The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  STELLA AND TINA WENT BACK to the laundry in September. The leaves on the maples turned yellow and the leaves on the oaks turned brown and the air grew frighteningly cold, just as it had last year. Stella knew the parade of American festivals now; she was looking forward to Christmas. Stella knew what to expect from America; she had gotten used to it.

  Then, in December, came Pearl Harbor.

  THE OUTBREAK OF WAR WAS TERRIFYING, even though no one was surprised. Now that the U.S. had declared war on Italy, Italian Americans had a lot to talk about. At the Italian Society there were men who wanted to go home and fight for Mussolini and those who sent money to support his war effort. There were men who were glad to be in America, far away from Mussolini’s fascism. On both sides of the argument people worried about their families back home. But the time for discussion was over—Italian Americans lived in and hailed from enemy states. They had to pick.

  For the Fortunas, the only choice was America. Tony, their patriarch, had no love for his homeland and was proudly naturalized. He would never take them back to Ievoli. The world had already been changing when the immigrants left, and now the change had accelerated, the bombs dropping on ancestral villages and obliterating their old way of life. Stella feared the Ievoli she loved existed only in the rubble of her memory.

  At night, airplanes roared overhead. The Fortunas lay in their beds wondering if bombs were going to fall. Like their neighbors, they put up blackout curtains so they wouldn’t make their building a target. Hartford was a munitions production capital, and the Fortunas lived only ten minutes’ walk from the Colt Armory, which operated twenty-four hours a day. The experience of Hartford at war was spooky, the abandoned streets, the furtive energy behind blackout curtains. Streetlights were against regulation; the girls had to walk to and from night school along unlit city streets.

  It was too bad Stella and Tina hadn’t become citizens already. Now all the Fortunas except Tony were enemy aliens. They had to go down to City Hall and register as such, have their picture taken for enemy alien ID cards, and get fingerprinted. If they were stopped and could not show their new identification, they would be in big trouble. They could be searched or interrogated at any time; police could come into their house and confiscate their belongings. Any letter they received from Italy could incriminate them. Some Italians were rounded up and sent to prison camps far away. They couldn’t keep a radio anymore, because the police might think they were using it to communicate with German submarines.

  “What would we tell a submarine?” Joey argued. He was angry he wouldn’t be able to listen to Crime Doctor or Jack Benny, Louie’s favorite.

  For young men, there was one quick way out of enemy alienhood, one way to citizenship and all its perks: enlistment. If you were willing to risk death for the United States of America, you could get yourself naturalized lickety-split. Half a million Italian American men enlisted during the war. Which brings us to the next important moment in our story.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME STELLA FORTUNA spoke to Carmenantonio Maglieri, it was snowing. The Fortuna sisters were walking home from Hartford High after a night school class; it was January 1942. The blackout-dark streets were covered in a film of ice.

  Carmelo—although of course Stella had no idea who he was at the time—slowed down his car, keeping pace with the girls, which made them nervous. Both he and the man in the passenger seat were dressed in olive-green U.S. Army uniforms.

  Carmelo rolled down the window and called out, “Would you like a ride?” Those were his first words to Stella.

  Her first words to him were “Go away.”

  But he didn’t go away; instead he leaned head and shoulders out the window, a friendly smile on his face. Stella watched warily as wet snow clusters embedded themselves in his waxed black curls. Her stomach turned at the thought of men following her and Tina in a car. The girls were on Farmington Avenue, still twenty minutes from home, and the hard black heels of their shoes skidded on the slick pavement.

  “Come on, hop in,” Carmelo said. He spoke Italian with the generic southern accent some immigrant men adopted in order to communicate with speakers of many regional dialects; he could have been from anywhere in Italy. “Pretty girls shouldn’t have to walk in the snow, in the dark like this. Let us take you home.”

  “No, thank you,” Tina said. “We absolutely do not accept rides from strangers.” She tugged Stella’s arm and they resumed their slippery march, elbows linked, leaving wet snow to pool in the exclamation points of their footprints.

  Carmelo rolled the car forward, catching up. “Very smart, not to take rides from strangers. But ladies! This weather is too much.”

  Neither Tina nor Stella replied, and the car tailed them as they shuffled on in silence. The cardboard shanties they passed were unsettlingly silent, the snow collecting on their pulping eaves. The moon was bright but diffuse, nestled among the storm clouds. Every night they made this trip Stella wavered between wishing it were better lit, so they would be able to see an assailant coming, and wishing it were darker, so they would have a chance of hiding.

  “Come on, ladies,” the man hanging from the window tried again. “It’s not safe out here. I promise we’ll take you straight home. On our honor as soldiers.” He smiled and his cheeks became glossy marbles of joviality. Stella had twin thoughts that his face was handsome and that it was smarmy. He caught her gaze and she narrowed her eyes at him so he wouldn’t mistake any invitations there.

  “We know all about soldiers,” Stella told him. She regretted it immediately; she didn’t want to give him any ideas he didn’t already have.

  But he had ducked back into the car to consult the man in the passenger seat. After a moment, the curl-covered head popped back out again. “Your father,” he said. “Tony Fortuna, right?”

  “How did you know?” Tina said reflexively, and Stella elbowed her so hard Tina had to cling to her sister to keep her balance.

  “So we’re not strangers!” said the smiling young man, smiling afresh. “Your father knows us. Ask him when you’re home, which will be in just a few minutes. He’ll tell you all about us. I’m Carmelo Maglieri, and this is Rocco Caramanico.” He indicated his companion with his thick thumb. “I worked with your father. We all worked together,” he amended. He was so excitable he hadn’t gotten his own story straight.

  “We’re not getting in the car,” Tina insisted as Stella was saying, “Worked together where?” The cold had evaporated her mistrust. She wanted to get in the warm car.

  “Construction, G. Fox,” he said. “Two years ago, in the summer.”

  It was true, Tony had worked on the G. Fox site. But Tina said, “If you really knew our father, you would know he would never let us get in your car.”

  “Come on, Tina,” Stella said. Her ankles hurt from walking on the ice. “This is stupid. They’re just going to give us a ride home.”

  “Stella!”

  “Fine, walk. I’m taking the ride.” Stella made for the curb, and the driver—Carmelo—stopped the car. “Try not to slip and break your neck,” she told her sister.

  “But Stella!” The expression on Tina’s face was simple despair. Her red lipstick appeared much darker in the dimly moonlit street, and with the snow catching on her hair Tina looked like a still from a movie.

  Stella slid across the car’s tan leather seat and called, “Come on, Tina. Get in.” Then again, more tenderly, “Get in. It’s going to be fine.” And Tina got in.

  THE GIRLS ARRIVED HOME WITHOUT INCIDENT and their father did not even yell at them about it. The trouble is, no matter how cold and dark the night, if you accept a ride from a man, you are allowing your entire circle to start gossiping. Stella made her own bed by getting in that car.

  YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN WAITING for Carmelo Maglieri to make his appearance ever since his father, Tomaso, met Tony all those years ago on the railroad. Well, Stella wasn’t waiting for him—she’d never heard of him. Nevertheless, I should tell you a l
ittle more about him here, since he won’t be going away, no matter what Stella told him or how many times.

  Carmenantonio Maglieri, known as Carmelo, was born in March 1921 in an Abruzzi mountain village called Sepino, a maze of medieval cobblestone alleys that sits on top of the ancient Samnite city of Altilia. Despite the Abruzzi’s rich history and adorable brand of stone-and-flower idyll, there was no work there. During Carmelo’s entire childhood, his father, Tomaso, had been sending home money from America. But in 1935 Tomaso was almost sixty years old; he wouldn’t be able to support the family with his own physical labor for much longer.

  Tomaso had applied for a visa for his son to join him when Carmelo was ten, but four years had passed and it hadn’t come through. Meanwhile the family farm in Abruzzi was struggling; every year was poorer. Plus, Tomaso Maglieri did not have good feelings about Mussolini’s government; it was one of the reasons he had tried to persuade his xenophobic wife to move the whole family to America. She never had to put her foot down, though, thanks to U.S. immigration restrictions.

  In the end, the Maglieris decided to smuggle Carmelo into the United States without a visa. He took a two-day train journey north to Genoa, where he boarded a Spanish cargo ship bound for New York. Other young men from his province had made similar undocumented migrations, disguised as cargo or blending in with international sailors long enough to disappear, unannotated, at a foreign harbor. Carmelo had instructions about who to ask for at the Genoese docks, and enough money to grease all the necessary palms of the ticket agents and hustlers on the Italian side of the journey.

  Being fourteen, Carmelo possessed that teenage fearlessness we all look back on with grim awe. It served him well, because he couldn’t speak to anyone on the boat during the ten-day crossing. There were two other stowaways, but they were Greek, and the crew spoke only Spanish. So when the critical moment came—the landing in New York—the stowaways had to be removed before the docking inspection. A small boat rowed them to shore in the dark of night—a nerve-racking journey for a boy who had never learned how to swim. The rowboat grounded in the sandy shoals of an unlit beach and the Spanish sailor indicated for the stowaways to disembark and splash through the last shallow meters of frigid water to shore. That was the end of his emigration.

  Carmelo wasn’t sure what to do next. He needed to find the place he was supposed to meet his father. Tomaso hadn’t known exactly when Carmelo would arrive, so he had given Carmelo the address of a paesan, a dockworker who lived in Brooklyn. Carmelo didn’t know what Brooklyn was, never mind how to get there.

  Carmelo bid the Greeks an awkward good-bye and started walking. He followed the first road he met and continued until he had reached a harbor. That seemed like the right place to settle down for the night; he would search in the morning for someone who could point him toward his next destination.

  The trouble was, Carmelo was no better off in daylight. He was scruffy and smelly in his grimy travel clothes, and no New Yorker would have wanted to talk to him even if he spoke any English. He had a little money, but no idea how to use it, and no common sense about his situation except to know that he must, must, must not be detained by the police. This was how he spent nine days. Nine days! He slept on a dock bench, hesitatingly approaching unhelpful strangers with his best Italian, ducking out of sight whenever he spotted someone in a uniform, and accepting scraps from the pushcart vendors, for whom he performed chores. Eventually it was one of the vendors who brought an Italian-speaking friend to the dock to see if they could solve the homeless boy’s problem. The Italian escorted Carmelo on the ferry and then on the underground subway to the address Carmelo had for the paesan’s house. Carmelo was so relieved that his dockside ordeal was over that he only realized later how generous the Italian stranger had been. He learned English quickly so he would never be caught speechless again.

  Tomaso came to pick Carmelo up in Brooklyn and brought him back to his railroad team in Pennsylvania. At first Carmelo was only allowed to be a water boy; he earned half wages for running errands. By the time he was fifteen, though, he was a full-fledged railroad man. He was popular with the other men, gregarious, good-natured, and happy to be the butt of a joke. The railroad men taught him to cook and to read English. They played folk songs around the fire every night, any man who could sing contributing tunes from his own village in his own dialect. Carmelo learned the concertina from a man named Otello from Cosenza. When Otello went back to Italy in December 1936, he left his concertina with Carmelo.

  Carmelo and Tomaso traveled wherever Reading sent them until 1937, when Tomaso fell in a ditch and broke his leg. The Maglieri men settled in Hartford for the old man’s convalescence, sharing a couch at the tenement apartment of the Carapellucci family, Abruzzesi friends who lived on Front Street. Carmelo, still without papers, talked his way into a job on a construction team. This was where he met Rocco Caramanico, who would become like his brother. This was also where he met Tony Fortuna. When they figured out Tony knew Carmelo’s father—it didn’t take long; the first thing Italians do when we meet other Italians is to run through all possible family connections—they had a laugh about Carmelo’s infant betrothal to faraway Stella.

  The men might have become good friends, who knows, but the flood of 1938 came, and the Carapelluccis’ tenement was destroyed. Tomaso went back to Sepino, but Carmelo stayed on, renting a room in a men’s boardinghouse. He told his father he would work hard, save carefully, and do whatever he could to reunite the family.

  Carmelo enlisted as soon as the U.S. entered the war so he could be granted citizenship with active duty. When the recruitment officer asked to see his documentation, Carmelo said—not untruthfully—that he had been very young when he’d come over from Italy, and that he hadn’t been able to find his papers. The U.S. Army was hardly going to turn away a young man who was willing to fight and die for the Land of the Free just because he had no right to be there.

  UNDER THE CHURCH IN THE CENTRAL PIAZZA of Sepino, Carmelo Maglieri’s hometown, there is a grotto dedicated to Santa Cristina, the patron saint. The shrine is lined with gilded chambers illustrating the stages of her life, her miracles, and her martyrdom, each chamber endowed by an emigrant far away. One of those grotto chambers bears Carmelo Maglieri’s name on a gold plaque. It is an old cliché about Italian American immigrants that they kept the homeland in their hearts, but Carmelo never stopped thinking of Sepino, even when it was clear he would never return.

  What can I say. Carmelo was a little bit of a sap. The type of guy who would tear up when his grandchildren came to visit. He was the opposite of Tony Fortuna in every way—well, in almost every way. Maybe this is why the betrothal joke was such a terrible one, if women are supposed to marry men who remind them of their fathers.

  THE SECOND TIME STELLA AND CARMELO met was the night Rocco decided to marry Tina.

  “You want the one with the mole on her lip,” Rocco’s older sister, Barbara, advised him. The Fortuna sisters were wearing matching blue dresses, so the mole was the best way to distinguish them.

  “The one with the mole is Concettina,” Rocco said. It was two days after he and Carmelo had picked up the girls on Farmington Avenue. Rocco had asked Tony’s permission to call again—it was plain he wanted to see about the sisters. On this second visit, he’d brought Barbara along as his consultant, and to represent his parents in Italy. Carmelo Maglieri had come along in support, or maybe with motives of his own.

  Rocco meant to ask Tony’s permission to marry one of the Fortuna girls before he left the Front Street tenement that very night. Rocco and Barbara had discussed this matter. In four days’ time, Rocco would be sent to the Pacific with his unit, and it was best to have someone waiting at home for him, someone who could send him letters and care packages.

  Now Rocco and his sister were standing in the doorway to the Fortunas’ kitchen for this private conference. All the Fortunas, turned out in their Sunday best, sat or stood around the dining room table less than ten fe
et away, pretending they weren’t wondering what the Caramanico siblings were discussing.

  “Concettina has the makings of a wife,” Barbara said. “You can tell she is hardworking just by looking at her.”

  Brother and sister watched the nervous party scene for a few minutes. Tina, who was indeed hardworking to look at, stood at her mother’s elbow, shoveling pasta onto plates and refilling wineglasses. Tony sat at the head of the table; then came Joey, nineteen, and Louie, eleven, and Tony’s friend Vito Aiello, whose wife was in Italy and who sometimes came over to play cards. Carmelo Maglieri was telling a story that had the boys laughing. Like Rocco, Carmelo had come in his full army uniform. Stella, the only woman sitting at the table, had her mouth set in a pout. Rocco saw his irresistibly charming buddy failing to charm her, and it made him want to try.

  “They are both hardworking,” Rocco told Barbara. “They work six days a week at the laundry. They give all their money right to their father, he’ll tell you.” Rocco always took Barbara’s advice obediently; she was sixteen years older and she looked after him well. He was pushing back now because some little spark inside him was interested in Stella Fortuna, not in Tina. He was hoping Barbara would change her mind.

  Barbara was not to be convinced. “But see how Stella is sitting while her mother and sister do all the work?” Yes, he saw; it was hard not to see. “Tina there, she’s obedient. Those sturdy Calabrese legs,” Barbara pointed out, and from this vantage Tina’s calves in particular looked quite sturdy. “She’ll bear you lots of sons and then still be strong enough to run after them.” Barbara would be wrong about the first part, although Tina would run after many other people’s children.