The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
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would get phone calls obviously about business but she never even listened to the 
words. She would be too busy toying with his body, fondling it, kissing it, burying her 
mouth in it. Sometimes when he got up to get a drink and he walked by her, she couldn’t 
help reaching out to touch his naked body, hold him, make love to him as if those 
special parts of his body were a plaything, a specially constructed, intricate but innocent 
toy revealing its known, but still surprising ecstasies. At first she had been ashamed of 
these excesses on her part but soon saw that they pleased her lover, that her complete 
sensual enslavement to his body flattered him. In all this there was an animal 
innocence. They were happy together.. 
When Sonny’s father was gunned down in the street, she understood for the first time 
that her lover might be in danger. Alone in her apartment, she did not weep, she wailed 
aloud, an animal wailing. When Sonny did not come to see her for almost three weeks 
she subsisted on sleeping pills, liquor and her own anguish. The pain she felt was 
physical pain, her body ached. When he finally did come she held on to his body at 
almost every moment. After that he came at least once a week until he was killed. 
She learned of his death through the newspaper accounts and that very same night she 
took a massive overdose of sleeping pills. For some reason, instead of killing, the pills 
made her so ill that she staggered out into the hall of her apartment and collapsed in 
front of the elevator door where she was found and taken to the hospital. Her 
relationship to Sonny was not generally known so her case received only a few inches in 
the tabloid newspapers. 
It was while she was in the hospital that Tom Hagen came to see her and console her. It 
was Tom Hagen who arranged a job for her in Las Vegas working in flue hotel run by 
Sonny’s brother Freddie. It was Tom Hagen who told her that she would receive an 
annuity from the Corleone Family, that Sonny had made provisions for her. He had 
asked her if she was pregnant, as if that were the reason for her taking the pills and she 
had told him no. He asked her if Sonny had come to see her that fatal night or had 
called that he would come to see her and she told him no, that Sonny had not called. 
That she was always home waiting for him when she finished working. And she had told 
Hagen the truth. ‘He’s the only man I could ever love,” she said. “I can’t love anybody 
else.” She saw him smile a little but he also looked surprised. “Do you find that so 
unbelievable?” she asked. “Wasn’t he the one who brought you home when you were a 
kid?” 
“He was a different person,” Hagen said, “he grew up to be a different kind of man.” 

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