The Family Corleone

by Ed Falco

  Outside, in the car, Clemenza leaned across the seat and threw the door open for Vito. “How’d it go?” he asked. The box of pastries pressed against his thigh was empty, and there was a yellow stain on his shirt, directly alongside the blueberry stain. Clemenza saw Vito glance at the empty pastry box as he got in the car. He said, “I overeat when I’m nervous.” He piloted the car onto to Park Avenue and asked again, “So, how did it go?”

  Vito said, “Take me home and then send someone to go get Tom and bring him to me.”

  “Tom?” Clemenza said, and he glanced at Vito with his face screwed up. “Tom Hagen?”

  “Tom Hagen,” Vito barked.

  Clemenza blanched and slumped in his seat as if he’d just been punched.

  “Get Hats too,” Vito said. “Have him bring Luca fifteen thousand dollars. Right now. I told Brasi he’d have it within the hour.”

  Clemenza blurted out, “Fifteen thousand dollars? Mannagg’! Why don’t we just kill him?”

  “Nothing would make the man happier. He couldn’t be trying any harder to get himself killed.”

  Clemenza looked at Vito with concern, as if something must have happened in Luca Brasi’s warehouse to make him a little crazy.

  “Just go get Tom,” Vito said, his voice softening a little. “I’ll explain it all to you later. I need to think right now.”

  “Eh,” Clemenza said. “Sure, Vito.” He reached for the pastry box, found it empty, and threw it into the backseat.

  12.

  Sonny’s image in a mirror against the bakery wall made him laugh. He was undressed behind the glass display case, next to the cash register, eating a lemon-custard-filled donut. Eileen’s aunt had taken Caitlin for the day, and Eileen had closed the shop early and invited Sonny over. She was in her bed now, sleeping, and Sonny had climbed down the flight of stairs that led directly from her living room to the back of the bakery and made his way into the shop for a snack. The big green shade was pulled down on the front window, and the blinds were closed on the glass door at the entrance. It was late afternoon and the light around the edges of the shade and the blinds came into the shop and cast an orange glow onto the walls. Outside, people walked past on the street and Sonny could hear snippets of conversations. A couple of guys walked by arguing about the World Series, talking about Washington’s lumberyard and Goose Goslin and whether or not they could hit off Hubbell. Sonny, like his father, had no interest in sports. It made him laugh to think that he was standing around eating a donut the way he was and those two birds not fifteen feet away talking about baseball.

  He wandered around the bakery, donut in hand, looking things over. Ever since the day of the picnic, Sonny found his thoughts drifting back to the compound and to the two mugs with the furnace scam. Something about the big guy, the one who picked up the wrench, bothered him. Sonny’d said something to Clemenza, later, after they were gone, something like “You believe those two clowns?” and Clemenza said, “Eh, Sonny. This is America.” Sonny didn’t ask him what he meant, but he figured he meant that this is the way things work in America: Everybody’s got a scam. Guys like Clemenza and his father and all the rest of them, they still talked about America like it was a foreign country. The big guy—it wasn’t even anything he said, though the bullshit about the pope got under Sonny’s skin. Why, he didn’t know, since he didn’t have any interest in religion, and his mother gave up on dragging him to mass every Sunday years ago. “Like your father,” she’d said, with anger, meaning Vito didn’t go to church on Sundays either—but being compared in any way to his father only made Sonny proud. The pope, to Sonny, was a guy in a funny hat. So it wasn’t anything the big guy with the wrench said that had gotten under Sonny’s skin; it was more the way he looked, and more the way he looked at Vito, even, than the way he looked at him, at Sonny. It stuck in Sonny’s craw, and he kept imagining giving that big guy a beating, smashing that look off his face permanently.

  In the back room, behind the bakery proper, Sonny noticed a closed door, narrower than usual, and when he opened it he found a small room with a cot and a pair of rickety bookcases. The shelves of the bookcases were packed tight with books, and there were more books on top of the ones with their titles facing out in a straight line. Next to the cot, a stack of three books rested on a small night table, under an old brass lamp. He picked up the stack of night-table books and imagined Eileen taking a break in this narrow room with a block-glass window that looked out on the alley. The book on the bottom was thick and heavy, with gold-lined edges to every page. He opened it to the title page and saw that it was the collected plays of Shakespeare. The middle book was a novel titled The Sun Also Rises. The book on top was skinny, and when Sonny opened it he discovered it was a collection of poems. He tucked it under his arm and brought it back upstairs, where he found Eileen dressed and standing over the oven in a kitchen that smelled deliciously of baking bread.

  When she saw Sonny she laughed and said, “Ah, put some clothes on, for God’s sake! Have you no shame!”

  Sonny looked down at himself with a grin. “I thought you liked the sight of me naked.”

  “It’s a sight I won’t soon forget,” Eileen said, “Sonny Corleone standing naked as the day he was born in my kitchen, with a book under his arm.”

  “I found it in the back room,” Sonny said, and he tossed the collection of poems onto the kitchen table.

  Eileen glanced at the book and took a seat at the table. “That’s your buddy, Bobby Corcoran,” she said. “Sometimes he comes to spend the day with me, pretending he wants to help with the bakery, and then he lies around in the back room reading his books.”

  “Cork reads poems?” Sonny said. He pulled up a chair next to Eileen.

  “Your friend ‘Cork’ reads all sorts of books.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Sonny said, “but poems?”

  Eileen sighed as if she was suddenly very tired. “Our parents made both of us read everything under the sun. It was our father, though, who was really the big reader.” Eileen stopped talking, looked affectionately at Sonny, and ran her hands through his hair. “Bobby was only a baby when the flu took both of them,” she said, “but they left all their books behind.”

  “So those are your parents’ books?”

  “Bobby’s now,” Eileen said. “Plus some Bobby or I added to the collection. He’s probably read all of them twice at this point.” She kissed Sonny on the forehead. “You should be going,” she said. “It’s getting late and I have work to do.”

  Sonny said, “Italians don’t read books,” and started for her bedroom to get into his clothes. When Eileen laughed, he added, “None of the Italians I know read books.”

  “That’s a different thing than saying Italians don’t read books.”

  Sonny, dressed, joined Eileen in the kitchen again. He said, “Maybe it’s just Sicilians that don’t read.”

  “Sonny,” Eileen said, and she took his hat off the hall tree near the front door, “nobody I know in these neighborhoods reads. They’re all too busy trying to put food on the table.”

  Sonny took his hat from Eileen and kissed her. “Wednesday again?”

  “Ah,” Eileen said, and she held her hand to her forehead, “about that, Sonny… I don’t think so. I think maybe this thing has run its course, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘run its course’?”

  “Cork tells me you have a new muffin you’re sharin’ your charms with now. You see her when you’re on lunch break from the garage? Isn’t that it?”

  “Mannagg’!” Sonny looked up to the ceiling.

  “And what about this Sandrinella your father wants you to marry?” Eileen asked.

  “Cork talks too much.”

  “Ah, Sonny,” Eileen said. “You’re Bobby’s idol. Don’t you know that? You and all your women.” She went to the oven, as if she’d just remembered something. She opened the oven door a bit, looked in, and then left it open as it was, just slightly.<
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  “Eileen…” Sonny put his hat on and then took it off again. “The lunch-hour thing,” he said. “That’s nothing. That’s just…”

  “I’m not angry,” Eileen said. “It’s none of my business who you’re running around with.”

  “If you’re not angry, what is it?”

  Eileen sighed, retook her seat at the kitchen table, and motioned for Sonny to join her. “Tell me more about Sandra,” she said.

  “What do you want to know?” He pulled out a chair.

  “Tell me about her,” Eileen said. “I’m curious.”

  “She’s beautiful, like you.” Sonny put his hat on the back of Eileen’s head and it flopped down over her ears. “Only her skin’s darker, like Italians, you know—savages.”

  Eileen took off the hat and held it to her chest. “Dark hair, dark eyes, fierce tits,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Sonny said. “That’s it.”

  “You fooled around with her yet?”

  “Nah,” Sonny answered, as if shocked. “She’s a good Italian girl. I’m not getting to first base till she sees the engagement ring.”

  Eileen laughed and tossed the hat back into Sonny’s lap. “Good thing you’ve got your Irish whore to bed, then.”

  “Ah, come on, Eileen. It’s not like that.”

  “Sure it is, Sonny.” She got up and went to the door. “Listen to me,” she said, her hand on the doorknob. “You should marry your Sandrinella and knock her up right away so she can have a dozen kids while she’s still young. You Italians like your big families.”

  “Look who’s talkin’,” Sonny said. He joined her at the door. “You Irish, your families are so big sometimes I think you’re all related to each other.”

  Eileen smiled, conceding the point. “Still,” she said, “I think we should stop seeing each other.” She stepped into Sonny’s body, gave him a hug and a kiss. “Sooner or later someone’s going to find out, and then there’ll be hell to pay. Better we end it cleanly, now.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Sonny reached over her shoulder and closed the door all the way.

  “Well, believe me,” Eileen said, curt and unyielding. “I always said this was nothing but a fling.” She opened the door and then stepped back and held it for Sonny, waiting for him to leave.

  Sonny leaned toward Eileen as if he might smack her, and then instead grabbed the door out of her hand and slammed it closed behind him. On the steps down, on his way out to the street, he threw a quick short jab at the wall, and plaster caved in under the wallpaper. He could still hear pieces of it tumbling down through the walls to the basement as the front door closed behind him.

  Carmella moved back and forth from the stove to the sink, banging pots and pans as she went about preparing an eggplant for dinner. Behind her, Clemenza bounced Connie on his knee at the kitchen table while Tessio and Genco sat alongside him in a row listening to Michael haltingly tell them about the school report he was preparing on Congress. Fredo, near tears, had just left the house saying he was going over to a friend’s. Upstairs, Tom was in the study with Vito, and for the past half hour everyone had been trying not to listen in on the occasional bouts of shouting and banging that issued through the study door and made their way down to the kitchen. Vito was not a man to lose his temper. He was not a man to shout at his children, certainly not to shout profanities—and so the whole household was tense and edgy over the shouting and cursing coming out of the study.

  “There’s forty-eight states,” Michael said, “and ninety-six men represent their constituents as senators.”

  Clemenza said to Connie, “He means they represent whoever’s paying them off.”

  Michael looked out the kitchen doorway and up to the ceiling as if he might be able to see through the floor and into the study, where it had been quiet for the past several minutes. He tugged at his shirt collar and ran his hand over his neck as if the collar was bothering him. “What do you mean?” he asked, turning back to Clemenza. “What do you mean, ‘who’s paying them off’?”

  Genco said, “Don’t listen to him, Michael.”

  Carmella, at the kitchen counter with a chef’s knife in her hand, said, “Clemenza,” ominously, without looking away from the fat eggplant on the cutting board.

  “I don’t mean nothin’,” Clemenza said, tickling Connie, making her wriggle and squirm in his lap.

  Connie threw her torso over the table toward Michael. “I can name the states,” she said, and she launched into her recital: “Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas—”

  “Sta’zitt’!” Carmella said. “Not now, Connie!” She brought the cutting knife down and began slicing up the eggplant as if it was a hunk of raw meat and the chef’s knife was a cleaver.

  Upstairs, the study door opened. Everyone in the kitchen first turned to look toward the stairs, and then, catching themselves, went back to what they were doing: Carmella went back to slicing the eggplant, Clemenza went back to tickling Connie, and Michael looked to Genco and Tessio and started reciting facts about the House of Representatives.

  When Tom came into the kitchen, his face was pale and his eyes puffy. He gestured toward Genco and said, “Pop wants to see you.”

  Tessio said, “Genco or all of us?”

  “All of you,” Tom said.

  Connie, who ordinarily would have leapt up on Tom at the sight of him, instead went around the table and stood next to Michael when Clemenza put her down. She was wearing shiny black shoes with white socks and a pink dress. Michael picked her up and held her on his lap, and then they both stared at Tom in silence.

  Tom said “Mama, I’ve got to go.”

  Carmella pointed to the table with the chef’s knife. “Stay for dinner. I’m making eggplant the way you like it.”

  “I can’t, Mama.”

  Carmella said, raising her voice, “You can’t stay? You can’t stay and have dinner with your family?”

  “I can’t,” Tom said, louder than he had intended. First he looked like he might try to explain or apologize, and then he left the kitchen and started for the front door.

  Carmella pointed to Michael. “Take Connie up to her room and read her a book.” Her tone of voice made it clear that neither Michael nor Connie had any choice in the matter.

  In the living room, Carmella caught Tom at the door as he was putting on his jacket. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said and he swiped at his eyes, which were damp with tears.

  “Tom,” she said, “Vito, he told me what happened.”

  “He told you?”

  “What?” Carmella said. “You think a man doesn’t talk to his wife? You think Vito doesn’t tell me?”

  “He tells you what he wants to tell you,” Tom said—and as soon as he said it he saw the anger in Carmella’s face and apologized. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I’m upset.”

  “You’re upset,” Carmella repeated.

  “I’m ashamed,” Tom added.

  “You should be.”

  “I behaved badly. I won’t do it again.”

  “Some Irish girl,” Carmella said, and shook her head.

  “Mama,” Tom said, “I’m part Irish.”

  “That don’t matter,” Carmella said. “You should know better.”

  “Sì,” Tom said. “Mi dispiace.” He hooked the zipper on his jacket. “The kids don’t know anything,” he said, as if he knew of course they wouldn’t know but was asking anyway.

  Carmella made a face as if to say the question was silly and the kids didn’t know anything. She stepped closer to him and held his cheeks in her hands. “Tommy,” she said, “you’re a man. You have to struggle against your nature. Are you going to church? Do you say your prayers?”

  “Sure, Mama,” Tom said, “sure.”

  “Which church?” Carmella shot back, and when Tom couldn’t come up with an answer, she sighed dramatically. “Men,” she said. “You’re all the same.”

  “Mama, listen. Pop says if anything like this happens again, I’m on my own.”
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br />   “So don’t let it happen again,” Carmella said, harshly. Then she softened a little and added, “Pray, Tommy. Pray to Jesus. Believe me,” she said, “you’re a man now. You need all the help you can get.”

  Tom kissed Carmella on the cheek and said, “I’ll be here for Sunday dinner.”

  “Sure you’ll be here for Sunday dinner,” Carmella said, as if that was always understood. “Be a good boy,” she said. She opened the door for him and then patted him affectionately on the arm as he left.

  When Vito, in his study at the window, saw Tom walk out onto the street and start for Arthur Avenue and the trolley, he poured himself some more Strega. Genco was leaning back on Vito’s desk with his hands on his hips and reviewing the situation with Giuseppe Mariposa and Rosario LaConti. Some of LaConti’s organization wasn’t falling into line so easily. They didn’t like the way Giuseppe took care of Rosario, humiliating him, leaving him naked on the street. Giuseppe Mariposa was an animal, they complained. Some of them were looking to the Stracci and Cuneo families, wanting to come in under their umbrella—anything but work for Mariposa.

  Tessio, standing by the study door with his arms crossed and with his habitual dour expression and tone of voice, said, “Anthony Stracci and Ottilio Cuneo didn’t get to where they are without being smart. They won’t risk a war with Mariposa.”

  “Sì,” Genco said. He stepped away from the desk and sank down heavily in a stuffed chair facing the window and Vito. “With LaConti’s organization either with him or under his thumb, and Tattaglia in his pocket, Mariposa’s too strong. Stracci and Cuneo will turn their backs on anyone who comes to them.”

  Clemenza, sitting next to Genco with a glass of anisette in hand, looked to Vito. “I’ve got to tell Mariposa something about this Luca Brasi situation. He’s expecting us to take care of it.”

  Vito sat in the window seat and held the glass of Strega on his knee. “Tell Giuseppe we’ll take care of Brasi when the time is right.”

  “Vito,” Clemenza said. “Mariposa’s not gonna like what he hears. Tomasino wants Brasi out of the picture now, and Mariposa wants to keep Tomasino happy.” When Vito only shrugged, Clemenza looked to Genco for support. Genco turned away. Clemenza laughed in a way that suggested he was amazed. “First,” he said, “Mariposa tells us to find out who’s been stealing from him—and we don’t deliver. Then he tells us to take care of Brasi—and we tell him ‘when we get around to it.’ Che minchia! Vito! We’re asking for trouble!”