Antonia and Paolo live at the very edge of Carroll Gardens, where the schools are improving but where, every weekday, they can hear the slam and shout of the highway construction.
Places Antonia knew as abandoned space or farmland when she was a child are buildings now. Canals have been dug and filled; the new highways stream through old Brooklyn, dividing Red Hook from Carroll Gardens with a kind of sanguine finality: here, they say, this will be the bad neighborhood, and this will be the good. At the construction site for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Antonia ducks, crouching as though otherwise she will hit her head. The new highway will cut a deep gash through her old neighborhood. The Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary has already been demolished as part of what Robert Moses called slum clearance.
Julia and Robbie do not stir, even as Antonia navigates the pram over the cracked and neglected pavement endemic to Red Hook; even as she turns backward and thumps them stair by stair up to Lina’s apartment. “Mamma,” she says, as Lina opens the door, “the war is over.”
“The war is never over,” says Lina, and as she and Antonia look at one another they are both thinking of Carlo.
Antonia spends the afternoon at Lina’s, where Julia and Robbie have to be watched every second so they don’t pull glass jars down from shelves or dip their small fingers into hot candle wax. Lina is making jam, boiling Sicilian oranges in sugar, and the whole kitchen is filled with fragrant air. Antonia finds a set of wooden blocks for Julia and Robbie and then rolls up her sleeves and works with Lina, alternately dipping glass jars into a pot of boiling water and setting them to steam-dry on a towel on the counter with glances over her shoulder to make sure Julia and Robbie have not abandoned the blocks for electric sockets or haphazard bookshelves or tiny glass beads.
“The world seems so much more dangerous now,” she says to Lina.
“Yes,” says Lina, “because you’re looking at it through his eyes and yours all at once.”
“Were you scared?” Antonia asks. She still shivers, hot and cold hysterics, when she thinks of Lina after her father died: the way she would look at Antonia and see right through her; Lina’s volatility, her fragile face.
“All the time,” says Lina. “And I used to be ashamed of that.”
“You’re not anymore?” asks Antonia.
Lina swoops down and moves a lit candle out of Robbie’s reach. “Fear is a tool,” she says simply. “I have learned how to use it.”
Inside Antonia’s body she can feel herself, in this very kitchen, at sixteen, the war just beginning, her life an outline, yet to be filled in. Anything could have happened, she thinks. The impossibility of ending up here. The strangeness of it. The luck and the tragedy.
Other people who were sixteen when the war began had their hands blown off; their faces burnt and twisted. Their mothers were killed by roving bands of soldiers, or their villages were ransacked. They escaped, like Saul, in the watery, mildewed holds of boats. They floated across the ocean away from everything they had ever known. They starved, their stomachs twisting in prayer, clenching at nothing. They died. Again and again, they died: the lives lost （lives! As vivid as Antonia’s, as real） rattle Antonia’s hands so she drops a jar onto the floor, where it splinters with a loud crack. She finds a broom.
What do you have to show for yourself? she wonders as she sweeps glass shards off the floor of her childhood apartment. Her hands have not been blown off. She has survived. The debt she owes fate seems too heavy to bear.
Something, thinks Antonia, has to change.
* * *
—
New York City spins along with the rest of the world, but it is also an eddy in the river of the universe: turning and turning in its own current.
The city celebrates. The war is over, they tell each other. The war is over, they tell themselves, again and again. They look in the mirror and say, “The war is over,” out loud. They make eye contact on the street; they almost smile; they do not go back to work on time after lunch; they forget where they live and walk, swinging briefcases and knocking into one another, saying, excuse me, excuse me, in a daze. It is as though all of New York has had one drink too many; the full-hearted wide-gestured openmouthed buzz of a party at its zenith. All over the city, strangers find their hearts beating in time with one another. They look at other passengers on buses, at other diners in restaurants, at other commuters in elevators, and they think, I know you.
* * *
—
Paolo’s brother was killed in France, when a chunk of shrapnel bounced off a building next to him and lodged itself in his chest. This is an open wound in his family. That the war is over, that the war is won, does nothing but illuminate the place Paolo’s brother should have at the table. The hook where he should hang his coat. So Paolo is with his mamma; his two other brothers are there too; nothing can console her, nor will anything ever console her again. Her son’s absence will be an aching, nauseating vertigo. The whole world is slanted now. There will be no body; she will not visit his grave. She says, they were boys, they were just boys, and Paolo puts a hand between her shoulder blades, soft, and as he does it he can feel himself clutching his mother at five years old, and nine, and twelve, and he knows she is right: he is a boy; his brother was just a boy.