The Family(43)
One of Paolo’s brothers was taken by the draft in February. No one wants to sit in his seat; no one can bear either to mention or not to mention his name. He sends letters but is not allowed to tell his family where he is. Paolo’s two other brothers wear matching suits, and their mamma flits like a butterfly among flowers between them, straightening their ties, reaching up to brush aside their stray curls. Moving as though her family is all there, as though one of her wings has not been torn off. Viviana Luigio is taking unexpected challenges one step at a time, and she is staying optimistic. She shares food and conversation with Paolo’s new work associates because it is, she believes, the kind and magnanimous thing to do. She maintains hope she can convince Paolo to take a restaurant job her cousin is holding for him. That her sons will come home safe from every battle they fight.
Antonia feels hot and grateful, safety like a parachute carrying her along an inch or so off of the ground. She thanks Joey, and for only half a second feels faint with the realization that her own father isn’t there, won’t see her, would have loved to: Carlo Russo, a hand on her back as she drifted to sleep, would have loved to see his daughter commit her life to a man she loved. Or, Antonia can tell herself this story: the breathless unfairness of not having Carlo also allows her to idealize him, to hold him up as the pinnacle of something she is constantly missing out on. Love, Antonia recites to herself, as she walks carefully through the sea of everyone she knows. Honor. She takes a breath. Obey.
Tonight Antonia and Paolo will go to a hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, the Grand Palace, where they will have a view over the East River. Tomorrow they will move into their own apartment. Paolo has been saving for rent and furniture all year. Antonia has picked out dishes, towels, bedside lamps. So I didn’t do it the way you wanted, she says defiantly, imagining herself at fifteen, awestricken in the high school library. I got us out, didn’t I? Last night was the final one she will ever spend in her childhood apartment.
They eat marinated red peppers and spinach ravioli with scalloped edges and trout with shriveled eyes and flesh of seaweed and lemon and river water. They all dance wildly; the sadnesses that always come to a family function are relegated to dark corners, to the bathroom line, to the side of the bar where they wait for their drinks. All night Antonia’s face is hot with food and wine and she watches Paolo, the boldness of his brows and lips and the half plum of his tongue; the jaunty tilted Homburg set just to shade one eye and then the other as he dances in the lowered light. After the reception, in the back of a powder-blue Cadillac, Antonia feels emboldened by four glasses of prosecco to run her fingers through the thick dark hair that escapes from under his hat brim, and he catches her fingers and pries open her fist so he can kiss the place where her middle finger meets her palm.
Sex makes Antonia feel like a wildcat, like a river. She finds herself kneeling on the edges of furniture, straining toward Paolo as he brushes his teeth, as he hammers a nail into the wall, as he opens the fridge and then meets her eyes across the room. She finds that she is spacious, that she is resilient, that she is flexible. Antonia is hungry as she runs a bar of soap over herself in the bathtub, as the water drips from the ends of her hair. She is surprised by the voracity of her own want; this tremulous, physical thing that comes from her body, that cannot be overthought.
She is pregnant almost immediately, and with each passing day feels less like an imposter in an adult world. She interlaces her fingers at night and squeezes the blood out of them in prayer. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
* * *
—
Sofia bakes and swells in the springtime sun.
Saul takes First Communion on a brilliantly blue May morning, body of Christ gluey on his tongue and the sour taste of wine lingering in the folds between his gums and his cheeks. Afterward, he holds the door of the church open for his pregnant fiancée and hopes his squinted, twisted face can be blamed on the bright sunlight outside. Because Sofia is who she is, she will not thank him for adopting her language and her holidays and her family’s name. Because Saul is who he is, he will not ask her to.
They are married by a priest who comes to the Colicchio apartment on a Friday evening and leaves with a thick envelope of cash and less guilt than he would have expected. For a wedding present, Sofia’s parents find them an apartment on Verona Street, situated carefully in the still-Italian area of Red Hook. Suspended on one side several blocks from Hamilton Ave, where the Irish kids who call themselves Creekies still throw punches, rocks, and sometimes knife blades at Italians who get too close, and on the other side, the old docks, where there are too many hollow-eyed desperate families who, Joey understands, would do anything to survive, the apartment is most importantly as far away as Joey can manage from the Red Hook Houses, where every day, it seems, new longshoremen and their families are pouring into the neighborhood like ants. Joey has his sights set on a townhouse in Carroll Gardens: one of the modern ones, with brick walls and new plumbing and a front yard filled with flowers. He imagines Rosa presiding over one end of a long wooden dining table. He can picture Sofia and his grandchildren living on one floor, the sounds of small feet pounding the wood floors and laughter coming up through the radiator pipes. But in the meantime, he finds, for his daughter, a railroad apartment with two bedrooms and a kitchen and a sitting room all in a line.
Saul and Sofia move their things in before they are married so they can sleep there on their first night. Rosa packs them boxes of second-best dishes, the old stockpot with the small dent in it, and when they arrive and the door shuts behind them there is an awkward silence in the apartment until Saul says, wait here, and goes into the kitchen, and comes back with a drinking glass wrapped in a dishtowel. He puts it on the floor before Sofia and tells her to stomp on it. Sofia does not ask questions, but lifts her foot and slams it down, and as the glass crunches it is like a film is peeled back from her eyes. She is giddy. She wants to take the glasses down from the shelves and smash them all.