Surely the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue resided eternally in some national racial-memory data bank.
Temple had seen these ranks of serious gray stone steps, with the gigantic and lordly lions on either side, in magazines, books and probably cyberspace. But here and now, for Christmas, they wore bow ties! Red bow ties. If only Midnight Louie could see them now!
Perhaps he would be less uppity about the simple red velvet collar Temple had bought with the holidays in mind.
Of course, the library lions' red bow ties were affixed to the bottoms of huge Christmas wreaths. The entire arrangement gave their fiercely feline meins (manes?) a humorous, holiday air, like seeing Charlton Heston wearing a beanie with a propeller on top.
Temple tripped up the stairs (in the light, airy sense of the verb, not as in tangling in her own feet) and entered a large interior as substantial as she had imagined--light gray limestone, marble and granite combining into a basso choir of stones and surfaces. She chose to walk up the wide staircase suitable for the entrance of a Cleopatra instead of taking the discreet elevator tucked down a corridor.
On the third floor, wood was added to the architectural orchestration, shining, smooth wood, a choir of coloratura sopranos in counterpoint to the solid stone basses of the building's ribs.
A mural-swathed rotunda awaited outside the book section. Temple gravitated to the Public Catalog Room. She was a member of the public. She had a cat, and perhaps even a log, if her diary counted.
First she had to scour the catalog. She discovered that the New York Public Library computerized catalog was called CATNYR a good sign. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. The subject matter of the Vietnam War scattered far and wide, and she wanted more recent summaries, summations written in the distant third person, overviews that might serve as a map.
Finally, after whole quarter hours of grazing, Temple brought her blue and white call slips to the reference desk.
Now the stern, substantial environment went to war with itself. She was to hie to the South Hall Main Reading Room to wait for her number to appear on a lighted board.
Was this hypertext heaven, or automated hell? She felt as if she were in an intellectual cafeteria, a fast-food-for-the-mind McDonald's. Except that the ceilings were so soaring she thought of cathedrals and shrines and the magical, mystical elevations of the Himalayas. Was anything as satisfying as knowledge? Maybe chocolate. And (shhhh, this is a library) sex with the proper not-stranger.
The Delivery Desk brought her babies to her with twenty-first-century efficiency. Temple finally settled down at a mundane table with her books and notes. She was trying to absorb ugliness in the midst of beauty. She read about officer fraggings and the freak-show talents of Vietnamese prostitutes and the treatment of napalm bums. She read about pot and Pol Pot, and how the world had delved into an adolescent self-mutilating phase before she could speak or walk. She read about CIA schemes and Asian immigrant dreams and an endless cycle of cynicism and self-indulgence and sin in Saigon and San Francisco.
All of which led to motives for murder. Two themes struck her innocent post-sixties mind: the Vietnam War's unprecedented divisive dissension at home: flag-burners versus flag-wavers, American against American, citizen against soldier, and how that ended in veterans coming home to be reviled, rather than honored. The Gulf War, comparatively brief as it was, hadn't been like that, though veteran charges of exposure to chemical weaponry were eerily similar in both wars, a PR ballet of accusation, denial, suspicion and investigation.
The other thing that struck her was drugs, how pervasive they were both at home and abroad, a unifying factor among protesters and protested, both the nihilist's and the idealist's painkiller of preference. Drugs that made dealing death bearable, drugs that made fighting death something one could deal with day after day.
Everyone worried about kids using drugs, in her own generation and the ones before and after it, but she had never seen anything like the drug-nirvana of that part of the sixties that she had lived as an infant, toddler and child.
People--young adults--who had lived through that intense period, that paroxysm of flirtation and fatal engagement with death and drugs, here and abroad, could be capable of anything. Any time. Any where.
Chapter 32
Christmas Party
"I don't know what to say," Matt's mother said in the car on the way to Bo and Mary Margaret's house in the suburbs.
"Now, or later?"
Matt had left the slushy freeway at the proper exit and now drove carefully through the early-dim, snow-packed streets. His mother's older model Honda Civic might be as unpredictable as she.
"Are you going to tell them?" she asked.
"Unless you want to do it."
"Do they have to know?"
"No, but I have to tell them."
"They really were proud of you."
"And won't be any more, because I'm not a priest anymore? How have I changed? Really?"
"Oh, Matt." Like a lot of women, she thought that sufficed.
"Oh, Mother."
"When did it become so terrible?"
"When having a baby was a price a woman paid. And only a woman. You tell me."
"If I'd given you up, we wouldn't have this agony."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I've counseled adoptive children who were sexually abused in their new homes."
"Oh, God! I didn't think it could be worse."
"It can. It is. We really didn't have it that bad; you're right about that, if I put it in context. But I can't put it in context when it's a secret. Secrets kill. They kill love, and hope, and family unity. That's why victims of sexual abuse are advised to admit the abuse, to name the abuser. Frankness frees. Secrets imprison."
"If you say so."
His mother had withdrawn to that inner world that was defined by her own worries and shrunken sense of self-worth. Matt sighed as he drove, wearing the brandy velvet blazer under his sheepskin jacket. It felt tight and confining, unlike the casual clothes he wore in Las Vegas.
Cold climates encouraged confinement and withdrawal. He ached for the wide-open warmth of Sin City. For snow-clear streets, and sun-god days. For neon nights. For Temple and Electra and the Circle Ritz. For Midnight Louie. For Bennie and Sheila. Even for George and Verle. But he was with his mother, and he ached most of all for her.
Thinking of the presents wrapped and tucked into a shopping bag in the backseat gave him colder feet than the poor heat circulation this old car could manage. Thinking of telling the extended family about his new status brought the cold to the level of his heart. This was the most difficult thing he had ever done, except for leaving the priesthood.
"The young people nowadays," his mother said, as if answering his unsaid thought, "don't go into the religious life like they used to. Now the church recruits old, used-up people like me; widows and widowers, people whose children are gone, who can become lay assistants."
"Wouldn't it be simpler to just let women be priests? They're eager to do it, like all of those excluded from something for centuries."
"Women priests? I don't know if women . . ."
"Mom, you are one. You ought to know."
"I've never liked being one. It's brought nothing but heartache. You can hunt Cliff and track him down. What can I do for revenge?
I never want to see him again. I never wanted to hear of him again. Your salvation comes at my cost."
"Your solution is self-abrogating avoidance."
"Your solution is confrontation and violence, just as his was."
"There must be a middle ground."
"It isn't here, in Chicago, at Bo and Mary Margaret's house."
He was silent for a bit. "I think I remember the way. That's pretty remarkable. Maybe what I should do is just enjoy myself. Celebrate Christmas. Would that make you happy?"