The Godfather returns

Chapter 21

IT IS SAID that babies bring their own luck, and so it was with Michael Corleone. The Corleones were mired in poverty, living in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement. Railroad tracks ran right down the middle of the street. Day and night, freight trains rumbled by, loaded with animals headed for slaughter. Children clamored for the chance to play cowboy, to mount a horse and warn pedestrians to get out of the way. Every week, one or two failed to hear.

Since Santino’s birth ten years earlier, Carmela had suffered four miscarriages. The baby who’d survived, Frederico, had been sickly all five years of his life. Vito was working six days a week in a corner grocery store owned by his adoptive parents. To make ends meet, he’d helped his friends Clemenza and Tessio hijack a truck, only to find that a bullying neighborhood dandy named Fanucci expected an extortionist portion of the proceeds. Weeks before Michael was born, Vito’s murder of Fanucci-widely suspected but only furtively discussed-brought Vito the respect of a grateful neighborhood. With a minimum of words, he began sorting out conflicts and protecting store owners from hoodlums and the police.

Michael’s birth itself was as painless as such a thing might ever be. He had ivory skin, long black eyelashes, and a head of lustrous hair. When the midwife spanked him, he took a deep breath but didn’t cry. She sighed like a girl at a Valentino movie. The moment he was at his mother’s breast, he was her favorite child. Vito had barely crossed the threshold to the room when he saw Michael’s noble features. The baby was the image of Vito’s own father, who’d fought alongside Garibaldi. Vito dropped to his knees and wept with joy.

The next day, thoughts of his father’s beloved olive grove inspired Vito to go into the olive oil business. Tessio and Clemenza would be his salesmen. Prohibition-which provided other profitable uses for their delivery trucks-was another stroke of luck that came into the world about the same time as Michael Corleone. Soon they were all rich.

Michael’s babyhood passed without his temperature ever climbing above ninety-eight. It was often cooler. He had a confidence about him, as if he knew people would love him and do what needed to be done and saw no need to make a fuss. His christening party was held in the street, which the police closed as a favor to the generous young importer. It seemed every Italian in New York was there. Michael’s godfather, the saturnine Tessio, spent the afternoon making silly faces at the baby, who was already able to smile. It was Vito’s smile, drained of menace.

After a year or so, the older boys saw that Michael had usurped them and become the favorite of both parents. Fredo reacted by putting mice in the baby’s cradle and, briefly, regressing into a period of bed-wetting. Once he even went to school and told everyone his baby brother had been sliced in two by the cowcatcher of the Eleventh Avenue freight train.

Sonny took bolder action, complicating Michael’s claim on Vito’s affections by bringing home a new rival, one Sonny chose himself-a sick and filthy kid whose parents had died of drink. At the age of twelve he’d been on the street, living by his wits-which, it turned out, were considerable. His name was Tom Hagen. Sonny ceded his narrow bed to his orphaned friend and slept on the floor. No one discussed making this arrangement permanent. But like so many of the Don’s affairs, a need presented itself and with a minimum of words was resolved.

Michael’s earliest memory was of the day his family moved to the Bronx. He was three. His mother was on the stoop, hugging neighbors good-bye and crying just as hard as baby Connie. Tom and Sonny must have been up at the new apartment. Michael was in the car with his father and a driver. Fredo stood at the curb, looking toward the trains. “What’s wrong?” Vito shouted. Fredo wanted to play cowboy. Sonny got to do it at least a hundred times. Fredo hadn’t done it once, and now they were leaving the neighborhood. Vito saw the misery on Fredo’s face. He took Michael by one hand and Fredo by the other and marched them down the narrow street. The man with the horse saw Vito, and a moment later Fredo was in the saddle, waiting for a train. When one appeared in the distance, Vito hoisted Michael onto his shoulders. Fredo rode the horse across the tracks, screaming his warnings, happy and unafraid.

The Corleones’ new apartment was in the Belmont section of the Bronx, on the second floor of an eight-story redbrick building. The apartment itself was humble but had a new icebox, good heat, and enough space for everyone. Vito owned the whole building, though so discreetly not even the super knew it. To young Michael, Belmont seemed like paradise. The streets were filled with boys playing stickball and the cries of men with laden pushcarts. The air shimmered with the tang of simmering onions and the sugary haze of rising breads. After supper, women carried chairs down to the sidewalks and gossiped away the twilight. Men shouted affectionate taunts to one another. There were more Italians in Belmont than in most of the towns they’d originally come from. They’d go years at a time without leaving the borough.

Outside the Corleones’ apartment was an iron fire escape. On hot nights they slept on it, an adventure tempered only when the wind shifted and sent the smell from the Bronx Zoo wafting down Arthur Avenue. “Enough,” Vito would say to his complaining children. “That zoo? It was built by Italians. What you smell is the fruit of their labor. How can a child of mine refuse fruit, which is a gift from God?” The others still complained sometimes, but not Michael. There were lions in that zoo, too. He loved lions. The Corleones. The lionhearted.

The Corleones became active in their new church. At first even Vito attended. Fredo went with his mother to Mass almost every day. When he was ten, he stood up at supper and announced that he’d had a talk with Father Stefano, his mother’s favorite celebrant and also his boxing coach, and decided to become a priest. The family exploded in congratulations. That night, Michael sat on the fire escape and watched his mother parade Fredo around the neighborhood. By the time Fredo returned, his face was covered with smeared lipstick.

At school, when Michael’s friends practiced that age-old ritual of bragging about their father, Michael would walk away. He’d been raised not to boast. He also had no need for it. Even the worst schoolyard bully knew that Michael’s quiet father was a man of respect. When Vito Corleone walked down the street, people backed away, almost bowing, as if he were a king.

One night at dinner, when Michael was six, there was a knock at the door. It was Peter Clemenza. He apologized for interrupting dinner and asked to have a word with Vito alone. Moments later, from behind the locked parlor door, Vito began to yell in Sicilian dialect, which Michael understood, but imperfectly. His father’s rage was clear enough. Michael’s mother fed olives and calamari to Connie and pretended to be oblivious. Tom smirked and shook his head. “It’s Sonny,” Tom said. Sonny wasn’t at dinner-which had become less and less unusual-but Tom’s smirk seemed to indicate that nothing truly grave had befallen him.

Still, Michael was terrified. Only Sonny-and, years later, Michael-would ever provoke Vito Corleone enough to shatter his legendary patience and reserve. There was no greater measure of the depth of his love for them. If the dead could speak, many would testify that it was Vito’s patience and reserve a person should fear most.

“What’d he do?” Michael said.

“Some stupid cafone stunt,” Tom said. “Typical Sonny.”

Tom and Sonny were both students at Fordham Prep. Since the move they’d run with different crowds. Tom was on the tennis team and an honor student. Perhaps because he wasn’t really a member of the family, perhaps out of gratitude, he’d quietly become the perfect son-the smartest, the most loyal, the best behaved, the most ambitious, and, at the same time, the most humble. The most ardent student of Vito’s code of behavior, he spoke Italian like a native, and was in every way but blood the most Sicilian.

As for Sonny, he’d been kicked off the football team after shouting at the coach (when Sonny had asked his father to intercede, Vito slapped the boy and said nothing). He sneaked bootleg gin and slipped into Harlem to hear jazz. Even at sixteen, Sonny was already getting a reputation as a ladies’ man, and not only from girls his age.

“What kind of stupid cafone stunt?” Michael asked Tom.

“A rubar poco si va in galera, a rubar tanto si fa carriera.” Steal a little, go to jail; steal a lot, make a career of it. “Sonny and two idiots he thinks are his friends pulled a stickup-”

“Ah-ah-ah!” Carmela clamped her hands over Connie’s ears. “Enough!”

The parlor door opened. Vito was shaking, red-faced, visibly angry. He and Clemenza left without saying a word. Connie broke into tears. Michael forced himself not to follow suit.

Years later, Michael would learn that Sonny had robbed a filling station that received protection from the Maranzano Family, though Sonny hadn’t known that. The robbery had been a lark. That night, Vito went to make things right with Maranzano and dispatched Clemenza to go look for Sonny. A few hours later, Pete found him atop a lonely and demonstrative housewife and dragged the boy to the office at Genco Pura Olive Oil to face his father’s wrath.

When Vito confronted Sonny about his stupid act, what Sonny said in his defense was that he’d seen his father kill Fanucci. Vito sat down, heavily, defeated, unable to talk to his son about how he should behave. When Sonny asked to quit school and join the family business, Vito relented and called it destiny.

Vito believed that he himself had done what he had to do in a world that offered little to a man who looked like he did and came from where he came from. He did so steadfast in the belief that life would be different for his children. He’d promised himself that none of them, not even Hagen, would follow in his footsteps. It was the only promise Vito Corleone ever broke.

At the time, though, all Michael knew was that, for the first time in his life, he’d seen his stoic father lose his temper, and that Sonny had somehow caused it. Moments after Vito and Clemenza left, Tom, obviously disgusted, excused himself and headed for the door. “Need anything, Ma? I’m going for a walk.”

She didn’t. Her face was gray and drawn.

Michael caught the door as Tom was closing it and followed him down the stairs. When they got to the street it was raining. A downpour. Tom leaned against the glass door, hesitating.

“Tell me what’s happening, Tom,” Michael said. “I have a right to know. We’re family.”

“Where’d you learn to talk like that, kid?”

Michael hardened his expression as best he could.

Tom glanced over his shoulder. The super and a few tenants were milling around. “Not here.” He motioned toward an awning a few doors down. Together, they ran for it.

At sixteen, Hagen didn’t know everything. But he knew how to read Sonny, and he worshiped Vito, so he knew more than anyone would have guessed. The things he told Michael that night, under the striped awning in front of Racalmuto Meat, were candid and true.

From that day on, Sonny became one of the men who accompanied Vito everywhere. He came home late if at all. When he was home, he doted on Fredo, who looked up to him the way Michael did Tom. For Michael’s seventh birthday, Tom gave him a tennis sweater. Michael wore it tied around his neck, the way Tom did.

Within weeks of one another, Sonny left home and got his own apartment in Manhattan, just off Mulberry Street, and Tom moved into a dormitory at NYU. Whether because of their departure or his own maturation, Fredo emerged quite unexpectedly at thirteen as a strong and powerful young man. Though undersized, he played guard on the freshman football team. After years of being knocked around, he won a small CYO boxing tournament. He was getting better grades and excelling in his religious studies under Father Stefano. Fredo was still shy around girls, but to them this shyness was suddenly endearing, an allure made more profound because they all knew he wanted to be a priest.

Michael couldn’t have pinpointed a moment when all this changed, when Fredo’s clumsiness became something darker, when the self-sufficiency became sullen self-absorption. It must have happened gradually, but to Michael, it seemed that one moment Fredo was a weakling, the next he was a strong, serious young man, and the next he was locked in his room for hours at a time. At sixteen, Fredo announced what everyone but his mother already assumed: he no longer wished to become a priest. He started flunking classes. He had dates, but only because girls found him harmless. Soon he, too, joined his father’s business, though Vito gave him only menial tasks: relaying messages, fetching coffee, unloading actual olive oil.

Vito Corleone kept stressing the importance of education, and sometimes at night he and Michael sat on the fire escape and dreamed big dreams about the boy’s future. Vito had had such conversations with the other boys, too, and only Tom-who was about to start law school at Columbia-even finished high school. Michael loved and respected his father, but he was scared that he’d turn sixteen and something in his blood would send him into the world Tom told him about.

Michael’s understanding of that world was still that of an eleven-year-old. During the summer, when Michael was home from school, his father-undoubtedly on days he expected to be uneventful-sometimes took him along as he made his rounds. Vito seemed mainly to go from meal to meal, at various social clubs, restaurants, and coffee shops, shaking hands, saying he’d already eaten, and then eating anyway. He’d leave without seeming to have conducted any business at all, unless it somehow all got done in brief whispers.

On one such day, Vito was suddenly called to meet with some people at the Genco Pura warehouse. He told Michael to wait outside. Michael found a baseball in the trunk of the car and went into the alley to throw it off the wall. When he got there, a boy he’d never seen before was already doing the same thing. The boy’s features were aggressively Irish.

“This is my alley,” Michael said, though he didn’t know what provoked him to say that.

“Aw, c’mon,” the boy said. “No one owns alleys.” He flashed a dazzling white smile and laughed. The laugh was kind of braying, but it somehow put Michael at ease.

Still, they didn’t say much more than that for a long time. They stood alongside each other in that alley, and each threw his scuffed baseball against the wall over and over, trying to outdo each other, though neither one was a born ballplayer.

“You know,” the Irish boy finally said, out of breath and taking a break, “my dad’s boss of all those trucks out there, and you know what’s in ’em, don’tcha?”

“Some of those trucks are my dad’s. All the ones that say ‘Genco Pura Olive Oil.’ ”

“Likkah!” The boy’s accent sounded like Katharine Hepburn’s: neither American nor British yet both. It took Michael a moment to realize he’d said liquor. “Enough likkah to get all of New York drunk tonight, and half of New Jersey, too.”

Michael shrugged. “It says olive oil.” Though he knew that most of those trucks carried liquor. He’d seen inside them before. “Where’d you learn to talk like that?” Michael said.

“I might ask you the same thing,” the boy said. “You’re Italian, right?”

“I don’t talk like anything.”

“Sure you don’t. Listen, you want to know why the coppahs aren’t here right now arresting everyone for selling all that bootleg likkah? Do you?”

“You’re off your nut. All those trucks have in ’em are olive oil.”

“Because my dad bribes every coppah in New York!” the boy said.

Michael looked up and down the alley. There was no one in earshot, but he still didn’t like the boy talking so loud about such things. “You’re lying,” Michael said.

The boy explained in detail how his father bribed all the cops. He spoke in specific terms about the murders and beatings necessary to make a profit selling liquor. Either he had a great imagination or he was telling the truth. “You’re makin’ it all up,” Michael said.

“Your people are worse, from what I hear.”

“You’re just talkin’ big. You don’t know anything.”

“Think what you want,” the boy said. “In the meantime, I dare you to go get a bottle of likkah off the truck and bring it back here and split it with me.”

This was nothing that had ever occurred to Michael to do, but he just nodded and went to get one. Fredo was helping another man unload a truck. Michael told them his father wanted to see them. When they left, Michael took a bottle of Canadian whiskey back to the alley.

“I thought you’d chicken out,” the boy said.

“You thought wrong. Maybe you’re just bad at thinking.” Michael opened the bottle and took a swig. It burned, but he didn’t embarrass himself. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Jimmy Shea,” said the boy, taking the bottle. He drank a big gulp of it, and it triggered an immediate coughing fit. He sank to his knees and started to vomit.

Moments later, their fathers caught them, two eleven-year-olds drinking whiskey in broad daylight at the height of Prohibition, and there was hell to pay. The boys-though their lives would run parallel-never spoke directly to each other again.

When Prohibition was repealed, Vito Corleone faced yet another fork in the road. He had, without suffering so much as an arrest, made a small fortune, enough to provide for his family and live the rest of his days in comfort. He chose, instead, to seek a partnership with Salvatore Maranzano, the New York underworld kingpin. Was that Vito Corleone’s one destiny? A cunning act of venal opportunism? Or did he do what he did simply because he was brilliant at doing it? Perhaps Vito had no choice. Sonny and Fredo were young men with little education and few skills. Left to their own devices, either son would probably have been dead in a year. Still, weren’t there legitimate businesses that a wealthy, brilliant man like Vito might have run? If there was ever a time for the Corleones to move to Las Vegas and go legit, this was it.

What happened instead is the stuff of history.

Maranzano scoffed at becoming an equal partner with Vito Corleone, and it touched off the Castellammarese War. Maranzano’s ally Al Capone sent two top men to New York to kill Vito Corleone. One was Willie “the Icepick” Russo, older brother of the future Don. Vito Corleone’s ability to derive power from the powerless paid off yet again. A railroad porter in Chicago sent information about what train the men were on, and a porter in New York led the gunmen into a taxi whose driver worked for Luca Brasi. Brasi tied the men up, and while they were still alive he hacked off their arms and legs with a fireman’s ax and calmly watched them die. Then he beheaded them. On New Year’s Eve, Tessio walked into a restaurant and shot Maranzano. Vito took over the Maranzano organization, reorganized other interests in New York and New Jersey into the Five Families we know today, and became capo di tutti capi. Boss of all bosses. He’d done so with a minimum of bloodshed and with hardly a mention of his name in any newspaper.

The young Michael Corleone had noticed more of his father’s men standing guard than usual, and his father had been gone at night more often. Otherwise, the upheaval didn’t touch that apartment building in the Bronx. When, years later, he learned what had happened, he was astonished. He’d remembered that as a good time for the family. Sonny got married. Tom finished law school. Connie got her first pony. Michael was elected president of his class. Fredo had come out of his shell and often took Michael with him into the city to shoot pool. Michael was a natural, able to see the angles on the table as if in a vision. Fredo was a capable player but a natural hustler, able to see the metaphorical angles several steps ahead of all but the best sharks. Anyone who underestimated the quiet, unflappable boy and his endearing loudmouth big brother left the table broke. The one time Fredo and Michael were rolled, Sonny found the two sore losers who’d done it and stomped them to death in broad daylight, in the middle of 114th Street, and left them there. The murder was investigated by a detective on the Corleones’ payroll. A dishonest Family shylock was convicted for it. Michael didn’t know a thing about any of that until he heard the story, years later, from Sonny himself, who thought the whole thing was hilarious. Why did they think they’d only been rolled once?

For more than ten years, peace reigned. The country foundered through the Great Depression and rose up to fight a just war, but during these hard times, Vito Corleone kept amassing power and riches. He brought a crew of stonecutters from Sicily to fashion mausoleums for nonexistent people that were in fact surprisingly commodious places to keep millions of dollars in cash. The Corleones continued to live modestly.

One day, well after this peace was under way, Michael was at the blackboard in his high school geometry class when there was a knock at the door. It was Fredo. He told the teacher there’d been a family emergency. Fredo didn’t say anything until they got in his car. “It’s Pop,” he said. “They shot him. In the chest. He’s gonna be okay, they said, but-”

Michael could barely hear him. The car was still double-parked in front of the school, but Michael felt like it had just gone over a huge dip in the road. “Who shot him?”

“They’re nobody,” Fredo said. “Gang of Irish shitbirds too dumb to know the difference between Pop and some nothing you’d get into a turf war with. This dumb Mick walked right up to Pop on the street and shot him, and a second later we all opened fire on him.”

“On Pop?” Turf war? Gang? Nobody ever said this kind of thing in front of Michael.

“What? No. Jesus, Mikey. Don’t be stupid.” He put the car in gear and tore off.

“Where are we going?”

“Home. The hospital’s too crowded.”

Crowded was a euphemism. Michael didn’t know for what and didn’t push it.

Carmela put on a brave front for her children, but Michael saw through it. After everyone went to bed, he could hear her through the wall of his room. She was praying when he finally fell asleep and when he woke up, too. He hurried to the kitchen to make the whole family breakfast, to spare her that tiny burden. She shooed him out of her kitchen, but on his way out she hugged him and started chanting something in Latin that he didn’t understand.

Later that morning, when Fredo said it was time to go to the hospital, Michael refused.

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Michael said.

“Right,” Fredo said.

“Then I’ll see him when he gets home.”

His mother’s face fell.

“I got a test coming up,” he said. “As long as Pop’s okay, I should go to school.”

His mother patted Michael on the cheek and told him what a good boy he was, that his father would be proud.

The next morning, Michael again refused to go. Fredo told his mother to take Connie and wait in the car. Then he pulled Michael aside and asked what the fuck he was trying to prove.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? C’mon.”

“He probably had it coming,” Michael said.

“He what? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me. He’s a criminal. Criminals get shot. He’s lucky he never got shot before. You all are.”

Fredo’s punch caught him squarely in the cheek. Michael fell into his father’s favorite armchair and heard a dull crash. It was the big ceramic ashtray with a mermaid on a ridged island in the middle. It had broken into two clean pieces, right down the middle.

Still Michael refused to go to the hospital. Fredo gave up. When the glue dried, the crack in the middle of the ashtray was barely visible.

The day Vito was discharged, Carmela had been up since dawn, cooking a dinner to welcome him home. The whole family came: Sonny and his new wife, Sandra, Tom and his fiancée, Theresa, everyone. Vito looked more weary than weakened. He seemed to be doting on Michael in particular. No mention was made of Michael’s failure to go to the hospital.

As courses came and went and glasses were raised high again and again, anger rose in the breast of young Michael Corleone. He was less than a year from his sixteenth birthday and remained fearful that he would somehow be drawn into working for his father. Even in times of peace and prosperity in the world his father ran, Vito was never safe from the countless men who thought they’d benefit from killing him. Michael loved his family with the depth and breadth of his soul, yet at the same time he wanted to get out of there: this apartment, this neighborhood, this city, this life. Where he wanted to go, he had no real idea. Why he wanted to do it was beyond reckoning. Only as a very old man would he attain enough wisdom to realize the folly of trying to divine why any human being does anything.

As Carmela nodded to Connie to help her clear the table for dessert, Michael clanged his wineglass with a spoon. He stood. He hadn’t made a toast all night. Michael looked at no one but his father, fork in midair. When their eyes met, his father gave a tiny smile. Seeing his father smile like that in the face of such trauma made Michael’s anger boil over.

“I would rather die,” Michael said, raising the glass, “than grow up to be a man like you.”

A stunned silence fell over the table like a heavy wool shroud. From where Michael stood, they had all disappeared. There were only two people in the world.

Vito ate the last bite of his chicken scaloppine and set his fork down. He reached for his napkin and wiped his face, almost daintily, then set the napkin down, and, with a coldness in his eyes that had never been directed at anyone in his own family, he stared down his youngest son.

Michael’s throat tightened. He clutched the wineglass. He remained standing, but he braced himself, ready for his father to laugh at him or say something about the long way Michael had to go to become a man like anyone.

Instead, his father continued to stare him down.

Michael felt chills run over him, and his legs begin to tremble. The knuckles of his right hand were white against the wineglass. The glass broke. Wine, blood, and broken glass fell to the table, and still no one said anything. Michael tried not to move, but he was shaking.

At last, Vito Corleone reached for his own wineglass.

“I share your wish,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. He drained the glass, set it down noiselessly. “Good luck to you,” he said, and he held his stare.

Michael’s knees buckled. He sat.

“Please.” Vito pointed at the broken glass. “Do your mother a favor. Clean that up.”

Michael did as he was told. Connie and his mother rose to clean everything else up and get dessert, but no one said anything. The sfogiatelle and the coffee hit the table, and the only sounds were clanking spoons and chewing. Michael wrapped his napkin around his bloodied hand and ate with his head down. Not even Fredo tried to make light of things and make peace.

The other Corleone children never even seemed tempted to rebel against their father. Santino was like a dog fiercely loyal to his keepers. Fredo was slavishly in pursuit of his father’s approval. Though Tom wasn’t blood, he sought Vito’s approval as fervently as Fredo and ultimately with more success. Connie, the only girl, enjoyed her role as the docile, doting daughter until long after Vito had died. Only Michael felt the need to rebel-as, perversely, the favorite child in most families can be counted on to do.

It was the rebellion of the good Italian son. None of it was directed at his mother. Michael doted on her so much that for a time Vito was concerned about his youngest son’s masculinity. Nothing he did embarrassed the family. He did not disobey his parents, yet his every choice seemed calculated to present some kind of affront to his father.

For example, when Fredo first told Michael that their father had been asking questions about Michael’s masculinity, Michael stopped bringing his dates by the apartment, just to keep his family in the dark. When Sonny offered to get him a hooker for his seventeenth birthday, Michael said he didn’t think his girlfriend would like it, and when Sonny asked, “What girlfriend?,” Michael showed up at Sunday dinner with a big-breasted blonde he’d been dating off and on for months. He started bringing a new girl home every couple weeks. None of them was Italian. The one time his father ever said anything to him about it, Michael said that he loved his mother, but there was no one else like her in all the world and never would be. “It’s none of my business,” Vito whispered to him later, but clearly with approval. Michael didn’t bring another girl home for seven years, when he took Kay as his guest to Connie’s wedding.

Michael applied to Princeton and Columbia and got into both. He went to Columbia because Tom had gone there for law school. Halfway through his first term, he learned that his father had given a sizable anonymous gift to the university’s endowment fund. He met Tom for lunch at the Plaza Hotel and told him he was dropping out. He asked if he could stay with Tom and Theresa after he did. Tom was working on Wall Street, and they had an apartment downtown. “Get a tutor,” Tom said. “A lot of people struggle their first year.”

“I’m getting straight A’s,” Michael said. He told Tom why he was dropping out.

“If all the students at that place whose fathers are in a position to support the school-”

“I don’t care about everyone else. I want to be there on my own merits.”

“You’re being so naive I can hardly stand to look at you.”

“So is it all right?” Michael said. “I’m sure you’ll have to ask Theresa.”

Tom shook his head and said, no, he could speak for Theresa. If Michael wanted to make the biggest mistake of his life, Tom wasn’t going to stop him.

At the end of the term, Michael, with straight A’s, dropped out of an Ivy League school and tried to find a job. Frustrated, he finally asked Tom one night at dinner if he could borrow enough money to take some classes at City College. When Tom told him that if he was going to borrow money anyway, he should borrow it for Columbia, Michael didn’t say anything.

“That’s just what the old man would have done,” Tom said. He paused, but Michael didn’t ask what he meant. Tom answered. “The silence.”

Which Michael maintained. Theresa cleared the table before anyone said anything more.

“You can’t run from who you are,” Tom said.

Michael laughed. “This is America, my orphaned friend,” he said. “Running from who we are is who we are.”

For a moment, Tom’s eyes flashed with anger. He composed himself. “You want money, you know where to get all the money you could ever need for anything. I’m not getting in the middle of this any more than I already have.”

Michael felt trapped. He could defy his father’s wishes by asking to join the family business, which was out of the question. Going to school and doing well and becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a professor: that was what his father wanted. He wanted Michael to follow another path entirely. But what path could Michael take that he wouldn’t find had been blazed by the invisible hand of his father? Most paths wouldn’t just be blazed, either. They’d be blacktopped, lit by floodlights, and flanked by sturdy handrails.

Where could he go?

His father was building a house on Long Island, and that spring the family would be moving-Connie, of course, who was sixteen, but also Fredo, who was still living at home. Sonny and Sandra had just had twin girls, and they’d have a house right next door. On the blueprint for his father’s house was a room labeled “Michael’s Bedroom.” When he saw it, he got the same suffocating feeling he’d had when he’d thought the family business would claim him at sixteen.

Michael had fallen prey to that curse of the young; he knew only what he didn’t want. A life driven by avoidance is like a team trying not to lose. Like a skydiver trying to land anywhere but in that one tree over there. Like the traveling salesman who can sleep in the barn so long as he doesn’t. Like two naked lovers in Paradise free to do anything at all except.

So Michael Corleone did what thousands of foundering young men in the 1930s did: he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Most of the other men in the corps, of course, were people with no advantages, no opportunities at all, men who told tales of a kind of desperate poverty that Michael (despite his parents’ tales of living through similar circumstances) had never before understood. He was stationed in the Winooski River Valley in Vermont. He planted countless trees and moved untold tons of earth. Unlike the other Italians, he ate the tasteless food without complaining. His name was constantly mispronounced, and he never corrected anyone. He volunteered to help the tutors who came in to give night classes, and before long he was running the camp’s education program. He taught hundreds of men to read, many of them Italians who could barely read Italian when Michael started working with them. Like everyone else, he was paid thirty dollars a month, twenty-two of which were automatically sent home to his family. At night, Michael lay in his bunk and tried to imagine his father’s face each month when that check arrived. Only during the courtship of his wives, Kay (his second wife and first true courtship) and Apollonia (first wife, second courtship), was Michael Corleone ever happier.

There were about a thousand men in his camp. Most were only a generation or two removed from their roots in Europe. If one thing united them, though, it was their pride in being Americans-a pride enhanced by their shared, daily mission. So when the Germans annexed Czechoslovakia, those who came from Germany felt no animosity from their Czech or Slovak campmates. Similarly, the only nationalistic fervor touched off in the Winooski Valley by the Italian invasion of Albania or the Soviet-Finnish War was a shared dread of what might happen next and how it would affect the USA.

“It’s going to be different for us,” said Joe Lucadello one night. He was a tutor, too. They were the last ones in the classroom building, locking it up. “Italians. Just wait.”

Joe’s people were from Genoa by way of Camden, New Jersey. He’d wanted to be an architect, but his family had lost everything in the stock market crash. Now he designed retaining walls and picnic shelters. Smart as a whip and about as skinny, Joe was Michael’s best friend in the corps.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Michael said. If America was drawn into the European war, everyone of Italian descent would be suspect.

“The German fellas look just like-”

“I know,” Michael said. “You’re right.”

“Don’t laugh, but I’ve been working on a plan to kill Mussolini.”

“Come on,” Michael said, laughing. “How are you going to do that?”

“I didn’t say I knew how. I said I’m working on a plan.”

Joe was that rare combination: a resourceful schemer who was prepared to act. Ordinarily, he was practical, too, but he had an idealistic streak.

“You couldn’t get within five miles of Mussolini. Nobody could.”

“Think about it. You read a lot of history books. There’s never been anyone-any hero, any villain, any king, any leader of any kind-that it was impossible to kill.”

It was a sobering thought. Michael did think about it, and he admitted that maybe Joe was right. “I suppose when you’re done with Mussolini you’ll go after Hitler.”

“I know I’m just dreaming,” Joe said. “I’m not a fool. I know I’m not really the man for the job. It’s just hard to watch the way the world is going and not do anything about it.”

On this they agreed. The ancient rift between northern and southern Italians had no effect on their friendship or their shared contempt for Mussolini. They dreaded war. At the same time-because it would crush Mussolini and at the same time be a chance for men like them once and for all to prove themselves in the eyes of the American people-they yearned for it.

Then there was the matter of Ustica. About the same time Mussolini signed the Axis treaty with Hitler, he ordered his army to Sicily to round up all known or suspected Mafiosi and imprison them on the tiny island of Ustica (Vito continued to regard Mussolini as just another vainglorious oppressor whose time would come and go). When Michael and Joe talked about the men imprisoned at Ustica, they lamented the lack of American due process. Michael gave no indication of his father’s allegiance with those men. Joe knew the Corleones as olive oil importers. There were cases of the stuff in the camp’s mess kitchen.

In June of 1940, when Italy declared war against the Allies, Joe Lucadello had a plan. “We go to Canada,” he said.

“What’s in Canada?”

Joe pulled out a newspaper clipping. According to the article, the Royal Canadian Air Force was seeking experienced American pilots. A World War I ace named Billy Bishop-“the Eddie Rickenbacker of Canada,” the article called him-would oversee their training personally.

“That’s great,” Michael said, “but we’re not experienced pilots.”

Joe had it all worked out. He had a friend, a Polish Jew from Rhode Island, who was a pilot for the CCC, dumping water to fight forest fires and spraying DDT on bug-infested areas where crews were about to work. Joe got the guy to give them lessons, and they all three went to Ottawa to join up. Joe convincingly forged licenses for him and Michael. They were all initially accepted. Two days later, Billy Bishop himself walked into the barracks and asked to see Michael Corleone (which he pronounced correctly-a tipoff something was up). He asked to see Michael’s pilot’s license. There were a number of men in that room without licenses, some of them crop dusters and barnstormers who a few months later would be holding their own against the Luftwaffe. The license wasn’t the point. Somehow, Michael knew, his father had found out he was here. There was no sense using the forged license and possibly getting Joe kicked out, too. “I’m sorry, sir,” Michael said to Billy Bishop. “I don’t have one.”

Michael took a bus back to the camp and got his job back. Six months later, he was on another bus, heading to New York for a surprise birthday party for his father, when the driver heard the news about Pearl Harbor. Shaking, he pulled over to the shoulder and turned up the radio. Eventually, they got back on the road. Michael walked straight from the bus terminal to Times Square. The place was teeming with men bragging about the killing they were about to do. Michael got in the line for the Army Air Corps, but as he waited an officer walked down the line and told everyone who was under five ten that he’d have to seek his revenge in another branch of the service. Michael missed the height requirement by an inch. The Marines, too, appealed to his ideals. An elite fighting squad, tougher than the rest, with a rigorous initiation and a sacred code of honor. They had the same height requirement, but emotions were running high, and Michael and the lieutenant signing him up gave each other a look and an understanding passed between them. Michael caught a cab to his father’s house.

Vito Corleone’s favorite child was the last person at the party to say “Surprise!”

Vito was stoic about Michael’s news. He asked the questions any loving and concerned father would. It was clear that he did not approve, though he never said so.

In the days that followed, the U.S. government rounded up the Italian citizens within its borders and held them as prisoners of war (Enzo the baker, for example, would spend two years in a prison in New Jersey). In addition, more than four thousand American citizens with Italian names were arrested. Theresa Hagen’s parents were among them, though they were not charged and were quickly released. Hundreds of people with less sophisticated legal representation were detained much longer-months, years-even though they, too, were charged with no crimes.

Before Christmas, the government issued an edict that restricted the participation of Italian Americans in war-related industries. All over the country, hardworking, law-abiding American longshoremen, factory workers, and civilian clerk-typists were summarily fired.

By then, Michael was at Parris Island, crawling like a reptile across a parking lot covered with broken oyster shells.

Four percent of the American population came from Italy. They were destined to make up ten percent of the casualties.

Everything the government issued Michael Corleone was too big-his helmet, his uniform, even his boondockers. He barely noticed. He was proud to be a Marine, and he saw what he wanted to see. But the first time his mother saw the picture of her youngest son, hair shorn, dressed in ill-fitting dress whites that looked more like a costume than a uniform, she burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for three days. She then put the photo on the mantelpiece. Every time she passed it, the tears began anew. No one dared to move the picture, though.

Michael Corleone’s platoon at Parris Island had forty-seven men, all from the East, with a fairly even split between northerners and southerners. Michael had never been in the South before. He knew more about the rivalry between north and south in Italy than the one here, and was surprised by how similar those two rivalries turned out to be. Being from southern Italy and northern America, he could see both sides. And the arguments were over nothing. Music, for example. The southerners liked what the northerners called shit-kicker music. The northerners liked Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, classy numbers they could dance to. Though Michael had known Johnny Fontane all his life, he kept that to himself during the many arguments waged over his music. Any time some petty squabble made the men even for a moment forget about the real enemy, their DI made them regret it-by becoming the real enemy. They’d all arrived most afraid of being afraid, of failing to do their duty when the time came. An hour later, they were more afraid of Sergeant Bradshaw than anything. Michael was a quiet, able soldier, but he spent his days convinced that at any moment his DI might kill him. At night, Michael lay sweating in his bunk, thinking about what a brilliant system boot camp was.

Michael’s suspicion that the Corps’s height requirement had been instituted in part to keep Italians out of the elite forces was borne out when he found only one other person of Italian origin in his platoon. Tony Ferraro, also from New York, was a minor-league ballplayer-a catcher. He looked it: stocky, bald on top. Like Michael, he’d volunteered as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor, but what he really wanted was to go into Italy and send Mussolini to hell.

Tony and Michael were the two shortest men in the platoon. They were slow-footed and weak marksmen, but they’d arrived at PI in better physical condition than most of the other men-happily, since everything they’d ever heard about Marine boot camp was true. Men collapsed, vomited, vomited blood. Michael learned to love it. He felt sorry for the platoons whose DIs sent them back to their barracks after only four hours of marching in the knee-deep sand instead of the eight Sergeant Bradshaw made them do. When boot camp ended, he addressed the platoon-for the first time-as men.

Every Marine in the platoon loved him. Many shed unashamed tears.

Michael, who shed nothing in boot camp but a few harmless pounds, again marveled at the genius of what had been inflicted upon him.

A few months later, Tony Ferraro was securing an island so small it didn’t have a name or a military purpose either when a Japanese sniper shot him right in the heart.

Before dawn, the men grabbed their rifles, shouldered their seabags, and stood at attention beside a row of idling trucks. A corporal with a thick southern accent called out names and assignments. He butchered Corleone, which Michael had expected. He was shocked, though, about what the corporal said next.

Camp Elliott, M1 rifle, infantry. Michael Corleone was going to the Pacific.

His dream of helping to liberate Italy was shattered. But what was he going to do, write his congressman? It was probably his congressman (after no more than a nod from Michael’s father) who’d rigged this in the first place.

Michael let nothing show. A Marine goes where he’s sent.

A southerner already on the Camp Elliott truck extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, Dago boy!” he said, pulling Michael up.

That was the Marine name for San Diego: Dago. Michael knew how else the man meant it, but he didn’t rise to the bait. They were Marines first, Americans second. Whatever else they were came after that.

Michael had never seen the West before, either. He spent the better part of the trip at the troop-train window, mesmerized. It was a good way to see what he was fighting for. Nothing could have prepared him for the size, grandeur, and beauty of this country. The farther west he went, the more he fell in love with the craggy, improbable landscape.

They stopped for a desert training session about thirty miles from Las Vegas, where the first big casino had opened months earlier. That night, Michael killed a rabbit with his bare hands and ate its stringy meat in a cold arroyo, staring at the otherworldly glow from the town that visionary men like him were destined to transform into an industry that would still be there, thriving, long after the fall of the Axis powers, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union, after most of America’s factories and steel mills went broke or moved to Southeast Asia.

In San Diego, Michael went through another few weeks of lectures and training, hand-to-hand combat, swimming tests, all the finishing touches, but when it came time to ship out, his heart again sunk. He’d been assigned to guard detail. Indefinitely.

The first chance he got, he went to a pay phone and called Tom. The Hagens were having dinner. A baby screamed in the background.

“I’m going to ask you something, Tom. If you lie to me, I’ll know. Things will never be the same between us.”

“Any question that starts out like that,” Tom said, “is one a man shouldn’t ask.”

Michael was young and undeterred. There would come a time when he’d have understood that Tom had just answered the question Michael was about to ask: “Did Pop have anything to do with my assignment?”

“Your assignment to do what?” Tom said.

Michael lowered his voice. “I did not join the Corps to be a cop.”

“You’re a cop?” Hagen said.

Michael hung up on him. A few days later, Michael pulled shore patrol and stood on the docks with his rifle shouldered, watching as men he’d come to trust shipped out, the air thick with bragging about all the Japs they were about to kill. He never saw any of those men again.

The worst guard detail job was making civilians follow the blackout law. People think their circumstances are special, and it’s impossible to reason with them. The first few exasperating nights of this, Michael wanted to smash in their smooth, self-important faces with the butt of his rifle, but he soon came up with a better idea. His CO, who had an even lower opinion of civilians, thought it was brilliant. “I never thought I’d say this to an Italian fella,” the CO said, “but you may be officer material.”

Michael took two other men and went to an oil storage facility north of the city, right on the coast. Two big oil tanks, both empty. It was a nice change of pace to be away from the whiny civilians and also to have a chance to make use of the training he’d had in explosives.

The next day, the newspapers and the radio (their anonymous source was Michael himself, pretending to be the CO) reported that the oil tanks they’d blown up had been hit by a Jap sub that-because of the illegal city lights-had no trouble hitting its target.

The blackout was much easier to enforce after that.

Michael went up the chain of command at Camp Elliott, trying to get reassigned. He applied for pilot training. At the beginning of the war, pilots had to be college graduates, but the rule was changed so that anyone with a 117 on his college entrance exam was eligible. Michael took the test, got a 130, but nothing happened. After one of the many times he stood at attention for a four-hour shift outside Admiral King’s office, Michael managed to get a word with him. The admiral promised to look into it personally. He even sounded optimistic about a transfer to the European theater. Nothing came of it. Michael was there a year but it felt like ten.

Finally it dawned on him that the admiral’s clerk filled out all the admiral’s paperwork and signed most of it. Michael noticed the clerk’s taste in music and arranged front-row seats at the Hollywood Bowl for the clerk and his wife to see the one and only Mr. Johnny Fontane.

Days later, Michael was reassigned to a combat battalion.

It shipped out on a converted luxury liner, painted battleship gray and fitted with guns. The troops were packed on that ship for weeks. They were almost in the harbor before there was any official word they’d be going ashore at Guadalcanal.

The fighting had been going on for months, Jap cruisers still lobbed shells onto the beach at night, and there were still pockets of resistance, including hundreds of men in underground tunnels, but the battle was all but over.

The beach at Guadalcanal was a junkyard of burned vehicles of all kind-tanks, jeeps, amtracs-but when Michael first set eyes on the place, with all those green coconut trees and white sand, it still looked to him like a tropical paradise, minus the girls.

Michael climbed down the cargo nets into a Higgins boat. He heard shelling in the distance, but no one shot at him as they landed. When he reached the beach, he tripped on something soft and went flying. He got up and ran for the tree line. He dove for cover next to a heap of tangled fencing wire and a pile of blackened corpses. The stench wasn’t so much a smell as a taste-burned, decaying meat, far up the nose and back in the throat. Michael looked back at the beach and realized that what he’d tripped on was a body, too.

The Japs left their dead to rot or wash out to sea. Those corpses were the first dead bodies he’d ever seen outside a funeral home.

The salty Marines who greeted the new troops seemed identically filthy, bearded, and tired. They said little. All the loud talk the new arrivals had done in their clean uniforms suddenly seemed like boys playing cowboys and Indians. Those men were warriors. When they took Michael on his first patrol, he blasted away at every rustling leaf. They just smirked and kept humping through the jungle. When they hit the dirt, Michael hit it, too. He could be sure a split second later there’d be tracers, bullets, shells, bombs-something coming to kill him.

Michael’s second day on Guadalcanal, he was on sentry at the perimeter of the airstrip. He heard a plane coming. A Navy Hellcat, scraping the treetops and spewing smoke. The pilot crash-landed a hundred yards away. The plane burst into flame. Michael broke into a sprint to try to help the pilot out of there. By then two jeeps full of people had pulled up, and Michael’s platoon leader, Sergeant Hal Mitchell, yelled at him to get back. The flames were too hot. Their fire truck had been bombed. The equipment they used instead could have barely put out a campfire. Michael could see into the cockpit. The pilot, trapped and screaming, looked right at Michael and begged to be shot. Michael gripped his rifle, but his sergeant gave no orders. The screams stopped soon after that. Michael needed to get burn treatment just from standing nearby.

Victory was declared at Guadalcanal a week or so later. The Marines who’d done most of the fighting were rotated out, sent home or at least for some R and R in New Zealand. The replacement troops were left behind to secure the island. On the map Guadalcanal’s just a dot, but it’s a hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, heavily forested with rough terrain and the destruction left behind by a battle that went on for months. Not to mention all the caves.

The caves were a nightmare. Dead bodies of course, deep crevices full of sewage, biting ants an inch long, rats the size of raccoons. The Marines went into the caves in groups of four plus a Doberman. Michael loved the first dog, but after a couple of them got blown up by booby-trapped corpses, he stopped getting attached.

Michael himself captured a grand total of one Jap, emaciated and near death. He propped the man up. The Jap pointed at Michael’s Ka-Bar. “Knife,” he said. He pantomimed shoving it in his guts. Michael wouldn’t give it to him. The man looked relieved.

At first, like nearly all the men on that caves detail, Michael saw it as a salvage operation. He learned to field-strip booty from a dead Jap faster than you could pull out your watch and check the time. Back at camp, the market for these things was flooded, and the best items left the island with the Marines who’d done most of the fighting. But an enterprising man can find a way. For Michael Corleone, it was the native people. Any gear that was useful in the home was easy to sell locally. Michael traded a lot of what he found for fresh fish. All Marines love a brother in arms who can improve on the lousy food, especially in a war zone.

One morning, though, Michael woke up and saw a pet cockatoo he’d gotten from a native for a carton of smokes get swallowed whole by one of those rats. He shooed the rat out of the tent, and when he did he looked up and saw the biggest spiderweb he’d ever seen, stretched between two coconut trees. The spider had caught a seagull in it. The gull was wrapped up, and the spider was eating it. Also, another dog died. Some days go that way. They were about to blow one last cave and go back to the base camp when Michael noticed a crayon drawing on the ground. It struck him as odd that some Jap was in here passing the time coloring a picture. Michael bent over. There was a whole stack of drawings. The one on top had an airplane in the sky with a meatball on the side and smiling people on the ground waving up at it. There was one of a family at a dinner table with an empty place setting, one of a princess, and several more of ponies. Just a regular little girl drawing pictures of ponies to send to her daddy, who probably died fighting a war whose course he couldn’t have changed one way or the other. Michael smoothed them out and set them down. He gave the signal to blow the cave.

He got back to camp and heard that Sicily had been liberated. Michael Corleone never again took anything off the enemy that he didn’t need for his own survival.

Compared to a lot of others, Michael’s battalion had it easy on Guadalcanal. They fared well during skirmishes on some of the surrounding islands, too.

Peleliu was another story. They were going in first. Cannon fodder.

The convoy that loaded onto the ship for the invasion looked like the Okies heading west. Every inch of the deck was crammed with men and machines, stacked high and covered with a patchwork of tarps. The heat was unbearable, a hundred and ten in the day and ninety at night. There wasn’t enough room below for everyone to sleep. They bunked on the deck, in or underneath trucks, anywhere they could find shade. Michael only pretended to sleep. Even the saltiest veterans on the ship looked pale and shaky.

By the time Peleliu came into view all there was to see was a wall of smoke and flame. Dozens of battleships pounded the island with sixteen-inch shells that sounded like airborne freight trains. Cruisers peppered it with smaller mortars. Soon the sound of all the guns bombarding Peleliu became one deafening thunder. The noise felt like it was pressing down on him. The whole ship throbbed with it. The air smelled like diesel fuel. The invasion force piled into amphibious tractors and Higgins boats and squatted down below the gunwales.

They went right into the middle of it. The air was full of the snapping of bullets. The smoke was so thick Michael couldn’t imagine how the driver knew where to go. Michael felt the amtrac scrape coral. Sergeant Mitchell shouted the order to hit the beach. Michael jumped out and ran. Everything was smoke and chaos. He was aware of men falling all around him and screams of pain, but he kept his head down and hit the deck alongside two other Marines behind a fallen tree. Up and down the beach, amtracs exploded and burned and sometimes men staggered out of them and were cut to pieces by machine-gun fire. Michael saw the deaths of at least a hundred of his brothers in arms. Men he loved and trusted, and he was not, even then, a man much given to trust. But all he felt was nothing. A blur. He’d been shot himself, on the side of his neck. Just a nick, but it bled like mad. Michael had no idea until the man beside him, a corporal from Connecticut named Hank Vogelsong, asked if he was all right.

In combat, no one ever really knows what’s going on. Somewhere far behind them was a colonel in charge of all this who didn’t know which way their guns were pointing. Someone Michael didn’t know and who’d probably never lay eyes on him had decided he was expendable. Not Michael personally. It’s not personal, just war. And Michael was a pawn. All he tried to do at Peleliu was not die. Nothing smart or brave. He was just luckier than the thousand other guys from his division who died that day.

Once enough of them made it across the beach, they were able to advance inland and start stacking rocks and debris so they could return fire. Enemy fire slowed, but still Michael was pinned down that whole first night. They’d apparently given up on those banzai attacks Michael had trained for, and there was never any chance to mow them down.

At first light, Sergeant Mitchell organized an assault on the ridge where most of the shooting was coming from. Michael and ten others made a run for it, about fifty yards to a clump of trees and scrub. Two were killed and two more were wounded before they got there. An American tank advanced to the other side of the ridge, and it drew fire the way tanks always do. Then the shooting stopped. They were twenty feet from the crest of the ridge. Hal Mitchell sent three men with automatic rifles and two with flamethrowers up to the crest. As they were about to scorch it, the Japs opened fire. Sergeant Mitchell ordered Vogelsong and Michael to help him get the wounded out of there and retreat. As Michael covered them, Vogelsong and Sergeant Mitchell carried one of the wounded men back to where Michael stood. As they were going back for the other one, an 80mm mortar killed him and wounded Vogelsong and Mitchell.

Later, when he was questioned about what he did next-both by his superiors and later by a reporter from Life magazine-Michael couldn’t explain what had possessed him to come to get his brothers in arms, or how he got out of there alive, either. Maybe there was too much coral dust from the mortar. Maybe they thought they’d already killed all the foot soldiers and were focused on taking care of the tank, which they blew up as Michael was charging their bunker. Michael had no training at all on that flamethrower. He just grabbed it without thinking and recoiled as a fat tongue of flame shot over the ridge.

There was machine-gun fire from a cave to his right, and Michael felt like his leg had been shot off. He fell and scrambled for cover-alone at the crest of the ridge, a sitting duck. The odor of burned flesh and napalm was horrible. He had a bullet in his thigh and one that went through his calf.

Right in front of him were six enemy soldiers with their eyes boiled out and their lips burned off. Their skin was mostly gone. Their muscles looked like a sketch from a science book.

Michael was pinned down for only twenty minutes before the Japs in that cave were taken out, too, and a corpsman covered head to toe with blood came over that ridge and got Michael out of there. He’d had whole years go by faster than those twenty minutes.

He had no memory of how he got from there to Hawaii.

His first thought when he came to his senses was that his mother must be worried sick. He wrote her a long letter, and he sweet-talked a nurse into picking out something as a gift to send along. The nurse chose a coffee mug with a map of the Hawaiian Islands painted on it. The day Carmela Corleone got it-along with the news that her son was coming home-she filled it with wine, raised the mug, and thanked the Virgin Mary for answering her prayers. From then on, each time she passed Michael’s photo on the mantelpiece, Carmela smiled.

Michael and Hal Mitchell both recuperated. Hank Vogelsong wasn’t so lucky. Right before he died he told the corpsman he wanted Michael Corleone to have his watch. When it arrived, Michael, who barely knew the man, wrote to Vogelsong’s parents, told them how brave Hank had been under fire, and offered to give them his watch back. They wrote back and thanked him but said they wanted him to have it.

While Michael was still in the hospital, he learned that he’d been accepted for pilot training. He was also promoted to second lieutenant. But the promotion was just symbolic, and he never did go to flight school. That was the end of Michael Corleone’s first war.

Just before Michael was discharged, a reporter from Life magazine came to interview him. Michael, who presumed that the story had been set up by his father, thanked the reporter for his interest but said that he was a private person. He already had a medal and he could do without the attention. But Admiral King personally told Michael to do it. Good for morale, he said.

Michael was photographed in a uniform that fit. The story ran in a special issue about the American fighting man. Audie Murphy was on the cover. On the facing page was James K. Shea, the future president of the United States.