The Family(28)

The Jewish boy will take the job, Joey is sure. He can see something of himself in the young man. Lenny at the deli says he’s more timely than a grandfather clock and kind, cool, calm, even when the place is packed and the customers are foaming around the mouth with hunger and impatience. Joey trusts Lenny’s judgment—Lenny has been on the Colicchio payroll for years; he’s an invaluable asset in what’s otherwise Eli Leibovich’s territory. Joey can see that Saul will have a knack for the work, and that he will appreciate the benefit of a job that feels eerily like family. It is a good job for someone who has lost his roots. As Joey knows from personal experience.

Joey moves his head onto his wife’s pillow and buries his nose in the mane of her hair. An hour more, he hopes, as her breathing lengthens and she seems closer to consciousness. Stay an hour more.



* * *



—

Sofia is awake. She has been awake since the darkest hour of the night, when it is inconceivable that it will ever get light. When just opening your eyes and looking through the crack in your curtains feels like you are staring at the naked body of the world, all vulnerable folds and soft corners. Sofia does not know what woke her up, only that it was a restlessness with no name, who would not let her soften back into sleep.

Sofia’s eyes smart as her room goes gray and lightens, and her limbs ache. Soon her alarm will ring and she will reach a hand out and press the chrome knob to shut it off, automatic. It is the first day of her last term of high school.





The new year dawns frigid and violent, war like a coat the world pulls over its shoulders. Antonia reads the news even after Lina banishes the Times from the house. She listens to the radio with her eyes squeezed shut. People are dying in London at incomprehensible rates. They are dying in Eritrea. In Bucharest. Antonia feels each of these losses like a prickle along her spine. The clock speeds up every day: it seems there is no time to waste. It seems human beings are more fragile than Antonia ever could have imagined. She throws herself into her relationship with Paolo. The war rearranges her priorities. It tells her she’d better put down roots, or risk missing her chance. It tells her the world will not iron out its flaws and instabilities for her, so she’d better make do with what she is given. Paolo takes her seriously. He makes her feel safe. They decide on three children: less chaos than Paolo’s upbringing; less silence than Antonia’s. The war encourages them to have this conversation. People continue to die. Antonia puts all her energy into constructing a future that will endure the chaos of the world around her. She believes, most days, that she can do this without escaping the Family after all.

Sofia dreams in Technicolor. Her attention wanders, but she lives fully in the present at every moment, so her life is an ever-changing tapestry of friendships and activities, of schoolwork not concentrated on and of meetings she is late for. She feels unsettled and fearful at the thought of graduation. The train is about to run out of tracks, and bold Sofia Colicchio has not figured out what she wants to do. And the war makes it all the more obvious.

Every day, it seems, Joey shuts the parlor doors for another evening meeting and Rosa wrings a dishtowel to shreds before making a platter of coffee and cake for Joey’s associates, Frankie comes home from school and tells the rest of them that Donny Giordano said his brother’s enlisting and anyone who doesn’t is an America-hating, Nazi-loving, kraut-slurping coward, and the room goes silent because Joey employs a raft of able-bodied young men who are already fighting a war of sorts, but they don’t talk about it at the supper table, and later Rosa leaves a pair of knitting needles conspicuously on Sofia’s bed because they won’t have her working in a factory like the other women but they’ll be damned if she doesn’t participate at all, and there are socks to be sent off in the army care packages. Every day the war circles closer and it tells Sofia, you decide to do something useful, or I’ll decide for you.

I don’t know what to do, she tells it, desperately. She hangs out her bedroom window like limp linen, she drapes herself over furniture all over the house. Sofia lying half-comatose on the sofa, sideways in an armchair, sprawled out in the kitchen so Rosa almost trips over her. I don’t know what I want.

Antonia has shrunk away from Sofia’s field of vision. A piece of Antonia—a piece Sofia has almost always been able to scent, to feel out—is missing. Or rather, it is somewhere Sofia has no access to. As the last months of high school tick away, Sofia considers the options laid out before her: marriage, university and then marriage, secretarial school and then marriage. None of them feel like a life she wants to step into. With only herself for company, Sofia feels violently confronted by that which she has not figured out, and expresses it by picking fights with her mother, by losing her temper with Frankie. You’ve been a real pill lately, nine-year-old Frankie tells Sofia, in the same infuriatingly matter-of-fact tone she talks to everyone with, child or adult, Family or grandparent. Where Sofia always wanted to be the center of attention, Frankie has managed to be simply comfortable in any situation. She follows the men’s discussions of politics and finances at Sunday dinner. She never burns food when asked to mind a pot. The rules seem slackened for her, as if Rosa and Joey were tired out by raising Sofia and now if Frankie doesn’t want to brush her hair one morning, she doesn’t have to; if Frankie wants to go to a movie with a friend and no parents, she is allowed to. No one ever says, Frankie, you don’t fit here. And Frankie manages to do whatever she wants anyway.