The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  “If all the students at that place whose fathers are in a position to support the school-”

  “I don’t care about everyone else. I want to be there on my own merits.”

  “You’re being so naive I can hardly stand to look at you.”

  “So is it all right?” Michael said. “I’m sure you’ll have to ask Theresa.”

  Tom shook his head and said, no, he could speak for Theresa. If Michael wanted to make the biggest mistake of his life, Tom wasn’t going to stop him.

  At the end of the term, Michael, with straight A’s, dropped out of an Ivy League school and tried to find a job. Frustrated, he finally asked Tom one night at dinner if he could borrow enough money to take some classes at City College. When Tom told him that if he was going to borrow money anyway, he should borrow it for Columbia, Michael didn’t say anything.

  “That’s just what the old man would have done,” Tom said. He paused, but Michael didn’t ask what he meant. Tom answered. “The silence.”

  Which Michael maintained. Theresa cleared the table before anyone said anything more.

  “You can’t run from who you are,” Tom said.

  Michael laughed. “This is America, my orphaned friend,” he said. “Running from who we are is who we are.”

  For a moment, Tom’s eyes flashed with anger. He composed himself. “You want money, you know where to get all the money you could ever need for anything. I’m not getting in the middle of this any more than I already have.”

  Michael felt trapped. He could defy his father’s wishes by asking to join the family business, which was out of the question. Going to school and doing well and becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a professor: that was what his father wanted. He wanted Michael to follow another path entirely. But what path could Michael take that he wouldn’t find had been blazed by the invisible hand of his father? Most paths wouldn’t just be blazed, either. They’d be blacktopped, lit by floodlights, and flanked by sturdy handrails.

  Where could he go?

  His father was building a house on Long Island, and that spring the family would be moving-Connie, of course, who was sixteen, but also Fredo, who was still living at home. Sonny and Sandra had just had twin girls, and they’d have a house right next door. On the blueprint for his father’s house was a room labeled “Michael’s Bedroom.” When he saw it, he got the same suffocating feeling he’d had when he’d thought the family business would claim him at sixteen.

  Michael had fallen prey to that curse of the young; he knew only what he didn’t want. A life driven by avoidance is like a team trying not to lose. Like a skydiver trying to land anywhere but in that one tree over there. Like the traveling salesman who can sleep in the barn so long as he doesn’t. Like two naked lovers in Paradise free to do anything at all except.

  So Michael Corleone did what thousands of foundering young men in the 1930s did: he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps.

  Most of the other men in the corps, of course, were people with no advantages, no opportunities at all, men who told tales of a kind of desperate poverty that Michael (despite his parents’ tales of living through similar circumstances) had never before understood. He was stationed in the Winooski River Valley in Vermont. He planted countless trees and moved untold tons of earth. Unlike the other Italians, he ate the tasteless food without complaining. His name was constantly mispronounced, and he never corrected anyone. He volunteered to help the tutors who came in to give night classes, and before long he was running the camp’s education program. He taught hundreds of men to read, many of them Italians who could barely read Italian when Michael started working with them. Like everyone else, he was paid thirty dollars a month, twenty-two of which were automatically sent home to his family. At night, Michael lay in his bunk and tried to imagine his father’s face each month when that check arrived. Only during the courtship of his wives, Kay (his second wife and first true courtship) and Apollonia (first wife, second courtship), was Michael Corleone ever happier.

  There were about a thousand men in his camp. Most were only a generation or two removed from their roots in Europe. If one thing united them, though, it was their pride in being Americans-a pride enhanced by their shared, daily mission. So when the Germans annexed Czechoslovakia, those who came from Germany felt no animosity from their Czech or Slovak campmates. Similarly, the only nationalistic fervor touched off in the Winooski Valley by the Italian invasion of Albania or the Soviet-Finnish War was a shared dread of what might happen next and how it would affect the USA.

  “It’s going to be different for us,” said Joe Lucadello one night. He was a tutor, too. They were the last ones in the classroom building, locking it up. “Italians. Just wait.”

  Joe’s people were from Genoa by way of Camden, New Jersey. He’d wanted to be an architect, but his family had lost everything in the stock market crash. Now he designed retaining walls and picnic shelters. Smart as a whip and about as skinny, Joe was Michael’s best friend in the corps.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Michael said. If America was drawn into the European war, everyone of Italian descent would be suspect.

  “The German fellas look just like-”

  “I know,” Michael said. “You’re right.”

  “Don’t laugh, but I’ve been working on a plan to kill Mussolini.”

  “Come on,” Michael said, laughing. “How are you going to do that?”

  “I didn’t say I knew how. I said I’m working on a plan.”

  Joe was that rare combination: a resourceful schemer who was prepared to act. Ordinarily, he was practical, too, but he had an idealistic streak.

  “You couldn’t get within five miles of Mussolini. Nobody could.”

  “Think about it. You read a lot of history books. There’s never been anyone-any hero, any villain, any king, any leader of any kind-that it was impossible to kill.”

  It was a sobering thought. Michael did think about it, and he admitted that maybe Joe was right. “I suppose when you’re done with Mussolini you’ll go after Hitler.”

  “I know I’m just dreaming,” Joe said. “I’m not a fool. I know I’m not really the man for the job. It’s just hard to watch the way the world is going and not do anything about it.”

  On this they agreed. The ancient rift between northern and southern Italians had no effect on their friendship or their shared contempt for Mussolini. They dreaded war. At the same time-because it would crush Mussolini and at the same time be a chance for men like them once and for all to prove themselves in the eyes of the American people-they yearned for it.

  Then there was the matter of Ustica. About the same time Mussolini signed the Axis treaty with Hitler, he ordered his army to Sicily to round up all known or suspected Mafiosi and imprison them on the tiny island of Ustica (Vito continued to regard Mussolini as just another vainglorious oppressor whose time would come and go). When Michael and Joe talked about the men imprisoned at Ustica, they lamented the lack of American due process. Michael gave no indication of his father’s allegiance with those men. Joe knew the Corleones as olive oil importers. There were cases of the stuff in the camp’s mess kitchen.

  In June of 1940, when Italy declared war against the Allies, Joe Lucadello had a plan. “We go to Canada,” he said.

  “What’s in Canada?”

  Joe pulled out a newspaper clipping. According to the article, the Royal Canadian Air Force was seeking experienced American pilots. A World War I ace named Billy Bishop-“the Eddie Rickenbacker of Canada,” the article called him-would oversee their training personally.

  “That’s great,” Michael said, “but we’re not experienced pilots.”

  Joe had it all worked out. He had a friend, a Polish Jew from Rhode Island, who was a pilot for the CCC, dumping water to fight forest fires and spraying DDT on bug-infested areas where crews were about to work. Joe got the guy to give them lessons, and they all three went to Ottawa to join up. Joe convincingly forged licenses for him and Michael. They we
re all initially accepted. Two days later, Billy Bishop himself walked into the barracks and asked to see Michael Corleone (which he pronounced correctly-a tipoff something was up). He asked to see Michael’s pilot’s license. There were a number of men in that room without licenses, some of them crop dusters and barnstormers who a few months later would be holding their own against the Luftwaffe. The license wasn’t the point. Somehow, Michael knew, his father had found out he was here. There was no sense using the forged license and possibly getting Joe kicked out, too. “I’m sorry, sir,” Michael said to Billy Bishop. “I don’t have one.”

  Michael took a bus back to the camp and got his job back. Six months later, he was on another bus, heading to New York for a surprise birthday party for his father, when the driver heard the news about Pearl Harbor. Shaking, he pulled over to the shoulder and turned up the radio. Eventually, they got back on the road. Michael walked straight from the bus terminal to Times Square. The place was teeming with men bragging about the killing they were about to do. Michael got in the line for the Army Air Corps, but as he waited an officer walked down the line and told everyone who was under five ten that he’d have to seek his revenge in another branch of the service. Michael missed the height requirement by an inch. The Marines, too, appealed to his ideals. An elite fighting squad, tougher than the rest, with a rigorous initiation and a sacred code of honor. They had the same height requirement, but emotions were running high, and Michael and the lieutenant signing him up gave each other a look and an understanding passed between them. Michael caught a cab to his father’s house.

  Vito Corleone’s favorite child was the last person at the party to say “Surprise!”

  Vito was stoic about Michael’s news. He asked the questions any loving and concerned father would. It was clear that he did not approve, though he never said so.

  In the days that followed, the U.S. government rounded up the Italian citizens within its borders and held them as prisoners of war (Enzo the baker, for example, would spend two years in a prison in New Jersey). In addition, more than four thousand American citizens with Italian names were arrested. Theresa Hagen’s parents were among them, though they were not charged and were quickly released. Hundreds of people with less sophisticated legal representation were detained much longer-months, years-even though they, too, were charged with no crimes.

  Before Christmas, the government issued an edict that restricted the participation of Italian Americans in war-related industries. All over the country, hardworking, law-abiding American longshoremen, factory workers, and civilian clerk-typists were summarily fired.

  By then, Michael was at Parris Island, crawling like a reptile across a parking lot covered with broken oyster shells.

  Four percent of the American population came from Italy. They were destined to make up ten percent of the casualties.

  Everything the government issued Michael Corleone was too big-his helmet, his uniform, even his boondockers. He barely noticed. He was proud to be a Marine, and he saw what he wanted to see. But the first time his mother saw the picture of her youngest son, hair shorn, dressed in ill-fitting dress whites that looked more like a costume than a uniform, she burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for three days. She then put the photo on the mantelpiece. Every time she passed it, the tears began anew. No one dared to move the picture, though.

  Michael Corleone’s platoon at Parris Island had forty-seven men, all from the East, with a fairly even split between northerners and southerners. Michael had never been in the South before. He knew more about the rivalry between north and south in Italy than the one here, and was surprised by how similar those two rivalries turned out to be. Being from southern Italy and northern America, he could see both sides. And the arguments were over nothing. Music, for example. The southerners liked what the northerners called shit-kicker music. The northerners liked Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, classy numbers they could dance to. Though Michael had known Johnny Fontane all his life, he kept that to himself during the many arguments waged over his music. Any time some petty squabble made the men even for a moment forget about the real enemy, their DI made them regret it-by becoming the real enemy. They’d all arrived most afraid of being afraid, of failing to do their duty when the time came. An hour later, they were more afraid of Sergeant Bradshaw than anything. Michael was a quiet, able soldier, but he spent his days convinced that at any moment his DI might kill him. At night, Michael lay sweating in his bunk, thinking about what a brilliant system boot camp was.

  Michael’s suspicion that the Corps’s height requirement had been instituted in part to keep Italians out of the elite forces was borne out when he found only one other person of Italian origin in his platoon. Tony Ferraro, also from New York, was a minor-league ballplayer-a catcher. He looked it: stocky, bald on top. Like Michael, he’d volunteered as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor, but what he really wanted was to go into Italy and send Mussolini to hell.

  Tony and Michael were the two shortest men in the platoon. They were slow-footed and weak marksmen, but they’d arrived at PI in better physical condition than most of the other men-happily, since everything they’d ever heard about Marine boot camp was true. Men collapsed, vomited, vomited blood. Michael learned to love it. He felt sorry for the platoons whose DIs sent them back to their barracks after only four hours of marching in the knee-deep sand instead of the eight Sergeant Bradshaw made them do. When boot camp ended, he addressed the platoon-for the first time-as men.

  Every Marine in the platoon loved him. Many shed unashamed tears.

  Michael, who shed nothing in boot camp but a few harmless pounds, again marveled at the genius of what had been inflicted upon him.

  A few months later, Tony Ferraro was securing an island so small it didn’t have a name or a military purpose either when a Japanese sniper shot him right in the heart.

  Before dawn, the men grabbed their rifles, shouldered their seabags, and stood at attention beside a row of idling trucks. A corporal with a thick southern accent called out names and assignments. He butchered Corleone, which Michael had expected. He was shocked, though, about what the corporal said next.

  Camp Elliott, M1 rifle, infantry. Michael Corleone was going to the Pacific.

  His dream of helping to liberate Italy was shattered. But what was he going to do, write his congressman? It was probably his congressman (after no more than a nod from Michael’s father) who’d rigged this in the first place.

  Michael let nothing show. A Marine goes where he’s sent.

  A southerner already on the Camp Elliott truck extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, Dago boy!” he said, pulling Michael up.

  That was the Marine name for San Diego: Dago. Michael knew how else the man meant it, but he didn’t rise to the bait. They were Marines first, Americans second. Whatever else they were came after that.

  Michael had never seen the West before, either. He spent the better part of the trip at the troop-train window, mesmerized. It was a good way to see what he was fighting for. Nothing could have prepared him for the size, grandeur, and beauty of this country. The farther west he went, the more he fell in love with the craggy, improbable landscape.

  They stopped for a desert training session about thirty miles from Las Vegas, where the first big casino had opened months earlier. That night, Michael killed a rabbit with his bare hands and ate its stringy meat in a cold arroyo, staring at the otherworldly glow from the town that visionary men like him were destined to transform into an industry that would still be there, thriving, long after the fall of the Axis powers, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union, after most of America’s factories and steel mills went broke or moved to Southeast Asia.

  In San Diego, Michael went through another few weeks of lectures and training, hand-to-hand combat, swimming tests, all the finishing touches, but when it came time to ship out, his heart again sunk. He’d been assigned to guard detail. Indefinitely.

  The first chance he got, he went to a pay phone and cal
led Tom. The Hagens were having dinner. A baby screamed in the background.

  “I’m going to ask you something, Tom. If you lie to me, I’ll know. Things will never be the same between us.”

  “Any question that starts out like that,” Tom said, “is one a man shouldn’t ask.”

  Michael was young and undeterred. There would come a time when he’d have understood that Tom had just answered the question Michael was about to ask: “Did Pop have anything to do with my assignment?”

  “Your assignment to do what?” Tom said.

  Michael lowered his voice. “I did not join the Corps to be a cop.”

  “You’re a cop?” Hagen said.

  Michael hung up on him. A few days later, Michael pulled shore patrol and stood on the docks with his rifle shouldered, watching as men he’d come to trust shipped out, the air thick with bragging about all the Japs they were about to kill. He never saw any of those men again.

  The worst guard detail job was making civilians follow the blackout law. People think their circumstances are special, and it’s impossible to reason with them. The first few exasperating nights of this, Michael wanted to smash in their smooth, self-important faces with the butt of his rifle, but he soon came up with a better idea. His CO, who had an even lower opinion of civilians, thought it was brilliant. “I never thought I’d say this to an Italian fella,” the CO said, “but you may be officer material.”

  Michael took two other men and went to an oil storage facility north of the city, right on the coast. Two big oil tanks, both empty. It was a nice change of pace to be away from the whiny civilians and also to have a chance to make use of the training he’d had in explosives.

  The next day, the newspapers and the radio (their anonymous source was Michael himself, pretending to be the CO) reported that the oil tanks they’d blown up had been hit by a Jap sub that-because of the illegal city lights-had no trouble hitting its target.

  The blackout was much easier to enforce after that.