The Family(6)

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The next morning Sofia will wake in her bed, and Antonia will wake in hers. The garbage carts come on Monday morning and if the trashmen look up, they sometimes see, in adjoining buildings on a small side street in Red Hook, two little girls in nightgowns, both staring out of their windows as a new week begins.





The summer when Sofia and Antonia are seven, their parents decide they have had enough of the punishing heat, and plan a beach trip.

At the beginning of August, they set out: Antonia’s mamma crammed into the tiny backseat with Sofia, Antonia, and the luggage, the other grown-ups in front. They join the throngs of New Yorkers crowding the Long Island Motor Parkway and proceed to inch along, a couple of miles per hour, for the whole afternoon.

The sun beats down on top of the car and inside they sweat into their clothes and seats and try their best not to touch each other. The traffic moves like a full and languid snake across Long Island.

Sofia quickly grows tired of watching the occupants of other cars and falls to counting the spots on her new skirt, but Antonia leans forward around Sofia and watches as a man in a suit picks his nose; as a woman with a white blouse taps her manicured finger idly on the windowsill; as two children push each other in a backseat that looks roomy and clean compared to the one Antonia is stuffed into like an oiled sardine.

Outside, the scenery is increasingly marshy. The trees shrink and curl, bent by a lifetime of Atlantic wind. It is desolate and calm.

Antonia’s papa, Carlo, looks at the browning, windblown grasses. He knows the exact moment his life turned in this direction instead of another.

It was the summer of 1908, ten days before his ocean liner docked at Ellis Island. He was sixteen years old, and he was hungry. His mother had stuffed his trunk with sausages and cheese; thick black bread; oranges from the orchard. She had also folded his grandmother’s rosary into his fist and held him tightly and sobbed.

Carlo ate like a king for the first two days of his trip. He spent the following week curled in a fetal position around a sloshing, putrid bucket.

It was on that ship that he met Tommy Fianzo, who had crossed the ocean five times. Tommy dragged Carlo out of his seasick stupor and fed him warm water, biscuit crumbs, weak broth. Tommy told Carlo to avoid coughing in the Ellis Island immigration line. Tommy offered Carlo a job.

It started as inexplicable errands. Stand here on this corner, Tommy might say, and watch that man—that one, with the red shirt, sitting at that café. Follow him if he leaves. I’ll catch up with you later. Or, when a tall man comes out of this door, tell him Mr. Fianzo says hello. He arrived when he was told and stayed until he was told to leave. He picked up packages and dropped them off. Eventually, he began accompanying Tommy’s brother Billy on overnight expeditions to pick up shipments of top-shelf bootleg liquor upstate. For his compliance and for all of the questions he did not ask, Carlo was paid—and handsomely. He sent his mamma packages stuffed with cash.

Carlo woke each morning with New York City drumming through him like a heartbeat. Eventually, he learned to walk quickly down the crowded Manhattan avenues; to see the people around him without really looking at them; to let himself be buoyed along by the rushing pulse of humanity. The summer smell of rotting fruit and charred meat and hot cobblestone was replaced by the damp leaves and roasted nuts of fall, and then muted in winter. Carlo felt taller with each season that passed.

And Tommy Fianzo was a kind and knowledgeable tour guide. Tommy introduced him to men close to his age; one of them, Joey Colicchio, became his best friend. Together, they drank until dawn; they sucked down oysters by the dozen at hole-in-the-wall bars; they felt themselves begin to put out the roots that would bind them to New York City. And Tommy was there when they cried for their mothers as the winter wind sucked at their skin, and when they needed a woman, and when they needed a post office or a telephone installation.

For the first few months, in fact, Carlo didn’t know how he would have gotten along without Tommy. Tommy told him where he could go in search of clothing, furniture, tobacco, food; which church basement would become a dance hall filled with eligible Italian girls on a Friday night.

It was several years after he arrived in America, somewhere in the churning innards of one of these dances—the flocking of young men and women back and forth, the display, like birds, of their finest clothes; the turbulent air making them all jittery—that Carlo met Lina, who became his wife on a stormy fall afternoon soon afterward. Carlo despaired about the rain, sputtering as it did in sheets of icy needles with each gust of wind, but Tommy said, sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata, and straightened Carlo’s tie before the ceremony, and looked at him like a brother.

Tommy encouraged Carlo to befriend a certain type of immigrant—one with slicked-back hair and a clean-shaven face. Carlo learned to ask if someone was in the Family, and to keep his distance if the answer was no.

It was many years of work for Tommy before Carlo began to notice himself answering questions with, “Well, Tommy might not like it if . . .” or, “Tommy usually says . . .” It was years more before he began to catalogue the pieces of the life he had built for himself—apartment, wardrobe, whereabouts—and trace each thread of that life back to Tommy. By the time Carlo was keeping a shaky-handed, shallow-breathed watch outside of rooms where unspeakable acts of violence were doled out for minor infractions against the Fianzo Family, it was too late for him to extract himself.