The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  Likewise, all hearts were warmed by the story of Vito Corleone’s lone intrusion into the romantic lives of his children-the blind date he’d arranged many years before for Connie, soon after she’d begun dating Carlo Rizzi, with a nice boy who’d just graduated from college with a business degree. Ed Federici’s lively, self-deprecating version of the disastrous date inspired Mama Corleone to slip a champagne toast to the happy fidanzati in between courses.

  And what courses they were: Crab legs and shrimp cocktail. Fried baccala and stuffed calamari. Steamed clams in a marinara sauce, over fresh angel-hair pasta. And finally-at least until the break before dessert-flounder stuffed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and several secret ingredients Zia Angelina had inserted when no one was watching.

  “The risk of heart attack,” said Ed Federici, palms on the table, dazed as a man looking at the empty space where his stolen car used to be, “triples in the first hour after a heavy meal.”

  Stan had given up halfway through the last course and was asleep in the next room, bathed in the flickering glow of an unwatched football game. Only two people were still eating: Frankie, forking it in like a champ, and Billy, who was poking at his flounder like a man who’d found gold and was trying to recall why it was valuable.

  Connie shushed Ed and slapped him on top of his florid, prematurely bald head. “Mamma hears that, she’ll be the one who has the heart attack.” She’d been drinking wine at the same pace all day and had just opened a new bottle of Marsala. Her slap, theoretically playful, was loud enough that those watching it flinched. Several people in other rooms stuck their head around the corner to investigate. The slap had immediately left a hand-shaped mark.

  Francesca led Billy from the table, taking him into her grandfather’s old office just as Aunt Kay finished folding up the kids’ table. “You get enough to eat, Billy?” Kay asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He sat down heavily on the leather couch against the wall.

  “Save room for dessert,” Kay said, smirking. “Hey, either of you seen Anthony?”

  “He’s outside, I think,” Billy said. “With Chip and a bunch of the Clemenza kids.” They were the children of kids Francesca used to play with when she was Chip’s age. Now those playmates had families of their own and lived in houses down the street.

  They were alone now. “You did good, baby. They like you, I can tell.”

  “Why are you grinning like that?” he asked, lying across the couch, clutching his stomach.

  She knelt on the floor beside him. “No such thing as a free lunch,” she whispered. “So pay up, buster. Kiss me.”

  He obeyed. It lingered, not the sort of kiss Francesca had meant to have in this house. When she opened her eyes, the lights were flashing off and on.

  “Don’t make me dump cold water on you,” Kathy said. “C’mon. Dishes. March. I’ll wash, you dry.”

  Billy lay back, the same sated look on his face he’d had in the hotel, and finger-waved.

  The women had of course been doing dishes all day. Francesca was looking at ten minutes’ worth of plates, knives, stemware, serving bowls, and baby bottles. A jazz station played on a small console radio Kathy had found somewhere. On a creaking wooden chair in the corner, Zia Angelina snored. The twins were otherwise alone together. “Where’s Grandma?” Francesca said.

  “Mass. She and Aunt Kay just left.”

  “Twice? You’re kidding me.”

  “Go look. Car’s gone.” Kathy bent her head toward Angelina. “Thank God she snores,” Kathy said. “Otherwise we’d have to be checking her all the time to see if she was dead. Don’t look at me like that. She’s deaf on top of her no English.”

  “How much you want to bet she can understand more than she lets on?”

  “Oh, you mean like Bee-Boy?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You think everyone else is so blind-”

  “I don’t think everyone is so anything.”

  “-but you’re the blind one. That snotty little good ol’ boy in there, asleep in Grandpa’s office-that’s some nerve, don’t you think? Can’t you see he’s just using you?”

  “Using me?” Francesca said. “What are you, back in high school? I took him in there.”

  “What are you, the Slut Princess of Tallahassee?” Her glasses were half fogged from the steam from the tap, but she kept them on.

  “You’ve lost your mind. It’s sad, actually. I feel sorry for you.” Francesca held up a fish-shaped porcelain platter and arched her eyebrows.

  “No idea,” Kathy said, “just stack it with that stuff under the phone there. Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas? To him, we’re a bunch of dirty Guineas. Something for him to laugh about over highballs at the yacht club with Skip and Miffie, the year he saw real dago gangsters with tommy guns in their violin cases.”

  Anthony Corleone had brought his violin all the way from Nevada just to play “Silent Night” for them-not well, but it was sweet. “I’m not even going to dignify that with a reply.”

  Kathy clanked a wineglass against the faucet, and it shattered. She didn’t even curse. She was cut. It bled like mad at first but was really nothing. They cleaned it up, together, without saying a word. Francesca got her a bandage.

  Kathy heaved a sigh, met her sister’s eyes, and said something in a voice so small Francesca had to ask her to repeat it. “I said,” Kathy whispered, “that it’s all true.”

  “What’s all true?”

  Kathy rinsed the scum from the sink and told Francesca to get her coat. They walked to the farthest corner of the yard, concealed behind a floodlight, and Kathy-an old joke they’d each done dozens of times-lit two cigarettes at once, in the manner of a Hollywood tough-guy leading man, and handed one to her sister. “You and Billy? That was probably the first kiss anyone ever had in that room that didn’t lead directly to-” She looked up into the snow, as if the right word might land on her.

  “To what?”

  Kathy stood with her hand on her hip and blew a stream of smoke away from the light. “Do you know how long it takes to have someone declared legally dead? Do you know how long it takes to get an annulment from the church?”

  “A couple months, I guess.”

  “You guess wrong, little sister.” Kathy was four minutes older. “Longer. That’s how it started.” When Aunt Connie had announced her engagement and set the date for December, Kathy had been as shocked as everyone else. She’d presumed that Connie was pregnant, but a chance discovery in Connie’s bathroom ruled that out. Kathy, being Kathy, had gone to the library and made some phone calls. It takes a full year before the state declares a person legally dead, and it’s complicated. Most annulments, even for a woman abandoned, take just as long.

  “Oh, come on,” Francesca said. “Is that all? A donation to some judge’s campaign fund, another to the Knights of Columbus, and everything gets sped up. It’s the way of the world.”

  Kathy shook her head. She looked away from her sister, into the darkness. “You don’t get it. She’s not getting an annulment. It’s a lie. She doesn’t need one. They lied to us. They hushed it up. Uncle Carlo didn’t disappear. He was murdered.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Uncle Mike and everyone he controls.”

  “You’re a retard,” Francesca said. “There was never even a funeral for Uncle Carlo.”

  “There’s a death certificate on file,” Kathy said. “I went to the courthouse and found it.”

  “I bet the New York phone book has a dozen people named Carlo Rizzi.”

  Kathy stood in the darkness, smoking, shaking her head. “The human eye is utterly passive,” she said, obviously quoting some professor or textbook. “Only the brain can see.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Kathy didn’t answer. She finished her cigarette, lit two more, and started again. One Sunday, she’d met Aunt Connie in the city, for lunch at the Wal
dorf. Connie showed up drunk, with a man who wasn’t Ed Federici, kissed the man good-bye, took her seat, and when Kathy confronted her by asking how it was going with the annulment, Connie blurted it out: Carlo didn’t disappear, she said. Mike killed him. Connie held up her hand and told Kathy not to speak. She was drunk, but her voice was steady. Mike killed him, Connie said, or had him killed, because Carlo killed your father. Carlo killed Sonny.

  Francesca burst out laughing.

  Kathy’s eyes looked lifeless. “Connie said that Carlo beat her up, knowing that Pop would come to her rescue. When she called him, Pop did just that, or tried to. Men with machine guns killed him when he was stopped at a tollbooth on the Jones Beach Causeway.”

  “Aunt Connie is out of her mind,” Francesca said, “and so are you if you believe that.”

  “Just listen,” Kathy said. “Okay?”

  Francesca didn’t answer.

  “Pop’s bodyguards were on the scene right after he was killed, and they took his body to an undertaker who owed a favor to Grandpa Vito. Nothing about it ever got into the newspapers. Some cops took bribes to write the whole thing up as an accident.”

  “Pop didn’t have bodyguards. No one-” She was going to say killed Pop but couldn’t.

  Kathy tossed away her cigarette butt. “Come on. You don’t remember the bodyguards?”

  “I know what you’re thinking about, but those were guys from his company. Importers.”

  Kathy bit her lower lip. “Do you honestly think I’d joke about this?”

  “I don’t think you’re joking. I just think you’re wrong.”

  “This is hard,” Kathy said. “Just hear me out.”

  Francesca, frowning, gave her an after-you gesture.

  “All right,” Kathy said. “So then Aunt Connie says that the men who… Well, the men at the tollbooth, those men, it turns out, were working for the same men who paid Uncle Carlo to beat her. She was crying her eyes out at this point, and if you’d seen it, believe me, you’d have believed her. Her own husband took money to beat her, and he did it, and the reason he did it was so that those men could kill her brother,” Kathy hissed, “so they could kill Pop-”

  “Stop it.”

  “-and she stayed with him for another seven years. She fucked him for another-”

  “That’s enough.”

  “-seven years, and she had babies with that monster. But it’s so, so, so much bigger than even that. Connie says that the same men who did all that are also the ones who shot Grandpa Vito and they’re the same people who killed Uncle Mike’s wife.”

  “First of all,” Francesca said, “Aunt Kay’s not-”

  Again, the hand. Not Kay, Kathy said. The other one, Apollonia, his first wife, in Sicily, about whom Kay knows nothing. She was blown to kingdom come with a car bomb.

  Apollonia? Francesca thought. Car bomb? Kathy had enough imagination to invent things that wild, but Aunt Connie certainly didn’t. If Connie had really said that, she’d either fallen for someone else’s lie or was telling the truth.

  Kathy kept talking faster, the stories Connie told piling onto the things Kathy had been able to confirm later. Moment by moment Kathy’s voice sounded colder. She might have talked for five minutes or five hours, Francesca had no idea. Francesca couldn’t stand there anymore and couldn’t move. She concentrated on the popping of the firecrackers in the front yard, the sound of children’s laughter. Later, she noticed those sounds were gone, but she hadn’t heard them stop. For a while she concentrated on how it felt to have snow melting in her hair. She tried to look at her sister and also past her, to the wintertime remnants of her grandfather’s beloved garden, where he died, happy, at peace.

  “… and that’s why Aunt Kay became Catholic and why she goes to Mass every day and sometimes twice. They’re on their knees trying to pray their evil murdering husbands’ souls out of hell, just like Ma ought to do for-”

  And then just like that Francesca was looking down at her sister, crumpled in the snow, bleeding again, this time from her nose. Her cigarette was still in her mouth. Her glasses had flown off her face and landed a few feet away. Francesca’s right hand was still balled into a fist, and it hurt. Kathy stirred. “Lunatic,” she muttered.

  A tide of rage roared in Francesca’s ears. She kicked Kathy in the ribs. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it was enough to make Kathy grunt in pain.

  Francesca turned and ran.

  Francesca lay on her side on the edge of a double bed, in a darkened room that had once belonged to Uncle Fredo, who’d lived here with his parents until he was thirty. He’d been in Las Vegas for ten years, but the décor-dark drapes and wood paneling, a faded map of Sicily, and a fly-fishing painting that looked like it came from Sears-seemed unaltered, as if Grandma Carmela expected him to move back in any day.

  After what might have been hours or minutes, Francesca heard someone in the bathroom across the hall, banging and running water in a rhythm that was unmistakably Kathy’s. Francesca heard Kathy’s footsteps, heard her get into the other side of the bed. She did not have to look to know that Kathy was facing the other wall, lying on her side, a mirror image of Francesca except for the pajamas. Francesca wore nightgowns.

  For a long time they lay there. If Francesca hadn’t spent thousands of nights in the same bedroom as Kathy, she’d have had every reason to presume she was asleep. “Why did you say I was pregnant?” Francesca said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When we first got here. When you ran to the car like you were actually glad to see me.”

  Again, anyone else might have thought Kathy had fallen asleep. “Ohhhhh,” she finally said. “That. Don’t you remember? When we dropped you off at school, the last thing you said to me was to not wreck my eyes reading. I said don’t get pregnant. You got here and the first thing you do, with your remarkable grasp of the self-evident, is tell me I have glasses. So I-”

  “Other way around. You said don’t get pregnant and I said don’t wreck your eyes.”

  “I stand corrected. So are you?”

  “No,” Francesca finally said. “Of course not.”

  “You haven’t? At all?”

  “Why? Have you?”

  “No,” Kathy said, so quickly Francesca figured the answer was yes.

  They did not talk about what had happened behind the floodlights-the stories or the punch or even the fate of Kathy’s eyeglasses. They stayed on opposite hips on opposite sides of the bed. They stayed awake long enough to hear their grandmother downstairs, beginning to fry sausage, which meant that it was probably about four-thirty. Eventually, they did fall asleep. Eventually, as sleeping people will, they moved. Inexorably, each was drawn toward the center of the bed. They entwined their arms and legs. Their long hair seemed blended together. They even breathed as one, each exhaling on the neck of the other.

  “Oh, honey,” Francesca whispered in the darkness, presuming her sister was asleep. “I can’t believe what I did. What I did to you.”

  “Maybe I am you,” Kathy murmured, and they, as one, went back to sleep.

  Francesca awoke to the piercing shrieks of children and the murmurs of herding adults. She sat up. Snow was falling. Downstairs, the pitch of the din grew higher. Over it all rose Grandma Carmela’s deep call of Buon Natale! Someone had arrived. Francesca hurried down the narrow back stairs. The kitchen was full of food but empty. She heard two sets of feet coming her way and stopped so she wouldn’t get smacked in the face with the kitchen door. The door flew open. Kathy and Billy were both showered and dressed, grinning like they’d just caught Santa Claus red-handed and commandeered the sleigh. Billy was decked out in a red blazer, a green tie, and a shirt so white it put snow to shame. Unfrayed cuffs. The white of divinity fudge.

  “You’ll never guess who just drove up with your uncle,” Billy said.

  “Which uncle?” She smoothed her ratty hair. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth.

  “Which one do you think?” Kathy said. />
  “Mike.” They both came to get me because they were competing to tell me this news.

  “Oh, please.” Kathy rolled her eyes. “Uncle Fredo.” She wasn’t wearing the glasses. She had a black eye, but not much of one. A person would have to be looking for it.

  “C’mon, guess,” Billy said.

  “I give up,” Francesca said. “Santa Claus.”

  “Weirder,” Kathy said.

  “Who’s weirder than Santa Claus?”

  “Deanna Dunn,” Billy said.

  Francesca rolled her eyes. On their last date, they’d gone to see that Deanna Dunn picture where she has a deaf baby and her husband dies at the end fighting the Great Chicago Fire. “Just tell me.”

  “I’m serious as a judge.” He held up his hand, ready to be sworn in. Even at twenty-two, dressed in a red blazer on Christmas morning, Billy was easy to picture as a judge.

  “He’s not kidding,” Kathy said. “It’s Deanna Dunn. Cross my heart.” Which she actually did. “I’d actually heard a rumor that she and Uncle Fredo were dating, but I didn’t-”

  Just then the kitchen door swung open, and trailing in Grandma Carmela’s wake came Uncle Fredo and Deanna Dunn. In person, Deanna Dunn’s head seemed gigantic. She was very tall and more beautiful than pretty. On her left hand was a diamond ring as proportionately absurd as her head.

  “Miss Dunn!” Francesca said.

  “What’d I tell you?” Kathy said, even though it had been Billy who’d told her. Kathy liked foreign movies. Deanna Dunn was someone she made fun of. But the way Kathy was looking at her now, she could have been the secretary of the Deanna Dunn Fan Club.

  “Please, darling. Call me Deanna.” Her accent was neither American nor British and in person sounded remarkably unlike human speech.

  She took Francesca’s hand.

  Deanna Dunn, so magnetic Francesca felt dizzy. Yesterday in Jacksonville had only in the most indirect way unleashed last night’s exchange with Kathy. It had nothing to do with the surreal sight of Deanna Dunn in this old, familiar kitchen. Francesca’s life had been seized by dream-and-nightmare logic.