This was in the summer of 1918. He was about to turn eighteen years old and had just gotten engaged to Anna Zito, arguably the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. Anna was fifteen, so small that Carmine could lift her one-handed like a barbell, and easily move her up and down, up and down, in the air, Anna screaming the whole time for him to stop. But he knew this thrilled her, just as he knew that when he and Angelo went swimming, the cousins Carla and Anna sitting on a blanket on the stones by the quarry, peeling apples and pears or making sandwiches of mozzarella and tomatoes, she liked how he came out of the water, sleek and wet and cold, and wrapped his arms around her, making her shiver and scream. He had seen her tracing the damp outlines his hands made on her waist and smiling.
Anna Zito, Carmine learned, was a girl who said no when she meant yes; who said stop when she meant go. Maybe all girls were like this. Carmine wasn’t sure. He asked Angelo if Carla meant yes when she told him no, but Angelo laughed. “Carla says yes and she means it,” he said. “I ask her if I can touch her breasts and she says yes and then she takes my hands and places them, one hand on each breast, and tells me to pinch.” Carla’s breasts were famously large. Even in a bra with bones and stays, her breasts swayed and rose magnificently.
More than once, Anna had caught Carmine sneaking glances at Carla’s breasts, and swatted him and pouted. But they were breasts that demanded attention. The nipples, Angelo had confided to Carmine, were pink. They had both assumed, for reasons neither could explain, that nipples were brown. “And,” Angelo had continued, “a big pink circle surrounds the nipples that pucker when you touch them.” Whenever Carmine looked at Carla after that, he tried to imagine it: those breasts like dough that has just risen, still warm from lying under the cloth; the big pale pink circles; then the hard nipples, also pink, jutting from them. Then Carmine would put his arm around Anna, and she would slap his knee and say, “No!” which meant he should hold her closer still.
EVERYTHING WAS IN CONEY ISLAND. This was what Carmine told everyone who tried to talk him out of going. In Coney Island, you’d find a wooden ride that plunged thirty feet down a wooden track. You’d find freaks, women with beards and men with feet where their hands should be and giants and midgets and even a person who was both a man and a woman. You’d find fine white sand and the blue Atlantic Ocean and women in woolen swimsuits running along the shore, showing their legs and arms to anyone. On the other side of that ocean, Carmine knew, lay Europe, and a war that would soon beckon American men. It would call him, too, if America didn’t get in there and win it, fast. Coney Island could be his only chance for something more, something big.
“Why would I go all the way to Coney Island when any day now, right here, Carla is going to let me put my thing inside her?” Angelo said.
“In Coney Island,” Carmine said, “girls will do that without any promises. They like to do it.”
“Those girls,” Angelo said, “are called whores.”
Carmine shook his head. “They’re not Catholic,” he explained. “That’s all. Girls who aren’t Catholic like it. They want to do it all the time.” He had no evidence of this, but Carmine believed that Anna’s nos and stops came from her fervent belief in Jesus Christ.
“Puttanas.” Angelo laughed. “You’ll see.”
ALL DAY, CARMINE worked on machines that tore fingers from hands or broke arms or sent fumes into the air that made you cough and turned your eyes red. The noise in the mills was loud enough to get inside your head and stay there even after you had gone home. The mill was dark inside, and damp, and by the end of a shift you felt like your back could break and you might lose your mind if you didn’t see sunlight.
Carmine had worked in the mills since he was seven years old. The pinky finger on his left hand was flat above the first knuckle from an accident when he was nine. His ears rang on and off all day, even when he was asleep or out of the mill. From where he stood that summer, seventeen years old, a war about to claim him and all the other boys he knew, his only hope was Coney Island.
THE NIGHT BEFORE he left, Carmine took Anna for a walk beside the river. It was eight o’clock, but still light, and the river flowed by them fast and murky from a spring heavy with rain. She let him hold her hand as they walked, and he liked the feel of her small smooth one in his big calloused one. They didn’t speak, but Carmine kept sneaking looks at her. She was beautiful; that was for certain. Her hair wasn’t curly or straight but fell in thick, luxurious ripples all the way past her shoulders and down her back. Most girls tied their hair into braids or buns, but Anna showed hers off, letting it hang loose like that. Her eyes were so dark that when he stared into them, Carmine couldn’t distinguish the pupils from the irises. But everything about her was small. Her tiny waist, her almost boyish breasts, her hands. As he held her hand now, Carmine slowly massaged it, as if he could count each thin bone.
“How do I know that you won’t meet a girl in Coney Island and fall in love with her and marry her and never come home?” Anna said finally.
“Because I love you!” Carmine said, surprising both of them. Once he said it, he knew it was true. What else could it be when he thought about her constantly? Dreamed about her? Tried to see her every day, at least once?
“If you love me—”