He kept his eyes on her as he reached into his jacket pocket. For a terrible moment she thought he was reaching for a gun or a knife. He took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Are you through?” he said.
“You don’t understand. I’m not like you, Michael. I could have never killed our… our son. I flew to Las Vegas to help organize a fund-raiser for the art museum, and right after I got there I had a miscarriage. I didn’t have any word from you for two weeks after that happened. Two weeks. No woman should have to live through that alone. I decided to leave you. I had other reasons, bigger reasons, all the reasons we’ve talked about, but that was the last straw. I knew you’d never give me a divorce. So I told you I’d had an abortion. I wanted to hurt you, and I told a lie to do it. I wanted to see that look on your face, and I saw it. I wanted to see what you’d do, and you hit me.”
Michael lowered his head and, very slightly, nodded.
“Jules Segal was my regular doctor, Michael. Do you really think that anybody, especially him, a man who knew who you are as well as anyone in Las Vegas, would have performed an abortion on the wife of a-of a man in your position? Segal wouldn’t have… I don’t know… lit a cigarette without your blessing. I never in my wildest dreams, my wildest nightmares, thought you’d send your goons-”
“We need to go,” Michael said. “I’m going.” He turned and went into the other room. “Come on, Mary, Tony. Who wants to go for an airplane ride?”
Mary shouted that she did, she did, and Tony didn’t say anything, but within moments her children had both kissed her and said their good-byes. No one turned off the television.
Kay Corleone-an accessory to murder before the fact-collapsed onto the bed.
She had no one to blame but herself. Michael was a killer. She’d fallen in love with him not in spite of that but-as he told her about what he’d done in the war-because of it. She knew in her heart that he’d killed those two men in the restaurant. She knew about a lot of other killings, too, and pretended not to. She married him and changed religions-leaving one that allowed divorce for one that prohibited it-so that she could go to confession and try to live with herself for loving a killer. When she’d finally worn Tom Hagen down and gotten him to tell her that the house in Lake Tahoe had in fact been torched and bulldozed because the FBI had bugged the beams and foundation, she’d actually thought, This is the last straw. But no. She’d stayed. She’d rebuilt. When men with machine guns opened fire and nearly killed her children, she left the house but stayed with him. Not until he abandoned her when she lost the baby and hit her and killed his own brother did she do what a truly innocent person would have done years ago.
A news broadcast came on. The lead story of course was the swearing in of the toothy new president. Kay looked up. In a shot of the crowd, she saw Tom and Theresa Hagen. She put her head back down, profoundly alone, and cried herself to sleep.
Chapter 24
DRESSED IN a pink ball gown that barely contained her swollen breasts and clutching a pair of Superman pajamas, Francesca Van Arsdale, six months pregnant with her second child, chased her first one (two-year-old William Brewster Van Arsdale IV, whom they were calling Sonny) through the maze of boxes in their apartment on Capitol Hill. Sonny was naked except for the gold Notre Dame football helmet he’d gotten for Christmas from her brother Frankie. She heard Billy’s Dual-Ghia and looked out the kitchen window. The sight of the woman getting out of Billy’s ridiculously expensive car stopped Francesca in her tracks.
She dropped the pajamas. It wasn’t the babysitter. It was her. That Woman.
Francesca braced herself against the kitchen sink. But no. It wasn’t. On second glance, the babysitter was about fifteen and looked no more like the woman Billy had cheated on her with-another member of the Floridians for Shea staff-than would have any other willowy blond beauty who was everything Francesca was not.
“Ready, Francie?” Billy called, opening the door.
Sonny, ecstatic, sprinted toward his father and gave him an inadvertent but savage header to the crotch. As Billy moaned and crumpled into a chair, Francesca scooped up the pajamas and then Sonny, too, and gave the girl-the little sister of someone Billy knew from Harvard Law School-an agonizingly thorough set of instructions.
“You look fantastic,” Billy said, holding the car door open. “Gorgeous.”
Francesca was quite clear on the fact that she looked like a big pink cow. She struggled to get into that low-slung car with some semblance of dignity. Billy didn’t seem to notice. When she was in, he leaned down and kissed her, chastely at first, and then passionately. When the kiss was over, he thanked her. Thanked her!
It had been like this for weeks. Her own mother had told her to forget about the affair. Men are going to have their goumadas. You know why surveys say that fifty percent of men cheat on their wives? she’d asked. Because the other fifty are liars. But once in a while, she’d said, you can pretend to be surprised to learn about some woman-which, if you don’t do it too often, can spark enough guilt to make your husband treat you like you were courting. In contrast, Francesca’s sister’s advice had been to kill him. But Kathy had never liked Billy. She was also (despite a string of boyfriends in London, where she was getting her Ph.D. in Continental literature) not a mother. Being a mother changed things more than anyone who was not a mother could possibly imagine. What was Francesca supposed to do, get a divorce? Raise two children alone? So far, her mother seemed to have been dead-on. But Francesca didn’t trust Billy’s newfound devotion. Despite all his penitential tenderness, he’d made love to her maybe twice since she started to show. When she’d been pregnant the first time, Billy had been turned on by it, had wanted to do it all the time.
“You should see my office, babe,” Billy said. Right after the inaugural address, Daniel Brendan Shea-the president’s brother and new attorney general-had assembled his staff and had a meeting. This didn’t bode well for Billy working fewer hours than he had during the campaign (though maybe in this case those hours would be more exclusively devoted to work). “It’s small, but it’s on the same floor as Danny’s.”
“You’re calling him Danny?” You’re calling me babe?
“That’s what he said to call him.” Billy actually stuck his chest out with pride. This was not a gesture she found endearing, though maybe she once had.
“On a first-name basis with the attorney general,” she marveled. Did he call That Woman babe, too? “I’m proud of you.”
Which, despite everything, was true.
“The third youngest attorney general in the history of the United States,” Billy said. “Before he’s done, don’t be surprised if he’s considered the best one, too. He has an incredible combination of intelligence and-this doesn’t sound like a compliment, but it is-ruthlessness.”
“Sounds to me,” she said, “like he’s the right man for the job.”
On the way to the ball, they made quick stops at parties at several different embassies and hotels. As if by magic, Billy knew where to go, where the valet parking would be, the names of the hosts, and how to find them. When Francesca got inside, she had to pee-she always had to pee; it was like having a truck parked on her bladder-and she always guessed wrong about which way the bathroom was. She couldn’t help but be dazzled to be in these ornate mansions-especially the French embassy, which gave her an evil thrill, thinking about how jealous Kathy would be when she heard about it. And everywhere she turned, she saw a famous face or met a powerful person. But at the same time, she was miserable. Strangers kept pawing her, presuming that they could touch her belly, and Billy never once told them to keep their filthy hands to themselves. Her back was killing her. And she felt inadequate and out of place, as she had for most of her marriage. The pregnancy aside-and it was never aside; this kid was going to be a giant-no one looked like her (the Italian embassy was not among their stops). The women were either tall, WASPy, and glamorous, with their hair piled high and sprayed perfectly in place (like That Woman, in other words), or they were Washington wives: elegant matrons in fat pearls who somehow managed to be both unobtrusive and lively.