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marry you for that? Look, I don't want an answer now. We're going to keep seeing each
other. You can talk it over with your parents. I hear your father is a real tough guy in his
own way. Listen to his advice."
"You haven't answered why, why you want to marry me," Kay said.
Michael took a white handkerchief from the drawer of the night table and held it to his
nose. He blew into it and then wiped. "There's the best reason for not marrying me," he
said. "How would that be having a guy around who always has to blow his nose."
Kay said impatiently, "Come on, be serious, I asked you a question."
Michael held the handkerchief in his hand. "OK," he said, "this one time. You are the
only person I felt any affection for, that I care about. I didn't call you because it never
occurred to me that you'd still be interested in me after everything that's happened. Sure,
I could have chased you, I could have conned you, but I didn't want to do that. Now
here's something I'll trust you with and I don't want you to repeat it even to your father. If
everything goes right, the Corleone Family will be completely legitimate in about five
years. Some very tricky things have to be done to make that possible. That's when you
may become a wealthy widow. Now what do I want you for? Well, because I want you
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and I want a family. I want kids; it's time. And I don't want those kids to be influenced by
me the way I was influenced by my father. I don't mean my father deliberately
influenced me. He never did. He never even wanted me in the family business. He
wanted me to become a professor or a doctor, something like that. But things went bad
and I had to fight for my Family. I had to fight because I love and admire my father. I
never knew a man more worthy of respect. He was a good husband and a good father
and a good friend to people who were not so fortunate in life. There's another side to
him, but that's not relevant to me as his son. Anyway I don't want that to happen to our
kids. I want them to be influenced by you. I want them to grow up to be All-American
kids, real All-American, the whole works. Maybe they or their grandchildren will go into
politics." Michael grinned. "Maybe one of them will be President of the United States.
Why the hell not? In my history course at Dartmouth we did some background on all the
Presidents and they had fathers and grandfathers who were lucky they didn't get
hanged. But I'll settle for my kids being doctors or musicians or teachers. They'll never
be in the Family business. By the time they are that old I'll be retired anyway. And you
and I will be part of some country club crowd, the good simple life of well-to-do
Americans. How does that strike you for a proposition?"
"Marvelous," Kay said. "But you sort of skipped over the widow part."
"There's not much chance of that. I just mentioned it to give a fair presentation."
Michael patted his nose with the handkerchief.
"I can't believe it, I can't believe you're a man like that, you're just not," Kay said. Her
face had a bewildered look. "I just don't understand the whole thing, how it could
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
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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.