The Family(7)
The week he learned he would be a father, Carlo walked up and down the New York avenues asking for jobs—in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, in restaurants, in factories, in a printing press, as a doorman, a gardener, a plumber’s assistant. He tried to apprentice himself to bricklayers. He walked into a boutique with a Shopgirl Wanted sign. Everywhere, he was greeted by eyes that would not meet his. He later learned that the one ma?tre d’ who had accepted his handshake turned up with a broken arm and wild eyes three days afterward. Tommy took Carlo to dinner and told him over filettos of veal so tender they dissolved without being chewed that they were family; they were brothers; if there was anything that was upsetting Carlo he could talk about it. “We’ll always keep you safe,” Tommy had said, earnest face made sinister in the low candlelight of the restaurant. After dinner the two men embraced in the midnight gaslight and Tommy cupped Carlo’s neck with his palm and called him brother again. “Business is booming,” Tommy said as he walked away.
That night, Carlo couldn’t sleep. We’ll always keep you safe, Tommy said in his head.
As he looks at the browning, windblown grasses, blurred together now as the car speeds up out of the sludgy New York traffic, Carlo Russo feels something soften inside of him. Suddenly, he could be anyone: a schoolteacher, a dentist, a blacksmith. A regular man, on vacation with his family. Carlo leans out the window and feels the hot air on his face and becomes lighter.
Though he has told no one, not even Joey, Carlo has a plan. This is the last year he will work for the Fianzos. Carlo has been saving small bills in a roll under his floorboard. Just pennies, shaved off here and there, from the money he collects for Tommy Fianzo. He has been inquiring—subtly, this time—about other jobs, in other states. There are farms in Iowa; there are fishermen in Maine; in California, he hears, oranges and grapes ripen under a familiar sun. Carlo is building something of his own. He imagines being in a car several months from now, Lina at his side, Antonia sleeping in the backseat. Driving his family due west at the speed of light.
* * *
—
Joey Colicchio taps his fingers on the steering wheel in time with a beat in his head and does not think about work either. He especially does not think about the fact that Carlo—sweet Carlo, family man Carlo, Carlo of the big heart—has brought in less cash than he was assigned for several months, barely, but enough that Tommy Fianzo has noticed, has asked Joey about it, has said hm, in a tone that Joey knows belies deep suspicion and danger. He especially does not think of that, because he is with his family, and his wife is smiling for the first time in weeks, and the persistent trail of sweat that leaks down into a puddle at his lower back all summer will feel a sea breeze this weekend. Joey knows that Carlo is dissatisfied. Flighty, Tommy calls it. Our flighty friend, he says. Tommy purses his lips; it can’t go on. Commitment is essential in a family. And in those moments Joey nods and feels like a traitor. He is good at his job. He doesn’t feel restless or ambivalent, like Carlo does. Not anymore. Not since he decided he would feel grateful, and accepted, and important instead.
Joey Colicchio had been brought to America by his parents when he was small enough to fit in the crooks of his mamma’s elbows. He imagines that he can remember a wooden bunk attached to the floor and ceiling; the boat rocking steadily on its way to somewhere else. The song of his parents’ hopes for him as they whispered through the seasick nights.
He does know that his papa insisted on Brooklyn, rather than the small Italian neighborhood in the heart of Manhattan, because he had heard there were still farms there. We are farming people, Joey can remember his papa saying. How do you know which way is up if you can’t see the ground? Joey’s father had wanted his children to have a sense of their roots, more than anything. It had caused him physical pain to collect his wife and his son and bundle them onto a boat to a new country, where they would never again feel the warm Sicilian dirt between their toes; where they would lose the ability to tell what time of year it was by the quality of the light, by the melody of the cicadas; where they would forget the old dialect in favor of hybridized American-Italian syntax that would be neither American nor Italian. Joey’s father had wanted Joey to know what it felt like to belong somewhere.
Unfortunately, America seemed not to want Joey’s family to feel like they belonged. They settled in Bensonhurst, a quickly growing Italian and Jewish settlement so far south in Brooklyn Joey grew up joking it was easier to go down around the South Pole to get to work in Manhattan than it was to fight the traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. The community was insular; they hardly left; they found themselves unwelcome in any area where the majority population was not Italian. Joey’s father took a job on a construction crew that spent more time hanging precariously from ropes in the air than digging in the earth. When they dug, it was to chisel out the landscape, to tame and iron flat the hills of Manhattan and the bigger Brooklyn settlements. Progress in New York was to be industry: buildings covering every square inch of the already-bursting islands.
Joey, though his parents filled his head with their dreams for him—be a doctor, be a scientist, own a business, bring us grandchildren—found that though he had grown up there, America accepted him only under strict conditions. Stay with your own kind; take the jobs we do not want. The American dream would have to be gleaned, bought, or stolen.
As soon as he was sixteen, Joey joined his father and a team of other barrel-chested, foul-mouthed, big-hearted Sicilian men who spent their days constructing the city. Joey finished every day caked in brick dust. He walked home with his father through the rows of immigrant homes and each day he could feel the disappointment rising off his father like a fever.