The friend of the poor is no more,
For Adelaide now is among the poor dead,
And her loss we shall sadly deplore.
For though noble her birth, and high was her station,
Their wants she relieved without ostentation,
But now she is gone, God bless her!
God bless her! God bless her!
But now she is gone, God bless her.
In your next letter tell me if you can use more of the wizard denture stickum which is on sale here. Many American celebrities wear it and boast about it on the telly.
With love and kisses,
Your daughter,
Margaret
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
17
Maerose behaved much, much worse than Charley ever thought any woman could after a simple roll in the hay. As soon as they recovered from it, she carried on like she had lost her mind. She made plans for them to be together for every hour of the day and night when he wasn’t either working at the Laundry or sleeping. She wanted to go to Baltimore with him when he went to Baltimore. She talked like she was on some kind of hop about how she had never dreamed anything could be so wonderful; about how she realized all at once that she had never been in love before in her life. She demanded to know if he loved her, then before he could answer, thank God, she wanted to know when they should tell Vincent and the don. Tell them what? Charley thought. That he had banged their daughter and granddaughter? Tell Vincent a thing like that and Vincent would zotz him. Charley tried smiling his way out of it, but he just didn’t have the experience, he was totally outclassed. What had seemed to come out of left field was a big boulder Maerose had thrown at him. He didn’t know how to defend himself, but she knew exactly what was happening.
Somehow they got dressed again and made it down to the van and Charley still hadn’t committed himself, but he had no idea how he had done it. “Oh, Charley,” she said as they were driving across south Brooklyn to Vincent’s house in Bensonhurst, “Poppa is gonna be so happy.”
“Happy?”
“A union of the two families who made the whole Prizzi presence in America possible. Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter and the son of his oldest friend, his consigliere.”
“Union?”
“Let’s keep it a secret just a little while longer. Let’s live inside this golden happiness for at least a few more days before we tell my father.”
“Are you—are you saying we’re engaged, Mae?”
She turned to him with her eyes shining. “Isn’t that what you wanted? To share one life together, for me to have your children—isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Jesus, Mae, everything happened so fast, I can’t really think. It’s such a new idea to me.”
“New? Then what were you thinking about when you—when you—took me—today? Did you think that I was just some—”
“No! No, no! But it happened so fast. I’m just saying yes—you’re right—let’s wait a little while before we tell Vincent.”
“Oh, my darling.”
Charley had been living at his father’s house on Eighty-first Street in Bensonhurst while the apartment was being decorated. It was the place Charley thought of as home; where his mother had taught him to cook and to respect the meaning of cleanliness. While he waited for Pop to come home Charley made pumaruoro o gratte—baked tomatoes filled with anchovies, minced salami, capers and bread crumbs—and he laid out the cylindrical tubes of hard pastry flavored with spice, coffee, cocoa, and lemon for the cannoli, then filled them with ricotta cheese and sugar flavored with vanilla so he and Pop could have a light supper while they talked. He kept looking at the clock, then he went into the living room and vacuumed the tops of the moldings and the picture frames because the girl could never seem to remember to do that. Pop got home at about a quarter to eight. He was knocked out that Charley had made two of his favorites for dinner.
Charley didn’t know how to talk about what was happening to him. He couldn’t get it together at dinner. Afterward, they went into the parlor with the overstuffed chairs, the lampshades with the long golden fringes, the upright piano his mother used to play, and the beer steins lined up all around the room on the shelf that was the ceiling molding. When he was a small boy, Charley had wanted to take the steins down to study them up close, but his mother always said they looked better from a distance. He still looked up to see them whenever he came into the room.
“Pop?”
“Yeah?”
“I gotta talk to you.”
“Whatsa matta?”
“I been going over it in my head and I can’t hardly figure out how it happened, but Maerose Prizzi thinks her and me is engaged.”
“Engaged?”
“Like engaged to be married.”
“You and Maerose? Well, Jesus. That’s terrific. What’s the problem?”
“Pop, I—I don’t know how—I mean—shit, Pop—one minute we hardly knew each other and the next minute she was saying how happy Vincent and the don are gonna be because we are engaged.”
“Whatta you mean, Charley?”
“She decorated my apartment. So today it was finished so she said we hadda go out and look at it.”
“So?”
“So we looked at it. It was terrific. Then she says, Carry me across the threshold, Charley. She was dressed all in white. She had a rose in her hand.”
“Like a bride?”
“Yeah. So I lifted her up and carried her across—I closed the door—then I look at her and she’s getting all hot so I don’t think, I do what anybody would do, I take her in the bedroom and I—yeah.”
“You mean—”
“Yeah.”
“Maerose Prizzi?”
“Yeah.”
“And now you are wondering why she says you and her is engaged?”
“Pop, listen—”
“What’s wrong with being engaged to Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter? You’ll inherit the earth! In a couple years you’ll be Boss. Whatta you so edgy about?”
“I don’t love her.”
“So you’ll get to love her. She’s lovable! She’s gorgeous! She’s talented! Tell me something she isn’t.”
“She isn’t the woman for me. I’m in love with somebody else.”
Pop’s jaw dropped. “No kidding?”
“Would I kid you? About a thing as important as this? What am I supposed to do?”
“There are things about Vincent you don’t know, Charley. When he was young. Believe me, Vincent can be an animal and he is all fucked up when it comes to honor. There was a guy who Vincent said peed on his honor who went to the movies. He sits in the back row. Vincent grabs the first thing he can find, a hammer, and he goes inna movie house. He hits the guy onna head with the claw end of the hammer and it goes right through. Vincent is very touchy when it comes to honor.”
“It don’t need to come to that.”
“The way Vincent is out of his head about honor, that’s how the don feels about gratitude, only he calls it disloyalty. If Mae tells them she is engaged to you, even if she doesn’t say nothing about how she got engaged to you, then if you try to say you ain’t engaged to her you’re gonna have Vincent on your ass about honor and the don all over you about disloyalty. I don’t know which is worse.”
“I can’t dump my main woman, Pop. There are very tricky reasons.”
“What reasons are better than staying alive?”
“I can’t, Pop. I’m telling you.”
“Who is this woman?”
“She’s in the show at the Latino. She thinks I’m a salesman.”
“What’s her name?”
“Mardell La Tour.”
“What’s her real name?”
“Mulligan.”
“Mardell—it’s probably Margaret. Call her Margaret and see what happens.”
“I like the Mardell better. She’s English.”
“English descent?”
“From England.”
> “Mulligan don’t sound English.”
“She oughta know. She’s from Shahffsbree, England. You should see how they spell it. I looked it up. It’s not near anything. Her father who left them when she was twelve died of leprosy, her mother told her.”
“That’s unusual.”
“She believes it. Nobody can talk her out of it. I tell her the mother said the father was a leper just as her way of saying he was the worst. She don’t even hear me.”
“What has all that got to do with Vincent maybe putting out a contract on you?”
“Because she goes to pieces if I say I’m gonna be away for a couple of days. I can’t walk out on her. I’m afraid of what she’ll do to herself. She’s a little crazy, Mardell, but tremendous. A valuable woman. She can’t cook, but she tries. I tell her, please, it’s not you. I can’t figure out how she fits in the bathtub she’s got. I gotta tell you, Pop. She breaks my heart sometimes.”
“She could be acting. Women are funny.”
“No. She’s always worrying. Jesus, sometimes she puts different-colored shoes on.”
“She wears colored shoes?”
“I tell her, listen—if anybody gives you any trouble, I’ll drop him off a bridge. Whatta you worried about, I say to her. She says, Who’s worried, I’m not worried. I ask her, How come you put different-colored shoes on?”
“We gotta face up to this, Charley.”
“It finally comes out that she thinks she isn’t good enough for people. I couldn’t even figure out what she was talking about. A beautiful girl, a funny girl, a smart girl in a lotta ways. How can she think she isn’t good enough?”
“I knew a woman once who thought she was a shit because all her life her mother told her she was a shit.”
“I grab her. I say—you want twenny-five thousand dollars cash? How many people you think you ain’t good enough for are walking around with twenny-five thousand dollars cash?”
“What did she say?”
“She said, How long is it since I put different-colored shoes on? I don’t think like I used to think anymore. You know why? Because you love me and anybody who has a man like you to love them has to know they are good enough for anybody in the world.”
“You got a problem.”
“I ask her how come she forgets to eat if I don’t tell her to eat?”
“She is certainly different.”
“I think she is also a little crazy. She does a special number on radio beams you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’d believe it. You got George F. Mallon trying to work up a case to send you to the hot seat. You are fooling around with peeing on Vincent Prizzi’s honor and Corrado Prizzi’s idea of what is loyal. What you need is a good radio beam. You’ll be lucky if you don’t catch cancer.”
18
For her Mardell characterization she developed certain quirks. As Mardell, she fell off chairs. She forgot to turn off shower baths. She told Charley she had left the apartment with a handful of change in her purse then had to walk through the night streets to the subway from the Latino on her stilt heels because she was too proud to ask anybody for cab fare.
Charley bawled the shit out of her, but he couldn’t see that it made any difference. It wasn’t until he figured out that she had to be worried all the time to behave the way she did that he let up on her. In the short time he had known her he paid more attention to her than he had paid to anyone else in his entire life.
He decided to make Baltimore a test case with Mardell. He knew he was going to have to go there for two days, and what made up his mind about taking a stand on such a nothing trip, as far as being separated from her was concerned, was a Sunday afternoon when he offered to go out and get her a pack of cigarettes and she began the blank-eyed stare and the crying.
“Fahcrissake, Mardell, I’m only going out for a pack of cigarettes.”
“That’s how my father left my mother, Charley. And he never came back.”
“Then go and get your own cigarettes. Do I want cigarettes? I don’t even smoke.”
“That is what occurred to me, Charley. That is what set me off. I know you don’t smoke and I am grateful to you for volunteering, but it reminded me of what my father did. You don’t need to get me cigarettes, I’m going to give up smoking.”
“Listen, Mardell, even you gotta know that I gotta have some consideration here. How do you think I feel? I tell you I love you, I do everything I can think of to prove I love you, but you don’t want it. You don’t trust me.”
“Charley!”
“Never mind. Just lissena me. I am talking respect here. When I tell you that I gotta go outta town for a coupla days, I am telling you a very normal thing. It’s business. I gotta make a living. I don’t do what I’m supposed to do and I get fired. You want me to get fired?”
She bit her lower lip and shook her head.
“Now lissena me, Mardell. I gotta go to Baltimore on guvvamint business. My company has a big contract with the guvvamint.”
“Baltimore? People commute to Baltimore.”
“Not when they gotta do what I gotta do. I am gonna call you three times a day—in the morning when I wake up, at lunchtime, then after your last show at night. Two days then I’m home witchew again. Six long-distance telephone calls. Are you gonna accept that or are you gonna cry and show me you don’t trust me and you don’t respect me?”
She nodded. She rushed into his arms almost knocking him to the floor, the sofa catching him as he went down. “It’s all right. Buckingham Palace says it’s all right. It just came in on the beam.”
Charley didn’t remember sleeping much that night but he felt too weak to get out of bed and read a magazine. His whole life had changed. He was stuck with the two most beautiful women in the time warp. It was as if some science fiction magazine had pulled him inside. Maerose and the radio beam. The don’s granddaughter and Buckingham Palace. It was too much from no matter where he looked at it. If Italian-type guys should marry Italian-type women, then he had got himself the most gorgeous, the smartest, the best-connected wop dame since Edda Mussolini. He couldn’t think of anything tremendous she didn’t have. She had class; she had education; she was so beautiful it made him dizzy; and how she had ever learned to do what she could do on a bed he didn’t want to know. Jesus—blue-black hair, eyes like a sex-crazed belly dancer crossed with Albert Einstein, and a body that, although it was different from Mardell’s, was a body so far beyond his lifetime ambitions for a body that it made him want to adjust his clothing whenever he thought about it.
How come I never felt like this about her before, he thought. Because I never saw her that way, that’s why. If only I got started on Maerose before the time I took Gennaro Fustino to the Latino none of this would have happened. But Maerose Prizzi was too far beyond his reach until she decided she was going to have to make the first move.
Worse, he thought, sitting inside his cup and making it runneth over was Mardell, a mountain of loving movements. She had hair like radishes floating in honey, an ass you could play handball on, toenails like canoe paddles, and golden eyes that were so big and scared that sometimes when he looked at her he almost busted out crying. He lost himself in Mardell and he saw himself in Maerose. Maybe the Arabs were right with their rules that it was okay to have a couple of wives—but who told the wives? That was the kicker—who told the wives?
Mardell was the biggest problem but, in a mysterious way, she brought him satisfaction. What am I, he wondered, somebody who walks around feeling so guilty about something or other that I need Mardell to make things rough for me so I know I done my penance and I can feel better about everything? But what did he have to feel guilty about? He lived right. He had never done anything to feel guilty about in his entire life.
As he thought about Mardell’s specialness, he came up with an answer. The reason he got so much satisfaction out of her was that he had to give her more than Maerose asked him to give. Not that Mardell ever asked for anything. She just stood th
ere, whacked up and helpless. Anybody would have tried to help her. She was probably nuts. So she needed him.
He had read about that in a lot of magazines. He had always thought that the women in the magazine stories framed it that way so the guy would cave in. But Mardell didn’t have the head on her to figure out things like that. Mardell just happened to be a natural problem. She was a freak, actually.
Maerose had read all the magazine stories and had figured out how to use them. She was almost too sane, but the main difference between her and Mardell was that Mae was insulated against the shocks of the world and Mardell had nothing but him to protect her.
He decided he knew two things: one, there was absolutely nothing good about the entire situation; two, he didn’t see how he was going to get out of it without totaling Mardell. He was in an impossible situation. Two women were out of their minds about him. Two terrific women were breaking their hearts because they were so in love with him they couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t save both of them. He was going to have to choose one or the other, but his terrible anxiety was for Mardell. Maybe for Maerose, too, but more for Mardell, because he knew in his heart she was capable of killing herself if she lost him.
19
Charley’s work in Baltimore was to put the fear into the three Social Security administrators who came over from Washington for the meeting and who had already been bribed and handled by Pop.
From the time he had been a kid, Charley had generated fear. At first it wasn’t something he had known he was doing, and after a while it became just another skill; a part of policy. If people weren’t doing right, they felt the fear and tried to shape up. The fear made people judge Charley’s seriousness about his work and made them more respectful. His father had made it clear to him that a man who is feared does not receive challenges to his honor and that the shield that fear creates covers everyone who is close to him. So, as he saw how hosing out fear could save time and get better results, he polished his techniques and encouraged his own awesome reputation. Techniques or not, Charley was basically a frightening man without even trying, forget the techniques, except maybe to women. His job in Baltimore was to frighten the three SSA civilians so that they wouldn’t be able to open their mouths if anything went wrong, which, because Pop had set it up, could not possibly go wrong.