If she were a man, which she wasn’t, she would have had that Mardell La Tour zotzed.
The idea hit her like a bolt of lightning. She could go to Eduardo, throw herself on his mercy, and have him turn Washington upside down until he got Mardell deported back to England. Let’s see how she likes Shaftesbury, England, with her great lover three thousand miles away and no chance of getting back to him or him getting to see her because she would get Eduardo to get the State Department to pull his passport.
She broke down in tears. She couldn’t go to Eduardo for anything. Eduardo would go to her grandfather about anything as serious as the jilting of a Prizzi, and her grandfather would tell her father, and her goddam barbarian of a father would right away put out a hit on Charley, and that would cause a split between Angelo and the family, her father and her grandfather, and it could break up the whole family and wreck every dream of power she had for the future.
She decided not to believe the agency’s report on Charley. She decided to find out for herself.
49
Reviewing her characterization as an English country girl, Mardell rated herself as about a seven out of a possible ten. She didn’t think she could have brought it off with someone like Freddie, for example. Freddie had gone to university in England. He knew English people. Her mother, her father, Hattie Blacker, Edwina—all of them—wanted her to marry Freddie and she had always intended to marry Freddie from the moment she had met him in the Kennedy White House five days before that terrible day in Dallas, but she had to finish her work with Charley first.
The plain fact was that, by any definition, a really great performance had to carry the entire audience with it. Still, the characterization had carried Charley along with it, and Miss Prizzi, and Charley’s father. They were, after all, her audience, not Freddie. She had enjoyed every moment at Yale, but she had been much more interested in dramatic writing then. The fact was, life must be the true school, she felt. She had been fulfilled by the whole La Tour experience. If everything had been just a routine theatrical performance instead of what she was doing, which was living the part, as she was required to do, she knew she could not have placed as much importance upon Charley as she was doing. A little bit of Charley went a long way and, in the passion of her art, she had let him become too important to her. He was really very, very sweet even if he was abominably sincere. Fortunately, she realized that it would soon become difficult for her to let go of him. In the middle of her characterization she would have to tell herself that, after all, he wasn’t Freddie. She wondered whether she would have seen Charley in the desperate way she saw him now if her life had been different.
If it had been different, she would never have left the Shaftesbury that she had hardly ever seen. Her imaginary father wouldn’t have been a leper. The Queen of England would not have directed radio beams into her mind, a spoof she still couldn’t believe that Charley had swallowed. She would have grown up there and married and by now have had children the way she was supposed to live. She wouldn’t have left home at fourteen with only her body, to be hired out as a decoration for nightclubs, with an urgent need to put a distance between herself and her mother and the place where she should have belonged.
She knew that, no matter how lucky she might have become, if all the other things had been the way those things were, she couldn’t have been given a more suitable, a finer leading man than Charley. He had played his part superbly in a role that called upon him to really love her. There was nothing new about being loved, but there was something awfully sweet about it. It was neither right nor wrong. She may have muddied Charley’s fiancée’s surety that things were preordained but that was the old la vie.
When the announcement of Charley’s engagement came in the post, she hid it and the invitation at the bottom of her bureau drawer, under her smalls. She thought of the scene that would take place if she accepted the invitation. Miss Prizzi would stare with horror at her acceptance, but she had sent out the invitation herself so there was nothing she could do about it. What would happen if she arrived at the engagement party and went through the crowd of guests to congratulate the young couple? The woman would attack her, she knew it. There would be an enormous scene, which she could play to the hilt, but Charley didn’t deserve such humiliation. She had to swallow her pride and let the woman score off her.
She got out a calendar and calculated that the date of the engagement party, Thursday, November 27th, was exactly two weeks from the day Charley had told her it would all be settled in two weeks. He wasn’t a complicated man. He had always done what he said he was going to do. He had tried to be honest. When he said things would be settled in two weeks, she had to accept that it meant he was acknowledging that he would be formally engaged to be married in two weeks but that he would still consider it to be an open contract; anything could be revoked up until the day he was actually married.
She would accept that. She wouldn’t be there to complicate it anyway. The announcement was just a formality which recognized the condition that the woman had said had existed between Charley and her since long before Mardell, herself, had met Charley. The time between the formality and the absolute truth, in Mardell’s eyes, a marriage between Charley and the woman, was an extension of her right to hope that, at the bitter end, he might not marry the woman. She thought fleetingly of throwing herself off the World Trade Center, or of casting herself into the polar bear cage at the Central Park zoo, or of asking Mr. Pomerantz to get her a job as a white slave in Rio or Hong Kong, but she thought of the fun in Washington during the Christmas season and of the entire promise of Freddie when she got around to it, so she grinned happily and decided just to send Charley and Miss Prizzi a wedding present instead.
That afternoon, when she was going to rehearsals at a hall on West Forty-sixth Street for her first time as a stripper-chanteuse, working out the new act that Mr. Pomerantz said had cost a lot of money, someone bumped into her on the crowded sidewalk, and in turning her body around to deflect the collision she saw Miss Prizzi about eleven feet behind her. Mardell was so surprised that her jaw dropped. The woman didn’t have any shame. Mardell went to her, the crowd needing to work its way around them.
“Are you following me?” she asked with curiosity rather than resentment.
“Are you still seeing Charley?”
“Not here. Not at rehearsals.”
“Is he going to pick you up there?”
“No.”
“Are you going to see him tonight?”
“Well—it is my night. Last night was your night.”
“Didn’t you get the announcement this morning?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then how can you see him tonight? It’s a matter of pride, isn’t it?”
“I don’t suppose that following people in the hope of discovering something you can use against them is a matter of pride, is it?”
“I have to protect what is mine.”
“We can’t stand here. Let’s have a cup of coffee.”
They walked together silently. They found a luncheonette on Eighth Avenue. They sat at the counter.
“Are you sure you want Charley?” Maerose asked.
“I’m just treading water, Miss Prizzi.”
“You know how Charley makes a living?”
“There has been too much else to think about.”
“He’s a hoodlum.”
“Other people told me that the first night I met him.”
“He’s a special kind of a hoodlum, he’s—” She wanted to tell the woman that Charley was the family’s vindicatore, but she couldn’t say the words. If she told an outsider about family business and, through Charley, it got back to his father and then her grandfather, she would be punished by her own people. But she had to do it, Charley was the most important part of her future moves. This woman had to be made to give up any claim on him. “He’s the avenger for our family. You will have to imagine the meaning of that for yourself.”
“Miss Prizzi—you have humiliated me on the telephone. You humiliated me at the hospital with those outlandish gladiola. You came to my apartment and humiliated me there. You have been following me in the streets, and now you are willing to pour shame on Charley with lies that only humiliate you. Let me help you. If you can marry him, he is yours. If you can marry him, I will go away. Until then, he is fair game—if you get my meaning. This coffee is giving me indigestion.”
50
At about a quarter to six, Pop came into Charley’s office at the Laundry and offered to drive him to night school.
“Thanks, Pop. I got the van outside.”
“It’ll be nice to ride together.”
“How’ll I get home?”
“The Plumber will drive your car to school.”
“Well—okay.”
They got into Pop’s beat-up Buick and drove out Flatbush Avenue toward Midwood.
Pop said, “We gotta talk, Charley.”
“A problem?”
“Worse than you think. Mae came to see me last night. She was a little drunk maybe; a little hysterical. I don’t know how things can go so far, but she’s had people following you. She showed me their reports.”
“I know, Pop, she done it in Miami.”
“I been around the Prizzis for over forty years. You gotta never forget that she is a Prizzi—maybe the most Prizzi since the don. She don’t give up. She don’t accept things the way they are.”
“Whatta you want me to do, Pop?”
“Charley—look. I only want the best for you. The last thing I’m gonna do is interfere with your life. I appreciate how you feel about Mardell. I like her, and if everything was normal I would say, if you love her, go marry her if you want.”
“Pop, what can I do? She’s still weak from the hospital. She wants to make out like she’s strong so she tells Pomerantz to set her up with a job. She won’t take any money from me. She never would. He books her into Newark. She ain’t strong enough for that. I can’t just walk out on her. She needs me.”
“I am not saying you gotta walk out on her. But you gotta understand that you only got a few more days either way.”
Charley expelled all the air in his lungs in a short, hopeless burst.
“I am saying that whatever you want to do now is strictly your business. Now, that is. I mean, right now. It may drive Maerose out of her skull, but it’s still a fair competition. But—when that engagement party at the old Palermo Gardens happens—when you stand beside Mae and take the congratulations of the people from the big families and from Eduardo’s contacts while the don and Vincent are looking at you and smiling at you—then the competition is over, Charley. You—and I am talking strictly about the situation you are in—might have it in your head by mistake that Mae doesn’t have any real claim on you until after you and her get married. You know better, Charley. When Corrado Prizzi lays out all that money to put all them people to the trouble to come all the way to Brooklyn to celebrate your engagement to his granddaughter, then that is the cutoff date as far as Mardell is concerned.”
“Pop, fahcrissake. This is the twentieth century. This is a free country.”
“Charley, what are you, an American? You are a Sicilian. You been a Sicilian going back hundreds of years. You know how the Prizzis think because they are double Sicilians, and if you keep up with Mardell after that engagement party—Jesus, Charley, can you imagine the shame on the don and on Vincent—on the whole family—when they have to send back five hundred engagement presents including a six-room apartment from the mayor, who is always playing both sides of the street anyway? I am not gonna speak for the don—you can figure that out for yourself—but Vincent is gonna want to have you whacked, you know that. I am not complaining, but I gotta be in the middle on all this. I mean—whose side am I on? I am on your side against the don and Vincent, so there goes forty years of friendship—and who else do I have?—I’ll sit alone in my house until I die.”
“That Mae is a hard woman,” Charley said. He held his stomach with both hands. “Nobody understands. This ain’t something which it is one woman over another woman. I got a lot of respect for Maerose. I have a responsibility to Mardell. But Mae is rich and strong and healthy. Sure she can be hurt, but not the way Mardell can be hurt. I don’t know, Pop. I just don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
“Never mind about strong and healthy. You gotta see it that Mae thinks you are worth fighting for, that you are more important to her than anything else. She is a proud woman. You think it was easy for her to come to me and tell me what she said to me?”
“Mardell is very breakable, Pop. Mae, the don, Vincent—they don’t break. They may even have forgotten how to bend. It sounds crazy, but I have the feeling that if I walk out on Mardell—” he shrugged hopelessly. He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“What?”
“She could kill herself.”
“I don’t want to make it sound easy, Charley. But what you gotta do is draw a line down the center of a piece of paper. You write Mardell’s name on one side of the line and then you write the Prizzi family, Mae, the don, and me, on the other side, with Vincent taking his chances. You look at it and you see that on the crowded side of the line that it’s your whole life—there ain’t anything else for you. Whatta you gonna do—move to England? Settle down in her hometown with her family?”
“Did Maerose tell you to talk to me?”
“She talked to me in such a way that she knew I hadda talk to you. You know what she told me she did?”
“What?”
“She’s been standing outside Mardell’s building for two days. She followed her wherever she went, when she went to buy food or to the bank and when she went to rehearsals. She was waiting for you to go into her house or she wanted to see if Mardell went out to meet you.”
“Aaaah, shit!”
“Mardell spotted her. They had a meet. You know what—if you wanna know how serious this thing is—what she told Mardell?”
“What?”
“That you were not only a hoodlum but that you do work for the Prizzis.”
“Maerose?”
“So Mardell isn’t the only one who is breakable.”
51
After the invitations had been addressed, Maerose told Vincent that she and Charley had become engaged. He responded like a class-A robot. She knew her grandfather hadn’t told her father the news because the don’s sense of omertà was so strong that it would not allow him to reveal any information, even the state of the weather, unless it had been initiated by him. There was the slimmest chance that Amalia might have called Vincent but, over the years, nobody could predict how Vincent was going to react to anything so they didn’t go out of their way to clue him in anymore.
“Poppa?” she said as he was lowering himself into his favorite chair to read the newspaper before she called him for dinner.
“What, fahcrissake?”
“I got news.”
He looked at her with alarm touching on panic, certain that she was pregnant. He didn’t dare speak, he stared.
“Charley Partanna and I are gonna get married.”
“Charley? Whatta you telling me? I never knew you and Charley even talked to each other.”
“Oh, we talk, Poppa,” she said slyly.
“I gotta know something, Mae.”
“What, Poppa?”
“Do you have to get married? You know what I mean.”
“We have to get married, but not for the reason you’re thinking, Poppa.”
He was overjoyed. “Jeez, Mae,” he said, “I always worried you was gonna marry somebody outside the environment. Charley! That’s—well—I guess that’s tremendous. But, Jeez, Mae, I’m gonna miss your little feet around the house.”
He kissed her on both cheeks and then returned to the newspaper. “You won’t believe what it says here,” he said, whacking the paper.
“What?”
“The headline is: ORGANIZED CRIME EXPERT SEES
DOWNFALL OF MAFIA. Where do they get these crazy stories?”
“From Eduardo, I guess.”
“Listen to this—‘New York State’s top expert on organized crime said yesterday that efforts to crack down on the Mafia were making major progress. Within a decade these efforts could transform the underworld organization into something unrecognizable’—blah-blah-blah. ‘Aggressive law enforcement using federal antiracketeering laws, along with internal strife and changing membership patterns within the Mafia, are undermining organized crime as never before, said the expert.’ What is this?”
“It had to be Eduardo who planted it, Poppa. He wins either way. It makes the public think we are finished when we never had it so good, but, if it should happen to come true, it’s what Eduardo wants anyway.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“Eduardo thinks the family don’t need the street operation—your side. He wants everything to be legit all the way.”
At dinner, which Maerose had cooked for her father while her seventeen-year-old sister was out romancing sixteen-year-old Patsy Garrone in the balcony of the Brooklyn Paramount, a couple of months after Willie Daspisa had turned to the protection of the Program, Maerose said, out of nowhere, “I bet all the families are laughing at us, Poppa, on account of Willie Daspisa.”
“What?” Vincent chewed every mouthful twenty times on his doctor’s orders, because that kept him from making a pig of himself at the table and having the extra calories churn up his blood pressure. But what could he do about the cholesterol? On television their safe count had been sixty-one points under his own count.
“Because Willie cost us and we didn’t do nothing about it.” She watched her father closely.
“We’re doin’ it, don’t worry. Willie ain’t gettin’ away with nothing.”
“Poppa, where is he? All the families know is that he cost us nine hundred thousand dollars’ worth—the fines to the bank in Boston, and a hundred and fifty a year to the families of the guys he railroaded. That we know is an infamità. That we know has to be avenged. We also know—our honor knows—that Willy Daspisa tried to nail Charley on a crappy political rap over Vito. So where is Willie and when are we gonna pay him off?”
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