“Oh. Great. She’s coming down?” Then he heard what she had said. “My intended?”
“Whassamatta?”
“Who told you that?”
“She did. Who else? I thought maybe you’d like to go out and meet her.”
“Well. Sure. You bet.”
“She’s gonna be staying with us. Here.”
“Sure. Absolutely. You got a flight number?”
“A car will pick you up at eleven. He’ll have the flight number. She gets in at twelve five, then youse can drive back here and we’ll all have lunch.”
“That sounds great.”
“Hey, you know what I’m gonna make for dessert, because I noticed that you got a real tooth for a dessert?”
“What?”
“Uccidduzzi with ‘scursunera! Real Sicilian. Hah? Hey?”
“Terrific. That will be absolutely terrific, Birdie.”
36
SON OF N.Y. MAYORAL CANDIDATE
ARRESTED ON SERIOUS TEEN
AND NARCOTICS CHARGES HERE
Marvin Mallon, age 31, son of George F. Mallon, the Reform Party candidate for mayor of New York, was arrested last night in a room at the New Iberia Hotel and charged with illegal entry, corrupting the morals of a minor, aggravated assault upon a minor, indecent exposure, carrying a deadly weapon, and illegal possession of two ounces of heroin.
Police said he had battered a 15-year-old girl, Laverne Toby, of Palestine, Texas, while attempting to force her to commit unnatural sexual acts.
Mallon alleges that Miss Toby and her mother were in his room at the hotel, but the hotel’s records show that he was registered in a single room, two floors below the Toby suite, on the other side of the hotel.
Police believe Mallon to be a drug dealer. The weapon he was carrying is believed to match the ballistic pattern of the weapon used to kill a narcotics wholesaler, Julius “Little Julie” Mingle, in Baton Rouge, last week.
Reached in New York, the suspect’s father, who conducted a “Pray-In” in New York’s Central Park yesterday with almost 100,000 people attending including national religious leaders, stated that the charges were “impossible and preposterous.”
Marvin Mallon, who gave his occupation as “religions contact person,” has no police record either in New York or in local or Federal records, it has been ascertained. The arrest is expected to have a strong negative effect on the Mallon candidacy.
The Mallon television broadcast in New York, scheduled for seven P.M. Monday night, was canceled by Mallon Campaign Headquarters. The candidate was unavailable for comment. He was in executive session with his aides, but ultimately it became necessary to sedate him. With eight days to go until Election Day, Mayor Heller offered the candidate the city’s entire cooperation in setting up the fullest flow of information between the candidate and the New Orleans Police Department, the media reported; a gracious gesture on his part, in view of the candidate’s announced intentions.
Early Monday morning, Charley dialed the Plumber at the Laundry in Brooklyn.
“Al? Tell Pop to call me.”
He ordered breakfast. Then Pop’s call came in.
“How is she?”
“She’s sitting up.”
“I thought pneumonia patients had to sit up so their lungs won’t get full.”
“I mean she is sitting up in a chair. I seen her last night. She asked for you.”
“She asked for me?”
“She wanted to know when you was coming back.”
“Yeah?”
“That story broke very good here.”
“I hope Mallon saw it.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to cook Mallon?”
“He’s through. And the Reform horseshit is through. We did everybody a terrific favor—the cops, the judges, the politicians, and millions of people who like to place a little bet, have a little fun, or use a little smack. A whole way of life was threatened here, Charley, but you stopped the bastards.”
“Then I can come home?”
“Anytime. But my information from Vincent is that Maerose is flying down there today. So if I was you I wouldn’t come right home.”
“I know. Jesus, Pop, what am I suppose to do with her?”
“My figure is that if she’s going all the way down there then she wants to make peace witchew because if she wanted to beat on you she’d make you go to her.”
“Yeah?”
“That is my best hunch, Charley.”
Charley got dressed, then he read the newspaper story again. The car arrived and he went out to the airport to find out if Pop was right.
37
Pop let himself into Mardell’s room at the hospital and beamed at her. It was a large, private, well-lit room with a lot of flowers in it that had come almost entirely from either Pop or Charley, with a little something from Maerose, and a bouquet from Freddie. Mardell, perhaps more beautiful because she had lost weight, sat under a blanket in the large upholstered chair, looked across the room at him, and smiled back.
“Mr. Partanna.”
“You’re looking very good. And when you look good, the whole world lights up.”
“You are so sweet. The fact that I am better is all your doing.”
“It’s a good hospital. I knew that before I had them send you here. Friends of mine own it.” He put a package near her on the bed. “I brought you some cookies. Or would you rather have rubies?”
“Cookies.”
He sat down in a chair facing her, near the bed. “The room smells great.”
“That gigantic pyramid of flowers in the corner is from Charley.”
“If he coulda done it he woulda picked every flower himself.”
“See that measly bunch of gladiola? They’re from Charley’s fiancée. I hate gladiola.”
“I didn’t know he had a fiancée.”
“Please, Mr. Partanna, not you, too.”
“She probably hadda phone the order in. You know, you say send twenty dollars’ worth of flowers to somebody and that’s what they send.”
“Twenty dollars?”
“Well—ten, anyway.”
“More like two.”
“It’s the thought that counts.”
“That’s what I mean. Is she really his fiancée, Mr. Partanna?”
“They grew up together. In the same environment.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t think they’re engaged.”
“Was it one of those arrangements that families decide?”
“Circumstances change things.”
“How?”
“Well, for one thing—you came along. You are important to Charley.”
Mardell turned her face away from him.
“This is a short life they give us,” Pop said. “If we don’t decide what we want and try to get it, then time marches on and we’re left behind, right?”
“What is she like?”
“She’s a good woman. She’s smart. And a terrific competitor. I know her from since she’s a baby. I work with her father and her grandfather.”
“And I’m a stranger.”
“What has that got to do with it? I don’t count. I just want the best for Charley. The father and the grandfather don’t know you’re alive. Charley don’t really have much to say about it. It’s between you and Maerose. Whichever one wants Charley the most is gonna get him.”
“Does it come down to that?” she said, looking at the window, into the distance. “I don’t think it does. She wants him just as much as I do. All that wanting has no effect on Charley. He has to decide. Charley has just about everything to say about it.”
“Listen, you’re a fine young woman. No matter how it turns out—and God knows I don’t know what that’s gonna be—it ain’t gonna be the end of the world. We gotta pick ourselves up and get started again and after a while it ain’t as important as it used to be.”
“She has a grandfather and a father backin
g her up. What do I have?”
“Sure, Charley knows Maerose all their lives. But you have important things going for you. He loves you.”
“Does he love Maerose?”
“Sure. That’s the hard part for him—for alla youse.”
“When is he coming home?”
“Next Wednesday. You’ll be out of here by then.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Wait. That’s all. Everything will settle itself by the end of next week.”
38
Monday at twelve minutes before noon, Charley watched Maerose come off the ramp from the plane at Moissant airport. She was wearing a fitted knee-length red wool suit with black fox collar and cuffs and a zip front jacket. She wore spike-heeled Italian winkle-picker shoes with long, pointed toes. He had never seen her look so gorgeous. She was smiling broadly as she rushed up to him and threw her arms around him. “Jeez, Charley,” she said, “we gotta catch up.”
“You staying at your aunt’s?”
“I’ll sleep there. I’m staying with you.”
“You gotta be the classiest thing ever to come into this airport.”
On the eleven-mile ride back into town they held hands but that was all, because the driver was an old friend of Vincent’s and he wouldn’t stop talking.
“How’s your father, Miss Prizzi?”
“He’s fine.”
“Give him my best. Tell him Gus Fangoso. We go way back.”
“He’ll be happy to hear from you.”
“I’m talking right after the war. Nineteen forty-six–forty-seven.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“He’ll know what you mean.”
He kept it up for about four miles. Charley said, “Hey, Gus. Stop at that drugstore onna corner up there.” Gus stopped the car. “Come in with me a minute,” Charley said to him.
They went into the store. Gus was a paunchy man in his late fifties, maybe six years older than Vincent. When they got inside the store Charley laid the fear all over Gus, then he said, “That is my fidanzata in the car. I ain’t talked to her for three weeks. I am sitting beside her for the first time in almost three weeks and I still can’t talk to her because you keep talking to her. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Sure, Charley. Absolutely.”
“Then we’ll go back to the car. And you put up the window. Capeesh?”
“Sure. I got it. Absolutely, Charley.”
They went back to the car. Gus held the door open and Charley got in. Gus went around to the driver’s seat. He started the engine then pressed the button that put up the power window between the front and the back seat. They drove into town.
“You must have said the magic words, or something,” Maerose said.
Still, there wasn’t time even to get started saying anything. To Charley it seemed like right away the limousine was rolling through high gates into the 150-yard-long brick driveway to the front door of the Fustino mansion, which triumphantly combined English, Mediterranean, and American architectural styles. The door was opened by an elderly, uniformed Italian maid whom Maerose embraced, kissed, and called Enriquette and introduced to Charley as Gennaro’s cousin. They had a view of seventy-eight feet through airy, high-ceilinged rooms. All of the space was air-conditioned. Tall cabinets filled with Meissen, Sèvres, and English porcelains stood beside tables that had been made for George IV. The house had been built by one of the biggest Pepsi-Cola bottlers in the South about ten years before, yet the effect the designers had achieved was of a great plantation house over a hundred years old.
The November sun was still high in a perfect blue sky. They were led to an enormous patio where a large oval table had been set for lunch. Two Fustino daughters with their husbands and three of the Fustino sons (out of nine), with their wives, were waiting for Maerose as she came into the patio with Charley. While tumultuous greetings went on, Gennaro took Charley off to one side. “That was nice work you done last night, Charley.”
Charley nodded, coloring slightly under the praise. “Natale was solid,” he said.
“Mallon looks like getting ninety to a hundred and thirty years on all the counts,” Gennaro said.
Birdie Fustino was greeting Maerose with hugs and kisses saying, in answer to Mae’s ecstatic comment on the house, “We just took it the way we found it. It takes eleven people to run it, four in the garden alone.”
It was a warm, affectionate, and happy lunch. Gennaro sat at the head of the table with Maerose at his right. Birdie sat at the other end with Charley at her right, and all the beautiful young siblings and spouses were spaced in chairs between. None of them was in the environment. The husbands were dentists and software designers, restaurant people, and an art gallery owner. They were a great-looking bunch of women, Charley thought, but Maerose was the absolute standout and everyone in the room knew it, particularly Charley. Nobody, not even Mardell, made him as horny as he got from just looking at Mae. Charley was sure that every now and then Gennaro was copping a feel on her knee under the table. Sometimes he was able to catch Maerose’s eye, and they grinned at each other.
Things are certainly looking up in this department, Charley told himself. He didn’t know anybody, so mostly he kept his mouth shut and pretended to listen to Birdie while he tried to figure out what he was going to say to Mae when they were alone, whenever that was going to be.
He concentrated on what life with her would be forty years ahead if it had happened that they were engaged and that finally they did get married. He would be seventy years old, she would be about sixty-two. They would have grown-up kids, even married kids. He would be a grandfather. The whole point of thinking ahead like that was: would he still remember Mardell? Would he still be worrying about her? Would he be worrying about where Mardell was and what was happening to her? Forty years was a long time, but better if he made it fifty years. He would be eighty. He would have grownup grandchildren. Jesus, he thought, life is certainly hard to figure.
Gennaro left at two o’clock. The lunch party broke up at about three fifteen. Maerose went upstairs to change. When she came down, she had on a café au lait sheath with a diagonal silver silk fringe spiraling around her long, lithe body. There was a big gold pin on her left shoulder. She looked like the kind of package anybody would like to get. She had a stab of extreme pleasure when she looked at Charley’s face as she came down the stairs and a surge of deep-down elation when she looked at the front of his trousers. They got away from Birdie at about a quarter to four. They sat quietly in the car until they had Gus drop them off in the Quarter. They walked a block and a half to the New Franciscan so Gus could tell Birdie that they had gone sightseeing. When the door closed in Charley’s apartment they both started to talk at the same time, stopped, and Maerose put her arms around his neck, holding on silently. After a while they kissed.
“What’s it gonna be, Charley?”
“Mae—I gotta say it—we ain’t engaged. You know that.”
“I didn’t come all the way down here to have you tell me stuff like that, Charley.”
“We gotta get this straightened out. You know that.”
“Are you gonna marry that mountain? She isn’t even in the environment.”
“I ain’t gonna marry nobody, Mae.”
“Then dump her. We’ll start even again.”
“The girl has pneumonia in New York. I can’t even think about dumping her.”
“You gotta dump her or dump me.”
“Why? Why can’t we just keep on going the way we been going?”
“I can’t do a stand like that.”
“I go back to New York next Wednesday. Lemme think about it.”
“Charley, look—suppose you decide on her? Whatta you gonna do, the business you’re in? Does she know the business you’re in?”
“No. Anyway, I don’t think so.”
“So maybe she’s not sure you’re legitimate. But how is she gonna get it straight in her head about every
thing you do? She’s English, she ain’t American. She’s never gonna understand what you do.”
“She’s had a lot of trouble in her life. Jesus, you don’t know. I’m like the only rock she can sit on. I don’t know, I get the feeling that if I take that away she’s gonna drown.”
“What about me? You think I can just throw this whole thing off like a bad cold? What about me, Charley?”
“I gotta figure the whole thing out.”
“You think because I fight you on this that I am some kind of Charles Atlas of the heart, Charley? You think when everything is down the tube and you have to make your move that, because she’s had a lot of trouble in her life and you think I haven’t—you can just figure that I’m gonna be all right?”
“That’s the only way I got left to think. What am I gonna think—I mean, how am I gonna get this thing straight if that ain’t the way I do it?”
“Get it straight the right way! You and me were meant for each other. We live the same way, we think the same way. Maybe part of the reason why I love you is because of the way you are trying to protect this woman, but nothing fits together with you and the woman. We are talking marriage—a lifetime. Things have to fit together, maybe not everything but the main things, the important things.” Suddenly, she switched to Sicilian. “We speak the same language, Charley.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Yeah. I know. You’re right, Mae. But this girl has everything different. Problems, where she is coming from, she could be the thing from outer space. But, like you said, we’re talking about a lifetime, so I can’t fool around with your life. We have to be sure. Give me two weeks against the lifetime, Mae.”
She took him in her arms and pulled him toward the step-ladder to the bed.
“That’ll never work, Charley. It’ll just go on and on and on. I saw the don. I told him—formally, like I sent him an engraved announcement—that you and me are gonna get married.”
Charley’s legs gave way. He dropped into a chair beside the bed. “You told the don that?”
“He wants to set a date. And after I give him a date, he wants to give us a big engagement party and bring in the people from most of the families around the country. I gotta tell him whether it’s on or it’s off, Charley. That means you gotta tell me.”