The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  There was no Sunday sauce that night; Queenie hadn’t left a pot to cook in. “She took my pasta strainer,” Assunta kept saying, as if this were the most inhuman injustice of the entire day. “My pasta strainer. She could have at least left me something to strain my pasta.”

  Carmelo tried to herd them all out of the hollow apartment for dinner upstairs. But Assunta couldn’t be left alone. Stella had bullied her into the shower, scrubbed the shit off her and gently rinsed her bloody scalp, then put her to bed. Assunta, drunk on her own grief, carried on with her hysterical weeping. Tina cried quietly in solidarity.

  “Forget it, Carm,” Stella told him. “It’s hopeless.”

  In the end, Carmelo brought down a pot of pasta he cooked upstairs in the Maglieri kitchen. The ones who were fit to eat ate it sitting on the bare carpet in the living room. The boys ran in circles in all the empty space, and Nino knocked over the cheese.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, Queenie’s speciously proper change of address card arrived in the mail, lettered in her secretarial hand. On Saturday, Stella left the children with Tina and made Carmelo drive her to the new house, which was on the West Hartford town line. The house was small, just one story, with redbrick siding and a square hedge. Louie and Queenie must have been saving assiduously for this, or maybe Queenie’s parents had given her money.

  Stella told Carmelo to wait in the car. “This won’t take long,” she said. She didn’t want his sociability and compassion bogging her down.

  Louie wasn’t home, but it was just as well, because Stella’s bone to pick was with her sister-in-law.

  “Shame on you,” she said when the pretty young woman answered the door. Queenie was wearing a flower-printed pink housedress that cinched at what Stella thought was an unrealistically narrow waist. “Shame on you for what you did to my mother. She’s been nothing but kind to you.”

  “I don’t have a problem with your mother. I think she’s a nice woman, even if she is a little unbalanced.” Queenie spoke quickly and forcefully, so Stella caught up with her meaning after it was too late to react effectively. “But your father’s a pervert, your brother Joey is a loser, and his wife is a lazy tramp with no education. I’m not bringing children into that house.”

  Stella was bristling with anger, but there was nothing Queenie had said that, strictly speaking, Stella disagreed with.

  “You didn’t need to leave like that,” she said finally. “It was cruel.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Queenie’s hard little face softened. “Your mother never would have let us go, Stella. And your brother Louie would never have the courage to fight with her.”

  TONY WENT DOWN TO SEE MR. GREENBURG, the Jew on Franklin Avenue, and bought furniture for the whole house again. Mr. Greenburg’s prices were good and he gave credit. Pay what you want now, he always said, and then just give me a little more each week as you can.

  “You could have made Queenie give you back all your furniture, Pa,” Stella said.

  Tony waved it off. “They’re just kids. They don’t have any money to spend. Anyway, your mother can enjoy picking out new furniture.”

  Stella wondered if he felt guilty but didn’t think her father had that capacity. This was his version of a papal indulgence for his sins, only the pope was Assunta.

  MICKEY’S BABY WAS BORN IN JULY, a little girl they named Betty. Tina and Rocco stood up as her godparents at the baptism. Stella was relieved Mickey hadn’t asked her and Carmelo.

  On the second Sunday of October, Mickey wasn’t feeling well and stayed home from church. Joey stayed home with her to take care of the baby. When the rest of them got home, Stella was more disgusted than she was surprised to find the first-floor apartment had been emptied of all the furniture.

  “Again?” Tina whispered to Stella.

  “What a pig,” Stella said, not bothering to whisper back. She was so pregnant she didn’t have energy to do anything but lean against the picture-stripped wall. “Raised in a barn, like I always thought.”

  “I don’t think she needed to make it all a surprise again,” Tina said.

  “Of course she didn’t. She just wants everyone to talk about her like she’s something special.” From where she stood, Stella surveyed the damage, the empty room, the chip that had been taken out of the doorframe by undisciplined movers. “You know what, though? Serves them right. Now they’ll have to pay their own goddamn rent and cook their own food and clean up after their own baby.”

  “Oh, the poor baby,” Tina said, and before the waterworks could start, Stella chided her, “Relax. You’ll see her plenty, just watch.” How would they get by, though, she wondered? Joey had been unable to get back his job at the electric company and had spent the last six months sweeping clippings off the floor at a barbershop.

  This time Assunta was angry, to Stella’s great relief. “There was no need to fool us like that,” she said.

  “She’s just a witch, Ma,” Stella said. “A drama queen. She wants attention.”

  Assunta banged the cupboards one by one, ascertaining that the Joseph Fortunas had, indeed, taken her every last pot and even her new pasta strainer. “We would have given them whatever they wanted. We know how much Joey makes; we would have bought him his own house. He didn’t need to steal ours.”

  “We wouldn’t have bought him nothing,” Tony interrupted. “This is the end for him. It’s time for him to grow the hell up and be a man.”

  Now Assunta looked upset. “But Tonnon—”

  “No,” he said. “It’s like the Americans say. They stole their bed, now they can lie in it.”

  IN NOVEMBER 1953, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to a third living baby, a girl this time, whom they named Bernadette, after the saint in that movie Stella had seen during the war, the girl from France who saw the Virgin on the hill. Carmelo’s brother, Gio, and his wife stood up as the baby’s godparents.

  Bernie would be Stella’s only daughter and would grow up unintimidated by the prospect of telling whole roomfuls of men what to do. She would turn up her nose at the various pitfalls of adolescence as she watched her brothers make every mistake in the book; she would eventually become the first person in her family to graduate from college, for which her proud father would insist on paying. Her no-nonsense personality perfectly suited her career as an accountant at a large Hartford insurance conglomerate, where she would eventually be made a VP. After years of insisting she never wanted to settle down—just like her mother—she would eventually change her mind, for which I am grateful, since she is my mother. She would marry an ethnically German computer programmer she met in a business development course at UConn—that’s my dad, the blue-eyed, blond reason I barely pass for Italian.

  My mom is a lone renegade branch on the Maglieri family tree, the only offshoot to move out of the Italian ghetto and into the suburbs, to read science fiction novels, and to refuse to baptize her children. But you would only have heard this story from a quasi-outsider, you know? A real Maglieri would never have written this down.

  IN MAY 1954, AFTER MONTHS of planning and, most importantly, with Assunta’s hard-won blessing, Stella and Carmelo Maglieri moved from Bedford Street to a house Carmelo had bought one town over, in Dorchester. Front Street was a crumbling wreck, and the Maglieris weren’t the only ones heading out.

  The new house was about twenty years old and cube shaped, like a bright blue birthday present waiting to be unwrapped. There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a closed-off back porch that overlooked the marshy grass Carmelo would turn into his arbor and vegetable garden. There was a carpeted staircase Stella’s boys would charge up and then go sliding down on their bellies for the next twenty years. Alder Street, the road was called, after a kind of tree, Stella would learn—ontano in Italian, a tree so common in Ievoli but which Stella had never once seen in America.

  Eventually the second bedroom would be built out with two sets of bunk beds, a third set of bunk beds would be installed in the landing, and a fourth where the dining room
table had been ousted—it wasn’t like they ever used it; the boys usually ate standing up in the kitchen, and Sunday dinners were always at Tina’s. Stella would convert her walk-in closet into a bedroom for Bernie, so that her daughter wouldn’t have to share space with the hooligans. Still, the Maglieris would be perpetually one bed short, but there was always a shirtless teenage boy draped over the couch, stinky sock feet hanging off the end, or dozing on his belly on the carpet in front of the TV. Sometimes there were multiple empty beds, in fact, because some combination of boys hadn’t come home all night, but with that many who can really keep track of them all. Certainly not Stella.

  THE HOUSE ON ALDER STREET had a neighbor on its left, but to its right was an empty plot of land, which Rocco and Tina bought. Rocco didn’t like the marshy quality of the ground and was paying good money to have it filled in with truckloads of soil. Then they would build a house exactly to their specifications.

  They would always be right next door so Tina could help with the babies.

  WITH THE MORTGAGE AND THE BABIES he had to buy new shoes for all the time, Carmelo got a second job, working barback at Charlie’s Restaurant & Bar. He would work at the electric company from six until three, come home, fix some pasta, change out of his uniform, and head to Charlie’s to open the bar at five. Eventually Carmelo would also take on a third job, working weekends for a landscaping company, mowing lawns and trimming hedges. But ends would always meet, if sometimes just barely.

  IN OCTOBER 1954, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to her fourth living baby, her third son. Stella and Carmelo debated who to ask to be godparents. They weren’t on speaking terms with Joey and Mickey yet. Instead, they asked Franceschina Perri, who was now Mrs. Carapellucci, and her husband, Frank.

  Carmelo had picked out the name Gaetano, after a friend of his from the railroad who had died in the war. Gaetano—“Guy”—would grow up to be the wealthiest of Stella and Carmelo’s sons, eventually running four successful restaurants, a bowling alley, and a vending machine supply company. Most of his brothers would work for him in some capacity, except for Tommy, who would always work at the electric company with his dad. Although he would never attend college himself, Guy would meet his future wife, Annabelle, a semiprofessional tennis player and the daughter of a congressman, at a Wesleyan sorority party that his motorcycle-riding buddies decided to crash. Everyone liked her an awful lot, although she would break Carmelo’s heart by turning his son into a Republican.

  IN DECEMBER 1954, JUST BEFORE THE FIRST SNOWFALL, Rocco and Tina moved into their new house. They had a spare bedroom for guests—an American luxury. Usually Tina would keep the door to this room locked so the boys wouldn’t go tramping through and eating the cookie arrangements she had made for some paesan’s upcoming baby shower.

  From the street, the two-story Maglieri house and the Caramanico ranch looked like they were the same height, since Rocco had had his house built on an artificial hill. For the next sixty years, whenever it rained hard, the Maglieri basement would flood, leaving a fetid stink it would take Carmelo days of airing to get rid of. The boys loved the flooding, because they would splash down the cement stairs and play water-war games in the seepage, although one time Johnny stepped on a screwdriver that was hidden under the dark water and ended up getting stitches in his foot.

  Sometimes Stella would sit on her screened-in back porch and stare up the hill at her sister’s clean white house and militaristically neat garden and wish she had a clean house and a dry basement and that all these muddy children were someone else’s. But she didn’t say anything to anyone about that, of course, because she was sure Tina sometimes sat next to Rocco in that lawn chair and looked down the hill at the puddle-filled grass of the Maglieri backyard and thought, I would trade this house and everything else I have for just one of those children.

  NOW THE HOUSE ON BEDFORD Street was empty, all of the grown Fortuna children moved out. Stella thought Tony would rent it again, but instead he put it on the market.

  Stella remembered how the Fortunas had fought to buy that house, counting their nickels into that tin can. It had only lasted them one decade.

  “Aren’t you sad to be leaving, Ma?” she asked Assunta.

  “It’s too far from the grandchildren,” her mother said. She meant Stella’s children, not Joey’s; Tony had not spoken to Joey since their exodus and Mickey was retaliating by not letting Assunta come visit the baby.

  Looking at it another way, Stella realized, she and Carmelo had become the core of the family—everyone else had gathered around them, restructured their lives around the Maglieris’. Was that what they all owed her? They had put her where they wanted her, and now they made her their queen.

  Louie and Queenie came over for the occasional Sunday dinner, but still had not started a family of their own. When Assunta had taken Queenie aside to ask her if there was a problem, Queenie had looked her in the eye and said, “Not that I know of, God willing. We’re just waiting until we have more money.”

  “What does she mean, waiting?” Assunta had whispered to her daughters as they were washing dishes after Louie and Queenie had left.

  Stella laughed, but her heart felt cold. She bounced baby Guy on her knee to make the chill pass. The thought flashed through her mind—Queenie had pulled off a trick Stella hadn’t been able to. But the thought flickered away as if it had been someone else’s memory of a distant past life.

  “You know what I heard,” Tina said. Her face was already red and Stella knew something wonderful or disgusting was coming. “If you don’t want to get pregnant, you can have your husband put it . . .” She hesitated, excited for her revelation but scared to pick out the words. “In the cul’. He can do whatever he wants there and it won’t make a baby. Or he can put it here,” she said, making an evocatively thrusting gesture in the direction of her armpit. “Or he can put it in your mouth.”

  “Tina! Shh!” Rocco, Carmelo, and Tony were drinking amaro in the living room, not necessarily out of earshot, with the three older children corralled on the floor with their trucks and dolls. If there was ever something Stella didn’t want Carmelo hearing, it was what Tina had just said. “Who did you hear that from, anyway?”

  “The ladies at Silex,” Tina said, secure in the authority of her American and Polish assembly-line friends.

  “These are the same ladies who say you can tell the size of a man’s thing by how long his nose is,” Stella said, but Tina didn’t hear her sarcasm.

  “Yes, it’s true.” Tina sounded wistful.

  “How would any of them ever know that, Tina? Unless they have seen more than one and can compare,” Stella teased. “I think your Silex friends must be loose.”

  “No.” Tina’s face defensively flared even pinker. “They heard from their friends.”

  Assunta was still stuck on the predilections of her youngest son. “Tina, you mean Queenie lets Louie put it . . . put it in her cul’?” She eyed her daughter, concentrating on this new idea. “Or her mouth?”

  “Ma!” Stella barked. The chatter from the living room had grown frighteningly quiet. “Ask her yourself the next time you see her.”

  Lying sleeplessly in bed that night, her breasts aching because Guy was already weaning himself, Stella turned the thought over and over. Would she let Carmelo put his thing in her mouth, if it meant she didn’t have to get pregnant again? The thought made her want to throw up, and she couldn’t make herself come to the answer yes.

  * * *

  STELLA CALLED GARDEN MEN to plant a hedge at the front of her property to stop the children from running into the road when they were playing in the backyard. She enjoyed watching the men in their dirty close-fitting jeans dig holes and bend over pots. The whole job only took a few hours and boom, there was a lush green curtain separating Stella’s private business from the rest of the world.

  Carmelo was furious, claiming he could have installed the hedge himself and saved them a lot of money. Stella pooh-poohed his ire. “When would you have ha
d time?”

  Several months later, when she was feeling particularly fed up with Carmelo, Stella called painters and had them paint the house bright pink while he was at work. He would learn better than to make her mad.

  LATER, MUCH LATER, after she went crazy, Stella would chop down the hedge herself with a pair of garden clippers. Her grown sons would marvel at the strength the destruction must have required.

  THEIR FIRST SUMMER ON ALDER STREET, 1955, Carmelo turned over the spongy dirt in the backyard, pumped out the water, and filled in the soil for a garden. He got up to weed in the earliest light of dawn before work. He planted zucchini, tomatoes, and peas. He planted two gooseberry bushes, unique Balkan varietals that had been smuggled past customs by an Albanian buddy from the electric company. He planted two grape trellises, one along the garden and one overhanging a picnic table.

  Stella looked at the perfect leafy stakes and considered how Carmelo’s garden looked like it could have been transplanted from a mountain terrace in Ievoli. They had come from distant villages, she and Carmelo, but in the United States their backgrounds looked almost the same.

  The air here was too moist, and the winter too cold, but on a hot day in June if Stella lay on her back in the tick-infested grass by the garden and looked up through the bean leaves, translucent lime-green in the sun, she could imagine she was home again.

  FOR THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS, on afternoons as they worked in their respective gardens, Carmelo would call up the hill to Tina, or she would call down to him—do you have any extra rags so I can tie my beans? Did Freddy mow your lawn like I told him? Is your wife’s vacuum cleaner still broken? Do you want to come have a glass of wine?

  THE GOOSEBERRIES AND THE GRAPE TRELLISES would get chopped down, too, and the beautiful fifteen-foot fig tree, after Stella went crazy.

  IN AUGUST 1955, LITTLE KNOB-KNEED TOMMY started kindergarten. School was awful for Tommy. He was tiny and he couldn’t run well or throw a ball—he had never learned that from his father, who didn’t know anything about balls himself. The worst thing about the whole school situation was that he couldn’t understand a word anyone said to him, because he’d never learned any English in the bosom of his Italian home. Tommy was a nonconversant runt, and that is a painful way to be forced to join society.