Antonia marries Paolo as the winter air loses its sting. Lina sits tearless and erect in the frontmost pew, looking straight ahead. In the back of the church, Paolo’s work associates line up neatly, and in a surreal coincidence, in order of height, like a matryoshka doll of criminals and smugglers. Lina can count the hairs on her head, so alert is her skin. So strong, her resolve not to acknowledge the Family men.
Joey walks Antonia down the aisle and is astonished that the little girl he watched learn to swim on a Long Island summer day is the capable, intelligent young woman he is giving away to be married. He nods as graciously as he can manage at Lina, but a nod cannot bridge twelve years of sorrow, the gaping vacuum between them where Carlo should be, the ways they have both evolved to survive.
Sofia and Saul do not sit together; they are not married yet; Sofia has stuffed herself into her nicest dress, which zipped when she stood with her stomach sucked in but which now seems to accentuate the expansion of her belly. When she stands she looks perfectly normal but when she sits she spills over her waistband. She does not fit in her dress; does not fit in this wedding, where she sits with her mamma and Frankie and covers her midsection with Frankie’s scarf. She does not fit with the women here; she cannot sit with the men. She is neither a child nor, truly, an adult. Sofia squirms. She can feel Saul’s gaze from the back of the room, where he stands with the other Family men. In the back, in deference to Lina. Present, in deference to Paolo and Joey, to the connections that bind all of them. There is no easy way to untangle what is Family and what is family. There is no clean separation of professional from personal. Sofia understands more of this balance now, because of Saul. Saul is connected to a wider world, where a girl’s anger at her father or frustration with her mother or adherence—or lack thereof!—to the rules is not the biggest thing. Where sometimes, Sofia is beginning to understand, you have to do things you wouldn’t have expected to protect the people you love.
One of Paolo’s brothers was taken by the draft in February. No one wants to sit in his seat; no one can bear either to mention or not to mention his name. He sends letters but is not allowed to tell his family where he is. Paolo’s two other brothers wear matching suits, and their mamma flits like a butterfly among flowers between them, straightening their ties, reaching up to brush aside their stray curls. Moving as though her family is all there, as though one of her wings has not been torn off. Viviana Luigio is taking unexpected challenges one step at a time, and she is staying optimistic. She shares food and conversation with Paolo’s new work associates because it is, she believes, the kind and magnanimous thing to do. She maintains hope she can convince Paolo to take a restaurant job her cousin is holding for him. That her sons will come home safe from every battle they fight.
Antonia feels hot and grateful, safety like a parachute carrying her along an inch or so off of the ground. She thanks Joey, and for only half a second feels faint with the realization that her own father isn’t there, won’t see her, would have loved to: Carlo Russo, a hand on her back as she drifted to sleep, would have loved to see his daughter commit her life to a man she loved. Or, Antonia can tell herself this story: the breathless unfairness of not having Carlo also allows her to idealize him, to hold him up as the pinnacle of something she is constantly missing out on. Love, Antonia recites to herself, as she walks carefully through the sea of everyone she knows. Honor. She takes a breath. Obey.
Tonight Antonia and Paolo will go to a hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, the Grand Palace, where they will have a view over the East River. Tomorrow they will move into their own apartment. Paolo has been saving for rent and furniture all year. Antonia has picked out dishes, towels, bedside lamps. So I didn’t do it the way you wanted, she says defiantly, imagining herself at fifteen, awestricken in the high school library. I got us out, didn’t I? Last night was the final one she will ever spend in her childhood apartment.
They eat marinated red peppers and spinach ravioli with scalloped edges and trout with shriveled eyes and flesh of seaweed and lemon and river water. They all dance wildly; the sadnesses that always come to a family function are relegated to dark corners, to the bathroom line, to the side of the bar where they wait for their drinks. All night Antonia’s face is hot with food and wine and she watches Paolo, the boldness of his brows and lips and the half plum of his tongue; the jaunty tilted Homburg set just to shade one eye and then the other as he dances in the lowered light. After the reception, in the back of a powder-blue Cadillac, Antonia feels emboldened by four glasses of prosecco to run her fingers through the thick dark hair that escapes from under his hat brim, and he catches her fingers and pries open her fist so he can kiss the place where her middle finger meets her palm.