The crowd was bigger than the one at the cemetery-something that anyone who took a bite of anything could have explained. Fredo made his rounds, embracing people and shaking his head about the tragedy and the terrible waste of it all. A few people made cryptic allusions to his promotion to underboss, and Fredo thanked them and said, you know, a man’s got to eat, and then ate. He drank beer so he wouldn’t get drunk. He lacked the charisma his father and brothers had, but as he’d grown older, he’d realized that for that very reason he was better at this kind of thing than they were. He intimidated no one. He was so frankly awkward that women wanted to mother him. Men would see him hovering at the edge of their conversation, hand him a drink, and bring him up to speed on the story they’d been telling. He’d reciprocate; drink with him once, and until the end of time Fredo Corleone would remember your poison. He’d thrived during his years of exile on the hotel side of the casino business because he genuinely liked to see people enjoying themselves, not just because then they’d owe him a favor.
Around the other Corleone men, people behaved like robots, silently rehearsing each word before they dared to speak. Around Fredo, they could be themselves. People liked him. He knew people saw this as a weakness, but that’s where they were wrong. There is no greater natural advantage in life than having your enemy overestimate your faults, Pop had said. Not to him, true. To Sonny. Pop had given Sonny lessons, a lot of times with Fredo sitting right in the room, totally ignored. Sonny heard. Fredo listened.
The room buzzed with speculation about the missing charter pilot known as O’Malley, and people opened up to Fredo about it as they never would have to Mike. He heard every theory under the sun, the most frequent being either that O’Malley was some kind of undercover cop or else that he was somehow connected to the Cleveland family. Both, maybe. But the higher-ranking men had other ideas. Butchie Molinari, for example, as he released Fredo from his embrace, merely whispered, “It’s Fuckface, no?” As he had all day, Fredo said he had no idea whatsoever, which was also something Mike could never have pulled off.
Why did he do this to himself? This endless comparison with his brothers. Fredo stood in front of the gilded mirror in the men’s room. He stood up straight and sucked in his gut. His eyes looked like, how did that song go? Two cherries in a glass of buttermilk. His brothers, he was sure, didn’t waste time comparing themselves with each other, and certainly not with him. He ran his hand through his thinning hair. He’d had enough to drink, that was for sure. He looked at his round face and tried not to see in it the traits he’d inherited from his parents, the stronger version of his jawline that Sonny had, the eyes that were just like Mike’s only closer together. He picked up the glass jar full of combs and tonic and smashed it against his own reflection. Green liquid rained everywhere. The mirror only cracked. Fredo handed C-notes to the man at the sink next to him and to the Negro attendant, who said he understood, we all loved Mr. Tony. Fredo headed through the nearly empty restaurant, past the ice sculpture of Tony Molinari, its forehead gruesomely melted, as if it had taken a hollow-point slug instead of a thousand loving caresses, and out the door into the cool dark, determined to be nobody at all, not even himself.
He ignored the men at the cab stand and, head down, continued down the wharf. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before the neighborhood turned rough, before he got to the bars full of stevedores and sailors and the back-alley bars that only the most depraved of those men knew about.
He stopped himself. No. Not again.
Ahead was Powell Street. A straight shot to his hotel. A long walk, but it’d do him good. Clear his head. He looked toward the gloomy distant lights of those bars, then up Powell Street. He was pretty sure it went by that old Italian neighborhood, North Beach. He could stop there, take a break, have a coffee, think this Colma thing through. It’d be nice, just the ticket.
The second he turned up Powell he felt a wave of self-congratulatory relief.
By the time he climbed the first big hill, though, he was sweating and having second thoughts. He was too winded to think about his plan or anything else except that he didn’t want a coffee anymore, he wanted something cold, even a beer, what could it hurt?
The street leveled out. The businesses started to have Italian names, but something was wrong. The streets were full of dirty-looking kids in sweaters and dungarees, some of them Negroes, hardly any of them looking especially Italian. He tried to remember when the last time was he’d been down here-’47? ’48? He looked down Vallejo and saw the coffee shop he was thinking of, smelled it a block away, and it still had the same name, Caffè Trieste, which he took as a sign-have the coffee, not a drink-but when he opened the door he caught sight of a redheaded white kid playing the bongos while a Negro in a black sweater stood next to him shouting who the fuck knew what-it was hard to make out over the shouting and finger snapping of the people at the tables. Mulberry-eyed girls, the man might have said. Mint jelly. Turtleneck angel guys.
Fucking Bohemians. He left. Somewhere in this city was a very tall whiskey and water with Fredo Corleone’s name on it.
He stopped in at another Italian place he remembered, Enrico’s, which looked about the same except for the sign outside saying LIVE JAZZ TONIGHT! Bohemians here, too, but the music sounded better, so fuck it. He paid his three bucks and took a seat at the bar. Piano, soprano sax, and a drummer with brushes. Crazy stuff, but Fredo got his drink and bobbed his head along with the syncopated beat. He was the only one in the room in a suit, which for some reason seemed to provoke people into coming up to him and talking to him about the “scene” and telling him about the wonders of reefer. He resisted the impulse to tell them he’d just come from the funeral of the guy who’d made most of the profit off their precious reefer. After another drink he started thinking this combo was about the best goddamned thing he’d ever heard. Before long he was at a table with a big group of people, men and women, even smoking some reefer when it came his way. The band took a break, and a fat Norwegian in a fez took the stage and said that after the intermission he’d read his haikus and the combo would jam along. Fredo felt a hand on his arm. It was a long-faced man with long sideburns, about thirty, in a sweater and taped-together eyeglasses. “I hear you’re with a record label,” the man said, practically blushing.
“That’s what you hear, huh?” Fredo dimly remembered having told this lie when he’d first sat down at the table.
“I got a band that plays here tomorrow,” the man said, and started describing his music in what was probably English. More gibberish. Turtleneck angel guy, Fredo thought. He looked him up and down. A fag, no question.
“I’m Dean,” the man said. “I like your suit.”
“Pleasure, Dean,” said Fredo. “Sit down, huh? The name’s Troy.”
The search for the missing pilot ended several weeks later, when a body was found at the bottom of a ravine by the Cuyahoga River, not far from the hospital, wedged in a sewer grate. Sewage and rushing water had accelerated decomposition. What remained had been feasted upon by river rats. The face and eyes were completely gone, and when the body was first lifted, live rats slithered out of its mouth and rectum. The admitting bracelet (GERALD O’MALLEY, MALE CAUCASIAN, AGE 38) and what was left of the gown were deemed authentic. The coroner ruled that the body’s injuries were consistent with the ones the pilot had suffered, right down to the distinct stitching style of his ER surgeon. Dental records might have been helpful, but the authorities had no idea who Gerald O’Malley had really been. Whoever he was, however he got from the ICU to the bottom of that ravine, the poor fellow was really most sincerely dead.
Chapter 13
T HE PLAN HAD BEEN for Billy Van Arsdale and Francesca Corleone to fly from Florida to New York along with Francesca’s brothers, her mother, and her mother’s perpetual fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, but Billy’s parents gave him his Christmas present early: a two-tone Thunderbird, waiting for him the day he came home from school in his yellow Joe College jalopy, an old
Jeepster that Billy loved partially because it mortified his parents but that, in truth, had done well to make it back to Palm Beach from Tallahassee. The chance to hit the road for a long trip in a car like that Thunderbird, he told Francesca on the phone, was too much to pass up. She thought she knew what he was also saying, but she said nothing about it and neither did he. The plane tickets had been bought, but Billy’s parents, who were going skiing in Austria, called their travel agent and had him take care of the refunds.
The night before the trip, Billy drove down to Hollywood. He’d been there once before, at Thanksgiving, a month after he and Francesca had started dating, and seemed to have made a good impression on everyone but Kathy, who was cold to him the whole time and then wrote Francesca the next week to say she was disappointed that Francesca’s self-hatred ran so deep. Francesca’s translation: Kathy was so jealous she could die.
Without Kathy around, though, everyone else in the family apparently took it on themselves to make Billy uncomfortable. Before he even had a chance to give Francesca a hug, Poppa Francaviglia had dragooned him to go next door and help put in a new toilet. In the middle of that, Nonna came in carrying a plate with slices of the oranges she’d grown herself on one side and ones that had come from his family’s company on the other, asking him to taste and see if he could tell which was which. They all went to dinner at a tacky steak joint just because Frankie’s football coach’s cousin owned it. Frankie asked Billy why he’d been a swimmer instead of a football player, had he been cut from the football team? Francesca was about to kick her brother under the table, but Billy said that was exactly what had happened and told a funny story about it. Chip spilled his Coke on Billy. Twice. Is it really possible for a ten-year-old to spill his drink twice, on the same person, accidentally? Everyone but Francesca seemed to think so.
Sandra supervised Billy’s loading of the Christmas presents into the trunk and backseat of his car (the hauling of same being a key to getting Sandra to go along with this trip), then escorted Billy and Francesca next door to her parents’ house, where Billy was being exiled as a deterrent to intimacy. It was only nine-thirty, but they had a long day tomorrow. The only reason Billy was spending the night-he only lived an hour away-was so that they could leave at dawn and abide by their pledge to drive all day and night, twenty-four hours straight through to New York without stopping at any hotel. “And if you do have to stop,” Sandra said now, yet again, “for some, God forbid, act of God, you’ll what?”
“Get separate rooms, Ma,” Francesca intoned. “Call to let you know we’re okay.”
“Call when?”
“Immediately, Ma. C’mon. Stop it.”
“And the receipts for those separate rooms?”
“We’ll show them to you to prove it.” As if that would prove a thing. “Ma, this is crazy.”
Sandra made Billy repeat the same litany. He complied. Sandra nodded and said that was good, she trusted them, and she hated to think what would happen if they ever betrayed that. “I know you want to enjoy a nice kiss goodnight,” she said, “so I’ll leave you alone now, eh?”
Hypocrite, Francesca thought. When her mother was her age, she was already pregnant.
“I love you,” Billy whispered, leaning slowly toward her, and she whispered it back, her lips still moving with the words when he kissed her. As if so triggered, the porch light went on.
“I love your family,” Billy said.
“You’re nuts.”
“You wish they’d get off your back, but everyone who doesn’t have what you have wishes they had it.”
It was not the first time she was afraid Billy was with her only because she was different, exotic, the Italian girl, a means of shocking his parents but less extreme than going out with a Negro. Or an Indian, like her roommate Suzy. But it was the first time she summoned the courage to say something about it. “You sure you don’t just love me for my family?”
He shook his head and looked away. Immediately she wished she hadn’t said it. He must have said or thought this about every girl he ever dated, including Francesca herself. As she started to apologize, he leaned toward her and kissed her again, touching her with nothing but his warm lips, and held it. When she opened her eyes, his were already open.
Before noon the next day, they had registered as man and wife at a small beachfront hotel north of Jacksonville. Francesca was afraid the desk clerk would object-neither of them wore a wedding ring-but Billy tipped the clerk as he registered. “You’d be surprised,” he said as they walked to their room, “how much discretion you can buy for twenty bucks.”
Now Francesca stood in the bathroom and took out the pale green negligee that-knowing her mother would go through her luggage-she’d rolled up and hidden in her purse.
Okay, she thought. Here goes. She watched herself undress, as if it were someone else, there in the mirror. A girl-a woman-in the last moments of her virginity. Unbuttoning, unfastening, pulling off, stepping out. Folding each piece of clothing, placing it gingerly on the marble countertop, as if she is afraid it will explode. Patting her stomach. Rubbing her hands over the small dents in her flesh where her fat bra strap had been, trying to make them go away. Twisting around, craning her neck to see what she must look like from behind. She touches her hair, and it doesn’t move. She brushes out the hair spray-long, even strokes-then looks up and tosses her head to watch which way her hair falls, what it looks like after it does. She dabs perfume onto her fingertips, applies it to all the places any woman at a makeup counter would advise, then bends her head and slowly reaches for the flame of black hair between her legs and dabs it, too. The woman’s breasts are large but (Francesca noticed, sighing) cumbersome, asymmetrical: the bosom of a peasant girl in a painting of a half-harvested field (or like Ma’s, the last person on earth Francesca wanted to be thinking about now). The woman takes in a deep breath, deeper now; her breasts rise, assuming shapes somewhat more like the ones in those magazines. Almost imperceptibly, she reddens. She grabs an obviously expensive silk negligee from atop her scuffed brown purse and holds it in front of her by the delicate ribbonry of its shoulder straps. She juts one hip, then the other. She frowns. The negligee is undeniably beautiful, but, somehow all wrong for this woman, at this moment. She holds it at arm’s length and lets go. It falls, a pool of fabric atop her neat pile of clothes. She stands naked, breathing not so much deeply now as heavily. Naked. Nude. But nothing like a painting. A real woman, young and scared, shaved and powdered, covered with goose bumps and shivering despite the tiny beads of sweat on her brow and under her breasts, her chest covered with a faint, splotchy blush. The woman shakes her head and chuckles silently, then smiles in a way she must hope is wicked, or at least brave. She opens the door. She faces the doorway. “Okay,” she says (Is that me? Francesca thought, that chirpy girl’s voice?), “close your eyes.” She crosses her arms over her breasts, hugging herself, closes her own eyes, and emerges into the uncertainty, the inevitability of the next room.
They planned their stops miles in advance, looking for filling stations where they wouldn’t have to wait for an attendant. To cut down on stops, they drank as little as possible. They ate nothing but the sandwiches, fruits, and little strufoli cookies from the picnic basket that Nonna had sent, even though Francesca warned Billy he’d be sorry he was eating even that much. They were each supposed to sleep as much as possible while the other drove, and Francesca did try, but between the replaying of those four hours in the Sand Dollar Inn and the bracing speed at which Billy drove that T-Bird, trying to make up for those four hours, blowing past tractor-trailers and decent families motoring unhurriedly along in their dull Chryslers-not to mention Billy’s habit of turning up the radio all the way whenever he found a rhythm-and-blues song or a song off that amazing new Johnny Fontane long-player-the best she could do was close her eyes.
A state trooper pulled them over. Billy showed the man his license, registration, and another piece of paper, mumbling something about “courtesy
.” Moments later, they were back on the road, uncited, going just as fast. His father’s massive donations to the Fraternal Order of Police, paying off once more. “My Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card,” Billy said. He blushed.
What an upside-down world, Francesca thought, the Carolina pines rushing by her window in a liquid blur. Billy, this older boy she’d once hated herself for being stupid enough to believe she might have, this big man on campus, this rich boy, reduced before her eyes to a boyfriend, her excellent boyfriend, eager to please, calling in favors on her behalf, crazy about her. It all started the day her sister left. That was the same day Francesca met Billy, but Billy’s falling in love with her, as much as he meant to her now, was a lucky by-product.
Growing up, Kathy had always been the smart twin. Francesca was the pretty one, or at least the one more interested in being pretty; the girly one. Kathy was the bohemian who loved wild jazz music and sneaked cigarettes. Francesca was the good Catholic girl. Francesca was a cheerleader and an attendant on the Homecoming Court. Francesca did her homework, or pretended to, in a malt shop. Francesca owned not one but two poodle skirts. But without Kathy around, Francesca-unconsciously-filled up the empty part of her where her sister had been by somehow becoming Kathy. At the time, she told herself that all the clothes shopping she’d done the first few weeks of the term was for her roommate, Suzy’s, benefit, something they could do together and a means of getting Suzy to stop wearing the terrible little-girl jumpers and dresses she’d shown up with. Only after she’d done it did Francesca notice she’d remade her wardrobe into Kathy’s, blacks and reds, turtlenecks and slacks. Likewise, Francesca couldn’t remember making a decision to start smoking, her sister’s brand, no less, but open her purse and that’s what was there. The smoking was probably a consequence of the studying. She never made a conscious decision to study more, but for no reason she understood, suddenly in class she was one of the smart kids, her judiciously raised hand sought by her beleaguered professors when they wanted to move things along. Which came first, the chicken of how good it felt in class to be one of those kids or the egg of long nights bent over her desk, smoke curling in the languorous haze of her study lamp?
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