sake of Jesus Christ and your poor wife. And so your nose will stop running like a
drunken Irish."
The Don, at the head of the table, watching everything, said to Kay, "Does it bother
you?"
Kay shook her head. The Don said to his wife. "He's out of your hands, it's no concern
of yours." The old woman immediately held her peace. Not that she feared her husband
but because it would have been disrespectful to dispute him in such a matter before the
others.
But Connie, the Don's favorite, came in from the kitchen, where she was cooking the
Sunday dinner, her face flushed from the stove, and said, "I think he should get his face
fixed. He was the most handsome one in the family before he got hurt. Come on, Mike,
say you'll do it."
Michael looked at her in an absentminded fashion. It seemed as if he really and truly
had not heard anything said. He didn't answer.
Connie came to stand beside her father. "Make him do it," she said to the Don. Her
two hands rested affectionately on his shoulders and she rubbed his neck. She was the
only one who was ever so familiar with the Don. Her affection for her father was
touching. It was trusting, like a little girl's. The Don patted one of her hands and said,
"We're all starving here. Put the spaghetti on the table and then chatter."
Connie turned to her husband and said, "Carlo, you tell Mike to get his face fixed.
Maybe he'll listen to you." Her voice implied that Michael and Carlo Rizzi had some
friendly relationship over and above anyone else's.
Carlo, handsomely sunburned, blond hair neatly cut and combed, sipped at his glass
of homemade wine and said, "Nobody can tell Mike what to do." Carlo had become a
different man since moving into the mall. He knew his place in the Family and kept to it.
There was something that Kay didn't understand in all this, something that didn't quite
meet the eye. As a woman she could see that Connie was deliberately charming her
father, though it was beautifully done and even sincere. Yet it was not spontaneous.
Carlo's reply had been a manly knuckling of his forehead. Michael had absolutely
ignored everything.
Kay didn't care about her husband's disfigurement but she worried about his sinus
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trouble which sprang from it. Surgery repair of the face would cure the sinus also. For
that reason she wanted Michael to enter the hospital and get the necessary work done.
But she understood that in a curious way he desired his disfigurement. She was sure
that the Don understood this too.
But after Kay gave birth to her first child, she was surprised by Michael asking her,
"Do you want me to get my face fixed?"
Kay nodded. "You know how kids are, your son will feel bad about your face when he
gets old enough to understand it's not normal. I just don't want our child to see it. I don't
mind at all, honestly, Michael."
"OK." He smiled at her. "I'll do it."
He waited until she was home from the hospital and then made all the necessary
arrangements. The operation was successful. The cheek indentation was now just
barely noticeable.
Everybody in the Family was delighted, but Connie more so than anyone. She visited
Michael every day in the hospital, dragging Carlo along. When Michael came home, she
gave him a big hug and a kiss and looked at him admiringly and said, "Now you're my
handsome brother again."
Only the Don was unimpressed, shrugging his shoulders
and remarking, "What's the difference?"
But Kay was grateful. She knew that Michael had done it against all his own
inclinations. Had done it because she had asked him to, and that she was the only
person in the world who could make him act against his own nature.
On the afternoon of Michael's return from Vegas, Rocco Lampone drove the limousine
to the mall to pick up Kay so that she could meet her husband at the airport. She always
met her husband when he arrived from out of town, mostly because she felt lonely
without him, living as she did in the fortified mall.
She saw him come off the plane with Tom Hagen and the new man he had working
for him, Albert Neri. Kay didn't care much for Neri, he reminded her of Luca Brasi in his
quiet ferociousness. She saw Neri drop behind Michael and off to the side, saw his
quick penetrating glance as his eyes swept over everybody nearby. It was Neri who first
spotted Kay and touched Michael's shoulder to make him look in the proper direction.
Kay ran into her husband's arms and he quickly kissed her and let her go. He and
Tom Hagen and Kay got into the limousine and Albert Neri vanished. Kay did not notice
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that Neri had gotten into another car with two other men and that this car rode behind
the limousine until it reached Long Beach.
Kay never asked Michael how his business had gone. Even such polite questions
were understood to be awkward, not that he wouldn't give her an equally polite answer,
but it would remind them both of the forbidden territory their marriage could never
include. Kay didn't mind anymore. But when Michael told her he would have to spend
the evening with his father to tell him about the Vegas trip, she couldn't help making a
little frown of disappointment.
"I'm sorry," Michael said. "Tomorrow night we'll go into New York and see a show and
have dinner, OK?" He patted her stomach, she was almost seven months pregnant.
"After the kid comes you'll be tied down again. Hell, you're more Italian than Yankee.
Two kids in two years."
Kay said tartly, "And you're more Yankee than Italian. Your first evening home and
you spend it on business." But she smiled at him when she said it. "You won't be home
late?"
"Before midnight," Michael said. "Don't wait up for me if you feel tired."
"I'll wait up," Kay said.
At the meeting that night, in the corner room library of Don Corleone's house, were
the Don himself, Michael, Tom Hagen, Carlo Rizzi, and the two caporegimes, Clemenza
and Tessio.
The atmosphere of the meeting was by no means so congenial as in former days.
Ever since Don Corleone had announced his semiretirement and Michael's take-over of
the Family business, there had been some strain. Succession in control of such an
enterprise as the Family was by no means hereditary. In any other Family powerful
caporegimes such as Clemenza and Tessio might have succeeded to the position of
Don. Or at least they might have been allowed to split off and form their own Family.
Then, too, ever since Don Corleone had made the peace with the Five Families, the
strength of the Corleone Family had declined. The Barzini Family was now indisputably
the most powerful one in the New York area; allied as they were to the Tattaglias, they
now held the position the Corleone Family had once held. Also they were slyly whittling
down the power of the Corleone Family, muscling into their gambling areas, testing the
Corleones' reactions and, finding them weak, establishing their own bookmakers.
The Barzinis and Tattaglias were delighted with the Don's retirement. Michael,
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formidable as he might prove to be, could never hope to equal the Don in cunning and
influence for at least another decade. The Corleone Family was definitely in a decline.
It had, of course, suffered serious misfortunes. Freddie had proved to be nothing more
than an innkeeper and ladies' man, the idiom for ladies' man untranslatable but
connotating a greedy infant always at its mother's nipple – in short, unmanly. Sonny's
death too, had been a disaster. Sonny had been a man to be feared, not to be taken
lightly. Of course he had made a mistake in sending his younger brother, Michael, to kill
the Turk and the police captain. Though necessary in a tactical sense, as a long-term
strategy it proved to be a serious error. It had forced the Don, eventually, to rise from his
sickbed. It had deprived Michael of two years of valuable experience and training under
his father's tutelage. And of course an Irish as a Consigliori had been the only
foolishness the Don had ever perpetrated. No Irish man could hope to equal a Sicilian
for cunning. So went the opinion of all the Families and they were naturally more
respectful to the Barzini-Tattaglia alliance than to the Corleones. Their opinion of
Michael was that he was not equal to Sonny in force though more intelligent certainly,
but not as intelligent as his father. A mediocre successor and a man not to be feared too
greatly.
Also, though the Don was generally admired for his statesmanship in making the
peace, the fact that he had not avenged Sonny's murder lost the Family a great deal of
respect. It was recognized that such statesmanship sprang out of weakness.
All this was known to the men sitting in the room and perhaps even believed by a few.
Carlo Rizzi liked Michael but did not fear him as he had feared Sonny. Clemenza, too,
though he gave Michael credit for a bravura performance with the Turk and the police
captain, could not help thinking Michael too soft to be a Don. Clemenza had hoped to
be given permission to form his own Family, to have his own empire split away from the
Corleone. But the Don had indicated that this was not to be and Clemenza respected
the Don too much to disobey. Unless of course the whole situation became intolerable.