Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Francesca resisted the urge to hang up. Instinctively, she knew that whatever the woman was about to say, it was something Francesca should hear, and wouldn’t want to. “Hold on,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Kathy if she’d go finish up Sonny’s haircut. Francesca closed and locked her bedroom door. She slammed the heel of her hand against the plaster wall. She put a hole in it. Kathy called out to see if she was okay. Francesca lied and said she was. She picked up the phone and sat down. “Now talk,” Francesca said. She covered her eyes with her throbbing right hand as if avoiding the sight of a dead dog on the road.

“To begin with,” the woman said, “you’re right. I’m in Washington. I work in a congressman’s office. When I first moved here, it wasn’t for Billy, it was for this job, but-”

“Do you really think,” Francesca said, “that you have the right to cry about this?”

The woman regained her composure and succinctly confessed. She and Billy had started up again not long after Francesca had lost the baby. They’d been at it off and on until lately, when Billy had gotten her pregnant and been so casual about her getting an abortion that she’d gone ahead with it. She was having a hard time living with herself, though, and had decided to quit her job and move back home to Sarasota.

Francesca clenched her teeth and pressed her swelling hand firmly against the bedpost, trying to use pain to keep the rage that was rising in her from exploding. Not yet. Don’t give this whore the satisfaction.

The woman said she was calling from her office. She and Billy had gone to a hotel at Dupont Circle on their lunch hour. There-what does it matter how it had happened?-whatever they’d had had come to a tearful end. She claimed that Billy had cried as much as she had.

“Feel better, do you?” Francesca said between her clenched teeth. “Can you live with yourself now?” She was shaking. If she’d been in the same room with this woman, it would have been nothing to kill her. Knock her down and stomp her pretty skull until it popped like a grape. Better yet, thrust a butcher knife through her heart.

“Not really,” the woman said. “Listen, say anything to me you want. I deserve it. I really don’t-” More tears. “I mean, I’m not the sort of person who-”

“Bad people,” Francesca said, “never think they’re the sort of person who did the things they did. I’ve got news for you, you whore. You’re not what you think you are. None of us are. You’re what you did, nothing more. You act like a whore, you’re a whore. I have to go.”

“Wait, don’t,” the woman said. “There’s something else I have to tell you. As bad as what I already said, this might be even worse. I think it’s even worse.”

“You don’t impress me as someone who knows the difference between good and bad.”

“It’s about your family.”

“I know that look,” Kathy said. “Don’t think I don’t know that look.”

“Help me bandage my hand,” Francesca said.

“You need to see a doctor,” Kathy said. “What happened that-”

“Help me.”

After years of petty conflict and drifting affection, the sisters felt a shock of understanding shoot through them. They’d had their differences the past few years, but the bond they had as twins never went anywhere. Summoned, it obeyed. There is nothing more complicated and less so than family, nothing easier to understand and at the same time unknowable. With twins, that all goes double.

Francesca didn’t explain any of the particulars to Kathy, yet Kathy understood what she needed to understand. She helped Francesca with her hand, helped her get dressed, listened to her instructions about Sonny ( get dinner at Eastern Market Lunch, he loves that, loves the market, too, but dress warm, it’s supposed to snow later tonight ). Kathy tried to soothe her but not counterproductively so.

Francesca kissed Sonny and grabbed the keys to Billy’s Dual-Ghia. They had only one car (though it cost more than two nice ones), and of course it was his, the selfish prick, a big fancy custom-built thing he was ordinarily reluctant to let her drive. At least he’d left it for her today so she could go pick up Kathy at the train station.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy called as Francesca slammed the apartment door behind her.

“Maybe I am you,” Francesca shouted back.

When she got there, since only Billy himself was allowed to use the parking garage, she had to circle round and round the building, looking for a space. Her tightly wrapped hand throbbed. Pain shot through it each time she had to shift. The pain wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It was somehow keeping her from crying. The last thing she wanted to allow herself to do was cry.

She banged her unbandaged fist on the leather-wrapped wheel, trying to quell her anger. It only made it worse. You are what you do, nothing more. Francesca was disgusted to be the kind of person who’d look for a legal parking space at a time like this. She growled, feral as a cornered wolf, and whipped the car into an empty space in a loading zone.

She strode but did not run up the steps to the Department of Justice.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Van Arsdale,” said the receptionist in Billy’s office. “Mr. Van Arsdale is in an off-site meeting with the attorney general. I don’t expect them back until tomorrow.”

Which Francesca knew. She was supposed to meet Billy at a bar he and his friends from work liked, down by the river in Georgetown, then go out for dinner and a movie. “Billy needed some files,” Francesca said. “He forgot them. He told me right where to look.”

The next thing Francesca knew, she was alone in Billy’s office, going where the whore had told her to go, looking where the whore had told her to look: in the backmost file in the top drawer. The file was thick and battered; the handwritten label-Billy’s handwriting-read Insurance.

Francesca couldn’t be seen going through it, not there. She tucked it under her arm, thanked the receptionist, and left. She went back to the car. It had not been towed. It had not been ticketed. A good omen, she thought, with no sincere hope it would be.

Inside the folder, as the whore had promised, was information about her family. Newspaper clippings that anyone might have kept, but from papers all over the country. Hundreds of carefully arranged and catalogued snapshots, including quite a few Francesca had taken with her own camera, even before Billy had met her: photos of everyone in her family, but especially those on her father’s side. There was the picture of her uncles and grandfather at Aunt Connie’s wedding that used to be on their dresser and had supposedly been lost in one of their moves. There were four notebooks, the same kind Francesca had been required to use for her freshman English themes, filled with notes about her family, and a several-page typewritten summary of the contents of those notebooks. She tried to figure out when he’d started doing this. The first began in December 1955, the day after they first made love. It wasn’t about that; it was everything that happened at Grandma Carmela’s house, not a journal of any sort, but notes, as if from a class. They weren’t faked. There were things in there only Billy could have known, rendered in handwriting that was unmistakably his (right down to the cursive-style capital A ’s and M ’s that he’d used then and replaced with printed style a few years later).

Can’t you see Billy’s just here to experience a gen-u-ine Mafia Christmas?

Billy told his whore blonde from Sarasota that he had this file. He probably showed it to her. They probably had a good laugh about it, naked in a hotel room overlooking Dupont Circle.