The Family(30)
But this year, Saul faces the onslaught of winter with a persistent and chilling despair.
If one’s soul is warm with love and one’s house is full of family and beloved trinkets and fragrant smells and one’s work is satisfying; if one sleeps well at night and eats well during the day and the muscles in one’s hands and feet do not cramp up, winter can be a welcome means by which to narrow the world down to the most important parts. But Saul, alone in a new country and desperately worried about his old one, has nothing to warm him up or weigh him down. He alternates between certainty that his life in Germany was a dream, and distrust that his feet have really touched earth since he crawled shaking out of the ship’s hold three months ago. He feels torn in jagged halves and faces winter in America with nothing outside of his fallible body and a bare room in a Lower East Side boardinghouse to cushion his bones against the cold.
Saul spends the first bitterly cold weeks of 1941 trekking against the wind to the deli and then against the wind home in the dawn; somehow, it manages to shriek down whichever street he walks on. Little bits of news from Europe begin to filter through Saul’s meager network. The fragmented stories are guessed at by holding tattered letters up to the light, and whispered so softly from the mouths of still-seasick refugees that they come out as prayers. Saul cannot sleep for worry. In the darkest part of the night, he pictures his mother in the starring role of each of the bits of news he has heard. A whole village forced to dig its own grave and then lined up at the fresh earth edge and shot. Children sick, sweating together in work camps. Typhus and influenza spreading through the smaller-and-smaller Jewish ghettos like fire through haystacks. Men standing naked in the snow until their shivering slows and their eyes soften; their gold teeth collected for mantels and windowsills. Trains slicing across the tattered flesh of Poland, Austria, Hungary. It is inconceivable to be alive, to sleep on sheets, to close the door of his room behind him each morning, to drink coffee in the sun. Saul cannot decide whether he wishes he were there. There is something torturous about the filtered rumors on which he sustains himself, even as he is comforted by imagining his mother alive somewhere—anywhere. When he is sleeping his mouth sometimes forms the words of the Friday blessings. Baruch atah Adonai, he whispers. Blessed are You. While he is awake he will not speak to God, or cannot reconcile the idea of God and the sickness tormenting Europe. God isn’t so simple, he knows his mother would say. But his mother isn’t there to say it.
Whether or not Saul’s body would have survived that winter alone, it is almost certain that his mind and soul would have been worse for wear. But thankfully, Joey Colicchio appears again in the middle of February, this time at the front door of Saul’s boardinghouse. People in Europe are dying, swaths of them knocked down like dominoes, whole towns simply erased. The Family men are expecting a bigger tide of immigrants than ever to begin throwing themselves at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean and Western bureaucracy.
The human instinct for survival kicks in when we least expect it. Desperate for some change, Saul accepts the job.
* * *
—
When Joey gets home from hiring Saul, Rosa, who is cooking, cleaning, and circling Frankie like a hawk to make sure she does her homework, kisses his cheek. Joey reaches for her with both hands, circles her waist, steers her toward him with palms on the back of her rib cage, growls down for her mouth with his mouth. But Rosa spins away, swats him with the back of her hand. “Dinner in ten,” she says. Joey, feeling cold where he had hoped to wrap Rosa into his arms, into himself, kisses Frankie on the top of the head. “Papa, my hair,” Frankie says, shrugging him away.
Down the hall, Sofia is sitting at her desk, chin propped up on her hand, hair glinting in a circle of lamplight. Joey imagines Sofia, four years old, running to him when he got home. Six, and sitting on his lap when they ran out of chairs at dinner, eating his olives when she thinks he isn’t looking and then grinning up at him, maniacal, bright as lightning.
Sofia, eight, hand on the back of small Antonia, who has collapsed into sobs at their kitchen table for the second time that week. Sofia, half her attention on the grief of her friend, and half watching Joey’s face the way a hawk watches a vole twitch, hundreds of feet below on the earth. I know what you did.
All I’ve wanted is to make life easier for you, Joey wants to say to Sofia. But Carlo’s face surfaces in his mind. That, and the heart-swell of power. The perfection of control. Liar, says his memory.
Sofia at fourteen, glaring at him, fearless, as he and Rosa and Frankie left for church. She was always his girl.
Go to her, he commands himself. Nothing moves.
Sofia, seventeen, cannot feel her papa’s desperation, and cannot connect to herself at four, six, eight, fourteen. Seventeen is an abyss: she feels divorced from her past selves, with their clearer heartbreaks. And the future—so close now the walls of the present buckle under its weight—is still a swirling panic. Sofia feels alone. She feels disconnected.
And when she sees Saul Grossman for the first time across a Sunday dinner table, she decides in an instant what she needs to tie herself back to the earth.
Saul is thin and dark-eyed. Close-shaven. Sofia watches him eat. He mixes everything together, small bits of beans and meat and cured lemon rind and sweet melon all in one bite. He chews carefully.
Sofia knees Antonia under the table. “Do you know who that is?”