48

Four hundred and nine announcements and invitations went into the mail, to a net of eight hundred and twelve guests. All Prizzis, Sesteros, and Garrones were included down to the ages of eighteen.

Maerose was on the phone constantly with her Aunt Amalia. Her grandfather insisted on being consulted at almost every turn about the list because, whereas there were people who had to be invited for family and business reasons, there were quite a few other people whom he absolutely couldn’t stand, or didn’t trust, or had tried to kill, or who had tried to kill him, so the don had to double-check everything.

When the list was finally approved and all the invitations mailed, one hundred and ninety-six tuxedos were sent to the dry cleaners around the country; a total of $476,000 was spent on dresses, furs, and hairdos; eighty-three advance reservations were made for 137 stretch limousines, and travel agents and airlines customer relations people felt a strain.

There weren’t going to be enough available suites in the three midtown Prizzi-owned hotels, so twenty-seven of the year-round tenants were given free, premature holidays in the Prizzi hotels in either Miami, Atlantic City, or Las Vegas—the spa of their choice—together with $500 worth of chips. They went out; the guests to the engagement party went in.

Angelo Partanna had agreed to respond to Vincent’s announcement from the dais that his daughter was to be married. Don Corrado Prizzi personally had a meeting with Biagio, the florist who now operated all the way out in Newark. Despite the distance, Maerose’s grandfather insisted that Biagio be the one to handle the decorations at the Palermo Gardens.

A courier service was laid on between the Lum Fong Chinese Restaurant on West 127th Street, which the Prizzis operated, and Gennaro Fustino’s hotel suite—a gesture of hospitality, because Mr. Fustino enjoyed that cuisine so much. A total of fifty-eight full-sized pizzas were delivered in warming ovens to the various guests. Barbers shaved men stretched out on Chippendale sofas, somber priests heard the ritual confessions of four visiting wives who expiated themselves of the sins of sloth, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and thinking bad thoughts, in $600-a-day suites. The weather held; clear, sunny, crisp, and altogether admirable all during the engagement party weekend.

Eight judges and three congressmen, feeling sufficiently anonymous in a crowd of that size, had accepted with pleasure. Two Cabinet members, eleven U.S. senators, and the White House sent their wives or secretaries out into the stores in Washington to select suitable engagement presents. In all, 419 invitees spent $405,289 on congratulatory gifts for the young couple; a future Boss of the Prizzi family was going to marry the granddaughter of Corrado Prizzi.

Lieutenant Davey Hanly and the entire Borough Squad accepted the invitations as tokens of the New York Police Department. The mayor of the City of New York personally provided the motorcycle escort to take the bride-to-be and her father to the reception, and he also pledged to her and to her fiancé a seven-year lease on a six-room apartment in the new luxury Garden Grove apartments, which were rapidly being constructed in an emerging part of the city, even if it wasn’t in Brooklyn.

The principal families of the fratellanza, from New England, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York planned to send not representatives but contingents, including many blood relatives of the Prizzis: Sal Prizzi had married the sister of Augie “Angles” Licamarito, Boss of the Detroit family. Two of the Garrone daughters had married sons of Gennaro Fustino, who was married to Don Corrado’s baby sister, while the don’s niece was married to Sam Carramazza, son of the head of the Chicago family. Don Corrado was second cousin to Sam Benefice, head of the New England family, and to Carlo “Gastank” Viggone, Boss of the Cleveland combination.

In addition to the more spectacular guests, the third generation of Prizzis, Sesteros, and Garrones, the strictly legitimate members of the family, had to be accommodated because each one of them knew there was no way to get out of attending the engagement party of Maerose Prizzi.

There were so many connections with the Los Angeles outfit that it had been a hard job for Maerose to boil down a final list. To bulk things up further, she had attended Manhattanville with the twin daughters of the Boss of the Seattle family, with whom the Prizzis also maintained a joint military industrial extortion business which involved national politics, and somebody, thank God, had remembered at the last minute.

With a profound sense of ritual, Mae dropped the first invitation into the mailbox herself, addressed to Miss Mardell La Tour. Then she went back into the maelstrom of dressmakers, caterers, car-parkers, musicians, balloon suppliers, memento manufacturers, floral delivery schedules, waiters, table and chair rental companies, and faced a meeting with the three capiregime, all cousins, about selecting an honor guard of eight bouncers from the family’s 1,800 soldiers to keep order as the hour got late, the wine got flowing, and the men began to get accustomed to the presence of the new ladies.

Mae didn’t sleep much. She kept sipping champagne all through the work of planning so she didn’t eat much. She wasn’t really physically ready for it when, ten days before the engagement party was to happen, the people she had following Charley reported that he had gone directly from his New Orleans plane connection to Miss La Tour’s apartment and had been spending every other night there.

That really did it. Maerose’s wig slipped. She went into a kind of controlled hysteria which pulled her further and closer to the edge of doing something irreversible.

She couldn’t believe the written report that she held in her hands and read over and over. In New Orleans he had looked her in the eye and had renounced this woman. That was how she remembered it. She tried to firm it up in her mind, but now that she thought about it, it was all kind of vague. He had pulled her up that ladder to the bed, held her in his arms, and said—maybe she was kidding herself, she knew she couldn’t remember much after they got to the top of that ladder. But he knew the engagement was officially announced, because he knew she had told her grandfather so he should have known that the woman had to be thrown away.

She felt burning contempt for Mardell for pulling that pneumonia shit. She had to have found some quack doctor who had injected her with pneumonia because she knew that a boy scout like Charley couldn’t walk out on a sick woman who was playing it so helpless that he probably had to lift her on and off the john like the soprano in Puccini’s French opera La Bohème. Everybody knew Charley was a goddam dummy where women were concerned and she had been willing to make every allowance for that. But he had promised her, he had given her his oath that he understood that they were the family and that the woman was an outsider and that he knew that it was all over, that he had to be finished with the woman forever. He was marrying a Prizzi, for Christ’s sake. What was this woman—some hick from the English sticks, a nothing who came over here to get her hands on American money.

Her second thoughts were that Charley didn’t deserve to live. He had dishonored himself, and by dishonoring her as well he had dishonored the Prizzis. She decided the quickest way to have the job done on Charley was to tell her father how she had pleaded with Charley, shaming herself and her family, in New York and in New Orleans, and how each time he had given his sacred oath that he would never see the woman again, but, as soon as her back was turned, he had gone into the bed of the woman who must, every day of her life, laugh at her and at the honor of the Prizzis. She knew her father. He would put out work on Charley. Charley wouldn’t last two days after she finished massaging her father.

But even while she was thinking that way, she knew she couldn’t let anybody give it to Charley. If her plan to take over the Prizzi family was going to work, she needed Charley. Charley was her ticket to the whole thing.

How could she make him come to his senses? She could make up her face with ashes and dress in black and go to see her grandfather and tell him what Charley had done to all of them, but that would diminish her to nothing in her grandfather’s eyes and she would never ever be able to persuade him to make Eduardo give her the job as his assistant so she could take over Eduardo’s operation someday. But what the fuck was the use of taking over Eduardo’s operation if she didn’t have Charley to protect her off side as Boss of the street operation? Charley had totaled her life in more ways than one.

The terrible blow to her pride she knew she would eventually get over. Why not? The only place women didn’t get over the betrayals by men was the opera, but that figured, because they were all so fat that they knew they couldn’t get another guy if the tenor dropped off their string.

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.