The Family(74)

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—

But out in the dark, Antonia knows, Sofia is doing God-knows-what. With God-knows-whom. For God-knows-how-long.





It is October in Red Hook, and Saul is leaving his Fianzo meeting, driving his feet into the metal of the stairwell. He bursts outside and lets the door crash shut behind him; the sound echoes back up the building and out over the water, as though he has slammed the door on Red Hook itself, on New York, on the rules of this strange world in which he finds himself.

Saul has been taking these monthly meetings alone since July. But today, as though Tommy Fianzo had coordinated his transition with Joey’s, Saul met with Tommy Fianzo Jr. I’ll waste no time, he had begun, smirk crawling like a centipede across his face, I’m going to be doing things differently than my father did. He was comfortable with you running things. I’m not. Tommy Fianzo Jr., with his slick-greased hair and his grease-slick nose; with his thick Fianzo fingers like sausages, pulling violently at the laid slices of capocollo on a plate on his desk; his mouth like purple worms; like viscera; the red wine stains in circles on the table. Saul didn’t touch his own wine; he took a certain satisfaction in refusing the ceremonial trappings of congenial meetings; he could assert, at least, that he was no fool.

Tommy Fianzo Jr. had looked at Saul like a dirty thing. Saul had swallowed the salt and bile of being unable to say what he so longed to say. With anyone else, he would have scoffed, said, your comfort is not my concern. But he is sobered by the seriousness of this feud; he is quiet with disbelief that Joey never found a way out of this atrophied and bloodstained relationship.

I’ll be watching you, my Jewish friend, Tommy Fianzo Jr. had said, before taking Saul’s meticulously filled envelope and tossing it in a drawer, pointedly careless. Very fucking carefully.



* * *



—

“I’ll walk,” Saul says to his driver. The driver tips his hat; his ride rolls slowly away. Saul turns north, to walk under the new highway. The line between Red Hook and Carroll Gardens buzzes now; it hums with construction, with transition; it vibrates the very core of South Brooklyn.

Managing two jobs is taking a toll on Saul. He worries constantly. He jumps in public, thinking that every shred of overheard conversation is his name, that every wallet withdrawn from a suit pocket is the gun that will reveal he has been found out.

Saul doesn’t know what to do.

Sometimes, when he is talking to Eli, he brings up the bounds of their relationship, carefully, trying to ascertain how long Eli imagines their partnership lasting. Someday, he says. Eventually. And once, of course, won’t always be sustainable. Eli has not so much as shrugged in response, has not ever inclined his head as Saul dances around the question: how will I get out of this? Saul could infer that Eli has no plans to let him go, but he is hopeful, or stubborn, or desperate.

During the winter, as 1947 slips into 1948, Saul and Sofia alternate between short, vicious arguments and a manic kind of attraction to one another. Both stop them in their tracks, make them late for work. Saul wonders if it is the energy of the secrets he is keeping—if working for both Eli Leibovich and Joey has managed to make him conductive, if his marriage has become an electrical current.

He knows it can’t last forever.



* * *



—

As the days grow colder, Antonia grows larger and larger. She eats ravenously. She sleeps ten hours a night. Robbie is late to school twice. Antonia gets a second alarm clock, but no bigger clothes. There are angry red lines across her belly and back at the end of the day.

Antonia fits herself into her old life for as long as she can. She sucks her stomach in. Her fear tangles itself amongst the buttons and zippers she begins to strain against. She stops going to the library to read after she vomits into a trash can, unable to make it to the women’s bathroom. This is a small failure, one she lines up with her others. Where did she think she was going, truly: a housewife spending mornings at a public library? What a flimsy way of convincing herself she was changing. Not unlike Lina, reading to avoid the ways her life was still bound to the Family that destroyed her. Antonia feels desperate, some days, and resigned, others.

When she lies down to sleep at night, her heart beats furiously against her chest. She is transported into visceral memories of the months after Robbie was born. It is a time in her life she has carefully contained: an aberration, a cautionary tale. But she remembers now. Every time Antonia shuts her eyes, she remembers pain, holding herself together so she could pee without splitting down the middle. The months she knew the world was there but could not make herself a part of it, like there was an impenetrable film suffocating her. The fear she felt at being in the same room as everyone she loved, but also, a thousand miles away.

When Antonia told Paolo she was pregnant, he took her in his arms and cried, and then he promised to be more grateful, less ornery, less dissatisfied with his job, with his lot. He stays like this all winter, telling her to put her feet up, not to lift that, Robbie, for God’s sake don’t torture your mother. So there are moments of perfect joy, when Antonia can imagine she is twenty, and marrying a beautiful man, and planning to have three babies and live in a spacious and bright home, which somehow, in her imagination, always smells like the ocean.

But when Antonia dreams, Carlo stands just out of her reach with his back to her. They are at the seashore. The water is still and opaque; it is both the end of the world and the source. Carlo walks away from Antonia toward the water. She screams Papa at the top of her lungs. He doesn’t turn around. Papa, Papa. Antonia rages. Her feet are stuck in the sand; she is too weak to pull them out, to go in after her papa. She watches as Carlo disappears into the sea.