19

They sat comfortably in the stube of Harry Garrone’s villa overlooking Zurich and its lake in Switzerland, reading the media reportage of Charley’s funeral in New York.

“This is sensational coverage!” Harry Garrone said. “What a turnout!”

“Where does he get that ‘feared and fearful’ crap?” Charley asked, staring at the newspaper.

“Seventeen PR people worked nine hundred and sixty-two man-hours to set it up and to turn out the crowd,” Maerose said. “The woman having the kid in the phone booth was a good touch. My people tell me that something happened with the normal circuits to the Vatican so they had to bring the blessing in by satellite.”

“That’s good,” Harry Garrone said. “Like a verce from the sky.”

Harry was Maerose’s second cousin, whom Charley had known all his life, and the family’s prime money-mover. “Jesus, you sure know how to make a cuddiruni pizza, Mae,” Harry said. “I love Swiss food, but, you know, I miss the old-fashioned stuff.”

“Charley made it,” Maerose said.

“He can cook?”

“Wait’ll you taste his sfasciatelle and his nipitiddata.”

“Come on, fahcrissake!” Charley said. “Tell me what’s gonna be.”

“Tomorrow morning we drive to Lucerne and you go inna clinic there,” Harry told him. “I got the very best face man inna world, Dr. Abe Weiler, an artist.”

“Face man?” Charley said.

“A surgeon, Charley,” Maerose said. “He does nose jobs.”

“What’s he gonna do on me?”

“He’s gonna sort of resculpt your face.”

“How long is it gonna take?”

“He does it in easy stages, Charley,” Harry said. “The whole thing will run about a month, six weeks.”

“That long?”

“Don’t worry. He’s the best.”

“Will he handle my prints?”

“That’s later. After the face. And after the dentist. We are flying in a specialist for prints from Hong Kong.”

“How long?”

Mae shrugged. “Another eight, ten days. But you’ll be moving around, don’t worry. In the whole time you’ll be maybe three days onna bed.”

“Moving around where?”

“Harry got us a villa on the Burgenstock, which don’t open for the season till the end of May,” Mary Barton said. “You never saw such a beautiful place, nine hundred feet up on a private Alp looking down on that fabulous lake.”

“Jesus, Mae—I dunno—I hate the idea of going under the knife.”

“And while you still have the bandages on, the tailors will come over from London—I already picked the materials—and measure you up for thirty-one suits, a coupla tuxes, and a set of tails.”

“Thirty-one?”

“One for every day of the month, silly. You’ll never have to buy another suit again.”

“Sports jackets?”

“Seven.”

“Then what?”

“When the suits are ready—and the shirts and shoes and socks and hats—”

“Hats?”

“Four hats, three caps, and a deerstalker—we’ll go to England to work out with the speech teacher.”

“I gotta make a speech?”

“She’s gonna teach you how to talk like Eduardo. Starting after the operations, while we’re still at the Burgenstock, we don’t talk Brooklyn any more. We talk English to each other so you can learn how. Capeesh?”

“Yeah.”

“Then after you have the speech part down pat, we work in London with a guy who used to be CIA, very Sicilian, a doctor, on the biofeedback so you can learn where Charles Macy Barton came from, who he is, and et cetera.”

“Jesus.”

“It sounds like a lot when I just say it, but, believe me, this time next year you’ll forget it ever happened.”

“Yeah?”

“Not that it’s gonna be easy, Charley, but we got terrific teachers. The face man, Weiler, is like the Gutzon Borglum of his business.”

“What’s that?”

“An artist. Like a Michelangelo. The dentist has done the teeth of more movie stars—international stars—than any other living dentist. He’ll give you teeth that could get you on television. They are terrific, but the really tremendous teacher is the one who is gonna teach you how to talk. I can’t wait.”

“Yeah?”

Maerose stood in awe as the hospital nurse unwound the last bandage from Charley’s head. She gasped, “Jesus, Charley, you are gorgeous. I’d follow you anywhere.”

“Gimme a mirror.”

Dr. Weiler, a shortish, gray-to-white-haired man with a Perlmutter moustache, handed him a large rectangular mirror. Charley gazed into it. Mae watched Charley’s eyes. He did not speak for a long time but studied the face in the mirror with the concentration a good witness puts into a set of police mugshots. His formerly somewhat simian nose had been narrowed and lengthened. He touched it gently.

“I never saw such a nose,” Mae said breathily. “I could fall in love with that nose alone.”

His mouth was wider with narrower lips, and the teeth that could be seen behind them were as beautiful as any Hollywood agent’s, the dentist’s criterion. Distinguished work-and-worry bags had been placed under each eye, giving him the striking appearance of a giant raccoon. His brow had been heightened, and (he had really needed eyeglasses for over eight years, since he had been forty-five) he wore important, high-fashion, large frame, black, thin-shell eyeglasses. His hair, formerly rounded on his forehead in the fashion affected by arrested juvenile personalities, was now parted on the left and combed straight back. It was no longer straight, but undulated in soft, black, shiny waves. It was rather fluffy, at least rumpled looking, in the Wendell L. Willkie manner, and it had a nice body to it.

“The hair is nice,” Charley said.

“The hair?” Dr. Weiler said.

“You are terrific with that long face, Charley. I can’t tell you what the new long face does for you.”

“That’s me?” he said at last, his voice ringing with awe, his surgically widened eyes staring at what he knew surely could not be his likeness in the mirror.

“I humbly believe it is one of the best jobs I have ever done,” Dr. Weiler said, “but I don’t take all the credit. You’ve got a beautiful integument there.”

As if altered internally, Charley rose in his chair with the majestic importance of a significant man. He took Dr. Weiler’s hand and shook it warmly, doing something he had never done before, holding the handshake with both hands. The meaning of the new face had blazed a path within him, deep into his soul, taking him straight to where he had always wanted to go but had never had the chance because of the handicap of his former face. His new face gave him a Lincolnesque sense of destiny. He had become, truly, Charles Macy Barton, leader of men. No one would ever figure him for a wiseguy again.

Standing, Charley picked up the mirror and stared into it. “I think everything’s going to be aaallll right,” he said. The force of American mythology had turned him. He felt legit. He knew in his heart that he deserved to walk among the mighty and control the prices to be charged for everything to tens of millions of his countrymen.

Maerose rejoiced in her heart. The first and most vital phase of the transformation, the place where Maerose feared they might find trauma that could have the effect of destroying all of the plans she had been setting down since she was twelve years old, had been conquered. Charley Partanna had died before his own eyes. He was Charles Macy Barton, American tycoon, at last. Sobbing with the joy of her so-precisely-realized ambitions, she rushed into her husband’s arms. She would be the first woman don the Honored Society had ever known. She was able to convince herself that the reason for her utter happiness was only a matter of how Charley’s new façade would affect the dimensions of her power. She tried to stifle the more natural response—her reaction as a woman. She tried to tell herself that the rather average-looking man she had acquired to be used and whom she could take for granted if she chose had been repackaged into something that would be even more useful in the new environment in which she would require him to perform.

But her heart had almost stopped as the surgical nurse had unwrapped the bandages and displayed a face that contained separate memory responses—snapshots from her childhood, her adolescence, and her fantasies, composite paragons whose features her imagination had formed, now all combined in one face, Charley’s face, responses that warmed her—thrilled her—the peaceful, resolute, meaningful face of a man who had understood his life as it had happened to him, forming the character of a grand seigneur, creating the compassion of noblesse oblige, the face of a man who would reach out in empathy to dedicate what he felt, and would feel, to her well-being and fulfillment.

She hadn’t been in love with Charley for many years, not since the few months after he had come back from the West Coast with the news that his wife had died. They had had a perfect three months and eleven days until Charley had fallen head over heels in love with the first of almost countless women, an organizer for the Delicatessen Workers Local 159 named Tootsie Lodz. Mae would never forget her even if Charley had, long ago. She had spent the next few years seeing him in and out of dozens of useless romances until all the meaning had gone out of what she felt for him.

Now that man was gone from her life forever. A new, entirely different man had emerged from under the bandages. She looked on that magnificent head that seemed to have been carved out of rose quartz by Praxiteles, a head like Apollo Sauroctonus, a head that belonged in a niche in the Vatican beside other works of art, and she knew that she had found the husband and partner for the rest of her life: Charles Macy Barton. She was a woman in love who was also locking up the powerlines that led to establishing her as the first woman capa di tutti capi in the history of the world.

Charley was astonished as he looked into the mirror that Weiler held up to him. He felt as if he had been stashed in the perfect hideout. He had beaten the system. He was in a place where no one could possibly find him, wearing a cloak of respectability so complete that, at last, he had done something of which Maerose could approve. It had worked just as she had said it would work. He was ready for whatever the next steps to absolute respectability would be.

But the calm majesty of his new face also made him begin to worry about his place in natural time. Before he left New York, he had read a magazine article on quarks and, although it had been interesting, it hadn’t really bothered him until now—the moment of his rebirth as a totally different man. The life span of a quark, he had read in the magazine, an energy flash within an atom, was so short that it had taken science a couple of thousand years just to find one, even after they knew the quarks had to be there. What made Charley brood, at the moment he looked at his new face, was that a quark’s life span was so short, in terms of the way people measured time, that to a human’s idea of time, it was what the physical measurements of an atom were to the universe.

He had been able to get a hold on the size of an atom when the magazine had said that the structure of wood atoms in a pipe bowl was almost identical with the structure of the planetary system. Protons revolved around a nucleus the way the planets revolved around the sun. What bothered him was that this universe he and Mae were standing in could be an atom in the structure of a briar pipe somebody was smoking someplace outside the envelope. If that was how it had been set up, he thought anxiously, if the time span of a quark could be parallel, within a hugely expanded time period of some dude who was smoking a pipe that contained this universe, then his survival time would be relatively equal to the life span of a quark. Worse still, the whole thing had to work in reverse. A quark could be a universe to some kind of a thing that was a planet in a system that was a quark to our universe. It was very depressing. It all made him feel that he didn’t have a lot of time left if one man’s eternity was just another man’s quark.

“Jesus, let’s go out to dinner, Mae,” he said.

They had dinner in Lucerne and talked about the future. “The clothes are gonna be so right,” Mae told him, “that you could make Prince Charles look lower class. So you don’t have to worry about the clothes. Or the teeth, or the face, or the prints.”

“But you are saying there is something I am gonna have to worry about?”

“Not worry. There is nothing to worry. But you are gonna have to work, Charley.”

“On what?”

“On how you talk. People know, when they hear, where other people come from. They can tell if they are slobs or rich people, if you know what I mean. We are gonna teach you how you’ll talk like super-rich, like tremendously high-level people. Believe me, Charley, the way you talk is more important than the clothes or even the face. It is even more important than the background, which will be an easy fill-in for you when we get to London. Six weeks and you’ll have the background down pat.”

Fifty-eight days later they were settled in a pretty, white house with a breathtaking view of a quiet English valley, a house called St. Bartholomew’s in Semley, near Shaftesbury, England, which to Charley had an oddly familiar ring, on the Wiltshire-Dorset frontier, to work with Lady Verena Smollett, a phoneticist and grammarian, who lived nearby in Mere. Maerose had reasoned correctly that a female teacher would gain a better response from Charley, but the first meetings were almost a disaster. Charley went bananas over Lady Verena, agonized with guilt and frustration because his wife was always in the room whenever he and Lady Verena worked, but he was drawn to her as he felt he had never been drawn to a woman before. Maerose read the symptoms: the light sweats, the lower lip clenched between his teeth, the rocking motion with hands held under his arms crossed on his chest, the inability to sit still combined with the inability to stand because of the bulges in his clothing.

She discussed the problem with Lady Verena.

“I wonder if you’ve noticed anything odd about my husband,” Mae asked casually one evening after a long session that had so exhausted Charley that he had stumbled off to bed.

“Yes, actually. I get the distinct impression that he has fallen in love with me.”

“Precisely.”

“He must be an awfully susceptible chap. Considering his age. I mean to say, he’s not a callow youth.”

“It’s his nature,” Mae said reasonably. “Are you married, Lady Verena?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’ve been wondering if it would be asking too much if we were to invite your husband to dinner here. Or lunch if he prefers.”

“Well—”

“It is also my husband’s nature to be unable to continue any infatuation with a married woman. Please don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t.”

Lord Smollett came to lunch. He was a large uncommunicative Ulsterman who was impatient to leave on a business trip. He was unable to understand anything Charley said because all of his vowel sounds and diphthongs were suspended between Brooklyn and Oxford. Nonetheless, Charley absorbed the knowledge that the man was Lady Verena’s lawful, wedded husband, which ended his aching love for the man’s wife as if she had been exposed as a member of the federal prosecuting attorney’s staff. Charley’s creed, which was that happily married women were inviolate, saved him. After that, the three of them—Maerose, Lady Verena, and Charley—worked uneventfully on Charley’s speech formation for 201 days, ten hours a day.

At first he unconsciously resisted the new sounds they were trying to insert into his larynx, but a breakthrough came in four days when Maerose thought to have a wall-sized mirror installed opposite Charley’s chair in the room. He was unable to fit Brooklyn sounds with his new face and the swanning naval officer posture that had been drilled into him. All at once, he came to accept the combination of sounds that the phoneticist was forging for him: a combination of a Boston accent with Locust Valley lockjaw, blended with the vitally necessary overtones of the speech of William F. Buckley, Jr., which had carried Edward S. Price so far.

Working glottal stops and vowel changes with clenched teeth and outthrust jaw while mastering all the historical, regional, and character phrase variations; then making the unstressed syllables and dropped syllables, and mastering the consonant changes and a compendium of typical words and phrases, mainly from the New England area, using Harvard as its capital; using correct exclamations such as “Blow my shirt,” “What in tunket,” and “Godfrey!” as if they were his ingrained second-nature responses to stress—it was all extremely difficult for Charley as it would be to any foreigner. But the two women beat on his concentration. They spent their days in that small house yelling at Charley despairing. Gradually, he mastered the new speech forms. There would be flashes when newcomers might have thought that they were listening to one of the new aristocrats that the continually burgeoning American gross national product had produced; then he would have severe lapses into the gullah of Italian-American Brooklyn and the indignant women would beat on him again.

There was one terrible result inflicted by the new face and the new speech: Charley discovered that he had lost the gift of putting the fear into people with a glance. “It’s gone, Mae. It’s just gone,” he said.

“How can it be gone? You need it, Charley. That is what is going to make the whole Barker’s Hill thing work.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Do it, let me see.”

He made a pathetic attempt to throw the fear out at her, but it was almost a comical failure. It came across his face like an upperclassman’s sneer at an elementary school but, in actual factual fact, wasn’t that effective.

“Charley, lissena me. When you first knew you could do it with a look, did it just come to you or was it an acquired characteristic?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean did you have to practice it!”

“I saw the don give the fear and—” He seemed reluctant to continue.

“Yes—what?”

“I went home and every afternoon I practiced in front of the mirror until I got it. Then I practiced more until I perfected it. Then after a coupla years I could scare anybody.”

“That’s it, then! That must be it! Dr. Weiler shifted your face muscles. The levator labii superioris muscles and the aguli oris and the zygomatucus major, those great pulleys of the face, have been modified! That just means you’ll have to work harder with the superficial surface of the subcutaneous adipose tissue around the malar bone and the masseter and Buccinator muscles. Weiler has lightened the weight of your eyelids. You’ve got to start again—at the beginning. You’ve got to retrain your entire face.”

“How?”

“You’ll practice! In front of a mirror! I’ll shift the speech lessons to only afternoons and nights, and you’ll practice the look all morning every morning.”

In seven weeks Charley had the look back. They went out to dinner, and he tried it out on a waiter. The waiter fainted. Lady Verena couldn’t understand what had made the waiter faint. Coaxed to demonstrate, Charley hosed fear over her. She fainted.

On August 9, 1991, the vocal transformation was complete; the Savile Row clothing and new luggage were delivered; and an enormous Rolls-Royce, a Design PV22 touring limousine built on a Phantom V chassis whose extra seventeen inches of wheelbase made possible the car’s steeply raked back, sweeping lines, and enlarged luggage space, arrived at St. Bart’s to take them to London, although the Barton luggage followed in another vehicle.

At the Berkeley Hotel in London, where they would stay for a few days until the staff got the Mount Street flat stocked with food and ready for them, they occupied a four-room apartment on the mews side. Over a bottle of room service Krug ’59, Maerose told Charley that she was pregnant.