Prizzi's Family
Maerose sat between the two men inside the enormous tonneau and listened to Charley’s silence, interpreting it as indifference. It was the biggest night in their lives so far and she was getting no vibes from Charley, just cold waves. The way he was acting she knew she had won, she knew he was finished with the woman, his father must have finally got him straight. But she also knew she had won nothing. This wasn’t Charley, not the Charley she wanted in her work.
There was plenty of time to think. Her contingency plan was flexible.
Nobody was talking. Her father had turned on the television and was watching a show called Everybody’s Health, about arteriosclerosis. He resented having to get all dressed up like this and to go to a place full of noisy people just so they could all be told what they already knew. He brooded over where they were going to put all those goddam presents.
Maerose stared at her dreams: having Charley, running the legit operation, dominating the family across the board, from the street side to the board rooms—with Charley at her side. But if she could not swing Charley over to her side—willingly and joyously—then she could also have overrated her ability to take over the Prizzi family. The one thing naturally followed the other. The first thing was the absolute measure of the second, so what was the use? If she went along with what had been set up for tonight she wouldn’t have any of that, because none of it was ever going to work, and nothing could be clearer than that. So, she explained to herself, because of what she did have, what she would always have—she was a Prizzi—she was going to have to make herself get him off the hook by sliding into the contingency plan.
She had really known all along in her heart of hearts that it was going to happen, she reminded herself. The two-ton showgirl had been too cool. She had been so sure of herself that she had to be sure of Charley. And he had never acted like a man who had been caught having a little poontang on the side. Charley was as serious about the woman as he couldn’t get himself to be serious about her. She had to face it. She had to throw it all away and get him off the hook in such a way that neither he nor anybody else would ever know she had done it. What the hell. She had her business and Brooklyn was going downhill anyhow. She wanted to cry, but her father was sitting beside her and he would only yell at her until he got a reason why she was crying, and Charley would only want to shoot himself, so she didn’t cry. The car pulled up in front of her family’s favorite dump for celebrating the great occasions, so she was going to have to make it a great occasion.
The preternaturally long car arrived at the entrance to Palermo Gardens yard by yard. Zingo Pappaloush seemed to get there some time before the passengers. They all got out.
“Wait here,” Vincent said to Zingo, and Zingo knew that the cops knew he would be allowed to move the car a few feet beyond the entrance and be parked there so that it would be ready when Vincent decided to go home.
The rest of the night was a blur to everyone. To Charley, to the don, to Amalia, to every one of the guests, and most of all to Maerose and to Vincent, who were to be ten years getting over it, if Vincent ever really got over it. The terrible night itself was less of a blur to Maerose while it was happening. If a climax is defined as a moment in a play at which a crisis reaches its highest intensity and is resolved, this became the climax of her life and, under the definition of Freytag’s Pyramid, her catastrophe.
The enormous room was arranged so that all the guests were seated at large, round tables. The table of honor, where Maerose and Charley sat with the don, Amalia, Vincent, Father Passanante, the priest who would marry the young couple, Pop, and Eduardo, with an aristocratic young woman called Baby who had attended Foxcroft and Bennington, was at the center of the room, at the edge of the relatively large dance floor. Over all of it, banquet room and dance floor, hung three large chandeliers from which were festooned crepe paper ribbons of red, white, and blue from one side of the room and red, white, and green from the other. Balloons bobbed against the ceiling in a dozen colors, rising in the warmed air. There was a raised stage with two alternating orchestras: the four-piece band of white-haired musicians who were the traditional fixtures at all Prizzi affairs, and a modern, eleven-piece group that provided music of more current interest (up to 1955). Along two of the walls there were long, two-tiered tables holding heaped platters of salads, antipasti, cold cuts, and sandwiches, mountains of tiny macaroni and farfalline, piles of salciccia, and banks of pastries and ice cream. On the third wall there was a bar where the extra men congregated. There were six bottles of two colors of wine on each table. At the tables on either side of the table of honor sat the representatives of the families, and equally nearby, if one row removed from the dance floor, were the statesmen, conglomerate heads, and prelates. All the men except the prelates wore tuxedos. The women were dressed merely spectacularly. The clergy, who with two exceptions were parish priests, wore either scarlet or purple soutanes. On each wall—north, south, east, and west—hung enormous sepia portraits: Arturo Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso, and Richard M. Nixon in heavy gold frames. Nixon was the chief executive of the country, but the don had admired him closely through his exciting tenure as congressman, senator, and vice president.
Maerose began the evening by clamoring so loudly for champagne that Vincent felt she was making it necessary for him to order at least a token glass of champagne for everyone in the room, which he resented bitterly, and which necessitated hurried telephone calls followed by the rushed dispatching of large trucks from warehouses. Mae refused food. She was getting drunk. Charley kept asking her if she wouldn’t like to eat something and then telling her to take it easy with the champagne. She said, “You want me to sit at this table or you want me to roam around and make myself a couple of new friends?”
During the one dance with Charley, she began by mussing the hair of the other women dancers and occasionally goosing the men.
“Mae, fahcrissake! Whatta you doing?” Charley said, locking in a fixed smile.
“Whatta you mean? I’m celebrating. We’re gonna get married, remember?”
“Your father is turning purple.”
“Charley, what are you—a party pooper?”
After that she refused to leave her chair, urging everybody to drink up, and carrying on shouted conversations with people on the dance floor. “Hey, Rosalia! Look out! Your ass is gonna fall off,” and other lighthearted sallies.
The don stared at her, unbelieving. He turned the stare into outrage and beamed it on Vincent. It was 9:41 P.M. when Mae finished her bottle of champagne and made her three big moves.
Move one: Charley was on the dance floor with Julia Fustino, Gennaro’s daughter-in-law who had helped to entertain Charley and Mae in New Orleans. Julia had won the Harvest Moon Ball in the lindy class the year before she was married. She was a terrific dancer and that inflamed Maerose, who began to behave like a jealous woman. She kept calling out to Charley from her table, “How come you don’t dance with the old bags, Charley? How come you go straight for the gorgeous women?” Or (very loudly), “Hey, Charley—come on! This is your engagement party, not an orgy.” And, “Come on, Charley. Drag her into a phone booth and get it over with, why doncha?”
Gradually other conversations at tables near the dance floor stopped altogether as the guests watched Maerose and little else.
Move two: Charley and Julia were dancing a sedate fox-trot when Mae lurched out of her chair and grabbed Julia’s arm, pulling her away from Charley. “I saw that, you son of a bitch,” she yelled, and whacked Charley across the chops. There was one great gasp from a few hundred throats and no gasps were greater or more horrified than the gasps from the center table directly on the dance floor.
Move three: Maerose pushed Charley away and half-staggered to the bar, where a line of young men had been drinking and watching the dancing; she grabbed a tall, dark one, and pulled him on the dance floor where she went into as lascivious a dance as either Vincent or his father, who took a large gross income out of pornography,
had ever seen. Vincent was trying on a case of apoplexy. The don looked as if he were going to turn her into stone. Only Father Passanante at the main table seemed to be enjoying watching the dance. After one turn around the dance floor that, as the Plumber said later, could have got her pregnant, Charley came forward from having returned Julia Fustino to her table, Mae threw her arms around the young man, socked her hips violently into his hips, and kissed him passionately. Vincent rushed out on the floor, got there ahead of Charley, and pried the two of them apart.
He grabbed her arm and began to pull her toward the door and said, “We’re going home.”
She jerked her arm loose. “Go home, Poppa,” she said. “It’s past your bedtime.” She grabbed the young man’s arm and pulled him away. She yelled at everyone, “In your hat and over your ears,” and sprinted out of the Palermo Gardens, pulling the young man along behind her. They disappeared from the room. Nobody knew what to say. Then, all of a sudden, everyone knew what to say all at the same time.
Hitting the outside pavement running, dragging the man, Mae yelled, “Zingo!”
The driver broke away from a knot of drivers. “Yes, Miss?”
“Get me out of here. Where’s the car?”
Zingo ran to the limousine and backed it up in front of the two people. Mae got into the car and pulled the man in behind her.
As the limousine pulled away, Charley and Vincent came running out of the building.
“What the hell is this?” Vincent said. “Did somebody put something in her drink?”
“Holy shit,” Charley said. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew Mae had made her move and that he didn’t want it that way. She had gotten him off the hook but she had fallen in the soup. It was bad enough the way it had been, but who needed this? He couldn’t figure out what to do except to let her sober up then to take her out to Vegas and marry her and stay away until the whole thing blew over.
She hadn’t been any drunker than Father Passanante, who didn’t drink. She had set the whole thing up because she thought he wanted to get off the hook but that he didn’t know how to do it. He knew one thing: it was never going to blow over with Vincent. As far as Vincent was concerned, she had dishonored him in front of the most important people on the planet. She was dead where Vincent was concerned.
She had fixed everybody—herself, sure—but him, too. If she was dead with Vincent, he, himself, was dead with her. She was his. She still knew that as much as he knew that. But she had run away from him. She was gone.
“I am ashamed in front of you, Charley,” Vincent was saying. “She has spit on all of us.” Vincent was so shaken that he was speaking in Sicilian. “She ain’t my daughter no more.”
“Come on, Vincent. It’s cold. We gotta go inside.”
“How we gonna face all them people?”
“We’re Prizzis, Vincent. That’s enough for them. We found out all about that tonight.”
When they got back to the table, Pop wasn’t there. They took their seats. Charley began a conversation about the Mets with Baby. Eduardo talked about the stock market to Father Passanante. Amalia wept quietly. Vincent took three pills. Don Corrado remembered, aloud and in close detail, some wild boar he had eaten, years before, on a trip with his wife after Vincent was grown up, on a grand tour of Italy, in a restaurant in Rome. It was called cinghiale in agrodolce, the latter being a sweet-and-sour sauce, and it could not in any way compare with the young lamb they had there. The boar was cooked with vinegar, anchovies, and flavored with rosemary, garlic, and sage, and his wife had said it wasn’t worth it to ask for the recipe, but she said that when they got back to New York she was going to see about getting some real baby lamb. The don wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. He could have been talking to his dead wife. He was just talking.
Pop returned to the table at ten fifty.
“She went to the airport,” he said. “She caught a plane for Mexico City with the man.”
The don turned politely to Vincent. “Get her back,” he snarled, then smiled terribly. “Mexico is no place for a young, single woman.”
“I had a talk with the airline’s night manager,” Pop said. “They issued Mae entry cards. She asked them to make a hotel reservation for her and they set her up at the Molina on Avenida Juárez.”
“Get on the phone, Vincent,” the don said.
55
The party broke up early. The people at the main table sat where they were as if everything were normal. After the Fustinos came over and said good night to everybody at eleven o’clock, Eduardo and Baby left. The don, who usually left all parties at half past ten, was still in his seat at the table at a quarter to twelve, after the last guests had come to them to say good night. No one mentioned Maerose. No one was solicitous of Charley. When the hall was empty except for the cleaning people, the don got to his feet. “I wanna talk to you tomorrow, Charley,” he said. “Come to my house at five o’clock.”
They all went outside. The don, Amalia, and Father Passanante got into the don’s limousine. Zingo, parked again after his trip to the airport, backed the stretch up for Vincent. Charley and Pop drove south toward Bensonhurst in Pop’s battered Chevy.
“Well,” Pop said, “she solved the problem.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s a great woman.”
“Yeah.”
“The fact is—I’m proud of alla youse. Class told. Everybody did what they was supposed to do. Mardell laid back. You accepted the facts of life. And Mae worked it so everybody has an out.”
“What happens to her now?”
“She knew what it was gonna be. She jumped out of a plane without a parachute, that’s all. What the hell, Charley, Mae didn’t belong in Brooklyn—she’s a modern woman. She belongs to the world out there.”
Pop dropped Charley off at the beach. Charley was just about inside his apartment when the phone rang. It was Vincent.
“Charley—what was that all about? I don’t wanna talk about her. I’m not gonna say her name after this. But I need a reason or I’m gonna—well, I need a reason.”
“I don’t know if I know, Vincent. I ain’t figured it out yet.”
“Did you have a fight or something?”
“No.”
“Then—what? Is she crazy?”
“I gotta think about it.”
“Who was that guy?”
“I never seen him before.”
“You’re a big fuckin’ help, you know that, Charley? You was suppose to marry her. So whatta you know about her—nothing.”
“That’s right. You’re her father and you don’t know nothing, either. I thought I knew her, but I had it all wrong. I didn’t know nothing about her.”
“She didn’t care about honor. She lost her faith.”
“Maybe you’ll find out about that someday and maybe you won’t,” Charley said, and he hung up.
Charley changed into street clothes, then he got into the van and drove to New York and was able to find a parking spot in front of Mardell’s apartment house. He rang Mardell’s doorbell. There were many sounds accompanying the unslotting of locks and door chains. She pulled him into the apartment as if assassins were running up the stairs after him, shut the door, and relocked it rapidly.
“Wasn’t tonight the—the party?” she asked him, wide-eyed.
“How’d you know that?”
“Somebody sent me an invitation.”
“Yeah?” He was astonished.
She nodded solemnly.
He shook his head in puzzlement. “I’m knocked out, baby. I gotta go to bed.” He walked ahead of her along the hall and turned left into the bedroom.
“Are you going to stay here tonight?”
He peeled off his shirt. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“I have a nine o’clock rehearsal. I open tomorrow night in Newark.”
“Okay. I’ll pick you up after the show.” He got into bed and went to sleep.
When he woke up, Mardell had left
to go to the rehearsal. He got dressed and made himself some breakfast, then he called the Laundry and said he was going to be out of the office until two o’clock to let Vincent plan his own day around him and not be there when he went in. They had brought Louis Palo in from Vegas to set up the moves on Willie and Joey, so he called Louis at the hotel and went over to see him. Two broads were just getting out of Louis’ room when he got there. One was Chinese. The other one could have been from outer space. Louis was a big ladies’ man, maybe even a little degenerate.
Charley laid out how he wanted everything to work. “You know where the big library is at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue?”
“I’ll find it.”
“They got telephone books on all the cities. Go in there and look up real estate agents in the Yakima telephone book.”
“Yakima?”
“It’s a city in the State of Washington. Write down the names. Then, when you get to Yakima, call one of the agents—case him first, maybe, to make sure he’s the biggest one—then tell him you want to rent a three-bedroom house somewhere not in town but just outta town. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“After you got it rented, then you go and see Willie at his furniture company and tell him you want him to tell you what you need for furniture and decoration. The decoration part brings Joey in. Then, while they’re working all that out, you call me at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, and I come out and do the job on them. You got it?”
“Are you gonna bring the tools?” Louis asked.