Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Moments later, Johnny was back behind the microphone, staring down at the sheet music on the stand in front of him. Milner’s this time. An old Cole Porter number that he’d recorded once before, way back when. He wanted to both kill this Milner and hug him. He’d love to prove the man wrong. He prayed that the man was right.

People who’d seen Johnny Fontane in clubs, or even those who’d seen him record ten years ago, wouldn’t have recognized the coiled, brooding man now breathing evenly behind the microphone. The remaining musicians took their places. The engineer wanted a mike check. Just as they were getting ready, some kid came in and asked where he should put Mr. Fontane’s tea. Johnny pointed but did not talk, rocked slowly in place but did not otherwise move, kept his eyes fixed on the music but did not really look at it. This all took only a few moments, but to Johnny it felt like hours and also like no time at all. He closed his eyes. The last time he’d sung this song, his voice had been as clear as rainwater and, as far as he was concerned, about as interesting.

Johnny was hardly aware of the song starting. His breath control was so built up from all that time in the pool, he was barely aware he was singing. The arrangement was everywhere and nowhere, kicking in when he wanted it, staying out of his way without needing to learn how. One verse in, and all Johnny was aware of was that bum in the song, trying to use pretty words and jokes to convince himself he could survive without the woman who’d left him. By the time Johnny hit the first chorus, he was that bum. He wasn’t singing to the other people who might be hearing him, in the studio, on the radio, in the privacy of their living room with a bottle of whiskey emptying out far faster than it should. He was singing to and for himself, telling truths so private they could burn holes through stone. There was nothing that anyone who really heard the music could do except look upon all the pretty words and false fronts lost love inspired, upon all the blame lavished on everyone who did the right thing and left you, and despair.

The song finished.

Milner lowered the baton and looked to the engineer, who nodded. The people in the studio-even the diminished band-burst into applause. Milner headed toward the booth.

Johnny stood back from the microphone. He looked around at the smiling faces of all these yes-men. Milner returned from the booth and started repositioning microphones. He said nothing. You’d swear the guy was Sicilian, for how little he said, and how much.

“No,” Johnny said. “Thank you all very much, but no. You fellas were great, but I can do better. Let’s give it a shot, okay?”

Milner repositioned another mike.

“That eighth bar, Cy,” Johnny said. “Can you do that up like Puccini?”

Milner fished a wrinkled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, a dry- cleaning receipt it looked like, and sat down at the piano bench, noodled around a bit, scribbled a few notes, gave a few brief directions to various men in the band.

Johnny wouldn’t be working with Eddie Neils anytime soon.

He’d been somewhere, gone somewhere, singing that song, and he could go there again, he was absolutely sure of it, and go deeper, and then do it a dozen more times. He could fill a whole long-playing record with songs that took people out of their lives, and deeper into them, and-it came to him, in a flash-sequence the songs the way Les Halley did back when Johnny was his singer, only all together on a record, so that everything plays off of everything else, in a way and to an extent that nobody, not even the best jazz cats, had ever quite done before.

Phil Ornstein kept congratulating everyone. Philly wasn’t going to be happy to have them spend the whole session on just this one song, but too bad. Johnny Fontane would defy you to show him a record shop where people walked in asking about the new releases from National Records. It was the songs they wanted. It was the singers.

Milner climbed to the podium. His glasses made it look like his regular eye was on the orchestra and his huge eye was on Johnny. Johnny looked down, and again they began.

Eight bars in, Puccini’s ghost somehow cracked the song open even farther, and Johnny filled his lungs with air and swam right in.

Michael and Kay spent the first hour of the flight in relative silence. Once Kay marveled about the startling beauty of the desert, comparing it to the work of abstract painters Michael knew he should know. He pretended to, and she talked about art for a while, and he sat there wondering why, about something so trivial, he hadn’t just been honest.

Michael asked about the move. Kay considered telling him about the day last week when the Clemenzas had shown up at his parents’ old house, which they’d already bought, and found Carmela Corleone standing at the window of her late husband’s office, a room she’d hardly set foot in over the years. She was drunk and mumbling prayers in Latin. This is my home, she’d announced. I’m not moving to no desert. He’d hear about that soon enough. Who was she kidding? He must already know. “It’s going fine,” Kay said. “Connie’s been a big help.”

Even that neutral comment was loaded. Michael didn’t react to the mention of his sister, but he knew Connie still blamed him for the death of her husband, Carlo, even though an assistant D.A. he knew from Guadalcanal had charged a Barzini button man with the murder.

“Strange,” Kay said after another long silence. “Flying over the desert in a seaplane.”

In every direction, desolate, unpopulated sand and scrub stretched to the horizon. Eventually shapes that turned out to be mountains emerged from the haze to the north.

“How are the kids getting along?” Michael finally asked.

“You saw them this morning,” Kay said. Mary, who was two, had cried and chanted, “Daddy, Daddy,” as they’d left. Anthony, who this time next year would start kindergarten, was sitting under a box on the floor, watching television through a hole. It was a program in which clay figures confront life’s problems: the temptation not to share one’s red wagon or the virtues of admitting one’s role in the shattering of Mom’s sewing lamp. Safe to say the little clay boy would never have to contend with two of his uncles being murdered. His cardigan-sweatered clay daddy would never be called an “alleged underworld figure” in The New York Times. His svelte clay grandfather was unlikely to drop dead at his feet. “How did you think they were?”

“They seemed to be making out fine. Do they have friends yet? In the neighborhood?”

“I’m still unpacking, Michael. I haven’t had time-”

“Right,” he said. “I’m not being critical.”

He was close enough to Reno airspace to check in.

“Your parents had a nice trip?” he said.

“They did.” Her father had taught theology at Dartmouth long enough to have a small pension from that, too, augmenting the one he’d been drawing since he’d retired as a pastor five years before. He and Kay’s mother had bought a travel trailer and planned to see America. They’d arrived yesterday, to help Kay get the house together and see their grandkids. “They said the trailer park was so nice they might never leave.” The Castle in the Sand had its own trailer park.

“They’re welcome to stay there as long as they like.”

“That was a joke,” she said. “So what do you have planned? What’s to do in Tahoe?”

“What would you say to dinner and a movie?”

“It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

“Lunch and a movie. A matinee. There’s got to be a matinee we can catch.”

“Okay. Oh, God, Michael, look! It’s beautiful!”