The Last Don - Mario Puzo [38]
Pippi did not know how terrible he looked to the other three. Did not know how cold his eyes became. He thought he had controlled his voice when he spoke, he thought he spoke reasonably.
“You’ve got to make a choice. I promise that if it doesn’t work out, you can have your own way. But I have to have a chance.”
Nalene shook her head. “You’re ridiculous,” she said. “We’ll go to court.”
At that moment Pippi made up his mind what he had to do. “It doesn’t matter. You can have your way. But think about this. Think about our life together. Think about who you are and who I am. I beg of you to be reasonable. To think about all our futures. Cross is like me, Claudia is like you. Cross would be better off with me, Claudia would be better off with you. That’s the way it is.” He paused for a moment. “Isn’t it enough for you to know they both love you better than me? That they would miss you more than they would me?” The last phrase hung in the air. He did not want the children to understand what he was saying.
But Nalene understood. Out of terror, she reached out and pulled Claudia close to her. At that moment Claudia looked at her brother beseechingly and said, “Cross . . .”
Cross had an impassive beauty of face. His body moved gracefully. Suddenly he was standing beside his father. “I’ll go with you, Dad,” he said. And Pippi took his hand gratefully.
Nalene was weeping now. “Cross, you’ll visit me often, as much as you want. You’ll have a special bedroom in Sacramento. Nobody else will use it.” It was, finally, a betrayal.
Pippi almost bounded into the air with exuberance. It was such a weight lifted from his soul that he would not have to do what he had for one instant decided to do. “We have to celebrate,” he said. “Even when we divorce, we’ll be two happy families instead of one happy family. And live happily forever after.” The others stared at him stony faced. “Well, what the hell, we’ll try,” he said.
Claudia never visited her brother and father in Vegas after the first two years. Cross went every year to Sacramento to visit Nalene and Claudia, but by his fifteenth year the visits dwindled to the Christmas holidays.
The two different parents were two different poles in life. Claudia and her mother became more and more alike. Claudia loved school; she loved books, the theater, films; she reveled in her mother’s love. And Nalene found in Claudia her father’s high spiritedness, his charm. She loved her plainness, which had none of the brutality of her father. They were happy together.
Claudia finished college and went to live in Los Angeles to try her hand in the film business. Nalene was sorry to see her go, but she had built up a satisfactory life with friends in Sacramento and had become an assistant principal at one of the public high schools.
Cross and Pippi had also become a happy family, but in a far different way. Pippi weighed the facts. Cross was an exceptional athlete in high school but an indifferent student. He had no interest in college. And although he had extraordinarily good looks, he was not excessively interested in women.
Cross enjoyed life with his father. Indeed, no matter how ugly the decision that had been made, it seemed to have turned out to be the right one. Indeed two happy families, but not together. Pippi proved to be as good a parent to Cross as Nalene was to Claudia, that is, he made Cross in his image.
Cross loved the workings of the Xanadu Hotel, the manipulation of customers, the fight against scam artists. And Cross did have a normal appetite for the showgirls; after all, Pippi must not judge his son by himself. Pippi decided that Cross would have to join the Family. Pippi believed the Don’s oft-repeated words, “The most important thing in life is to earn your bread.”
Pippi took Cross in as a partner in the Collection Agency. He brought him to the Xanadu Hotel for dinner with Grone-velt and maneuvered so that Gronevelt would take an interest in his son’s welfare. He made Cross one of the foursome in his golf games with high-rolling gamblers at the Xanadu, always pairing Cross