Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

As Carmela nodded to Connie to help her clear the table for dessert, Michael clanged his wineglass with a spoon. He stood. He hadn’t made a toast all night. Michael looked at no one but his father, fork in midair. When their eyes met, his father gave a tiny smile. Seeing his father smile like that in the face of such trauma made Michael’s anger boil over.

“I would rather die,” Michael said, raising the glass, “than grow up to be a man like you.”

A stunned silence fell over the table like a heavy wool shroud. From where Michael stood, they had all disappeared. There were only two people in the world.

Vito ate the last bite of his chicken scaloppine and set his fork down. He reached for his napkin and wiped his face, almost daintily, then set the napkin down, and, with a coldness in his eyes that had never been directed at anyone in his own family, he stared down his youngest son.

Michael’s throat tightened. He clutched the wineglass. He remained standing, but he braced himself, ready for his father to laugh at him or say something about the long way Michael had to go to become a man like anyone.

Instead, his father continued to stare him down.

Michael felt chills run over him, and his legs begin to tremble. The knuckles of his right hand were white against the wineglass. The glass broke. Wine, blood, and broken glass fell to the table, and still no one said anything. Michael tried not to move, but he was shaking.

At last, Vito Corleone reached for his own wineglass.

“I share your wish,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. He drained the glass, set it down noiselessly. “Good luck to you,” he said, and he held his stare.

Michael’s knees buckled. He sat.

“Please.” Vito pointed at the broken glass. “Do your mother a favor. Clean that up.”

Michael did as he was told. Connie and his mother rose to clean everything else up and get dessert, but no one said anything. The sfogiatelle and the coffee hit the table, and the only sounds were clanking spoons and chewing. Michael wrapped his napkin around his bloodied hand and ate with his head down. Not even Fredo tried to make light of things and make peace.

The other Corleone children never even seemed tempted to rebel against their father. Santino was like a dog fiercely loyal to his keepers. Fredo was slavishly in pursuit of his father’s approval. Though Tom wasn’t blood, he sought Vito’s approval as fervently as Fredo and ultimately with more success. Connie, the only girl, enjoyed her role as the docile, doting daughter until long after Vito had died. Only Michael felt the need to rebel-as, perversely, the favorite child in most families can be counted on to do.

It was the rebellion of the good Italian son. None of it was directed at his mother. Michael doted on her so much that for a time Vito was concerned about his youngest son’s masculinity. Nothing he did embarrassed the family. He did not disobey his parents, yet his every choice seemed calculated to present some kind of affront to his father.

For example, when Fredo first told Michael that their father had been asking questions about Michael’s masculinity, Michael stopped bringing his dates by the apartment, just to keep his family in the dark. When Sonny offered to get him a hooker for his seventeenth birthday, Michael said he didn’t think his girlfriend would like it, and when Sonny asked, “What girlfriend?,” Michael showed up at Sunday dinner with a big-breasted blonde he’d been dating off and on for months. He started bringing a new girl home every couple weeks. None of them was Italian. The one time his father ever said anything to him about it, Michael said that he loved his mother, but there was no one else like her in all the world and never would be. “It’s none of my business,” Vito whispered to him later, but clearly with approval. Michael didn’t bring another girl home for seven years, when he took Kay as his guest to Connie’s wedding.

Michael applied to Princeton and Columbia and got into both. He went to Columbia because Tom had gone there for law school. Halfway through his first term, he learned that his father had given a sizable anonymous gift to the university’s endowment fund. He met Tom for lunch at the Plaza Hotel and told him he was dropping out. He asked if he could stay with Tom and Theresa after he did. Tom was working on Wall Street, and they had an apartment downtown. “Get a tutor,” Tom said. “A lot of people struggle their first year.”

“I’m getting straight A’s,” Michael said. He told Tom why he was dropping out.

“If all the students at that place whose fathers are in a position to support the school-”

“I don’t care about everyone else. I want to be there on my own merits.”

“You’re being so naive I can hardly stand to look at you.”

“So is it all right?” Michael said. “I’m sure you’ll have to ask Theresa.”

Tom shook his head and said, no, he could speak for Theresa. If Michael wanted to make the biggest mistake of his life, Tom wasn’t going to stop him.

At the end of the term, Michael, with straight A’s, dropped out of an Ivy League school and tried to find a job. Frustrated, he finally asked Tom one night at dinner if he could borrow enough money to take some classes at City College. When Tom told him that if he was going to borrow money anyway, he should borrow it for Columbia, Michael didn’t say anything.

“That’s just what the old man would have done,” Tom said. He paused, but Michael didn’t ask what he meant. Tom answered. “The silence.”

Which Michael maintained. Theresa cleared the table before anyone said anything more.

“You can’t run from who you are,” Tom said.

Michael laughed. “This is America, my orphaned friend,” he said. “Running from who we are is who we are.”

For a moment, Tom’s eyes flashed with anger. He composed himself. “You want money, you know where to get all the money you could ever need for anything. I’m not getting in the middle of this any more than I already have.”

Michael felt trapped. He could defy his father’s wishes by asking to join the family business, which was out of the question. Going to school and doing well and becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a professor: that was what his father wanted. He wanted Michael to follow another path entirely. But what path could Michael take that he wouldn’t find had been blazed by the invisible hand of his father? Most paths wouldn’t just be blazed, either. They’d be blacktopped, lit by floodlights, and flanked by sturdy handrails.

Where could he go?

His father was building a house on Long Island, and that spring the family would be moving-Connie, of course, who was sixteen, but also Fredo, who was still living at home. Sonny and Sandra had just had twin girls, and they’d have a house right next door. On the blueprint for his father’s house was a room labeled “Michael’s Bedroom.” When he saw it, he got the same suffocating feeling he’d had when he’d thought the family business would claim him at sixteen.

Michael had fallen prey to that curse of the young; he knew only what he didn’t want. A life driven by avoidance is like a team trying not to lose. Like a skydiver trying to land anywhere but in that one tree over there. Like the traveling salesman who can sleep in the barn so long as he doesn’t. Like two naked lovers in Paradise free to do anything at all except.

So Michael Corleone did what thousands of foundering young men in the 1930s did: he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Most of the other men in the corps, of course, were people with no advantages, no opportunities at all, men who told tales of a kind of desperate poverty that Michael (despite his parents’ tales of living through similar circumstances) had never before understood. He was stationed in the Winooski River Valley in Vermont. He planted countless trees and moved untold tons of earth. Unlike the other Italians, he ate the tasteless food without complaining. His name was constantly mispronounced, and he never corrected anyone. He volunteered to help the tutors who came in to give night classes, and before long he was running the camp’s education program. He taught hundreds of men to read, many of them Italians who could barely read Italian when Michael started working with them. Like everyone else, he was paid thirty dollars a month, twenty-two of which were automatically sent home to his family. At night, Michael lay in his bunk and tried to imagine his father’s face each month when that check arrived. Only during the courtship of his wives, Kay (his second wife and first true courtship) and Apollonia (first wife, second courtship), was Michael Corleone ever happier.