They still love school, because of Mr. Monaghan, who fought in the Great War and has a limp, and who lives by himself in the basement apartment of a run-down brownstone a stone’s throw from the ship forge. Mr. Monaghan has a twinkle in his eye. He is long and lanky and lively. He looks at them when they speak.
Every morning they spin a globe and pick a part of the world to learn about. This is how they have come to know about the pyramids, and the Taj Mahal, and Antarctica. No matter where Mr. Monaghan’s finger lands, he knows stories about the place, and he has pictures, and he tells them great, animated, nearly too-tall tales that hold twenty children rapt, still as stones in their seats. And today Marco DeLuca has stolen Sofia’s turn to spin the globe.
He did it without knowing, which means when Sofia looks at him with a furrow in her brow and a boiling fury in her chest, he returns her gaze with his own soft, impassive stare, and does not know why she is glaring, and that makes it worse. Inside Sofia’s body a heat builds, flushing her face and shaking her fingertips and turning the breath in her body to bile. Later in her life, friends and family will come to recognize the telltale tightening at the mouth and narrowing of the eyes as Sofia sinks into anger. She, too, will come to appreciate the hot, swollen, all-consuming fire of an imminent fight.
Today Sofia does not participate as her classmates look at pictures of sea creatures in old copies of National Geographic and Mr. Monaghan’s special Encyclop?dia Britannica. She does not ooh and whoa with them as Mr. Monaghan draws a to-scale stick figure of a human being on the chalkboard, and next to it a to-scale giant squid, and next to that a blue whale. She stares at Marco, and she waits in vain for Mr. Monaghan to remember that it should have been her turn. She feels the great unfairness of life rippling through every fiber of her being.
Antonia knows something is wrong with Sofia with the sixth sense of someone who does not understand, yet, that human beings think of themselves as separate containers. She participates in the sea creatures lesson, though rumbling around in the crush of children without Sofia makes her nervous. She cranes her neck with everyone else to see the picture of sharks lined up by size, and gasps on cue at the diagram of a shark’s many rows of sinister, red-rimmed teeth, but she sits quietly as Mr. Monaghan calls on her classmates to name the seven seas, and doesn’t raise her hand even when the rest of the class is stumped on “Indian.” She looks down at her shoes, which are very black against the pale of her stockinged legs. For a moment, she imagines being one inch tall. She could live inside her desk then—weave blankets out of torn-up paper, the way the mice she found in her closet had done with tissues; eat crumbs and bits of rice from leftover arancini and the occasional shaving of milk chocolate. She does not notice Sofia narrow her eyes as Marco makes his way back up the row of desks.
It is this moment that Sofia’s anger boils and cannot be contained inside her skin anymore. As Marco DeLuca approaches her seat, Sofia clenches her small hands, and extends her leg to catch him across the shins.
Antonia looks up to see Marco DeLuca sobbing as he picks himself up from the floor. In the din that follows, Antonia snatches up images that she will sort out later—Sofia, her leg still lifted into the aisle, her mouth open in shock; Maria Panzini, wailing and clutching the side of her desk in a very good impression of an old lady; Mr. Monaghan, face bare in unmasked shock and horror; and a single, glistening, red-rimmed tooth, lying on its side on the linoleum floor.
And as Antonia watches, she sees a strange expression creep over Sofia’s face—a version of the one Sofia’s father wears when he smashes a water bug under his shoe, or slits the glistening belly of a fish.
That expression will haunt Antonia for many years. It will come back to her in the moments she is not sure whether to trust Sofia, during the dark and thin parts of their friendship. There is a seed of something volatile in Sofia. Antonia searches herself and cannot find a similar place. She does not know whether or not she is relieved.
Later that evening, Sofia sits in her chair in the kitchen, snapping the ends off of green beans. She understands by the stiffness of her mamma’s shoulders and the thick quiet in the kitchen that she is in trouble. Tripping Marco had made her feel giddy, and a little surprised. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. But Sofia does not quite feel sorry.
* * *
—
Every Sunday, after Mass, the Russos and the Colicchios pile into one car and drive across the Brooklyn Bridge, to Tommy Fianzo’s house for dinner.
Tommy Fianzo lives in a sprawling four-bedroom penthouse close enough to Gramercy Park that everyone who walks by outside his home is dressed head to toe in silk and leather, furs and pearls. He doesn’t have a key to the park but can often be heard telling anyone who will listen that he doesn’t want one, doesn’t care about the things the Americans do, here, your glass is empty, come, have a drink, have some wine. The Colicchios and the Russos arrive as one unit in a slow parade of Tommy’s employees.