Tina was looking at her with that willfully stupid expression. She was waiting for Stella to tell her what to think, how to feel.
Stella stood. “Tina, why don’t you go wash the plates now?”
“But what about Papa?”
“Papa can feed himself when he gets home.” Stella squeezed past her father’s empty chair. “Never mind, stay there. Sit,” she warned her mother, who had started to rise. Stella had an idea.
Shivering with nerves—she had never done something like this before—she went into the kitchen and took down three short glasses from the cupboard and the jug of her father’s wine from the sideboard. She set the glasses on the dining room table and filled them nearly to the brim.
“There,” she said.
Her sister and her mother were looking at her expectantly. She knew what they were thinking—What is this? We don’t do this—because this was what men did, drinking after dinner, like smoking a pipe. Stella passed a glass to Tina and took one for herself. “Salut’,” she said. She waited until the other women lifted their glasses, still watching her with misgiving. “Salut’,” Stella said again, and took as large a swallow as she could. Almost immediately she felt better, as if the wine were a calming medicine.
“Salut’,” Assunta echoed, and took her own large gulp. With no reason left not to, Tina followed suit.
Late into the night the women drank and played briscola. The tension eased as the wine opened up their respective angers and affections. Stella noted the feeling of the drunkenness setting in, reveling in it as the cards became harder to count and their mistakes became increasingly funny. The dining room had ceased to feel uncomfortably cold; she now appreciated the draft, which rippled sensuously up her arms. So this is why they drink, she thought. This happy softness.
“I don’t care if he wants to go see a puttana,” Assunta said between deals. She hadn’t cried since they started on the wine. “Oh, Madonn’, you think I’m jealous of what some other woman is having done to her?”
Stella would never have been able to say the words sober, but here they were, tumbling out of her mouth: “What’s it like, Mamma? When he does the job to you?”
Assunta waved her hand, dispelling the unpleasant thought. “Oh, just a big hassle, you know? Part of being a wife. You gotta be there for him when he wants to do it, doesn’t matter how you’re feeling, and then sometimes it makes a baby.” Assunta was staring at the table, her eyes glazed, but she kept speaking, candidly—Stella tried not to move a muscle, afraid that any disruption would make her mother clam up. “And even if you think to yourself, we have enough babies, I don’t want to be pregnant again, you can’t say no to your husband.”
The candle on the table between them flickered. Stella’s heart was racing. Her imagination was damply alive with the alcohol and she couldn’t stop a progression of visions, putting herself in her mother’s place.
Tina was watching her mother with wide eyes. “Does it hurt?” she blurted.
“No, it doesn’t hurt,” Assunta said. “Not all the time. Only when you really don’t want to. Or sometimes it hurts when he drinks too much, or if it takes a long time.” Stella’s mother wrinkled her chapped nose. “The best husbands are the ones who finish the job fast, and whose pistola isn’t so big, so they don’t hurt as much.” She shrugged, her sheepishness overtaking her alcoholic immunity. “But you can’t know that before you get married. You just have to take your chances.”
Stella gulped down a glass of wine. She hoped she’d already taken all the chances she was going to have to in her life.
By the time they finished the bottle, they were too drunk to play cards anymore. It was one in the morning and Antonio still hadn’t come home. Stella and Tina helped their mother, giggling sleepily, to her bed, then huddled together in their own—the cold had seeped in again through the filmy wine-warmth. The girls whispered to each other in the dark. Tina’s breath was sweet and sour and thick; Stella wondered if her own was the same. Would Antonio beat them when he found out what they’d done? Why had he left to be with a puttana when his wife was right here? Should Stella be happy he wasn’t bothering Assunta, or offended he had broken God’s law and chosen another woman over his wife? How grotesque, to know your husband was also doing grotesque things to another woman. Did that other woman also have his children for him?
Stella thought about the money Tony must spend to keep a puttana. How much sooner might he have brought his family to America if he had saved that money—if he’d really wanted them there?
The darkness shrank and bulged around her. Stella was full of the memory of that hot summer night in Ievoli, of Antonio’s naked ass thumping into Assunta’s pushed-up skirts. She felt the pinch in her groin, the blood rising under her father’s fingernails. Stella felt sick to her stomach—a mixture of the wine, the memory itself, the indignity her sweet mother had endured because she owed her obedience to a brute. . . . Stella realized her thighs were throbbing; she was clenching them tightly together. That was never going to happen to her. Never.
* * *
SPRING BROKE ON 1940. Along the Fortunas’ walk to and from mass, the trees were still naked, but gray, dry bushes burst into yellow flowers, root to tip. Forsythia—they were everywhere, living wildly roadside or manicured into thick, square hedges that separated the houses. Stella would learn that forsythia was how you knew winter was over in Connecticut. The spring air was still colder than Christmas back home, and Stella couldn’t believe the flowers didn’t die. But they didn’t, and they were followed by more.
Home in Ievoli, Stella thought, the camellias and the daffodils would be blooming. She hoped someone picked a bouquet for Nonna Maria, who loved their smell.
THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH THE HOUSE Antonio was going to buy on Bedford Street. Although he’d been promised a terrific deal, there was no way he would ever have the two thousand dollars he needed. He made no mention of money he’d already saved before bringing his family to Hartford; Stella was certain no such money existed. He made eighteen dollars a week working his construction job. The rent on the Front Street tenement was six dollars a week; one dollar went into the church basket at mass. Five dollars went into the grocery jar on the kitchen counter. Even if Antonio was putting the remaining six dollars in the bank, which Stella doubted, he would only be able to save three hundred dollars a year.
His wife and children would have to find jobs.
This was how Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe found their way to the tobacco farm in the summer of 1940. Antonio’s friend Vito Aiello had worked there when he’d first arrived in the country, tenting and harvesting large-leaf shade tobacco, the kind they use for fancy cigar wrappers. In April, Antonio brought Zu Vito over for dinner to explain how it would work. They’d catch a truck on Farmington Avenue and it would take them to and from the farm, which was outside Hartford in the countryside. The tobacco season ran from May through August. Anyone could show up for fieldwork; as long as you did a good job your first day, they let you come back again.
Tina cried in bed that night, little hiccupping sobs. Stella was swimming through her own confusion and dismay, thinking of the oranges she would be harvesting back home. She let Tina cry for a while, imagining the tears were tapering off, but they never did. Finally, tamping down her own nasty thoughts, Stella stroked Tina’s long hair and said, “Don’t be upset, little bug. Come on, stop crying. You’ll wear yourself out.”
Tina coughed to clear her teary throat. “I thought we were going to live real nice here,” she said. “We were going to live in a nice house, have nice clothes. But instead he made us give up our own house and come live where we have to share with other people, and he made us give up our own land and come work on someone else’s farm like cafoni.”
This was all true. Stella stroked her sister’s hair quietly for a few minutes. Don’t waste sadness on the problem, she scolded herself. Sadness is weak. Think of how to fix the problem, instead.
“We’re not cafon
i,” Stella said. “It’s the opposite. Anyone can own land here in America. Yes, we’re going to work in a field, but then we’ll have money to buy our own house. All right? Forget Papa. We’re going to work hard and buy a house for Mamma.”
Tina’s blubbering had stopped. Stella guessed what her sister must be thinking—how surprising, the idea that girls like them, Tina and Stella, could buy a house. They had worked for chestnuts and olive oil, but they had never worked for money before.
“You really think we can buy a house?” Tina said eventually.
“We’re going to work really hard,” Stella said. “You know how good we are at working hard, little bug. We can do it.”
“We can do it, Stella,” Tina repeated. “We’ll buy Mamma a house.”
EACH DAY, IN THE TWILIGHT BEFORE DAWN, Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe walked down to Farmington Avenue and waited with the other day laborers until the tobacco truck came; then everyone climbed up the metal steps to the flatbed and sat thigh to thigh on the splintering benches, clinging to their neighbors. The truck carried them out of Hartford on a wide, painted highway, then along narrower streets lined with magnificent houses, one after another, as if everyone here were some kind of minor nobility. And then on to the shade-leaf tobacco farms, acres of thin cotton tenting stretched between eight-foot-high stakes. In the summer breeze, the dark green leaves, wide as your hand, beat gently against the cloth cage, dancing shadows you could see from the road.
The sun would just be rising as the laborers were sorted into field hands and stitchers. The fieldwork involved pulling weeds, mending tents, and harvesting mature leaves, ten hours under the beating summer sun. The air was heavier and wetter here than it had been in Ievoli, and amplified the discomfort of the heat. The shade under the tobacco tents was no relief, it was so stifling and humid. Stella’s and Tina’s smooth pink cheeks burned so badly the skin cracked and peeled off in itchy sheets. Stella learned to look out for little green snakes in the dirt and for thin-legged brown spiders, sometimes as big as her palm, nesting near the holes in the netting, where the bug hunting was best.
In the barns, the leaf-stitching team sorted through the baskets brought in for drying and separated the leaves by size. Each leaf was strung into a graduated stack that would later roll into a single cigar. The foreman, who was courteous to the older ladies, never selected Assunta to do fieldwork, which was a blessing, what with her varicose veins.
Everyone else waiting for the truck in the morning was black. Stella was scared almost out of her wits the first day to be surrounded by black people, and none of the Fortunas would have gotten on the truck if Vito hadn’t been there with them.
“Just keep your hands and your eyes to yourself and they won’t bother you,” Vito told them. “Joe, you can take care of your mother and sisters, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Giuseppe said, although he was more of a symbolic chaperone. He was seventeen and still boyishly slender.
Fortunately, many of the black people were women, which was much less worrisome than being surrounded by black men, whom Antonio had warned his wife and daughters to be very afraid of, although Stella thought if it had really been so important to her father that their virtue not be subjected to strange men, maybe he shouldn’t have made them go to work in the fields in the first place. Many of the women were friendly and tried to chat with Assunta and the girls. Some of the black ladies were not Americans, either, Stella learned. They were Jamaicans, from an island they said was hotter than the hottest day of Connecticut summer.
“You make test?” Stella asked two of the ladies in the English Za Filomena had taught her. She never learned their names. “For sitizenscippu?”
They shook their heads. They were only in America for the summer. When the tobacco season was over, they’d go back to their hot island. “That’s home, and we love it.”
Stella indulged in a short, jealous fantasy in which she would sail home to Ievoli at the end of the tobacco season. “Then why you come here? If you just go back home.”
The ladies laughed. “Money, girl,” the thinner one said. “Same as you.”
The money in question was sixty cents a day per person, two quarters and a dime. The foreman paid them as they boarded the truck at the end of the day. Zu Vito had warned them they’d be easy robbery targets when they got off the truck in Hartford at sunset, obviously coming home from day labor, so they walked quickly and kept their eyes down. When they’d made it safely to the Front Street tenement, they filed through the kitchen and dropped their coins into a washed-out bean can on the narrow shelf where Assunta had perched the photo of the first Stella. When all the Fortunas had made their daily deposit in the bean bank, Stella counted up the total, making a tally mark for each accrued dollar on a paper ledger she tucked in the can. She kept the can where they could all see it to inspire them; she maintained the ledger as ostentatiously as she did so that Giuseppe—or Joey, as he was going by now—would know he couldn’t steal from it for candy or cigarettes.
On Friday night after dinner, Stella and Tina stacked the week’s quarters and dimes and rolled them into the paper wrappers the bank gave out. There were forty quarters in a ten-dollar deposit roll, and every week the Fortunas made at least one such roll. Five-dollar rolls of dimes were rarer accomplishments, a roll every other week. On Saturdays, while her children worked a sixth day at the tobacco farm, Assunta went to the bank to make the weekly deposit in their house savings account.
The whole cycle should have been miserable, toiling away in the sun to save money for the house they’d thought their father had already bought them. But . . . no. That sound of the coins echoing hollowly in the empty can, less and less hollowly as the can filled—it had become Stella’s favorite sound. Assunta and her children were buying themselves their own house. They were a little army led by a haphazard but lovable general, and together they were taking care of business.
START TO FINISH, the tobacco season lasted four months, and by the beginning of September there was no more work. Then Stella and Tina were back to being stuck in the Front Street apartment all day.
To make matters worse, the news that Nonna Maria had died finally reached Hartford. It came in a letter from Antonio’s younger brother Zu Egidio, who wrote to relate his intentions to emigrate to Australia, and who in passing offered condolences. Maria must have died months earlier; Za Violetta had not gotten around to sending them a letter.
As one would expect, the news was debilitating for Assunta. She had been sure that by leaving Ievoli she had written her mother’s death sentence, and now her guilt was irrefutable. She vacillated between silent, sobbing prayer and hysterical anger. In her grief, Assunta’s awe of her husband vanished. She blamed Tony for snatching her away in a time of need. She shouted into his face, and when he struck her to silence her she shouted more. The neighbors downstairs banged on their ceiling when the fighting got too loud; the blond-bunned woman who lived on the other side of the third-floor landing came over armed with a rolling pin to say she’d appreciate it if “you screaming wops” could keep it down. Assunta did not care about being called a wop, but Tony did, and it made him even angrier.
Stella wanted to comfort her mother, to mourn and pray for Nonna Maria together, but she wasn’t going to step into the battle between her parents. Instead, she and Tina hid in their bedroom, crocheting and watching the shantytown dwellers move among their bonfires. Stella crossed her eyes at the dismal façades of the tenements behind the sciantinas, pretending that beyond them on the obscured horizon was her little mountain overlooking the marina, that in a stone house at the little mountain’s peak there was a bowl of fresh olives, just harvested, sitting on the table and waiting for her to bite into their tender green flesh. Stella thought of the first Mariastella. With Nonna Maria gone, there would be no one left to remember the baby or to clean her grave.
STELLA ALSO RECEIVED A LETTER from Stefano’s mother in Sambiase. Stefano was still away in Africa. She begged Stella to s
end a letter she could save for him.
Stella was torn between guilt at not having written—she owed it to Stefano; he had no other girl to write to him while he was at war—and misgivings about not knowing what to say to this man she had realized she would never marry. In the end she had little Louie, who had learned good penmanship in the American school, write a message for her. Dear Signora, We are praying for Stefano every day, and for your family. We are well here but we are working hard and we think of our family in Calabria. We send you our best wishes. Sincerely, Stella Fortuna.
After that, the war must have become more difficult, or perhaps the censorship was stopping communication, because the Fortunas had no other letters for a long time.
STELLA AND TINA WERE ONLY trapped in their dingy tenement room for a few weeks before they found another job. One of their new friends from the Italian Society, a sweet, thin Pugliese girl named Fiorella Mulino, had found jobs for them in a laundry on Front Street. It was no good for Joey, because they only hired women, or for Assunta, who couldn’t be on her feet for ten hours, but Stella and Tina arrived with Fiorella the first Monday of October and the manager let them stay. They were put in Fiorella’s group, ironing and starching, up on the second floor.
Instead of paying a day wage like the tobacco farms, the laundry paid by the piece, which put a kind of performance pressure on their employment. Stella liked it. Each shirt starched and ironed was worth two cents. After a frustrating first day, she got the knack—dipping the shirt, stretching it across the board, pressing and alternating irons. She experimented with stroke rotations to permeate the heat more quickly and evenly through the cloth. She could fit four or even five shirts in an hour, and sometimes came home with eighty or ninety cents a day.
Tina, on the other hand, did not respond well to the time pressure. She was a person who liked to do things thoroughly—whatever anyone else did, Tina did it more, and harder. For example, she had once washed Assunta’s good ceramic pitcher so energetically that the handle had broken off in her hand. This aggressive task approach did not combine well with the anxiety of counting accomplishments against the clock; under pressure, Tina could not harness the required finesse. The first time she got in trouble was for a shirt so stiffly starched it had to be rolled to crack it, then sent down to the first floor and rewashed. Tina starched for four days, her face an arterial pink and streaming sweat, which descended her jaw like tears and spattered the bosom of her dress. On the fourth day, she overcompensated for her slowness by pressing too hard on the shirt she was ironing, leaving a devastating iron-shaped burn mark. The manager was enraged, but yelling at Tina was never any good, because she sobbed so thoroughly—as thoroughly as she scrubbed pitchers—that after a while you felt stupid yelling and ended up doing whatever you could to get her to stop. So Tina was sent home at three o’clock with no pay; she wasn’t fired, although it took Stella all evening to convince Tina she hadn’t been. Stella didn’t tell her sister that she’d given the manager the seventy-four cents she’d earned that day to pay for the ruined shirt so he wouldn’t count it against her little sister. Tina could come back to work the next day, but she had to be on the washing team on the first floor, with the Polish ladies. That was less desirable work to the Italian girls, but at least Tina couldn’t accidentally ruin anything in the washing room. Maybe with her vigor she’d be able to get some of the tougher stains out.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 19