Once, a sheriff’s deputy who’d taken a swing at Johnny Fontane after Fontane had fucked the guy’s wife died mysteriously in the desert. So what? Fontane fucked a lot of men’s wives. People die mysteriously in the desert every day. There was never a shred of evidence of any causal connection between those two terrible but commonplace truths.
Sure, Fontane was Vito Corleone’s godson. He got along with Michael, too. He was friendly with Russo, with Tony Stracci, with Gussie Cicero, and so on. So were a lot of people (Ambassador M. Corbett Shea, for example). He wasn’t a member of anyone’s quote-unquote crime family. Johnny Fontane was just loyal to people who were loyal to him when his life was nothing but Mondays.
Butta-beepa-da-boppa-da-boop.
In the end, Johnny Fontane was a singer. The world will not see his like again.
He called himself a saloon singer, but at first that was Sicilian humility, then false modesty, then-after the masterpieces of American song that he released in the late fifties and early sixties-a disingenuous joke that the whole world was in on.
Take, as only one of many examples one might cite, his performance at James K. Shea’s inaugural ball.
That famous striped tux would have looked clownish on anyone else, but on Fontane it seems perfectly natural, one of the signal moments in twentieth-century style. All evening, he’s a charming and funny master of ceremonies, with none of the boys-will-be-boys dicking around from his nightclub act or the ponderous showbiz patter of his late-career arena shows. He is, when called upon, a brilliant duet partner-most notably with Ella Fitzgerald on a quiet, stirring a cappella version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Fontane’s own set consists of just three songs. The occasion would not seem to play to his strengths. His greatest recordings were either torch songs sung from a singularly male perspective or anthemic renditions of numbers about battered losers who endure-neither of which would have struck the right note for the occasion.
We first see him alone, in a pool of light. The top hat sits on a stool beside him. The music starts, just a piano and drums. Brushes. It’s a slow, loping arrangement of “It Had to Be You.” Fontane holds the microphone away from him at an angle and sings with his head cocked toward the ceiling. Throughout the song, Fontane moves the mike to alter his tone, playing it as well as Charlie Parker played his horn. Great voices abound, but Johnny Fontane is something rarer: a great singer.
The crowd bursts into applause. Fontane grabs his top hat and rips into “Ridin’ High,” stalking the stage with an animal ferocity Cole Porter could never have imagined. When Fontane finishes, breathless, the crowd leaps to its feet. Fontane’s grin is unmistakably that of a kid who grew up with nothing and looks out to see he’s got more than everything.
While there may be little to redeem the earnest version of “Big Dreams” that the Shea campaign co-opted as its official theme song (with new lyrics written by Wally Morgan), Johnny Fontane, suffused with the triumph of the moment, gives it a hero’s try. He certainly seems sincere. After the opening verse, a curtain behind him rises, and the rest of the night’s acts stride forth and join in for the chorus. When the camera cuts to the audience, the houselights are up and everyone’s standing and singing along, too. The president kisses his first lady. Fontane throws them his top hat. The president catches it and puts it on. It fits.
Chapter 25
I KNOW YOUR NAME IS BILLY, ” Mary said. “I only call you Bee-Boy because my cousin Kathy who looks just like Francie only without a baby inside calls you that too, even though I thought of it first, back when I was a baby. But I’d been born, of course.”
“I like it,” Billy said, showing everyone inside the apartment, “coming from you.”
Francesca had been up since four, unpacking the kitchen boxes, going to the grocery store, and cooking breakfast. She was exhausted but used to it. The baby kicked so much she hadn’t been getting much sleep anyway.
“Everything’s just about ready,” she said. “Excuse the mess. We’ve only been here two days. Billy, why don’t you give them the ten-cent tour and then we’ll eat. Hey, Sonny! Get over here, right now! We have guests!”
Her son got up from in front of the TV and ran and tackled Tony. Sonny was just shy of his third birthday. Tony was nine. Tony took it well. Uncle Mike noted his son’s patience with obvious approval. She’d never noticed much resemblance between Uncle Mike and Grandpa Vito, but suddenly it was there in her uncle’s weary eyes, so much so it was spooky.
“So this is Sonny,” Michael said, picking him up. “I’m your Uncle Mike. You’re pretty tough, huh?”
Francesca rolled her eyes. “Sonny won’t take that helmet off. Half the time he even sleeps in it. It’s Frankie’s fault. At Christmas, all he did was teach Sonny how to play football.”
Billy, for no apparent reason, eyed Uncle Mike as if he thought he might drop Sonny.
“Good teacher, I bet,” Michael said. Frankie Corleone, as a sophomore, had started at linebacker for Notre Dame.
“You like football, sport?” Billy asked Tony.
Tony shrugged.
“That’s the way I am, too,” Billy said, mussing the boy’s hair.
“He hates that,” Mary said.
“I don’t mind,” Tony said.
She reached for his hair herself, and he slapped her hand. Michael set Sonny down, scooped Mary up in one arm, and held Tony by the hand with the other.
“Sorry,” Michael said. They immediately calmed down. He was an amazing father.
“Don’t be,” Francesca said. “They’re just being kids. I bet you fought with your brothers and Aunt Connie worse than that. I’m lucky I never killed my sister.”
“Nice apartment,” Michael said.
The building was more than a hundred years old. It was once a mansion and had been divided into four big apartments. Theirs was on the ground floor and included most of what must have been a ballroom and was now their living room, dining room, and kitchen. The wooden floors were sloped and buckled enough that Sonny’s toys and marbles were forever rolling across rooms. Francesca loved it. She’d never lived anyplace that was more than twenty years old before, and certainly nowhere so elegant, however faded. Several times a day she’d walk to the curb just to look at it and marvel that this was where she lived.
Thinking of this, she looked out at the curb and saw Al Neri still sitting in the car. “Your driver can come in, too, you know,” she said as everyone sat down. “I bet he’s hungry.”
“He ate already,” Michael said. “He gets up early.”
Francesca wasn’t really that anxious about breakfast-after all, other than Uncle Mike, it was just Billy and three kids. Still, she apologized for the sausages, which were the best she had been able to find on short notice-she had no idea where to shop-but everyone else seemed to think they were fine. The rolls she’d found weren’t what she’d have chosen, either, but they went over all right, too. She could only blame being pregnant for the box of jelly doughnuts.
Her fretting gave her something to talk about other than Aunt Kay. She couldn’t figure out how to bring that up. The Corleones were Catholic, yet in the last few years both Aunt Connie (who’d been married to Ed Federici for less than a year before they’d split up) and Uncle Mike had gotten divorced. And there must be some reason her mother and Stan the Liquor Man had never gotten married. All that, plus Billy’s situation. It had Francesca worried. She couldn’t think of much that would be more horrible than living a continent away from your kids.
“I was sorry to hear about you and Kay,” Billy said. Blurted it out, just like that. Francesca didn’t know whether to admire him for his bluntness or slap him.
Michael answered with a rueful nod.
Francesca reached across the table and gave her uncle’s arm a squeeze in sympathy.
“I spent my whole childhood rooting for my parents to get a divorce,” Billy said. “But you and Kay didn’t-”
She kicked him under the table.
“You never know, I guess,” Billy said. “How often do you get to see Tony and Mary?”
Just like that, right in front of them. Slapping him seemed like the way to go.
“Not as often as I’d like,” Uncle Mike said. “I’m trying to rearrange some of my responsibilities with my businesses so that I’ll have more time for that.”
“Daddy has a new airplane!” Mary said. “He’s going to fly and see us all the time now.”
Tony took another jelly doughnut, though he hadn’t eaten the one that was on his plate.
“I keep a small apartment in New York for when I’m there on business,” Michael said. “I may get something bigger so that they can stay there, too, whenever I come east.”
“I still think of all of you as being in New York,” Francesca said. “It seems like you just moved to Nevada.”
“Six years,” Michael said. “Almost four in Tahoe. I kept both houses, in Vegas and Tahoe, too. They’re both bigger than I need, but for Mary and Tony they’re home. They’ve been home.”
“It’s different these days,” Billy said. “People move around a lot more. Look at us, sweetie. Three years of marriage, three addresses.”
“It’s funny,” she said, “all those years in Florida, and I still think of New York as home. I should have gone to college there, the way Kathy did. She loved being back.”
“But then we’d have never met,” Billy said.
Francesca cocked her head. He was completely sincere, crestfallen, as if he really were imagining never meeting her. It was so impossibly vulnerable, she just melted.
“The love of my life,” she said, completely sincere, too, reaching out to stroke his cheek.
“Francie and Bee-Boy sittin’ in a tree,” Mary said. “C’mon, Tony. Sing it with me.”
“Dad,” Tony said. “Tell her to cut it out.”
Michael Corleone raised his coffee cup. “To love,” he said.
It was the perfect thing to say.
The kids stopped squabbling and everyone raised a glass, and no one, Francesca thought, could have felt anything but love.
Except Billy, whose participation in the toast couldn’t have been more halfhearted.
When they left, Francesca sent a plate of food along for the bodyguard.
They stood on the white marble front steps, waving as the car pulled away. “You always say you love my family,” she said to Billy. Sonny was running in circles, arms pumping, carrying his teddy bear like a football. “So why don’t you like my uncle?”
They’d been through so much. Why not get rid of this taboo, too?
But Billy didn’t say anything. He called to Sonny to stay away from the street. Sonny wasn’t all that close to the street, actually, but Billy picked him up and went inside.
That night, after Sonny was asleep, Francesca came to bed, exhausted, to see that Billy had her side covered with file folders. He was propped up on his side, reading.
“Want me to sleep on the sofa?”
He looked up, startled, then immediately scooped up the folders and dropped them to the floor. She got into bed, and he turned off the light and started giving her a massage: unhurried, careful, lingering on her swollen feet and sore lower back. She’d come to bed with barely enough energy to close her eyes, but when he finally took her nightgown all the way off, she turned toward him, and when his tongue slid between her lips, she let out a low, hungry gasp.
“What was that?” he said.
“Shut up and love me,” she said.
For a few moments, minutes, she forgot everything she was worried about and just was.
Out of breath afterward and slick with sweat, she felt enormous again. Billy rested his tanned arm on her mountainous fish-white belly. They lay like that for a long time.
The baby started kicking, harder than ever.
“Why don’t I like your uncle, huh?” Billy asked.
“Forget it,” she said. She knew, anyway, or thought she did. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She felt the searing pain of a contraction.
“Wow. I felt that,” Billy said. “What a kick!”
She clenched her jaw to endure the pain. It started to ease.
“Remember when I broke my leg skydiving?” Billy said.
“Of course I do,” she said, her breathing slowing now.
“I lied. I’ve never been skydiving in my life.”
Her hips bucked with another contraction, sharper this time.
“I think this is it,” Francesca said. “I think I’m having the baby.”
That night, Francesca fell victim to her family’s grim history. Her paternal grandmother always refused to talk about it, but she’d had at least four miscarriages. Her maternal grandmother went to Mass every July 22 to mourn the one she had. Her mother and two of her aunts had suffered them, too.
Francesca’s baby, born three months prematurely, was a fighter. She lived for almost a day. She was named Carmela, after her great-grand-mother. Francesca wanted to bury her next to her as well, on the family burial plot on Long Island. Billy disagreed. He thought the baby should be buried in Florida. Circumstances-the horror of losing the baby and Billy’s all-around contrition even before that-ensured that this was a disagreement, not an argument, and that Francesca would prevail.
Michael Corleone paid for everything. Francesca knew that Billy objected, but she was pleased that he had the good sense not to insult her uncle by refusing his help. The ceremony was small and held at the cemetery, in a driving snowstorm.
Billy’s parents didn’t even come. Her own twin sister didn’t come, either-just sent a telegram from London saying she was sorry to learn the bad news. Her brother Frankie missed the spring intersquad football game for it and never complained. Her brother Chip missed his own sixteenth birthday party for it, also without a second thought. Family.
It was a traditional Italian cemetery, with pictures of the dead in cameo frames mounted on the marble monument. As Francesca left, she bent to kiss the cold images. Grandma Carmela. Grandpa Vito. Zia Angelina. Uncle Carlo. Her father, Santino Corleone. She looked into his laughing eyes and thought, See you next time, Daddy.
Uncle Fredo was missing and presumed dead, but there was no picture of him here. There was no picture of baby Carmela, either. None had been taken. She’d lived, briefly, but had had no life.
Uncle Mike, as busy as he undoubtedly was, came early, stayed late, and was a tremendous comfort. Not even her mother was able to talk to Francesca as openly about the nightmare of losing a child as Uncle Mike did. And seeing Sonny playing with Tony and Mary at the reception afterward, watching how well they got along, what buoyant spirits they all seemed to have, gave Francesca hope she could go on.
Billy was struggling with the baby’s death and, understandably, was having a hard time talking about it.
She was having a hard time not blaming him. It was irrational, she knew. But it seemed like a kind of justice being visited on them for his having wanted her to get an abortion when she had been pregnant with Sonny. And what on earth had possessed him to think that telling her he’d been so disinclined to marry her in the first place that he’d only done it after her uncle had sent men to break his leg would make him seem like the good guy in the story?
On top of that, every time she looked at him, she imagined that he was worrying about being photographed by the police or the FBI while attending a gen-u-ine Mafia funeral. That was probably unfair. She had no idea what he was thinking. But they had been photographed. Evil, heartless bastards. She was starting to understand the oppression her uncle faced every day, that her father had faced every day, too.
Suddenly, on the day she buried her own daughter, it clicked. He’d used his parents’ money and his efforts in the Shea campaign to get the job in the attorney general’s office so he could destroy her family.
That was ridiculous, she immediately realized. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She was emotional, distraught, with crazy hormone
s running amok from head to toe. This was Billy. Whatever his faults-and who doesn’t have faults?-this was the one true love of her life.
Still.
When she’d accused Billy, once, of there having been a crime behind his own family’s fortune, he’d nonchalantly said he was sure there’d been several. Those assholes are capable of anything, he’d said, and he hadn’t been joking. So why was he worried about whatever her family might or might not have done? She knew what her sister would say: Because we’re Italian. It was Kathy who’d found out that the new president’s father had been in business with Grandpa Vito. Bootlegging. A crime that no longer exists. A crime that never should have been a crime, but a crime nonetheless. A generation later, James K. Shea is in the White House and Michael Corleone (again, according to Kathy, who’d gotten it from Aunt Connie, who’d sobered up and seemed a more reliable source than she used to be) had cut himself off from criminal activity of any kind and yet was still being trailed by the heartless maggots from law enforcement at the family-only funeral of his baby niece. Why? Because we’re Italian.
A few weeks later, on a transatlantic call Francesca had been working up to since the funeral, she woke her sister up from a deep sleep and told her how much she’d been hurt that Kathy hadn’t come home.
“You had a funeral?” Kathy said. “I thought it was just a miscarriage.”
“Just a miscarriage? And anyway, she lived for-”
“Do you know what time it is here?”
“How could you not know we’d have a funeral? When I lost baby Carmela-”
“You named it? Oh, honey. Honey. You named it after Grandma?”
It.
Francesca hung up.
Even though Jimmy Shea had said that he probably wouldn’t be able to get out to Las Vegas until after his administration’s first hundred days, from the moment Johnny Fontane got back from Washington, he took time out of his frantic professional schedule to oversee preparations at his newly expanded estate as if the president’s first visit would be tomorrow. Johnny added ten people to his staff, including a retired member of the Secret Service, whose job was to stay in constant contact with his old agency, to be ready at a moment’s notice if the president needed to come west and blow off a little steam. There was now a guest room accessible through an ingenious recessed panel from what would be the president’s office as well as from a stairway in the floor of the closet, which would allow the Secret Service to show women in and out via the new underground garage. Louie Russo had given Rita Duvall her own suite at the Kasbah, but as a backup, Fontane had at least three of Hollywood’s reigning sex goddesses clamoring to be of service as well, again at a moment’s notice. Danny Shea had started back up with Annie McGowan, who’d been his mistress before she had been married to Johnny, and Johnny had made it clear to them both that they’d be welcome anytime, together or separately. He’d given several of the best chefs in L.A. fifty thousand apiece just to agree to drop everything and come when Johnny called. Johnny didn’t go for drugs himself, but Bobby Chadwick and the president both had a thing for cocaine; the stuff Gussie Cicero had gotten him was supposedly as pure as it gets.
The Godfather returns Page 45