The Family(35)

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But later that night, Sofia is drying dishes. Rosa has stepped out of the kitchen to go to the bathroom, and Nonna has left with Pops already, taking her eagle eyes with her. No one is watching as Saul moves quietly through the doorway of the kitchen and stands so close to Sofia she can smell him, so close the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck strain up toward him. “See you next week,” he says.

Inside Sofia there is boiling, thick blood. There are rushing rapids pumping through her veins, against her hot cheeks, her fingertips, the eyes of her knees. Change thrumming itself close to the surface of her skin, threatening to burst through at every moment.





BOOK THREE



1941–1942





Paolo loves Antonia with a desperation that wakes him in the night and surprises him with its vehemence. When he is with her, he can feel the atoms in his body coalescing, straining, conspiring to be closer to her. When he is not with her, he is drawn by the string of his obsession, woven closer to her person. Paolo’s fixation has started to express itself in sleeplessness. He lies awake staring at the cracked paint on the ceiling of his bedroom and feels something writhe under his salted skin.

Before Antonia, Paolo’s fantasies of an adult life were all in black and white. He was a product of rough and winding tenements, where spit-swears and playground brawls transitioned into a crude adulthood. Life was about survival—of polio and measles, of violence perpetrated by the dregs of the Five Points gangs and the bigger, meaner school bullies, of factory work that left heads spinning and fingertips bleeding. Pleasure was taken haphazardly and without thought for consequences or continuation. It was meat served outside of Sunday supper, or whiskey tossed burning down an exhausted throat, or the soft bed of a loose woman. Just enough of them escaped and came back for holidays, telling stories of success as Broadway producers or bankers, that the rest of them were able to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that hard work paid off; that the American dream was alive and well. Paolo’s mother didn’t stand for nonsense and that included fantastical daydreaming—she had raised her sons to work hard and take comfort in the little things. This supper, she would say. The most beautiful radishes! And then she would glare and raise her eyebrows and say, if you’re lucky, a good woman.

As a child, Paolo did not think of women except as elements of a successful adult life: a good job, a good woman, a good home. He wanted desperately to follow his mother’s advice, but also transcend it; wanted a neater, more orderly, more sensible home than the chaotic whirlwind of his childhood apartment. Wanted to be known, on the street, under his own name, instead of being lumped in with the passel of Luigio boys: You’re the smallest one, aren’t you? The littlest?

His thoughts of Antonia are all in color. His fantasies of present and future so wrapped up together he does not always know if he loves the Antonia in front of him or the Antonia fifteen years in the future in his head. But Paolo is twenty-one years old, and everything is still happening all at once, and he thinks he understands how he has been made, and what motivates him. The way his mother can reduce him to the barest, most desperate version of himself with just a word. The way he wakes aching from the tips of his toes to the webbing between his fingers with unfinished thoughts of Antonia, opening the door to a home they share, which is full of light, full of grand and unblemished furniture. Antonia, opening the door to a back bedroom. Antonia, opening the buttons on her dress. Opening her mouth. Swallowing him whole.



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In July, Antonia dreams she has shown up for her first day of university. She enters an ivy-covered building and walks into her kindergarten classroom. The other students laugh at her as she tries to squeeze herself into a child-size desk. Maria Panzini leans to whisper to her neighbor behind a hooded hand and Antonia knows it is about her. I’ve always wanted to come here, she tells herself. It will get better.

Antonia wakes shivering, though the heavy midsummer air sits thickly in her bedroom. She wraps a sheet around herself and tiptoes into the living room and folds herself into the space softened by Lina’s body on the couch. She is overcome by gratitude that she will not live in this apartment forever.

Antonia has done a good job of convincing herself that marriage—that the life she is carefully constructing with Paolo—is what she wants. Paolo wants something different than the world he was brought up in, too. For him, that change is the Family—which Antonia had always thought she needed to escape in order to move forward. But Paolo is sure of himself. He’s a dreamer, like she is, but he’s careful, measured, constructive. Paolo has a plan. He’s saving his wages for an apartment, for furniture, for bedding. They will be married next spring. Paolo’s future is full of clean rooms, of well-behaved children, of warmth and security. Antonia has adopted it as her own.

When she brings up classes at university with Paolo, he looks distracted, confused. He cannot fit the idea of Antonia working toward a degree into his future fantasy, but he loves her. He loves me. He wants her to be happy. He will try, he says, to figure it out. We’ll figure it out.



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Like Paolo, Saul cannot sleep at all during the summer of 1941. He walks and walks and thinks of women. He spends the dark hours winding his way up and down the length of Manhattan, moving until his legs buzz with fatigue and then retreating into the steamy subway, the air of which is thick and helps him to keep his head attached to his body. Some nights he is ecstatic with thoughts of Sofia. When Saul is with Sofia, the terror that bitters his tongue and twists his stomach is reduced to nothing. Sofia makes him feel like he is standing on his own feet. He has become infatuated by her smell and her strength; by the ways she is tangible and surprising; by the honey of her laugh and the earth he can smell in her hair.