The Godfather Returns (45 page)

“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. Mozart 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.

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
B
ILLY,”
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,
Sonn
y
! 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
airplan
e
!” 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 hormones 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.