“Ugh, Tina,” Stella said, but they didn’t have time to waste. She could hear the oven squeal as Rocco moved it with unfortunate ease. “I don’t see why you thought it was going to fall on you,” he was saying to Assunta. They only had seconds to solve this.
Tina bent down behind the bed and rose slowly, carefully, the china tureen sloshing brimful between her hands with a soupy yellow-brown liquid in which Stella could plainly, regrettably, make out the lupini Tina had been snacking on at lunch. Stella heard Rocco coming back down the hall and in a flash of synchronicity she threw the window open just as Tina lunged toward it—for a moment they were perfectly connected again, like they had been as children, as if they shared the same set of eyes and hands and impulses—and Tina tossed the whole lot of it, nightgown, shit, tureen and all, through the open window, which Stella brought crashing back down onto the sash just as the china smashed against the driveway.
Rocco opened the door and looked from one flush-faced sister to the other. They smiled at him pleasantly.
“What are you doing in here?” he said to Stella after a moment of confusion.
“Just leaving,” Stella said. “Tina was lending me her red nail polish.” She wished she’d been able to think of something else to say, but what were the odds that Rocco would notice her nails were already painted?
“Huhn,” Rocco grunted. Stella filed past him, followed by Tina, who went to wash herself off before her husband noticed the streak of brown across her bosom.
IT WAS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, Tony’s sitting out the whole charade peacefully.
Tina and Rocco had gone to bed; Stella was sitting at the kitchen table with her mother when Tony joined them. He seemed cheerful and youthful; Carmelo’s demeanor had proved its contagiousness. He poured himself a glass of wine and topped off his wife’s and daughter’s.
“Salut,” he said, and Stella murmured “Salut” soberly as he clinked her glass. Assunta did the same, but she was peering up at her husband through her bushy eyebrows in a way that put Stella on alert. Her mother knew what was coming.
“I’m toasting the impending marriage of my oldest daughter, who all the world thought was doomed to be a spinster.” Tony smiled at his women. “Congratulate me.”
“Tonnon,” Assunta said, warning.
“Congratulate me!” He slapped the table, indicating that his good-naturedness was not to be taken for granted. “It’s a great thing for a father.”
“Congratulations,” Assunta whispered, making Stella apologetic eyes.
“Now, fhijlia mia,” he said to Stella, “I think you have a lot of work to be doing on your trousseau.” He shook his finger at her, almost playful. “I have a feeling you have been very neglectful.”
“Papa, I’m not getting married.” But Stella was shaking, tremors running up her arms. You’re a cold woman, Stella.
“Oh yes, you are. I told Carmelo this afternoon. He’s coming back tomorrow with a ring.” Antonio shrugged, jovial. “Who knows, maybe he’ll buy you a diamond, although God knows you don’t deserve one.”
Stella’s mind was trembling with confusion; in this weird moment, her conviction had eroded. The cot in the kitchen; the recurring nightmare, recurring again; Carmelo’s hothouse roses. Carmelo, Carmelo. Carmelo, who had purchased her from her father like he would have a cow, who didn’t care whether he had her consent as long as he had Antonio’s. But . . . She hated herself for thinking it, but . . . Would it really be so terrible to be married to Carmelo Maglieri? He was no Rocco Caramanico; he would never barter Stella for lightbulbs or ogle her sister. But marriage—to have her body broken open by a man . . .
“But Papa.” Stella swallowed half her wine, a sour splash in her throat. “Remember when you told Rocco you weren’t going to make Tina marry him? That it was Tina’s choice if she wanted to get married?”
“You have a choice, too,” Tony said. “You can choose to marry Carmelo Maglieri or you can go straight to hell, if I have to kill you myself.”
For once in his life, Tony showed mercy and stood up and left the kitchen, a dramatic exit for the pater ex machina. At least Stella didn’t have to argue with him anymore; she had so little dignity as it was.
Not meeting her mother’s eye, Stella drank down the rest of her wine, trying to sort through her feelings. I would have given you anything you wanted, Stella, Carmelo had said. I would have given you the world. Had he meant it? But what was the world to her, if her own body wasn’t hers? The second glass of wine was spreading over her stomach. She stood and went to the counter for the flask.
Assunta followed her, reached up, and put her palm against the nape of Stella’s neck. Her hand was warm, making Stella realize how cold the kitchen was.
Her mother had always loved Carmelo. Her mother, who loved Stella so much. Her smart, simple mother, who knew so much about survival. Assunta wouldn’t wish this marriage on Stella if it were such a terrible thing.
Assunta touched the white bone cornetto hanging against Stella’s chest. “You need this now.”
Stella stood motionless at the counter for a long time after her mother went to bed. She needed a lot more than protection against the Evil Eye right now. She needed a plan.
PLAY ALONG.
Stella remembered the folk adage that the best way to cover up a love affair was to get married to someone else—a girl suffered a lot less public scrutiny once her virginity was out of the way. Stella was adopting a similar strategy, although to opposite end: she was going to save her virginity by getting engaged. Instead of continuing to treat Carmelo as her enemy, she would enlist him as an ally—albeit without his knowledge—in her plot to escape Tony. The months leading up to the wedding, Stella had learned from Tina’s experience, would be packed with frivolous expenses, which would offer her a cover for grafting money from her Silex salary into her secret stash. Meanwhile she would have to work out the logistics. She would have to prepare herself for the possibility that she might be disowned, kept away from her mother forever.
In any case, the first step in the resistance was entering into the engagement.
On Monday after work, Stella took great pains to look her best for Carmelo’s visit, locking herself in the bathroom one last time. She changed into her watermelon dress, even though it was a little too early in the spring for the airy linen, and affixed Fiorella’s butterfly brooch to its bosom. She didn’t have time to wash her hair before dinner, but she fluffed it with a comb and pinned it prettily above her ears. It had been long enough between cuttings that the resulting curls bobbed against her cheekbones, which she rouged.
She was reapplying her lipstick when she heard Carmelo arrive, then Tina’s nervous knock on the bathroom door. “He’s here. Stella?” She must have been wondering if tonight would be another showdown.
“Just a minute.” Stella took her time laying down one last coat. She felt quietly in control. It was the most peaceful, the happiest she had felt in months, since Rocco moved in—no, since before Louie got shot.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, the Fortunas were already noisily gathered around the spread Assunta and Tina had made: oven-fried chicken cutlets, hot artichoke hearts, still in the pan they’d been braised in, a two-pound bowl of pasta aglio e olio, and a dandelion salad from the backyard. Stella affected an air of chastised melancholy as she offered Carmelo her hand in greeting. She didn’t want her father getting suspicious.
Carmelo didn’t wait long, only until everyone but Assunta was seated. Although there was barely space for him between the table and the dining room wall, Carmelo pushed back his chair and took a knee at Stella’s feet. “Stella Fortuna, I want to ask you a question,” he said. He pulled a jeweler’s box out of his jacket pocket, opened it, and set it on the table between them. Inside was a gold ring with three diamonds. Stella stared at it, distracted against her own will by the sparkle of the center diamond, which she couldn’t help but notice was bigger than the single diamond Rocco had bought for Tina.
; Carmelo, who was still kneeling, took Stella’s hand, which she observed more than she felt. “Stella Fortuna,” he repeated her name, and then again, “Stella Fortuna, I would be honored if you would be my wife. Will you marry me?”
He spoke to her in Italian, but the words were the American ones, a gallant appeal for her favor. As if this were her choice. As if this arrangement were any less of a business transaction than Rocco’s bartering over lightbulbs with Tony.
“Yes,” Stella said quickly, and was glad it was the only thing she was required to say. In this actual moment of the proposal, her calm vanished and unease prickled in her stomach. She wasn’t a natural liar, even if she was good at putting on a show.
“Are you sure you want to marry me, Stella?” Carmelo’s blue eyes were steady and searching, and she struggled to meet his gaze. The ring in the open box sat on the dining room table between them. “For a long time you didn’t want to. Are you sure you’ve changed your mind?”
The unease that was simmering in her gut heated up to a boil. He was asking her point-blank what she wanted. Was it the right thing to lie to him, to use him?
But no, she reminded herself—he didn’t really want to know. He had never taken her seriously before. Why would he now?
“Yes, I’m sure.” She was shocked at the sound of her own voice, firm, neutral. There was no other way to win the war against her father; if Tony didn’t kill her, as he’d threatened, he would at the very least find some other man. “Before, I didn’t want to get married at all,” she said. “Now I’ve decided I would never marry anybody else.”
* * *
IT WAS A SIX-MONTH ENGAGEMENT, not too short, not too long. Carmelo’s ring was just a little too tight on her finger and left a red mark when she slid it off to wash her hands. “You have to stop doing that, Stella,” Za Pina warned her. “You’re going to lose it. You gotta get used to wearing it all the time.”
All the people who had nagged and pressured her for the last four years were suddenly kind and caring. They threw her parties and bought her gifts. They were genuinely happy for her, now that she was falling into line.
Carmelo came over for dinner three or four nights a week and everyone was very joyful now. He kissed her on each cheek now when he came and when he left, and she accepted his kisses. She made no trouble. She waited.
In the hot summer evenings of 1947 Stella sat at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, waiting for her cot, as Assunta scrubbed the stove and ran a lemon wedge over the counters to keep away the ants. When the rest of the house was asleep, they sat together and drank under the single naked bulb that hung over the linoleum. In the old days, Tina would have joined them, but now Tina was closed behind the door of her room with her husband. Nevertheless, this was the time of day Stella was happiest, sitting with her mother. On these sleepy summer nights, Stella could almost imagine they were home in Ievoli, in a world with no men to serve and service, just her and her mother, who loved her—that if she stepped out the back door into the warm evening air she would see not the picket fence that separated the Fortunas’ garden from the neighbors’ but instead via Fontana rolling down the mountainside into the breeze-bobbing valley of silver-green olive trees.
Stella loved her mother so much. Her chest ached with the idea that these evenings were the last they would spend together like this. Stella had forty-two dollars in her secret sock and six more weeks until the Fortunas thought she’d be walking down the aisle. She hadn’t figured out where she could possibly go, but she was going to have to make her move soon. Make her move or be trapped forever.
“I’m so afraid, Mamma,” she said. They had finished the entire jug that night. Stella’s heart thumped, swelling painfully under the weight of what she wanted to say to her mother. “I’m not like you,” she managed. It was the closest she could get to what she meant. “I can’t be a mother.”
“Of course you can, little star.” Assunta wrapped her soothing hand around Stella’s wrist. “Any woman can be a mother. It’s natural. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
Stella fought back the grotesque image of a child swelling inside her. “It’s not natural for me. I don’t love babies the way other women do. I don’t even like them.”
“It is different when it’s your own, Stella. You’ll see. You love it more than anything. Everything will change for you.”
“What if I’m not like other women, Mamma?” Stella’s breath ran out before she could finish the question.
“You are,” Assunta said. “All women are the same.”
When her mother went to bed, Stella lay looking at the extinguished lightbulb, whose fiber seemed to give off a residual glow in the black and gray kitchen. Even her mother, the person she loved most in the world, didn’t understand that Stella meant what she said. Even her mother didn’t take her seriously.
ONE PERSON DID TAKE STELLA SERIOUSLY: her enemy, her father. He’d been watching her carefully, waiting for her to slip up. Maybe she had been playing too docile; maybe that had raised his suspicions.
Stella was still a little hungover when she got home from work the next day. Her headache had fermented over the course of eight hours on the assembly line. The air in the Bedford Street house was swampy with late-August heat and heavy with the basil-garlic aroma of Assunta’s raù. Unknotting her head kerchief, Stella followed Tina toward the kitchen, where they usually fixed a snack before dinner.
But Tony was home today, and he was sitting at the kitchen table. From the way Assunta was standing silently by the stove, staring into her pot, Stella knew something was wrong even before she saw what Tony had in front of him: a pile of coins; an array of crumpled dollar bills that had been smoothed flat; a flaccid knitted pink sock.
“Papa,” Tina said.
“Why don’t you leave, Tina,” Tony said. “Go to your husband.”
Bright red face hanging, Tina hurried out of the kitchen. She did not meet Stella’s eye as she passed. In retrospect, it all should have been clear then, but Stella’s mind was still struggling to catch up.
“Tonnon.” Assunta was crying—why hadn’t Stella noticed immediately?
“Quiet, woman.” Tony didn’t look or sound angry. He patted the pile of coins on the table in front of him. “Rocco gave me all this money,” he said to Stella. “He found it in a drawer in his room. He was worried it might be stolen from me, so he turned it over. Do you know where the money came from, Stella?”
Rocco. The pervert, the thief, the betrayer. Stella felt a wash of guilt, guilty blood rising into her cheeks and drumming in her ears. She fought back the guilt with anger. “It’s mine,” she said. “It’s my money.”
“What do you mean, it’s yours?” Tony’s eyebrows were jumping. “You say it’s your money but you mean it’s mine, right? You’re my daughter, and as long as you live in my house the money you bring in is my money.”
Stella’s mind was hot with stupefaction as she tried to think of a way to calm him down. Assunta was crying into her hands now, her whole face obscured.
“What is the money for, Stella?” Tony said. “What have you been stealing money from your father for? Your father who’s been spending his every penny to give you a beautiful wedding?” His chair shrieked against the linoleum as he stood. “Thirty dollars just for the goddamn flowers, eh?”
Her money, spread out over the table. Irrationally, Stella tried to think of how she could take it back. Later, she couldn’t explain to herself why she hadn’t just bolted—hadn’t recognized the hopelessness and run for her life. In the moment, though—well, it was one of those moments a person doesn’t understand as it happens, only after it’s over.
“Well?” Tony was standing in front of her now, he was gripping her shoulder, his wide uncompromising thumb driving into the soft partable flesh of her arm socket; he was forcing her up against the red-flowered wallpaper. Stella emitted an unintentional sound, a grunting yelp. Tony seized her loose curls in his left hand and bashed her head into the wall, knock
ing it into Assunta’s shrine to the first Stella. Her vision smearing and then clearing, Stella saw that the wood-framed photo had tumbled to the floor, facedown. “Well, fhijlia mia? What was the money for? Was it to pay me back for your wedding cake?”
“It was to run away.” The words came out of her mouth like a curse; then and later she would never know why she said them. Maybe it was because she was so angry she would have cut off her own head to annoy him. Maybe it was because she had never been a very good liar, or because she knew in her heart that her plans to run away were over forever now, and she lashed out in despair. Or maybe it was the little ghost who made her say it, facedown on the floor, taking this one last chance to get even. “I was going to run away,” Stella said, “and I was never going to come back.”
“Shut up!” Tony roared at Assunta, who was shrieking now, an earsplitting ululation that made Stella’s skin crawl. “You,” her father said to her, “you make your mother cry. Her oldest daughter says she’s going to run away and live like a whore?” His fist full of her hair, he dragged her, hunched over and stumbling like a three-legged dog, out of the kitchen and down the hall toward his bedroom. Stella’s whole body was hot with panic, her skin prickling as she tripped over herself to keep up with him. “You need to be taught a lesson,” Tony was saying. “You’re so damn stubborn you refuse to learn your place in this world. Well, this can’t go on. I can’t give you to your husband like this.”
He threw her onto his bed and locked the bedroom door behind him, an oak safeguard between himself and his wife’s bloody knuckles and clawing fingernails. “Take off your dress,” Tony told Stella. “Your shoes. All your clothes. Take them all off.”
“I—” She stood up, staring at her father, his tousled hair a black halo in the dim afternoon light. Stella was dipping into her nightmare—it was exactly like this. Paralysis settled on her limbs. She swallowed. “What?”
“I said take off all your clothes,” Tony said. “You can obey me and take them all off nicely or I will cut them off you with my knife.”
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 29
