4

Maerose Prizzi and Charley Partanna were married on August 9, 1986. Their courtship had begun in 1967, but there had been complications. It had picked up again in 1979, just before Charley’s marriage, and after his wife’s tragic death it continued in fits and starts because Charley’s attentions wandered whenever a woman of his dreams happened into his life and because Maerose had begun her serious work as executive assistant to her uncle at the top of Barker’s Hill. She worked until she dropped every day to make herself indispensable to her uncle and to learn everything he knew about the operation of Barker’s Hill, mother lode of all the great American El Dorados and her birthright.

While Mae applied sweat to oil the grindstone, Charley was dormant romantically, with the exception, after the first six months of his widowerhood, of a reasonably short but wild infatuation with a parking meter officer named Babe Matzger.

The marriage to Mae, when it finally happened, had enveloped Charley as unexpectedly as any normal disastrous earthquake. Maerose had been relentless about setting the whole thing up. Not that there weren’t small complications. Nineteen years before, in 1967, Maerose Prizzi had gone to her grandfather’s house to tell him that she was going to marry Charley Partanna. But that intention was not to be realized. So in 1986, the second time around, she felt she would lack credibility if she made the announcement without Charley at her side, even though she knew that Charley had been summoned by her grandfather and given his orders to marry her.

This essence of credibility had not been easy to arrange. Charley had been reluctant. It was an organizational matter to him. “Look,” he told her, “I already seen the don on this. I’m involved here, I admit, but it’s a family thing between you and your grandfather. You wanna talk to him, talk to him. He wants to talk to me about it, he’ll send for me. I don’t go walking into the don’s house unless he says he wants to see me.”

“Charley! Come on! Do this right! I’m forty-one years old, fahcrissake, and I coulda been married a couple dozen times if it wasn’t for you.”

“Ah, shit!”

“Anyway, what’s the big deal? He’s a sweet little old man.”

Charley shuddered. He took a deep breath and spoke on the heavy exhale. “All right. I’ll do it. But you gotta do the talking.”

They arrived at the don’s house in Charley’s black Chevy van. Calorino Barbaccia was on the door, cradling the sawed-off shotgun in his arms as a matter of ceremony, not necessity, because too much international business and industry as well as the political health of the country through its PACs depended on the don staying well and strong for anyone to want to try to break in and zotz him. Calo showed Charley the respect, and, after Charley had asked for his kids by name, for his wife by name, and for his mother, they were shown upstairs to the don’s space, which had started out as a room, then had extended into two rooms, and now took over the entire top floor.

The don sat reposefully, dreaming his terrible dreams, listening to the record player deliver the prologue to Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele, not because he was so crazy about it but because it had been a favorite of Arturo Toscanini’s, who had chosen it, with the third act of that opera, for his only postwar performance at La Scala, in 1948, when the don and his wife, now long with the angels, had been there on the only trip back to the old country they ever made.

“Ah,” he said as they came in, “the young people.” Maerose knelt beside his chair and kissed his hand. Charley bowed stiffly. “Sit, please,” the don said. “Have a cookie.”

They arranged themselves in small straight-back chairs facing him.

“As it was meant in heaven, Grandfather,” Maerose said tremulously, “Charley and I are going to be married.”

The don sat straighter. Seriousness replaced the arch gaiety. He looked from Maerose to Charley. It was a look of consequence. Charley had hosed out a lot of fear himself in his time, but what he knew about giving fear compared to what the don knew was at the Cabbage Patch doll level.

“You’re gonna have kids?” the don demanded.

Charley nodded automatically. Maerose said, “We want children very much, Grandfather.”

“There is something I want you to do for me, Charley,” the don said, staring at them.

“Whatever you say, Grandfather,” Maerose said shyly.

Charley nodded.

“It is something that will only be between us and the lawyers. Nothing will change. To us, you will always be Charley Partanna.”

“What do you want Charley to do, Grandfather?” Maerose asked anxiously.

“I want him to change his name. The way you changed your name to Mary Price twenty years ago so you could be a society decorator. And Eduardo.”

Maerose was thrilled and renewed by those words. They meant that her grandfather was getting hooked on respectability, just as she had been steadily guiding him toward it, and the don’s hunger for respectability was the trigger that would fire her ambitions and that would allow her to help him forward in shaping and solidifying his goals until, when he died, which had to be sooner rather than later, she would control everything.

Attorneys of a Barker’s Hill affiliate firm filed a petition for the Partanna name change two days later in the courthouse of the town of College, Alaska. The petition was granted.