9

Charley and Maerose Partanna had had a long and stormy courtship of nineteen years, but no matter what had happened to them, and plenty had happened, no matter how long the separations, they always found their way back together again. Charley was aware of her, as Vincent’s daughter, by the time she was five years old and he was in his teens. They had come together formally at a birthday party for Mae’s sister, Teresa, at the old Palermo Gardens, in 1967. They had had a fairly involved affair then, but, due to circumstances which were (probably) unfair, Maerose had been exiled from Brooklyn by her father for nearly ten years, because she got drunk at the party for her engagement to Charley and ran off with some guy to Mexico. She was barred until her father happened to get zotzed. It was toward the end of the exile that she and Charley had seen each other again, but, what with one thing and another—like Charley getting married to a California woman, then the woman dying tragically on him—they didn’t get a chance to spend much time together. But, throughout the exile, they had seen each other at family weddings, christenings, and funerals.

Really finding each other had been a slow, even excruciating, process. Charley had tended to “lose himself” with a flock of other women, undoubtedly trying to forget the wife whom death had torn out of his arms, meeting and seeming to become infatuated with either eight or ten, or thirty or forty, young women in such a succession that their names and faces had become a blur, even to him. Through all of this, perhaps from the day she met him, Maerose seemed to have been in love with her own sense of who and what Charley was. By force of will, by a stamina that far exceeded his stamina, and keeping in mind whatever it was she needed to keep in mind about what Charley Partanna could provide for her special needs, Maerose gradually surrounded him, as the Sioux had surrounded General Custer at Little Big Horn. When they finally married, to the utter satisfaction of Don Corrado, Maerose was forty-one years old, and perhaps somewhat rigid in the pelvis to deliver children, and Charley was forty-nine, perhaps somewhat rigid in the head for adjustment to marriage, but despite the flight of their youth and the drawbacks of long familiarity, it was a marriage that had been made in heaven.

Maerose was a woman who had matured with style. At twenty-two she had resembled a Tuareg queen in the deep Sahara at the time of the Crusades, surrounded by an ardency of knights who had wandered from their crusade to find her, deep in the desert, to seek her out and join her mystery. Now, at forty-three, after ten years of exile in Manhattan, after twenty-one years of flinging herself at the rock of Charley Partanna, and a certain amount of secret champagne, she resembled rather a hunting falcon dressed by Balenciaga, causing that great man to weep with gratification wherever he was, as he looked down and wondered where he had taken the right turning. She was elegantly predatory. She was singleminded, and she hunted only for the food for her power.

Maerose had a magnificent nose, passionate, yet merciless; eyes so glorious in their brightness and liquidity, in the fish-shaped, caramelesque calm of their implacable stare that surely they had been retouched, repolished, and replaced before the final gift of life had been bestowed upon her. She wore clothes as a work of art by Caravaggio wears paint. Her fingers were of such length and her hands of such slenderness and lightness of touch that Charley told her, adoringly, that she could have been one of the great cannons of all time and he meant it from the heart.

With all this external perfection, Maerose Partanna had an inner life that combined the objectivity of Albert Einstein with the brisk efficiency of Attila the Hun. Most of the time, which is to say between the ages of eighteen months and the present, she was less than straightforward because not only did she admire her grandfather, Don Corrado Prizzi, but indirection, subtlety, and labyrinthian deviousness were to her as if they were parts of the oath of the Girl Scouts of Sicily, and, deep within her spirit, Mae wanted to prove with her life that she was more Sicilian than her grandfather had ever been.

People who live with each other are seen by outsiders to be coping with each other’s immutable traits when, all the time, they are merely intent upon developing their own unchangeable foibles. Any outsider would have thought that the union of Maerose Prizzi and Charley Partanna would fall short of any possibility of success, but, because they were so different, it was a perfect marriage: each supplied what the other lacked.

Maerose was quick and informed. Charley was slow-thinking and had a suspicion of information because, in the practice of his business, people had seldom proved to operate the way the instructions on their package said they would. Charley was chary of commitment. Maerose was its agent. They had approached their marriage with considerable circumspection, perhaps needing to insure themselves that their judgment was correct, but more likely needing to get any number of other things done before they settled down to domestic life. The fact that they had overdone this caution was characteristic of both of them because Maerose found it almost impossible to make any decision that did not immediately advance her in terms of power, and Charley was just as indecisive unless something happened, anything at all, that could release him from the chores of his daily existence into one or another (and yet another) steamy Eden of romance. Charley was a ruthless romantic. Maerose was a devout realist. Maerose was brutal in conception, Charley in execution, and he had done a lot of those.

When they were both sure that, by marrying each other, they would get what they had to have, they entered into holy matrimony at a high Anglican Church of England service, in Manhattan—a happenstance that the groom hoped his parish priest, Father Passanante, never found out about, entirely because his don had ordered it—in which the bride had exulted because of the presence of her uncle, Edward S. Price, at his father’s bidding, giving the bride away, with the preeminent Washington lawyer, S. L. Penrose, standing as best man, and, somehow by some miracle, the lady general of the Salvation Army at Mae’s side as her maid of honor, all resulting in the formation of the true Prizzi dynasty, an all-reaching reality to house and legitimatize the Prizzi billions. At the benign intonation of an Episcopal dominie, she had been transformed from Mary S. Price to Mrs. Charles Macy Barton. The announcement on the New York Times society page stated that the groom, chief executive officer of Lavery, Mendelson, the great Wall Street investment banking house, was a descendant of Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, and Captain Richard H. Macy, founder of the great department store that bore his name. Lavery, Mendelson was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barker’s Hill Enterprises, which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Corrado Prizzi.