Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

She settled back to study him as only mothers can while a waiter brought menus and filled their heavy, stemmed water glasses.

“You look a little tired, Matt. Is it those late hours at that radio job of yours?”

“No, Mom, it’s traveling for these speaking engagements. The luncheon address I did today was over at two P.M. but I was there until four answering questions and meeting underwriters.”

“What group was it again?”

“The supporters of Wendy’s Way, a group of national shelters for runaway girls.”

She shook her head, which only improved her hair-do. “Poor girls. They don’t have family support like in the old days. Now it has to be all out in the open.”

Matt held himself back from pointing out that her family didn’t support her much in the old days, other than making her feel ashamed. His mother might look like a modern woman, but a lot of old assumptions still lingered beneath the flashy renovation.

“A table for four?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Your cousin Krystyna is coming along later. I hope that’s all right? She has a late class. Studio arts, she said.” Mira sipped her water, then eyed him over the reading glasses, framed in indigo metallic, she had slipped on to skim the menu. “Boyfriend, too,” she mouthed, rolling her eyes.

“You don’t like Krys’s boyfriend?”

“He’s like all the young men these days. Odd.” Then she took off the glasses and smiled. “I’ll tell you what to order. I know the chef’s best dishes. I like your jacket.” She eyed him while he shrugged out of the bulky down jacket to reveal an amber velvet blazer.

“I wore it at Christmas at Uncle Stash’s, remember? After living in a desert climate, this cold calls for clothes with a warm feeling.”

“Cold! It’s spring here.”

“In Las Vegas, it’s summer practically.”

“Are you going to keep living in that awful city?”

“It’s no more awful than Chicago.”

“It’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of the U.S.”

Matt laughed. “The city’s reputation is exaggerated. It’s only like…Ninevah.”

“So the speech went well.”

He nodded. They always went well. “And I was well paid.”

“Shouldn’t you be donating your services, if it’s for charity?”

“The point is these are fund-raisers. They expect to pay for a well-known speaker to get donors to contribute.”

“A lot different from your last job.”

“Not really. I just talk to a larger audience than I ever did at the crisis hotline, and I get paid a lot more.”

“Hmmm.”

Earning money for what looked like doing nothing was as suspect a notion as living in Las Vegas to his mother’s generation and place.

“So what should I eat?” he asked, bewildered by creamed herring appetizers, kielbasa and borscht, varieties of knedle , or dumplings. He hadn’t eaten “Polish” since he had entered the seminary.

She happily took him on a verbal tour of the menu before recommending the cucumber salad and chicken Polonaise. And she urged him to try the beer sampler, a specialty of the house for tourists. She would have a Stinger cocktail.

Matt supposed he was a tourist here with his own mother as much as any out-of-towner. His head began to spin from the noise and the heat and the long day, not to mention his mother’s whip-lashing values: old-school Roman Catholic Polish Chicago with glittering bits of rez biz grafted on. She’d be ready for Sin City yet.

After they ordered, the waiter soon brought a tipsy tray of miniature glass beer steins filled with an array of ales colored like precious topaz from shades of palest yellow to dark amber. There were twelve in all, but each only offered about four swallows.

Matt decided to work his way from dark to light, picking up one of the silly steins. His mother looked sophisticated behind the sleek sculpture of her martini glass while Matt played with baby steins.

“To Chicago,” he said, raising his Lilliputian lager.

“Chicago.” She set down her glass after a genteel sip and rearranged her silverware. “I’m thinking of selling the two-flat.”

Matt felt ambushed by a slap of raw emotion. He had a love-hate relationship with the old duplex he had grown up in, he realized in an instant of confused emotion. Its beloved, old-fashioned familiarity was forever married to his stepfather’s brutality.

“Where would you live?” he wondered.

“A small apartment. Between the old neighborhood and here. There’s plenty of public transportation, and Krys keeps pushing me to drive more in the city. It’d be easier to keep up, and I could use the retirement investment money.”

“Makes sense to me.”

Her lips tightened. “The family can’t see it. But it’s time to move on.”

“I have,” he pointed out.

She grinned shyly at him. “Have you ever! I hate to say it, but ever since you left the priesthood, your life seems to be on a magic carpet ride…speeches, radio shows. What about that girl you mentioned?”

“Girl?”

“You know. In Las Vegas. The one you liked a lot.”

Matt downed a small stein of slightly red beer. “She’s still there. We’re still friends.”

“Nothing more?”

“No.”

“But when you were here at Christmas it sounded more serious than that.”

“Did it? Maybe you just thought so. Or I did. I’m traveling too much to settle down now anyway.” He hoped that didn’t sound as much like an excuse to his mother as it did to him.

Her face had sobered, reading what he wasn’t saying. “Well, she wasn’t Catholic anyway.”

As if that would make him feel better about losing Temple.

His mother was leaning over to one of the vacant chairs and lifted a smart new navy purse off it. Looked expensive. She unclasped the gilt catch and brought out an oversized business envelope stuffed with papers.

“These are copies of the legal papers on the purchase of the two-flat. You know, from your father’s family’s lawyers. It’s got the firm name on it, and a lawyer signed for them. I thought if you had time to look into things—”

“You could do it more easily from here, Mom.”

She hesitated. “But I’m a woman. They never take a woman as seriously as a man at these big law firms. And you’re famous. Sort of. And…I can’t do it, Matt.” She looked away.

She meant that she was ashamed.

“It’s fine. I’ll do it.” He put his hand over hers, was surprised when her other hand suddenly clasped it, as warm and dry as hot-water-bottle-heated sheets in winter. They had never been demonstrative at home under Cliff Effinger’s despotic rule. Had never showed emotion so as not to trigger his rages.

Yet there had been comforts in that cold home, and Matt found himself wanting to go take final photographs of the old place before it was sold, even as part of him wanted to see it torn down board by shingle by rafter.

“You sure you want to find out who my real father was?” he asked. “He died in Vietnam, after all. The family lawyers made plain you would get that two-flat and that was all. There’s no advantage in it.”

“A photo maybe, huh? A name. I don’t want money. Never did. I want a memory.”

He looked away.

He was the product of a one-night stand between innocents on the brink of war. How many others like him lived in forgotten, bitter corners of the world? He was lucky he had been born in America of ethnically similar parents, that his mother’s unwed status had only resulted in an abusive stepfather and social discomfort, not utter ostracization.

“You deserve to know,” he told her at last. “I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded, and started asking him about the radio show, so he entertained her with anecdotes until the food came. He didn’t mention Elvis. It wasn’t nice to make fun of the dead, only of the living. But maybe Elvis was a little of both.