The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  STELLA’S OLDEST GRANDDAUGHTER GRADUATES from high school. She will go to one of the best universities in the country. Stella won’t recognize its name, and no one will ever successfully explain the big-city job the granddaughter eventually gets. But Stella will proudly attend all her graduation parties, and happily pose for pictures wearing the granddaughter’s flat tasseled cap.

  Her other grandchildren will become mechanics, hairdressers, nurses, bankers, auditors, graphic designers, restaurateurs. One will become the principle of an elementary school. One will own a country club, another a funeral home, another a car wash. One will go to Hollywood and act in movies produced by J. J. Abrams, Jodie Foster, and the Coen brothers. Stella won’t recognize those names, either, but she’ll enjoy watching her granddaughter’s face, thirty feet tall, on the screen at the movie theater.

  CARMELO IS CROSSING THE PARKING LOT at the post office when he is hit by a car—an eighty-nine-year-old driver who presses on the gas instead of the brake.

  He survives. After he is released from the hospital with three broken ribs, his children wait for his postconcussion confusion to clear up. It never does, and eventually they realize he has also suffered a massive stroke.

  HER DAUGHTER, BERNADETTE, takes Stella in her blue car to Lyman Orchards. Stella used to take her children there in the summer. You pick whatever is in season—strawberries, apples, pumpkins—then pay by the pound. Today they pick blueberries.

  Stella picks and picks. She is so fast—she was always faster than Tina when they were younger, picking chestnuts, harvesting olives, selecting tobacco leaves. Well, Tina’s not here; Bernie didn’t invite her. Something else for Tina to be jealous of.

  Stella has a straw hat, lavender, with a flopping brim that covers her face. The sun doesn’t bother Stella; she is tough. She picks till her plastic barrel is full to the top. When she stands to look for Bernie she sees her many rows of bushes away. Stella waves; she has to wait for her daughter to come over, because the barrel is too heavy for Stella to lift.

  Oh, Ma! What did you do? Bernie laughs. She can barely carry the barrel down the hill to the farmhouse, where they tip the berries into plastic bags and weigh them. Bernadette is rubbing her forehead. I had no idea she would pick so much, she says to the girl at the cash register. Can’t I write you a check? The girl has an orange bandanna tied over her head, knotted at her neck, the way Assunta used to wear a cloth to cover her bald patches. I’m so embarrassed. No ATM?

  In the car on the way home Bernie stops at a drive-through, hands Stella a lemon ice in a paper cup.

  TOMMY TAKES TINA AND ROCCO on a trip to Italy and France to see the old relatives who are still left alive.

  Mingo is staying with Stella and Carmelo while Tommy’s away. His wife has left him and he has been released from rehab, supposedly clean. All Mingo has to do is keep an eye on Stella, make sure she gets her medicine and doesn’t try to harm her husband.

  But it makes her so mad to see Carmelo sitting there in his chair, stupidly watching television. Now when she sees him so weak, like a baby, the fifty-seven years of their marriage evaporate and she can only think about the time he overpowered her—as fresh in her brain as if it had happened this morning, she can still feel the stockings pulling taut against the soft flesh of her thighs, even though her thighs are now fluffy with age, and she hasn’t worn nylons in twenty years. It makes her so angry she wants to hurt him, and now she can.

  What are you doing lying on the floor, Dad? Mingo asks when he gets home from wherever he was—my guess would be the bar. But Carmelo is incoherent. He has a large bruise on the back of his head.

  Stella is sitting in her chair crocheting.

  Mommy, what happened to Daddy? Mingo asks.

  He did a bad thing is all Stella has it in her to say to her son.

  STELLA DOESN’T FINISH THE BLANKETS she crochets anymore. She makes half a blanket but then loses interest and starts a new one. While she crochets Tommy sits next to her and unravels the neglected blanket, rerolling the yarn for her to use again next time she loses interest.

  ROCCO CARAMANICO HAS A STROKE AND DIES. The dying part takes him three days. He is intubated and can’t talk, but he’s not ready to go. He flaps his arms and tries to communicate with all the nieces and nephews who come see him.

  You’re our second father, they tell him, crying. Many of Assunta’s grandchildren got her crying gene. They sit vigil with Tina at the hospital bed until he finally goes. Then there is the two-day funeral.

  Tommy brings Stella to the wake, which makes everyone nervous. She stands in the receiving line—the deceased’s beloved sister-in-law—accepting condolences. She lets this go on for three hours before she starts telling people, He wanted to marry me, not her, pressing mourner’s hands, and she is going to rot in hell for her jealousy, at which point Richie bundles her into the car and drives her home.

  LOUIE’S KIDNEYS GIVE OUT. Queenie is inconsolable. She loses sixty pounds.

  It wasn’t a perfect marriage, she tells her nieces and nephews. We had our ups and downs like any couple. But I really think he was the best of them.

  Stella doesn’t cry at Louie’s funeral. But that’s only because Stella doesn’t cry.

  WHEN CARMELO DIES, more than six hundred people sign the logbook at the wake.

  It is anyone’s guess how Stella feels at the funeral. She registers no emotion. They had been married sixty-three years, twenty of which passed after she had her mind cut out. They had raised ten children together. They had attacked each other—they had broken each other in different ways. They had buried their hatchets and found peace, only to have their peace medically disrupted. They had stuck it out.

  Everyone besides Stella cries like hell. I cry like hell. I loved Carmelo. I’m crying now thinking about him.

  But no one else had to forgive him for the things Stella had to forgive him for.

  NOW IT’S ONLY THE WOMEN LEFT. How it started, how it will end.

  TOMMY NOW OWNS THE HOUSE at 4 Alder that used to belong to his grandfather. Tony left the house to Tommy in a surprise bequest that fractured the Fortuna family forever. People-pleasing Tommy tried to make it right, invited Joey and Mickey to stay in the house they thought they’d inherit, offered them money, which they took. But Joey died the next summer while the blood was still bad; thirty years have passed, but the cousins don’t speak.

  Tommy moves Stella across the street when Carmelo dies. It will be easier to take care of her there, since number 4 is only one story. And walking through number 4 none of the Maglieri children have to picture their absent father, who should have been sitting there reading a paper and sipping a Michelob Light.

  NINETY-FIVE IS VERY OLD, and the days are soft and run together. Stella can’t always hold on to the number ninety-five. Sometimes she tells people she is one hundred, or one hundred twenty. It doesn’t seem unrealistic.

  Whenever someone comes to visit, she takes them to her bedroom and points at the studio photo of her ten children, taken when Artie was three. Those are my twenty children, she says. The photo is positioned in front of a wall mirror, so in fact there are twenty children there, sort of. No one is sure if she really thinks she had twenty children or if she is pulling their leg.

  AN OLD WOMAN COMES TO VISIT. Stella knows her from somewhere, but can’t quite place her—maybe from church? The church is where most of the old women are. Her hair is white and wispy on top and underneath is charcoal-gray.

  “What are you making today?” the old woman says. She talks loud enough that Stella can hear her, so Stella smiles.

  “It’s a blanket for my daughter, Bernadette,” Stella says. The old woman’s face tightens. Is she jealous? “You know my daughter, Bernadette?” Stella asks cagily. The invidia is evil; she will test this old woman. “She’s very smart. She has a beautiful house on top of a hill. Her husband built it for her.”

  “He didn’t build it, Ma,” the old woman says. “But I’m glad you like it.”

&nbs
p; STELLA SPENDS HER DAYS CROCHETING in her armchair in front of the bay window. She can see straight across Alder Street into the bay window of her jealous sister, Tina, who has put new pruned shrubbery in front of her house, thinking wasting money on landscaping will make people like her more.

  Tina is sitting in her own armchair, staring wistfully right back.

  * * *

  NOW I HAVE TOLD YOU what I know about my grandmother, Stella Fortuna, everything I’ve been able to dig out of public and private records. It is your turn to decide what you believe. Maybe you, as an outsider, can see something that we who are too close cannot.

  I have come to understand Stella as a woman of incredible will and strength, of charisma, of innate intelligence. She was not a woman of her time, and she was made to pay a high price for her unwillingness to conform. If only Stella had been allowed to live her life on her own terms, how might things have been different? I wouldn’t exist, it’s true—would I write myself out of this if it would spare her the suffering? No, I wouldn’t, selfish girl. So I’ve written myself into it, instead.

  ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER SHE DIED, I went in search of the first Mariastella Fortuna. I went to Ievoli, at the summit of the little mountain overlooking the olive valley and the two seas. The village is all but empty; there isn’t even a mailbox in it, because the post doesn’t come here anymore.

  Ievoli is a ghost town, but I could not find Mariastella’s ghost. If it clings unhappily to this earth, I don’t know if it could haunt anyone. I know little of the occult, but it seems to me that a ghost must be remembered to do any haunting. No one remembers the first Stella anymore. The only photo of her must have been destroyed; no one has seen it in years. When I started writing this account, I knew what the first Stella looked like. Now I can’t really remember much of her face, only the round black eyes. After me, maybe no one will remember anything.

  I went to the Ievoli cemetery, to see if I could find her. I said a prayer, even though I don’t believe in a god. I walked through the uniform mausoleums and I touched their cool marble walls, pressed my face to the protective glass façades of the burial vaults, peered through petals of real and silk flowers to try to make out names that might be hers. But of course she isn’t there. She has no loving survivors, no one to light her candles or pick away the clover sprouts that found purchase in the cracks of her tomb. That is, if she even has a tomb; who can say that her bones haven’t been moved and the space recycled during the hundred years that have passed with no one to look out for her.

  There are no Fortunas left in Ievoli—or maybe anywhere else; I haven’t been able to find any. They are gone, eradicated, the monstrous men driven away to the farthest parts of the globe, California, Argentina, Australia, where they have been absorbed one way or another, the women quietly married out into new families and new names. Mariastella Fortuna, if she still lurks somewhere among the living, is the last of her kind, a little ghost with a bad name.

  Epilogue:

  Hic Jacet

  IT IS THE SATURDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS and I have a cooking date with Auntie Tina. I park my car strategically in Stella’s driveway and visit with her first so she won’t give me the silent treatment. She is watching Turner Classic Movies in bed; I lie down on the white duvet next to her and she holds my wrist between her silky fingers. For forty-five minutes we watch The Bad Seed together—for some reason it’s always on when I visit. Stella is not feeling talkative today; from the way she keeps wriggling her jaw I can tell she’s not wearing her teeth. But periodically she turns to give me her squashed close-lipped smile and stroke my arm. I’m not sure she knows who I am, but she loves me anyway.

  I kiss her good-bye when I notice her eyes are spending more time closed than open. As I cross the street I can still feel the spongy pads of her fingertips pressing gently on my arm. I think of how much love she has to give and feel that familiar tiny heartbreak that even now, in their dying years, she cannot give any of it to her sister.

  Auntie Tina is in the basement kitchen when I arrive. She is already kitted out in her once-yellow apron and her hair kerchief—I assume she has been cooking since dawn, judging by the hundreds of hockey-puck-esque totò cookies lined up on the three prep tables. She is clammy with sweat when I kiss her cheek. Last year she went to a new doctor for her general physical and he was so alarmed by how much she sweats that he made her do a whole battery of lymphoma tests. No ninety-seven-year-old woman should sweat like that, he said. Yeah, well. Joke was on him.

  “You go see you grandma?” is the first thing Auntie Tina asks me.

  “Yup.”

  “You no wanna make her mad,” she warns.

  “I sat with her for almost an hour.” I know she already knows this—I am sure she has been checking for my car.

  “Maybe you go see her again when we finish?” she suggests. “She lonely all day.”

  “All right,” I say sadly. “Come on, let’s get cooking.”

  I’m here to “study” Auntie Tina’s recipes, which is tricky. I’ve been over to “study” cooking many times before, have endured hours of chastisement and sabotage, and the unspoken truth of the matter is that although Auntie Tina doesn’t want her recipes to die with her, she doesn’t really want anybody else to be able to replicate them, either. O! the inner turmoil of cooking with your niece! The terrorizing balance of instruction and mysticism you must strike to keep her from getting uppity! No wonder Auntie Tina is so sweaty.

  The totò are already baked and cooled, so next we have the frosting. You have to frost the cookies all around to seal in their moisture. Naturally I am not to be trusted with this sacred task; Tina will handle the cookie-dipping and delegates to me the less critical application of sprinkles. I am only a few cookies in before I reveal my insurmountable inadequacies and Tina snatches away my sprinkle shaker. She finishes the job alone, dipping the cookies with her left hand and sprinkling with her right.

  I just want to say, I make my own totò at home and they come out perfectly fine. Not that I’d ever be able to hold my head up with them around here. But my non-Italian friends like them.

  I exile myself to the sink, where I wash the morning’s accumulated dishes, including Auntie Tina’s Tupperware batter bowl. It is the biggest individual piece of Tupperware I’ve ever seen, a mealy weatherbeaten sea-green color. It has cracked along the bottom and been repaired with duct tape. About ten years ago my mother, who has characterized the Tupperware bowl as “disgusting,” bought Auntie Tina a new one as a replacement; Tina promptly regifted it.

  When the cookies are frosted and drying, we troop upstairs for a lunch break. Auntie Tina pops nervously up out of her chair every few minutes and rummages through the fridge again to see if she’s forgotten anything she might be able to put out for me. She offers to make me some pastina and I decline four times. There are seven dishes already on the table—lupini, homemade suppressata, pickled mushrooms, chicken cutlets, pizzelle, someone’s leftover sausage and peppers from a couple nights ago, mustazzoli that my Aunt Queenie made. “Not so good,” Auntie Tina confides as she unwraps the plate. I dutifully break off a piece, chew, and pronounce that Auntie Tina’s are better.

  It is after lunch, as we are rolling little meatballs for little meatball soup, that I broach the subject of my project. “It’s almost done,” I tell her. “Thanks to you, and all your help.”

  “You finish you story about you grandma?” Tina puts down a grape-size meatball on the full tray of perfectly uniform grape-size meatballs. “What you say about me?”

  “You want to read it?” I tease.

  But Tina doesn’t laugh. She hesitates, then says, “Maybe you can write that it’s no her fault, that she no right in the head.”

  “What’s not her fault?”

  But she doesn’t tell me what she means. Instead, she says, “Maybe you can write that it’s no true that I was jealous for her.”

  “Oh, Auntie Tina.” The jealousy, again—of all the things that shouldn’t matter
anymore. And yet neither Stella nor Tina will ever recover from their own remorse—they will suffer for the rest of their lives for the way the world came between them, each blaming the other for her weakness, each secretly blaming herself for her own. But there is nothing for me to say that will make that better.

  I see she is crying, voicelessly, like Assunta would have cried, her tears tipping off her ancient cheeks and adding their umbrae to the already mottled apron. “You can write that I love her and I only want to take care of her.”

  “Auntie Tina.” I feel a prickle of my own tears, but that would not be helpful. Tina cannot heal the rift with Stella, and now she is putting all her hopes in me, as if I can somehow save the story, find the happy ending. “Everyone knows you love her,” I say, as I always do. “Everyone knows how hard you try.”

  “I love her,” she says again, swiping her runny nose with a paper towel. “I always love her. Maybe you can write that.”

  “Yes. I will write that.” I grab her hand across the table and squeeze to cement my promise. My fingers are covered in gummy raw beef; hers are as clean as if she hasn’t just rolled two hundred meatballs.

  “You was using too much water, makes the meat sticky,” she chides me, shaking off my hand. Her nostrils are pink but her tears are gone.

  She pushes herself up out of her seat and comes around to my side of the table, where my tray of little meatballs is only halfway full. “Too big,” she says, picking up an offender and rerolling it between her fingers. “Oh no, this one too small.”

  “Here, let me—” I try. But it is no good. In her most subtle way, which is to say not very subtly, she slides the tray out of my reach so I can’t interfere and rerolls each of my meatballs, one by one.

  “Oh well,” I say, getting up to wash my hands. “Guess that’s the end of that.”

  Auntie Tina, who is already setting up her frying pan, pauses to give me a rueful smile. “You no worry,” she consoles me. “When they in the soup, nobody gonna know which meatballs you make.”