During the day, now, Saul waits outside cafés while Joey takes meetings, or he is paired with an older Uncle, and asked to remind someone of their debt, which usually means punching the indebted man in the jaw a couple of times and asking about his children; occasionally twisting a wrist or brandishing a switchblade and threatening the loss of a finger.
Saul misses the ferry ride to Ellis Island, the soft German he could speak to reassure the families he was meeting, the ease with which he could help them. Speak English, not German, he would tell them. They’ll spell your surname wrong. Let them. Don’t cough. Stand up straight. Now that it’s over, Saul wonders why his interaction with those families ended where it did: at the other side of the Ellis Island ferry, as he handed them brown paper packets filled with falsified degrees and resumes and letters of recommendation with which they could start over as Americans. He wonders who they were: families so desperate they paid their weight in gold for a few false documents and a promise; once, a teenage girl, alone, who told him her family had sold their jewelry for her ticket. When will they be able to come? she asked, and Saul had said, don’t cough or touch your face when you get to the front of the line. Use only the first syllable of your surname. Weeks passed when he told this to four families, nine. Why didn’t you run after them, beg them to ask their relatives about your mother, kiss the hands that had touched European soil? Love for a place that wants you dead is an evolving beast.
With the end of the war, though, came the end of that job. And soon Saul found himself immersed in what anyone would call the scrap work of paid goons. Now his levelheaded stare, his impeccable work ethic, and his ability to close the door behind his face and fit in anywhere, while answering no questions, are all qualities that make him an intimidating and efficient errand runner.
There are moments, small ones, mere slivers of seconds, when Saul wonders how he ended up in his life. When he imagines being eight, spread prone on the floor of a house his mother was cleaning, reading a comic or staring out the window into the filtered, old-fashioned European sunlight, or walking along the River Spree, tossing bread crusts to ducks. It is impossible for him to reconcile the world through the eyes of himself as a boy with the world he lives in now. Impossible, that his mother is gone and that he lives in America and that he is married into a family that feels like home, some days, and like a prison, others. And in those moments of impossibility Saul considers the steps he would have to take to get himself back to a recognizable life: leave his wife, leave his child, hitch a ride across the seething ocean to a home that, by all reports, no longer exists. Leave the Brooklyn streets, so familiar to Saul they could be the lines carved into his own palm. Still, he thinks, some days, the alternative is staying. Staying in a world where feeding his family means menacing others’. A world where he comes home and washes other men’s blood from his knuckles before dinner. Saul understands luck. He understands that given the slightest twist of fate, he could have lived a thousand different lives—some more lucky, some less.
* * *
—
Sofia has settled in to her role as The Boss’s Daughter, a term a couple of the men used pejoratively under their breaths to describe her when she started but which is now for all intents and purposes a term of endearment, earned over the year and a half her father’s men have watched her stand her ground against men much bigger than her, men who have the unpredictability engendered by desperation and fear. My father won’t like to hear that, she tells indebted shopkeepers, importers, restaurateurs, a policeman hoping to get off the Family payroll. Or more recently, my husband is a kind man, but I imagine this will test his limits. Sofia has mastered the blank face and imperturbable tone of her father, of Saul. She has added a red lip. She has added her own flair. She is touted as psychological weaponry. You’re just a woman, someone might say, a politician who paid for discretion, for protection. Yes, Sofia would respond. I’m a messenger.
Sofia hardly remembers her resistance to this job. This job, which she now knows, the way Saul and Paolo know, is a lifeline. Instead she thrives on a diet of adrenaline and performance. She feels like she has been standing in the dark, watching outside a bright room her whole life, and now she is standing inside, bathed in light. There is always a man or two with a pistol outside the door of her meetings. Her father didn’t offer her the danger he offers the men. But Sofia never needs the backup. She has found that the very specter of the Family is enough. She has realized that Joey and Saul and Paolo, while formidable at work, all draw from the well of mystery and folklore surrounding their occupation. The very idea of them is enough to clear a path down the sidewalk, a space at the bar. Sofia drinks from the well. She finds that until this moment, she has been parched.
I, Sofia would say, am a best-case scenario, for you.
The summer they are nearly five, Julia and Robbie get the chicken pox at the same time and Saul and Sofia and Julia come to stay at the Luigio apartment, where for five days and nights Julia and Robbie have to be watched so they don’t scratch each other and where Antonia and Paolo and Saul and Sofia can relive a sort of pre-child utopia, their lives and possessions and sleeping schedules interchangeable and magic. In the mornings Sofia distracts the feverish, stir-crazy animals who have replaced Julia and Robbie, and Saul makes breakfast: elaborate concoctions of eggs and leftovers, caramelized bacon, muffins fresh and filled with fruit and bits of chocolate. Turkey with Swiss, he sometimes thinks, doling out scrambled eggs. Tongue with mustard.
On the morning of the third day Saul is sautéing onions when Antonia walks into the kitchen. “Sofia had to run out,” she says. “Again.”
Saul nods. And then he notices that Antonia, who is sitting at the kitchen table, chewing on a crust of bread, looks unmistakably melancholic. “Is something bothering you?” he asks.
“It’s—well, it’s Julia,” says Antonia. She trails off. Saul can hear her chewing. “She reminds me of myself, lately. Just a kid, looking for a home, feeling lonely, missing—well, you’re here, but missing my papa. Trying not to miss him. And—never mind.”
“And what?” Saul is concentrating.
“And not having, necessarily, the mamma I needed, when I needed her.” Antonia is quiet. She watches Saul’s back, the shoulder blades moving through his sweater as he stirs.
Years ago, Saul asked Sofia what happened to Antonia’s father. It was early in their courtship and he was distracted by her hands in his, the way the busy sidewalk seemed to clear for them to walk, and her smell: like soil or like lilac, something he wanted to eat, to choke on, to drown in. So when she said a tragedy, he accepted that as the whole answer. But as Saul looks at Antonia, he realizes there is a hole in his understanding of the sorrows that shaped her. A specter, standing in the kitchen, watching him cook. He has not learned what he needs to know, when he needs to know it. “Antonia,” he asks, carefully, “what really happened to your papa?”
Antonia’s face goes gray and green. “You don’t know,” she says.
The air in the kitchen grows close, thick, rancid with the secret. Saul realizes he is holding his breath. “I know some of it,” he says.
Antonia peers down the hall to make sure Julia and Robbie are still nowhere to be seen. “Do you know that Joey meets with a man called Tommy Fianzo every month?” she asks.