The Family(22)
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Frankie is eight now, precocious, and as eagle-eyed as Rosa. Why don’t you come over as much, she asked Antonia last Sunday, and Antonia felt her stomach flip, like she had been caught doing something forbidden, and then she returned to helping Rosa set up. The two card tables folded and stashed behind the sofa are dusted and arranged end to end so that everyone can fit; there is a long brown leaf that, installed in the dining room table, allows it to seat ten squashed, rather than six spread out.
Each week Sofia and Antonia have small conversations about comfortable things while they set the table, chop the onions, wipe the dust out of the wineglasses. They feel close enough to breathe each other in; it is enough time that they do not have to feel guilty about letting their friendship erode away outside. And, each of them notices, she seems happy. She seems happy without me.
Sofia and Antonia stumble out of their junior year of high school as June of 1940 begins to swelter in earnest. The next week, the radio announces that Italy has joined Germany, and Antonia and Sofia find themselves crushed into Sofia’s apartment with countless familiar bodies, all of them restless in the early summer heat. Wine is poured, and the room fills with a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. A pile of hats and sweaters and pocketbooks buries Sofia’s desk.
“It will be just like the Great War,” says Rosa’s father. Pop rarely makes an appearance at dinner, but when he does he commands the room: sitting spread-legged in Joey’s chair across from the couch, hands crossed over his belly. This gesture of deference on Joey’s part serves to ameliorate the natural tension between sons-and fathers-in-law, but it is also how he maintains his status: look how confident he is, people think. Joey can give away power without losing any. Look how honorable. “We will be pared down to our essential functions. To the necessities.”
“But what does that mean for us?” asks Paulie DiCicco.
The room hushes. Five men turn their heads toward Paulie: Joey’s newest hire, who should not have spoken out of turn. The women, Sofia and Antonia among them, sense the thin tense air and quiet for a moment.
“The anxiety of youth,” says Joey, in apology. The air softens. The women turn back to their circle. Without quite acknowledging it, Sofia and Antonia move closer together. Antonia slides napkins into their rings one by one. Sofia is wiping the tarnish off of a pile of forks. Both of them perk up their ears to listen to the men’s side of the room.
“But, Pop,” says Uncle Legs, Rosa’s oldest brother. “All the Families are solvent right now. It won’t be like last time. We’re all doing good.”
“It won’t be like last time because this is not a pointless war,” says Joey. There is grumbling in response to this.
The Family cannot decide what to think. As Italians, they want to support Italy with their very breaths and bodies, though that’s been a complicated task for years and years of rumors about Mussolini’s new world order, and most of them are unsurprised that the economically devastated villages they and their families fled have fallen prey to this new evil. As immigrants, they are wary of war, and not sure whether to believe the whispers of inhumane atrocities committed against anyone not aligned with the objectives of the Third Reich. As Americans, they want badly to turn away from yet another European catastrophe, to disengage from the tangled knot of politics and culture dragging their cross-Atlantic cousin into the mire.
As businessmen, of a fashion, they are intrigued. Post-Prohibition finances have been shaky and uncertain, stumbling along thanks to protection payments from easily bullied restaurateurs and small shop proprietors—a flower shop known for beautiful and expensive wedding bouquets, a rug importer on Atlantic Avenue, a travel agency that plans the summer vacations of slightly lesser Rockefellers—but it’s not thriving as things did when wine was worth its weight in gold. War, they know, makes some things scarce. Things that can be procured, of course—if you know the right people, and for the right price. And, they realize, war in Europe means that people will want to leave. They will want to get somewhere. And they will need help—especially from a discreet group familiar with all the secret paths and trade routes east of the Mississippi along the Canadian border.
Rosa fills glasses with unfamiliar trepidation. At the end of the last war, Rosa met Joey, and the adrenaline of the whole world propelled them smoothly through their courtship; it filled the room when their conversation lagged; it made starlight and majesty out of the gray buildings that were their horizon. What could happen this time? she thinks, looking for Joey in the room. She is not interested in change. Her beautiful girls, her husband: Rosa is settled in.
Across the room, Joey is distracted; he does not meet her eyes. If he saw her, he would smile. He hasn’t felt real uncertainty in long enough that he is jolly, clapping backs and toasting. He is focused: it draws him in; it electrifies him. The danger of complacency is that it makes you tired. It makes you dull. It distracts you from the heat as the water around you begins to boil.
* * *
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Late that evening, when the clocks have started again from zero and the conversations have broken apart into little cells of worry and speculation strewn through the living room and hallways, Antonia and Sofia find themselves alone in Sofia’s room.
When the awkward dregs of their friendship are not watered down by the presence of others, the air suddenly seems still, and thick. Antonia has an uncontrollable urge to shuffle her limbs around restlessly, and Sofia cannot look Antonia in the eye.