“She don’t hafta go to Australia. We’ll have a little funeral—you and Mae, Amalia, me, and Eduardo. We’ll have Corrado inna ground before anybody knows he’s dead.”
“You would do that for Mae, Pop?”
“Not for Mae, Charley. I gotta do it for Corrado. I swore to him I would do it.”
36
When Charley went into Mary Barton’s bedroom that night, after he had talked to the skipper of the RS Jack Frost on the radio telephone bounced off the company’s satellite, she was propped up on a pile of pillows watching a videocassette of “The Wodehouse Playhouse.” She turned it off with the remote when Charley came in.
“What did Pop want?”
Charley sat on the side of the bed and stared into her face. “He found the don,” he said.
Mary Barton closed her eyes. Her right hand went slowly to her face. She put the second knuckle of her index finger between her teeth and bit down.
“It’s over now, Mae. You don’t have to keep turning to stone every day. It’s all right. I understand—Pop understands—what you did.”
Her wild eyes implored him.
“Pop will be in England tomorrow. He’ll take the don off, have him laid out in a casket, and fly him back here.”
Tears ran down her cheeks, but she didn’t make a sound. She gripped her knuckle with her teeth and made uncontrolled muted noises in her throat, the sounds of a small animal caught in a trap in a forest where any sound would be an anomaly.
“We’ll bury him the day he gets here,” Charley said. “A very small funeral. You and me, Pop, and Amalia and Eduardo.” He reached out and touched her cheek with his full hand.
Her terrible fear burst free. “Oh, Charley,” she sobbed, reaching out for him and pulling herself to him. “How I love you! I love you.”
He kissed her, then held her until the sobbing subsided. “I think it would be nice if we also invited Enrichetta,” he said. “It would mean a lot to her.”
With her face pushed into his chest, Maerose nodded again and again.
37
When Pop got back from England with the don’s body, Charley met him at Kennedy. Pop seemed to be hearing an echo of his old friend’s death, telling him to be ready because he was next. Charley felt his father’s awe, which had come to him with three solid days of living with what remained of Don Corrado. He said, “What the hell, Pop. He had to go. Nobody beats that system.”
“It’s just funny how it all worked out. He come here from such a hot country. Jesus, I still can remember nearly dropping from the heat there. Then he lives in New York for seventy years, the most changeable climate in the world. But when he dies—what? Mae packs him in an icebox and sends him on a cruise.”
Charley put his arm around his father’s stooped shoulders. “Average it all out, temperaturewise,” he said, “and where he went after he died has to have the perfect climate.”
“I got a lot of papers to get the body in.” He pulled a sheaf of documents from his inside breast pocket. “They done a really classy embalming job in England. The guy actually made a house call.”
“I got people here to handle the papers,” Charley said. “Mr. Dalloway?”
A brisk man with an entourage of two rushed to Charley’s side like a cheetah. “Yes, sir?”
“See that this cargo is cleared, please. You had them bring a hearse along?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take the cargo to the Santa Grazia Funeral Home in Brooklyn. At this address, please.” Charley gave him the papers from Pop’s hand.
“Yes, sir!” Dalloway and his unit wheeled as one man and took off like arrows in flight.
“You want a cup of coffee, Pop?”
“I gotta go in and see Amalia. Did you tell her?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. She’s gonna take it hard, Charley. All this time, she thinks her father just snuck out of the house and went someplace on business.”
“I got a limo outside.”
“Not that flashy Rolls?”
“No. It’s a rental from one of our companies.”
They moved out of the terminal. The car was waiting. They got in and Charley rolled up the partition between the tonneau and the driver.
“Flying ain’t so bad,” Pop said, “if you discount the food, the movie, and the seats. Maybe I’ll go visit the old country.”
“We need you here, Pop.”
“Your people were a lotta help getting Corrado in the box and outta the country, Charley. For a minute there, I thought I had blown it. I began to think I shoulda let him ride back to New York in the icebox, but your people took over. They set him up for the custom embalming job, and they put in the fix to clear him for the flight home.” He sighed. “Jesus, when I found him he was still in his nightshirt, the way we left him four months ago.”
Charley patted his father’s hand. “It’s okay, Pop.”
“No, it ain’t, Charley. Mae done a terrible thing here. Nothing is gonna be okay until we find out how Amalia is gonna take the news.”
“You gonna tell her about Mae?”
“What for, fahcrissake?”
When they got to the don’s house in Brooklyn Heights, Pop told Charley it would be better if he saw Amalia alone.
“I’ll be at the office,” Charley said. “When are you going to make the funeral?”
“Tomorrow. We gotta get him in the ground and get it over with before the papers start everybody walking down memory lane.”
Amalia settled Angelo Partanna in a big chair in the main floor living room, which no one had entered, except Amalia, who watched television in there every night after the don had gone to sleep at seven o’clock. Because the don had never come downstairs, Amalia had let Maerose’s company do the decorating. The living room was like a room in an English country house, comfortable and colorful. Amalia had added her own little touch. There were dozens of soft cushions scattered upon the many pieces of furniture.
“Where you been, Angelo?” she said with affection. “I ain’t heard from you in three, four days.”
She was a small, refined-looking woman in her late sixties with a trim figure and elegant legs. She dressed well, in the Bloomingdale’s style. No one would have made her for what she had never ceased to be, a Sicilian country woman. “Take away the little moustache,” Don Corrado had said to Pop time and time again, “and you got a show girl.” Her eyes had the Prizzi intensity. For all her life, Amalia had been careful to view life from a distance, but she had seen it, recorded it, and measured it against what she knew to be the greatness of her father.
“Well—”
“You have news of Poppa! You found Poppa! Did you find Poppa, Angelo?”
He nodded.
“My God!” she said. “Where is he? Why ain’t he here if you found him?”
Tears filled his eyes as he stared at her.
“He’s gone? Poppa’s gone?” Her hand covered her mouth tightly as if to keep her sanity from escaping. Angelo measured her shock and answered carefully.
“He’s at Santa Grazia’s Funeral Home. The funeral is tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” She was deeply shocked. “How can it be tomorrow? People gotta come from all over the country. Fly in even from Sicily. Does the Cardinal know? He’s gotta say the requiem mass. Jesus God, Angelo, thousands and thousands of people are involved here. How can the funeral be tomorrow?”
“It’s better that way, Amalia.”
“No! It can’t be! You think we can just lose a great man like we’re burying somebody’s dog in the backyard?”
“Lissena me,” Angelo said harshly. “He was my friend. I loved him. I wouldn’t do nothing for him the wrong way.”
“But—what the hell?—who is gonna be there if nobody knows? How can the people and the whole world pay their respect to him?”
“I was the last one to talk to him.”
“It’s not only the family, Angelo. History is involved here. A great man is gone.”
“He made me swear that, if he died—and he knew then he was gonna die, Amalia—he made me take an oath on the immortal souls of my two grandsons that when he died only you and Mae and me and Charley and Eduardo and Father Passanante would go to the funeral. He said to me he had to be in the ground before the newspapers and the television found out about it.”
“I don’t unnastan. What about my son, Poppa’s grandson, Rocco? What about Pasquale, in California?”
“Right after the funeral you can tell them.”
“Rocco will go crazy.”
“Lissena me! You think there ain’t a lotta people who are gonna bleed over this? But, if it’s only the five of us, then after a while they’re gonna unnastan the whole thing.”
“How does anybody know Poppa said that to you?”
“He wrote a letter. It’s in the letter.”
“Where’s the letter?”
“What?”
“The letter, where is it?”
Angelo replayed the don’s death scene in his mind. When he had told about the letter, he had used a kind of shorthand because he didn’t have time for a lot of words. He had said, “The force of destiny.”
“It’s upstairs. In the sleeve of the record album, La Forza del Destino. I put it back there myself after I hadda show it to Eduardo.”
“I wanna see it,” Amalia said.
“Come on. We’ll go up.”
They climbed the stairs in silence. They entered the enormous room. They walked to the wall that held shelf upon shelf of record albums, several thousand of them. Angelo halted at the F’s, then ran his finger along the numbered positions to slide out the album they sought. He held the front flap of the liner open and reached inside. His hand came out with a long white envelope. Before the Blessed Decima Manovale took over the house, he thought, he had to go through every record sleeve on these shelves. This was Corrado’s special filing system. There could be some terrible secrets and a lotta spare cash in there.
Amalia stared at the open letter for a long time. “Well, if this is the way he wanted it, then that’s how it’s gotta be. But how come Mae and Charley if not Rocco?” she said implacably. “Mae is a granddaughter, but Charley ain’t even a relative.”
“Charley is the husband. The husband goes with the wife to funerals.”
“So how come Mae if not Rocco?” Amalia said bitterly. “She is the granddaughter so she is going, but Rocco is the grandson and he is nothing.”
“Charley’s people found the don,” Angelo lied easily. “So Charley knew first. He didn’t know about what the don told me before he went, so, naturally, he told his wife. So she has to go.”
“So does Rocco.”
“Lissena me, Amalia. Five people are going. And five is a big risk. Rocco is gonna be so knocked out that the don is dead and he’s the first one of the soldiers to know that so he’s gonna tell evveybody. Tomorrow morning the television, all the papers. Ten thousand people will show up at the church plus eleven TV cameras. The FBI and the IRS. Then Eduardo will be through—washed up. You don’t want your own brother to be president of the United States? The don knew what was gonna be if we didn’t keep it quiet until it was over. You gotta do it his way.”
“If Rocco don’t go, then Maerose can’t go. And if she don’t go, then Charley ain’t going. I am telling you, Angelo.”
“All right. Charley don’t go. Maybe that’s good thinking. He is running a ten-, twenty-billion-dollar operation. What is a guy name of Charles Macy Barton doing at a fratellanza funeral, they’re all gonna say.”
“And Mae don’t go.”
“So that’s it. You, Eduardo, and me. That’s it.”
“No,” she said sobbing brokenly. “It ain’t right. He was a great man and the mighty of the earth should come to his grave and praise him.”
“You gonna spit on your father’s dying wishes?”
“No. Whatever he ever wanted, that’s what I want for him.” But her face had changed and Angelo had spent his life reading faces and clocking body language. Deep in the eyes of the sweet, obedient, compliant Amalia, altars to malevolence were shining within the cathedral of her Sicilian resentment.
Her face settled into a mask of defiance. “You think I don’t know nothing. You think I was some kind of machine who walks in and outta the room with cookies and grappa and the food? I listened to everything that went on in there—setting up little Sal Prizzi, telling Charley to zotz this one and that one, hearing Mae talk Poppa into—what?—being respectable, looking nice, walking a line like he was some American shithead instead of a mafiusu Sicilian! You think it didn’t break my heart, hearing her talk to him and seeing him buy it, the whole thing? And now—on the day he is dying on his deathbed, he tells you, his consigliere, not me, his daughter, that he wants you to put him in the ground in silence, a secret from the people he made and the people who made him.”
“With this kind of money riding, that’s the way it’s gotta be,” Angelo said, reaching out to touch her arm.
She flinched and stared at him with contempt. “Where was he when you found him, Angelo?”
“In England.”
Amalia crossed herself.
“Lemme tell you what happened to him,” the old man said, all ready with a pack of lies.
38
Amalia stayed in her room upstairs. Angelo went down to the main floor and told Calo Barbaccia to get him a taxi. He went to his house in Bensonhurst and called Charley. “Tell Mae I’m comin’ to dinner wit’ choose,” he said.
“How did Amalia take it?” Charley asked.
“Not on the phone.” He hung up.
Charley met him at the door. They went into the drawing room, crossed into the cozy book-lined study that made Angelo think of the old One Hundred and Fourth Field Artillery Armory. It had a gigantic snooker table that no one had ever played on and a movie screen behind a Fra Angelico that could be cantilevered from the ceiling by an electric switch. “The Wodehouse Playhouse” was on the television screen to keep Charley kosher about upper-class attitudes. Mary Barton was waiting—a different Mary Barton—more subdued, womanly again. A police report might have said there were no marks on her, but Angelo could see the marks, welts upon her soul endlessly bleeding in her punishment for what she had done to her grandfather. Angelo went to her and took her in his arms. “Like you always did, Mae,” he said gently, “you was only thinking exactly like the don.”
She clung to him until Charley said, “How did Amalia take it, Pop?” and Angelo broke away gently.
“Lemme put it this way,” Angelo said. “She wanted a big public funeral with evvey family in the country coming in and all the Prizzi soldiers and their women doing their thing for the TV cameras and the FBI.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Maerose said.
“There was only one way to go. I told her what the don told me just before he went to the angels.”
“What, fahcrissake?” Mary Barton said.
“That nobody should know he was dead until he was inna ground. That’s what he made me swear. You and him think the same, Mae.”
“Oh, Jesus!” She covered her face with her hands.
“But she held out that Rocco had to go to the funeral and I told her no. Anyways, we made a deal. Rocco don’t go, you don’t go, Mae. And if you don’t go, Charley don’t go.”
“My stars and body,” Charley said. “Who does go then?”
“Amalia, Eduardo, and me. That’s it.”
39
The small church was nearly empty. Three people stood in the front row. Father Passanante led the procession just ahead of the closed casket as it was rolled on its gurney away from the altar by the mortician’s staff. The three mourners peeled out of the front pew and followed the casket down the aisle, Amalia between her brother and Angelo Partanna, the two men needing to support her.
The three mourners got into the only limousine that waited behind the black hearse in front of the church. The short cortege rode across Brooklyn to the Verraz
ano Bridge to the family’s cemetery, Santa Grazia di Traghetto in Staten Island, swiftly following the route that Charley Partanna’s funeral had taken so slowly almost two years before.
Father Passanante intoned the litany at the graveside and the three mourners repeated the words after him. The priest closed his breviary.
“I have known Corrado Prizzi for thirty years,” he said. “There was no man who matched his qualities. He was a positive man. He was generous to those whom circumstances forced him to encourage or to chastise. He was a singleminded man who kept an openness to God and who husbanded the temporal power accorded to him with a kind of justice. He died shriven. He has gone to the angels.”
The simple wooden casket was lowered into the grave. Father Passanante sprinkled earth upon it and intoned the ritual. The three mourners wept, the men bowed and uncovered on the perfect early spring morning.
When the service was over, the mourners returned to the limousine, which rolled slowly out of the marbled park. Father Passanante got into his Korean two-door and left after he had offered up his own prayers at the grave.
Amalia sat between the two men, staring straight ahead. “We are free of the oath which Poppa made you take, Angelo,” she said with a dulled voice. “Now I can avenge what has been done to my father.”
“What are you talking about, Amalia?” Eduardo said, thinking several hundred thoughts at once about the Republican nominating convention.
“You have respectability, you think, Eduardo. But it was laid over you like a blanket and it can be snatched away.”
Eduardo leaned across her and looked at Angelo. “Do you know what this is all about?” he asked testily.
“Let her talk it out, Eduardo.”
“I am going to take us back to where we all belong, to what our meaning is, to what we are.”
“Please, Amalia, shut up. I have a lot on my mind.”
“Listen to her, Eduardo,” Angelo said.
“When I get to a telephone, I am going to call the television and the Daily News and tell them whose son you are. I am going to tell them who Charles Macy Barton is—that we are all Sicilians, mafiosi, and that we have become what we are at the pleasure of our father, the don of dons, Corrado Prizzi.”