“Where’d you get the soda?”
“The dorm mother came by with them,” Sandra said. “To welcome you.”
“I said I was you,” Kathy murmured.
Francesca was, for a split second, furious. But it probably wasn’t a bad idea. It was just a soda. And as for Kathy’s pretending to be Francesca, it was efficient and would hardly cause trouble in the long run. Just like Kathy herself. “Thanks,” Francesca said.
Kathy waved a hand. “Don’t mention it.”
“I won’t. You going to share that Coke?”
“That’s Charles Mingus there.”
“Wonderful. You going to share that Coke?”
Kathy handed it to her. “Charles Mingus plays bass. Wild, huh?”
Francesca took out the straw and drank as much of the soda as she could, hoping to finish it, but the fizz in her nose overcame her. She handed the bottle back to her sister.
On the next trip down, her mother stuck her head into the common living room, grabbed a delicate-looking wooden chair, and motioned Francesca down a dark hall to the side door. Classes didn’t start until Tuesday, and, thanks to her mother, Francesca had already broken two cardinal rules from orientation-Never leave the side door open and Never take furniture from the living room. Other girls and their parents immediately benefited from this, too, of course.
Her mother took three heavy boxes and could barely walk. Francesca set her load down on the steps to the side door, waiting for her mother to catch up.
“Why couldn’t you have gone to a girls’ school?” called Sandra Corleone, breathing heavily, pointing with her head toward the next building, where dozens of young men and their parents were moving in. Her mother was a loud talker. “Like your sister is?”
Her mother’s sundress was so drenched with sweat that in places Francesca could see her dark-colored bra and underpants. She was not a slim woman, but her underwear seemed unnecessarily gigantic. “How are you possibly going to unload Kathy’s stuff all by yourself?”
“Don’t worry about Kathy. She’ll be fine. You know, no one said the boys’ dormitory would be right next door.” Her voice grew even louder. “I don’t like the looks of that.”
People were looking, Francesca was sure. Francesca was tempted to correct her and say men’s dormitory, except that that would have made things worse.
On the next trip, her mother took a lighter load. Still, by the time they got to the side door, she was huffing and puffing and had to stop. She plopped down on that wooden chair, which made a splintery sound. People are supposed to move to Florida and be out in the sun all the time and slim down so they’ll look good in tennis clothes and at the beach. Her mother was getting bigger all the time. This summer, Francesca had caught Stan the Liquor Man pinching her mother on the ass and saying he liked her caboose. Francesca shuddered.
“How can you possibly be cold?” her mother asked.
“I’m not.”
“Are you sick?”
She looked at her mother, who was practically having a heatstroke in that straining chair. “No,” Francesca said. “I’m fine.”
“Right next door,” her mother repeated, pointing at the men’s dorm with her thumb this time. “Can you believe it? Because I can’t.”
Why she was talking so loud, who knew?
“So why didn’t you want to go to a girls’ school?”
She said this loud enough that Francesca was sure people in the men’s dorm could hear. “This is a good school, Ma, all right?” She extended a hand to help her mother up. “C’mon.”
When they got to Barnard, Francesca knew, all Kathy would hear was “Why did you have to go so far from home?” Anything Francesca did was found wanting for not being enough like what Kathy did and vice versa. Before the homecoming dance, her mother had pulled Francesca aside to extol the virtues of Kathy’s date, whom she later that night dumped. Then Francesca asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. The next day, her mother started listing all the things wrong with him. He’s changed, Sandra said. Anyone with eyes can see that.
Francesca took another trip by herself. It was only then that she noticed how many doors were festooned with Greek letters. Her mother and Kathy had talked her out of coming up the week before, in time for sorority rush, her mother because she had her heart set on the convenience of making one big hoop-de-doo car trip and Kathy because she said sororities were great for WASPs, sluts, or dumb blondes, but not for any sister of hers, who already had a family and who certainly didn’t need to pretend she was the sister of a bunch of slutty blonde WASPs. Francesca had said that cinched it, she was rushing. But she hadn’t. Only now did it occur to her that the friendships made last week might already mark Francesca as a loser, an outcast: as different.
By the time she got back to her room, her mother had opened her boxes and suitcases and begun putting things away. She’d also produced a small Madonna print and a set of red bull horns, neither of which Francesca would leave up after her mother left. “You don’t need to do that,” Francesca told her.
“Bah,” Sandra said. “It’s no problem.”
“Really,” Francesca said. “I can take care of it.”
Kathy laughed. “Why not just tell her you don’t like her going through your stuff?”
“I don’t like you going through my stuff, Ma.”
“I go through your stuff at home. Stuff? I hope this good school here will teach you not to talk like a dirty beatnik. And anyway, what are you trying to hide from me, eh?”
“Nothing.” Beatnik? “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not at home.”
Sandra looked up as if startled by a loud noise.
Then she sat herself down at Francesca’s desk and burst into tears.
“Now you’ve done it,” Kathy said, sitting up.
“You’re not helping any.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kathy said, and of course she was right: it’s not just yawning and laughter that can be contagious.
The twins teared up, then began to cry, too. They all three huddled together on the bed. It had been a terrible year. Grandpa Vito’s funeral, which had been rough on everyone. Then Uncle Carlo’s bizarre disappearance. Chip, the sweetest one in the family, getting called a name at school, snapping, and breaking the kid’s skull with his thermos. Yet there was only one other time the three of them had ever been like this: united, embracing, sobbing. The girls had been in Mr. Chromos’s math class. The principal came to get them and took them to his office without telling them why. Their mother was in there, her face red and puffy. She said, “It’s your father, there’s been an accident.” They all fell onto the principal’s smelly orange couch and sobbed for who knows how long. Now, sobbing together again, they must have thought of that day, too. Their sobs got louder, their breathing more ragged, their embrace tighter.
Finally they calmed and released their grasp. Sandra took a breath and said, “I only wish-” She couldn’t say the rest of it.
A sharp knock came at the door. Francesca looked up, expecting this to be the true first impression her dorm mother would have of her. Instead it was a couple, he in a powder blue suit and she in a poodle-cut hairdo, both smiling and sporting HELLO, MY NAME IS name tags.
“Excuse us,” said the man, whose name tag read BOB. “Is this Room 322?”
The number was painted in black on the door. His index finger was actually touching it.
“Yes, pardon us,” said the woman. They both had an extremely thick southern accent. Her nametag read BARBARA SUE (“BABS”). She was looking past them to the Madonna and frowning. “If y’all’d like us to come back later-”
“This is her room,” the man said, stepping aside and gently pushing a dark-skinned girl across the threshold. The girl kept her eyes on her Mary Janes.
“I believe we’re interrupting,” the woman said.
“Are we interrupting?” the man asked.
Sandra Corleone blew her nose. Kathy wiped her face on Francesca’s pi
llow. Francesca used her hand. “No,” she said. “No. Sorry. Come in.”
“Fantastic,” the man said. “I’m Reverend Kimball, this is my wife, Mrs. Kimball, this is our daughter Suzy. With a Z. Not short for Suzanne. Just Suzy. Say hello, Suzy.”
“Hello,” the girl said, and then looked back down at her shoes.
“We’re Baptist.” The man nodded toward the Madonna. “We have Catholics in Foley, though, the next town over. I played golf once with their leader. Father Ron.”
Francesca introduced herself and her family-pronouncing it Cor-lee-own, which even her mother did lately-and braced for a question about her name. It didn’t come.
Suzy looked from one sister to the other, visibly confused.
“Yes, we’re twins,” Kathy said. “That one’s your roommate. I go to another school.”
“Are you identical?” Suzy asked.
“No,” Kathy said.
Suzy looked even more confused.
“She’s kidding,” Francesca said. “Of course we’re identical.”
The man had noticed the bull horns. He touched them. Sure enough, they were real. “Suzy is an Indian,” he said, “like you folks.”
“She’s adopted,” whispered the woman.
“But not a Seminole,” he said, and laughed so loud everyone else in the room jumped.
“I don’t follow you,” Sandra said.
With a whiny sigh, the man stopped laughing. Suzy sat at what would be her desk and stared at its Formica top. Francesca wanted to give her flowers, wine, chocolate, whatever it would take to make her smile.
“ Florida State,” the man said. “They’re the Seminoles.” He pantomimed throwing a football. He laughed again, even louder, and stopped laughing, even more abruptly.
“Naturally they are,” Sandra said. “No, I mean about being an Indian. We’re Italian.”
The man and the woman exchanged a look. “Interesting,” he said. Inner-esting.
“Yes,” said his wife. “That’s different.”
Francesca apologized and said her mom and sister had to go but she’d be back in just a sec to help Suzy with her stuff.
Her mother flinched slightly at stuff, but of course did not correct Francesca in front of the Kimballs.
Francesca and Kathy held hands on the way out to the car. Neither one of them could, or needed to, say a word.
“Want me to drive, Ma?”
Sandra opened her purse, took out a handkerchief and her keys, tossed the keys to Kathy.
“Don’t get pregnant,” Kathy said.
Their mother let this go, did not even express feigned decorous shock.
I won’t become a WASP either, Francesca thought. Or a dumb blonde. Or anyone else’s sister. She squeezed Kathy’s hand. “Don’t wreck your eyes reading,” Francesca said.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy said.
“Maybe I am you,” Francesca said.
It was an old joke. They’d always wondered how their mother had kept them straight as babies, always presumed they’d been mixed up a few times until they were old enough to assert their own identities.
They kissed each other on both cheeks, the way men would, and Kathy got into the car.
As Francesca hugged her mother good-bye, Sandra managed it at last. “I only wish,” she whispered, “that your father could be here to see this.” Sandra stepped back, triumphant. She looked from one daughter to the other. “His college girls.” She blew her nose. It was very loud.
“Pop never liked us to cry,” Francesca said.
“Who likes to see his family cry?” Kathy said.
“He wasn’t exactly one for tears himself,” Francesca said, wiping her face on the sleeve of her raincoat.
“Are you kidding?” her mother said. “Sonny? He was the biggest baby of us all. At movies he’d cry. Corny old Italian songs made him blubber like a baby. Don’t you remember?”
Seven years later, and Francesca was already starting not to.
She watched the Roadmaster nose its way through the clogged, narrow, palm-lined drive. As the car pulled around the corner, Francesca silently mouthed the word good-bye. She had no way of knowing this for sure, but she’d have bet her life her sister did the same.
Chapter 5
N ICK GERACI heard footsteps coming from across the darkness of the abandoned casino. A heavy limping man in squeaky shoes. “Sorry to hear about your ma, kid,” a voice called.
Geraci stood. It was Laughing Sal Narducci, Forlenza’s ancient consigliere, dressed in a mohair sweater with diamond-shaped panels. When Geraci was growing up, Narducci was one of those guys you saw sitting out in front of the Italian-American Social Club, smoking harsh black cigars. The nickname was inevitable. A local amusement park had this motorized mannequin woman at the gate called Laughing Sal. Its recorded laughter sounded like some woman who’d just had the best sex of her life. Every Sally, every Salvatore in Cleveland, and half the Als and Sarahs, got called Laughing Sal.
“Thanks,” Geraci said. “She’d been sick a long time. It was kind of a mercy.”
Narducci embraced him. As he let go, he gave Geraci a few quick pats, though of course Falcone and Molinari’s bodyguards had frisked him back in Detroit. Then Narducci opened the wall. Laughing Sal saw the bag, lifted it, and nodded. “ Arizona didn’t help her none, huh?” He put the bag down without even opening it, as if he could count money purely by weight. A half million in hundreds weighs ten and a quarter pounds. “Bein’ away from this fucking weather?”
“That definitely helped,” Geraci said. “She liked it there. She had a pool and everything. She was always a big swimmer.”
Narducci closed the wall. “Her people were from by the sea, you know. Milazzo, same as mine. Me, I can’t swim farther than from here to the far side of a whiskey glass. Ever been?”
“To the far side of a whiskey glass?”
“Milazzo. Sicily.”
“ Sicily yes, Milazzo I never quite made it to,” he said. He’d been in Palermo only last week, working out minor personnel issues with the Indelicato clan.
Narducci put a hand on Geraci’s shoulder. “Well, like they say, she’s in a better place.”
“Like they say,” Geraci said.
“Jesus Christ, look at you.” Narducci squeezed Geraci’s biceps, as if they were fruit he might buy. “Ace Geraci! Looks like you could still go twenty rounds in the Garden.”
“Nah,” Geraci said. “Probably just ten, eleven.”
Narducci laughed. “You know how much money I lost on you over the years? A bundle, my friend. A bundle.”
“Should have bet against me. That’s what I usually did.”
“I tried that,” Narducci said. “Then you’d always win. And your father? How’s he?”
“Getting by.” Fausto Geraci, Sr., had been a truck driver and a Teamsters official. Connected but never inducted, he’d driven cars and done various favors for the Jew. “He’s got my sister there.” And the Mexican woman on the other side of Tucson he thinks no one knows about. “He’ll be fine. He misses going to work, if you want to know the truth.”
“Retirement don’t suit some people. But he should give it time, the retirement.”
Not a problem Nick Geraci ever expected to face. You come in alive, Vito Corleone had said at Geraci’s initiation, and you go out dead. “We ready?” Geraci said.
“Ready.” Narducci slapped him on the ass and escorted him back through the casino. Geraci looked for an exit route, a flight of stairs. Just in case.
“How long since that casino was in business?” Geraci asked.
“Back in the Italian navy days,” Narducci said, meaning the fleet of speedboats they’d operated on the Great Lakes during Prohibition. “Now we got these ships. Best things to have. No local fuck has the resources to raid ships. Plus, your guests are stuck out on the lake all night. Give ’em a show, set up a few rooms with some girls, then drop ’em back off at their cars. You’ve taken all their money, a
nd they’re happy you did it.”
The Stracci Family had huge secret casinos in the Jersey Palisades, but as far as Geraci knew, none of the Families in New York had gambling ships like that. Maybe he’d look into developing a few, once the peace was solid and things cooled down.
“Other than legal joints in Vegas and Havana, we’re out of the on-land stuff altogether,” Narducci said. “Except down in West Virginia, which don’t really count. You can buy off that whole state for less than the heating bill on this place here.”
He ushered Geraci into a dank room and pulled open the door to an old cage elevator.
“Relax, kid,” Narducci said. “Who’s going to kill you here?”
“I get any more relaxed,” Geraci said, “I’ll need you to tuck me in and read me a story.”
They got in. Narducci smiled and hit the button. He’d called it right, though; it was how Geraci had been trained: elevators are death traps.
“Changing the subject,” Narducci said, “I gotta ask. How’d a big cafone like you get through law school?”
“I know people.” He’d done it on his own steam, night school, busted his ass. He still had a few classes to go. But Nick Geraci knew the right answers to things. “I have friends.”
“Friends,” Narducci repeated. “Attaboy.” He put his hands on Geraci’s shoulders and gave him a quick rub, the way a cornerman might.
The door opened. Geraci braced himself. They stepped into a dark, carpeted hallway crowded with chairs and settees and little carved tables that were probably worth a mint. At the end of the hall was a bright marble-floored room. A young redheaded nurse pushed Vincent “the Jew” Forlenza toward them in a wheelchair. Narducci left to go get Falcone and Molinari.
“Padrino,” said Geraci. “How are you feeling?” His speech and probably brain were fine, but he wasn’t going to walk again.
“Eh,” Forlenza said. “What do doctors know?”
Geraci kissed Forlenza on each cheek and then on his ring. Forlenza had stood as godfather at his christening.
The Godfather returns Page 8
