“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.
There were about a thousand men in his camp. Most were only a generation or two removed from their roots in Europe. If one thing united them, though, it was their pride in being Americans-a pride enhanced by their shared, daily mission. So when the Germans annexed Czechoslovakia, those who came from Germany felt no animosity from their Czech or Slovak campmates. Similarly, the only nationalistic fervor touched off in the Winooski Valley by the Italian invasion of Albania or the Soviet-Finnish War was a shared dread of what might happen next and how it would affect the USA.
“It’s going to be different for us,” said Joe Lucadello one night. He was a tutor, too. They were the last ones in the classroom building, locking it up. “Italians. Just wait.”
Joe’s people were from Genoa by way of Camden, New Jersey. He’d wanted to be an architect, but his family had lost everything in the stock market crash. Now he designed retaining walls and picnic shelters. Smart as a whip and about as skinny, Joe was Michael’s best friend in the corps.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Michael said. If America was drawn into the European war, everyone of Italian descent would be suspect.
“The German fellas look just like-”
“I know,” Michael said. “You’re right.”
“Don’t laugh, but I’ve been working on a plan to kill Mussolini.”
“Come on,” Michael said, laughing. “How are you going to do that?”
“I didn’t say I knew how. I said I’m working on a plan.”
Joe was that rare combination: a resourceful schemer who was prepared to act. Ordinarily, he was practical, too, but he had an idealistic streak.
“You couldn’t get within five miles of Mussolini. Nobody could.”
“Think about it. You read a lot of history books. There’s never been anyone-any hero, any villain, any king, any leader of any kind-that it was impossible to kill.”
It was a sobering thought. Michael did think about it, and he admitted that maybe Joe was right. “I suppose when you’re done with Mussolini you’ll go after Hitler.”
“I know I’m just dreaming,” Joe said. “I’m not a fool. I know I’m not really the man for the job. It’s just hard to watch the way the world is going and not do anything about it.”
On this they agreed. The ancient rift between northern and southern Italians had no effect on their friendship or their shared contempt for Mussolini. They dreaded war. At the same time-because it would crush Mussolini and at the same time be a chance for men like them once and for all to prove themselves in the eyes of the American people-they yearned for it.
Then there was the matter of Ustica. About the same time Mussolini signed the Axis treaty with Hitler, he ordered his army to Sicily to round up all known or suspected Mafiosi and imprison them on the tiny island of Ustica (Vito continued to regard Mussolini as just another vainglorious oppressor whose time would come and go). When Michael and Joe talked about the men imprisoned at Ustica, they lamented the lack of American due process. Michael gave no indication of his father’s allegiance with those men. Joe knew the Corleones as olive oil importers. There were cases of the stuff in the camp’s mess kitchen.
In June of 1940, when Italy declared war against the Allies, Joe Lucadello had a plan. “We go to Canada,” he said.
“What’s in Canada?”
Joe pulled out a newspaper clipping. According to the article, the Royal Canadian Air Force was seeking experienced American pilots. A World War I ace named Billy Bishop-“the Eddie Rickenbacker of Canada,” the article called him-would oversee their training personally.
“That’s great,” Michael said, “but we’re not experienced pilots.”
Joe had it all worked out. He had a friend, a Polish Jew from Rhode Island, who was a pilot for the CCC, dumping water to fight forest fires and spraying DDT on bug-infested areas where crews were about to work. Joe got the guy to give them lessons, and they all three went to Ottawa to join up. Joe convincingly forged licenses for him and Michael. They were all initially accepted. Two days later, Billy Bishop himself walked into the barracks and asked to see Michael Corleone (which he pronounced correctly-a tipoff something was up). He asked to see Michael’s pilot’s license. There were a number of men in that room without licenses, some of them crop dusters and barnstormers who a few months later would be holding their own against the Luftwaffe. The license wasn’t the point. Somehow, Michael knew, his father had found out he was here. There was no sense using the forged license and possibly getting Joe kicked out, too. “I’m sorry, sir,” Michael said to Billy Bishop. “I don’t have one.”
Michael took a bus back to the camp and got his job back. Six months later, he was on another bus, heading to New York for a surprise birthday party for his father, when the driver heard the news about Pearl Harbor. Shaking, he pulled over to the shoulder and turned up the radio. Eventually, they got back on the road. Michael walked straight from the bus terminal to Times Square. The place was teeming with men bragging about the killing they were about to do. Michael got in the line for the Army Air Corps, but as he waited an officer walked down the line and told everyone who was under five ten that he’d have to seek his revenge in another branch of the service. Michael missed the height requirement by an inch. The Marines, too, appealed to his ideals. An elite fighting squad, tougher than the rest, with a rigorous initiation and a sacred code of honor. They had the same height requirement, but emotions were running high, and Michael and the lieutenant signing him up gave each other a look and an understanding passed between them. Michael caught a cab to his father’s house.