The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  Tommy, as the oldest child of two immigrant parents, had it the worst. When Nino started kindergarten the next year, things were tough but not as tough, because at least he had Tommy. And then by the time Bernie went to school, two years after that, she was so used to hearing her older brothers speak English at home, and so used to the English-speaking television in their front room, that it was almost no trauma at all.

  IN OCTOBER 1955, STELLA GAVE BIRTH TO FEDERICO. Carmela and her husband, Paolo, took the train down from Montreal to stand up as godparents.

  Freddy would be the most handsome of Stella’s sons, with his glossy black hair (before it all fell out) and his grandmother’s down-turned chocolate eyes, the unusual Mascaro eye shape that had made Assunta the beauty of Ievoli, and which here in America got Freddy nicknamed “the Jap.” He would inherit his father’s musicality and eventually become the frontman in a local band.

  Freddy, the fifth baby, would also be the breaking point for poor Stella’s mind, which could no longer conceive of her children as individuals versus as a mass. Maybe four would have been all right, but five was just too many, and by the time the oldest were teenagers their name had become TommyNinoGuyFreddy! Bernie, obviously, was an exception, what with her being a princess instead of a hooligan.

  NEXT UP WAS NICOLA, “NICKY,” in August 1956, less than a year after Freddy. No one was really ready for Nicky. Stella hadn’t even believed she could be pregnant until she was almost six months along; she’d become so inured to morning sickness over the last eight years that she hadn’t managed to distinguish it from a hangover. Stella and Carmelo didn’t know who to ask to be godparents on such short notice, so Tina and Rocco stood up again. The Maglieris had to wait to have the baptism until after the Caramanicos got back from their ten-year anniversary trip to Italy, which they had been planning for a lot longer than Stella had been planning on having Nicky. But at this point Stella and Carmelo were willing to cut a few corners, and they were sure God would understand.

  Luckily Assunta now lived across the street. She was still working in the tobacco fields but could stay home on the worst days and help Stella with the two new infants. As much as Stella was annoyed by her father’s proximity, she was grateful for her mother’s.

  Nicky, one of only two sons who would inherit Carmelo’s famous blue eyes, would grow up to be the gentlest of the Maglieri boys. He loved animals, and Stella was always catching him slinking up the stairs with his jacket zipped around a suspiciously squirming bulge. Stella would have to go chasing him and banging on his door—“Nicky! What do you have in there!”—lest she find another squirrel he’d tried to save from a cat bleeding in his bedding, or another green garden snake coiled up in the bathtub. Nicky would be too gentle for the world, though, and would retreat into a cave life, spending his adulthood watching television in the bedroom he’d once shared with his brothers, stretching various disability checks to cover a medicating supply of weed and grape soda.

  WHEN YOU COME FROM A LARGE ITALIAN FAMILY, not only do you simply have more relatives numerically than many American families do, but you also keep in closer touch with them. This means a socially obedient Italian American will have more special occasions than their non-Italian friends can conceive of. Funerals and baptisms, anniversary and graduation parties, babies’ birthdays, but worst of all weddings, weddings, weddings, and the showers and fittings and shoe-dyeings that precede them.

  Carmelo was a socially obedient Italian, and for better or for worse, Stella was married to him. This was why she spent what felt like every Saturday at a wedding. Carmelo made her go shopping for nice dresses, thinking that would make her feel better, but she hated being trussed up in sequins or silk when her breasts were leaking or her stomach swollen tight against the fabric. The music and small talk made her tired, as did picking out gifts from registries and smiling for people whose names she couldn’t recall. She remembered how she used to love the September fhesta in Ievoli, the Italian Society dances during the war, but it was a different person who had been doing the dancing then than the one who was doing the remembering now.

  Italians, in case you did not know, invite children to all occasions. This meant every week or so the hooligans had to be wrestled into their little suit pants, which were just the right material for sliding across newly waxed floors. The boys were the life of their own party, even if that meant dismantling the bride and groom’s; no one knew whether to laugh at them because they were adorable in their tiny matching suits or to actually call the police. Nino, who had the practical mind of an engineer, was famous for coordinating drag races with empty serving carts stolen from venue kitchens. They never smashed a wedding cake, but they did once get a plate of marinara dumped on a bride’s train.

  It was around this time, 1958 or 1959, that Stella gave up and just let them do whatever they wanted. “Those are wild kids, Stella,” people would say to her, in their reprimanding but unhelpful Italian style.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she’d say back. “There’s too many of them. I’m outnumbered.” Let anyone who wanted to look down on her take the matter up with her Catholic husband. God had given her all these children; there must be a reason He had not given her the ability or desire to keep up with them.

  Sometimes Stella couldn’t bear the idea of another wedding. At first she would play sick, but then, increasingly, she would just not get ready and Carmelo would know he was on his own. He was no better at controlling the hooligans than Stella was, but Stella knew no chiding women came up to him to complain about his sons’ behavior, which was only one of the reasons she felt no guilt. On these evenings, blessedly free, with only the littlest babies on her watch, she would bring a flask of wine up from the cellar and drink it alone on the porch, watching the sun drop behind the oaks in the marsh.

  IN JANUARY 1958 CAME GIOVANNI, named for his paternal uncle and godfather. On the heels of his too-soft brother Nicky, Johnny would grow up to be rambunctious enough for two. He would be the son who brought the most chaos into the Maglieri house, starting with the time he got kicked out of fourth grade for carrying a knife, but as an infant he was one of the easiest, from Stella’s perspective. No goddamn colic.

  Then, in fall of 1958, there was a miscarriage. Stella hadn’t been very far along, less than four months, and this time she felt no grief, just a sense of hollow distaste as she flushed the globs of pink tissue down the toilet. Honestly, she didn’t feel much of anything anymore; when she did, she drank until the feeling was gone.

  ASSUNTA AND TINA CAME OVER to sit with Stella after work. The sisters would crochet while Assunta looked through Tina’s anniversary trip photo album, which lived at Stella’s house just for this purpose. Rocco had taken photos of Tina surrounded by pigeons in Piazza San Marco in Venice; Tina on the Spanish Steps in Rome, like Audrey Hepburn in the movie where she is a runaway princess; Tina in front of St. Peter’s cathedral in the Vatican, so close to His Holiness the Pope. It was nice to think the beautiful things in the photos were their cultural legacy as Italians, even if Hartford had more in common with Ievoli than did the Venetian lagoon. Assunta turned the pages with so much wonder, it was hard to believe she had been doing the same thing every day for the last two years.

  The evening quorum of Fortuna women lasted until Rocco or Tony came home from work and wanted dinner. Carmelo, of course, would not be home from his shift at the bar until eleven at the earliest. So Stella had the evenings to herself—herself and her seven children—and to fill this unsupervised time she usually brought a bottle of Carmelo’s wine up from the basement.

  WHEN DOMENICO WAS BORN IN FEBRUARY 1960, he was everyone’s favorite, maybe because for a while people thought he would be the last. As an adult he would be everyone’s least favorite Maglieri boy, because he would destroy his good marriage with alcoholism and waste the rest of his short life as a drug addict. But he sure was an adorable baby, with a round face and a full head of fluffy black hair. They called him Mingo, or just Ming, after
Carmelo’s uncle.

  Joey and Mickey stood up as his godparents. Carmelo thought asking them would heal the family rift. Life hadn’t been easy on the Joseph Fortunas. They were living in the same apartment they had run away to in 1953. Mickey still dressed like a tramp, but motherhood had mellowed her out; Stella could tolerate her through a Sunday dinner.

  Joey and Mickey had two little girls, and Mickey was cooking up a third. Stella wasn’t sure whether Mickey’s daughters were normal, since Stella lived in a world of small boys, but the Fortuna girls seemed savage to her, wild eyed and undergroomed. No wonder, Stella thought, since their mother was just a large child herself. The girls would dismantle Bernie’s toys while Bernie looked on with condescension. Stella had to explain to her daughter that her grubby cousins didn’t have toys at home. She had to teach Bernie to hide the good dolls in her pillowcase so the poor little Fortuna girls wouldn’t ruin or steal them.

  IN JULY 1961, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to her ninth living baby, Enrico “Richie” Maglieri. He was eight pounds and popped right out after only forty-five minutes of labor, God bless him. Queenie and Louie would stand up as his godparents.

  Richie would grow up to be a perpetual bachelor. He would never find a way to reconcile his sexual orientation with his macho Catholic family’s values, and so never told anyone—never had any kind of partner at all. Maybe I should look at the bright side here; maybe his reticence saved his life, vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis that took two dear friends from his community theater group. Meanwhile, his brothers act like Richie just never got his act together to woo a lady. Even now they’ll say, “Poor Richie, he never found the right girl. Who knows, maybe he still will.” If anyone suggests anything about the closet the family will jump down your throat defending him. But that’s just it, isn’t it? If gayness is a slander to be defended against, there’s not a lot of room for a man like Richie, who wouldn’t wish to cause anyone any hurt and who doesn’t admire boat-rockers, to say anything at all.

  ASSUNTA CAME OVER ONE SATURDAY MORNING in April 1963 to find a box of dried pasta spilled across the kitchen linoleum. Baby Richie, who had learned to stand, was holding himself up by the garbage can, his fingers gripping the slimy liner bag, and Mingo was prising open a second box of pasta, which Assunta took away from him, leaving him mopey. Where the other boys were was anyone’s guess.

  Stella was on her knees in front of the downstairs toilet. Her hair bun was sleep-styled to reveal just how much white had come in.

  “I’m forty-three years old, Ma,” Stella said. She felt like a cabbage you find in the bottom of your vegetable crisper two months after you forgot it there. “How can I still be getting pregnant?”

  Assunta rubbed her daughter’s back and helped her stand so she could flush away her nausea. “Women in my family are strong,” Assunta told Stella, pinching her hip. She added in English she had learned from the television, “Built to last.”

  ON JANUARY 4, 1964, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to a final baby boy, whom they named Arturo. Artie was the second son to inherit Carmelo’s blue eyes. He was such a liar you couldn’t believe a word he ever said, but a lovable scamp nonetheless. When he was only twelve, he would save up his lawn-mowing money to buy a beat-up shell of a Mustang for two hundred dollars, then restore the whole thing all by himself—a crooked little genius with an engine, that one. He would marry his high school sweetheart, Nancy, who was mixed Sicilian and Cherokee. They would have four daughters, half of whom grew up to be scrupulously honest and the other half of whom took after their father.

  ARTIE WAS AN ENORMOUS BABY, almost eleven pounds, Stella’s biggest. He came out naturally after two exhausting hours of pushing. It was not a pleasant experience. It was a week before Stella’s forty-fourth birthday and she had had just about enough of this goddamned nonsense.

  When her husband came in to see her in the hospital room after the delivery, Stella said to him, “I’m done, Carmelo. You can sleep with whoever you want, but it’s not going to be me anymore.”

  Death 7

  Choking

  (Change of Life)

  ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, July 24, 1970, the day she almost died for the seventh time, Stella Maglieri woke up in a wet pile of sheets, drenched in her own sweat, her head pounding with a medium-grade hangover. The day would be hot, as hot as the day before had been, and to make the sweating worse Stella was going through her change of life.

  The clock on her dresser read eight ten. The bed next to her was empty. Since Artie was born Carmelo had slept in the armchair downstairs in front of the television. He would have left for work three hours earlier in any case.

  Stella put her feet on the floor, feeling blood pooling in the soles. Lately her feet were tender in the morning. She didn’t wonder too much what the soreness meant. Her body was a ruined mess, covered in scars: the burns on one arm, the surgery seam on the other; the crescent in her now-silver hairline; the sutures across her abdomen from the pig trampling; suckle-heavy breasts and torso thickened by eleven term pregnancies; stretch marks on her loose-skinned upper arms she didn’t even understand (why would that skin have stretched?); bunions so extreme her big toe turned toward the other four like it was addressing a panel of judges. Her ankles were as thick as her calves, like the tree-trunk ankles of the old mountain-climbing village ladies she and Tina had smirked about in their youth. Stella had used herself up, and now it was her time of life to sweat out her passage into cronedom. Sweat and sweat.

  Stella did not look at the old-looking woman in the mirror as she tied a handkerchief over her hair. She tightened the knot in the back so the cloth squeezed at her tannin-throbbing temples. Somehow, this gave her some relief from the hangover—a trick she had learned in the last two years. She pulled on a pair of ankle-high nylons and stuck her feet into the powder-blue slippers she would wear until she had to leave for her night shift.

  The door to the boys’ bedroom was still closed. The teenagers would sleep all day unless someone woke them up, but someone wouldn’t be Stella. She liked to enjoy this peaceful morning time before all the activity kicked up, even if enjoying mornings meant sitting through instead of sleeping off her wine headaches. She shuffled down the blue pile carpeting of the stairs—carefully; the stairs were narrow and the carpeting too thick for perfect safety—and fixed herself breakfast in the kitchen: two pieces of chewy bread and a cup of wine. She didn’t toast the bread, just pulled out the soft interior with her fingers, then sucked on the crust, grinding it against the empty sockets in her gums, using the bread to scratch an ancient itch.

  MEANWHILE, UPSTAIRS IN THE HOUSE’S only full bathroom, Stella’s daughter, Bernie, was buttoning up the striped shirt of her work uniform. Bernie had just finished her junior year in high school and had a part-time job as a cashier at Gardener’s Market. She was supposed to be at work at eight thirty and had only just woken up, but since she didn’t wear makeup or blow-dry her hair or anything like that, she didn’t need much time in the mornings.

  Her last chore before she ran out the door was to leave food in Penny’s dog dish. None of her brothers would remember, except Nicky, but he was thirteen and could easily sleep until 4 P.M. and then poor Penny would starve all day. Bernie ran down the stairs and through the living room, paused to give her mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table, a kiss on the forehead, and snatched two slices of bread from the plastic bag. Mouth full, Bernie continued out onto the covered porch, where they kept the dog food and Penny’s bowl. The bowl was full.

  Chewing the bread, Bernie considered what she was seeing. Why hadn’t Penny eaten her food? Normally she was clamoring for her breakfast, yipping and snuggling Bernie’s knees as she tried to scoop. But Penny wasn’t even here. Was this her food from yesterday? But wait—Bernie had slept over at her friend Patty’s the night before, so she hadn’t fed the dog since Wednesday morning. In fact, she hadn’t seen the dog in days. But someone must have. There were eleven full-time people living in this house, and plenty of passers-through.
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br />   “Mommy, have you seen Penny?” Bernadette asked the unlit kitchen before she realized her mother wasn’t there anymore. Bernie went stomping up the stairs—not with any particular emotion; her work shoes were just bottom-heavy—and ventured into the den of the snoring and farting. The den, where the older teenagers slept, was definitely the worst place in the house. She knocked hard first—she did not want to have to see anything unpleasant her brothers might be doing in their teenage sleep—and then opened the door to let the room air a little bit before she stuck her head in.

  “Ey!” she said. There was no sign of life, but she knew the drill. “Ey. Quit faking. Have any of you seen Penny?” No movement from either set of bunk beds. Bernie smacked a bare calf protruding from the top bunk closest to the door, just about at eye level. It belonged to Freddy, who kicked out blindly but meaning it. Bernie stepped back in time. “Freddy. Have you seen Penny?”

  “No. Go away.”

  “Guy?” She reached into the lower bunk and shook her brother’s shoulder. Guy didn’t respond at all. He would pretend he was asleep even if the house was on fire, just to make his point.

  She tried Nicky. “Nicky,” she said as he rolled over sleepily. “Nicky, Penny’s missing. Have you seen her?”

  “Penny’s missing?” he said, his voice sharp and upset, but his eyes were still closed. He might or might not remember any of this conversation after Bernie left.

  She was going to be late for work, but the more she thought about Penny, the worse she felt. Unless Bernie saw the dog with her own two eyes, there was no way she would be able to believe Penny was anywhere but in a ditch on the side of Farms Boulevard; the traffic that whizzed right by had claimed countless Maglieri family pets over the years. But Penny was special. Everyone loved that dog; she was the sweetest thing, with her coppery little face.