Prizzi's Family

maerose was a lady who got what she wanted--and what she wanted was Charley

Maerose Prizzi, granddaughter of the head of the Prizzi family, was graduated from Manhattanville five months before the don made Charley Partanna her father's underboss. She felt drawn toward Charley because of his new status. Before that, if she knew he was alive, it was because he was Angelo Partanna's son and Angelo was the family's consigliere. Maerose was attracted to power.

When she was graduated, her father gave her five points in the restaurant-linen-supply industry to assure her cash flow and 15 points in a going interior-decorating business in New York, not only because decorating was one of the things she wanted to do but because the Prizzis owned two big antique-reproduction-furniture factories in North Carolina and a big upholstery-fabrics company near Florence.

She had a feeling for color; like her grandfather, she knew money, and by reading in the New York Public Library at night for two months, working with the craftsmen in North Carolina and Florence (who were sent to New York) and listening carefully to an elderly queen who had once been an Oscar-winning set dresser in Hollywood, she was able to sound like the professional equal to her two partners. After 15 months, she bought one of them out and dominated the survivor. In two years, she was the sole (continued on page 128) Prizzi's Family (continued from page 80) stockholder of a thriving business that operated, with a little help from her friends, in New York, Beverly Hills and London.

Maerose was a tall, gorgeous grabber who wore clothes with the assurance and style with which Marilyn Monroe had worn her ass. She was the most classically Sicilian Prizzi of them all, a cool aristocrat risen from a line of Arab-Greek-Phoenician Sicilians, with a nose like a Saracen, passionate and unremitting, and the sexually inquisitive eyes of a Bedouin woman in purdah. She was the definition of serenity and total adjustment on her surfaces, but, underneath, she was like the center of the placid earth--eruptive.

After Manhattanville, although she kept an unannounced apartment in New York on 37th Street off Park, she lived at home with her father, Vincent Prizzi, and her 16-year-old sister, Teresa, in her father's house in Bensonhurst. She had an occasional fling with one or two clients in New York, but in Brooklyn, she was strictly virgin territory.

When she was in New York, working with clients or seeing friends, she spoke with the grammatical elegance and diction of a woman on whom many years of higher education had been lavished. But when she was in Brooklyn, speaking to anyone--her father, her grandfather, anyone in her family--she spoke the street language with a heavy Brooklyn-Italian pronunciation and phrasing.

There was usually a filled glass of champagne on the desk in her office, not for effect but because she was always pitched so that she needed a drink. That was anathema to her family, so, when she drank, she drank only in New York.

She had been thinking about what she really wanted to do since she was 12. She wanted to take over, run and control both sides of her family's business operations: the street side, where her father held the power, and the political/investment side, where her Uncle Eduardo, a.k.a. Edward Price, lived. What was implicit in her takeover plan and what therefore exalted it to an extreme was one clear fact: She would need to replace her grandfather as head of the family. Her reasoning had refined itself into a fairly straight line. Her grandfather was an old man; he had to die soon. Her father was a sick man; he couldn't last too long. Eduardo was healthy and younger than her father, so he would have to be taken from the inside. She was going to have to continue to cultivate Eduardo, as she had been doing since she was 15. After she established decorating branches in Palm Beach and Washington, she planned to sell the whole thing to Eduardo, giving him an idea of how well she understood business. Then she would have her grandfather persuade Eduardo to take her into Barker's Hill Enterprises, so that gradually over, say, a ten-year period, while he got older and older, she could undermine him with key elements of the family's hierarchy.

Until she spotted Charley Partanna, she knew the weak link in her plan was the street side of the family operation. Her father, boss of the street side, would never allow her, a woman, to have anything to do with family business. Out of nowhere, Charley Partanna was made her father's underboss and vendicatore. Her grandfather respected Charley. Charley had a big future in the family. Charley was going to have a lot of power. Therefore, she was going to have to marry Charley in order to take him over and control the street side, which fed money to Eduardo's operation. Then, in ten or 15 years, when she took over Eduardo, she would control both sides of the family's operations. Everyone would have to call her Donna Mae, the first woman in history to stand at the head of a Mafia family. Maerose had to be slightly mad to live with such an ambition. Any Sicilian man could have told her it was an impossible dream.

She had her first clear shot at Charley at her sister Teresa's 17th birthday party. Charley Partanna was there as a feudal duty. Teresa was a Prizzi. Everyone whose surname was Prizzi, Sestero, Partanna or Garrone was there: men, women and children. At the proper time, her grandfather, in a show of great age, would shuffle to the microphone and make a speech. He would whisper into Vincent's ear in Sicilian, then Vincent would speak it into the microphone in Brooklynese, dumping the words out of the depths of his stomach the way a piled wheelbarrow is emptied by upending it. Then the don would hand over the traditional annual birthday check of $1000 to Vincent, who would beckon Teresa to the stage and hand the check to her. She would kiss her grandfather, her father and her uncle Eduardo. The four-piece band, all bald or white-haired men who had been playing at Prizzi parties for 51 years, would then play Happy Birthday to You and all of the Prizzis, Sesteros, Partannas and Garrones would sing out the words. Vincent would lead Teresa to the dance floor. The band would play The Anniversary Waltz and after one turn of the floor, Patsy Garrone, Teresa's fidanzato, would cut in and everyone would join in the dancing.

Maerose made sure she was standing next to Charley Partanna during the singing, so that when the band began to play the dance music, all she had to do was say, "Come on, Charley. Let's dance."

"Jeez, Mae," Charley said. "I ain't danced since Rocco's anniversary."

"Whatta you do on Saturday night? Raise pigeons? Come on!" She pulled him onto the dance floor. "Hey!" she said after a few turns. "You're a terrific dancer."

"I put eight hundred and forty dollars into Arthur Murray's to learn how to do it."

"Yeah?"

"I do rumba, samba, mambo, waltz and fox trot."

"I heard you went to night school."

"Not for dancing."

"How come I never see you around?"

He shrugged. "I'm around. You go to New York."

"Why don't you come over to the house for dinner?"

"Vincent sees me all day."

"How about lunch on Sunday? Poppa (continued on page 133) Prizzi's Family (continued from page 128) eats lunch on the don's boat Sundays."

"Well--"

"Where you living?"

"At the beach."

"Did you have a decorator?"

"What?"

"That's what I do in New York."

"Yeah."

"Why don't I decorate your apartment?"

"Whatta you mean?"

"I mean the right colors, so--no matter how you feel when you walk in or when you wake up--when you are there, you feel better."

"Yeah?"

"You might have to throw out all the furniture."

"Jesus, you want colored furniture?"

"The shapes have to harmonize with the colors. That's how we lock in the perfect."

They danced together every third dance, because Maerose appeared beside him and asked him to dance. She was dancing with her father while Charley went to the john. Then he stood with his father, who was drinking a root beer and watching the dancing.

"Whatta you," Pop said, "discovering Maerose after all these years?"

"She's gonna decorate my apartment. We gotta meet someplace. Dancing, we're holding a meeting."

"You're holding all right," Pop grinned. "But it ain't no meeting."

•

Maerose went to Charley's apartment Sunday morning to see the layout. They toured the four rooms, she made a dozen pages of notes and he gave her the keys to the apartment. "The whole thing is in your hands," he said. "It's up to you how you fill up this place."

"It's gonna take about four weeks."

"I'll move in with Pop."

"We gotta have meetings so I can lay out progress reports."

"We don't need meetings. Whatever you want, do it."

"I wanna have meetings."

"How about four o'clock Thursday?"

"What's four o'clock? What's wrong with the nighttime?"

"I got things I gotta do."

Her voice went hard. "You got a girl?"

He shrugged. He was spending a lot of time with a showgirl named Mardell La Tour from the Casino Latino, but that was none of Maerose's business.

"You have to see her one hundred percent of the nights?"

"Whenever."

"I want you to meet me for dinner Thursday night." She was the immovable object.

Charley couldn't figure out what was happening. This was Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter. But she was acting very horny. What was he supposed to do? Tell her to get outta here? This was getting to be a tricky situation. Sooner or later, he was going to have to talk it over with Pop.

"That would be great," Charley said reluctantly.

•

Maerose had viewed Charley as an instrument to further her plans until he made it absolutely plain that, as far as he was concerned, she shouldn't even have existed. She had never been brushed in her life. Men fell over themselves if she smiled at them, men who didn't even know she was Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter. Charley was falling all over himself to get away from her. Until he had turned her down flatly for dinner and everything else, he had been just another pleasant guy, a lightweight who could have been more useful than other men because she would have been able to build on him when she married him. Now she saw he was going to take a little training. The thought of his resistance was an aphrodisiac, but it also cut about 16 feet off her height.

She didn't believe he had another woman. From what she heard around, Charley had always played women very casually or in intense bursts. Then, after a pause, he moved on. He was probably in the burnout phase now, so she would let it run its course. But in another way, if he wasn't ever going to get the hots for her, it could be a problem. She was going to have to think about how to heat him up.

Charley talked to Maerose three times when she called during the next two weeks to report progress on the apartment. Charley had always liked Maerose in the way the French feel about the queen of England: with a distantly feudal, hopeless fealty and devotion. She was Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter, which made her not only sacred but maybe even a little dangerous. The only time he had ever thought about her before she came into his life as his interior decorator was as the little kid he remembered dropping bags of water on people in the street from the third floor of her father's house, which, to Vincent, was the funniest thing he'd ever seen until she dropped one on him. Her mother had been alive then, Charley remembered, or else Vincent might have lost his head and shot the kid.

Things had developed differently. She wasn't a little kid anymore, and even he was beginning to understand that she was locking her teeth into him, and if he didn't do something about it soon, he would never be able to get her to let go. She had little presents for him. "Jesus, Mae," he would tell her, "I'm supposed to be the one who gives you the presents."

"So? Go ahead."

She gave him a cordless telephone for his terrace and a natural-noises machine for beside his bed. It could make sounds like the ocean, waterfalls or rain in two strengths. She gave him an electronic horse-race analyzer, even though it was a known fact that he went to the races only once a year, bet only on sure-thing information and never put a bet down away from the track, because "Let the civilians have it" was the way he saw it.

He was forced to give her a bottle of perfume, but it was the wrong kind. "Whatta you mean, not subtle?" he asked her on the telephone. "Either it smells or it don't."

He had to have lunch with her one Tuesday, because she said she had to show him some fabrics. The lunch worked out OK, because he was always on the lookout for new food ideas, and in the little Sicilian joint she found on the Lower West Side in New York, he stumbled onto a menu item called Crown of Thorns, a nest of spaghetti woven into an open-topped toque that had pointy olives and pimientos embedded in it. He was going to make it for Easter and send it in his mother's name to Father Passanante at the rectory at Santa Grazia did Traghetto.

Five days later, she talked him into going out to the apartment. The job was finished and she said they had to see it together. He had to say yes, even though it was the middle of the afternoon on a working day, because she was insistent about it on the telephone and, after all, if she had finished the job, she rated it to have him look at the work with her.

Mae was actually glowing the way women are supposed to glow when they are pregnant, which she absolutely could not have been on his account. She was wearing something white and filmy, which didn't seem right somehow for a raw November day as they drove through a sleet storm. Riding out in the van with the swivel seats, and the two phones, front and back, the icebox, the stereo TV and the pile carpet, she held a single long stemmed red rose in her hand. "I should have it in my teeth," she said, "but we couldn't talk."

•

She unlocked the apartment door and threw it open upon the small entrance hall, which she had done in cream and beige. There was a carved V'Soske' throw rug in eight shades of caramel and green on the floor. The Japanese prints on the walls had beige-leather frames. The single half wall facing the door held a bowl of brown-and-green-silk orchids made in Taiwan by a Prizzi company. The lighting was soft.

"Is this the right floor?" Charley said.

"Carry me over the threshold, Charley," Mae commanded.

Charley had gone ahead of her into the apartment. "Holy Jesus, Mae," he said.

"You really done a terrific thing here."

The old furniture was gone. It had been picked up by the Salvation Army. Brand-new stuff he had never seen in his life had taken its place, all of it in beautiful, living color. "How'd you ever figure out how to do this?"

She was still standing outside the apartment. "Charley?"

He turned to face her.

"Carry me in," she ordered.

They stared at each other for seconds before he understood what she was really telling him. He crossed the room and lifted her into his arms. Jesus, he thought randomly, I'm gonna have to work out with bar bells.

He kicked the door shut and stared down at her face, so close to his, her nostrils flaring in and out like a swan's wings, her enormous black eyes glazed with lust as she stared up at him. So he kissed her and she held him there, arms around his neck. It wasn't so bad was the sensation he got, so, being very healthy and in the prime of his life, he staggered with her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed, then he laid her.

It was tremendous. It was like being locked in a mailbag with 11 boa constrictors. Several times he thought the whole ceiling had fallen on him. His head came to a point, then it melted suddenly and flopped all over his shoulders and out all over the bed. His toes fell off. Then, when it was over, it hit him what he had done. He had laid a Prizzi and, depending on what attitude she took, what was he going to do about that?

•

"Oh, Charley," she said as they were driving across south Brooklyn to Vincent's house in Bensonhurst. "Poppa is gonna be so happy."

"Happy?"

"A union of the two families who made the whole Prizzi presence in America possible. Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter and the son of his oldest friend, his consigliere."

"Union?"

"Let's keep it a secret just a little while longer. Let's live inside this golden happiness for at least a few more days before we tell my father."

"Are you--are you saying we're engaged, Mae?"

She turned to him with her eyes shining. "Isn't that what you wanted? To share one life together, for me to have your children--isn't that what you wanted?"

"Jesus, Mae, everything happened so fast, I can't really think. It's such a new idea to me."

"New? What were you thinking about when you ... when you ... took me today? Did you think I was just some--"

"No! No, no. But it happened so fast. I'm just saying, yes--you're right--let's wait a little while before we tell Vincent."

Charley had been living at his father's house on 81st Street in Bensonhurst while the apartment was being decorated. It was the place he thought of as home, where his mother had taught him to cook and to respect the meaning of cleanliness. While he waited for Pop to come home, Charley made baked tomatoes filled with anchovies, minced salami, capers and bread crumbs, and laid out the cylindrical tubes of hard pastry flavored with spice, coffee, cocoa and lemon for the cannoli, then filled them with ricotta cheese and sugar flavored with vanilla, so he and Pop could have a light supper while they talked. He kept looking at the clock, then he went into the living room and vacuumed the tops of the moldings and the picture frames, because the girl could never seem to remember to do that. Pop got home about a quarter to eight. He was knocked out that Charley had made two of his favorites for dinner.

Charley didn't know how to talk about what was happening to him. He couldn't get it together at dinner. Afterward, they went into the parlor with the overstuffed chairs, the lamp shades with the long golden fringe, the upright piano his mother used to play and the beer steins lined up all around the room on the shelf that was the ceiling molding.

"Pop?"

"Yeah?"

"I gotta talk to you."

"Whatsa matta?"

"I been going over it in my head and I can't hardly figure out how it happened, but Maerose thinks her and me is engaged."

"Engaged?"

"Like engaged to be married."

"You and Maerose? Well, Jesus. That's terrific. What's the problem?"

"Pop, I--I don't know how--I mean, shit, Pop, one minute we hardly knew each other and the next minute she was saying how happy Vincent and the don are gonna be because we are engaged."

"Whatta you mean, Charley?"

"She decorated my apartment. So today it was finished, so she said we hadda go out and look at it."

"So?"

"So we looked at it. It was terrific. Then she says, 'Carry me across the threshold, Charley.' She was dressed all in white. She had a rose in her hand."

"Like a bride?"

"Yeah. So I lifted her up and carried her across--I closed the door--then I look at her and she's getting all hot, so I don't think, I do what anybody would do, I take her in the bedroom and I--yeah."

"You mean--"

"Yeah."

"Maerose Prizzi?"

"Yeah."

"And now you are wondering why she says you and her is engaged?"

"Pop, listen"--"

"What's wrong with being engaged to Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter? You'll inherit the earth! In a coupla years, you'll be boss! Whatta you so edgy about?"

"I don't love her."

"So you'll get to love her. She's lovable! She's gorgeous! She's talented! Tell me something she ain't."

"She ain't the woman for me. I--I'm in love with somebody else."

Pop's jaw dropped. "No kidding?"

"Would I kid you? About a thing as important as this? What am I supposed to do?"

"There are things about Vincent you don't know, Charley. When he was young. Believe me, Vincent can be an animal and he is all fucked up when it comes to honor. There was a guy who Vincent said peed on his honor who went to the movies. He sits in the back row. Vincent grabs the first thing he can find, a hammer, and he goes inna moviehouse. He hits the guy on the head with the claw end of the hammer and it goes right through. Vincent is very touchy when it comes to honor."

"It don't need to come to that."

"The way Vincent is outta his head about honor, that's how the don feels about gratitude, only he calls it disloyalty. If Maerose tells them she is engaged to you, even if she doesn't say anything about how she got engaged to you, then, if you try to say you ain't engaged to her, you're gonna have Vincent on your ass about honor and the don all over you about disloyalty. I don't know which is worse."

"I can't dump my main woman, Pop."

"Who is this woman?"

"She's in the show at the Latino. She thinks I'm a salesman."

"What's her name?"

"Mardell La Tour."

•

Charley didn't remember sleeping much that night, but he felt too weak to get out of bed and read a magazine. His whole life had changed. He was stuck with the two most beautiful women in the time warp. It was as if some science-fiction magazine had pulled him inside. Maerose and Mardell. The don's granddaughter and the showgirl. It was too much, no matter where he looked at it. If Italian-type guys should marry Italian-type women, then he had got himself the most gorgeous, the smartest, the best-connected wop dame since Edda Mussolini. He couldn't think of anything tremendous she didn't have. She had class. She had education, she was so beautiful it made him dizzy, and how she ever learned to do what she could do on a bed, he didn't want to know. Jesus--blueblack hair, eyes like a sex-crazed belly dancer crossed with Albert Einstein and a body that, although it was different from Mardell's, was a body so far beyond his lifetime ambitions for a body that it made (continued on page 165) Prizzi's Family (continued from page 134) him want to adjust his clothing whenever he thought about it.

Worse, sitting inside his cup and making it runneth over, he thought, was Mardell, a mountain of loving movements. She had hair like radishes floating in honey, an ass you could play handball on, toenails like canoe paddles and golden eyes that were so big and scared that sometimes when he looked at her, he almost busted out crying. He lost himself in Mardell and he saw himself in Maerose. Maybe the Arabs were right with their rules that it was OK to have a couple of wives--but who told the wives? That was the kicker--who told the wives?

•

Charley had to go to Miami to do the job on a South American coke manufacturer's representative named Little Jaimito. Mardell put up a fuss at his leaving, so he took her with him. They had reservations to spend the weekend after he did the work at Disney World.

At eight o'clock in the morning, in Miami, Charley installed himself in the penthouse suite of the Bolivar across the hall from Jaimito's apartment; they were the only two apartments on the floor. He changed into a T-shirt and a white jump suit, which was what the hotel's handy men wore, and, at a quarter to ten, sat in a chair and looked through the hole he had bored in the door until Jaimito and his four bodyguards left the suite and went down the hall to the elevator. Charley waited ten minutes, then he went across the hall and removed the lock from the front door of Jaimito's suite. He replaced it with a remote-control lock and tested it. He went into the suite and put identical locks tied to the same circuit box into the door to the terrace and the only other inside door, which led from the living room to a hall that gave access to the bedrooms.

He hung a do not disturb sign on the doorknob, put a gas mask over his nose and mouth, got up on a light aluminum stepladder and fixed the grenades to each of the chandeliers at either end of the room. They were suspended on release wires that were controlled from his circuit box. When the grenades were released, they would drop to face level and the copper wire would pull the pins, liberating the cyanide gas.

While he worked, the other door opened and a small blonde with black eyebrows came into the room wearing a short nightgown. She was about 19 and very wise-looking. "Whatta you doing up there?" she said sharply. "Why you got that thing on you face?" She walked over beside the ladder and stared up at him.

He kicked her on the point of the chin. He climbed down from the ladder, stripped off her panty hose and used them to tie her hands and feet together behind her back. He dragged her along the bedroom hall to the second bedroom, jammed a big ball of tissue into her mouth to keep her quiet and dumped her in a closet. He returned to the living room and cleaned everything up before he took the do not disturb sign off the door and went back to the apartment across the hall at 12:10.

He waited in the apartment across the hall. At 3:20, he could hear Jaimito and his men returning, making Spanish noises like a pet shop in a fire. Charley broke the electronic connection with the door to the suite that released the lock, so when the goon got there, he said, "Hey, boss, the maid forgot to lock the door."

"You guys go in first," Jaimito said in Spanish.

Charley watched them through the peephole as all five men disappeared into the suite and shut the door. He activated the remote electronic locks on all three doors, securing them. Then he triggered the chandelier mechanism, which dropped the grenades and pulled the pins. He waited 20 minutes, then he slipped the gas mask over his face and went into the apartment. The five bodies were sprawled around the room, on chairs and on the floor. Charley released the lock on the terrace door and opened it wide to let the ocean breeze ventilate the room, so that when the night chambermaid came in to turn the beds down, the air in the room wouldn't make her sick.

He was back at his hotel with Mardell at 6:30. Mardell was preoccupied. Her voice sounded far away.

"Did you have a good day at the office?" she asked.

"Very good."

"A woman called you today."

"Yeah? Who?"

"She said her name was Maerose Prizzi."

He had his back to her.

"She wanted to know what I was doing in your room," Mardell said.

"It must have been some crazy woman."

"She said she was engaged to be married to you."

He turned to face her. "She said that?"

"Yes."

"She had no right to say that. I never said I was engaged to her."

"Who is she, Charley?" Mardell asked as if she were talking over a recipe for a ham sandwich.

"She's the granddaughter of the man I work for. She's much younger than me."

"How much younger? About twenty years? Is she nine, Charley?"

"Listen--I know her all my life. I mean, she's had one of those schoolgirl crushes from away back."

"Then you are not engaged to marry her."

"Engaged? To Maerose Prizzi? Mardell--she's like a relative to me." He gave God time to strike him down. "I mean like a second cousin or a kid sister."

Mardell got into bed, took two pills, shaking them out of the vial elaborately, snapped out the light on her night table and lay on her side, facing away from the other side of the bed. "Don't talk to me anymore, Charley."

Charley jammed himself into his pajamas and stamped off into the living room. He dropped into a chair, lit a big cigar and stared at a racing form. He was a condemned man.

•

Maerose appeared to be looking out the window of her office, which faced a pleasant, landscaped back yard behind the double brownstone her company occupied in Turtle Bay, but she was looking into her mind and seeing Charley. Her face was blank, her eyes were like the Xs in the eyes of a cartoon character after it has been wonked over the head with a fact of life. She couldn't believe it. She had called the Prizzi hotel in Miami Beach, she had asked for Mr. Charles A. Partanna and a woman had answered.

"Put him on the phone."

"Mr. Partanna is not here."

"Where is he?"

"He's at his office."

It was one of those superior voices. Charley's office! "Who is this?"

"This is Mrs. Partanna."

The shock was like an icy sword thrust into Maerose's bowels. "Missus Partanna? When did that happen?"

"To whom am I speaking?"

"This is Maerose Prizzi. Please remember that name, so that you can get it right when you tell Mr. Partanna I called. I am Mr. Partanna's fiancée."

It was the broad's turn to take the kick in the head. Maerose could hear her gasp. She could hear her make a light geek sound. "His fiancée?"

"What's your name?"

"Mardell La Tour."

"Listen, Miss La Tour. I'm calling from New York, or else I'd come over there and we could both break a couple of chairs over that son of a bitch's head. When do you get back to New York?"

"Monday, I suppose. But, really, Miss Prizzi--"

"You and I will have a little talk. I'll call you."

•

The moment she hung up on Mardell La Tour, Maerose put detectives on Charley. If he continued to two-time her with that woman, she'd break his back.

She knew from her father that Charley was in Miami to handle a problem with a schmeck producer, but he had told the woman that he had to go to an office, not that he would have told her why he was there, no matter what; but the point was, the woman couldn't be in the environment, because any woman in the environment knew that men like Charley didn't have an office when they went to Miami.

Maerose looked deep into her future and knew that she needed Charley. All her plans depended on Charley. Finding out that he had a woman with him in Miami only made the feeling sharper.

•

Maerose wore flat-heeled shoes and very little make-up to create the little-girl effect for her grandfather. She put on a kilt with a Fraser plaid and a Shetland pullover, then a tartan tam-o'-shanter with a chin strap and a big tuft on top. She stared at herself in a full-length mirror and wondered how Scottish transvestites dressed.

The phonograph was playing Vincenzo Bellini's Il Pirata, a Sicilian story. It was in the middle of the melting cantilena, Pietosa al Padre', when she entered the don's room. Her grandfather smiled at her and bowed his head but held up a hand to keep her from speaking until the aria was finished. Maerose sat down with her feet held primly together.

The room was a replica of the duke's bedroom from Corrado Prizzi's boyhood. There was hardly a space on the wall that was not covered with a 19th Century painting or an aquatint in a baroque frame. The furniture was dark, heavy and overstuffed, and everything in the room except the don had fringe on it.

The aria ended. The don stood and opened his arms to her. She rushed into his embrace--but carefully, because he was so small and fragile.

"My beautiful girl," the don said. "Come, you must sit down and have a cookie, my dear."

They sat side by side with a small taboret holding a heaping plate of Sicilian sweets and cookies between them.

"How good it is to see you," the don said.

"I wanted you to be the first to have the news, Grandfather. I haven't even told Poppa yet."

"News?" he said delicately.

"I am going to be married to Charley Partanna."

"Oh! What wonderful news." He clasped his hands before his tiny chest and rolled his eyes heavenward. "The two most perfect young people of my life--a marriage!"

"I have come for your blessing."

"You have my blessing a thousand times, if you are sure this is what you want and that there will be a marriage."

"We are sure, Grandfather."

"Then we must have a big party and make an announcement. Because it is for you--my favorite granddaughter--it will be the biggest party people have seen for months. At the old Palermo Gardens. Four weeks from now?" He held out his hand and she kissed it. She left the room with wet eyes. On the phonograph, the quintet, and soon the sextet, began to develop with comments from the chorus. It was a beautiful moment. She had nailed Charley to the stage.

•

The day after Charley got back to New York, a political situation--namely, the coming election of a new mayor--had presented dangers to him. Pop, who had people everywhere, had found out that the reform candidate intended to go on television and charge Charley with the murder of a man who was high up in the narcotics business. And then the reform candidate intended to announce that the mayor was a part of the business, too. So Pop insisted that Charley get out of town. He was sent to New Orleans under the protection of Gennaro Fustino, the capo who handled Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and southern Arizona, who was married to Don Corrado's baby sister, Birdie.

When Charley got to New Orleans, Maerose called him from New York. She started out cordial.

"Cholly? Mae."

He leaped out of the chair and took the call standing at attention. "Hey, Mae!"

"How come you didn't call me?"

"Well--maybe they told you--this was an emergency trip."

"I am not going to wait around until you get back, Charley. I am coming to New Orleans."

"Mae! Wait! Check it with Pop before you make a move. I got a job your uncle Gennaro wants me to do. I won't have any time to see you--as much as I want to."

"Either this whole thing matters to you or it don't. If you won't come to New York, I'm going there. And don't try to dummy up on me, either, Charley. I talked to that woman you took with you to Miami. I'm gonna make you drop the other shoe. And you know something else?"

"What?"

"I hate big sloppy broads."

"Who?"

"You know who."

"She may be big, but she ain't sloppy. And I'd say the same for you, Mae, if anybody ever said that about you."

She slammed the phone down. He was bewildered. What did he say wrong?

•

Monday at 12 minutes before noon, Charley watched Maerose come off the ramp from the plane at Moisant airport. She was wearing a fitted knee-length redwool suit with a black-fox collar and cuffs and a zip-front jacket. She wore spikeheeled Italian winkle-picker shoes with long pointed toes. He had never seen her look so gorgeous. She was smiling broadly as she rushed up to him and threw her arms around him. "Jeez, Charley," she said, "we gotta catch up."

"You gotta be the classiest thing ever come into this airport."

On the 11-mile ride back into town, they held hands, but that was all, because the driver was an old friend of Vincent's and he wouldn't stop talking. When they finally got into Charley's hotel room, they both started to talk at the same time, stopped, then Maerose put her arms around his neck, holding on silently. After a while, they kissed.

"What's it gonna be, Charley?"

"Mae--I gotta say it--we ain't engaged. You know that."

"I didn't come all the way down here to have you tell me stuff like that, Charley."

"We gotta get this straightened out."

"Get it straight the right way! You and me were meant for each other. We live the same way, we think the same way." Suddenly, she switched to Sicilian. "We speak the same language, Charley."

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Yeah. I know. You're right, Mae. But we're talking about a lifetime, so I can't fool around with your life. We have to be sure. Give me two weeks against a lifetime, Mae."

She took him in her arms and pulled him toward the bed.

"That'll never work, Charley. It'll just go on and on. I saw the don. I told him--formally--that you and me are gonna get married."

Charley's legs gave way. He dropped into a chair beside the bed. "You told the don that?"

"He wants to set a date. And after I give him a date, he wants to give us a big engagement party and bring in the people from most of the families around the country. I gotta tell him whether it's on or off, Charley. That means you gotta tell me."

"Set a date? Jesus, Mae--"

"A line has to be drawn, Charley. We can't go on and on like this."

Charley thought of his father and mother. He thought of the don and the family and how he had never lived outside it, because, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing outside the family. If only Mardell were the kind who would take a bundle of cash and forget the whole thing.

"Yeah," he said to Maerose, staring into her eyes. "We gotta set a date."

She kissed him. "It better be settled in your mind, Charley, because by now the don has told a lot of people. Like my father."

•

Two days later, in New York, Maerose ran a finger over the heavy engraving on the parchment paper and drank in the words that glowed like jewels under her eyes.

Mr. Vincent PrizziofNew York Cityannounces the engagementof his daughterMiss Maerose Amalia PrizzitoMr. Charles Amadeo Partannason of Mr. Angelo Partannaof New York City(continued overleaf)Maerose reread the small card that was an invitation to the reception at the Palermo Gardens. It was the absolute clincher.

She folded one copy of the formal announcement and stuffed it into a heavy cream-colored envelope, then dropped the small card into it. Smiling serenely, she sealed it and addressed it to Miss Mardell La Tour. She stamped the envelope and put it carefully aside in a small drawer of her desk before beginning to address the other envelopes from the long list at her elbow.

•

Four hundred and nine announcements and invitations went into the mail, to a net of 812 guests. All Prizzis, Sesteros and Garrones down to the age of 18 were included. When the list was finally approved and all the invitations mailed, 196 tuxedos were sent to dry cleaners around the country, a total of $476,000 was spent on dresses, furs and hairdos; 83 advance reservations were made for 137 stretch limousines, and travel and airlines customer-relations people felt a strain.

There weren't going to be enough available suites in the three midtown Prizzi-owned hotels, so 27 of the year-round tenants were given free, premature holidays in the Prizzi hotels in Miami, Atlantic City or Las Vegas--the spa of their choice--together with $500 worth of chips. They went out; the guests went in.

Eight judges and three Congressmen, feeling sufficiently anonymous in a crowd of that size, had accepted with pleasure. Two Cabinet members, 11 U.S. Senators and the White House sent their wives or secretaries out into the stores in Washington to select suitable engagement presents. In all, 419 invitees spent $405,289 on gifts for the young couple; a future boss of the Prizzi family was going to marry the granddaughter of Corrado Prizzi.

Lieutenant Davey Hanly and the entire borough squad accepted invitations as tokens of the New York Police Department. The mayor of New York personally provided the motorcycle escort to take the bride-to-be and her father to the reception, and he also pledged to her and to her fiancé a seven-year lease on a six-room apartment in the new luxury Garden Grove apartments, which were rapidly being constructed in an emerging part of the city, even if it wasn't Brooklyn.

The principal families of the fratellanza from across the nation sent contingents. In addition to the more spectacular guests, the third generation of Prizzis, Sesteros and Garrones, the strictly legitimate members of the family, had to be accommodated, because each one of them knew there was no way to get out of attending the engagement party of Maerose Prizzi.

Maerose didn't sleep much. She kept sipping champagne all through the work of planning, so she didn't eat much. She wasn't really physically ready for it when, ten days before the engagement party was to happen, the people she had following Charley reported that he had gone directly from his New Orleans plane connection to Mardell La Tour's apartment and had been spending every night there.

That really did it. Maerose's wig slipped. She went into a kind of controlled hysteria that pulled her closer to the edge of doing something irreversible.

She couldn't believe the written report that she held in her hands and read over and over. In New Orleans, he had looked her in the eye and renounced the woman. That was how she remembered it. She tried to firm it up in her mind, but now that she thought about it, it was all kind of vague. He had pulled her onto the bed, held her in his arms and said--maybe she was kidding herself, she knew she couldn't remember much after they got into bed. But he knew the engagement was officially announced, because he knew she had told her grandfather, so he should have known that the woman had to be thrown away.

Everybody knew Charley was a goddamn dummy where women were concerned, and she had been willing to make every allowance for that. Her second thoughts were that Charley didn't deserve to live. He had dishonored himself, and by dishonoring her, he had dishonored the Prizzis. She decided the quickest way to have the job done on Charley was to tell her father. She knew her father. He would get out a contract on Charley. Charley wouldn't last two days after she finished massaging her father, but even while she was thinking that way, she knew she couldn't let anybody give it to Charley. If her plan to take over the family was going to work, she needed Charley. He was her ticket to the whole thing. But if he resisted her about Mardell, would he also resist her in her plans for her future? Damn!

•

Motorcycle cops of the escort were talking together on the street in front of Vincent's house when Charley got out of the stretched car and went up the walk to the house. They were waiting for him. The front door opened and they were all dressed to go. Maerose was dressed more beautifully than even she had ever been dressed in her life, or maybe it was because he had never seen her wearing this kind of long dress with all the bare everywhere and the hair like a helmet. Charley kissed Mae on the cheek. She stayed hanging there after he finished, as if she were waiting for something more. They went out to the car. Both men were wearing tuxedos like a couple of waiters.

Maerose sat between the men inside the enormous tonneau and listened to Charley's silence, interpreting it as indifference. It was the biggest night of their lives so far and she was getting no vibes from Charley, just cold waves. She knew she hadn't won. She would be standing there for the rest of her life with an armful of cold fish.

There was time to think. Her contingency plan was flexible. Maerose stared at her dreams: having Charley, running the legit operation, dominating the family across the board, from the street side to the board rooms--with Charley at her side. But if she could not swing Charley over to her side, then she could also have overrated the ease with which she could take over the Prizzi family. The one thing naturally followed the other. The first thing was the absolute measure of the second. If she went along with what was set up for them tonight, none of it was ever going to work, and nothing could be more clear than that.

She was going to have to move right away to get herself off the hook. It was going to total a lot of people. Her father would go out of his mind. When she did what she had to do, it would bring a lot of punishment down on her, but she had time on her side. All she had to do was watch and wait and after a little while, her grandfather would let her back into the family and she could move ahead on getting what she wanted with some alternate plan.

•

The enormous room was arranged so that all the guests were seated at large tables on three sides of the dance floor. The table of honor, where Maerose and Charley sat with the don, Aunt Amalia, Vincent, Father Passanante, Angelo Partanna and Eduardo, was at the center of the room. Over all of it, banquet room and dance floor, hung three large chandeliers from which were festooned crepe-paper ribbons of red, white and blue from one side of the room and red, white and green from the other. Balloons bobbed against the ceiling in a dozen colors, rising in the warmed air. There was a raised stage with two alternating orchestras: the four-piece band of musicians who were traditional fixtures at all Prizzi affairs and a modern, 11-piece group that provided music of more current interest (up to 1955). Along two of the walls were long, two-tiered tables that held heaped platters of salads, antipastos, cold cuts and sandwiches; mountains of tiny macaroni and farfelline; piles of salciccia and banks of pastries and ice cream. On the third wall, there was a bar where the extra men congregated. There were six bottles of two colors of wine on each table. At the tables on either side of the table of honor sat the representatives of the families and one row removed from the dance floor were the statesmen, conglomerate heads and prelates, including the papal nuncio. All the men, except the prelates, wore tuxedos. The women were dressed merely spectacularly. The clergy wore scarlet or purple soutanes. On each wall hung enormous sepia portraits: Arturo Toscanini, Pope Pius XII, Enrico Caruso and Richard M. Nixon in heavy gold frames.

Maerose began the evening by clamoring so loudly for champagne that Vincent felt she was making it necessary for him to order at least a token glass of champagne for everyone in the room, which he resented bitterly and which necessitated hurried telephone calls followed by the rushed dispatching of large trucks from warehouses. Mae refused food. She was getting drunk. Charley kept asking her, then telling her, to take it easy. She said, "You want me to sit at this table or you want me to roam around and make a coupla new friends?"

During one dance with Charley, she began--by mussing the hair of other women and occasionally goosing the men.

"Mae, fahcrissake! Whatta you doing?" Charley said, locking in a fixed smile.

"Whatta you mean? I'm celebrating. We're gonna get married, remember?"

Charley was on the dance floor with Julia Fustino, Gennaro's daughter-in-law, who had helped entertain them in New Orleans. Julia had won the Harvest Moon Ball in the Lindy Class the year before she was married. She was a terrific dancer. Maerose began to behave like a jealous woman. She kept calling out to Charley from her table, "How come you don't dance with the old bags, Charley? How come you go straight for the gorgeous women?" or (very loudly) "Hey, Charley--come on! This is your engagement party, not an orgy," and "Come on, Charley, drag her into a telephone booth and get it over with, why doncha?"

Gradually, conversations at tables near the dance floor stopped altogether as the guests watched Maerose and little else.

Charley and Julia were dancing a sedate fox trot when Mae lurched out of her chair and grabbed Julia's arm, pulling her away from Charley. "I saw that, you son of a bitch!" she yelled and whacked Charley across the chops. There was one great gasp from a few hundred throats and no gasps were greater or more horrified than the gasps from the center table directly on the dance floor.

Maerose pushed Charley away and half staggered to the bar, where a line of young men had been drinking and watching the dancing. She grabbed a tall, dark one and pulled him onto the dance floor, where she went into as lascivious a dance as either Vincent or his father, who took a large gross out of pornography, had ever seen. Vincent was trying on a case of apoplexy. The don looked as if he were going to turn her into stone. Only Father Passanante at the main table seemed to be enjoying watching the dance. After one turn around the dance floor, which Eduardo said could have got her pregnant, as Charley came forward from having returned Julia Fustino to her table, Mae threw her arms around the young man, socked her hips violently into his hips and kissed him passionately. Vincent rushed out onto the floor, got there ahead of Charley and pried the two of them apart.

He grabbed her arms and began to pull her toward the door and said, "We're going home."

She jerked her arms loose. "Go home, Poppa," she said. "It's past your bedtime." She grabbed the young man's arm and pulled him away. She yelled at everyone, "In your hat and over your ears," and sprinted out of the Palermo Gardens, pulling the young man along behind her. They disappeared from the room. Nobody knew what to say. Then, all of a sudden, everyone knew what to say.

Hitting the outside pavement, dragging the young man, Maerose yelled, "Zingo!"

The driver broke away from a knot of drivers. "Yes, miss?"

"Get me out of here. Where's the car?"

Zingo ran to the illegally parked limousine, four feet from the entrance, and backed it up in front of Mae. She got into the car and pulled the man in behind her.

As the limousine pulled away, Charley and Vincent came running out of the building.

"What the hell is this?" Vincent said. "Did somebody put something in her drink?"

"Holy shit," Charley said. He wasn't sure what had happened, but he knew Mae had made her move and that he didn't want it that way. She had gotten him off the hook, but she had fallen into the soup. It was bad enough the way it had been, but who needed this? He couldn't figure out what to do except to let her sober up, then take her out to Vegas and marry her and stay away until the whole thing blew over.

He knew she hadn't been any drunker than Father Passanante, who didn't drink. She had set the whole thing up because she thought he wanted to get off the hook but that he didn't know how to do it. He knew one thing: It was never going to blow over with Vincent. As far as Vincent was concerned, she had dishonored him in front of the most important people on the planet. She was dead where he was concerned.

"I am ashamed in front of you, Charley," Vincent was saying. "She spit on all of us." He was so shaken he spoke in Sicilian. "She ain't my daughter no more."

"Come on, Vincent. It's cold. We gotta go inside."

"How we gonna face all them people?"

"We're Prizzis, Vincent. That's enough for them. We found that out tonight."

When they got back to the table, Pop wasn't there. They took their seats. Charley began a conversation about the Mets. Eduardo talked with Father Passanante about the stock market. Vincent took three pills. Don Corrado remembered, aloud and in close detail, some wild boar he had eaten years before on a trip with his wife.

•

Charley sat in the don's room in the don's house the next morning at 11:20. He looked into the don's tiny, cold eyes. "What will happen to her?"

"Her father must be considered. He was wronged in front of all those people. The family was wronged. She will be taken care of, but she must be banished from Brooklyn. What I am asking you to understand is that she will be banished from the family--and you are a part of the family. She is banished from you. She banished herself from you."

"I understand, padrino."

"Have a cookie, Charley. Have a nice cup of coffee. Now, tell me about how you handled Little Jaimito in Miami."

"Maerose was a tall, gorgeous grabber and the most classically Sicilian Prizzi of them all."

"This was Corrado Prizzi's granddaughter. But she was acting very horny. What was he supposed to do?"

"'Engaged? To Maerose? She's like a relative to me.' Charley gave God time to strike him down."