He sat quietly, sweating in the cool summer night, because he couldn’t get a handle on what he was supposed to do. She was a married woman without a husband. Let him stay lost, she said. He began to think about that. They were going to need at least a couple of years together until she was educated at least a little bit to understand why he had to stay where he was. Sooner or later she would have to catch on that he was in the environment. She would put two and two together. The women would wise her up. She was an American. She knew that the country needed people like the Prizzi organization to get a little relief—why else would they lay on the glamour in the TV and in the books and in the movies, which always showed the people in the environment as being very glamorous people? Maerose would set Irene straight. After all, Irene didn’t need to know
exactly
what he did. She would know that he was in the environment and that he counted in the Prizzi family. Very few people could prove what he did anyway. If he took his time about the whole business of wising up Irene they could be home free without her going into shock. She would gradually meet all the Prizzis, Sesteros, and Garrones and see what terrific people they were—warm, real, stand-up people.
But suppose the husband showed up before Irene was ready to have everything worked out for her? That could be bad. Also, it could even be bad if the husband stayed lost. He couldn’t introduce a woman to the whole family unless it was seriously set that he was going to marry her. Don Corrado was a religious man. They couldn’t get married if the husband stayed
lost. A divorce was no good because the Prizzis, Sesteros, and Garrones didn’t go for divorce. They were old-fashioned.
Irene needed to be made a widow. That was it. She had said herself that she had no use for the guy. She hadn’t seen him for four years. If she was made a widow it couldn’t hurt her. All he needed was the husband’s name and a little basic information so his people could find him. But he had to be careful. Irene was smart. But maybe Maerose could get it out of her, then pass it along. He could have the husband set up wherever he was and have the job done on him. Nobody could connect him with it. Then he and Irene could get married at Santa Grazia’s just like the rest of the family, and everybody would be proud to send them Christmas cards.
He was so elated that he called Irene.
“It’s Charley.”
“Aaaah.”
“I’m a wreck.”
“Can you get out here this weekend?”
“Jesus, I don’t think so.”
“Tell me.”
“I love you.”
“Truly?”
“It’s real.” He was helplessly in earnest. “Maybe it’s not scientific but it’s real.”
“Scientific?”
“I read in a magazine that, according to a doctor, when two people try to make one stable couple that what they are doing is looking for what they thought they needed from their mothers.”
“Charley!”
He wondered if he had made some terrible mistake.
“I can’t even remember my mother.”
“But that’s the scientific part. Your head still knows what you think you needed from your mother whether you can remember your mother or not. That’s what
you need and it’s a deep thing, an emotional thing, so when you think you see that in somebody that they can bring to you what you know you needed from your mother—that’s what falling in love is. The magazine was very clear on that. A doctor wrote it.”
“But, Charley, I can’t suppose that what I wanted from my mother was that she be six foot two with a voice like a taxicab and an appetite for pasta like the entire Boy Scouts of Italy.”
“No, not that. Not what you can see with your eyes. It’s what you sense—like someone who will always protect you and take care of you, someone who will be kind to you and won’t yell at you, someone who doesn’t want
any
body else but you. It’s possible, the theory.”
“All I know is, whether I think I know it or know I know it, I have to know when I’m going to see you again.”
“This weekend. Absolutely. I have to know that also. We have to be together this weekend.”
He got to bed at eleven o’clock. He fell asleep thinking about how he had to get some hot airline blank-ticket stock from Ed Prizzi to set himself and Irene with plenty of back-and-forth transportation. At a quarter to twelve, the phone rang. It was Pop.
“Cholly?”
“Yeah, Pop.”
“Vincent wants to see you.”
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow. Two o’clock.”
“Okay.”
“Not at the laundry. At Ben’s.”
Ben Sestero’s house was where Corrado Prizzi lived.
“What the hell is this, Pop?”
“Whatever it is,” Pop said, “it hit the fan tonight.”
Chapter Six
Corrado Prizzi lived with his favorite child, Amalia Sestero, who took care of him as she took care of all of her children, her kitchen, her church, and her family’s life. The house, as befitted a business executive who could expect rewards that matched his responsibilities, was in Brooklyn Heights with a magnificent view of lower Manhattan island, which could have been a foreign country to Don Corrado.
Neither the don nor his son Vincent owned anything. Houses, cars, furniture, jewelry, and equipment were all held in the names of various companies. As traditional men of respect they felt that it was more important to observe the rules of humility and austerity—and, perhaps to give the Internal Revenue Service no reason to assume that they could afford such luxuries, which would have required more than their meager incomes.
Amalia answered the door serenely, as if the armed doorkeeper were not there, and kissed Charley on both cheeks. “I got some
gelu i muluni
for you, Charley,” she said softly in Sicilian, “for when after Poppa goes to bed.”
She led the way to two sliding oak doors and knocked softly. A muffled voice inside told her to come in. She slid open the doors, Charley entered,
and she slid them closed again behind him. The room was paneled in dark wood. The furnishings were heavy and somber because it was a room for serious things—eating and meeting. The curtains had been closed. The wax fruit, in the basket at the center of the table, gleamed dully in the light falling from a central lamp, which had a red silk shade with peach-colored fringes, and only half-illuminated faces whose owners, as far as their business meetings were concerned, preferred shadows or darkness.
Vincent Prizzi and Pop sat at the bare dining room table. They were two elderly Italian-American businessmen in black suits, ties, white shirts and shined shoes. Their permanent expressions—pleasant, deferential, and courteous—had tightened into a grimness underscoring the respect paid to them throughout their communities. These included Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, Miami, Vegas, Atlantic City, Phoenix and LA, the District of Columbia, London, Sicily, Turkey, Iran, Laos, Colombia, Mexico, and southern France, although neither of them had ever been beyond Brooklyn or Vegas.
Vincent Prizzi was built like a tractor. Everything about him was heavy: his speech, his jaw, and his justice. He was a man who took seriousness seriously. When he drank anything he always rushed it carefully around his mouth and through his teeth before swallowing it. He had once been his father’s enforcer, when his father had been active in all operations on a day-to-day basis, just as Charley Partanna was Vincent’s enforcer now. But he saw as little of Charley as he could because of the humiliation his daughter had inflicted upon Charley and himself almost ten years before. He knew it was wrong but he could not forgive Charley, either, for three reasons: first, for being the subject which had caused this stain upon Prizzi honor; second, for not getting married to some other woman so that the whole thing could be conveniently forgotten
by all of them. How could he speak to his daughter or permit her to marry as long as the man she had wronged remained unmarried? Vincent’s attitude to Charley was entirely proper, but formal and strained, because everyone who witnessed their relationship was aware that Vincent was incapable of actually feeling the degree of solicitude for Charley that he strained to project, overworking to convey that he wished with everything he felt that he could make up to Charley for what his daughter had done to him. At the same time, sharply aware that this was a weak position for a Boss to be seen in with one of his own people, he resented Charley for being the cause of his pain. And that was the third reason. Consequently, he dealt, not through Charley, his Underboss, but through Angelo Partanna, which only served to increase the powers of both Partannas throughout the family. But when he needed Charley, or when his father told him they needed Charley, he sent for him and suffered his presence.
Vincent’s piercing eyes were frightening. They were as unremitting as laser beams, each glance a
keraunion
, that prehistoric artifact which was once believed to have fallen as thunderbolts. But Vincent’s chilling gaze was caused by his nearsightedness and his vanity in refusing to wear eyeglasses. He moved about with difficulty—sometimes with a slight limp, sometimes with a more pronounced one. There were times when he could not walk at all. He sent one hundred dollars a week to the Little Sisters of the Grievous Wounds for them to pray in congress, asking St. Gerardo, patron saint of gout, to intercede for him.
Angelo Partanna was as much taller than Vincent (and ten years older) as Charley Partanna was taller than Angelo. Angelo’s sweetness and amiable good cheer about murder and corruption were legendary in the environment. He was a man of brutal loyalty. Other men’s pain, cupidity, and punishment were simple
commodities to Angelo Partanna. He was dapper in his way. After his wife, Charley’s mother, died in 1950 he had emerged as a heavy ladies’ man. He had groomed white plates above the ears, below his vulture-bald head, and his moustache was a white Puccini-style. His skin was like dark, lumpy cocoa. His nose was like a parrot’s beak, a nose that had been left behind centuries before in the DNA of some Arab invader of western Sicily. Charley’s resemblance to his father was a matter of gesture and speech rather than a physical similarity—horses do not look like parrots. But they had the same ball-bearing eyes, opaque to empathy. Both men, father and son, had been bred to serve their feudal lords. Time had only
seemed
to change for Sicilians.
The Partannas, father and son, were the prime
condottieri
of the Prizzi family and guarded whatever the Prizzis had, because what the Prizzis had, the Partannas, the Sesteros, and the Garrones—in that order—shared.
“Siddown, Charley,” Uncle Vincent said.
Charley pulled up a chair stolidly. He was accomplished at bearing Vincent’s sufferance of him.
“I give that tip on the ransom insurance to Eduardo, Charley,” Pop said. “He checked it out with the insurance lawyers and they said it would work.”
“Good,” Charley said.
“Jesus, my gout is killing me,” Vincent said.
***
Charley was listening with half his mind. He needed to think about Irene and he couldn’t help thinking about Irene. The doctor in the magazine has got to be right, he thought. How else could anybody account for such a tremendous feeling grabbing two people whether it was a convenient time or an inconvenient time? It had to be that Irene and every other woman he had loved had somehow signaled to him that she could bring to him what he imagined, formlessly, he
had wanted from his mother. Not that his mother hadn’t given him those things, she hadn’t deprived him. She had been the most terrific woman in his life. He wanted to be admired and his mother had admired him, so all the more did he want to be admired by women after she had gone. His mother had been busy all day long, so maybe what he wanted as much as getting her love and admiration was all of her time whenever he wanted it. Things like that. Those signals had come off Irene from the first moment they saw each other. And he had fielded the same vibes from Mardell Dupont, the crazy stripper in Jersey City twenty years ago. He had gone out of his skull about that girl and it lasted for fifteen months, until she killed herself. The note said she had done it because they had given her second billing but he always wondered, because it happened the day after he had been indicted for the murder of Bummy Fein and Binky what’s-his-name. He thought it all out when it happened and he decided that Mardell had been born and brought up a suicide, like all suicides. But she was some woman—the beautiful way she spoke, like music, which his mother, for all her great points, never did because she had been brought up in the old country. Mardell had loved him and had admired him and she had been smarter than the whole Supreme Court.
Maerose, more than anyone else, Maerose proved that the doctor in the magazine was right, because Maerose was
all
the things his mother was as well as what she wasn’t. It was a powerful combination. Maerose was a hot-blooded Sicilian woman who needed to be run with all a man’s strength, because sometimes she thought she was her grandfather. But she liked to drink and that was no good. She drank too much one night when she was tired and she started up a fight with him because he was dancing a lot with Vera Bendichino, a Harvest Moon contest winner. Then, to give it to him good, she left the party with
some guy nobody had ever seen before, also a juicer, and that was the end of Maerose’s life with him. They found her drunk in Mexico. Her father sent her away someplace for five months and whatever they gave her made her vomit all over everything until she lost her taste for booze. She was on grass now.
Maerose was a tremendous woman in every way, but Charley knew that even if he had wanted her again (for a couple of years he wasn’t sure whether he did or not) he couldn’t have her, because the Prizzis were too ashamed of her for what she had done when she had been betrothed to him. But, in every way except the most important way, he loved her. She was brave just the way his mother had been brave, and she had a soft voice and an immense heart. The Prizzis had just left her lying there like a broken bottle for almost ten years and no one had seen her with a man, which didn’t mean she never was with men, but there was so much sadness in her eyes that he thought the Prizzis had made her pay too much.