The Godfather's Revenge (29 page)

This wasn’t about Johnny Fontane, Francesca thought. This was about Billy. Francesca’s blood jumped. Her aunt, too, knew what had really happened with Billy.

Connie chugged what was left of her coffee.

Francesca did the same with her wine.

Outside, the perpetually sulking Victor Rizzi had taken a seat and was wheeling through the radio dial. Sonny and Little Mike kept tossing the football. Victor was a runt for a teenager, and the two younger boys weren’t all that much smaller. Little Mike Rizzi, who was nine, looked exactly like his Northern Italian father: he had Carlo’s blond hair and pale blue eyes, even the same broad chest and bulging forearms. Sonny, likewise, was a near duplicate of Francesca’s father—big for his age, a mop of bushy, curly hair, the same dimpled cleft chin. He’d somehow affixed balled-up socks to the inside of his school uniform shirt in a vain attempt to make it look as if he were wearing real shoulder pads. Victor found what he’d been seeking on the radio: the Beatles, yet again. He sang along, and the little boys joined in.

The women’s eyes met. It was clear to both of them now that each was waiting the other out.

“You’re right,” Francesca finally said. “OK? I know you’re right. It’s just that, when I think about it, about how things turned out for me, it’s…strange.”

“Don’t think about it.” It was a reproach, not a suggestion.

“Did you know that’s actually impossible?” Francesca said. “I learned it in school, in psychology. There’s a term for it. The way the mind works, if you tell it not to think of something, it automatically thinks of it.” She held up the chef’s knife. “Don’t think about a knife.”

“School,” Connie scoffed. “They didn’t teach you nothing about Sicilians in school, I can tell you that.” She turned and faced the oven. “I’m thinking about whether I made enough of the manicott’,” she said. “There. See that? It’s easy. I’m not thinking about nothing else now. And anyway, what makes you think you’re special, huh? What makes you think you’re different from anybody else?”

Francesca tried not to take the bait. Women in her family had probably been saying this to their daughters and nieces for centuries. Francesca had heard it countless times from her own mother. She’d heard Grandma Carmela say it to Connie several times, too. “Maybe because everybody’s different from anybody else.”

“Wrong,” Connie said. “Dead wrong. That’s what everybody wants to believe. But it’s just a technicality. I suppose
maybe
it’s true if you’re a man, but for women—”

“Oh, Connie.”

“Look, who do
you
think has got the sort of life they expect? Huh? Not even men, really. You think Mike or…” Connie stopped herself. She picked up the towel from the floor. “No. Nobody’s got that.”

“That’s not what I see,” Francesca countered. “Maybe not
exactly
what they thought, but more or less. From what I can see,
most
people are like that.”

“Like who?”

“Like my mother. Just for example.”

“Your mother? Your mother is a widow, too. Widowed young—same as you. You think she expected that? Did
you
expect that?”

Francesca made a gesture of concession with the knife. “All right, fine, but other than that, she ended up having the kind of life her parents raised her to have, more or less what she would have expected, really. Same as you, too, in that regard.”

“Same as
me
?” Connie laughed. “Oh, sure. Do you think I
expected
to have my first husband go out for cigarettes and never come back? Do you—”

Francesca cocked her head skeptically.

Connie closed her eyes and waved Francesca off.

“I see your point,” Francesca said. Carlo’s disappearance remained the official story, though Francesca presumed that every adult member of the Corleone family knew the truth. His murder wouldn’t have been something Connie expected, either. “Go ahead. I’m sorry.”

“Do you think I expected to grow up and get
divorced
?”

“No, Aunt Connie, I don’t, but—”

“Divorced!” She muttered something in Latin. “I can hardly believe it myself, and, oh, that poor, sweet man. Ed! Oh, my God.” She paused and swallowed hard, as if she might cry, though she did this every time her second husband came up, and she never cried.

Ed Federici was from the neighborhood, an accountant, the man her father thought she should marry, whom she
did
marry, not long after Grandpa Vito died and right after the annulment of her marriage to Carlo came through. Ed was a kind man who made an honest living and never laid a hand on her in anger, but he’d bored her. Get a couple glasses of wine in Connie back then, and she’d go around talking about how Ed’s
cazzo
was the size of her thumb and to make matters worse, anytime she started to feel something down there, he’d go soft. Now, though, Ed Federici (happily remarried to a younger, heavyset woman and living in Providence, Rhode Island) was a saint her wickedness had helped martyr.

Connie regained her composure.

“I’m making it sound like it’s all bad, the surprises a person has in store, but obviously it’s not. Just look around. Every life has got problems,
carissima,
but we’ve been blessed. When I was a little girl growing up on Arthur Avenue, you think I
expected
to live in a penthouse in Manhattan? Do you think I expected to shop in the finest stores and eat in the finest restaurants and have drivers who squire me around and the best shoes on my feet, months before they even show up on the runways, like I was a princess in a fairy tale? Who could expect that?”

“No, but I bet you expected to take care of your family, and you do. That’s a blessing, too, but it’s one you had to have expected. You’re, I don’t know, what Grandma was. A real matriarch.”

“A
matriarch
? Is that how you see me? Like your
grandmother
? I’m only thirty-seven years old!”

She was actually forty-one, Francesca knew. “Thirty-seven’s not young.”

“Thirty-seven’s not old.”

“If thirty-seven’s not old enough to be a matriarch, how old do you need to be?”

“Older than thirty-seven. I know that much.”

Maybe forty-one, then?
But Francesca didn’t say it. “Well, Michael thinks of you as the matriarch.”

“You don’t know what Michael thinks. It’s a bad idea for you to pretend like you do.”

Francesca grabbed the tongs and tossed the salad. “Call it whatever you want to call it, but the way things are now, especially if Theresa doesn’t come back, it’s you that’s holding our family together, kind of the same way your mother did during some of the bad times in those days. Which is good. I mean it as a compliment.”

Connie pulled out a stack of plates.

“Michael thinks of me as his
sister
, all right?” Connie said. “Not his mother or some matriarch. And believe me, Theresa will come back. Tom didn’t do that nasty business, and we all know it.”

Francesca started to say something, then caught a look from her aunt and stopped herself.

She finished the salad, got the drinks, and helped finish setting the table. Eight places. The table could sit three times that many, but they’d taken some of the leaves out. The room looked cavernous.

For a long time, Francesca and Connie careened from room to room with no noise but the clanging of plates and bowls and silverware, the banging of hip-checked drawers, getting everything to the table without ever for a split second getting in each other’s way, as if their moves had been choreographed and not merely practiced thousands of times.

“Be honest,” Francesca finally said. “You know in your heart of hearts that Tom was with that woman for years. That’s
also
nasty business. And he did that. You know he did.”

Connie looked around as if someone might be listening and then lowered her voice. “We don’t know what he did or didn’t do,” she said, pointing a wooden spoon at Francesca as if in accusation. “All right? But I’ll tell you something right now. If Tom says that the photos are doctored, that it’s all a big frame-up, then I believe him.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t believe that for a minute.”

“I’m not having this conversation.”

“You don’t believe him, Connie. I know you don’t.”

“Tom’s a man, all right? We should just leave it at that.”

“Being a man? That’s an excuse?”

“It’s nothing, but you’re the one who thinks people have the lives they expect to have.”

“I was only saying that some people do.”

“Right, and I’m only saying that Tom and Theresa, both of them, are exactly the kind of people you’re talking about.”

“I thought you said nobody has the kind of life he expects to have.”

Connie ignored her. “Mark my words: Tom and Theresa will figure things out. That’s what people like them do. Theresa’s left Tom before, you know. Off and on, usually not for long. Did you know that? She has. She’s a college girl, and, no offense, a lot of times that’s what college girls do. They run.”

“Wait, you’re saying this is
Theresa’s
fault? Her husband spoke vows before God and then he broke them. He cheated on her. Not only that, he humiliated her. His betrayal was written up in all the newspapers, on
television
. You know as well as I do that the men in this family, if they betray each other or their business associates, it’s, let’s just say, bad.”

“Stop it. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

“
Those
vows count, I guess, but if they break their vows to God and their wives, that’s OK? That’s nothing, right? Right. Because we’re nothing.”

“It’s not OK, all right? But I hate to break it to you. It
is
expected.”

“I thought you were arguing the other side of that point.”

“I’m not arguing nothing. I’m making dinner for my family, is all I’m doing. All right?” She glanced at the oven clock and took out the manicotti. It looked a little overcooked but not bad. “All I can say is this,” Connie said. “You’re a young girl,
carissima
. So, fine, you think life don’t go where you expect, eh? But it goes where it goes, and what’s beautiful? What’s beautiful is that in the end, everybody winds up where they’re supposed to be.”

Francesca grabbed the chef’s knife from out of the sink and raised it as if she were that madman in the shower scene from that movie. “Don’t think about a knife,” she said, and in frustration she drove it into the cutting board.

“What’s wrong with you?” Connie said. “That’s hard on the point.”

“That’s
hardly
the point,” Francesca said.

She strode from the kitchen, shaking her head, to go tell the men and the children that it was time for dinner.

As she came into the courtyard, her little boy saw her and his laugh was euphoric.

“Mommy!” he shouted, patting his heartbreaking attempt at shoulder pads. “I’m Frankie the Hit Man!” It was her brother Frankie’s nickname when he played linebacker at Notre Dame. “And I’m gonna tackle you!”

He came running.

“Don’t you dare, buster,” she said, grinning.

The tackle he applied was a bear hug around her waist.

“I like your shoulder pads,” she said, which cracked him up again.

She staggered a step and sat down in a tulip-backed metal chair. Dread rolled over her in what seemed like a literal wave. If Francesca was
ever
away from this boy, from that laugh, if for any reason she was separated from him, she couldn’t bear it.

But no.

She couldn’t think about that.

“Go wash your hands,” she said. “That goes for you two, too,” she said to Little Mike and Victor. “Go.”

She stood, went to the wall phone just inside the door, and pressed the intercom button.

“Dinner,” she said.

“Be right down,” said Michael Corleone. “Hey, Francie? What are we having?”

She watched Sonny run down the hall, away from her, following his cousins.

“Manicott’,” Francesca said. She tried to think about whether they’d made enough.

WHEN KATHY GOT HOME THAT NIGHT—LATE, WHICH
had become the norm—Francesca was still awake, on the couch in the living room of their suite. The TV stations had signed off the air, and she was reading
Pylon,
by William Faulkner.

“What are you doing up?” Kathy said.

By way of an answer, Francesca held up the book.

“Oh,” Kathy said. “Well. G’night.” She’d been drinking, and she smelled like an ashtray.

“You have a minute? A few minutes?” She hadn’t stayed up to read. She didn’t know why she’d held up the book to answer that question.

“What is it? Because if it’s more bad news, I’m not sure if I can—”