Mario Puzo - Fools die

Janelle raised her head slightly and gave the sweet, tentative smile that made me forget how I hated her.

“Yes,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”

She bowed her head then. Her face had an absentminded, amused look as she remembered that love affair. I knew she always remembered her love affairs with affection, even when they ended very badly. She looked up again.

“Does that bother you?” she said.

“No,” I said. But she knew it did.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked at me for a moment, then turned her head away. She reached out with her hands, slid them under my shirt and caressed my back. “It was innocent,” she said.

I didn’t say anything, just moved away because the remembered touch made me forgive her everything.

Again expecting her to lie, I said, “Doran told me because of the fourteen-year-old kid you stood trial for impairment of the morals of a minor.”

With all my heart I wanted her to lie. I didn’t care if it was true. As I would not blame or reproach her if she were an alcoholic or hustler or murderess. I wanted to love her, and that was all. She was watching me with that quiet, contemplative look as if she would do anything to please me.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked, looking directly into my face.

“Just tell me the truth,” I said.

“Well, then it’s true,” she said. “But I was acquitted. The judge dismissed the case.”

I felt an enormous relief. “Then you didn’t do it.”

“Do what?” she asked.

“You know,” I said.

She gave me that sweet half-smile again. But it was touched with a sad mockery.

“You mean, did I make love to a fourteen-year-old boy?” she asked. “Yes, I did.”

She waited for me to walk out of the room. I remained still. Her face became more mocking. “He was very big for his age,” she said.

That interested me. It interested me because of the boldness of the challenge. “That makes all the difference,” I said dryly. And watched her when she gave a delighted laugh. We had both been angry with each other. Janelle because I dared judge her. I was going to leave, so she said, “It’s a good story, you’ll like it.” And she saw me bite. I always loved a story almost as much as making love. Many nights I’d listened to her for hours, fascinated as she told her life story, making guesses at what she left out or edited for my tender male ears as she would have edited a horror story for a child.

It was the things he loved me most for, she told me once. The eagerness for stories. And my refusal to make judgments. She could always see me shifting it around in my head, how I would tell it or how I would use it. And I had never really condemned her for anything she’d done. As she knew now I would not when she told her story.

– -

After her divorce Janelle had taken a lover, Doran Rudd. He was a disc jockey on the local radio station. A rather tall man, a little older than Janelle. He had a great deal of energy, was always charming and amusing and finally got Janelle a job as the weather girl of the radio station. This was a fun job and well paid for a town like Johnson City.

Doran was obsessed with being the town character. He had an enormous Cadillac, bought his clothes in New York and swore he would make it big someday. He was awed and enchanted by performers. He went to see all the road companies of all the Broadway plays and always sent notes back to one of the actresses, followed up by flowers, followed up by offers of dinner. He was surprised to find how easy it was to get them to bed. He gradually realized how lonely they were. Glamorous onstage, they were a little pathetic-looking back in their second-rate hotel rooms stocked with old-model refrigerators. He would always tell Janelle about his adventures. They were more friends than lovers.

One day he got his break. A father and son duo were booked into the town concert hall. The father was a pickup piano player who had earned a steady living unloading freight cars in Nashville until he discovered his nine year-old son could sing. The father, a hardworking Southern man who hated his job, immediately saw his son as the impossible dream come true. He might escape from a life of dull, back breaking toil.

He knew his son was good, but he didn’t really know how good. He was quite content with teaching the young boy all the gospel songs and making a handsome living touring the Bible Belt. A young cherub praising Jesus in pure soprano was irresistible to that regional audience. The father found his new life extremely agreeable. He was gregarious, had an eye for a pretty girl and welcomed vacations from his already worn-out wife, who, of course, remained home.

But the mother too dreamed of all the luxuries her son’s pure voice would bring her. They were both greedy but not greedy as the rich are greedy, as a way of life, but greedy as a starving man on a desert island who is suddenly rescued and can finally realize all his fantasies.

So when Doran went backstage to rave about the lad’s voice, then proposition the parents, he found a willing audience. Doran knew how good the boy was and soon realized that he was the only one. He reassured them that he did not want any percentage of the gospel-singing earnings. He would manage the boy and take only thirty percent of any thing the boy earned over twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

It was, of course, an irresistible offer. If they got twenty-five thousand dollars a year, an incredible sum, why worry if Doran got thirty percent of the rest? And how could their boy, Rory, make more than that amount? Impossible. There was not that much money. Doran also assured Mr. Horatio Bascombe and Mrs. Edith Bascombe that he would not charge them for any expenses. So a contract was prepared and signed.

Doran immediately went into furious action. He borrowed money to produce an album of gospel songs. It was an enormous hit. In that first year the boy Rory earned over fifty thousand dollars. Doran immediately moved to Nashville and made connections in the music world. He took Janelle with him and made her administrative assistant in his new music company. The second year Rory made more than a hundred thousand dollars, most of it on a single of an old religious ballad Janelle found in Doran’s disc jockey files. Doran had absolutely no creative taste in any sense; he would never have recognized the worth of the song.

Doran and Janelle were living together now. But she didn’t see that much of him. He was traveling to Hollywood for a movie deal or to New York to get an exclusive contract with one of the big recording companies. They would all be millionaires. Then the catastrophe. Rory caught a bad cold and seemed to lose his voice. Doran took him to the best specialist in New York. The specialist cured Rory completely but then casually, just in passing, said to Doran, “You know his voice will change as he goes into puberty.”

It was something that Doran had not thought of. Maybe because Rory was big for his age. Maybe because Rory was a totally innocent young boy, unworldly. He had been shielded from girlfriends by his mother and father. He loved music and was indeed an accomplished musician. Also, he had always been sickly until his eleventh year. Doran was frantic. A man who has the location of a secret gold mine and misplaced the map. He had plans to make millions out of Rory; now he saw it all going down the drain. Millions of dollars at stake. Literally millions of dollars!

Then Doran got one of his greater ideas. He checked it out medically. After he had all the dope, he tried his scheme out on Janelle. She was horrified.

“You are a terrible son of a bitch,” she said, almost in tears.

Doran couldn’t understand her horror. “Listen,” he said, “the Catholic Church used to do it.”