The Godfather Returns (21 page)

Except for a stretch of Virginia, Billy drove the whole way. Francesca did eventually get some sleep, too, before she felt Billy’s hand on her shoulder and awoke, disoriented, to the harsh glare of winter light off fallen snow.

“Thought you’d want to see this.” He pointed at the New York skyline. “Your hometown.”

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Billy was so obviously proud of his accomplishment, of providing this miraculous view for her. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen the city from the Jersey side before. It was a stunning view, but nothing about it looked like home. “Pretty.”

“Aren’t you excited?” he said.

“Are you okay? You sleepy? Have you ever driven in snow before? What time is it?”

Yes. No. Often, on ski vacations. Right on schedule. They’d made up all four hours.

“I love you,” she said, leaning over to kiss his stubbly cheek.

“Name’s Junior Johnson, ma’am,” he said, affecting a southern drawl. “At your service.”

“Who’s Junior Johnson?”

A race car driver who’d first developed his skills evading federal agents during bootlegging days. She’d never heard of
Junior Johnso
n
? A distant cousin, it turned out, of Billy’s mother.

“Ah,” said Francesca. “So
that’s
where the Van Arsdale fortune originated.”

Billy started to say something and stopped himself.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Get it out of your system now.”

“No need,” he said.

“You sure?” They’d discussed it before. She’d told him that her father had rebelled against all that, that he was a legitimate businessman. His import-export company was called The Brothers Corleone, but only out of respect for his father’s wishes. He’d been the only brother involved. “Because this isn’t discussed, okay? Anything you want to ask about all that, you ask it right now, but whatever you do, don’t embarrass me in front of my family.”

He turned toward her, his mouth open. “I don’t believe you think I would—”

“I don’t,” she said. “You wouldn’t. We’re just tired. I’m sorry. Just drive.”

Christmas Eve, yet still the morning traffic was awful. By the time they made it to Long Beach, they’d lost one of the hours they’d regained.

Two squatty men in long overcoats came out of the stone gatehouse at the entrance to the semicircle mall of houses her family owned. Billy rolled down the window. Francesca could smell the food cooking from inside her grandmother’s house, a good fifty yards away. She leaned over Billy’s lap so the guards could see her.

One of the men called her Kathy and said he was sorry, he hadn’t recognized the car, hadn’t recognized her at first either, without her glasses.

Glasses?
“I’m Francesca, actually,” she said.

The man nodded. “We were told Silver Hawk, not Thunderbird. Your ma don’t know cars too well, I guess. Better get a move on. She’s been callin’ down here for hours.” The outside of her grandparents’ house—the smallest and least ostentatious on the half-circle mall, all eight of them owned by her family—was entirely undecorated. Her grandmother was still in mourning. With no lights or wreaths, the house seemed smaller. Diminished. Across the street, the bungalow where she and her family had once lived stood dark and empty. Someone had built a snowman in the front yard and hung a wreath the size of a truck tire on the door.

Before Billy could even turn into the driveway, Francesca’s family started pouring out of her grandmother’s house, led—of all people—by her twin sister, the languid bohemian one, wearing big black eyeglasses and bounding across the snowy lawn like, yes, a cheerleader.

“Hungry?” Francesca asked Billy.

“Starving,” Billy said.

“Pace yourself,” Francesca said, “but not too much, or they’ll think you don’t like them.”

She opened her door, blasted first by the shock of the cold
—how could she have ever lived here, in this icebox?—
and then by Kathy, whose embrace slammed her against the side of the car. They jumped up and down and squealed, none of which had been Kathy’s style for years. Though at Thanksgiving their reunion had been similar. Only when they separated to look at each other and Francesca felt the cold wind in her face did she realize she’d been crying. “You got glasses,” Francesca said.

“You’re pregnant,” Kathy said, then stepped back as the rest of the family descended.

Francesca, stunned, was enveloped in their hugs and kisses. Kathy rocked on her heels, smiling, and gave a little innocent-seeming wave, though the glasses made her expression hard to read. Francesca knew a person could get pregnant the first time, and she knew that what Billy had done wasn’t safe—pulling out of her, grabbing her hand and clutching it over him. But it was hardly a dangerous time of the month. And anyway, twins or not,
how could Kathy know?

Billy hoisted a huge mesh bag of Van Arsdale oranges onto one shoulder, grapefruit onto the other. “The tree’s where?” Billy said.

“What tree?” Kathy said. She scooped up Mary, Aunt Kay’s adorable little girl, holding her against her hip, like somebody’s mom. “Wha ’twee?” Mary parroted.

“The Christmas tree,” Billy said. “To put the presents under.”

“We’re Italian, Billy-Boy,” she said. “There is no Christmas tree.”

“We
Italian,
Bee-Boy!” Mary shouted.

At least this was the Kathy of old. “For God’s sake,” Francesca said, “we have a Christmas tree at home. Grandma doesn’t have a Christmas tree, is all. Put it by the
presepe.
”

Her grandmother clucked at the
for God’s sake.
Billy cocked his head.

“A whaddyacallit,” Francesca said. “A nativity scene, I guess.” She stopped herself and looked at Kathy, who understood the unspoken question and nodded: yes, the
presepe
was holy enough to be in keeping with Grandma Carmela’s mourning. “In the living room. You’ll see it.”

Francesca’s mother arched an eyebrow, raised her left arm, looked at her wristwatch.

“The snow,” Francesca said. “It slowed us down.”

“All the way it snowed?” her mother said.

“From D.C. on,” Francesca said, just guessing. She’d been asleep.

“No, you made real good time,” blurted a bald guy, who’d introduced himself as “Ed Federici, friend of your auntie’s.” Kathy had mentioned him in a letter; he and Aunt Connie were engaged, even though her annulment hadn’t come through yet. “I’d say. With that much snow.”

Stan Jablonsky agreed. “Don’t mind her,” he said, winking at Sandra, which Francesca always found creepy. “She’s been up since dawn, your ma, looking out the curtains for you.”

The two fiancés loaded themselves up with the rest of the packages and on the way inside began interrogating Billy about the routes he’d taken, the bridges, the shortcuts, the gas mileage.

How is it possible, a family Christmas, and
those two outsiders
were the only other men? Stan, who’d been engaged to her mother for three years with no date set, and the accountant who did her family’s taxes, engaged to a woman who was still married? The manliest of them all, Francesca’s father, Santino, was dead. Her grandfather, always the laughing, doting epicenter of any family gathering, was dead, too. Uncle Mike wasn’t coming (he was in either Cuba or Sicily on business—she’d heard both, maybe it was both, but
for Christma
s
? Grandpa Vito must be rolling over in his grave). The Hagens had moved to Las Vegas and weren’t coming either. Uncle Fredo was supposed to have been here yesterday but apparently had called and said he might not make it at all. Uncle Carlo had apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.

Just the two sorry fiancés. And Billy.
Her Billy.

Francesca watched him go, eager to save him from an afternoon of cards, televised football, and endlessly proffered snacks, suddenly weak in the knees with desire for him—had that even
happened,
back in Jacksonville? But she was pulled away from him, powerless against the tide of women who swept her, as if in a dream, into her grandmother’s hot, pungent kitchen: a fortress of enduring love that time had somehow never touched.

Clouds of steam, a mist of flour, tubs of boiling oil, counters spread with sheets of dough, waxed paper covered with slabs of fresh, seasoned fish. That hulking white stove, a museum piece that would probably outlive them all. In the next room, the spindle of the record player was crammed with the same Christmas 45s that had been wafting into this kitchen for Francesca’s whole life: Caruso, Lanza, Fontane, you name it. Children ran in and out, always underfoot, nibbling sweet scraps. Aunt Kay stood at the sink, washing dishes until it came time to make the handful of things she knew how to make. Her mother, Sandra, sturdy and earthy, and Aunt Connie, shrill and bitter, had never liked each other, but in this kitchen they anticipated one another’s moves and needs as if they were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Angelina—her grandmother’s Palermitan aunt, who must be a hundred years old now and still without a word of English—sat in the corner behind a card table, assembling ingredients that came her way. And of course Grandma Carmela oversaw everything, barking out instructions, stepping in to execute the most tricky tasks, all with an abiding love always felt but never stated.

Kathy pointed to a pyramid of milky-white eggplant, then handed Francesca a chef’s knife and a freshly uncapped bottle of black cherry Brookdale soda, chilled in a snowbank outside. One look at the bottle—they couldn’t get it in Florida, of course—and Francesca broke into tears again. Where had the tough girl gone? Where was the part of her that had been Kathy?

“Ah, the sweet tears of joy,” her grandmother said in Italian. She raised her chipped coffee mug, the same one she’d used for as long as Francesca could remember, its faded image of the Hawaiian Islands now crusted on the outside with the remnants of a dozen doughs and batters. “For a proper
cena de Natale,
this is the ingredient most crucial of all!”

Who could help but be moved by this affirmation, from the lips of a woman widowed less than a year? Each of the other women scrambled to find her own cup, mug, or bottle and raised it high.

Against the nape of her neck, Francesca felt Kathy’s face, the temple of those eyeglasses. “You’re just a big sap,” Kathy whispered, and together, identically, the twins laughed.

At Mass, Francesca had to keep whispering instructions to Billy, who’d never set foot in a Catholic church before. He was as endearingly clumsy with the kneeling and the crossing as he was on the dance floor. But she could feel Kathy’s eyes on Billy, even if Billy couldn’t. She could hear Kathy saying that this was just the kind of thing that’s lovable now and makes you crazy later, even if Kathy—seated at the far end of the pew, steadying poor Zia Angelina—uttered nothing but hymn and litany.

When the church bell tolled for repentance, Francesca made a fist and struck her breast softly four times, one for each hour in the Sand Dollar Inn. At the altar rail, she did it again, one for each time that they’d made love. Walking back to the pew, she kept her eyes down, penitent, away from Billy’s, but once she kneeled and finished her prayer, she sat back and took his hand. Only then did she realize that Aunt Kay—next to her, still on her knees, her lips moving in silent prayer—had taken Communion, too.

“She converted,” Kathy said on the ride home.

“I figured that, but after all these years?” Francesca said. “For the kids, I guess?”

They were in Billy’s T-Bird.

Kathy raised an eyebrow. Even with the glasses, she bore a disconcerting resemblance to their mother.
“Per l’anima mortale di suo marito.”
For her husband’s mortal soul.

Her husband’s mortal soul?
Francesca frowned at her sister.

“She goes every day,” Kathy said. “Just like Grandma. And for the same reason.”

“Everybody goes for the same reason.” Francesca still hadn’t been able to pull her sister aside and ask what she’d meant when she’d said,
You’re pregnant.
“More or less.”

Kathy’s eyes widened, exasperated.

Despite or more likely because of the heavy absences felt by nearly everyone around the table, the Corleone family’s traditional Christmas Eve feast of the seven fishes was as loud and raucous as ever. The wine flowed freely, the women making up for what, in years past, would have been drunk by men. During the early courses, the children’s Christmas letters, expressing their plainspoken love for their parents, were read one by one, youngest to the oldest. The poignant and disturbing notes receded as the writers got older, but every letter was received with strident good cheer, culminating in the letter from Aunt Connie. It was the first time in more than thirty years that Carmela Corleone had received only one declaration of filial love—a delicate moment that Connie, to the astonishment of more than a few, lightened with a letter so hilarious that it was still being passed around courses later.

Likewise, all hearts were warmed by the story of Vito Corleone’s lone intrusion into the romantic lives of his children—the blind date he’d arranged many years before for Connie, soon after she’d begun dating Carlo Rizzi, with a nice boy who’d just graduated from college with a business degree. Ed Federici’s lively, self-deprecating version of the disastrous date inspired Mama Corleone to slip a champagne toast to the happy
fidanzati
in between courses.

And what courses they were: Crab legs and shrimp cocktail. Fried
baccala
and stuffed calamari. Steamed clams in a marinara sauce, over fresh angel-hair pasta. And finally—at least until the break before dessert—flounder stuffed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and several secret ingredients Zia Angelina had inserted when no one was watching.

“The risk of heart attack,” said Ed Federici, palms on the table, dazed as a man looking at the empty space where his stolen car used to be, “triples in the first hour after a heavy meal.”

Stan had given up halfway through the last course and was asleep in the next room, bathed in the flickering glow of an unwatched football game. Only two people were still eating: Frankie, forking it in like a champ, and Billy, who was poking at his flounder like a man who’d found gold and was trying to recall why it was valuable.