While Saul is working late Julia is often at Antonia’s house. This started as a way for Sofia to avoid talking to Rosa about her job, but it has become habit, lifeline. Sometimes Sofia comes with her, to stay up with Antonia past bedtime, conversation like a low sonata on the couch. Sometimes Sofia is elsewhere. When Sofia shuts the door to Antonia’s house and walks away, she feels relief and joy and an anticipation that crawls like static under her skin. She does not think about Antonia, whose slightly pressed lips have been a moral barometer since Sofia learned to talk. She does not usually think about Julia. Your Child, people say to her, constantly, as though because Sofia Has A Child she has relinquished all claim to agency, as though Sofia needs reminding that the top of Julia’s head smells like warm bread, as though Sofia isn’t a better mother now, a fucking lioness. My Child will never be made to feel guilty for existing the way she wants to, Sofia thinks. And so she parents: when Julia wants to eat leftover pastry for breakfast, spongey cakes with chocolate ganache, thick cognac cream, Sofia opens the box and eats, too, with her hands. When Julia wants to skip her bath and crawl under her sheets with dirty feet and tangled hair, Sofia tucks her in. So what, she says to Rosa. She’s fine, she says to Antonia, who finds an excuse to make bath time a part of any day Julia spends there.
Mostly, Sofia is a middleman; a calming draft prescribed to men who work for the Family when they begin to get nervous. This is something new Joey is trying. He imagines Carlo, and how things might have changed if Carlo could talk to a woman, someone young and professional and pretty who showed him how his job was connected to family, to the earth, without ever directly mentioning those things. Sometimes having a woman in the room can exacerbate tension. But there are many moments when Sofia can put a jumpy man at ease without saying a word.
Sofia doesn’t mind. She is good at this—so good any objections she might have conceived of, objections to being used like a decoration, like the breathing equivalent of a stiff drink, fall to the wayside. She bursts out of bed each morning. When she gets home from her dinners, her drinks, her cappuccino-turned-glass-of-wine, she is bright-eyed and babbling, talking to Saul in tones loud enough to wake Julia, enamored with herself. I changed him, she thinks, she tells Saul, she whispers to herself in the bathroom mirror. I made him different. She doesn’t think about whether she is changing men for the better, or in service of a mission she believes in. It is enough for Sofia that each man’s intention appears to bend and shift as she speaks and moves. At the beginning of 1946 Joey pours her a glass of port and tells her he’s going to have her start taking different meetings, and so when Sofia is not charming flighty Family men and nervous detectives, she is supervising shipments of wine, vinegar, aged and crumbling cheeses, and she is learning to set her mouth so no one asks her questions or gives her any shit, and she is feeling, each day, more and more powerful, more and more connected to the internal beating, not just of her own heart, but of the entire changing world.
With Antonia, Sofia is careful. She knows Antonia doesn’t approve. But she cannot stop working, and she cannot lose Antonia. They are bound together by so much now: their history, their families, their children, who sleep better if they are in the same room as one another. So Sofia’s job is something that she and Antonia step around, examine silently, try to avoid.
And Antonia, who has softened into parenthood, into wifehood, into the role of best friend and babysitter and beloved aunt to Julia, does not say anything to Sofia. Antonia always takes Julia when Sofia shows up, dressed to the nines. She does not tell Sofia that the independence she boasts of stinks like Lina’s job at the laundry. She is not certain, of course, that Sofia is doing any worse than she, Antonia, is—where is Antonia’s independence, after all, her university certificate, her wraparound porch, her three children who have never heard of the Family, who will be doctors and explorers and farmers? She had a brief period of rebellion last year, when the war ended: she spent days and days looking up university schedules. She could have a degree if she took two night classes a week for six years. When she brought this to Paolo, he was angry. He told her there was enough change in their family with the end of the war. He didn’t know what his job would look like, or if he would even have one. He didn’t know what their finances would be like. His own family was in constant crisis, his mother refusing to get out of bed. Everything is unstable, he said. I feel like the ground beneath my feet is already dissolving. The last time I felt so—was after Robbie was born, when you— He hadn’t finished, but had left Antonia to her own guilt about the last time she abandoned her family. You know I want this for you, he said as they went to bed. You know it’s just bad timing.