The Godfather returns

by Mark Winegardner

  At every party, though, except for during her trips to the restroom, Billy stayed by her side. It was painful to watch him thwart his instinct to abandon her and work the room, but not so painful that Francesca was ever tempted to tell him to go do what he needed to do.

  They finally arrived at Constitution Hall and were walking up the steps when she heard a high, unfamiliar voice calling her name. She turned and couldn’t see where it was coming from.

  “Bee-Boy! Bee-Boy!”

  Francesca’s heart soared. It was Mary Corleone and Uncle Mike. She hadn’t seen them since her wedding day, more than three years before. Her uncle looked like he’d aged ten years.

  She reached down to pick Mary up and then thought better of it. “I hardly recognized you,” Francesca said. “You’re huge.”

  “You’re huge, too,” Mary said, rubbing Francesca’s belly. Mary was her cousin. She could rub until her heart’s content. “We both have on the same-colored dress. That’s a baby in there, right? I’m smart. I’m seven years old.”

  Uncle Mike asked if he could touch it.

  “Of course,” she said. “You are smart,” she told Mary. “It is a baby. A big one, I think.”

  When the baby kicked and Michael recoiled in delight, Francesca noticed her cousin Tony, standing behind his father. She bent down to hug him, too. He smiled but didn’t say anything. There was a man in a long coat behind them, too, who must have been a bodyguard.

  “My brother doesn’t talk much,” Mary said. “But he’s not retarded. When he sings he can say anything. People are going to sing at the fancy ball, did you know that?”

  “You’re retarded,” Tony said, perfectly well.

  “I was hoping I’d see you here,” Francesca said. “When did you get in?”

  Michael looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Are you staying long?” Francesca asked. “We’re not really moved in, but I’d love to have you come see our apartment.”

  A look passed between Billy and Michael, then Billy turned the other way. The only other time they’d seen each other had been at the wedding; Billy had acted funny then, too. She knew it had to do with how her family’s past might affect his political future. Every marriage has taboo conversations, she thought, and this, really, was their only one. They were lucky.

  “Just for the night,” Michael said. “Next time I’m in town, maybe. The work with the transition team is over, obviously, but I should still be back here on business fairly often.”

  Billy extended his hand to the bodyguard. “Billy Van Arsdale.”

  “We met,” Al Neri said. But that was all he said.

  “C’mon, Uncle Mike,” Francesca said. “You sure you don’t have time for a home-cooked breakfast?”

  “Yeah, are you sure?” Mary said. “Mommy says breakfast is the most importantest meal of the day.”

  “All you eat for breakfast is cheese,” Tony said.

  “That’s from a song,” Mary scoffed. “I eat everything. Please, Daddy? Can we go?”

  Marguerite Duvall took the stage with ten women in red lingerie and ten slim men in tight-fitting simulated chaps, to re-create the big production number from Cattle Call, complete with the burning bordello and her famous risqué-but-classy finish. Rita played the French madam, the best friend of the sheriff. It was a small role, but this number had helped get her a Tony award nomination (that and the rumor that she was sleeping with the man who was now president).

  Johnny Fontane stood in the wings, dressed in a white cape with a purple satin lining and a striped swallowtail tuxedo designed especially for tonight’s event by the best designer in Milan. He was sipping what looked like bourbon but was really tea and honey in a rocks glass.

  “The lovely and talented Miss Done-’Em-All Duvall,” said Buzz Fratello, shaking his head in admiration. He and Dotty were on next. “I hear she’s fucking Fuckface, too.”

  Johnny had introduced her to both Jimmy Shea and Louie Russo. But Fontane had included Rita in the inaugural ball on his own, with no word from either of them. The talent roster had been his call. The Ambassador made some suggestions, but Johnny ignored him. Rita might not be the biggest star here, but she’d been nominated for a Tony award, for Christ’s sake. For Fontane, she was a good luck charm. He’d met her when Hal Mitchell rounded her up-back when she was just some struggling French showgirl-for a threesome the night before the first sessions on Fontane Blue. Ever since then, Johnny Fontane’s life had been mostly Saturday nights. Even when things had gone south with Annie McGowan, a week in Acapulco with Rita and a Golden Globe for that picture about the alkie detective, and everything was so jake it was jacob.

  The fake bawdy house was in flames now. The audience seemed to be eating it up.

  “Look at him,” Fratello said, meaning the president: front and center, holding hands with his wife and beaming at the taut-legged, high-kicking ersatz hookers. “I’ll sleep a lot better tonight knowing the leader of the free world is a man who appreciates fine pussy,” he said.

  “Relaxes the hand that’s on the button,” Johnny agreed.

  Buzz made his inimitable leering noises. “Which button we talkin’ about?” Buzz asked, which cracked Johnny up.

  “Let me ask you something, Buzz,” Johnny said. “You’re a paesano. You sing in all the same joints I do. You know the same guys I know. Why don’t they ask you that Mafia shit?”

  “You know the definition of dirty Guinea? An Italian gentleman who just left the room.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m funny,” Buzz said. “Who ever heard of a funny gangster?”

  “I got news for you, pally. You’re not that funny.”

  “I love you, too, you wop bastard.”

  Not a lot of other people could talk to him this way, but from Buzz it was different.

  “C’mon. You own a part of a casino, Johnny. Who else owns casinos but wiseguys?”

  “A lot of people, and you know it.”

  “I know it, but that’s not how people see it,” Buzz said. “Look, I hear it, too. What you said to that reporter yesterday, you were right.”

  “I never read that about you.”

  “You probably sold more records since we been talkin’ than I will all year. Crook your little finger, and any chick alive follows you home. And you’re a movie star. If that ain’t enough, you got your pussy-chasing partner there elected president, and he owes you. When you’re on top of the world, my dago friend, little people sit home at night, dreaming about knockin’ you down. Forget it. You’ll live longer.”

  Jimmy Shea was a man of vision who’d inspired the country and gotten the most votes. Nobody got him elected. Johnny had worked hard to help him, but so had a lot of people. Still, he was proud Jimmy had won, and he had high hopes for what it would be like to be one of the best friends of the president. He’d already redone his estate in Las Vegas, expanding the main house and building bungalows for guests and Secret Service. There was a second pool now and even a helicopter pad. Jimmy had said it would be his western White House.

  Now came the big finish. The stage was full of fake smoke, and Rita tore off her dress. She was wearing a body suit. The squares in the cheap seats might have sworn they saw her bird, but from where Johnny Fontane stood, it was pure cornball, not to mention a lousy substitute for Rita in the genuine altogether.

  “You know the other reason they don’t ask me as often if I’m in the Mafia?”

  “What’s that?” Johnny was backing away, ready to take the stage.

  “Because I’m not.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Buzz lowered his head. “I am sorry if I have displeased you.” He dropped to his knees, grabbed Johnny Fontane’s right hand, and kissed the signet ring Annie McGowan had given him during their brief marriage. “Forgive me, Godfather.”

  Only once did Billy Van Arsdale ask Francesca Corleone if her family was in the Mafia. It was the day before his graduation from Flo
rida State. His parents had taken them to dinner at the Governor’s Club, gotten into a noisy, drunken argument, and left separately. “I love your family,” she’d said, deadpan, hoping to lighten the mood. It had come out wrong.

  “At least,” he said, “they’re not in the Mafia.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” He brightened, as if he’d been waiting to ask the question from the time they’d met and finally had his opening. “Is your family in the Mafia?”

  “That’s what you think, isn’t it? That all Italians are in the Mafia? That we eat-a the pizza, we squeeze-a the tomatoes, and we-”

  “Not all Italians,” he said. “I’m only asking about the male members of your family.”

  “Of course not.” She threw down her napkin. She stood up, punched him in the mouth, and stormed out.

  She knew that her family was in the Mafia-Kathy had convinced her-but Francesca hadn’t meant to lie. What she’d heard was her own anxiety, the anxiety that lurked behind his question: the fear that Billy was with her only because she seemed exotic. He was always looking for something new and different: foreign movies, the latest records, beat poetry in a coffeehouse in Frenchtown, the Negro neighborhood in Tallahassee. Once, they had driven six hours to the Seminole Reservation so he could learn to wrestle alligators. Every few weeks, it seemed, he started some new hobby. Every haircut was a little different than the one before it.

  Can’t you see Billy’s just here, Kathy had said, to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas?

  Francesca started running through the hot night, determined not to cry. It was over. Fine. Good. He’d been her first love, but so what? He wouldn’t be her last. He was going off to Harvard Law School in the fall, and she’d be back here. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Also, he was a jerk. A phony. It had felt great to hit him. It had made a great smacking noise that had sounded more impressive than what people would expect from a girl. Her hand still tingled. She’d have to thank her brother Frankie for being such a pain in the ass over the years and giving her the chance to hone her skills.

  The same mysterious ability Billy deployed to breeze into and out of all those inauguration-night parties had been on display that night in Tallahassee, too. She’d had no destination. She’d run down a hill and into a residential neighborhood unfamiliar to her, and at the exact moment she realized she might be lost, she heard a car slow down beside her and there was Billy, in his Thunderbird. He’d known just where to go.

  “Wow, what a punch!” He was smiling, laughing through his big, undamaged white teeth. She was a girl who could knock your block off, another way she was exotic and new. “I love you, slugger.”

  “How did your family get so rich?” she asked. “Behind every great fortune there’s a crime.” She’d read that in a book by one of the French writers Kathy was studying. Balzac, maybe.

  “Several, I’m sure,” he said. “Those assholes are capable of anything.”

  Those assholes were his father and grandfather. It was bizarre to hear anyone talk about his family that way.

  She got in the car.

  They made up that night, but the drama of that evening set the tone for their courtship.

  The long-distance romance had all the melodrama such things do among the young, fraught with ten-page letters, sneaking suspicions, and tearful phone calls-at least on Francesca’s part. Billy claimed to be so busy at Harvard that he barely had time to eat or sleep, much less write her letters or talk on the phone long distance. Then he sent her a postcard, of all things, a typed postcard, to tell her he’d gotten an internship with a firm in New York and wasn’t coming back home to south Florida that summer. She borrowed her roommate Suzy’s VW bug and drove all night to Cambridge, to end the whole mess in person. Naturally, she and Billy slept together. She went home more confused than ever and, it turned out, pregnant.

  He wanted her to get an abortion.

  Then he even made arrangements for a doctor in Palm Beach to do it.

  Francesca couldn’t bear the thought of it. But she certainly didn’t want to have the baby, either. Marrying Billy-not that he’d asked or even mentioned the possibility-was out of the question. She told Kathy-the first and only person she’d confided in-that she wouldn’t marry that snake if he was the last man on earth. Everything that could happen was something Francesca Corleone definitely would not do.

  Billy broke his leg skydiving (the end of another new hobby), and while he was in the hospital he had a sudden change of heart-inexplicable, from Francesca’s perspective, though who can explain a change of heart? The day he was discharged, he flew to see her and proposed.

  Overjoyed, she accepted.

  They were married in July with him still on crutches. She’d been upset that he’d have to slit the leg of his tux, and he assured her he could afford the small tailoring charge. She got upset about a lot of things-a pregnant bride’s prerogative, perhaps, but all of it a substitute for the two things she was really upset about: her walks up and down the aisle. Down would be pathetic, with Billy on crutches. But up would be impossible. Who could ever take her father’s place? Not her little brothers, and certainly not Stan the Liquor Man (who was still engaged to her mother and who still hadn’t married her). Uncle Fredo was older than Uncle Mike, and she knew Uncle Fredo better. She was drawn to Uncle Mike, though, and always had been. He was a war hero, a romantic figure, a man who looked great in a tuxedo. She knew some of his dark secrets-at least via the imperfect conduits of Kathy and Aunt Connie-but despite this, in the end he was the only man she could imagine giving her away. “It’s who Pop would want,” she told Kathy, her maid of honor, expecting her twin sister to disagree. “Obviously,” Kathy said instead. No one said obviously with more withering scorn than Kathy. “Who else?”

  Uncle Mike balanced Francesca’s jittery nerves with his dignified and regal bearing. He told her that her father would have been proud, that Santino was here, watching, be sure of that. But he was smart enough to say this a long time before they went up the aisle, so that they could cry together and get those tears out of the way. When they were finally alone in the narthex, he took her arm and told her not to worry. He shrugged. “It’s only the rest of your life.”

  She laughed. It was the perfect thing to say.

  She went down the aisle happy. Only when Michael gave her hand to Billy did she see that it was her uncle whose face was streaked with tears.

  On the trip back down the aisle, she steadied Billy, and he managed to make it without crutches. At the reception, he even danced. He was such a bad dancer in the first place, at least with the cast he had an excuse.

  They moved to Boston. When he finished law school, he turned down a job making a fortune on Wall Street (he already had a fortune) in favor of being a clerk for a judge on the Florida Supreme Court. It was tough to be back in Tallahassee as her class graduated (she went to Suzy Kimball’s graduation party and hardly knew the poised young woman who was bound for missionary work in China). But Francesca had a family now and truly did think she was happy-at least until Billy quit his job with the court to work for Floridians for Shea. He was gone all the time. Eventually Francesca found out that he was doing more than campaigning.

  How did she find out about That Woman?

  Francesca was a Corleone. It was a maxim, much repeated in her family, that it was impossible, over time, to deceive a Corleone. That was one theory. She was also that most dangerous of adversaries to philandering: a woman whose darkest fear is that her husband doesn’t think she’s good enough for him.

  Ernest Hemingway is not Papa, that guy with the white beard. He’s not the voice of a lost generation. He’s not a straw man to be dismissed as sexist by tweedy frauds whose lives will give less to the world than any of several of Hemingway’s lesser afternoons. He’s those great early books. Nothing else matters.

  Einstein is not a poster boy for genius. Picasso is not a swarthy bald womanizer. Moza
rt isn’t an enfant terrible. Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath aren’t tragic affronts to the oppressive male hegemony. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren’t harmless, lovable little brown guys white people can feel comfortable endorsing. Babe Ruth isn’t a fat slob who ate hot dogs and visited sick kids in the hospital. Yes, the Mafia fixed the Sonny Liston fight that allowed Muhammad Ali to become the heavyweight champ in the first place, and, yes, Ali stood up for what he believed in. But first and foremost, he was a man who could knock the toughest motherfucker in the valley on his ass and make it seem like poetry.

  Johnny Fontane was a fine actor when he felt like it. He had an enviably large penis that he put to great use. He helped transform Las Vegas from a desert stopover into the fastest-growing city in the United States. He was the son of immigrant parents, the embodiment of the American dream. He looked great in a hat. He invented American cool (Caucasian division).

  Big deal.

  What difference does it make that Fontane gave the Shea campaign a half-million bucks in a satchel that had been a personal gift from Jackie Ping-Pong? Ping-Pong had nothing to do with the money itself. Johnny had to carry it in something. (And, anyway, he lived in a world where people gave a lot of gifts. Once, he’d had an accountant who told him to cut back on all that. Fontane sent him a Rolex.) Fontane raised millions for that campaign, so what does it matter that this particular half million was part of the skim from the Kasbah, a Chicago-owned casino in Las Vegas? What difference does it make who in West Virginia wound up with it, or how exactly those recipients might have used it to ensure that Jimmy Shea won a state that he might have won anyway?

  Fontane introduced Rita Duvall to both Louie Russo and Jimmy Shea (not to mention Fredo Corleone, whose baby she put up for adoption in 1956, right before her career took off). What happened after the introductions had to do with her, not Johnny Fontane.