Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

“It’s William Brewster Van Arsdale the Third!” she said.

“That was a joke,” Francesca said.

“You have that look on your face again,” Suzy said.

Francesca tried to cock her eyebrow the way Deanna Dunn had in that movie a few years back where she played a killer.

Billy spent the duration of the president’s remarks making notes on index cards. Francesca spent it telling herself that in a world of stupid crushes, this was plainly the stupidest.

The president tugged at his sashes. He told them to look right and look left and that one of those people wouldn’t make it to graduation and to make sure that one person wasn’t you, then he directed jumper-clad Spirit Leaders at the ends of the aisles to start lighting everyone’s candles. Thunder sounded. He said it was now his pleasure to introduce the student body president. “Of course, anyone out there who ever ate any fresh Florida fruit is already a faithful friend of his family.” The president paused to chuckle and call attention to how pleased he was at his own alliteration. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. William Brewster Van Arsdale.”

“I thought you said that was a joke?” Suzy said.

Francesca shrugged. Van Arsdale Citrus ?

Billy came to the podium, waving. He pulled out the rocket ship from inside his jacket. As he did, the rain began to fall harder. Billy forged on. The rocket was a prop for him to talk about the coming space age in which the students here would live their exciting lives. Candles flickered out. People started to leave. Abruptly, in that Florida way, the skies opened. Francesca buttoned her raincoat. The band ran for cover. Moments later, water filled the track around the field. Billy tucked the rocket back into his jacket and whipped his index cards into the wind. “Our formal education,” he shouted, “should stay in balance with the important things we’ve already learned. Love. Family. Common sense. C’mon, everybody, let’s have enough sense to come in out of the rain!”

By the time he said it, most everyone had. Except Francesca, who just sat there.

She was kidding herself. It was ridiculous. It was obvious to her now that, in the dining hall, he’d been up to one of two things. Either he was trying to be a do-gooder, reaching out to the two weird-looking ethnic girls. Or else he’d been making fun of her.

She watched him jog alongside the dean and the robed president, sharing a golf umbrella.

Of course he was the sort of person for whom a big umbrella would just materialize.

Francesca, the last person sitting, cast off her wet candle and put her head in her hands.

She should go home. Not her dorm. Home home.

As she always did in her darkest moments, she tried to picture the face of her father. Every time, it got just a little bit more difficult. He struck the poses and smiled the smiles he had in photographs. Was it really Daddy she saw now, or was it just that picture of him at Aunt Connie’s wedding, where it seemed like he’d managed to drape his arms over every adult in the family, where he was happy and in love with Ma and looking out for everyone? Francesca and Kathy had been off to the side, dancing with Johnny Fontane, a character who now seemed as unreal to her as Mickey Mouse. For that moment anyway, things had worked.

She bent over and let the rain pelt her. Francesca knew in her heart she no longer really remembered the sound of her father’s voice. And, really, on this count too, she was kidding herself: reading much too much into the old-fashioned haircuts, the tuxedos and the dresses and Uncle Mike’s wonderful Marine Corps uniform and its ill-fitting cap, tricked like some dumb girl by the natural-seeming smiles on the faces of dead people, by skillful photography, by some freak accident of misleading light. Things had never worked. Who doesn’t know that? There were other family photographs, ones Francesca usually chose not to think about. The one of her Uncle Fredo sitting on the curb, sobbing. The one of Grandpa Vito hiding his face from the photographer that The New York Times had used for his obituary. The Polaroid of her mother, sitting with her shirt off in Stan the Liquor Man’s Naugahyde office chair, which Kathy had found hidden next to a huge rubber penis in a hollowed-out corner of their mother’s box spring. The scalloped-edged one, where her father was clubbing a tuna to death somewhere off the coast of Sicily, smiling like a boy on Christmas morning.

Are you any relation? What would Francesca have said if Billy hadn’t told his friends not to be ridiculous? She had no idea.

There were so many reasons to love storms. Francesca Corleone might or might not have been crying. She had no intention of leaving the field until the last fat drop fell.

A NYONE WATCHING Michael Corleone land the plane on Lake Mead -the drivers of those two Cadillacs, for example, standing at the end of the dock and holding ropes-might have thought he’d done this hundreds of times instead of maybe twenty. Kay, asleep in the seat beside him, didn’t even stir-not until Tommy Neri and the two young guys squeezed into the back with him broke out in applause.

Kay sat bolt upright, eyes wide in panic. “My babies!”

Michael laughed. A beat later, he regretted it. It had struck him funny, her needless panic, and kind of touching, too. With anyone else, he wouldn’t have reacted without thinking. Kay was the only person in the world who could make him act against his own nature.

“Sorry, Mrs. C.,” Tommy said. “Should’ve seen it, though. Your husband’s a natural. I’ll admit it now, I was a little edgy about it. I didn’t go on a regular airplane until last year.”

Kay rubbed her eyes.

“I wasn’t laughing at you,” Michael said. “You okay?”

“They do float,” Kay said to Tommy. “Floatplanes. Though sometimes they also flip.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What were you dreaming about?” Michael said.

She put her hand to her chest, as if to still a racing heart. “I’m fine. We’re home?”

“Well, we’re back at Lake Mead.”

“That’s what I meant. What do you think I meant, the mall back in Long Beach?”

Michael hated it that the notion of home had any shred of ambiguity. He also hated having even a tiny quarrel in front of people who weren’t that close to him. He didn’t answer her until he got the plane to the dock. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I thought you meant.”

Kay unbuckled her seat belt and elbowed past the men. She’d been sore since Michael had swung back by their property to pick up the men for the ride back. She got into the back of their car, the yellow one with the black roof.

Michael told the men to give his regards to Fredo and Pete Clemenza-the red Cadillac was Fredo’s; it was supposed to go meet their respective planes-and that he’d be at the Castle in the Sand no later than six-thirty.

He got in back beside Kay.

“A date,” she said. “Like old times. All day until late tonight. That was what you said.”

“I needed to get them back here somehow. You slept through it all anyway.”

She shrugged. It was not a conciliatory shrug. There were two kinds of wives in this way of life. Once, he’d been married to the other kind. In the end, a wife like Apollonia, which is also to say a wife like his mother, a Sicilian girl who went along with every word her husband said, wouldn’t have suited him and certainly not his children, not in America.

Still, he couldn’t stand for this, not in front of others. Even his most loyal men should not see the head of their Family commit any weakness, however petty.