Prizzi's Glory by Richard Condon
Claire Coolidge was divine in the real sense of the word, he thought, like a goddess. Red-gold hair, green eyes, a beautiful sweet face, and the most gorgeous legs he had ever seen, but she held her feet pointing in different directions like a gin drinker. It was a lucky thing he hadn’t remembered her as being this beautiful because he never would have made it here today—his legs wouldn’t have held him.
They had a large booth, up front, for six people, just the two of them.
“I want to get one thing straight, Mr. Partanna,” Claire said before they could even order a drink. “I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas about me. I was working for Mr. Gibson because I had to eat and I had to somehow get together enough money so that I would be able to wait through the season until something opened for me in ballet. That’s it entirely. And you’d better believe it.”
“You must like that kind of dancing,” Charley said.
“Since I was six years old—” A waiter appeared. “I’ll have a jugo de piña con Bacardi,” she said.
The sentence went through Charley like a knife. The only other woman in his life who had ordered that drink had been his late wife, Corinna. No, that wasn’t her name. Phyllis? Faith? It would come to him, but even if he didn’t have her name on the tip of his tongue—Mardell! Mardell Dupont!—he remembered the drink. “Same for me,” he said.
“Since I was six years old I have dreamed of being a dancer,” Claire said. “When I was sixteen I appeared in my hometown ballet company in Winsted, Connecticut. When I was eighteen I danced for the Dallas Ballet. I am now twenty-two. Since then I have appeared with the Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Boston companies, although I have never danced in opera. And, despairingly for me, I have never danced in New York.”
Charley felt stronger. He knew a little something about opera, but he had not known that they danced there because he had only heard opera on the don’s phonograph records. “Would you like to dance in an opera?”
“My God, Mr. Partanna, if you could get me a place with a New York opera company, I—I just don’t know what I’d do. Thank you,” she said to the waiter.
“Menus?” the waiter said, extending the cards.
“Later!” Charley said, hitting him with a piece of fear that turned his spine to water.
He had one thing on his mind. He had to get a book on ballet, memorize it, then come on strong.
“Call me Charley,” he said to Claire. The waiter had fled.
“Please call me Claire.”
“Did you know that St. Claire was the patron saint of television?”
“I am a Unitarian.”
“Claire—lissena me—I gotta say this. When I saw you, I went. I am in love with you. I am outta my head about you.”
“Does that mean you can place me with a ballet company?”
“Opera or straight?”
“Opera, I think—because I never did opera.”
“Where do you live?”
“I’m at the YWCA right now.”
Charley took a deep breath and a tremendous chance. “Would you like a nice apartment—say near the opera—if I could do that for you?”
She looked at him quite directly, not even blinking her beautiful green eyes. “If you could place me with the opera, I think that would be absolutely wonderful, Charley.”
The crowded, sweaty past thawed and resolved itself into a dew. The present took on a fifth dimension of sensation. The future shone so brightly that, surreptitiously, Charley had to adjust his clothing.
3
Four months later, in May 1986, while Charley was wildly in love with an absolutely lovely black woman named Ellen Beauwater, whom he met while she was selling him some socks over-the-counter at Bloomingdale’s, Maerose, his fiancée, finally found the time to admit that she knew that Charley was seeing another woman.
“Charley, lissena me,” she said after destroying dishes and furniture noisily. “You have another woman, I know it. And I’m not gonna hold still for it, you understand?”
“Mae! Fahcrissake! Whatta you want from me?”
“We’re gonna get married.”
“Married?”
“Nineteen years, Charley. You know who you need to shack up with? A psychiatrist.”
“Married?”
“Yeah. We’re gonna get married and live at my place in New York.”
“Jesus, Mae—”
“I was busy day and night planning a future for us, and you took advantage. Did I sneak off with other men? Did I?”
“How do I know?”
“You’re almost fifty years old, fahcrissake. How long can you keep on sniffing around? Don’t answer! It’s all over, Charley. A nineteen-year engagement is too long. People are gonna start laughing soon. We’re gonna get married, Charley.”
The next day, when he was told on the phone by Amalia Sestero, the don’s daughter/hostess/cook, that he would be having lunch with the don in three hours, he realized two things: (1) it was lucky that all he had had for breakfast was a glass of grapefruit juice and a couple of leftover pagnoccati; and (2) he was absolutely sure that Mae had turned the don loose on him because it was too much of a coincidence, her talking about getting married last night and the don giving him absolutely no notice to get over there today. It was a slow process, but once Charley understood something he hung on to it.
He marveled how Maerose could twist her grandfather, the don, around her finger whenever she wanted to. He had never known anyone else who could do that, nobody, not even Pop, who had been close to the don for over fifty years.
There had been a lot of times when Charley had tried to figure out how come he was always changing women. He knew in his heart that he had always been happy with only two women—Maerose, and whoever else happened to be there when he rolled over in bed. In the beginning, a long time ago, he had thought it kept happening because he was (basically) your typical hot-blooded Latin. He had read a lot in magazines about Latins being passionate and how they needed more action than other people, but he knew a lot of Latins in Brooklyn and there were plenty of them who first figured out what it would cost to take a woman to dinner and maybe a movie, then decided to shoot some pool with the guys instead.
Charley had had money coming in from overall points in the street operation ever since he had been Underboss. He had been Boss for seven years with even more points. He had almost enough money in Swiss banks and here and there to redo Brooklyn along the lines of Paris, France. He could have bought anything for women. Take Claire Coolidge. She was grateful when he offered her a season pass to the Mets that his assemblyman had given him, on the day they parted two months after he had set her up with the opera ballet, and she knew he was giving her to another man, but she wouldn’t take it. She liked him because part of the mystery that surrounded Charley’s responses to women was that somehow he picked women who were going to turn out to like him, and no matter how often it happened, he never got tired of it. But Mae had put her finger on it: he was forty-nine years old, practically a middle-aged man if he lived to be a hundred, and the time had come for him to stop fooling around. It came to him why he was always changing his mind about women, crazy about them for a while, then not able to remember their names or their faces.
Gradually, he realized that he did it because he was exhausted with the monotony of his life. The same problems, the same solutions: stupid guys would get outta line and Vincent, or the don, or Pop would tell him to zotz them. The same thing over and over. He realized that it had probably been a mistake to get a high school education because more and more as time went on he realized he had nobody to talk to except the women—educated women, cultured women, interested women—not the lumps of muscle he had to try to talk to all day long like Al Melvini. Other people in the world couldn’t have this problem, he thought. Maybe I have too much money or something, but I don’t spend it because the IRS could find out, so how could I know? He kept changing women because it was the change away from the monotonous life he lived fro
Charley nodded to Calorino at the front door, kissed Amalia on the cheek, and asked her if she felt good, and they went up the two flights of stairs to the don’s huge room. As they reached the top, Charley could hear the tenor herniating in the role of Avito, a former prince of Altura, in Italo Montemezzi’s The Love of Three Kings. Charley entered the don’s room.
“My boy, my boy!” the don sang. “How good of you to come. We are about to sit down to lunch.” Don Corrado stood up abruptly and moved with eagerness to the dining table. He gestured to Charley to take a place at his right hand.
Amalia came in with steaming bowls of zuppa d’accia, a Calabrese specialty, which was a celery broth holding large pieces of sausage with cheese and hard-boiled egg that she served with grated cheese and pieces of toast. The don attacked the soup without a word. Charley, because of past experience, ate as sparingly as he could. The don asked for a second bowl of soup; Charley begged off. Next they attacked mountains of risotto alla Siciliana. Then, with great gusto, the don brought his gargantuan appetite to an enormous platter of beet salad, turned bright, blood red by its pigment, betacyanin, which, because the slight, little man had inherited two recessive genes, passed out through his urine the same color as he had swallowed it, truly symbolizing his meaning as a capo di mafia.
Amalia tottered in, trying bravely to support a testa di puorco, a pig’s head, which had been boiled with celery, carrots, onions, and herbs and set in a jelly made from the stock, flavored with Marsala and some vinegar. Because it was a cold dish it signified to the don that he was having a light lunch. Charley had one helping. The don returned for a third helping, drinking Albanello di Siracusa, a dry white wine that had a dry and appetizing finish and eighteen degrees of alcohol. The light lunch was topped with a cassata, alternating layers of sponge cake and cream made with ricotta cheese flavored with chocolate and candied fruits, topped with a frosting perfumed with almonds and lemon.
Charley nearly went under. The drowsiness dropped heavy weights into his head and upon his eyelids. His head lolled. His eyes rolled and closed, but he fought to keep awake. He counted on the jolt of a strong cigar to counteract the coma that always happened after he had lunched with the don.
At Don Corrado’s bidding, he made it to the easy chair that was placed beside, and three-quarters facing, the don’s chair.
“Please,” the don said, “you must have a cigar and a grappa.”
Charley lit a Mexican cigar and poured himself a jelly glass of grappa but did not drink it.
“I want to tell you I am pleased that the tests of the orgy opportunities have gone so well,” the don said in the dialect of Agrigento.
“It fills a need,” Charley said.
“In September I want to proceed with the nationalizing. Will you have your people write the operating manuals?”
“Yes, padrino.”
“By the end of the year the salesmen must be ready to take it into their territories.”
“Yes, padrino. And, it is necessary to say this, because Girolama Picuzza has done such a really great job on the test operation, I recommend that we give him three-quarters of a point in the national and let him run it.”
“That is perfectly all right with me.”
There was a considerable pause. Charley felt a need to sip the grappa.
“Charley, you are like a son to me. No—I want to change that—you are more than a son, you are part of the Prizzi meaning which Vincent, God rest his soul, never achieved.”
“Thank you, padrino.”
“You are nearly fifty years old, and for nineteen years I have seen you with my granddaughter and I have wished, with all my heart, that one day soon you would come to this old man who has so few days left upon this earth which God, in his kindness, created for us and ask me for my granddaughter’s hand in marriage.” He stared at Charley with his most implacable stare, hastening Charley to answer lest the ancient, tiny man reach out and strike him down.
“It is settled, padrino. I went to Maerose last night and I pleaded with her to marry me. I am deeply moved to be able to tell you that she has accepted.”
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.”
“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.
5
In July 1987, eleven months after Maerose’s wedding, her Aunt Amalia, the don’s daughter, led the way up the stairs. As they reached the door they could hear the overture from Rossini’s William Tell, with its beautiful passage for violoncellos, through the heavy door. Amalia knocked lightly and they heard Don Corrado’s voice calling out faintly for them to enter. As she went into the huge room, Maerose, once more, was inundated by its decoration. There was hardly a space on any of the three walls that was not covered with heavy gold picture frames in many sizes, which contained such a variety of painted subjects as had not been seen, except in Sicily, where they had multiplied on the walls of aristocrats in the decades before Garibaldi came and the Honored Society had entered its modern phase.