Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Francesca started running through the hot night, determined not to cry. It was over. Fine. Good. He’d been her first love, but so what? He wouldn’t be her last. He was going off to Harvard Law School in the fall, and she’d be back here. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Also, he was a jerk. A phony. It had felt great to hit him. It had made a great smacking noise that had sounded more impressive than what people would expect from a girl. Her hand still tingled. She’d have to thank her brother Frankie for being such a pain in the ass over the years and giving her the chance to hone her skills.

The same mysterious ability Billy deployed to breeze into and out of all those inauguration-night parties had been on display that night in Tallahassee, too. She’d had no destination. She’d run down a hill and into a residential neighborhood unfamiliar to her, and at the exact moment she realized she might be lost, she heard a car slow down beside her and there was Billy, in his Thunderbird. He’d known just where to go.

“ Wow, what a punch!” He was smiling, laughing through his big, undamaged white teeth. She was a girl who could knock your block off, another way she was exotic and new. “I love you, slugger.”

“How did your family get so rich?” she asked. “Behind every great fortune there’s a crime.” She’d read that in a book by one of the French writers Kathy was studying. Balzac, maybe.

“Several, I’m sure,” he said. “Those assholes are capable of anything.”

Those assholes were his father and grandfather. It was bizarre to hear anyone talk about his family that way.

She got in the car.

They made up that night, but the drama of that evening set the tone for their courtship.

The long-distance romance had all the melodrama such things do among the young, fraught with ten-page letters, sneaking suspicions, and tearful phone calls-at least on Francesca’s part. Billy claimed to be so busy at Harvard that he barely had time to eat or sleep, much less write her letters or talk on the phone long distance. Then he sent her a postcard, of all things, a typed postcard, to tell her he’d gotten an internship with a firm in New York and wasn’t coming back home to south Florida that summer. She borrowed her roommate Suzy’s VW bug and drove all night to Cambridge, to end the whole mess in person. Naturally, she and Billy slept together. She went home more confused than ever and, it turned out, pregnant.

He wanted her to get an abortion.

Then he even made arrangements for a doctor in Palm Beach to do it.

Francesca couldn’t bear the thought of it. But she certainly didn’t want to have the baby, either. Marrying Billy-not that he’d asked or even mentioned the possibility-was out of the question. She told Kathy-the first and only person she’d confided in-that she wouldn’t marry that snake if he was the last man on earth. Everything that could happen was something Francesca Corleone definitely would not do.

Billy broke his leg skydiving (the end of another new hobby), and while he was in the hospital he had a sudden change of heart-inexplicable, from Francesca’s perspective, though who can explain a change of heart? The day he was discharged, he flew to see her and proposed.

Overjoyed, she accepted.

They were married in July with him still on crutches. She’d been upset that he’d have to slit the leg of his tux, and he assured her he could afford the small tailoring charge. She got upset about a lot of things-a pregnant bride’s prerogative, perhaps, but all of it a substitute for the two things she was really upset about: her walks up and down the aisle. Down would be pathetic, with Billy on crutches. But up would be impossible. Who could ever take her father’s place? Not her little brothers, and certainly not Stan the Liquor Man (who was still engaged to her mother and who still hadn’t married her). Uncle Fredo was older than Uncle Mike, and she knew Uncle Fredo better. She was drawn to Uncle Mike, though, and always had been. He was a war hero, a romantic figure, a man who looked great in a tuxedo. She knew some of his dark secrets-at least via the imperfect conduits of Kathy and Aunt Connie-but despite this, in the end he was the only man she could imagine giving her away. “It’s who Pop would want,” she told Kathy, her maid of honor, expecting her twin sister to disagree. “Obviously,” Kathy said instead. No one said obviously with more withering scorn than Kathy. “Who else?”

Uncle Mike balanced Francesca’s jittery nerves with his dignified and regal bearing. He told her that her father would have been proud, that Santino was here, watching, be sure of that. But he was smart enough to say this a long time before they went up the aisle, so that they could cry together and get those tears out of the way. When they were finally alone in the narthex, he took her arm and told her not to worry. He shrugged. “It’s only the rest of your life.”

She laughed. It was the perfect thing to say.

She went down the aisle happy. Only when Michael gave her hand to Billy did she see that it was her uncle whose face was streaked with tears.

On the trip back down the aisle, she steadied Billy, and he managed to make it without crutches. At the reception, he even danced. He was such a bad dancer in the first place, at least with the cast he had an excuse.

They moved to Boston. When he finished law school, he turned down a job making a fortune on Wall Street (he already had a fortune) in favor of being a clerk for a judge on the Florida Supreme Court. It was tough to be back in Tallahassee as her class graduated (she went to Suzy Kimball’s graduation party and hardly knew the poised young woman who was bound for missionary work in China). But Francesca had a family now and truly did think she was happy-at least until Billy quit his job with the court to work for Floridians for Shea. He was gone all the time. Eventually Francesca found out that he was doing more than campaigning.

How did she find out about That Woman?

Francesca was a Corleone. It was a maxim, much repeated in her family, that it was impossible, over time, to deceive a Corleone. That was one theory. She was also that most dangerous of adversaries to philandering: a woman whose darkest fear is that her husband doesn’t think she’s good enough for him.

Ernest Hemingway is not Papa, that guy with the white beard. He’s not the voice of a lost generation. He’s not a straw man to be dismissed as sexist by tweedy frauds whose lives will give less to the world than any of several of Hemingway’s lesser afternoons. He’s those great early books. Nothing else matters.

Einstein is not a poster boy for genius. Picasso is not a swarthy bald womanizer. Mozart isn’t an enfant terrible. Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath aren’t tragic affronts to the oppressive male hegemony. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren’t harmless, lovable little brown guys white people can feel comfortable endorsing. Babe Ruth isn’t a fat slob who ate hot dogs and visited sick kids in the hospital. Yes, the Mafia fixed the Sonny Liston fight that allowed Muhammad Ali to become the heavyweight champ in the first place, and, yes, Ali stood up for what he believed in. But first and foremost, he was a man who could knock the toughest motherfucker in the valley on his ass and make it seem like poetry.

Johnny Fontane was a fine actor when he felt like it. He had an enviably large penis that he put to great use. He helped transform Las Vegas from a desert stopover into the fastest-growing city in the United States. He was the son of immigrant parents, the embodiment of the American dream. He looked great in a hat. He invented American cool (Caucasian division).