"Oh, yes, Matt. No more pain and accusation. I've had enough to last a lifetime."
And it had, Matt thought.
The Belofski house was bigger, higher, peakier than Matt's mother's old southside place in town, which had been bought with the secret wages of sin and guilt. Unshuttered windows brimmed with light and shadow figures moving on the accidental stage of a well-illuminated house on a dark December evening.
The broad walks had been scraped clean to the concrete. Matt helped his mother navigate the frost-slicked path, but she didn't really need assistance in her loafer shoes. He carried the shopping bag overflowing with presents: hers for her family, his for her.
Moving from the ear-crisping cold outside onto the steamy front porch and then through the thronging main rooms felt like a spiritual journey, each step meditated upon many times before being taken in real life.
Matt smelled cinnamon and apples, strongly spiced sausage, beer and eggnog.
The Christmas tree, seven feet tall, commandeered a hall corner. Bo came to collect their coats, then directed Matt and his mother into the living room.
They had just passed under the oaken arch when Krys materialized before them like a rather large elf in a short red velvet skirt, a black leather vest dangling hardware, a white blouse dripping ruffles and the cross earring, among others much less refined. Tonight her lips were painted purple to match her nails.
"Goodness, Krystyna!" Mira Devine said. "You've grown so much this last year; you've grown right out of that skirt."
"No, ma'am, I haven't." Krys grinned and pointed up at the center of the archway.
Matt turned to bump into a cluster of white berries hanging there. No way, he thought. Not with the family politics here tonight. He was a walking catalyst for a lot of people's unacknowledged crises; he understood that.
Bo came back, jovial as a jelly-bellied Santa, his face florid. He clapped Matt on the brandy velvet shoulder and drew him away from the two women. "Let me introduce you around, cousin. Lots of folks here haven't seen you since you were a little shaver or your . .. ah, induction."
"Fine. But don't introduce me as Father anything. I've left the priesthood."
Bo froze in amazement. "You didn't say that at the airport."
"It didn't seem the right time."
"What'll I say here, like to relatives and neighbors?"
"Say I'm your cousin, Mira's boy. Matt Devine."
"They know what you were."
"I want them to know what I am."
"What is that now, if you're not a priest anymore?"
"I'm a hot-line counselor. A mostly honest man. A good neighbor. A bad enemy. A friend. A son. A cousin. A reluctant motorcycle rider. A pretty good martial-arts expert. And, lately, a natty dresser. I could be a ladies' man, but I haven't got the heart for it. Ask your daughter. And I'm a Don Quixote, looking for answers where there are only questions. This family is one of the hideouts."
Bo had paled with every new description on Matt's list. Now he said numbly, "My daughter?"
Matt pointed at the mistletoe drooping from the arch's central post. "She's a great kid. You have to show her that you trust her before she needs to prove to you that you can't. Let her go where she wants to college. She'll learn. That's what it's all about."
"Matt, I ... I don't know what to say."
"Say nothing, then. Just think about it all."
"Jeez. Mary Margaret. . ." Shaking his head, Bo went in search of his better half to share his shock.
Matt retreated to the appetizer table near the fireplace and poured himself a cup of punch. He watched the dynamic of the rooms alter as guest arrived. Couples came in, bundled to the eyeteeth in mufflers and turned-up collars. Coats went upstairs to a bedroom depository. The guests, stripped down to their wannest festive clothes, gravitated to their separate spheres.
Men gathered at the fireplace or the informal bar, talking duck-and deer-hunting, sports and stocks.
Women, dressed in their best and looking their most attractive, clustered around the younger children or hied to the kitchen to "help."
Matt circulated, eavesdropping as only an outsider can. Women discussed recipes and infant care, although a younger cadre gathered in front of the blank TV set and dissected workplace politics with a will. Krys and her age group met in corners to whisper and snicker, unlikely objects gleaming at their ears in symbolic rebellion. He smiled to see Krys sporting his gift cross like it was a tattoo from a punk-rock band.
His mother, he noticed, drifted unnoticed from women's group to women's group. As the only woman among them unaccompanied by a husband, and as once the most beautiful, he could imagine what a threat she had been in her youth. And he had begun to see beauty as a force to be acknowledged, as well as reckoned with. His mother's current drabness, her cultivated invisibility, were the result of decades of abuse, not just from a man named Cliff Effinger, but from her own family and culture and church.
He himself had been inclined to carry on that tradition. And now look at him: tracking a man down on the mean streets of Vegas, flirting with underage semi-cousins in big-city malls, trying to do unto his mother as Temple had done unto him, trying to awaken the sleeping beauty in everyone, including himself, for without self-love, there was only self-hate, and self-hate always looked outward for others to share the burden.
"Matt! I remember you!"
A guy Matt didn't remember had come by, flushed with good cheer and Polish beer.
"Larry. Aunt Marya's boy. Bo said you've rejoined us poor sinners 'washing and sweeping' in this vale of tears, as my four-year-old says. I don't blame you for leaving. The church is pretty messed up these days. I tell you, I'll think twice before I let my little Ashley become an altar girl someday after all the admissions that have come down. No wonder you left."
"Your little Ashley is pretty smart. Washing and sweeping is better than 'wailing and weeping in this vale of tears, 'but its still women's work. Maybe your little Ashley should skip parish work and go straight to seminary after high school. She'll find a lot of women there."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not. Women really want to learn theology. They respect it more because it's been denied them. Maybe they're latecomers, but they're better ministry candidates than most men nowadays."
"But the Pope--"
"There'll be another Pope. And another. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying counseling work."
"Oh, good. You're in California now?"
"Close. Las Vegas."
"Say, what about that place? I'm taking the family there for Easter. I'll look you up. Gotta see that New York-New York skyline hotel. And there's a water park, I'm told by the three water spaniels the fairies switched for my real kids."
"What are you doing?"
"Not much. Wage slave. The economy keeps dipping every time I get a little ahead. Wife's working now. Hey, the kids are almost all in grade school--Catholic grade school--and there isn't enough for her to do at home, now that she's got me and the boys on her chore-doing list." He shrugged. "I thought we'd be traditional, like the old folks." He glanced to Bo and his compatriots across the room. "But things change, huh? Hope you like life in civvies. You know, you could get a job as a model. The family's never been a slouch on good looks, especially the women."
"Thanks. I owe it all to my mother."
"Your mother? Oh, yeah. You're Mira's kid." He nodded. "A nice lady. Kinda quiet."
That was just it. His mother had no reason to be a nice lady. He considered her confession: he had resulted from one night of unconsidered youthful infatuation. Maybe that was more than most people had in their whole lives. Maybe human passion had its own reason and right for being. But was the price always a denial of any passion, then? Or work, for what was right, for each other?