The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  That night she came home to Bedford Street, bathed, set her hair in rag curls, and slept in her own bed, then got up in the morning to fix the girls breakfast before they got ready for the photographer. The pronouncement that her daughter didn’t need her seemed to have done the trick.

  In all the drama of Louie’s accident, Tina had been completely distracted and so had forgotten her panic about her impending sexual encounter with her husband-to-be. Which was just as well. Stella had been about at the end of her rope listening to her sister speculate and fret.

  THE WEDDING WENT SMOOTHLY, and there were many compliments paid to Tony Fortuna, who had hosted a lovely event.

  Stella had seen many American weddings by now, and she knew what to expect. But seeing Tina come down the aisle looking so serene, so holy, she felt her heart pound with melancholy. Tina was leaving Stella to make her own family.

  Carmelo Maglieri hadn’t come from Chicago to be Rocco’s best man, but he sent the newlyweds a card with eight dollars in it. In Carmelo’s place, Rocco asked another paesan of his, a squirrelly young man named Jack Pardo. Among Rocco’s other groomsmen were Joey, Mikey Perri, and, excitingly, a Portuguese man named Jimmy whom Rocco worked with at his new factory job. Rocco and Tina had Jimmy escort Josie Brandolino, Tony’s boss’s daughter, who wasn’t very pretty and who they assumed would be grateful for a date even if he wasn’t Italian.

  Fiorella Mulino caught the bouquet, but she wouldn’t be the next to get married. In fact, she would never get married at all. She would die of breast cancer two years later, when she was twenty-six years old. She must have already been sick at the wedding, although the girls didn’t know it yet. In the bridal party photo that still hangs on Tina Caramanico’s wall, Fiorella’s eyes are ever bright, her sweet smile full of youthful perfection.

  In the evening, the new Mr. and Mrs. Rocco Caramanico rode away in a limousine to a fancy hotel near the train station. Their bags were already packed and waiting for them there; the next morning they would board a train for Washington, D.C., for their weeklong honeymoon.

  That night, for the first time in her life, Stella slept alone. She woke up many times during the night and would have to struggle out of her sleepy confusion to remind herself why Tina wasn’t there.

  WASHINGTON WAS VERY HOT, APPARENTLY, and full of large white buildings. But that wasn’t what anyone cared about.

  “It hurt so much, Stella,” Tina told her. “I was so scared. And then he wanted to do it so many times, every night and sometimes in the morning.”

  Stella wasn’t surprised Rocco had turned out to be a goat with all those sexual appetites. She wasn’t sure how much more of Tina’s honeymoon gossip she wanted to hear—she was as curious about Tina’s experience as Tina was eager to discuss it, but the details made Stella’s stomach roil. She didn’t say anything, just let Tina continue.

  “He made me take off all my clothes, even my brassiere.” Tina hadn’t ever worn a brassiere, or even heard of one, until she came to America, but now that the girls knew what the undergarment was for, the thought of not wearing one was perverse. “He wants to suck on my nipple, like a baby.” Tina’s deep-set eyes were round with scandal. “Have you heard of that? A grown man sucking like a baby?” Stella grimaced. She imagined grown men did all kinds of abhorrent things. “And then, when he puts his liquid in you, it’s all sticky and it makes your skin itch. You want to wash it off because it smells, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to wash it off, because maybe then I won’t get a baby. Then sometimes I can smell it on myself even outside, when we’re walking around, and I wonder if other people can smell it, too.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Stella said.

  “Yes,” Tina said, chastised, and her face assumed a propitiating expression. “Maybe if I get pregnant soon he’ll stop.”

  ROCCO CARAMANICO HAD A GOOD JOB working at the Gillette factory, where he was a foreman on the production floor, but he didn’t have the money yet to buy the house he had promised his new bride. In the meantime, the Caramanicos moved in with the Fortunas to save money.

  The sleeping arrangements needed to be reorganized. The newlyweds required their own room, certainly, with a door. The only solution was the room the sisters had shared. But where would Stella go? She couldn’t sleep with the boys, and Assunta’s living room was not an option. All the fancy things Assunta had made Tony buy for her were on display there, the doily-covered marble coffee table, the gold upholstered couch—all the symbols of her better life here in America, the things that set her apart from the dirt-sweeping village girl she’d been. No one would be sleep-sweating or drooling on that couch.

  “If you would just get married and move out, this wouldn’t be a problem,” Tony told Stella, both with humor and without.

  Assunta was hoping the tenants on the second floor would move out soon so that the Caramanicos could take over up there and Stella could have her room back. The Bedford Street house was designed for three families; if Assunta managed it right, she could have all her children living under her roof indefinitely. But she couldn’t just kick the current paying tenants out, especially with Tony so tight for money, what with his only working part-time and with all the wedding expenses.

  “You could sleep with me on the bed and your father can sleep on the cot in our room,” Assunta offered. Tony hadn’t been allowed connubial rights since the last miscarriage, doctor’s orders.

  “No way in hell, Ma,” Stella said, and Assunta smacked the back of her hand because of her bad language. Assunta didn’t know about Stella’s nightmare about her father. But Stella would have rather joined the shantytown behind Front Street than shared a bedroom with Tony.

  Instead, Stella slept in the kitchen on the trundle bed. The house was noisy and stinky with too many bodies. At night Stella couldn’t set up her bed until everyone had gone to sleep, or she would be underfoot in the kitchen. She was sleep-deprived and always on edge. She had no privacy at all, and now there was an extra man walking around the house. Stella had nowhere to keep her clothes in the kitchen, so they stayed in Rocco and Tina’s room. Dressing in the morning became a quadrille of awkwardness, Stella trying to dart in to reclaim her clean underwear during the slender margin of time in which Rocco took his militarily efficient shower. She hated when he caught her alone in the bedroom, felt his searching eyes on her nightdress as he stood in his bathrobe.

  Rocco’s muted lasciviousness made her nervous. He was the type of man who had never trained himself not to stare at a woman’s breasts, and she’d noticed his eyes wandered over whatever female parts they were presented with. Having had this thought—that her sister’s husband had thought about her body, and that the man had access to her any time he liked—Stella found it difficult to let herself fall asleep at night. She would start awake, feeling terribly vulnerable.

  In her perpetual haze of half-sleep, the nightmare came back. The days began to run together in a sleepy smear. Stella’s work at the factory became listless and imprecise.

  This, she thought, living like this might wear me down.

  AT THIS MOMENT OF WEAKNESS, the worst thing that could possibly happen happened—it was like the footfall of God stamping out Stella’s future. She saw it descending on her, but there was nowhere to jump out of the way.

  January 12, 1947, the Fortunas were celebrating Stella’s twenty-seventh birthday. Tina had baked a lemon pound cake. Stella was warm with wine and pleased with the party. Everyone—the Fortunas, the Caramanicos, Zu Ottavio and Za Caterina Perri, the entire Nicotera family—was crowding around the dining room table, which had been set with Assunta’s nice yellow glass dessert plates, when the doorbell rang.

  Joey stood up to get the door, and then he was bursting back into the dining room, shouting, “Look who’s here!”

  There he was, wielding a dozen hothouse roses like a knight’s sword. His cheeks were cold-bright, and snow ridged the shoulders of his overcoat and the brim of his fedora. Perhaps it was only the swath of co
ld air he brought in with him, but it felt like witchcraft when the temperature in the dining room dropped enough for goose bumps to rise on Stella’s arms. You’re a cold woman, Stella—she remembered his words the last time she’d seen him, a curse laid on her skin.

  “Carmelo!” Assunta couldn’t contain herself and burst into joyful tears. “What’s the matter, Joey? Take his coat, he must be freezing, he must be soaked! Carmelo, what are you doing here? Give Joey your coat! Come sit down, get warm!”

  “These are for you, Stella,” Carmelo was saying, the arm of roses extended toward her as Joey wrestled the partially removed coat off Carmelo’s other shoulder, scattering snow across the rug. “I apologize for disrupting your birthday party. Auguri, tanti auguri.”

  Stella took the flowers from him, stunned, numb, her mind soft. A wine-rich smile was stretched across her face, and she only realized when it was too late, when Carmelo beamed his cherry-cheeked smile back at her, that she must have looked like she was happy to see him.

  She didn’t need to say anything, thank God, because everyone was falling on Carmelo with kisses and hugs and handshakes and shoulder slaps. Was he back? Was he just visiting? Stella sat quietly in the middle of the hubbub and rubbed a rose petal between her thumb and index finger, wishing the silky fibrousness would recall her to reality.

  Assunta brought an extra stool and Carmelo was installed at the table with a slice of yellow cake as wide as a building brick. With a typical amount of audience interruption, this was the story he told.

  The store in Chicago hadn’t worked out so well. The business was good, people in and out all day, lots of sales, constantly restocking, but Carmelo’s brother, Gio, was too generous, letting people buy on credit, and the brothers were barely breaking even. After a year and a half, Carmelo knew enough about running a business to realize he’d been wrong about wanting to. He decided to sell off his share and come back to Hartford. Gio was selling his share in the store now, too, and would follow in a couple months.

  Carmelo had come back to Hartford before Christmas. He needed a job, though, and he wasn’t getting anywhere asking around. Jobs were hard to find, with all the boys back from the war and the factories done with their war contracts. He was running out of ideas when he got very lucky.

  He was walking down Franklin Avenue at five thirty in the morning—he’d gone out early to get a paper and check the wanted ads—and passed a bunch of men milling around a chain-link fence, a pile of shovels and picks beside them. On a whim he took off his long wool coat and left it by the fence, then strolled up and joined the men. He was freezing cold but less conspicuous without the coat. The timing was perfect, since the foreman hadn’t given out assignments yet, and Carmelo grabbed a pick and followed where the guy pointed, to a white line painted on the crumbling concrete. He watched a couple other men set about work, watched how they wrestled up the old concrete and dug straight down on the white line, making narrow, carefully defined canals in the road—they were laying space for underground electrical wires.

  Carmelo dug and dug; hours passed, the other men on the line chatting with him but no one asking where he’d come from or getting suspicious that there were too many men. He was just beginning to get into the swing of the work, beginning to feel like he was good enough that maybe he could talk them into letting him stay on, when he hit what turned out to be a live wire—someone had mispainted the line he was following.

  “Suddenly I wasn’t cold anymore!” Carmelo slapped his thigh and everyone at the table around Stella laughed or cooed in horror.

  He woke up flat on his back in the hospital, nearly electrocuted to death, and that’s when it came out—when they tried to do the paperwork for the hospital bills—that Carmelo Maglieri wasn’t even a United Electrical employee. Everyone got very nervous about lawsuits and seemed relieved to learn Carmelo wasn’t intending to take anyone to court—as long as they could give him a job. A job they gave him, and a slightly gratuitous chunk of change to cover his medical expenses.

  Joey poured all the men more wine as the story wound down. Tina was smiling as she gathered plates. Her joy at seeing Carmelo was simple and pure; her friend was back. For once, Stella helped her take the dirty dishes to the kitchen. Seeing her sister so happy, Stella felt guilty knowing she had driven Carmelo to leave, taken him from people who cared about him. But Tina didn’t think of things in those terms. At least, Stella hoped she didn’t.

  Over the sink, where Tina was running hot water into the basin, Stella whispered, “I can’t believe he’s here, Tina. I thought we were done with him.”

  “But he likes you, Stella.” Tina slammed down the tap and squeezed the excess water out of the dishrag with two hands; her usual unnecessary force. “Can’t you see that? He’s here because he still likes you even after how mean you were.”

  Stella swallowed. “I wasn’t—”

  “He’s a good man, Stella,” Tina interrupted her. “You should stop teasing him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

  Tina dropped the rag in the sink and left Stella alone in the kitchen.

  * * *

  IN FEBRUARY 1947, Tina had been married six months. The first three, the ladies at the Sacred Heart socials joked about Tina’s robust good health and how a little one was probably on the way, but when Tina blushed and waved them off they left her alone, because everyone knows it’s bad luck to talk about a pregnancy before the mother is showing. By the holiday season, though, Tina was fair game. She’d been married long enough, and all the ladies who’d already had to go through it wanted a turn at her, to make sure she had to go through it, too. They’d come up to her after mass and pat her belly, right there in the church, and ask her if there was something cooking.

  “We’re trying,” Tina would say, turning her dark pink.

  The ladies would cackle and say, “You have to try harder!”

  Now that half a year had passed, people asked Tina point-blank what she was waiting for, or if something was wrong. Tina didn’t know how to answer these questions and became flustered and downtrodden. It was upsetting to watch. When she could, Stella would step in and change the subject; usually this meant offering herself as a sacrificial lamb, because most ladies were more disgruntled that Stella wasn’t married than that Tina wasn’t pregnant.

  On Ash Wednesday, Tina made a huge dinner for the whole family, hot boiled ricotta polpette, parsley-baked fish, fresh linguine she had cut before work. But her six-month anniversary had just come and gone and she was so distraught by that milestone that she couldn’t eat her own feast. Six months of being a wife and she hadn’t been able to do the most important thing.

  Stella rubbed her sister’s back while Tina cried in the Caramanico bedroom. “What’s wrong with me, Stella?” Tina asked, as if Stella could possibly have the answer.

  “You know it can take time,” Stella said. “You’ve heard all the same stories I have. It’s only been six months.”

  “Maybe I did something wrong and God doesn’t want me to be a mother.” Speaking these words made Tina start sobbing again.

  “Tina. Enough. You’ve never done anything wrong in your life.” Stella scratched gently at Tina’s scalp, which had always soothed her since she was a little girl. “Just give it time, little bug, and pray to Santa Maria. I promise I will pray for you, too. Va bene?”

  Stella did not want to see Tina suffering like this. But she also wanted Tina to conceive as quickly as possible for selfish reasons; if there was a grandchild for Tony and Assunta to concentrate on, there would be less pressure on Stella to marry Carmelo.

  NO ONE COULD ACCUSE TINA of not working that particular chore as thoroughly as she worked any other. She had told Stella more than once that she hoped Rocco’s enthusiasm would eventually wane, but behind their closed bedroom door Tina seemed not to suffer inordinately while paying her marital debt. That very night, only hours after she had cried too hard to eat her own polpette, Tina made so much noise, soft cries like a little baby’s, that Stella, tip
toeing to the bathroom, paused in the hallway to listen in disgusted amusement. Rocco’s voice was a low, coarse rumble, his words obscured, but Tina’s were not.

  Stella shouldn’t have, but she did: she took a careful, silent step toward the door of her old bedroom and laid her ear against the wood.

  “That’s nice,” Stella heard, then Rocco’s low murmur, then “That’s nice” again.

  It was not the first time Stella had overheard the Caramanicos in the act—it would have been impossible not to, with Stella’s sleeping just around the corner in the kitchen—but she still found it horrifying and fascinating, almost unbelievable, that her good-girl sister seemed to enjoy having such an awful thing done to her. Breathing shallowly, the door cool against her too-hot ear, Stella tried to guess what the sounds she heard could mean. She felt the familiar knot in her stomach, the ball of nausea that always accompanied her dream, as she imagined what Tina must be letting Rocco do.

  Stella was so focused on not betraying herself by making any noise that she failed to notice her father’s approach until his musty, garlicky night breath landed on her neck. “Jealous, eh?”

  Stella coughed in surprise, choking on her own spittle as she whirled around, bringing herself eye level with a sweat-matted T of curling lead-gray chest hair.