Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

29

Reception Deception

Matt and Temple, a bit worn from the festivities, had escaped the reception to stand in a small wood-paneled library with a bar so discreet no barman waited to serve them.

The “them” included Max’s bewildered parents all the way from Racine. And another Racine couple, his aunt Eileen and her husband Patrick Kelly.

Temple took quick mental notes to match with her Skype impressions.

Kevin Kinsella was tall like his son, thick black hair dramatically streaked with white. Max’s mother, petite Maura, had deep-mahogany red hair Temple envied. It gave her presence. Gravitas. No one would ever dare call her “carrot-top” or “cute”. Her sister Eileen’s similar color hair was feathered all over with white, like wedding cake frosting.

“You’re a lovely young couple,” Eileen Kelly said.

“And it was a fine Catholic wedding in a beautiful church,” Maura added. “The Spanish style is stunning. But Eileen and I and our husbands, the Kinsellas and the Kellys, don’t know why we’re both here, except for an even more-than-usual rare and cryptic message with the wedding invitation that this ‘Private Reception’ is courtesy of our literally prodigal son, Michael.”

Matt exchanged glances with Temple, both of them startled to hear Max’s real first name used.

These sets of parents resided in a sixteen-year time warp. One pair had grudgingly accepted the puzzle of a long absent son, one had become long reconciled to having a dead son.

Matt cleared his throat. “Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella. We know him as ‘Max’.”

The two sets of parents blinked for a moment to translate the string of given names to “MAX.”

Kevin Kinsella answered. “Michael or Max, we thought this was some crazy ‘surprise’ and we’d end up really being at his wedding.”

Temple felt a pang echoed by Matt’s sudden pressure on her hand.

Once it could have been. For a few surreal, crazy moments yesterday it had been.

“I’m sorry,” Temple said. “Yes, magicians love surprises, but that would have been cruel. This is as gentle as we could think to make it, since we know Max and you don’t know us.

“You saw our names on Skype, on the wedding invitation. You know I’m Temple Barr, a public relations freelancer, and the Crystal Phoenix is my best and most prestigious client.

“My husband”—first such reference!—“Matt Devine is a syndicated radio show counselor and we’re about to go national with a TV talk show.”

“Most impressive, young woman.” Kevin Kinsella leaned back into the goose down cushions. “But what do TV celebrities have to do with us or our AWOL son? We were deceived into hoping for a reunion.”

“To have come all this way, no matter how lovely and festive the occasion…” Maura’s voice began to shake.

“Oh,” Temple pled, “we have such good news for you all. Please let us take our time with it. We don’t want to shock you.”

Eileen stepped forward. “And you have affixed these family matters of strangers to your own wedding? Why?”

“Simple,” Temple said, stepping forward to meet her, “my and Matt’s work, our hearts are committed to being good with people, and you, dear people, have been living under a cloud of well-meant misconception for almost two decades.”

“You certainly are direct,” Patrick Kelly said.

“I’ll be more direct.” Matt went behind the bar. “There’s some world-class Irish Whiskey here. I understand your families’ separate devastating losses have caused a breech between the sisters and their husbands. How about a toast to new understanding? Also, we have a toothsome nonalcoholic champagne for anyone, and especially Father Hernandez, when he comes along.”

“He’s—?”

“One of the finest and dedicated priests I’ve known. And I’ve known many. I used to be one.”

Jaws dropped.

Keeping separate, but edging forward like newborn zombies, the couples approached opposite ends of the bar to accept the Irish “water of life”, pronounced ‘whiskey’ in Gaelic, in glittering Baccarat glasses.

Kevin sipped the straight drink the color of his wife’s hair. “Now you are my kind of ‘Whiskey Priest’,” he said, turning an insult into a compliment.

Matt smiled. “I’m afraid I’m Polish, but I do envy the Irish their humor, their heart, their dash.”

“Are you Irish Catholic?” Eileen asked Temple, eyeing her red hair, which the Phoenix’s beauty salon had styled into a dazzling sunset cloud. Temple never wanted to sleep on it again and lose the effect, but that would be rather counter-intuitive on a wedding night.

“I’m an Anglo-Celtic mutt, but am I Catholic? No.”

“Not even Lutheran?” Maura asked.

“No. I’m not Lutheran, although I’m from Minnesota and realize the Catholics and the Lutherans are not fond of each other.” These sixty-something couples would know that rivalry well.

“Episcopal then!” Eileen was sure. “She seemed at home with the liturgy,” she told her husband Patrick.

“No.” Temple was amused.

“What then?”

“Besides my wife?” Matt put in.

“I’m UU.” Temple waited.

“UU? Is that for a Utah University?” Patrick wondered.

“Well, my parents are out at the reception, and are Unitarian Universalists, but I appear to have fallen away some.”

“‘Unitarian Universalists’ are that all-of-everything equally church,” Kevin said. “How can you fall away from nothing?”

Temple shrugged. “It avoided a lot of angst.”

“UU,” Maura mused. “That’s why you wouldn’t object to a Catholic wedding ceremony.”

“No. My only ceremonial requirement was a train as long as I am tall, five feet.”

“That was indeed an impressive train,” Eileen agreed.

“And your gown was lovely and very modest, like a nice Catholic girl’s.” Maura beamed at Matt.

“Let’s face it,” Temple said, glancing down. “I haven’t got much to be modest about.”

“She has an Irish sense of humor,” said Kevin.

Eileen sipped thoughtfully. “You two keep treating this occasion as a celebration. And it is, obviously, for you. But you keep trying to pull us into it. We’re all strangers to you.”

“I do want you all involved,” Matt admitted, taking Temple a tall crystal flute of Father Hernandez’s champagne. “I’ve married the love of my life, we’ve got the job offer of a lifetime, and I’ve been honored to be asked to officiate, by Michael/Max, as an ex-priest and a counselor who learns more than he informs, over the correction of a tragic family…disintegration.”

He had poured another Jameson’s and now went to the coffered door, balancing the precious Baccarat glass on his palm like a butler.

“Presenting the world-renowned Mystifying Max, magician, counterterrorism agent and prodigal son.”

Max stepped through door on cue in his borrowed Fontana brother silver-gray tuxedo. It was always a performance with Max, Temple thought. A pose that kept him one step removed from that act of terrorist violence that had changed everything in his life.

“My God.” Maura stepped toward him, her right hand reaching for what must have seemed a mirage. “You’re the image of Kevin when I married him.” She covered her mouth with the other hand as her eyes floated in sudden tears and she swallowed a sob.

Kevin quickly stepped between her and their son, partly to shield her emotional meltdown, partly in anger. “Explain yourself, Michael. Your mother always understood your grief at Sean’s loss, but you didn’t understand the depth of hers, with you growing so distant, almost the same as dead, from the family. An occasional postcard from Europe with a performance venue pictured on it. We understood survivor’s guilt, but not the lengths you took.”

Max took the drink from Matt’s hand. “They told me,” he nodded at Matt and Temple, “that telling you would be my moment of penance. If I only had to explain just my seventeen-year-old self. I’ll start there.”

He looked at Eileen and Patrick apologetically and sighed.

“You were so right to worry. Sean and I were stupid kids who did exactly what you four ‘stuffy’ parents warned us not to do on our high school graduation trip to the old country. We scooted right up to Northern Ireland to view the Troubles firsthand. And drink even more beer without being carded.”

As the parents stirred and prepared to condemn the risk, Max gestured them to be seated.

“Please sit down.” Temple indicate two roomy loveseats set at right angles around a large travertine coffee table equipped with crystal coasters. Each couple took a sofa as Max’s narrative continued.

“Yes, we promised that we, with our good grades and love of family history, would benefit from seeing the Old Country before we moved on to college. They call it a ‘Gap’ year now.

“It was all innocent stupidity.” Max advanced into the room, looking at his mother. “It’s such a strange thing, Mom. America is a melting pot, yet we all still cling to our ethnic origins.” He looked around, “Irish being a common one, but Polish as well.” He nodded at Matt.

“To be seventeen having your first look at an another country, an island, among people who look exactly like you, speak with the same lilt, drink the same ale, laugh at the same jokes…to feel at home so far away from home. It was inebriating. We courted the colleens. The black Irish and the red-haired girls who seemed so exotic and yet familiar at the same time. Far more interesting than our American high school girls. Besides, we’d gone to all-boys’ high school with the Christian Brothers.

“We competed to drink ourselves under the table, we competed to spirit a girl away from the pub to…wherever. We met one stunner of a Black Irish rose. Older, early twenties, but so much the better. We wanted to win her to ourselves to sample whatever undescribed bliss that had been cruelly hidden from us.”

Max shrugged. “I won. A hollow victory. The pub bomb exploded while I was ‘off-campus’. But that was not the only bomb that day. The other bomb that exploded my life was one Kathleen O’Connor, as damaged a young woman as had lived through the hell of Magdalene laundries called “asylums”, where young pregnant girls were overworked and abused for being victims of institutionalized ignorance and family assault.”

“Oh,” Eileen breathed rather than said. “That Judi Dench movie Philomena.” She rose and went to sit beside Maura on the Kinsella-occupied couch. They looked at each other for a long moment before Maura reached out for Eileen’s hands.

“Philomena?” Patrick asked. “I had a nun named that in eighth grade. We never saw any such movie, Eileen.” He glanced at the sisters’ twined hands. “And you two haven’t been so cozy since— He eyed Kevin with a question in his eyes.

“We went to the movie theater on our own. Together. Last year.” Maura spoke defiantly, smiling through her tears.

“It was a true story, about a young unwed mother named Philomena. Her toddler son was adopted out to America, for money, from one of those merciless homes named after Saint Mary Magdalene. Not a newborn, a two-year-old! Can you imagine the lasting severed bond? Remembering each other, lies to both kept them apart for decades, never again meeting. At least Philomena finally learned her son’s fate. He’d died in the prime of life and had asked to be buried at the Magdalene institution graveyard, in case his mother ever came looking for him. So she did find him at last.”

Of course, Temple thought, they would go to see Philomena together alone, almost furtively, women who had lost sons at the same time from the same brutal event. Sisters who had carried on with guarded emotions and doubt and self-doubt and subtle estrangement.

Temple knew the movie’s plot and wasn’t watching the women. She was watching Max. He downed the remaining three fingers of whiskey in his glass in one heroic go. Set the expensive crystal down with a thump on the long table behind the couch, and came around it to kneel in front of the weeping women, covering their entwined hands with his large ones. Head bowed, voice raw, he whispered, “Bless me, Mothers, for I have sinned.”

During the long silence punctuated by the women’s sobs, everyone kept stone-still. Matt caught Temple’s glance returning to him, and pulled her closer.

“I know,” she whispered. “You’ve heard that beginning sentence in a lot of Confessions. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’. Would you have ever dreamed you’d hear it paraphrased by Max?”

Matt shook his head. “It will do him good. And it’s the perfect way to apologize to this crowd.”

“And sinned again.” Max went on, sitting back on his heels.

“What is this?” Kevin sounded uneasily gruff. “An Irish wake? More whisky and less tears. What’s done is done.” He eyed his son. “So what more are we to learn, Michael, that we have an unsuspected grandchild somewhere?”

Max was able to discharge his deep emotion in a shaky laugh. “Not that. No. Sorry.” He rose and sat on the huge square coffee table’s edge. “There’s still a lot more story to come, though. We Irish love telling and hearing stories.”

Temple retrieved his glass and went to Matt, already holding the Jamison’s bottle. He cocked his eyebrows as he refilled it and eyed the others.

“As a humble radio counselor, I’d advise a topping off,” he said as he made the rounds. “What is the famous line from that old movie you love?” he asked Temple.

“Bette Davis in superb sardonic form. ‘Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’”

Temple took her champagne glass, sat on the coffee table beside Max, and set the glass down on the nearest coaster. Matt settled into Eileen’s place on the sofa after offering her husband Patrick an inquiring look.

“There’ll be no more waterworks, I hope,” Patrick muttered.

Max sipped from his glass and gave Temple a wry smile before continuing. “You were all quite right after the bombing. I underwent paroxysms of guilt on all fronts. It took a while for the authorities to sort out the crime scene and separate the wounded from the dead, or pieces of them. I knew Sean had gone missing.” Max shut his eyes for a moment. “I had to provide his toothbrush for DNA testing, which was quite new then.

“No one was there to stop me. I became a vengeance machine. I told the IRA men that Sean and I had come over hoping to join the movement to free Northern Ireland from the British…yes, what we now call ‘young naive foreign fighters’ for ISIS. I’d always done magic tricks as a hobby and that makes you very observant, very able to be unobserved. I was a perfect spy, really, and I found the two men who’d planted the bomb and gave their names to the British. I never heard what happened to them, but a swift, secret killing was fine with me then. Many people were badly wounded, but Sean was the only one dead.

“Of course, in my guilt and fury I had no time for colleens whose eyes ‘shined like the diamonds’, as in the old song. I didn’t know that Kathleen’s savage early life had made her psychotic about being abandoned. She couldn’t understand that my bond with Sean made avenging him my only priority. And I didn’t know then she was an IRA agent, a champion fund-raiser well-known to the scattered Irish abroad.

“So,” Max said, “when I came home for the closed casket funeral, I saw that my lies to cover up why we were in Northern Ireland in that pub weren’t credible. And I saw that the pressure of one cousin back from a pub bombing without a scratch—or visible ones, anyway, and the other cousin identified from fragments—would gall good people, one family happy but guilty, the other reminded daily of their loss, and guilty. And me guiltiest of all.”

Matt shook his head. “Catholic guilt is built-in. We’re asked to examine our consciences from the age of seven, and that situation was a perfect trifecta.”

Maura just sat there, numb. “Our collective grief blinded us to the living. We thought of you still as a child. And here you’d been through war, through your own hell, and we didn’t know it.”

Max shook his head, to deny her need for guilt. “Then word came that the IRA realized I’d ‘betrayed’ them, probably alerted by Kathleen, and had a price on my head. In those days before the peace, IRA sympathizers were everywhere, especially in the U.S. I had to get as far away as possible or my family and friends could get caught in the cross-fire. By then, counterterrorist operations had heard of my exploits, so they both saved and recruited me and magic became my cover. It turned out I was quite a good magician, especially at disappearing acts.”

Temple turned to face Max. “So you were already adept at it when my turn came.”

“You?” Maura jerked her head toward the other couch where Matt was now sitting. “But you just married him.” She stared at Temple again.

Temple smiled. “Yes, Maura, your son swept me off my feet in Minneapolis and directly to Las Vegas, where he had a year’s engagement as The Mystifying Max. We planned on marrying soon. When he realized some shady characters had waylaid me to inquire about him, he left on the closing day of his act, without a word, the same night a dead man had been discovered on the hotel premises, which made him a suspect.”

“He left without a word?”

“I followed him from my home city and family and a good job.’ Temple linked arms with Max. “And, to ensure my safety, he left me here for the police and other less honest people to harass. Still…I love my freelance public relations work, and Vegas is the place to be for that. Then Matt moved into my apartment building. And Max did finally come back to face the music.”

The moment of astonishment hovered, a paused recorded Lifetime movie moment.

“And,” Matt announced from behind them all, from the door through which Max had entered. “So, finally did Sean and his wife Deirdre of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, come back.”