in a city like Las Vegas with its spine of world-class hotel-casinos and shopping and entertainment. She could walk into a five-star Chicago hotel for lunch with awkward relatives or relatives-to-be—or dinner with network execs—and feel not one whit intimidated.

Minneapolis–St. Paul had been the metropolitan oasis for all the Upper Midwest states of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, but Vegas mimicked the crème de la crème of the country and the world.

She hadn’t realized that before and knew now that she owed that confidence to Vegas moguls Steve Wynn and company and … Max Kinsella.

Matt had always been a “people” person like her, and despite the evolution he’d worked through, his innate interest in other people and the common good would always allow him to mix equally well with the high and mighty and small and meek.

But personal business offered more emotional minefields than business-business, so Temple linked arms with Matt as they moved through the lavish Water Tower Place toward the elevators to the hotel high above Chicago’s Miracle Mile.

“Do you look like your dad?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he answered wryly. “We’ll see what the male-pattern baldness odds are on that side of the gene pool if we ever glimpse his brother.”

“They’re … uneasy with each other?”

“Who knows? This is pioneering territory. I doubt either one of them can appreciate what my mother went through.”

“You too.” She shook his arm slightly.

“I’m the mediator here. My issues are off the table.”

“Can you do that, Matt?”

“Supposed to be good at it.” He smiled and folded her hand into his as they waited for the elevator. “Your presence will lower the territorial testosterone.”

“I see. I’m a mother substitute here.”

“Kinda.” He grinned. “You’re a very versatile woman. These midlife men will be on their best behavior in front of a hot young chick like you.”

“You’ve planned all this out.”

“Darn right. On the radio I have to improvise. It’s made me adaptable under pressure. On TV or here, I’ll need an underlying plan, to be more in control. The producers and I have talked about that. The audience needs to identify with both the host and guests.”

“‘The producers and I,’” she whispered affectionately in the elevator as they streaked up at stomach-swooping speed. “I feel like I’m engaged to Prince William.”

“Now, that’s a male-pattern baldness family history I’d rather not have for all the jewels in the Tower of London. Also the paparazzi. Kate Middleton is a brave woman.”

“Oh, you’ll get the paparazzi, brother,” Temple said.

By then the maître d’ was showing them over a carpet where the soft hush of hundred-dollar bills falling had been replaced by the sweet chime of seventeen-hundred-dollar-an-ounce gold rings clinking against the finest French crystal.

A stocky blond man stood at Temple’s arrival for Matt’s introduction.

“Miss Temple Barr, this is Jonathan Winslow.” Matt waited for them to shake hands.

Then the waiter pulled out Temple’s chair and—as waiters everywhere did, from pretentious low-end to plushest high-end—pushed it in not quite far enough for a woman as short as she. Darn! On this thick carpet, trying to inch the seat forward would be more awkward than a father and his bastard son having lunch together, which, double darn, was happening right under her nose.

“Temple owns a PR business in Las Vegas, including the Crystal Phoenix account,” Matt told his father, “and her problem-solving talents sometimes extend to murder.”

His father’s snow white eyebrows lifted above the reading glasses he’d donned. “Murder she wrote. How interesting as well as attractive. I’m a garden-variety businessman, I’m afraid. No special talents except managing the money other people made before me.”

“Sounds like a good trick these days,” Temple said.

“I’m delighted to meet the lovely Miss Barr. May I call you Temple?” he asked. “I really like the name. I have a daughter named Torrence.”

“Of course. What does Matt call you?” Temple asked.

The men’s exchanged looks went from surprised to rueful.

Matt answered, “We’ve managed to avoid addressing that issue so far. I’m Matt, of course, being younger.”

“And I’m Jon,” his father said. “I travel in circles where nothing is abbreviated, including names, and I’m damn weary of being Jonathan.”

Temple decided “Jon” was a clever diplomatic way to find a “special” name for just Matt to use, skirting any adoption of a role—“Dad”—both would regret and couldn’t use in front of others anyway.

“Jon without an h.” She almost tasted the spelling. No unnecessary elements. “It suits you, Mr. Winslow.”

“And you will now use it forthwith, Temple?”

“Of course, Jon. As a PR person I’m a great believer in the right name for the right occasion.” Actually, her using the familiar form of address before Matt did would help ease him into the new relationship.

Meanwhile, their water glasses had been swiftly and silently filled by the technique of pouring from the ewer’s side, not its spout. The spa water bottle remained on the table for refills.

Temple had worn her highest heels, the David Letterman female-star strutters that were pretty much as hobbling as bound feet … and still the linen napkin wanted to slide off her lap. The “lovely Miss Barr” could use bib clip.

“I think drinks are in order,” Jon suggested when the waiter reappeared.

The drink menu was an abridged version of War and Peace between an obesely padded leather jacket.

Temple ordered an obscenely expensive glass of white wine whose vintage and vintner she didn’t recognize. Jon ordered single-malt scotch, the kind Max favored. Matt surprised her by asking for a Bombay gin martini.

“Unfortunately,” Temple said of her wine, “I’m the designated walker.”

“Yes.” Jon grinned. “What is with the women wearing all these extreme high heels? They can’t be comfortable.”

“Temple’s always been a footwear connoisseur,” Matt said. “Don’t worry. She works at home in bare feet most of the time.”

“In my case,” Temple added, “I got the short stick in the genetics lottery. Also, the heels make excellent defensive weapons.”

“It’d be better to run,” Matt said.

The menus came next, just as padded as the liquor ones but larger. They all studied them as if needing to pass a test.

“You are my guests, of course,” Jon said. “So how are you?” he asked Matt. “How’s the trip business going?”

“You are the trip business.”

“How’s your mother?” Jon had turned businessman brusque.

“Well, but more than somewhat confused, as you can imagine.”

“Same with my brother.” The waiter came to take their orders and then they were left in blessed peace for a few moments. The level of attentive service at this restaurant assured a good many necessary “time-outs” in the conversation.

Temple suspected they all ordered just to get it over with. Salads were too messy for delicate, groundbreaking conversations, Temple knew from experience. Your mouth was always sprouting spinach leaves that wouldn’t chew, or your fork was pursuing vagrant bleu cheese crumbles just as words were most urgently called for. The guys ordered steak entrées and she wild salmon.

“You should know,” Jon told them while the tablecloth still hosted only drinks, the roll basket, and butter containers, “and this might be a bit shocking. I want to come out of the closet.”

That shut their mouths.

“In terms of our”—he gestured back and forth between himself and Matt—“relationship.”

Matt, shocked, opened his mouth to speak.

“You’re right, Matt. Secrets are corrosive. Besides.” Jon looked sheepish. “My brother knows something is wrong. I can’t keep him in the dark much longer.”

“I don’t even know your brother’s name,” Matt said. “Why should he be the deciding factor in anything that involves my mother, as well as you?”

“Because he loves Mira and wants to marry her.”

“If he does, he’ll let her come to terms with the problem on her own. She won’t even talk to me about it.”

“It’s not a problem.” Jon smiled the same heart-stopping way Matt did when he was pleased. “Knowing Philip, he’ll win her over. Consider me the advance guard for a better future trip to Chicago,” Jon told him. “You’re not exactly nobody. The extended family only knows you’re a ‘distant relative,’ but is wild to meet you,” he added as ruefully as Matt spoke of his birth father’s family. “Now that I’ve seen the lovely Miss Barr, that’ll go double.”

Matt just shook his head, trying to imagine—like Temple—who, when and where, would tell Mira the family that had banished mother and infant son thirty-five years ago was strong-arming their belated introduction into their bosom.

After a few sips all around, Jon broached what seemed an even more uneasy subject for him. “Since the … revelation, I’ve studied the family financial structure.”

“I’m financially fine,” Matt said. “I’d be financially fine if the best job I could find was at a fast-food place.”

“I understand that. I admire where you are. I admire your independence. I’m not thinking according to need. I’m thinking according to … justice. Moral responsibility. My parents’ family had an inflated notion of their position. They opposed my enlisting in the armed forces. They wiped my wishes and obligations and responsibilities away like bread crumbs off a table.”

He gestured at the recently brushed white linen cloth.

“They sinned against me, and your mother, and you. You of all people should understand those terms.”

“I do,” Matt said. “I just don’t want to apply them to anyone else.”

“‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’” Temple put in helpfully.

Jon sat back and took a hit of scotch. “That’s what my family always feared.”

“Someone alien having a claim on their money, right?” Temple said. “Especially someone their heirs might have liked or loved. ‘Money is the root of all evil,’ et cetera. Oh, heck, Mr. Jon Winslow. I’ve always been a working girl. All I need is a decent place to live where there’s a really good selection of vintage and resale rags, an honest man to love and love me, and a job that challenges my brain. The rest is luck or compromise, and I don’t believe in either.”

Jon took a big belt of single malt, and closed his eyes momentarily. “Paying off your mother,” he told Matt, “paying for a two-flat for her and you and nothing more, was written off as a ‘bad investment.’ If you can turn the other cheek on that, I can’t. My parents were like a minor league version of the Kennedys under old Joe, the bootlegging womanizer. Men had to excel in power positions and the women didn’t count except as props.”

Matt sat silent. Temple saw the muscle flexing in his left jaw because she faced it and Jon didn’t.

“I’m not guilty,” Matt told his father, “of forgiveness and mercy toward your family any more than I’m guilty of rage and revenge. I’m just certain, lousy as my low-end so-called family situation was, I came out better than if I’d been condescended to and manipulated in the high-end success factory you were put through.”

Temple clapped softly.

“Yeah,” his father admitted, “I did it all by the family code after I got my ‘going rogue’ stage over. It’s golden and shiny on the outside, but hollow on the inside. I think I always missed the genuineness of my youthful patriotic instincts. My most treasured moments are the ones least plotted.”

“Not mine. What about your brother?” Matt asked. “Did he fit the family mold?”

“Just who is interviewing whom about who’s fit to marry into whose family?”

Matt shrugged, but smiled at that bit of humility. “I couldn’t defend my mother then. I can now. Or try at least.”

“I wish I could say that for my kids. They’ve all done ‘well,’ but … anyway, Philip and his wife weren’t able to have children. They put their spare time into charity work for kids. That seemed to bond them better than board dinners and corporate cocktail parties. It was an awful thing when Sarah died. Cancer. So … I’m shocked, but fine with what’s happened. The only mystery is why Mira is so freaked about it. That was thirty-five years ago.”

“Simple for guys,” Matt said. “You had an incandescent one-night stand to idealize.”

Jon’s inbred control shattered. “How did you know it was ‘incandescent’?”

“I’ll never tell,” Matt said, but Temple knew.

His mother had given him a new surname from a soaring Christmas carol, “O Holy Night,” also called in the lyrics, “O Night Divine.” She totally approved of Matt’s not getting his father’s ego or interest up by keeping this most personal of his mother’s secrets.

“The woman had to bear the consequences, as it’s so coyly put,” Matt went on, “and you can never imagine how hellish that was.” He took the gloves off. “You couldn’t have used a condom?”

His father’s ruddy middle-aged complexion reddened more. “Being prepared made the sin bigger.”

“I bet you got over that in the military.” It was Matt’s first slightly bitter remark.

Temple hadn’t thought of that, of Jonathan Winslow getting clued in to “protect himself” while Mira’s “lost” innocence was paid for again and again through the years.

“It was my first time too,” Jon muttered. “I was scared about what I’d done and where I was going … I had just turned eighteen and was trying to prove I wasn’t the kid my family thought I was, but I still was. As soon as I got back, I started looking for her.”

“She’d never be the same. She thought you were dead all those years. Then you were resurrected. She regrets every decision she made since that time. That’s why she refused to meet with you when I tried to arrange it. You were still dead to her. Now, if she marries your brother, there’ll be this bitter family secret with a walking, talking souvenir.

“Either of you told your brother?” Matt asked last.

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know so?” Matt sounded incredulous.

“Mira refused to meet me, remember. I know the restaurant where she works, of course, Polandia, because that’s where Philip met her. I don’t dare show up there, but I made it my business to know where she lives, her phone number. She doesn’t have e-mail.”

Matt shared his father’s disbelieving smile. “Without a kid at home she had no one to update her on new technology, including social networks. She’s living with a much hipper niece these days, so I’m guessing the e-mail will come. In her own good time.”

“Not Facebook,” Temple put in. “Too dangerous given the situation. It’s all about connections and Mira is still all about keeping connections apart.”

Jon sipped his drink. “I’m a married man, whether I still want to be or not. I’m just a hangover from the past, but I don’t see how frankness and ‘being open’ is going to resolve anything.”

“Did I say it would?” Matt said. “I’m not a miracle worker.”

“Trouble is,” Jon continued, “any … unfortunate bit of personal history goes viral in this Internet age. If I held out hope that ‘an honest mature discussion’ could do anyone any good, I’d get it out on the table between the three of us. But it wouldn’t stay discreet. You know that, Matt.” Jon’s forehead wrinkled. “This might blow up your career opportunity too.”

“Just what Temple was saying. That doesn’t worry me. Blowing up people’s lives does.”

Jon Winslow lifted his glass in Temple’s direction. “Good thinking. You must be wondering what kind of families live in Chicago. Mira thinks her own relatives are demanding and judgmental and my relatives are egocentric and snobbish.”

“That’s okay,” Temple said with a grin. “Matt and I are the opposite of all that … well, one at a time. I can’t say that I don’t get all crusading and judgmental sometimes, and that Matt doesn’t expect everybody to be the best that they can be.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Matt said, “but gossip is the new hard news.”

“I’m sure your mother would never want anybody—her, me, you, or the pixie PR woman here—to do anything to jeopardize your future. I’m sure everything she did in the god-awful situation I left her in was meant for your betterment.”

“Yes,” Matt agreed. “It was all meant for me.”

Temple bit her lip. Parents’ best intentions often go wrong. She was sure her parents didn’t intend their protectiveness toward their only daughter and youngest child to be smothering. Or that Matt’s mother’s cruelly driven quest for respectability would put her and her son in a domestic abuse lockdown. Or that Max’s parents and grieving aunt and uncle ever expected that having one dead and one surviving son would drive an unbridgeable wedge between everyone, forcing the victim, Max, out.

“My mother and I,” Matt told his father, “are facing some blowback from the past right now. There’s no way she could possibly settle her present dilemma without that being confronted and put to rest. That’s what Temple and I intend to do as soon as we can.”

Jon looked back and forth between them. “You’re that kind of a team already?”

They looked at each other and shrugged with a smile.

“I guess we are,” Temple said.

“So that’s the way things will have to stay for a while longer,” Matt said. “In suspended animation.”

“It’s killing my brother.” Jon frowned and then sighed. “He’s coming to me for advice. If we all sat down and you refereed—”

“No. Not yet.” Matt was firm. “You’re a heck of a nice guy and so, I bet, is your brother, or my mother would never have fallen for the both of you. I’d be proud to have a new father and uncle, but my mother isn’t ready for a ‘one big happy.’ And she’s the one who’s borne the burden of your mutual regard for her. “Don’t you get it?” Matt asked his father. “Thirty-five years is a nanosecond when it comes to the human heartbeat.”

Temple noticed that Jon had been looking more and more sheepish as Matt spoke, and now made his closing argument.

“Face it, Jon. She’s scared to death she’ll still feel something for you if you met again, under any circumstances. And I bet you are too.”

“Do you believe she does?”

Matt turned to Temple. “What do you think now that you’ve met the birth parents?”

“I haven’t met Philip,” she said, “so this is a half-boiled opinion.” Temple was not about to mention she was personally quite familiar with romantic tangles, popularly known as “triangles.”

“Mira needs to see you again,” she told Jon, “to see for herself that the past is buried, even if you aren’t.”

“Wise advice, Miss Barr,” Matt told her, his penetrating eyes reading hers. “Would you like to appear on my talk show?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “But I get a lifetime contract.”