The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  “Your baby’s with God, Stella,” Tina said. She had made it that far, and now she was no good anymore, because she had fallen to the linoleum floor to cry into her skirt.

  Stella looked up at the ceiling. Her mother wept on her left and her sister on her right. She hoped a nurse would come along and take care of them because she couldn’t speak to them anymore, or maybe ever again. She closed her eyes and dove into her pain.

  STELLA HAD CARRIED TO TERM a healthy baby boy whose corpse weighed ten pounds, four ounces. He had been in a breech position going into the labor, and the doctor, a rookie, had tried to make the baby turn. When the labor didn’t proceed as expected, the doctor used forceps to reach up into Stella and try to pull him out. But the baby was just too big for the birth canal; his shoulders stuck. As the scene in the hospital had modulated into panic, the doctor performed a proctoepisiotomy, making a surgical incision that would marvel later generations—where, exactly, did he think the baby was? By the time they extracted the baby, he was dead, strangled with his own umbilical cord.

  AGONY, DELIRIUM, DARKNESS, AGONY.

  Had it been this bad when she was a child, being ripped apart? Was it just that there was more of her now, so she could feel more pain?

  Stella had no control over whether she was asleep or awake. At the worst moments, sweat itching in her raw stitches, when the weight of loss on her chest was so heavy she battled to pull enough air into her lungs—in those moments, when she wanted nothing more than to leave herself, when sleep would have been the greatest reprieve, she had no access to it. She had to listen to the mourning and awkward bedside conversations of the terrible people who came to visit her. They were all terrible now.

  Why did you let me live this time? she asked God, over and over. What was the point?

  Sometimes she said it out loud, and if Assunta heard her she shushed her. That wasn’t how God worked.

  TINA WIPED STELLA’S FOREHEAD WITH A COOL, damp towel. She plumped Stella’s pillow and dabbed water on her dry lips. “Good Stella, lucky Stella, lucky star,” she crooned, making a song out of Stella’s names. Brava Stella, Stella Fortuna, stella fortunata.

  Stella waited until Assunta left the sickroom, then said, “You think I’m lucky?”

  Tina was caught off guard by her sister’s voice after so many hours of uninterrupted silence. “Lucky to be alive,” she said, but it sounded like a question.

  Stella felt the Eye on her. Her heartache compressed into a sickness she finally understood. “At least now neither of us has a baby,” she said.

  Tina blanched. “Stella. No.”

  “Admit it, get it off your chest so God can forgive you.” Stella was so exhausted she couldn’t put any fire into her words, but they didn’t need any fire. “You were jealous of my baby and now, deep in your heart, you’re happy that it’s dead.”

  The expression on Tina’s face made Stella’s gut roil with hate—her big, stupid tears; Tina would try to cry her way out of this like she had every bad thing that had ever happened to her. Stella hated her sister more intensely than she had ever hated anyone before, even Carmelo, even her father. Even her father hadn’t killed her baby.

  “No, Stella, you’re wrong.” Tina wiped clear mucus from her chin. “I only wanted to love it. I wanted to love your baby and I am so sad for you.”

  “There’s nothing you can say that would ever make me forgive you,” Stella said. She had used up all her energy. She turned her face away and closed her eyes.

  “Why are you crying, Tina?” Assunta asked when she came back.

  “I’m not,” Stella heard her sister say, then snuffling and nose-blowing.

  Tina didn’t sing anymore, but she didn’t leave Stella’s bed, either.

  MOSTLY WHEN STELLA’S EYES OPENED, there were Assunta and Tina, no matter what. But this time it was dark—the only light came from the hospital wing outside, and it was a man sitting next to her in the chair with the wooden arms.

  “Carmelo?” she asked the darkness, because for a moment she wasn’t sure.

  “Stella.” He was crying. She heard it in his voice—typical Carmelo, he made no effort to hide it from her. “My Stella, my star. My precious Stella. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She realized he had been holding her hand when his grip tightened. “Please come back to me. Please don’t leave me. Let me take care of you. Let me make it better.”

  Maybe Stella was the weakest she had ever been in her life, because she felt her heart turn. When she wondered how she would put all the bad things behind her, she realized that her mind did not even want to remember what they were, and the path was suddenly quite clear. She would bury the first year of her marriage with her baby boy. That was how she would save herself.

  Stella Maglieri squeezed her husband’s wet hand. “I’m here, Carmelo,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  THE HOSPITAL DISCHARGED HER AFTER FOUR DAYS, with the recommendation that she spend at least five weeks in bed. The doctor prescribed her a painkiller Stella took sporadically the first few days, but it made her so disoriented and ill at ease that she stopped. Anyway, the worst pain was in her mind and her heart, and the pills did nothing to divorce her from that.

  Things that were difficult included sitting up or down, or any other action that put any pressure at all on her perineum. Going to the toilet was torture, reviving the agony of the not-yet-healed flesh the doctor had sliced to admit his forceps. The vagina is an organ of trauma, though, and as intense as this misery was, when it healed it did so completely.

  During her days, Stella lay in bed, the skin on her arms browning in the late-morning light and her sore, hardened nipples leaking unused milk into the souring fabric of her nightgown, and unpacked and repacked her thoughts. Tina would come up before work with a plate of frittata or a muffin and a cup of coffee and put it on a chair by Stella’s bed. Tina never said anything, and Stella usually pretended she was still asleep.

  Carmelo made Stella dinner every night, hot food with meat so that she could rebuild her blood. But Stella often heard him talking to Tina in the kitchen, and she knew that many parts of the dinner her husband brought her were her sister’s secret offerings. She recognized Tina’s oven-fried chicken cutlets and knew the taste of her sister’s tomato sauce, which was spicier and not as sweet as Carmelo’s.

  Assunta, whose legs had been inflamed with arthritis and who hadn’t been able to work all year, sat with Stella and crocheted. Mostly they didn’t talk, except the time Stella blurted out, “Mamma, what if it never gets better?”

  Assunta’s soft cheeks drooped sadly. She wrapped her hand around Stella’s ankle under the blanket. “I know how you feel, my Stella. I lost my first baby, too.” She was quiet for a moment. “But then God gave me you. My greatest gift.” She gave Stella’s ankle a gentle squeeze. “Maybe he has an even greater gift for you.”

  THE FUNERAL WAS CARMELO’S IDEA. Antonio said it was a waste of money, buying a plot of land and a headstone for a baby who had never even taken a breath in this world, but Antonio didn’t make decisions for Stella anymore.

  They held the funeral two weeks after Stella came home from the hospital. She wasn’t supposed to be out of bed, but it was only a few hours, a graveside service and the burial of the tiny casket with the embalmed body of baby Bob Maglieri.

  “What kind of name is Bob?” her brother Joe had scoffed. “It’s not a name at all. Why didn’t you name him Robert, at least?”

  Stella didn’t owe anyone any explanations, and certainly not her good-for-nothing drunk of a brother. But she had named her dead baby Bob so that he would never have to share his name with any living child.

  STELLA WORE A NEW BLACK DRESS to the grave service. She walked between Tina and Assunta, each of them holding one of her arms, just like Assunta had walked to her own child’s funeral on the arms of her own mother and sister thirty years earlier.

  Stella threw dirt onto the lowered coffin—the bald, mustachioed funeral director had to explain
to them what to do. Afterward the mourners would assemble at Bedford Street for a luncheon.

  As their friends departed the graveside, Tina said, “Stella, can you forgive me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Stella said. “Forgive you for what?” She looked at her sister sideways, wondering if Tina had to say more. She did.

  “For . . . for being jealous.” Tina’s voice broke.

  “Tina. You don’t really believe any of that old-world bullshit.” Stella threaded her arm through her sister’s and pressed away the dread in her own heart. “The doctor made a mistake. No one else is to blame for anything. You can’t listen to those stupid old cows who say things like that. They’ll ruin your life.”

  AS THEY WALKED BACK TOWARD THEIR WAITING CAR, Za Pina said to Assunta, “What’s the matter with Stella? She doesn’t cry at her own son’s funeral?”

  “You don’t know my Stella,” Assunta said. “She has never cried in her life, not even when she was a little girl and she had her guts ripped open by pigs.”

  CARMELO SLEPT ON THE COUCH until Stella had her stitches taken out. He moved back to their bed in September, when she was mobile enough to change the sheets with her mother’s help. Carmelo would lie carefully on his side of the bed, afraid of accidentally hurting her during the night. He sometimes stroked her hair until he fell asleep.

  Another month passed. Stella’s healing flesh had closed all its gaps. The only pain she now carried was the metaphysical one.

  Carmelo knew to wait long enough before asking. And when he did ask her, “Stella, can we try again?” one night in October, maybe because the ache she had to heal most desperately was the one in her heart, she said yes.

  FOR THE REST OF HER SEXUAL LIFE, which would last fifteen years, Stella gave her body to her husband without resistance or comment, even when she was so pregnant she thought her spine would snap or when she was so tired she fell asleep in the middle. As time passed, Stella learned complete separation of her mind and her interrupted body. She learned to crouch in the window of her mind, gazing out past the shantytown of her subconscious and far beyond, to the silvery blue of the Tyrrhenian marina and the mountain crowned by the Ievoli church chiazza, where the Most Blessed Madonna of the Sorrows stood, ever patient, ever beatified, her golden heart bleeding for her dead son.

  * * *

  IN APRIL 1949, TINA HAD BEEN MARRIED to Rocco Caramanico for two and a half years. Stella was four months pregnant when her sister told her the definitive news.

  “We will never have children. There’s something wrong.”

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise, after all this time trying, but somehow Stella was shaken. “I thought you said the tests . . .”

  Tina brought over two cups of coffee to the kitchen table. Even though it was Stella’s apartment, it was Tina who acted like the hostess. She set the cups down on either side of the jelly jar of violets Carmelo had picked for Stella yesterday.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Tina said, not without some satisfaction. “It’s Rocco. When he was in New Guinea he got mumps, and it made his, you know.”

  “Sterile? It made him sterile?”

  “Yes.” Tina’s face was red. “His thing, you know, it works fine.” Stella had more observational evidence than she needed on that front already. “But what’s inside hasn’t got any . . . you know. No babies. He’ll never be able to make babies.”

  The sisters sat through an uncomfortable moment of silence as the scatology dispelled and the finality of the situation settled in.

  “But he must have known he had had mumps before you got married,” Stella said. “He knew all this time.”

  Tina shrugged. She was staring at her coffee cup. Her eyes were round and bald-looking.

  Could Rocco really have done that? Could he have married Tina, knowing how badly she wanted children, and then let her go on all this time with false hope? Even Rocco couldn’t be that cruel and selfish—could he? But Stella couldn’t ask her sister that right now; that would be a different kind of cruelty.

  “Tina,” Stella said finally. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We could get the marriage annulled if I wanted to,” her sister said. “I could try again with someone else. The priest said there would be no problem in this case.”

  “Do you want an annulment?” Stella asked carefully, her heart lifting.

  “No,” Tina said quickly. “I said for better or for worse, didn’t I?”

  “But Tina, that’s not fair, not if you didn’t know—”

  “We have a good marriage,” Tina interrupted, her tone decisive. “We want to stay together even without children.”

  Stella’s small hope that Rocco Caramanico might become part of her past vanished. But what did Tina even mean, a good marriage? Stella was speechless for a long moment as she tried to understand. What made a marriage good? Stella had never thought of marriage as anything but an arrangement to be endured in order to create children—an arrangement she had, for that very reason, done her best to avoid. How could Tina’s marriage be good if it prevented the one thing she had wanted most in life, to be a mother? Stella swallowed the lump in her dry throat, a clot of confusion and sadness.

  “You could adopt,” she said, feeling futile.

  Tina was already shaking her head. “We don’t need another person’s baby, with who knows what other person’s problems. We decided no, we’re happy the way we are. We don’t have to pray about this anymore.” She looked up and smiled. “It’s going to be okay, Stella. I am going to have all of your babies to take care of. And who knows how many you’ll have.”

  THE ANSWER WAS TEN—TEN WHO SURVIVED THEIR CHILDHOOD.

  IN JUNE 1949, LOUIE GRADUATED from Hartford High. Stella sat through the sweltering ceremony, fighting the urge to pee, and clapped loudly as her baby brother walked across the temporary stage under the basketball hoop to shake the hand of the principal. Tony had the diploma framed and hung it in the Fortuna living room.

  Louie was spending the summer working for a friend of Zu Tony Cardamone’s, a licensed electrician named Bill Johnson. Louie had to be at work in West Hartford by 6 A.M. on the dot—time is money, and an electrician’s time is quite a lot of money. To get to and from work, Tony bought Louie a bicycle with shining black hubcaps. Carmelo took Louie aside and told him not to worry, he’d help him get a car.

  Joey had a job, too, finally. Carmelo had introduced him to the hiring manager at the electric company. The manager, who liked Carmelo, had found Joey a position. Stella hoped her brother respected his job enough not to do anything stupid. She didn’t want Carmelo to get in trouble for a bad referral.

  ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1949, Stella gave birth to a baby boy, six pounds, six ounces. The birth was natural and uncomplicated, although—it must be said—not that much less painful than the time she had almost died in childbirth.

  They named the baby Thomas, after his paternal grandfather, but with the American spelling. A healthy boy to carry on the family name. Of course Tina and Rocco stood up as the baby’s godparents at the baptism.

  THIS IS WHERE THINGS STARTED to speed up for Stella. It began with the hours mixing together so that the days lost any discretion. Mealtimes were meaningless; Stella ate when she was hungry, which was all the time, because the baby sucked her dry like an adorable cannibal. The only thing Stella let herself care about was him, Tommy, until she felt the next one coming alive inside her and then her caring was divided, and then there would be a third, and it was divided again, and so on and so on until she was so fractioned and diluted by her own caring that every other thing in the world receded into winking stars on a peripheral horizon. Fifteen years later, when the bearing was finally over, she would look at the forty-four-year-old woman in the mirror and struggle to itemize what had happened in the lost interim.

  ONE THING THAT HAPPENED WAS QUEENIE. Cute as a button, she seemed, but in retrospect there were plenty of warning signs.

  On a Tuesday evening in May 1950, Stella wa
s sitting in her mother’s kitchen, nursing baby Tommy, when Louie burst in, the screen door to the garden banging behind him. He ignored Tina, who was peeling carrots and whom he almost hit with the door, and Stella, who tsked him as she pulled a cloth over her bare breast and Tommy’s pinched, concentrating little face.

  Assunta was standing at the stove moving the pasta around with her wooden spoon so it wouldn’t stick to the pot. “Mommy,” he said to her back. “I want to get married.”

  Assunta turned around and looked at her son. “Okay, Louie,” she said. “You going to find a girl?”

  “I found one,” he said. “And I asked her to marry me, but she said no.”

  Assunta and Tina both gasped and Stella hid a smile by turning her face into Tommy’s blanket. “You proposed to a girl without bringing her here first?” Tina exclaimed as Assunta smacked him on the shoulder with the dripping spoon.

  “What’s the matter, you go so fast.” Assunta smacked him again, harder. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No trouble,” Louie said. “She’s a good girl—very strict father.” The drooping bags under his eyes—he’d had them since he was a little boy—gave him a canine affect that made him look particularly earnest. “I had to say something because I didn’t want her to get away. I didn’t want her thinking I wasn’t serious.”

  “Sounds like you better tell us about this girl,” Stella said. “And we better get our stories straight before Papa gets home.”

  Two weeks ago, Louie had accompanied Bill Johnson on a house call in West Hartford. It was the family’s oldest daughter who let them in and explained the problem with the fuse box. She spoke perfect, fast English and Louie hadn’t had any idea she was Italian until he noticed the wooden plaque over the doorframe—the pastel face of Jesus over the words DIO BENEDICA LA NOSTRA CASA. The pretty girl stayed and watched their work sharply. Louie was sweating with panic because he didn’t want to jeopardize his job, but he couldn’t leave without saying something.