Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

A freeway had cut close to the cathedral, leveling the old Polish neighborhood. A statue of the New World’s Our Lady of Guadalupe in her vivid blue cloak gleamed amid all the gold-flecked Old World icons of Madonna and Child. This must have been where Matt’s parents had met, Temple thought, eyeing the tiers of flickering votive candles, although no one was talking about that.

So Temple wasn’t surprised when they drove out into the suburbs to Uncle Stach and Aunt Wanda’s house, which was filled with Zabinskis large and small. Nothing marred the Thanksgiving-festive dinner, starting with barszcz, beet soup. The whole family enjoyed spelling out their consonant-heavy words for Temple’s benefit, and Krys was particularly articulate on intoning the full form of her name, K-r-y-s-t-y-n-a.

Matt leaned near to tell Temple that Krys had used to “hate” her Old World name spelling.

Every kind and color of kielbasa were available, sausages colored from beige to yam golden to oxblood red brown. Given the large contingent of cousins both older and younger than Matt, there were various meats from breaded pork to Americanized turkey with giblets and gravy, boiled potatoes and noodles and lots of cream and poppy seed pastries for dessert, along with wine.

The long after-dinner recovery time showcased Krys’s slow burn at Temple’s easy adoption by her demanding family. She flirted furiously with Matt’s younger male cousins, of which he had enough to make up a new Fontana brothers gang. She drank way too much beer. And she declined driving home with them at 6 P.M., saying she was having too good a time. She would be along later. Maybe.

“Krys,” Mira had rebuked her. Matt just smiled and escorted Mira and Temple out the front door.

“She’s a big girl,” Matt told his mother on the way to the car.

“I never knew she was so silly.”

“She’s what … just past twenty, Mom? A good age to still be silly. Anyway, I thought the afternoon went well. Not the usual awkwardness about my decision.”

“Or me,” Mira agreed.

“We’re a triple threat,” Temple said, linking arms between them and thinking how odd it was that people would let their nearest and dearest become outcasts, to any degree.

Then she thought how Max’s parents and aunt and uncle couldn’t handle his survival when his cousin Sean had been killed, driving Max away into the itinerant life of a magician-cum-counterterrorist at an age when he should have been entering college.

Her own family had never “approved of” her move to Vegas with Max. Or of Max.

As Matt installed his mother in the front seat, Temple claimed the back, then sat in the middle and leaned forward to chat with them both, relieved to have passed the not-Polish, not-Catholic test. Mira was as happy and relaxed as Temple had yet seen her. Maybe it was the two glasses of dinner wine.

Krys and her glowering postadolescent pout had bonded them. All three were over and done with familial disapproval.

They were still laughing and joking about the golonka, pork knuckles, Uncle Stach had teased Temple about refusing to eat when they entered the apartment.

“Sit on the sofa,” Mira said. “I have some Madeira Krys didn’t know about, given to me by the restaurant long ago. I would like to make a private toast to the engaged couple.”

Matt pulled Temple down beside him on the sofa for a not-so-quick kiss while his mother bustled away. He mouthed at Temple, “ Mo-ther? A third glass of wine in one day? Ma-deir-a in her cupboard?” he whispered.

Mira returned, three tiny cut-crystal stemmed glasses fanned expertly in one hand and the labeled bottle in the other. Breathlessly, she put the pieces on the coffee table and poured the rich amber liqueur, making the glass bowls into cut-topaz jewels.

Matt kept his arm around Temple’s shoulders as Mira raised her glass. Temple’s toes curled in her shoes. Being “family” so fast felt amazing. She missed her own. Next.

“To my wonderful son and the perfect partner he has found for his new life. Na zdrowie. ”

Temple eyed Matt, who toasted her. “To your health.”

“Na zdrowie,” Temple repeated with a lift of her glass, echoing the accent.

“Perfect,” Mira said, beaming. “Like a Polish girl.”

She rose to return the bottle to the kitchen. Matt’s mother apparently went light on alcohol, probably because of Effinger, Temple supposed.

Mira had stopped in midpace.

Matt noticed and looked beyond her. The wall phone in the kitchen was blinking red. “You have a message, Mom. It’s okay. Take it. Temple and I will just make out on the couch.”

“Matt.” Mira turned on him in admonition, but she was blushing. “I won’t take it now and desert my guests.”

Matt frowned. “Krys was pretty pi … perturbed. Better check.”

Still Mira hesitated.

Temple rolled her eyes at Matt. This might be the rebuffed swain calling. Mira didn’t want them to hear.

“Just check it, Mom,” he said. “We’ll go into the dining room and page through the family album again, now that Temple has met so many of us.”

They did as he suggested, keeping their voices hushed.

“She’s in a horrible position, Matt,” Temple whispered. “The soap operas are all going off the air, but your mother, after trying to live as low-profile a life as possible for years, is cast by fate in a doozy, caught between two brothers.” Her eye fixed on a tall young guy early in the album. “Is that Uncle Stach? Life certainly was broadening for him.”

“All that beer and sausage. Strange, I don’t care for the ethnic menu.”

“You didn’t grow up on it.”

“No,” he said, turning serious. “I never developed a taste for Polish conviviality.” He and his mom had always been on the fringe, awkward reminders of the family’s inability to deal with real life.

A cry from the kitchen followed by something hitting the floor made them jump up in tandem, the album slapping shut on Uncle Stach and Aunt Wanda and their brood.

It took only steps to reach Mira. She was standing stricken beside the telephone, the receiver dangling on its curlicued cord at her feet.

Matt swooped on it and straightened, putting the receiver to his ear, then skewing it sideways so Temple could stand on her toes to hear the last bit of the message. A brusque cold male voice was saying …

“—chop off his tail inch by inch.”

Chapter 20

Lefty Behind

Ah, Sweet Home à la Obama.

I am still in Chicago. I am still in stir.

Beer tops pop again. Cigars reek. I peer squinty-eyed out the black mesh at the end of my carrier. The cigar smoke is rising up from the beer cans upon which the stogies are perched while my captors chow down.

I must say that Chicago sausage is some of the most highly spiced and aromatic I have ever sniffed, no doubt because so many Poles, Germans, Czechs, and other Eastern European folks settled here.

“What was that?” Shifty stirs and lowers a foot from the crate to the filthy floor. “Is that damn cat growling?”

“Let it growl. We can always cut off its tongue.”

Actually, it is my ungovernable stomach growling and if the boys get in a position to do my innards violence, it will already all be over for Midnight Louie.

I have had enough of this nonsense.

I know what I came to find out. Effinger died in Vegas with a certain valuable something or piece of knowledge in his possession and a year later it is still missing, yet so desired that the Vegas outfit, whoever they are, are digging into his past to locate its hiding place.