The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  “What’s the matter with you, Stella?” Franceschina Perri whispered. The girls huddled together in the kitchen, watched over by Assunta’s somewhat sanctimonious new Blessed Virgin figurine, which stood on the wall shrine by the photo of the dead baby Stella. “Why are you playing around? Someone else is going to snap him up.”

  “Snap him up if you want him,” Stella said. She certainly didn’t want to get herself into a jam where her father thought she was encouraging Carmelo’s courtship. “I give him to you. My gift, you can thank me later.”

  “Those eyes, though!” Franceschina clucked her tongue. “To die for.”

  “In Calabria lots of men have blue eyes,” Stella said dismissively. “It’s nothing special to me. I prefer dark eyes anyway.”

  After everyone had eaten, Carmelo opened the black box he’d brought and revealed a concertina. “May I play you a song, Signora Fortuna?” he asked loudly, because people had already started to assemble to see what was going to happen.

  Assunta was giggling at the attention; she actually had to press her hands to her mouth to contain herself. “Oh, Carmelo, don’t be so formal. You can call me Assunta.”

  “Well, lovely Zia Assunta, may I play you a song?” He had shouldered the concertina’s strap and pressed a few chords—the living room was full of the anticipation of live music. “I know just the one I want to play. It runs through my head every time I see you.” He made moon eyes and covered his heart. What a ham, Stella thought.

  Assunta, still giggling, nodded. Carmelo’s foot tapped triple time on the wooden floorboards, and before he even played the opening chord Stella already knew what he was going to sing. Her heart was pounding in her ears; she knew her face was red with emotion. The words were a little different than the words Stella knew, a dialect more northern sounding than the one spoken in Ievoli, but they were Calabrese—where had Carmelo learned to sing in Calabrese?

  I saw her at the water doing her washing

  My Calabrisella, with her dark eyes

  By the time he had reached the second line, everyone was squealing and clapping with joy, because “Calabrisella Mia” was every Calabrese’s favorite song, especially here, so far from home. Even cranky old Zu Aldo was smiling. Carmelo had won over a whole room of stubborn, distrusting Calabresi with one song on his concertina. Stella’s heart was still pounding, caught in the memory of the fhesta in Nicastro all those years ago, dancing around the bonfire among the swirling pacchiane and the Gypsies, the night she thought of as the happiest in her life. The song had taken her home.

  Carmelo’s voice was clear and sweet, and was completely overwhelmed when the entire room joined him for the chorus:

  Tirulalleru lalleru lala! Sta Calabrisella muriri mi fa!

  As the last bar to the song closed and all the gathered friends were clapping and cheering, Carmelo turned to Stella and winked.

  FIORELLA HAD A NEW JOB in the fall of 1942, in a factory where she made mortar shells. They paid her thirty cents an hour—twelve dollars a week, since they were strict and only let you work eight hours a day. “If you get tired and don’t put the pieces together exactly right, someone can get killed,” Fiorella explained. But anyway, twelve dollars a week! She would never go back to the laundry.

  Hartford—home to Pratt & Whitney, which produced aircraft parts, and munitions factories like Colt—had converted itself into a war engine. The factory owners were desperate to fill their payrolls so they could meet their government contracts. They were hiring girls galore, and even girls had to be paid minimum wage for these jobs.

  Stella and Tina, meanwhile, were enemy aliens and were not even allowed inside any factory related to the war effort. Their four dollars a week from the laundry, which they turned over to their father, seemed especially paltry now.

  Antonio, who had given up his construction job to go work at Pratt & Whitney building propellers, said to them, “Don’t you wish you’d listened to me, and studied and gotten your papers?”

  ROCCO CARAMANICO WROTE TO TINA regularly from his post in New Guinea. He wrote two or sometimes even three times a week, which the girls could tell by the dates at the top, but the letters arrived in packets about once a month. If there was a gap in correspondence, Tina knew it was because the letters were lost, not because he wasn’t writing them; he had revealed himself to be a consistent young man. If too much time went by between packets, Tina assumed Rocco was dead, and Stella would have to console her sister with reminders that he hadn’t been dead any of the previous times.

  The letters were always addressed to “My Friend Tina”:

  To My Friend Tina,

  Thank you for sending me presents. It was very kind of you. The cookies were very good. Only a little stale, although I think you must have mailed them more than a month ago. Thank you for making them for me. It is raining here right now and I should go to sleep. Please give my regards to your family.

  Your friend, Rocco Caramanico

  Louie showed them where New Guinea was on a map from his geography textbook—farther away than they had been able to imagine, near Australia—and translated unfamiliar words that pertained to army life, like “mess” and “KP duty.”

  “That’s Kitchen Patrol,” Louie explained. “So he cooks for the other soldiers.”

  Rocco wrote often about KP, and especially about boxes of chicken parts. The chicken arrived in a box that had once been frozen, although by the time it came to Rocco it was a collection of thighs and organs and pieces of congealed blood sloshing around in a slimy yellow liquid. Rocco’s job was to dump the box into a pot and cook it all together as it was, and that was what the unit ate, day in and day out. Sometimes he found feathers still in the box.

  The letters never mentioned combat, enemies, or what work his chemical engineering corps was doing. The women had no way of knowing to what degree he was censoring himself so the letters could get through to them.

  Barbara, Rocco’s sister, found the idea of her brother in a kitchen hard to believe. “Rocco doesn’t know how to cook anything,” she said. He was very traditionally minded about those things; it was one of the reasons it was so important he found a wife who could cook and keep house.

  Tina and Barbara put together care packages that they sent to New Guinea at the beginning of every month, homemade cookies and knitted socks and whatever else they could think of that would survive the journey.

  Of the thirty packages they sent during the years Rocco was at war, he received eight.

  IN OCTOBER 1942, the Fortunas received a letter bearing the Nicastro postmark. Stefano Morello from Sambiase had been killed in North Africa.

  Tina only waited for Tony to finish reading before bursting into noisy tears. “He was such a nice boy,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry, Stella, I’m so sorry, he was such a nice boy.” Assunta, too, had begun to cry, lifting her apron to wipe her face.

  Stella, who of course could not cry, even now, held her mother and her sister and stroked their backs as they took turns sobbing into the bosom of her dress. In her heart she’d known she would never marry Stefano, but after six years of letting people believe she’d intended to, she was overwhelmed with melancholy. She thought of the day they’d met at the Nicastro fhesta, of his winter visits to Ievoli, gathering snow in the garden for scirubetta and feeding little Luigi with his spoon.

  Stefano had died never knowing she’d intended to break off the engagement.

  That evening, lying still in their bed after Tina had cried herself to sleep, Stella worked to construct a mental image of Stefano, of his hands, his hair, the way he dressed. Even the face was indistinct to her. Maybe she would have thought of him more often if she’d had a memory aid, like her mother’s photo of the lost Mariastella.

  Feeling a little bit disgusted with herself, she relaxed into a sense of relief. Stefano had given her a gift by dying—an excuse for spinsterhood. No one would expect her to let anyone court her; she was grieving. Stefano had bought her time—perhaps enough time.
She could legitimately drag out the mourning for five years, she thought, and by then she would be twenty-seven. Far too old to marry.

  She said a prayer for Stefano now.

  THE CHRISTMAS EVE PARTY at the Society was the pivotal event of the year and had required much preparation. Franceschina Perri had her eye on a boy named Frank Carapellucci and had enlisted all the girls to help her run him down. Stella had never seen a girl go so unabashedly crazy for a boy like that. But Franceschina was a red-blooded American girl; she pooh-poohed the rules of decorum the Italian girls had been raised to follow. You did what you had to to get what you wanted.

  Franceschina had met Frank at his welcome-home party at the beginning of December. He’d enlisted, shipped off to the Pacific, gotten shot in the spine, and been sent back home, all in six months’ time. The bullet was extracted and Frank was given his discharge papers, a free man with a little bit of a limp. Franceschina was determined to get her claws into the handsome war hero before some other girl got the same bright idea.

  Unfortunately, Frank was a cool cucumber, and thus far had resisted Franceschina’s flirtations. She had contrived to get her mother to invite the Carapelluccis over for post-mass luncheon, but the whole party had been for naught because Frank had only stayed for a sandwich and then left to meet some friends. Franceschina had hinted she would say yes if he asked her out on a date, but he had not picked up on the hint.

  “I don’t understand,” Franceschina whined. The girls had each dropped by the Perris’ house after their own various post-mass luncheons to see how it had gone, and now they were locked in Franceschina’s room. “He seemed like he liked me, like he was making eyes at me, but then he didn’t ask me out! Why? I made it so clear I like him, it’s embarrassing!”

  “He probably has another girl he’s not telling you about,” Stella said. “That’s the reason he acts like that.”

  Fiorella, always erring on the kinder side of human nature, defended this man she hardly knew. “I think he’s just shy.”

  “I do, too,” Carolina piped up. “With the shy ones, you have to go after them hard or they slip away and someone else gets them.”

  “Ugh, Carolina.” Stella smacked her on the arm. “Don’t tell her that! She’s already throwing herself at him. That’s not how men work at all.”

  “What do I do, Stella? Tell me,” Franceschina begged. “How can I make him pay attention to me?”

  “You can’t make him pay attention to you,” Stella said. “That’s the point. He has to want to pay attention to you. Otherwise you have nothing but trouble.”

  “Okay, then how do I make him want to pay attention to me?”

  From where they sat on the bed and carpet, Carolina, Tina, Fiorella, and the forlorn lover Franceschina herself all turned their faces to Stella, waiting. Stella was the group expert in boys, since all the boys wanted her, and she had the girls’ utmost respect because she didn’t give a damn.

  Stella was quiet for a minute, thinking about what she had in her arsenal for this situation. “Well, if we got you a really good dress . . . Carolina, do you still have that pattern you wanted to try? The one with the, you know.” She waved her hand in her bosom area. They did, indeed, all know. Carolina nodded. “If you get me the fabric, I can make you that dress to have for the Christmas party at the Society.”

  “You can use my sewing machine, Stella,” Fiorella offered. Stella had been counting on that already—she was the best sewer of the group but wouldn’t have been able to finish a whole dress in that time without Fiorella’s better equipment.

  “What if he doesn’t go to the party, though?” Tina said.

  “That’s our job, to make sure he does,” Stella said. “We’ll stop at nothing to make sure he’s there.”

  Stella assigned the tasks. Fiorella would have Stella and Tina over for dinner every day after work for the next week so Stella could make the dress. Carolina was in charge of the gossip ring: she was to find out who Frank Carapellucci’s friends were, and she was to lure them into making sure their buddy came to the Christmas party.

  “You don’t have to be sneaky,” Stella advised. “Tell the friends there’s a girl who’s expecting him.” Stella thought for a moment, then added, “Flirt with the friend if you have to. Give him some reason to cooperate, you know?”

  Carolina tossed her glossy dark hair. “Anything for the cause.”

  “If you get married, you’ll be Francesco and Franceschina,” Tina pointed out.

  Franceschina’s eyes flashed. “So cute! It’s too perfect.”

  Stella felt bad for this guy if he was planning on trying to say no.

  THE EVENING OF THE PARTY, the girls reassembled at the Nicoteras’ house. Everyone prepared their battle positions, pulling out last-minute hot rollers and passing a bottle of Fiorella’s mother’s perfume.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Stella,” Carolina said. “But before you get mad at me, you remember you told me to do whatever I had to do to make sure Frank went to the party, right?”

  “She did,” Franceschina said solidly.

  “What is it, Carolina?”

  Carolina smiled an evil little smile. “Well, guess who is Frank’s paesan?”

  “He’s Abruzzese,” Franceschina remembered. “What’s the name of the village?”

  But Stella already knew the answer before Carolina chirped, “Carmelo Maglieri! So, Stella, I told him you were going to be at the party, and that if he made sure Frank came that you would dance with him.”

  Fiorella and Tina squealed.

  “Ooo, Carolina! You are such a crook.” Stella’s heart was pounding. Handsome, smug Carmelo Maglieri—she did not want to see him again, and she certainly didn’t want to have to endure a dance with him. “You wait until now to tell me? I don’t even have time to think of an excuse to get out of it.”

  “I would have called you, if you had a phone.” Carolina paused to put on a bright red lipstick that matched her bright red Christmas dress. “Anyway, Stella, there are much worse people to have to dance with. Wait till you see who I promised Fiorella here to.” She winked and all the girls hooted with mirth.

  Stella knew she wouldn’t be able to explain why she was so dead set against Carmelo’s attention—they thought he was a catch, with his twinkling blue eyes and his concertina voice and his smart gray suit. She could hardly explain it to herself, but her gut instinct screamed out against him.

  Stella solved her problem by sticking tightly by her mother throughout the party instead of mingling with her girlfriends. Tina, regretful to miss the romantic high jinks but reluctant to leave her sister, stayed in their corner. The Fortuna women watched Carolina, Fiorella, and Franceschina attack the Abruzzesi boys, pinning them in a cage of skirts, and soon the whole group was laughing and chatting. Stella congratulated herself for the excellent appearance of Franceschina’s bosom, which Frank seemed to be having trouble not looking at.

  “Well done, Stella,” Tina said.

  “Thank you,” Stella replied.

  “Franceschina should pay more attention to her minne or they’re going to fall out,” Assunta worried.

  Carmelo Maglieri was not to be shaken off, though, and when his paesan Frank was safely dancing with his huntress Carmelo stepped through the crowd to join the Fortunas, bending low to kiss Assunta’s hand. Stella saw how the gesture charmed her mother, her simple mother who had never seen a film in the cinema. Carmelo’s necktie was holly-green. It was hard to ignore the brightness of his eyes.

  Tina had dozens of questions for Carmelo about Rocco, but it quickly became clear that he had little to tell her; Rocco was not sending Carmelo letters from abroad. When Tina fretted over this, Carmelo laughed. “Why would he send letters to me?” he said. “It’s much more important for him to write to his special girl.”

  Predictably, Tina’s face began to turn fuchsia at this. “Am I really his special girl, do you think?”

  “I’m sure Rocco thinks of you every day.
”

  The idea passed through Stella’s head that maybe Carmelo was checking up on Tina for his pal, keeping her loyal. She felt a new flare of distrust for him.

  “We pray for him every day,” Tina was saying. Her eyes were wet and energetic in her flushed face. “You should pray for him, too.”

  “I will,” Carmelo said. His voice was serious now. He turned to face Stella. “I was sorry to hear about your fiancé. My condolences to you and your family.”

  Stella’s wariness toward Carmelo coalesced into a cold nausea. Why would he be sad about Stefano, whom he’d never known? No man was that tenderhearted. No—by bringing up Stefano, Carmelo was alerting her to the fact that he saw her as on the market.

  “We’re very sad,” Stella said stiffly. “He was a good man.”

  “He was a good man,” Tina repeated, her voice breaking. Oh, not at the party, Tina, Stella thought, but Assunta was reaching out to grab Carmelo’s wrist, an intimate gesture that surprised both her daughters into silence. “You are a very good man,” Assunta said to Carmelo. “Thank you for thinking of us.”

  Suddenly the nausea overwhelmed Stella, and she was half-blinded by silvery spots of panic swimming over her field of vision. “Excuse me,” she said. She twirled away from them and walked briskly toward the ladies’ room. She had to escape. Let them think she was upset about Stefano. Luckily there was no line of waiting women. She locked herself in a stall and sat right down on the toilet in her dress, gulping lungfuls of urine-scented air, trying to calm herself.

  She had been shaken by a vision of being married to Carmelo, too-smooth Carmelo, with his patient jokes and his unknowable agenda. Once the thought was in her head, she couldn’t fight off the related thoughts it spawned. His hands on her, which set off ripples of phobic chills. Her body swelling with his baby. Her legs splayed like an animal’s, like she had seen her mother’s when Louie was born, that awful purple fig slimy with blood. Stella felt her body cramp, a ripple of fear and revulsion that started in her mons and shot up into her stomach. She couldn’t banish the vision. She clutched her stomach, feeling the suture scars through the cloth of her dress. She had already been broken open once. It wasn’t going to happen again.