The Family(25)

—

As night settles over Brooklyn like a silence, Sofia and Antonia plant their hands against the brick wall between their apartments and they each know the other is there. They know they will not abandon one another. They give in to the strength of the bonds that have made them.

Outside a war is growing. The whole world churning. No one goes to bed on time and the radio stays crackling on until there is nothing but canned music and then static. Still, as the night passes, someone is always hovering near the radio, listening. Waiting for information, or for a reason. For proof the world is not ending. To hear a long-lost relative’s voice, or a message from God.

Until the morning broadcast, all there will be is static.





The first time Antonia lays eyes on Paolo Luigio, he is a red-eyed, saggy-shouldered blur on his way into Sofia’s building, and she is not looking where she is going. When she crashes into him, a brown paper parcel tumbles out of his arms and spills passports—stiff, red, unused, full of promise and obligations—all over the floor. Paolo and Antonia stand stunned for a moment.

Antonia bends to the ground, sweeps up some of the passports, and hands them to Paolo. “Excuse me,” she says, as she nearly runs down the street. And then stops, and turns, and says, “I’m late for school,” and feels heat prickle across her cheeks and down her back.

“Morning, miss,” he says, and touches the edge of his hat.

It is as simple or as infinitely complicated as that.

It does not occur to Antonia until she is sitting in her social studies class, sweating through the seams of her starched school dress, to wonder what a man she had never seen before was doing delivering passports to Sofia’s apartment.

When she sees him again, two weeks later, she says, “Good morning,” and he smiles. She spends the rest of the day squirming each time she remembers their interaction. Her words tumbling, louder and harsher than she meant them, out of her childish lips. His gracious eyes, his nod. Antonia, trembling and suddenly much more uncomfortable than ever in the confines of her body.

Antonia finds herself waiting for the sight of Paolo’s hat making its way down the sidewalk each morning. She rarely says more than hello, but she thinks she can smell him on her clothes each day. In his presence she is butter melting. She is molten lava. She is a small green plant unfurling toward the light.



* * *



—

Paolo Luigio was born on Elizabeth Street, in the kind of boxy tenement apartment with more walls than it was built with and more inhabitants than it was meant to house. He is the youngest of four brothers, and the first to leave for work in Brooklyn, where his impeccable handwriting and meticulous craftsmanship can be of use forging paperwork—passports, birth certificates, letters of reference—that Jewish refugees need to find legitimate American jobs. He doesn’t mind the odd hours or the moral ambiguity of the work; he dreams of wearing a suit as beautifully tailored as the ones his bosses wear; of walking into a room and feeling it hush in his presence. Greatness, that ever-elusive standard by which some boys are born judging their lives, had whispered in his ear early on.

Paolo asks Antonia to lunch as the trees begin to lose their leaves. She tells herself to say no, not to go out with a man who so obviously works for Joey Colicchio, but when she opens her mouth nothing comes out and she finds herself nodding. She cannot focus her eyes, but she is warmed syrup. She is an ice cube in the sun. Antonia thinks Paolo seems to exist in two places at once: here, in the hallway, smiling at her, and also, somehow, somewhere in a future of his own imagining. Neither of them lives entirely on the earth. They go to the corner café and Antonia learns that Paolo is twenty years old. She learns that he loves to read but grew up speaking Italian at home and finds reading in either English or Italian to be more difficult than listening to a conversation. She learns that he likes the work he does for Sofia’s father, but not what it is. “You know how it goes,” he says, by way of not explaining, and she does. She tells him that her father died when she was young, but not how. “It was just one of those things,” she says by way of not explaining, and he nods. She learns that Paolo is afraid of heights, and as he tells her, she watches him fiddle mindlessly with the napkin ring, the butter knife, and though the rest of his body is calm she learns that he is never still. She tells him that she is timid in large groups of people. “I don’t think you should be,” he says, definitively, and she asks, “Why?” and he says, “Because you’re spectacular,” and then falls silent, and as Paolo watches Antonia in the midday restaurant air he realizes that though her mind is rarely calm she is nearly always still.

After they have paid, Paolo walks Antonia home, and she feels the omnipresent gaze of the neighborhood ladies through the second-story windows on King Street, and the heat of Paolo’s body walking next to hers, and the ripple of traffic as the garbage collectors shout their way down the block.

At the bottom of her stairs, Paolo puts three fingers to the brim of his hat and winks, just barely. For the next hour she cannot stop replaying it: his elbow bent, his goodbye quicker than she had imagined, her hand sliding along the wrought iron railing as she walked up the stairs. Until she sees him again, Antonia will not be able to remember what he looks like.

The fall passes this way: lunch with Paolo, and coffee, and slow walks at the edge of Antonia’s neighborhood, where she is less likely to run into anyone she knows. She is nervous: she hadn’t expected to fall for someone Joey had hired. She hadn’t expected to fall for anyone at all. In Antonia’s mind, an alternate future begins building itself. She will marry Paolo. She will escape Lina’s house without abandoning her. Antonia wants desperately to be good. And for the first time in her memory, it seems like she might be able to pull it off.