The Last Don - Mario Puzo [198]
“And you know the most terrible thing?” the Don said. “Your father, Pippi, made a mistake. He should never have spared Rose Marie, though I loved him for it.” He sighed. He took a sip of wine and, looking Cross full in the face, he said, “Be aware. The world is what it is. And you are what you are.”
On the flight back to Vegas, Cross pondered the riddle. Why had the Don finally told him the story of the Santadio War? To prevent him from visiting Rose Marie and hearing a different version? Or was he warning him off, telling him not to avenge his father’s murder because Dante was involved. The Don was a mystery. But of one thing Cross was sure. If it was Dante who killed his father, then Dante must kill him. And surely Don Domenico Clericuzio knew that, too.
CHAPTER 19
DANTE CLERICUZIO DID not have to hear this story. His mother, Rose Marie, had whispered it into his tiny ear from the time he was two years old: whenever she had one of her fits, whenever she felt her grief for the lost love of her husband and her brother Silvio, whenever her terror of Pippi and her brothers overcame her.
It was only when Rose Marie had her worst fits that she accused her father, Don Clericuzio, of the death of her husband. The Don always denied giving the order, as he denied that his sons and Pippi had carried out the massacre. But after she accused him two times, he packed her off to the clinic for a month. After that, she only ranted and raved, and never accused him directly again.
But Dante remembered her whisperings always. As a child he loved his grandfather and believed in his innocence. But he schemed against his three uncles though they always treated him tenderly. Especially, he dreamed of vengeance on Pippi, and though these were fantasies, he thought them for his mother’s sake.
When Rose Marie was normal she took care of the widower Don Clericuzio with the utmost affection. To her three brothers she showed sisterly concern. With Pippi, she was distant. And because in those times she had such a sweet visage, it was difficult for her to express malice convincingly. The structure of the bones in her face, the curve of her mouth, and the gentle eyes of liquid brown denied her hate. To her child Dante she showed her overwhelming need to love, which she could no longer feel for any man. She showered him with gifts out of that affection, as did his grandfather and his uncles out of something less pure, a love muddied with guilt. When Rose Marie was normal, she never told Dante the story.
But in her fits she was foul-mouthed, full of curses, even her face could turn into an ugly mask of fury. Dante was always bewildered. When he was seven years old, a doubt entered his mind. “How did you know it was Pippi and my uncles?” he asked her.
Rose Marie cackled with glee. She seemed to Dante a witch out of his fairy-tale books. She told him, “They think they are so clever, that they plan for everything with their masks and special clothes and hats. Do you want to know what they forgot? Pippi was still wearing his dancing shoes. Patent leather and black string bows. And your uncles always grouped themselves together in a particular way. Giorgio always to the front, Vincent a little behind, and Petie always to the right. And the way they looked at Pippi to see if he would give the order to kill me. Because I had recognized them. The way they wavered, almost shrank back. But they would have killed me, they would have. My own brothers.” She would then burst into such great weeping that Dante would be terrified.
Even as a small child of seven, he would try to comfort her. “Uncle Petie would never hurt you,” he said. “And Grandpa would have killed them all if they did.” He wasn’t certain of his Uncle Giorgio or even Uncle Vinnie. But in his child’s heart, it was Pippi he could never forgive.
By the time Dante was ten years