would have called me at home before this. Obviously he doesn't want to resume our
relationship."
Mrs. Corleone's voice came briskly over the phone. "You a very nice girl, you gotta
nice legs, but you no gotta much brains." She chuckled. "You come out to see me, not
Mikey. I wanta talk to you. You come right now. An' no pay the taxi. I wait for you." The
phone clicked. Mrs. Corleone had hung up.
Kay could have called back and said she wasn't coming but she knew she had to see
Michael, to talk to him, even if it was just polite talk. If he was home now, openly, that
meant he was no longer in trouble, he could live normally. She jumped off the bed and
started to get ready to see him. She took a great deal of care with her makeup and
dress. When she was ready to leave she stared at her reflection in the mirror. Was she
better-looking than when Michael had disappeared? Or would he find her unattractively
older? Her figure had become more womanly, her hips rounder, her breasts fuller.
Italians liked that supposedly, though Michael had always said he loved her being so
thin. It didn't matter really, Michael obviously didn't want anything to do with her
anymore, otherwise he most certainly would have called in the six months he had been
home.
The taxi she hailed refused to take her to Long Beach until she gave him a pretty
smile and told him she would pay double the meter. It was nearly an hour's ride and the
mall in Long Beach had changed since she last saw it. There were iron fences around it
and an iron gate barred the mall entrance. A man wearing slacks and a white jacket
over a red shirt opened the gate, poked his head into the cab to read the meter and
gave the cab driver some bills. Then when Kay saw the driver was not protesting and
was happy with the money paid, she got out and walked across the mall to the central
house.
Mrs. Corleone herself opened the door and greeted Kay with a warm embrace that
surprised her. Then she surveyed Kay with an appraising eye. "You a beautiful girl," she
said flatly. "I have stupid sons." She pulled Kay inside the door and led her to the
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kitchen, where a platter of food was already set out and a pot of coffee perked on the
stove. "Michael comes home pretty soon," she said. "You surprise him."
They sat down together and the old woman forced Kay to eat, meanwhile asking
questions with great curiosity. She was delighted that Kay was a schoolteacher and that
she had come to New York to visit old girl friends and that Kay was only twenty-four
years old. She kept nodding her head as if all the facts accorded with some private
specifications in her mind. Kay was so nervous that she just answered the questions,
never saying anything else.
She saw him first through the kitchen window. A car pulled up in front of the house
and the two other men got out. Then Michael. He straightened up to talk with one of the
other men. His profile, the left one, was exposed to her view. It was cracked, indented,
like the plastic face of a doll that a child has wantonly kicked. In a curious way it did not
mar his handsomeness in her eyes but moved her to tears. She saw him put a snow-
white handkerchief to his mouth and nose and hold it there for a moment while he
turned away to come into the house.
She heard the door open and his footsteps in the hall turning into the kitchen and then
he was in the open space, seeing her and his mother. He seemed impassive, and then
he smiled ever so slightly, the broken half of his face halting the widening of his mouth.
And Kay, who had meant just to say "Hello, how are you," in the coolest possible way,
slipped out of her seat to run into his arms, bury her face against his shoulder. He
kissed her wet cheek and held her until she finished weeping and then he walked her
out to his car, waved his bodyguard away and drove off with her beside him, she
repairing her makeup by simply wiping what was left of it away with her handkerchief.
"I never meant to do that," Kay said. "It's just that nobody told me how badly they hurt
you."
Michael laughed and touched the broken side of his face. "You mean this? That's
nothing. Just gives me sinus trouble. Now that I'm home I'll probably get it fixed, I
couldn't write you or anything," Michael said. "You have to understand that before
anything else."
"OK," she said.
"I've got a place in the city," Michael said. "Is it all right if we go there or should it be
dinner and drinks at a restaurant?"
"I'm not hungry," Kay said.
They drove toward New York in silence for a while. "Did you get your degree?" Michael
asked.
"Yes," Kay said. "I'm teaching grade school in my hometown now. Did they find the
man who really killed the policeman, is that why you were able to come home?"
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For a moment Michael didn't answer. "Yes, they did," he said. "It was in all the New
York papers. Didn't you read about it?"
Kay laughed with the relief of him denying he was a murderer. "We only get The New
York Times up in our town," she said. "I guess it was buried back in page eighty-nine. If
I'd read about it I'd have called your mother sooner." She paused and then said, "It's
funny, the way your mother used to talk, I almost believed you had done it. And just
before you came, while we were drinking coffee, she told me about that crazy man who
confessed."
Michael said, "Maybe my mother did believe it at first."
"Your own mother?" Kay asked.
Michael grinned. "Mothers are like cops. They always believe the worst."
Michael parked the car in a garage on Mulberry Street where the owner seemed to
know him. He took Kay around the corner to what looked like a fairly decrepit
brownstone house which fitted into the rundown neighborhood. Michael had a key to the
front door and when they went inside Kay saw that it was as expensively and
comfortably furnished as a millionaire's town house. Michael led her to the upstairs
apartment which consisted of an enormous living room, a huge kitchen and door that
led to the bedroom. In one corner of the living room was a bar and Michael mixed them
both a drink. They sat on a sofa together and Michael said quietly, "We might as well go
into the bedroom." Kay took a long pull from her drink and smiled at him. "Yes," she said.
For Kay the lovemaking was almost like it had been before except that Michael was
rougher, more direct, not as tender as he had been. As if he were on guard against her.
But she didn't want to complain. It would wear off. In a funny way, men were more
sensitive in a situation like this, she thought. She had found making love to Michael after
a two-year absence the most natural thing in the world. It was as if he had never been
away.
"You could have written me, you could have trusted me," she said, nestling against his
body. "I would have practiced the New England omerta. Yankees are pretty
closemouthed too, you know."
Michael laughed softly in the darkness. "I never figured you to be waiting," he said. "I
never figured you to wait after what happened."
Kay said quickly, "I never believed you killed those two men. Except maybe when
your mother seemed to think so. But I never believed it in my heart. I know you too
well,"
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She could hear Michael give a sigh. "It doesn't matter whether I did or not," he said.
"You have to understand that."
Kay was a little stunned by the coldness in his voice. She said, "So just tell me now,
did you or didn't you?"
Michael sat up on his pillow and in the darkness a light flared as he got a cigarette
going. "If I asked you to marry me, would I have to answer that question first before
you'd give me an answer to mine?"
Kay said, "I don't care, I love you, I don't care. If you loved me you wouldn't be afraid
to tell me the truth. You wouldn't be afraid I might tell the police. That's it, isn't it? You're
really a gangster then, isn't that so? But I really don't care. What I care about is that you
obviously don't love me. You didn't even call me up when you got back home."
Michael was puffing on his cigarette and some burning
ashes fell on Kay's bare back. She flinched a little and said jokingly, "Stop torturing me,
I won't talk."
Michael didn't laugh. His voice sounded absentminded. "You know, when I came
home I wasn't that glad when I saw my family, my father, my mother, my sister Connie,
and Tom. It was nice but I didn't really give a damn. Then I came home tonight and saw
you in the kitchen and I was glad. Is that what you mean by love?"
"That's close enough for me," Kay said.
They made love again for a while. Michael was more tender this time. And then he
went out to get them both a drink. When he came back he sat on an armchair facing the
bed. "Let's get serious," he said. "How do you feel about marrying me?" Kay smiled at
him and motioned him into the bed. Michael smiled back at her. "Be serious," he said. "I
can't tell you about anything that happened. I'm working for my father now. I'm being
trained to take over the family olive oil business. But you know my family has enemies,
my father has enemies. You might be a very young widow, there's a chance, not much
of one, but it could happen. And I won't be telling you what happened at the office every