54

The distinguished guests from all over America were pouring into the three Prizzi hotels in midtown Manhattan. The Papal Nuncio went to Brooklyn for lunch with Don Corrado directly after his fittings with Ungaro, planning to avoid the party itself if he possibly could. Movie stars, media stars, and television stars were stacked up like cordwood, waiting to heat up the Palermo Gardens. A story would appear in the society pages, but otherwise, in terms of news coverage, the engagement was strictly not a news event. The people who knew who the Prizzis were knew about the engagement, and the rest of the world had only vaguely heard of the Prizzis so they weren’t news—or at least they hadn’t been news for quite a number of years since the public relations policy of the fratellanza had been changed into a policy of nonviolence or, if there had to be violence, then violence that could be pinned on a lot of wild South Americans and blacks.

Maerose Prizzi, the young woman in whose honor the party was to be given, was the niece of the financier, Edward Price, just to place her vaguely, and no one had ever heard of Charles Amedeo Partanna. Hoodlums, if there still were such things as hoodlums, being the human component of such a nonexistent thing as the Mafia, were confined to television fiction or had become a part of American history. The people who owned the great companies or took them over in elaborate hijacking operations, or flipped them, or merged them with one another to hike the price up, were called financiers, not hoodlums. The public was finally getting its nomenclature straight, as it had when narcotics were renamed controlled substances and taxes were called revenue enhancement.

Everything was done on an enormous scale which dwarfed the antics of old-time “gangsters.” Everything was done out in the open, by people who were known leaders and whose names turned up regularly on the business pages. The fact that there was a Sicilian-American family that was prominent in an isolated section of faraway Brooklyn, headed by a forgotten old man, could mean nothing to anyone. So what, if the old man’s number in the dusty, never-consulted files of the New York Police Department was #E-14481, or if he was #362142A to the FBI, and #247 in the Federal Narcotics Bureau listings. There was nothing to report about the occasion except the joy of a bride-to-be.

Vincent provided a superstretch limousine driven by his own man, Zingo Pappaloush, to pick up Charley at the beach, then to go to Vincent’s house in Bensonhurst to take Charley, Maerose, and Vincent to the old Palermo Gardens near the Navy Yard, which was set among the borders of Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg. The Palermo Gardens had been the hallowed grove for every important Prizzi, Partanna, Sestero, or Garrone celebration for the past fifty years. The building was thirty-seven years old when Corrado Prizzi bought it, and he had used it constantly, organizing dances, observances, and assemblies for the immigrant Sicilian people who had rallied around him in the new world, establishing him as their leader in the right way, not with force, or certainly not entirely with force.

The city had tried to condemn the building twice in the past nine years, but each time Don Corrado had told Eduardo to get the ruling changed. It was now nominally owned by the Blessed Decima Manovale Order, a nonprofit organization of religious ascetics who had taken vows of poverty and who also held a voting trust of oil shares for the don.

Charley, riding from the beach to his fiancée’s house in Bensonhurst, couldn’t shake the depression he had fallen into. He had seen Mardell for the last time the night before; for the last time in their lives, and he hadn’t had the guts to say goodbye to her. He tried. At the time he was trying he reminded himself that he was at least trying, but he never made it. Neither one of them could have stood it if he told her. He would never have gotten away. They would have had to either elope or negotiate a suicide pact or something. It was like when you hit a ball against a wall which faces a wall, after a couple of strong bounces the bounce goes out of it and it can’t make it back to the other wall again. He couldn’t say the same things all over again. They had both heard the same song too often, so he hadn’t said anything; he hadn’t even said goodbye.

He couldn’t let it lie there like that. He could write her a letter. She liked Pop. He could ask Pop to go to see her and deliver the letter. She was so touchy about money that it wasn’t even remotely possible to leave her a big check when he slipped out of her apartment this morning. He hadn’t even set up something with a bank to send her enough money every month that it wouldn’t somehow make her ashamed—because she was a little off her head where it came to money—but still enough so he would know that she was going to be able to keep eating and paying the rent. He was going to have to get Eduardo to have his lawyers set up a fake inheritance from some phoney relatives in England. That was the only way he could think of to get her to take money.

He knew her. When she figured it all out, or when he figured out some way he could tell her what happened, she would probably never call Marty Pomerantz again or pay any attention to Marty’s calls to her because he had set it up and she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him. Aaaaah, shit! He remembered that Vito used to say he didn’t have women to bring him trouble. Charley didn’t even understand that anymore. If you wanted to be around somebody there had to be trouble, because each side thought they knew better than the other one about what was the best thing for the other one. Jesus, that had certainly happened to him, two women—terrific women—had fallen so head-over-heels in love with him that they had lost all control. That was life. That was nature in the raw. He just had to learn to live with it.

If only Maerose could have been satisfied with being with him three nights a week and every other Saturday. They could have gotten married and he could have gone along with Mardell. His body would have gotten used to it eventually. After a year or two of a steady routine like that, he wouldn’t have to rest up in the daytime anymore. It would have been like the boy who had lifted the tiny calf every day until he was a man and the calf was a three-thousand-pound bull; it could be done. Both women would be happy and there wouldn’t have to be all this sweat. But no. Maerose had to have it her way.

The motorcycle cops of the escort were talking together on the street in front of Vincent’s house when Charley got out of the stretch car and went up the walk to the house. They were waiting for him. The front door opened and they were all dressed to go. Maerose was dressed more beautifully than even she had ever been dressed in her life, or maybe it was because he had never seen her wearing this kind of a long dress with all the bare everywhere and the hair like a helmet. Charley kissed Mae on the cheek. She stayed hanging there after he finished, like she was waiting for something more. They went out to the car. Both men were wearing tuxedos like a couple of waiters. Vincent burped twice getting into the car, so loud that Zingo looked around, alarmed, and put up the glass division in the car.

Maerose sat between the two men inside the enormous tonneau and listened to Charley’s silence, interpreting it as indifference. It was the biggest night in their lives so far and she was getting no vibes from Charley, just cold waves. The way he was acting she knew she had won, she knew he was finished with the woman, his father must have finally got him straight. But she also knew she had won nothing. This wasn’t Charley, not the Charley she wanted in her work.

There was plenty of time to think. Her contingency plan was flexible.

Nobody was talking. Her father had turned on the television and was watching a show called Everybody’s Health, about arteriosclerosis. He resented having to get all dressed up like this and to go to a place full of noisy people just so they could all be told what they already knew. He brooded over where they were going to put all those goddam presents.

Maerose stared at her dreams: having Charley, running the legit operation, dominating the family across the board, from the street side to the board rooms—with Charley at her side. But if she could not swing Charley over to her side—willingly and joyously—then she could also have overrated her ability to take over the Prizzi family. The one thing naturally followed the other. The first thing was the absolute measure of the second, so what was the use? If she went along with what had been set up for tonight she wouldn’t have any of that, because none of it was ever going to work, and nothing could be clearer than that. So, she explained to herself, because of what she did have, what she would always have—she was a Prizzi—she was going to have to make herself get him off the hook by sliding into the contingency plan.

She had really known all along in her heart of hearts that it was going to happen, she reminded herself. The two-ton showgirl had been too cool. She had been so sure of herself that she had to be sure of Charley. And he had never acted like a man who had been caught having a little poontang on the side. Charley was as serious about the woman as he couldn’t get himself to be serious about her. She had to face it. She had to throw it all away and get him off the hook in such a way that neither he nor anybody else would ever know she had done it. What the hell. She had her business and Brooklyn was going downhill anyhow. She wanted to cry, but her father was sitting beside her and he would only yell at her until he got a reason why she was crying, and Charley would only want to shoot himself, so she didn’t cry. The car pulled up in front of her family’s favorite dump for celebrating the great occasions, so she was going to have to make it a great occasion.

The preternaturally long car arrived at the entrance to Palermo Gardens yard by yard. Zingo Pappaloush seemed to get there some time before the passengers. They all got out.

“Wait here,” Vincent said to Zingo, and Zingo knew that the cops knew he would be allowed to move the car a few feet beyond the entrance and be parked there so that it would be ready when Vincent decided to go home.

The rest of the night was a blur to everyone. To Charley, to the don, to Amalia, to every one of the guests, and most of all to Maerose and to Vincent, who were to be ten years getting over it, if Vincent ever really got over it. The terrible night itself was less of a blur to Maerose while it was happening. If a climax is defined as a moment in a play at which a crisis reaches its highest intensity and is resolved, this became the climax of her life and, under the definition of Freytag’s Pyramid, her catastrophe.

The enormous room was arranged so that all the guests were seated at large, round tables. The table of honor, where Maerose and Charley sat with the don, Amalia, Vincent, Father Passanante, the priest who would marry the young couple, Pop, and Eduardo, with an aristocratic young woman called Baby who had attended Foxcroft and Bennington, was at the center of the room, at the edge of the relatively large dance floor. Over all of it, banquet room and dance floor, hung three large chandeliers from which were festooned crepe paper ribbons of red, white, and blue from one side of the room and red, white, and green from the other. Balloons bobbed against the ceiling in a dozen colors, rising in the warmed air. There was a raised stage with two alternating orchestras: the four-piece band of white-haired musicians who were the traditional fixtures at all Prizzi affairs, and a modern, eleven-piece group that provided music of more current interest (up to 1955). Along two of the walls there were long, two-tiered tables holding heaped platters of salads, antipasti, cold cuts, and sandwiches, mountains of tiny macaroni and farfalline, piles of salciccia, and banks of pastries and ice cream. On the third wall there was a bar where the extra men congregated. There were six bottles of two colors of wine on each table. At the tables on either side of the table of honor sat the representatives of the families, and equally nearby, if one row removed from the dance floor, were the statesmen, conglomerate heads, and prelates. All the men except the prelates wore tuxedos. The women were dressed merely spectacularly. The clergy, who with two exceptions were parish priests, wore either scarlet or purple soutanes. On each wall—north, south, east, and west—hung enormous sepia portraits: Arturo Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso, and Richard M. Nixon in heavy gold frames. Nixon was the chief executive of the country, but the don had admired him closely through his exciting tenure as congressman, senator, and vice president.

Maerose began the evening by clamoring so loudly for champagne that Vincent felt she was making it necessary for him to order at least a token glass of champagne for everyone in the room, which he resented bitterly, and which necessitated hurried telephone calls followed by the rushed dispatching of large trucks from warehouses. Mae refused food. She was getting drunk. Charley kept asking her if she wouldn’t like to eat something and then telling her to take it easy with the champagne. She said, “You want me to sit at this table or you want me to roam around and make myself a couple of new friends?”

During the one dance with Charley, she began by mussing the hair of the other women dancers and occasionally goosing the men.

“Mae, fahcrissake! Whatta you doing?” Charley said, locking in a fixed smile.

“Whatta you mean? I’m celebrating. We’re gonna get married, remember?”

“Your father is turning purple.”

“Charley, what are you—a party pooper?”

After that she refused to leave her chair, urging everybody to drink up, and carrying on shouted conversations with people on the dance floor. “Hey, Rosalia! Look out! Your ass is gonna fall off,” and other lighthearted sallies.

The don stared at her, unbelieving. He turned the stare into outrage and beamed it on Vincent. It was 9:41 P.M. when Mae finished her bottle of champagne and made her three big moves.

Move one: Charley was on the dance floor with Julia Fustino, Gennaro’s daughter-in-law who had helped to entertain Charley and Mae in New Orleans. Julia had won the Harvest Moon Ball in the lindy class the year before she was married. She was a terrific dancer and that inflamed Maerose, who began to behave like a jealous woman. She kept calling out to Charley from her table, “How come you don’t dance with the old bags, Charley? How come you go straight for the gorgeous women?” Or (very loudly), “Hey, Charley—come on! This is your engagement party, not an orgy.” And, “Come on, Charley. Drag her into a phone booth and get it over with, why doncha?”

Gradually other conversations at tables near the dance floor stopped altogether as the guests watched Maerose and little else.

Move two: Charley and Julia were dancing a sedate fox-trot when Mae lurched out of her chair and grabbed Julia’s arm, pulling her away from Charley. “I saw that, you son of a bitch,” she yelled, and whacked Charley across the chops. There was one great gasp from a few hundred throats and no gasps were greater or more horrified than the gasps from the center table directly on the dance floor.

Move three: Maerose pushed Charley away and half-staggered to the bar, where a line of young men had been drinking and watching the dancing; she grabbed a tall, dark one, and pulled him on the dance floor where she went into as lascivious a dance as either Vincent or his father, who took a large gross income out of pornography, had ever seen. Vincent was trying on a case of apoplexy. The don looked as if he were going to turn her into stone. Only Father Passanante at the main table seemed to be enjoying watching the dance. After one turn around the dance floor that, as the Plumber said later, could have got her pregnant, Charley came forward from having returned Julia Fustino to her table, Mae threw her arms around the young man, socked her hips violently into his hips, and kissed him passionately. Vincent rushed out on the floor, got there ahead of Charley, and pried the two of them apart.

He grabbed her arm and began to pull her toward the door and said, “We’re going home.”

She jerked her arm loose. “Go home, Poppa,” she said. “It’s past your bedtime.” She grabbed the young man’s arm and pulled him away. She yelled at everyone, “In your hat and over your ears,” and sprinted out of the Palermo Gardens, pulling the young man along behind her. They disappeared from the room. Nobody knew what to say. Then, all of a sudden, everyone knew what to say all at the same time.

Hitting the outside pavement running, dragging the man, Mae yelled, “Zingo!”

The driver broke away from a knot of drivers. “Yes, Miss?”

“Get me out of here. Where’s the car?”

Zingo ran to the limousine and backed it up in front of the two people. Mae got into the car and pulled the man in behind her.

As the limousine pulled away, Charley and Vincent came running out of the building.

“What the hell is this?” Vincent said. “Did somebody put something in her drink?”

“Holy shit,” Charley said. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew Mae had made her move and that he didn’t want it that way. She had gotten him off the hook but she had fallen in the soup. It was bad enough the way it had been, but who needed this? He couldn’t figure out what to do except to let her sober up then to take her out to Vegas and marry her and stay away until the whole thing blew over.

She hadn’t been any drunker than Father Passanante, who didn’t drink. She had set the whole thing up because she thought he wanted to get off the hook but that he didn’t know how to do it. He knew one thing: it was never going to blow over with Vincent. As far as Vincent was concerned, she had dishonored him in front of the most important people on the planet. She was dead where Vincent was concerned.

She had fixed everybody—herself, sure—but him, too. If she was dead with Vincent, he, himself, was dead with her. She was his. She still knew that as much as he knew that. But she had run away from him. She was gone.

“I am ashamed in front of you, Charley,” Vincent was saying. “She has spit on all of us.” Vincent was so shaken that he was speaking in Sicilian. “She ain’t my daughter no more.”

“Come on, Vincent. It’s cold. We gotta go inside.”

“How we gonna face all them people?”

“We’re Prizzis, Vincent. That’s enough for them. We found out all about that tonight.”

When they got back to the table, Pop wasn’t there. They took their seats. Charley began a conversation about the Mets with Baby. Eduardo talked about the stock market to Father Passanante. Amalia wept quietly. Vincent took three pills. Don Corrado remembered, aloud and in close detail, some wild boar he had eaten, years before, on a trip with his wife after Vincent was grown up, on a grand tour of Italy, in a restaurant in Rome. It was called cinghiale in agrodolce, the latter being a sweet-and-sour sauce, and it could not in any way compare with the young lamb they had there. The boar was cooked with vinegar, anchovies, and flavored with rosemary, garlic, and sage, and his wife had said it wasn’t worth it to ask for the recipe, but she said that when they got back to New York she was going to see about getting some real baby lamb. The don wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. He could have been talking to his dead wife. He was just talking.

Pop returned to the table at ten fifty.

“She went to the airport,” he said. “She caught a plane for Mexico City with the man.”

The don turned politely to Vincent. “Get her back,” he snarled, then smiled terribly. “Mexico is no place for a young, single woman.”

“I had a talk with the airline’s night manager,” Pop said. “They issued Mae entry cards. She asked them to make a hotel reservation for her and they set her up at the Molina on Avenida Juárez.”

“Get on the phone, Vincent,” the don said.