38

Monday at twelve minutes before noon, Charley watched Maerose come off the ramp from the plane at Moissant airport. She was wearing a fitted knee-length red wool suit with black fox collar and cuffs and a zip front jacket. She wore spike-heeled Italian winkle-picker shoes with long, pointed toes. He had never seen her look so gorgeous. She was smiling broadly as she rushed up to him and threw her arms around him. “Jeez, Charley,” she said, “we gotta catch up.”

“You staying at your aunt’s?”

“I’ll sleep there. I’m staying with you.”

“You gotta be the classiest thing ever to come into this airport.”

On the eleven-mile ride back into town they held hands but that was all, because the driver was an old friend of Vincent’s and he wouldn’t stop talking.

“How’s your father, Miss Prizzi?”

“He’s fine.”

“Give him my best. Tell him Gus Fangoso. We go way back.”

“He’ll be happy to hear from you.”

“I’m talking right after the war. Nineteen forty-six–forty-seven.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“He’ll know what you mean.”

He kept it up for about four miles. Charley said, “Hey, Gus. Stop at that drugstore onna corner up there.” Gus stopped the car. “Come in with me a minute,” Charley said to him.

They went into the store. Gus was a paunchy man in his late fifties, maybe six years older than Vincent. When they got inside the store Charley laid the fear all over Gus, then he said, “That is my fidanzata in the car. I ain’t talked to her for three weeks. I am sitting beside her for the first time in almost three weeks and I still can’t talk to her because you keep talking to her. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Sure, Charley. Absolutely.”

“Then we’ll go back to the car. And you put up the window. Capeesh?”

“Sure. I got it. Absolutely, Charley.”

They went back to the car. Gus held the door open and Charley got in. Gus went around to the driver’s seat. He started the engine then pressed the button that put up the power window between the front and the back seat. They drove into town.

“You must have said the magic words, or something,” Maerose said.

Still, there wasn’t time even to get started saying anything. To Charley it seemed like right away the limousine was rolling through high gates into the 150-yard-long brick driveway to the front door of the Fustino mansion, which triumphantly combined English, Mediterranean, and American architectural styles. The door was opened by an elderly, uniformed Italian maid whom Maerose embraced, kissed, and called Enriquette and introduced to Charley as Gennaro’s cousin. They had a view of seventy-eight feet through airy, high-ceilinged rooms. All of the space was air-conditioned. Tall cabinets filled with Meissen, Sèvres, and English porcelains stood beside tables that had been made for George IV. The house had been built by one of the biggest Pepsi-Cola bottlers in the South about ten years before, yet the effect the designers had achieved was of a great plantation house over a hundred years old.

The November sun was still high in a perfect blue sky. They were led to an enormous patio where a large oval table had been set for lunch. Two Fustino daughters with their husbands and three of the Fustino sons (out of nine), with their wives, were waiting for Maerose as she came into the patio with Charley. While tumultuous greetings went on, Gennaro took Charley off to one side. “That was nice work you done last night, Charley.”

Charley nodded, coloring slightly under the praise. “Natale was solid,” he said.

“Mallon looks like getting ninety to a hundred and thirty years on all the counts,” Gennaro said.

Birdie Fustino was greeting Maerose with hugs and kisses saying, in answer to Mae’s ecstatic comment on the house, “We just took it the way we found it. It takes eleven people to run it, four in the garden alone.”

It was a warm, affectionate, and happy lunch. Gennaro sat at the head of the table with Maerose at his right. Birdie sat at the other end with Charley at her right, and all the beautiful young siblings and spouses were spaced in chairs between. None of them was in the environment. The husbands were dentists and software designers, restaurant people, and an art gallery owner. They were a great-looking bunch of women, Charley thought, but Maerose was the absolute standout and everyone in the room knew it, particularly Charley. Nobody, not even Mardell, made him as horny as he got from just looking at Mae. Charley was sure that every now and then Gennaro was copping a feel on her knee under the table. Sometimes he was able to catch Maerose’s eye, and they grinned at each other.

Things are certainly looking up in this department, Charley told himself. He didn’t know anybody, so mostly he kept his mouth shut and pretended to listen to Birdie while he tried to figure out what he was going to say to Mae when they were alone, whenever that was going to be.

He concentrated on what life with her would be forty years ahead if it had happened that they were engaged and that finally they did get married. He would be seventy years old, she would be about sixty-two. They would have grown-up kids, even married kids. He would be a grandfather. The whole point of thinking ahead like that was: would he still remember Mardell? Would he still be worrying about her? Would he be worrying about where Mardell was and what was happening to her? Forty years was a long time, but better if he made it fifty years. He would be eighty. He would have grownup grandchildren. Jesus, he thought, life is certainly hard to figure.

Gennaro left at two o’clock. The lunch party broke up at about three fifteen. Maerose went upstairs to change. When she came down, she had on a café au lait sheath with a diagonal silver silk fringe spiraling around her long, lithe body. There was a big gold pin on her left shoulder. She looked like the kind of package anybody would like to get. She had a stab of extreme pleasure when she looked at Charley’s face as she came down the stairs and a surge of deep-down elation when she looked at the front of his trousers. They got away from Birdie at about a quarter to four. They sat quietly in the car until they had Gus drop them off in the Quarter. They walked a block and a half to the New Franciscan so Gus could tell Birdie that they had gone sightseeing. When the door closed in Charley’s apartment they both started to talk at the same time, stopped, and Maerose put her arms around his neck, holding on silently. After a while they kissed.

“What’s it gonna be, Charley?”

“Mae—I gotta say it—we ain’t engaged. You know that.”

“I didn’t come all the way down here to have you tell me stuff like that, Charley.”

“We gotta get this straightened out. You know that.”

“Are you gonna marry that mountain? She isn’t even in the environment.”

“I ain’t gonna marry nobody, Mae.”

“Then dump her. We’ll start even again.”

“The girl has pneumonia in New York. I can’t even think about dumping her.”

“You gotta dump her or dump me.”

“Why? Why can’t we just keep on going the way we been going?”

“I can’t do a stand like that.”

“I go back to New York next Wednesday. Lemme think about it.”

“Charley, look—suppose you decide on her? Whatta you gonna do, the business you’re in? Does she know the business you’re in?”

“No. Anyway, I don’t think so.”

“So maybe she’s not sure you’re legitimate. But how is she gonna get it straight in her head about everything you do? She’s English, she ain’t American. She’s never gonna understand what you do.”

“She’s had a lot of trouble in her life. Jesus, you don’t know. I’m like the only rock she can sit on. I don’t know, I get the feeling that if I take that away she’s gonna drown.”

“What about me? You think I can just throw this whole thing off like a bad cold? What about me, Charley?”

“I gotta figure the whole thing out.”

“You think because I fight you on this that I am some kind of Charles Atlas of the heart, Charley? You think when everything is down the tube and you have to make your move that, because she’s had a lot of trouble in her life and you think I haven’t—you can just figure that I’m gonna be all right?”

“That’s the only way I got left to think. What am I gonna think—I mean, how am I gonna get this thing straight if that ain’t the way I do it?”

“Get it straight the right way! You and me were meant for each other. We live the same way, we think the same way. Maybe part of the reason why I love you is because of the way you are trying to protect this woman, but nothing fits together with you and the woman. We are talking marriage—a lifetime. Things have to fit together, maybe not everything but the main things, the important things.” Suddenly, she switched to Sicilian. “We speak the same language, Charley.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Yeah. I know. You’re right, Mae. But this girl has everything different. Problems, where she is coming from, she could be the thing from outer space. But, like you said, we’re talking about a lifetime, so I can’t fool around with your life. We have to be sure. Give me two weeks against the lifetime, Mae.”

She took him in her arms and pulled him toward the step-ladder to the bed.

“That’ll never work, Charley. It’ll just go on and on and on. I saw the don. I told him—formally, like I sent him an engraved announcement—that you and me are gonna get married.”

Charley’s legs gave way. He dropped into a chair beside the bed. “You told the don that?”

“He wants to set a date. And after I give him a date, he wants to give us a big engagement party and bring in the people from most of the families around the country. I gotta tell him whether it’s on or it’s off, Charley. That means you gotta tell me.”

“A date? Jesus, Mae—”

“A line has to be drawn, Charley. We can’t go on and on like this.”

Charley thought of his father and his mother. He thought of the don and the family and how he had never lived outside it because, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing outside the family. If he decided that he had to stay with Mardell he would have to leave the family, leave all his people. If only Mardell was the kind of a girl who would take a bundle of cash and forget the whole thing.

“Yeah,” he said to Maerose, staring into her eyes. “We gotta set a date.”

She kissed him. “It better be all settled in your mind, Charley, because by now the don has told a lot of people. Like my father.”