Omerta - Mario Puzo [59]
In the privacy of their home they reverted to their origins. Mr. Pryor wore patched baggy pants and collarless black shirts, while Mrs. Pryor dressed in a very loose black dress and cooked in the old Italian style. He called her Marizza and she called him Zu.
Mr. Pryor worked as the chief executive of a private bank that was a subsidiary of a huge Palermo bank. He treated Astorre as a favorite nephew yet kept his distance. Mrs. Pryor indulged him with food and affection as if he were a grandson.
Mr. Pryor gave Astorre a car and a handsome living allowance. Schooling had already been arranged at a small obscure university just outside London that specialized in business and banking but also had a good reputation in the arts. Astorre enrolled in the required curriculum, but his real interest was in his acting and singing classes. He filled his schedule with electives in music and history. It was during this stay in London that he fell in love with the imagery of fox hunting—not the killing and the chase but the pageantry—the red coats, the brown dogs, the black horses.
In one of his acting classes Astorre met a girl his own age, Rosie Conner. She was extremely pretty, with that air of innocence that can be devastating to young men and provocative to older ones. She was also talented and played some of the leading roles in the plays staged by the class. Astorre, on the other hand, was relegated to smaller parts. He was handsome enough, but something in his personality prevented him from sharing himself with an audience. Rosie had no such problem. It was as if she were inviting every audience to seduce her.
They took vocal classes together too, and Rosie admired Astorre’s singing. It was evident the teacher did not share her admiration; in fact, he advised Astorre to drop his music courses. He did not really have more than a pleasant voice, but even worse, he had no musical comprehension.
After only two weeks Astorre and Rosie became lovers. This was more by her initiation than by his, though by this time he was madly in love with her—as madly in love as any sixteen-year-old can be. He almost completely forgot Nicole. Rosie seemed more amused than passionate. But she was so vibrantly alive, she adored him when she was with him; she was ardent in bed and always generous in every way. A week after they became lovers, she bought him an expensive present: a red hunting jacket with a black suede hunting cap and fine leather whip. She presented them as something of a joke.
As young lovers do, they told each other their life stories. Rosie told him her parents owned a huge ranch in South Dakota and that she had spent her childhood in a dreary Plains town. She finally escaped by insisting she wanted to study drama in England. But her childhood had not been a total loss. She had learned to ride, hunt, and ski, and in high school she had been a star in the drama club as well as on the tennis court.
Astorre poured his heart out to her. He told her how he longed to be a singer, how he loved the English way of life with its old medieval structures, its royal pageantry, its polo matches and fox hunts. But he never told her about his uncle, Don Raymonde Aprile, and his childhood visits to Sicily.
She made him dress in his hunting garb and then undressed him. “You are so handsome,” she said. “Maybe you were an English lord in a past life.”
This was the only part of her that made Astorre uncomfortable. She truly believed in reincarnation. But then she made love to him and he forgot everything else. It seemed that he had never been so happy, except in Sicily.
But at the end of one year, Mr. Pryor took him into his den to give him some bad news. Mr. Pryor was wearing pantaloons and a peasant knit jacket, his head covered with a checkered, billed cap whose shadow hid his eyes.
He said to Astorre, “We have enjoyed your stay