The Godfather - Mario Puzo [235]
Kay put her hand on Hagen’s arm. “He didn’t order you to tell me all the other things?”
Hagen hesitated a moment as if debating whether to tell her a final truth. “You still don’t understand,” he said. “If you told Michael what I’ve told you today, I’m a dead man.” He paused again. “You and the children are the only people on this earth he couldn’t harm.”
It was a long five minutes after that Kay rose from the grass and they started walking back to the house. When they were almost there, Kay said to Hagen, “After supper, can you drive me and the kids to New York in your car?”
“That’s what I came for,” Hagen said.
A week after she returned to Michael she went to a priest for instruction to become a Catholic.
FROM THE INNERMOST recess of the church the bell tolled for repentance. As she had been taught to do, Kay struck her breast lightly with her clenched hand, the stroke of repentance. The bell tolled again and there was the shuffling of feet as the communicants left their seats to go to the altar rail. Kay rose to join them. She knelt at the altar and from the depths of the church the bell tolled again. With her closed hand she struck her heart once more. The priest was before her. She tilted back her head and opened her mouth to receive the papery thin wafer. This was the most terrible moment of all. Until it melted away and she could swallow and she could do what she came to do.
Washed clean of sin, a favored supplicant, she bowed her head and folded her hands over the altar rail. She shifted her body to make her weight less punishing to her knees.
She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.
Afterword
by Peter Bart
I FIRST MET Mario Puzo at a difficult time in his life. He had just completed the first one hundred pages of The Godfather and had spent the meager $5,000 advance from his publisher. At forty-five, Puzo already owed $20,000 to relatives and bookmakers, so he understandably felt a certain panic. At the time I was a young production vice president with Paramount Pictures, so we had cause to circle each other warily. I was interested in his novel as possible film material; he was interested in whatever option money I might offer. Yet, eager as he was for a movie sale, Puzo was direct and plainspoken about his novel in the works. “I’m writing this book to make money,” he told me straight on. “This isn’t War and Peace.” Under prodding, however, he began to discuss its themes and principal characters with some passion, only to catch himself and reassert: “Look, I don’t want to mislead you—I’m doing this for the money.” His first two novels, The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), represented some really good writing, he told me. “I even immodestly think of them as art.” The books had elicited good reviews but zero income, Puzo said, so it was time for him to get down to the business of supporting his family.
Puzo finally scratched together the money to finish his book, thanks to a paperback sale and an option payment from Paramount. The novel went on to make him millions. It hovered on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty-seven weeks and became the number one book all over the world, transforming Puzo from a penniless writer to an international celebrity. Suddenly he was hanging with movie stars, attracting lucrative screenwriting assignments, and holding forth in a palatial summer home in Malibu. Through it all he remained the same taciturn, down-to-earth literary craftsman who was delighted that readers around the world had embraced his characters even though he still felt he’d not written that good a novel.
Did he really believe this? Like many writers, Puzo liked to give off