The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  When Tina came in and called under the stall doors for her, Stella ignored her. “Stella. Stellll-la. Come out. Stellll-la.” Stella was stubborn in her silence. Finally, after the attempted interference of several other women, Tina went away.

  Stella closed her eyes and tried to draw her mental picture of the mountain, the blue-silver olive leaves rippling like water in the breeze. She waited in the stall until the roiling in her stomach had subsided. Before going back to the party, she took the opportunity to pee. When she pulled down her panties she found blood in them—she must have lost track of the days again. She pulled down a handful of toilet paper from the roll, squashed it into a wad, and plugged it in, feeling better already. Perhaps it wasn’t a premonition that had given her chills, just regular cramps.

  NEVERTHELESS. SHE COULDN’T LET CARMELO MAGLIERI get too close.

  “Did you ever think,” said Stella to her mother the next morning as they were setting the table for lunch, “that blue eyes, like Carmelo’s . . . that you need to watch out for mal’oicch’?”

  “That’s silly,” Assunta said immediately.

  “You know what they say about blue-eyed men,” Stella said. “Nothing to stop the devil from looking out.”

  “That’s superstitious nonsense,” Assunta said. “You know that’s not how it works.”

  “I know,” Stella replied, chastised.

  But before bed that night Assunta pronounced the fascination banishment over each of her children.

  THE WAR WAS A HARD TIME, a literally dark time, a world muted by blackout curtains. Between the curfews and the absent young men, the social gatherings were short, stultified. There was no more meat; there was no more sugar. There were memorial masses for the boys who wouldn’t come home.

  Meanwhile, the Fortunas worked hard and got by. Tony rented out the second and third floors of the Bedford Street house to paying tenants, so there was rental income on top of their salaries. He still took his daughters’ pay, but he gave them spending money for movies, haircuts, soda fountains. They were becoming more American by the day.

  Every year, Stella’s yearning for Calabria faded a little more, the pain of her separation softening into nostalgia. She felt guilty when she noticed, but she couldn’t help herself. Ievoli was healing over, an old wound Stella, the survivor, had overcome. There was plenty in America for her to love—her colorful dresses, the delicious rich food, the cinemas and cars and toilets that flushed.

  You work hard, time passes. Even hard times pass. For Stella, this wasn’t hard times—she would have happily lived this way, working hard, eating her fill, spending her evenings with her mother and sister and friends, for the rest of her life.

  * * *

  JOEY HAD ENLISTED IN THE ARMY IN 1942, and after two years of preparing for deployment he was shipped out with his unit to Europe in late autumn of 1944. He sent one letter, a single sad page addressed to Assunta and written in censor-proof English. The letter ended with one line in poorly spelled Italian: I wish I was home. No one heard anything else from him for six months, until the day in March 1945 when the Western Union boy came to Bedford Street.

  Stella knew why he was there as soon as she saw him through the curtain. The uniform, the high-brimmed hat with the gold seal—they only sent a telegram for one reason.

  “I’ll get the door, Ma,” Stella shouted to the kitchen. Her mother must be protected from this—at whatever cost Assunta must not answer the door. Stella took a deep breath as Tina appeared at her elbow.

  “Stella. What is he here for?” Tina’s voice was already ragged with tears.

  Stella took another breath. Her heart was pounding. She was about to be told her brother was dead. She had to prepare herself.

  Stella opened the door three-quarters and stood solidly in front of it, blocking Tina from running out onto the porch. “Yes?” Stella said to the messenger boy. Her throat was tight.

  He was probably only fifteen years old, with an acne-blistered forehead and thick, rimless glasses. “Ma’am. Is this the home of Anthony and Assunta Fortuna?” He pronounced Assunta’s name “Uh-suhn-ta.”

  Behind her, Tina was squeezing Stella’s arm so tightly it hurt. “Yes,” Stella said. “Those are my parents.”

  “He has a telegram,” Tina said in Calabrese, and began to sob.

  “Ma’am, I have a delivery for them.”

  “I will take it.” Stella pressed her weight into the palm that was bracing her against the doorframe, letting the sharp edge of the wood cut into her skin. Behind her, Tina’s sobbing had risen to high-pitched gasps.

  The boy rubbed his nose uncomfortably. “I’m supposed to deliver it to either Mr. or Mrs. Anthony Fortuna.”

  Stella stepped forward and snatched the telegram out of his hand. “My brother is dead?” She felt the knot in her stomach convulse as she pictured Joey, in his uniform as she’d last seen him, dashing, handsome Joey, then her mind’s eye flashing to his little fleecy head nestled against her shoulder in the bed they had shared as children. She heard the smack of Tina’s hands on the foyer tiles behind her as her sister collapsed, wailing.

  The messenger boy took a step backward and Stella seized his wrist so he couldn’t leave. “What does this say?” she demanded. There were only a few lines of text, but Stella couldn’t understand anything except Joey’s name and the date. She searched for “dead” or “kill” but the English in the telegram was unfamiliar, too officious. “My brother Joey—he was killed?”

  “Uh.” The boy leaned forward and studied the text. “Not dead, no. Is she okay?” he said, pointing to Tina, who was prostrate weeping, her open mouth pressed into the floor tiles.

  “She’s fine.” Stella’s dark tunnel of dread began to recede. “My brother’s not dead?”

  He shook his head.

  Still squeezing the boy’s wrist, Stella turned to Tina. “Get a grip,” she said. “Joey’s not dead.”

  Tina instantly stopped sobbing. “Not dead?” She hiccupped. “Then what?”

  The boy said English words Stella didn’t understand. When she looked at him blankly, he repeated himself, and pointed to the telegram.

  “He’s hurt?” Stella tried. “Hurt bad?”

  “No, geez,” the boy said impatiently. He had a whole sack of visits he still had to make. “Is there someone in your house who speaks better English?”

  AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS IN A military hospital in France, Joey was sent home to Hartford. He’d been recovering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his left forearm. At least, that was how his discharge papers described the injury; Joey himself would never admit it, so people would always shrug and say, “We’ll never know exactly what happened.”

  After two years of army training, Joey had apparently not been mentally prepared for combat; when his unit landed in France, his misgivings overwhelmed him. The rest of the 103rd headed north to invade Germany, but Joey Fortuna never made it out of Marseilles.

  The army had court-martialed Joey as soon as he was released from the military hospital and sent him home with a dishonorable discharge. Despite his criminal act of self-mutilation, the Hartford veterans’ hospital offered him an operation to fix his arm at no cost. Joey declined the surgery; he was afraid that if he were able-bodied they would send him back to war. A pointless sacrifice—if only Joey had been smart enough to ask around a little, he’d have learned DDs were never redeployed.

  Despite his long sojourn in the French hospital, Joey’s arm healed incompletely; the radius and ulna had both shattered on the bullet’s impact, and the arm had been somewhat sarcastically reset by a harried military surgeon who only suffered malingerers because of his Hippocratic oath. Joey had avoided jail time, but the dishonorable discharge together with his new physical impairment became a long, dark shadow over his life and prospects.

  Furthermore, as was protocol for a noncitizen soldier who had been dishonorably discharged, the INS had terminated Joey’s naturalization application.

  Tony dragged Jo
ey down to the army office on Asylum Street to protest. He made Joey wear a suit. “You can’t do that,” Tony roared at the soldier on desk duty. “He went to war for you! The paperwork, it’s already done. He’s a citizen.”

  The soldier had no sympathy for cowards. He was cold and calm. “In the event of dishonorable discharge, they can put a stop to the naturalization application, even retroactively.”

  “Retroactively?” Tony repeated.

  “Meaning even if it’s already done. They can undo it.”

  Joey stared at the linoleum as Tony became outraged. “He fought for your country!”

  “My country?” the soldier said neutrally. “Look, Mr. Fortuna, your son committed a crime against the U.S. military during a time of war. He’s lucky to not be subject to more extreme disciplinary measures.” For clarity, he spelled it out: “You’re lucky he’s not in jail.”

  That was the end of that negotiation. Tony stormed off to the bar without anything further to say to his son, who walked home alone.

  If Joey had died during active duty, his whole family—parents, siblings—would have been immediately eligible for United States citizenship. But that was the root of the problem; Joey had been unwilling to die, or even get too close to risking death. And now he was a disgraced small-time criminal with no GI benefits and a bum arm.

  Tony would never forgive his son for his cowardice. Tony, who’d spent four years in combat on one of the bloodiest battlefronts in human history and who’d never shot himself in the arm, resented the weakness he saw in Joey. A son was meant to be proof of a father’s manliness; Tony’s son was unmanly. He was soft and spoiled and scared, a man who could earn no respect. As long as both men lived they were never able to heal this breach. Tony ignored his son if they were in the same room. If they did speak to each other—if Joey, restless for drama, forced a conversation—it ended in shouting, taunting, and a xylophone of slamming doors.

  Joey was physically unfit to perform many of the construction and factory jobs the other noncitizen immigrant men took, and the truth of his situation was a black mark against him, quickly sussed out by interviewers whose own boys were off being brave. You’re injured because you served, but you don’t have American papers or veteran benefits . . . ? After four or five anemic attempts to find a job, Joey gave up and spent his time in his room at Bedford Street. He drank from the time he woke up—usually around noon—until he eventually fell asleep. He went through gallons of Tony’s wine. Drinking was a habit he had picked up overseas, and he intended to live the rest of his life in a wine-dulled haze.

  “You don’t need this,” Assunta would say to him when he sat down at the kitchen table in his undershirt and long johns. She’d say it as she poured him a tall glass of red wine from the jug she kept ready on the counter.

  “Trust me, Ma, I do need it,” he’d reply. He’d wait for her to set a dish of breakfast pastina in front of him. “This is who I am now, your pathetic drunk failure of a son. This is how it’s gonna be.”

  The presence of this replacement monster—a different person entirely from the mischievous, affectionate, pretty-faced Joey who’d gone to war—was a continuing shock to Stella. The sight of him at the wine-stained kitchen table—it made her feel sick. He was her brother, the baby she’d learned to hold when she was just a baby herself, who’d cried for a whole day when his favorite stray cat disappeared, who’d wink as he cracked open chestnuts for her with one sharp, deft bite. Her baby brother—still so handsome now, despite his red eyes and nasty smile. But he was a monster who didn’t care whom he hurt, as long as he could celebrate his own damage. She didn’t see his suffering, like her mother did. He was an agent of corruption in their house, a perfect thing that had rotted and was determined to rot everything around it.

  Joey’s return was particularly annoying for Louie, who was fifteen and had had the boys’ bedroom to himself for three years. Louie was a straight shooter, neat and polite, with subdued manners his teachers appreciated. He was on track to graduate from high school—the first person in his family to do such a thing—and had done well on the football squad. The sour-smelling and maudlin older brother in his bedroom was cramping his teenage style. In the summer, when school was out, Louie started sleeping at friends’ houses and sometimes not coming home for days at a time.

  Assunta cried about this, because Louie was her favorite. “You know he’s the best of you kids,” she would tell Joey as he sat at the table in a hanging-open bathrobe. “You let him take care of you like he’s the older brother.”

  “I’m old in my heart, Ma,” Joey would say. “I’m so old I don’t have any reason to go running around doing shit to impress people. I know there’s no point.”

  CARMELO MAGLIERI SOMETIMES TOOK JOEY out for a beer. It seemed to be what Joey needed, and he would come home in a better mood.

  “You should marry him, Stella,” Joey told the whole family one night at dinner. “You know he’s got it for you. He’s been waiting for three years for you to come around.”

  Tony looked up from his food, appraising his oldest daughter. Stella felt herself flush so violently the skin on her neck began to itch.

  “Good for him,” she said shortly.

  “Come on, Stella, you could do a hell of a lot worse.”

  “Shut up, Joey,” she said in English. It sounded much stronger in English. “You’re an idiot.” She knew her father was still watching her.

  “And you’re a snot.” Joey was shaking his head. “What about you you think is so great you could do better than Carmelo? Good-looking guy like that? Any one of the girls at the Society would say yes in a heartbeat.”

  “Well, let them fight over him, then.” Stella focused on the cool air around her, willing away the burn in her face and neck.

  “You should be thinking about your prospects, Stella,” Tony said. “You’re twenty-five. You never know who is going to come back from this war.”

  “Papa, Tina hardly needs more of a reason to worry about Rocco,” Stella said. It was mean to turn the conversation that way, but the strategy revealed itself to be a stroke of genius. The focus was now on the latest news of Rocco Caramanico. No one said anything else about Carmelo Maglieri that night, but Stella knew the seed had been planted in her father’s head. Carmelo had just become her enemy.

  CARMELO WORKED AT PRATT & WHITNEY, like Tony, but in the engine unit. After Joey brought up Stella’s marriage prospects at the dinner table, it somehow came about that Carmelo was picking up Tony in the morning and driving him to work in his Plymouth. Stella wasn’t sure if her father had sought out Carmelo or if Carmelo had made the offer. Either way it was bad news.

  When he dropped Tony off after work, Carmelo would come up for a glass of wine and then end up staying for dinner. He was not subtle about his interest in Stella. She was being courted, and her father, who was old-world enough to believe his opinion mattered, was pleased. Stella was aware of the danger. Little innocent-looking lifestyle changes, like the commuting arrangements and the dinner drop-ins, were going to pile on her gradually until she found herself the mother of Carmelo’s ten children and not sure when, exactly, she’d been broken down.

  Stella was besieged in her own house, and her supposed allies were sympathetic to the enemy. Everyone liked Carmelo. He flirted with Assunta, who would chuckle and swat him with her kitchen towel. She invited him back night after night for dinner. “Poor thing,” she’d say, “living in that awful bachelor building with a bunch of men.” Stella didn’t feel one bit sorry for him; the man was hardly starving and could easily charm some other doting mother into feeding him.

  Carmelo gossiped with Tina like they were old girlfriends. He taught Louie card games. On nights Carmelo came over, Tony and Joey would both stay in, and the men would play cards at the kitchen table—a rare rapprochement between Joey and his father. This was the year Tony began to go out less in the evenings; it might be when his relationship with that other, unknown woman ended. As much as Stella resen
ted Carmelo’s infiltration of her family, she knew her mother was happier, free of the anxiety and sadness she’d had to rally against every night her husband hadn’t come home.

  Carmelo read and wrote well in both Italian and English; he read the newspaper every morning, he told them, and that was how he learned everything he’d ever known. It was Carmelo who enabled the Fortuna girls to pass their citizenship tests, at last, in July 1945. Carmelo read the study questions aloud, interpreted them into Italian, and quizzed the sisters until, finally, it felt like Stella was memorizing something she understood. He spoke to Tina in English, knowing she struggled with the language, prompting her kindly.

  Carmelo now used Calabrese expressions he must have picked up from the Fortunas. Was he working so hard to fit in with them that he even changed his speech? Stella wondered, was he doing it on purpose or subconsciously? And—which would be worse?

  IT WOULD COME EVENTUALLY, the direct confrontation. “Eventually” turned out to be the week after Stella had become a United States citizen.

  “With your father’s permission,” Carmelo had said during dinner, in front of the whole damn family, “I would like to take you out on a date, Stella.”

  “A date,” Antonio said, repeating the American word. “What kind of date?”

  “Dinner and a movie on Saturday night,” Carmelo said. He seemed calm and confident. Meanwhile Stella was full of dread, looking down at her plate of pasta as the rest of her family stared at her. Their glee was palpable; it filled the dining room and clamped around her like an invisible vise. How could she fight against his charisma?

  “Well, Stella?” Tony said.