The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
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possibly be.” 
“Well, I’m not giving any more explanations,” Michael said gently. “You know, you don’t 
have to think about any of this stuff, it has nothing to do with you really, or with our life 
together if we get married.” 
Kay shook her head. “How can you want to marry me, how can you hint that you love 
me, you never say the word but you just now said you loved your father, you never said 
you loved me, how could you if you distrust me so much you can’t tell me about the 
most important things in your life? How can you want to have a wife you can’t trust? 
Your father trusts your mother. I know that.” 
“Sure,” Michael said. “But that doesn’t mean he tells her everything. And, you know, he 
has reason to trust her. Not because they got married and she’s his wife. But she bore 
him four children in times when it was not that safe to bear children. She nursed and 
guarded him when people shot him. She believed in him. He was always her first loyalty 
for forty years. After you do that maybe I’ll tell you a few things you really don’t want to 
hear.” 
“Will we have to live in the mall?” Kay asked. 
Michael nodded. “We’ll have our own house, it won’t be so bad. My parents don’t 
meddle. Our lives will be our own. But until everything gets straightened out, I have to 
live in the mall.” 
“Because it’s dangerous for you to live outside it,” Kay said. 
For the first time since she had come to know him, she saw Michael angry. It was cold 
chilling anger that was not externalized in any gesture or change in voice. It was a 
coldness that came off him like death and Kay knew that it was this coldness that would 
make her decide not to marry him if she so decided. 
“The trouble is all that damn trash in the movies and the newspapers,” Michael said. 
“You’ve got the wrong idea of my father and the Corleone Family. I’ll make a final 
explanation and this one will be really final. My father is a businessman trying to provide 
for his wife and children and those friends he might need someday in a time of trouble. 
He doesn’t accept the rules of the society we live in bgcause those rules would have 
condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force 
and character. What you have to understand is that he considers himself the equal of all 
those great men like Presidents and Prime Ministers and Supreme Court Justices and 
Governors of the States. He refuses to live by rules set up by others, rules which 

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