Matt recognized so many facial types, even in the younger generation. His old neighborhood was inbred, static. But it wasn't just that he was of the rare younger generation who had become a priest, he realized, he was of interest because he had left. Left the neighborhood, the city, the state. And now he had left again, left the priesthood.
Then people he had almost forgotten, puzzle people whose adult faces hid traces of the familiar childish ones, came up to shake his hand and remind him who they were and who he had been in their memories and to ask how he was doing now.
"Phone counseling, huh? Must be tense work, especially in Las Vegas," said an overweight woman with coarse gray hair corkscrewing to her shoulders.
He was horrified to recall her as a grade-school classmate. Time was already sorting people into parodies of their childhood selves, and his generation was only in their early thirties.
"Like endless confessions," she went on, "but with more interesting sins than in your ordinary parish."
"Sins are the same everywhere. What's your line?" Matt had recognized the hearty, no-nonsense manner of a working woman.
"I got a law degree after the kids were in school, and now I run a low-cost legal aid pool for anybody that really needs it--the poor, the handicapped, single mothers, anybody the system is used to stomping all over."
"Now you're the one with a hundred stories to tell, I bet."
"Sure can tell you live in Las Vegas, Matt, but I won't take that bet."
He was amazed by how they remembered him from schooclass="underline" good on the swim team, always studious. Several said they had been surprised when he entered the seminary. They sounded so benign in retrospect, his school days. These people had seen the surface he had wanted them to see. He had always been successful at misrepresenting himself, even to himself.
When the crowd had dwindled to immediate family, Matt checked his new watch, surprised to find it was after eleven.
Mary Margaret, Bo's Irish wife, paused in picking up empty dessert plates and glasses. "We always go to midnight mass at St. Stan's. Want to join us?"
He turned to consult his mother, but she wasn't in the chair she had occupied all evening.
"Kitchen." Mary Margaret's graying head nodded in that direction.
Matt grabbed some empty plates--he knew from several rectory housekeepers that a man entering a women-at-work zone had better bear a token gesture of pitching in--and wended through disarranged chairs to the house's crisis center.
Now the countertops were piled with the disorderly remains of the feast; there was hardly a place to put more plates. The women's duties were winding down; dishes would be done in the morning. So they clustered around the battered kitchen table. Matt was surprised to see his mother there, the new blue topaz earrings twinkling like the exotic eyes of some hidden persona just behind her everyday self.
They were talking hairstyles.
Matt interrupted long enough to find out if she wanted to attend midnight mass, while the other women gazed on him with the fond, interrupted attention he was used to evoking from older women.
She did, and he left, bemused. He had a feeling that she had never been swept into female holiday circles before, that she had been like him, the utter outsider.
Returning to the now-deserted living room, he was waylaid by a purple-lipped vixen.
"You've been ducking that archway all night," she said.
"Darn right. Did you trap anybody else?"
"Only Uncle Stach. This family may eat like the Russian army, but otherwise it's very repressed."
"Maybe that's why everybody eats like the Russian army. Thanks for your help at the mall. Your gift ideas were a hit."
"I had no idea your mother was so . . . shy."
It wasn't shyness, but he saw no need to correct her. She herself was shy, under that brash exterior. Everybody developed a second skin in high school, to keep the first one from being flayed to shreds, he decided.
"You going to come back?" she asked, leaning against the heavy oaken post at the end of the archway.
"My mother lives here."
"She's always lived here, and you didn't come back."
"I will more often now that I have a personal shopper here."
"Hey, that's what I'm good at. I guess I should major in nursing, or something that pays well, but I'd really like to do art."
"Do both."
"That's a tough load."
"It'll pay off when you graduate and can go either way. The time to bear down is when you're young and have the energy. It doesn't last forever"
"Does never knowing what you should do last forever?"
He laughed. "Yeah. That does. Forever."
"I bet this was hard for you. Tonight, I mean."
He nodded. "But easier than I thought. Things we fear are always like that."
"Like the super big roller coaster at a theme park?"
"Roller coasters aren't on my Ten Worst Things list."
"No, you're all grown-up."
She sounded despondent, so mired in Jekyll/Hyde indecision about who she was and what everybody else was. Matt felt a wave of tenderness for her, for himself too, when he had been there.
He put his hands on her arms and kissed the black lips that wanted so desperately to he recognized without being betrayed. It was a high school kiss, sweet and utterly unsexual on his part, just deeply affectionate.
Her eyes were shining. She was bedazzled by her own power in making what she wanted to happen more than by the kiss. An older guy had recognized her. A man who wasn't supposed to like girls that much.
"Can I write you?" The words blurted out, unpremeditated.
He hesitated, not wanting to turn a fleeting moment into an unhealthy obsession.
"Never mind." Her eyes were shifting away, thinking about becoming ashamed.
Matt hated that look more than anything in the world, his mother's look, which he had grown up with.
"Sure you can write me. I just haven't been at my place long enough to remember the address right off. I live at the Circle Ritz."
"That sounds like a dude ranch."
"It's this wild four-story apartment building with condominiums too. Built in the fifties. Round. There's a wedding chapel out front."
"That is wild."
"That's Las Vegas." He gave her the address. "Don't you want to write this down?"
"I'll remember it." Her eyes were shining again.
The women started drifting in from the kitchen.
Chapter: Letter to Louise; Part 3
Being the Meditations of Midnight Louie in New York City
"I am about to impart to you some priceless wisdom, just in case you are my daughter and could use some guidance. Being priceless, wisdom is no doubt undervalued, but here I go anyway: the best place to be on Christmas Eve, I have discovered, is the kitchen. That is where all the eats are, and where the noise level is the least.
"I have unwittingly spent many a Christmas holiday out of doors, aware only that there were a good many more turkey leavings outside my favorite restaurants during the season to be merry. Also, the handouts came with a tad more mercy, but not noticeably so.
"Now I have seen the light. Or, rather, I have seen lots of lights. It is fitting that I am spending my first indoor Christmas in Manhattan, which becomes an island of illumination for the period. The small twinkling lights Miss Temple Barr adores (perhaps because she is more than somewhat small and twinkling herself) bedeck the city's stern gray-granite face like electrified fleas on a dignified Russian Blue grand champion. (I pity these purebreds; they are never allowed to have any fun. There is something to be said for being relatively worthless in the scheme of things.)