The Godfather returns

People who’d seen Joh

Joh

The song finished.

Milner lowered the baton and looked to the engineer, who nodded. The people in the studio-even the diminished band-burst into applause. Milner headed toward the booth.

Joh

“No,” Joh

Milner repositioned another mike.

“That eighth bar, Cy,” Joh

Milner fished a wrinkled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, a dry- cleaning receipt it looked like, and sat down at the piano bench, noodled around a bit, scribbled a few notes, gave a few brief directions to various men in the band.

Joh

He’d been somewhere, gone somewhere, singing that song, and he could go there again, he was absolutely sure of it, and go deeper, and then do it a dozen more times. He could fill a whole long-playing record with songs that took people out of their lives, and deeper into them, and-it came to him, in a flash-sequence the songs the way Les Halley did back when Joh

Phil Ornstein kept congratulating everyone. Philly wasn’t going to be happy to have them spend the whole session on just this one song, but too bad. Joh

Milner climbed to the podium. His glasses made it look like his regular eye was on the orchestra and his huge eye was on Joh

Eight bars in, Puccini’s ghost somehow cracked the song open even farther, and Joh

Michael and Kay spent the first hour of the flight in relative silence. Once Kay marveled about the startling beauty of the desert, comparing it to the work of abstract painters Michael knew he should know. He pretended to, and she talked about art for a while, and he sat there wondering why, about something so trivial, he hadn’t just been honest.

Michael asked about the move. Kay considered telling him about the day last week when the Clemenzas had shown up at his parents’ old house, which they’d already bought, and found Carmela Corleone standing at the window of her late husband’s office, a room she’d hardly set foot in over the years. She was drunk and mumbling prayers in Latin. This is my home, she’d a

Even that neutral comment was loaded. Michael didn’t react to the mention of his sister, but he knew Co

“Strange,” Kay said after another long silence. “Flying over the desert in a seaplane.”

In every direction, desolate, unpopulated sand and scrub stretched to the horizon. Eventually shapes that turned out to be mountains emerged from the haze to the north.

“How are the kids getting along?” Michael finally asked.

“You saw them this morning,” Kay said. Mary, who was two, had cried and chanted, “Daddy, Daddy,” as they’d left. Anthony, who this time next year would start kindergarten, was sitting under a box on the floor, watching television through a hole. It was a program in which clay figures confront life’s problems: the temptation not to share one’s red wagon or the virtues of admitting one’s role in the shattering of Mom’s sewing lamp. Safe to say the little clay boy would never have to contend with two of his uncles being murdered. His cardigan-sweatered clay daddy would never be called an “alleged underworld figure” in The New York Times. His svelte clay grandfather was unlikely to drop dead at his feet. “How did you think they were?”

“They seemed to be making out fine. Do they have friends yet? In the neighborhood?”

“I’m still unpacking, Michael. I haven’t had time-”

“Right,” he said. “I’m not being critical.”

He was close enough to Reno airspace to check in.

“Your parents had a nice trip?” he said.

“They did.” Her father had taught theology at Dartmouth long enough to have a small pension from that, too, augmenting the one he’d been drawing since he’d retired as a pastor five years before. He and Kay’s mother had bought a travel trailer and pla

“They’re welcome to stay there as long as they like.”

“That was a joke,” she said. “So what do you have pla

“What would you say to di

“It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

“Lunch and a movie. A matinee. There’s got to be a matinee we can catch.”

“Okay. Oh, God, Michael, look! It’s beautiful!”

The lake, much bigger than Kay had imagined, was dotted with fishing boats and ringed by mountains. Around most of it, thick dark pine forest extended to the banks. The surface of the water looked as smooth as a lacquered table.

“It is,” he said. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place.”

He glanced at her. She was swiveling around in her seat, craning her neck to see the splendor into which they were descending. She seemed happy.

Michael came in low, near the shore, and landed the plane not far from a dock and boathouse. There seemed to be nothing else around but woods and a clearing nearby, where a point of land jutted into the lake.