Prizzi's Glory

  No one had the time or energy to check out all of the details of the Barton story, but, if some nosey Parker did rumble around among the accepted facts, he would soon discover that Charles Macy Barton (or a stand-in) had indeed run the course, but that the invisible stand-in had soon afterward passed away at Corrado Prizzi’s suggestion.

  Charles Barton had been exhaustively documented with birth and marriage certificates, Social Security registration, tax receipts going back for twenty-five years, driver’s licenses, club memberships, and a subscription to W magazine that had been predated back to the founding issue, together with all of the other scraps of proof-of-being litter that any sensible community requires.

  The headset he wore day and night also fed Charley the jargon of his milieu, imbedding into his memory such doctrinaire acronyms of big business as TIA, CPM, AQL, PERT, ROI, and ZBB, which stood for trend impact analysis, critical path method, acceptable quality level, performance evaluation and review technique, return on investment, and zero-based budgeting. Charley and Mary Barton breakfasted each morning while exchanging those and other buzzwords that businessmen used to bring mystery to the art of buying cheap and selling dear. After two months of it, Charley could use key buzzwords and phrases effortlessly, in easy-flowing sentences—mobicentric management, adhocracy, horizontal integration, zero-sum game, change agent, futurists, Delphi technique, break-even analysis, span of control, interface, and suboptimization—at will, without seeming to need to think about it. He acquired equal conversational authority on the arts, where his vocabulary and imagery-within-tradition were prodigious. Conceptions such as enchainement de grand jetes en tournant while discussing ballet, and punching out melodic lines, or Diz jamming, were a part of the new language to Charles Macy Barton. He knew album-oriented rock from mainstream pop, but it was his mastery of the jargon of the high, modern, and pop graphic arts that took the breath away, and his conversational prejudices for opera and the concert hall were equally impeccable. Verbal responses to modern painting were the most difficult for Charley to master. He felt, with considerable justification, what can one say about a Motherwell or a Warhol that has not already been said?

  These expanding successes impressed upon him day and night the need to remain au courant with all argots related to the most remote of his interests as winespeak and dressmakerspeak. For seven hours every weekend, when other people were dawdling in McDonald’s or looking at television or exploring sex, Charles Macy Barton sat quietly in the biofeedback position with the headset strapped on and the tapes containing the last trendinesses of American speech being absorbed by his relentlessly retentive mind.

  Charley liked being respectable. The written record of his never-never life struck deep chords within him. Their repetitions through the feedback had the chords growing into something more complexly logical than J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” The very sonorities of respectability, so various, so new to Charley, filled his central ego with new aromas as if, at Thanksgiving time, a deep-breasted turkey had been roasted, then stuffed with an exotic dressing that was redolent of new, exotic flavors.

  Since he had graduated from high school, he had yearned for recognition for himself, not just for his work (as legendary as it had become throughout the Honored Society), which, by social insistance, had to be shrouded in anonymity. A vindicatore could be recognized in song and story by his peers, but where was the vigorish when that could be incriminating among the straights? He wanted recognition from the world at large: a W interview, a Rolling Stone cover, a Horatio Alger award, the admiration of the masses. He took pride in his new clothes, new face, new dental arrangements, and in the stately bearing these brought to him. He was perhaps too overweeningly proud of his education, as recorded in the biography that Mary Barton had written, and he found incalculable fulfillment in the way Maerose—that is, Mary—looked at him when he commanded a table from the maitre d’hotel at the hotel restaurant across Mount Street in London. They ate Italian food only at home now, were never seen entering an Italian restaurant.

  Charley appreciated the jigsaw puzzle of modern trendiness and of the many-layered culture that had made his instant acceptance possible. His wife had assembled a totality of new meaning within him, which had brought with it a bottomless faith in all instant labels. As each day went over the abyss to fall into the bottomless past, he became deeply set within his new carapace and more certain of his right to be cloaked in all things respectable.

  But also, for the first time in his life, he was enjoying himself. No more dull routines of being expected to set the street prices for cocaine and pot every Monday morning. No more the depressing responsibility of zotzing his fellow men. He had the feeling that he could almost see over the horizon. His life, which, before the great changes, had been like being locked inside a junked refrigerator that had been dumped into an abandoned empty lot in the South Bronx, had suddenly become limitless, open, and admirable. Everything felt right. He could spend his money without being indicted by the IRS. He was a Rolls-Royce owner. He rarely had to hose fear on anyone in the new life. Women, who were sensitive to grotesque amounts of money and power, got the hots for him whenever he walked into a room. Nobody pressed him into the rut that had been his old life, and he thrilled to the freedom to expand endlessly outward like a musical note from an oboe to seek the edges of the (known) universe. Instead of the old routine—the conversations about how the Mets were playing nice ball and the monotonous daily demands of what he should shop for to make his own dinner—he had travel, the sort of food cultured people ate, even though what they were eating cost an arm and a leg, and he was somebody.

  An expression of Mary Price Barton’s long-deceased mother, “It is fiddly work making houseflies, said the Lord,” had been constantly on Mary’s mind as she had struggled through Charley’s metamorphosis, but, at last, Charley was re-created: a walking dichotomy, a man who was capable of being nostalgic about two different pasts, like the way, in America, white people viewed the blacks. As Charley assimilated his new character and culture, she felt power as she had always dreamed of feeling the force of power. Even her grandfather would be in awe of what she was about to become.

  Mary Barton was just a tad more than seven months pregnant, far along enough to have allowed the sonogram technician at the Princess Grace Hospital in London to tell her that she was going to have male twins. She carried the cargo well, as tall women can. She looked portly but not wheelbarrow pregnant. Charles Barton was made solemn and thoughtful by the news.

  “Jehoshaphat, Mae,” he drawled behind an outthrust chin, after grabbing her and kissing her with his new, wider mouth, “I am fifty-four years old, almost fifty-five, but I have made double of what most other people usually make.”

  “Twins come down through the female line,” Mary explained. “My grandmother had twins.”

  “Blow my shirt!” He looked as if he did not really believe anyone else could have twins. “What shall we name them?” He spoke with those unflawed phonetic stresses whose doom was the burden of money, his jaw clenched shut in the Locust Valley manner because, when he lapsed, his wife kicked him in the ankle.

  “I thought we should call them after the don and your father—Conrad Price Barton and Angier Macy Barton.”

  He stared at her in awe. “Conrad? Is that what the don’s name is in English?”

  She nodded. “But we’re going to call him Rado. That will be his nickname.”

  “The o at the end. Isn’t that a little Italian?”

  “Italian? Good heavens no. It’s very, very jet set.”

  “But what is Angier?”

  “It’s the French-American aristocratic equivalent of Angelo, which derives from the Sanskrit angiras, a divine spirit, and from the Persian angaros, a courier. In Greek it is angelos, meaning ‘a messenger.’ In Arabic the word is malak—Hebrew loan word. Angelos was first used as a personal name in Byzantium, whence it spread to Sicily, where there was a thirteenth-century saint of the name.??
?

  “Interesting,” Charley said.

  When the Bartons returned to New York, they brought with them eleven wardrobe trunks; the enormous Rolls; Danvers, a driver/valet, who had matriculated at the Rolls school at Crewe and who had studied pressing and sponge cleaning at the Tailors’ & Cutters’ in London; and a Sicilian lady’s maid, Enrichetta Criscione, a woman with sewing skills who spoke no English and doubled as a waitress. She had never been off her native island before the Honored Society had graciously found her for Mary Barton. The Bartons had also acquired a housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan; a Swiss chef, Ueli Munger; a Chinese butler of enormous dignity named Yew Lee; and a Patek-Philippe watch that automatically registered the date change at each leap year and that had cost Mary Barton, as an Arbor Day gift to her husband, $27,812. All of these, and the Bartons, occupied a triple-front house on East Sixty-fourth Street, which had a seventeen-foot statue by Henry Moore in the garden and four enormously valuable paintings by James Richard Blake inside (two of these from the inexpressibly breathtaking Prism collection).

  Before they had set the horizontal living quarters trend, requiring that the strivers within the nouvelle society abandon the concept of vertical housing to try to achieve horizontal housing within an extremely limited metropolitan demographic area, the record price of a triplex condominium had been $5.2 million, set by some Fort Worth people. The quadriplex of four private houses on East Sixty-fourth Street, redesigned and reconstructed into one magnificent dwelling with twenty-foot ceilings, had cost $9.6 million. It had a ballroom, an indoor jai alai court, a large quoits facility, and nursery air-filtering systems that circulated the scents of newly mown hay and deep green forests; nannies’ quarters with wall-to-wall television and conveniently placed, handheld electronic tickers for the stock and commodity markets; a nursery kitchen and a large walk-in vault for toys. Mary Barton, herself, after all, a former professional decorator, had conceived all the interior designs for the house from Switzerland and England, had approved or rejected, from photographs, all of the breathtaking Georgian furniture (and what Architectural Digest was to call “an important collection” of antiques); had fingered swatches of materials, wallpaper, and carpeting before they were installed, bringing off many startling effects such as the “living rug” in the main salon, which was an illuminated, channeled wall-to-wall transparent glass water tank that covered the entire floor, filled with tropical flora and brilliantly colored tropical fish that moved through the maze of invisible glass-walled channels and that would also continually divert guests from asking dopy questions about Charley’s past.

  When people were favored with invitations to attend the Macy Bartons’ housewarming on May 30, 1992, four months after the birth of the twins, they came from the capitals of Europe, from Texas, from Hollywood, and from Washington, the proud elite of the old guard of New York’s nouvelle society, to pay homage to an old friend, Mary Price, once New York’s favored decorator (but hardly to be considered as only a fournisseur), the niece of Edward S. Price, front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Indeed, Mary Price Barton had made her place in New York’s nouvelle society long before her brilliant marriage to the puissant Charles Macy Barton.

  Charley was amazed to observe that, if anyone were asked a direct question about him, people got very nervous. It was the sort of nervousness that overwhelms any American group when a new person entering the group is said to control an insane amount of money. The most socially stable and sensitive people became unpoised and mechanical when they entered Charley’s or Mary Barton’s presence, harboring wild dreams of either of them suddenly behaving utterly irrationally, such as seeing the visitors’ true value and bestowing a large-hearted sum of money on them.

  As an ingrained Sicilian, Charley knew that the opposite side of the coin of hope is fear. Instinctively, he worked that edge. In a relatively short time, with the exception of very few people, including Mrs. Colin Baker, the arbiter of every crisis in the real society, no one would answer direct questions about Charles and Mary Barton until Mary Barton had cleared the questions.

  On the third day in New York, although Eduardo was campaigning in caucus and early primary states, Mary Barton told her husband that the time had come for him to make his first appearance in the offices of Barker’s Hill Enterprises as the company’s CEO.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You go there and meet the people—your people.”

  “Alone?”

  “I can’t go looking like the Goodyear blimp, Charley. I typed out a few cards for little comments you can make at different occasions during the visit. There is nothing to it.”

  “What if they ask me questions about what they should do about running the business?”

  “I have typed out safe, standard answers on the little file cards. Fahcrissake, Charley! Eduardo told you he never answered a direct question.”

  “How will Eduardo feel about me going in and just taking over?”

  “Eduardo is out kissing babies in the heartland. And he personally named you as his successor.”

  Charley went to the Barker’s Hill offices in the Barker’s Hill building, which dominated a slight rise in the Avenue of the Americas, a rise that two full-time PR men and a professional briber were working to have officially designated as Barker’s Hill on the city maps. Danvers guided the Rolls into the especially private parking space under the building, a perquisite no one else enjoyed, which was five feet three inches from Charles Barton’s private elevator to his offices at the top of the tower sixty-eight stories above the street.

  Charles Barton rose to the command deck and accepted introductions to Miss Blue, his personal secretary, and to one Sestero and one Garrone, who had been Eduardo’s personal vice-presidents. Not one of them recognized him, and they were people who had known him since he had come back from Nam in ’67.

  He was shown around the executive suite. He appreciated the private bathroom, dressing room, and shower, but he ordered the removal of the sauna and the whirlpool bath. “They breed germs and cause infections,” he said sternly, consulting a palmed file card. “I could get hypersensitivity pneumonitis from breathing the contaminated air. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is rampant around hot tubs and whirlpool spas. Put a billiard table in here instead.”

  Edward Price’s former office was furnished in the same austere PR “plain as an old shoe” style as the company’s DC-10: harsh, uncushioned, country furniture; a rolltop desk, spittoons, all of it on uncomfortable, unpolished plank floors, with photo portraits of Enrico Caruso, Pope Pius XII, Arturo Toscanini, and Richard M. Nixon on the walls in stark gilt frames.

  “What in tarnation!” Charley said, peeking at a palmed file card as he surveyed the room. “Where are we? On a movie set? Who thought this up, some press agent?” He ordered that the large, six-windowed, corner office be redecorated, telling Miss Blue to call his wife for instructions. “In the meantime, I’ll use your office,” he said to Carleton Garrone, who had been introduced as his general assistant.

  He had lunch in the company’s executive dining room, attended by its black-coated waiters, who themselves looked like bank presidents, with twelve of the thirty-one vice-presidents within the Office of the President, receiving them four at each course, in alphabetical order, greeting them warmly, and listening gravely to their immediate problems, promising early solutions. A vice-president named Kent Black, who was in charge of the Mass Communications Division, which was subordinate to Community Affairs, kept pressing Charley for solutions to his alleged problems to the point where Charley had to snarl at him to wait his turn, then hose him with the fear. The others at the table froze.

  Everyone, except the dumbstruck Black, urged the Luxury Hamburger on him, a creation of Edward Price’s. It was made with ground, inch-thick, New York sirloin strip steak with sterlet caviar used as a stretcher. Charley gagged on it. “What in tunket is this?” he said, choking on the food. Shocked by Charley’s lèse-majesté, for the caviarburger was Edward Pri
ce’s favorite dish, but greatly impressed by his palate, the four vice-presidents then at the table explained the hamburger’s ingredients.

  “It is not only garbage,” Charley exploded, throwing the fear over them, “it is a sacrilege, mixing fish eggs with good meat. Take it off the menu.” The incident took its place in the company’s legends around the world.

  21

  In the December of ’91, before the printemps of their apotheosis, Charley and Mary were invited to lunch at Don Corrado’s for a celebration of Mary Barton’s gravidity and Charley’s new face, which Angelo Partanna already had traveled in to New York to see, but which would be entirely new to the don. Angelo had thanked Mary Barton for having used his wife’s name as the foundation for her new family name. “I just wanted to get everybody in,” she said warmly.

  Don Corrado was so overjoyed at the news of the twins and the choice of their names that, for the first time in man’s memory, he had invited a woman to lunch with him. Maerose had heard much of these legendary lunches from her father and Charley. She accepted the invitation as the final stroke of her achievement of her place as the invisible capa of the Prizzi family.

  It was truly a family party: Don Corrado, Maerose, Charley, and Angelo Partanna, with Aunt Amalia darting in and out of the kitchen. When they arrived at the front door, Charley started a big hello for Calorino Barbaccia, but Mae kicked him in the ankle and walked on his lines. “Calorino!” she cooed. “How nice. This is my husband, Charles Macy Barton.”

  Calorino touched his forelock.

  “How is your son?” she asked.

  “Back in solitary, Miss.”