The Godfather's Revenge (28 page)

“I thought maybe you were going to say the two things you do are suck blood and kiss ass,” Michael said.

Klein laughed. “Those, too.”

“That’s four things.”

“They’re all related.”

“So what’s your point?”

Their food came.

“Don’t be naïve, is my point,” said Sid Klein when they were alone again. “The Feds don’t want to take you to court for any of this, they want to ruin you. Under those circumstances, they’re much less concerned with what’s legal than you are.” He beckoned toward his plate. “Ga-no-chee?”

O
n one of the first warm days of spring, Francesca Corleone Van Arsdale—shrouded with dread, as she was almost all the time now—was cooking dinner with her aunt, just the two of them. It was one of the nights Kathy taught class. The kitchen windows were open. Francesca could see and hear Connie’s boys, Victor and Little Mike, out in the courtyard, tossing a football with her little boy, Sonny, who’d just turned six. Victor had a radio out there, too—he took one with him almost everywhere. The station was playing that new Beatles record, “She Loves You.” The Hagen girls, Christina and Gianna, would have ordinarily been out there, too, until they were called upon to set the table, but they were in Florida with Theresa. The men were all upstairs.

In their treehouse.
That’s what Kathy called it, behind the men’s backs. She joked to Francesca that she was going to give them a
NO GIRLS ALLOWED
sign for Christmas. This was disrespectful and, of course, not even strictly accurate, especially since Rita Duvall seemed to be spending more time with Michael lately—but Francesca saw the truth in it. The whole setup here was the realization of a boy’s grand fantasy—a prince who grew up to be king, who moved to an island and built a fortress atop a high building, complete with a garden that was a replica of the one so beloved by his father, the dead king. True, the garden had been Aunt Connie’s project. But all she was doing was re-creating something her father had created inside something her brother had created. Boys have the luxury of yearning for the past while living in their dreams of the future. Women might wish to do the same, but they spent their days enslaved to the present. And what sort of present was it? The Great Age of the American Boy, featuring a boyish, cocksure president who still played boys’ games (touch football, little boats) and inspired his citizens by espousing a boy’s dream of flying to the moon (and, subliminally, of becoming the first to urinate on its surface when no women were watching). The styling of new radios, record players, cars, speedboats, fighter jets, and reconnaissance planes came straight out of boys’ comic books. Tall, phallic TV towers shot millions of tiny particles of light into space, where they would swim toward infinity. The most popular TV show in this world,
Bonanza
, was a boy’s story about four “men” living alone on a ranch (the manly oldest-brother character was dropped): Ben, the grandfatherly patriarch; Hoss, the giant boy-man middle child; Little Joe, the headstrong, baby-faced teenager and certified ladykiller; and Hop Sing, the infantilized Chinese cook (thus obviating the need for any mothers or wives). The most popular musical act in the world, the Beatles, featured four mop-topped British lads dressed in cute matching suits and Cuban-heeled boots, singing in the style of such American-boy originals as Larry Williams—whose biggest hit, “Bad Boy,” the Beatles played in all their concert performances—and Little Richard, the greatest Peter Pan figure American culture had yet produced. And it all played out against the chilling backdrop of the Cold War, that secret-gadget nirvana, the most dangerous boys’ game of all time. All the world was now at the mercy of double-dog dares and lines drawn in the dirt. As the world’s very existence hung in the balance, the most important question of the day was who had the biggest concealed missile and at whom it might be pointed.

Or so went the thesis of a scholarly book Kathy was writing.

Francesca handed her aunt the ricotta filling for the manicotti and got started on the salad. Connie started assembling the shells. Connie and Francesca were talking about nothing, as usual—the status of various homework assignments, cleaning the place up because the cleaning people were coming, whether certain items of clothing had or had not been picked up at the cleaners. Nothing, in other words. Nothing, Francesca thought, when, as usual, there was so much to talk about. It was as if everybody in their family had a list of all possible topics of conversation, long-term and short-term both, and honored an unspoken agreement to introduce none of the fifty most important topics—except in the heat of the moment. Then, of course, passions reigned, and it was no-holds-barred (Little Sonny loved to watch wrestling on TV and the terms bled into Francesca’s subconscious). Whoever got hurt probably had it coming, and if not, what were you going to do? Nothing. Sometimes it went the other way; it was the flames of
your
passions that blistered someone else. So in the end it all evened out. Pain came at you out of nowhere, and every person’s story was destined to end the same way. What was that cowboy song Uncle Fredo used to sing?
No matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive
. It used to make all the nieces and nephews laugh. He’d sing it in a funny voice with little yodeling hiccups. It had seemed so funny then, and it seemed like such a nightmare now. No one talked about that, either. About Fredo. Far, far too high on the list.

The long chef’s knife was crushing the tomatoes instead of slicing them, and Francesca pulled out the whetstone to give it a quick sharpening. Connie was prattling on now about how disappointed she’d been in the movie they saw together last night, which Francesca had liked, if only for the jazzy score and the way Johnny Fontane looked in tights. He was a kind of man-boy, too, but with Johnny it was different, at least for Francesca. She understood that he was the epitome of a certain sort of manly cool, a public bearer of the code. But his youthful, playful streak—the sophomoric, wisecracking practical joking; the nightcrawling and carousing that revealed the little boy inside him who didn’t want to go to bed for fear of missing any grown-up fun—kept Johnny from seeming impossibly too old for her. Francesca and Johnny had now met twice, quietly, to talk business—once at lunch and once over drinks in a booth with red curtains at Hal Mitchell’s on Fifty-fourth Street, to talk about starting up a fund that would honor the memory of his best friend, the singer and actor Nino Valenti. The meetings weren’t a secret, but she hadn’t told anyone in her family about them, especially not Connie. What was there to tell? That he’d asked her to come to California to meet with him a third time, and she’d said yes? It wasn’t as if they’d even kissed, unless her hand and her cheeks counted.

Francesca slid the knife over the stone.

Connie, with heartbreaking earnestness, was analyzing the surprise ending of last night’s movie. How—she argued—could the J. J. White, Jr., character be the rightful king of England?

Please open your hymnals to topic number fifty-one. Now keep paging.

“He’s the only colored man in the entire movie,” Connie said, “and we’re supposed to believe he’s the king? The King of Merry Old England. King Mulignan the First. To be honest with you, even in a comedy, I can’t see it.”

“Hmm,” Francesca said. Dread wrapped around her more tightly. “Yeah.”

“Speaking of Johnny,” Connie said, “Michael told me that the rumors are true.”

The dread closed its hands around Francesca’s throat.

“What rumors?” Francesca said. She could feel herself reddening. She didn’t dare look at her aunt.

“You didn’t read about it?” Connie said. “He’s working on a deal to play Christopher Columbus.
The Discovery of America.
He’s producing it, too. Apparently he’s talking to studios now. Lots of big stars, CinemaScope, everything. Sergio Leone might direct and either Morricone or Nino Rota is going to do the score, although there’s also talk of Mancini or Cy Milner. There was an article in
Screen Tattler
that said they want to film on location in Italy and build exact replicas of all three boats.”

“All three, huh?” Francesca said. She drew the knife one last time across the whetstone, wiped it off, and went back to chopping the vegetables.

IN HER HEART, IN THE PIT OF HER STOMACH
, Francesca knew where all the troubles in her family were leading: to her. She hadn’t talked about it to anyone, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. She’d killed her husband. She’d lost her temper, that famous family temper, her father’s legacy, and she’d killed her husband with his own decadent sports car. She wanted desperately to go to confession and be absolved from this mortal sin, but it wouldn’t work: she didn’t exactly regret what she’d done. Billy had betrayed her. He was going to hurt her family, and he’d
already
been hurting her, sleeping with that woman he’d had on the side since law school (and lying about it). So what if that whore had been blamed for killing him? There was justice in that, too. It had actually felt
good
to do what she’d done, even in the face of his broken and bloodied body. Especially that, she hated to admit. The adrenaline it had unleashed, the relief she’d felt: it would be dishonest to forget about that. On the other hand, she was not a monster. She couldn’t help but be torn about what she’d done. She’d killed her husband, and she’d be rotting in jail right now if her family hadn’t taken care of things for her. Her little boy, Sonny, the light of her life, would be without her. She’d be without him. That was unthinkable. But now, as this mess raged on with Tom Hagen, it seemed more and more clear to her that what she had done was going to catch up to her sooner or later—and probably sooner.

Thank God she was a twin, so at least she could feel like Kathy understood some of this without it needing to be said. She felt sorry for the members of her family who weren’t twins. Which was all of them, actually, except for Aunt Connie, whose twin brother died in the womb. Poor Connie had been surrounded by death even before she was born. How must that make Connie feel? Who knew? In fairness, it wasn’t just Connie. Nobody talked about it. In fact, Francesca had learned about the dead twin a few months ago, at Christmas, when Connie’s godfather, Ozzie Altobello, had come over and stayed too long and drunk too much wine and sat in a corner, weeping, and telling the story to Kathy and Francesca, who’d been aghast. When they’d asked Connie about it the next day, she’d abruptly changed the subject. When they’d asked their uncle about it, Michael confirmed that it was true but changed the subject almost as swiftly. Forty-one years later, it was still too high on the topics list. No one ever talked about Francesca’s dead child, either: Carmela, born prematurely, who’d lived for only one day.

Outside, Little Sonny exploded with laughter, and over and over yelled, “Touchdown!”

“You know, if you put a kitchen match between your teeth,” Connie said, pointing toward the box of them over the stove, “the onions won’t cause all those tears.”

Francesca stood back from the counter and turned her head, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand.

“It’s the sulfur in the match head that does the trick,” Connie said.

Connie had told her this countless times. Francesca went back to the chopping board.

“Suit yourself,” Connie said. “No sense suffering,
carissima,
when you don’t got to.”

Francesca sighed.

“What?” Connie said.

“Can’t a person just sigh?”

“If what you did was
just
sigh, sure. That didn’t sound like just a sigh to me.”

And then there was this. Nobody in her family talked about anything, but they pressed you on everything.

So, fine. She’d try.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “I mean, never in a million years…” Her voice trailed off.

Connie had all the manicotti tubes assembled now in the dish and was spooning the marinara sauce over the top. She gazed expectantly at Francesca.

Francesca looked up at the ceiling as if what she was trying to say was up there on a cue card. “I wouldn’t want anyone, especially Uncle Mike, to think I didn’t love working for the foundation,” Francesca said, meaning the Vito Corleone Foundation, “because I do.”

“You should.”

Connie had been openly jealous when she’d heard that Francesca was flying to Los Angeles in a few weeks to meet with some of Johnny Fontane’s people about plans for Johnny’s own foundation. Not even Johnny: just his people.

“I do,” Francesca said. “It’s very rewarding, honestly. But by the same token, it’s also the kind of thing I always thought of as something that old…that
older
women do. Charities and such. This isn’t coming out right.”

Connie put the pan in the oven and closed the door. She didn’t set the timer, which drove Francesca nuts. Everyone was just supposed to remember. It’s how mistakes got made, that kind of overconfidence.

“What I’m trying to say,” Francesca said, “is that, when I was growing up, if somebody would have told me that when I was in my
twenties
I’d be a widow, with no prospects and only one child, doing—”

“Who tells
anybody
things like that? Snap out of it. You can what-if yourself right into the laughing academy. This is your life, not some movie where, I don’t know, some
oobatz
ghost visits you from the future with news of how you turned out. You want my advice? You think too fucking much.”

Francesca’s eyes widened.

Connie blushed. She threw a dish towel at Francesca and turned her back on her.

Francesca had never heard her aunt—or any woman in their family—use that word. Any number of Italian swear words, sure, and a few of the milder American ones, but not
that one.