This was the period when the thought entered her head: What is the point? Of course there never is any point, but until you think that thought for the first time it doesn’t matter that there isn’t. And once Stella had the thought, it was stuck, soaked into her skin and tunneling along her arteries. Her fast, perfect fingers were dulled by it, her elbows harder to lift and her neck sore. Her days were gray and slid together. There were no bright spots, no memories she would take with her of this time, her early marriage.
Stella had never had a life goal before, a specific precious thing she badly wanted, the way her father had wanted to be American, or her mother had wanted a house, or Tina wanted a baby. But now Stella had something else, the pure, irrefutable knowledge that there was nothing she wanted at all. Not only did she have nothing left to lose, she had nothing left to win, either.
WHEN I THINK OF STELLA’S LIFE during this time, I grieve for her. But my relationship with her misery is nuanced, because I am a product of it. As you have surely figured out by now, Stella Fortuna is my grandmother. And as you’ll see if you stay with Stella even through this grimmest of passages in her story, my life is only one of many she spared by not ending her own.
* * *
TONY HAD BOUGHT THE THREE-FLOOR WALK-UP on Bedford Street with the notion that someday all three floors would be full of his progeny, a palazzo of Fortuna offshoot families. Now that those satellites were starting to come into being, however, Tony was having trouble getting rid of the tenants he’d rented to.
The family who had lived in the second floor had left peacefully as soon as they’d found somewhere else to go, and the Caramanicos had moved into that apartment just before Stella’s wedding. But the lady on the top floor, Miss Catherine Miller, would not leave.
“It’s my house,” Tony told her, “so if I tell you to leave you have to leave.”
“That’s not how things work here,” Miss Miller said, with the sanctimonious conviction of a retired schoolteacher. “I know my tenant rights. I can have my lawyer come down here and remind you of what they are.”
Both parties enjoyed an enraged battle, and she might never have left if she hadn’t had a stroke just before Christmas and been relocated to a care facility. In another circumstance Stella would have sympathized with Miss Miller; it came as no surprise to Stella that her father could make someone have a stroke. But she secretly resented Miss Miller for never sharing the secret of her independence. It was an irrational feeling of betrayal, because Stella had never gotten up the courage to speak to her except small talk about the milkman.
And Stella was acidly grateful to Miss Miller for her timing with her stroke, because now that she was pregnant and forced to visit it even more often, Carmelo’s shared bathroom was intolerable. If I died, she had actually thought—had begun to say out loud to Carmelo—if I died right now at least I wouldn’t have to use that toilet again.
“That’s just a stupid thing to say, Stella,” Carmelo would reply, but they moved into the third-floor apartment in the Bedford Street building the very same day that Catherine Miller’s nephew told Tony his aunt wouldn’t be coming back. Tony gave the nephew fifty dollars in cash for her larger furniture; Assunta and Tina packed her other belongings in boxes and stored them in the garage. Miss Miller would never come and retrieve them.
STELLA COULD PEE IN PRIVACY NOW, as often as she wanted, but now she had a toilet of her own she had to clean. She had a claw-foot bathtub now, but she never wanted to bathe. Her hair was short these days, but she still didn’t feel like washing it. She was always hungry, but she hated to feed the monster inside of her. She would eat and she would hate herself afterward, rubbing and scratching the greasy feeling of guilt off her face and neck, leaving red welts on her skin.
She watched as her body went through the first changes of the pregnancy ruination she had dreaded her entire life. She had been vain, she had thought she was beautiful, and now she was being punished for her vanity as, one by one, the features she had been proudest of were taken away. Her flat belly thickened; it would never be anything but swollen or vacantly sagging for the rest of her life. Her once-smooth bronze skin broke out in various rashes. Her eyes were dull in the mirror, the whites turned reddish-yellow. The dark under-eye bags would merge seamlessly into the facial sagging of age, so there would never be a moment between pregnancies when her pretty face was restored. Everything beautiful about Stella Fortuna’s life was over.
Worse than any of this physical humiliation was the fact that it did not make her husband stop desiring her body. He took her almost every night. Stella turned her face to the wall so she wouldn’t have to watch him. There was no more damage Carmelo could do to her—the child had already quickened in her womb—and yet for some reason that knowledge didn’t make her loathe and fear copulation any less. Staring at the wall, she fought off the smeared layers of associations—the nightmare, her father’s leather belt on her naked breasts, the marble sink in the Montreal hotel. When she closed her eyes she remembered the wisdom of her mother—the best husbands were the ones who got the job done fast. Sometimes Carmelo was fast. Sometimes he was not.
She couldn’t fight off her nightmare, so she learned to escape into it. The rapist was coming toward her with his big rough hands, and she would climb into the window frame, where she’d be safe from him. As Carmelo’s penis bumped and scraped against her insides, she tried to build herself a vision of what was out that window, over the metal fence and beyond the shantytown. She pictured Ievoli, the glowing yellow-green of the citrus leaves in the April sun, the silver-blue of the September olive groves, the sunbaked July rows of bulging tomato stakes marching like soldiers along the terraced mountain.
Her world was a gray ache and she couldn’t live inside it.
They made her go down to Sunday dinner at Tony and Assunta’s, but she was ashamed to be seen by her family, knowing they looked at her and thought, How nice and quiet she is now, and Someone gave her what she deserved. She could hear their thoughts ringing around the dinner table in the undercurrent of their solicitous questions about her health. Joey was the only honest one, cackling about her fertility every time he saw her. Joey was honest, but he was still the worst.
Carmelo gave her money and told her to go buy dresses, but she didn’t want to go outside. Her body hurt and disgusted her, and what was the point of buying a dress that wouldn’t fit next week? He told her to use the money on whatever she wanted, whatever would make her happy, but nothing would make her happy.
At night, when she could find no respite in sleep between her trips to the bathroom, Stella sometimes closed her eyes and pictured the face of the first Stella, the wretched little ghost who had haunted her for a quarter of a century. “Are you jealous of me still?” she’d whisper into the dark. “Are you jealous of this?” Because jealousy was two-sided, and the second Stella did not feel lucky to be the living Stella anymore.
On Saturdays when there was no work to go to, Stella would play sick while Tina went to the wedding showers for their Italian Society friends. When she got home she would come up to Stella’s dark room and try to cheer her up with smuggled cookies.
“Tina,” Stella asked her sister one day, “do you believe there’s really a God?”
“Stella! Of course there’s a God. What are you saying?” Tina whispered, as if that would stop her omnipotent deity from overhearing.
“But why do you think so?” Stella asked. “Just because the priest says so? How do you know for sure, Tina?”
“Of course I know,” Tina said.
“But how?”
Stella didn’t expect an answer. Tina only had answers other people had given her, the answers other people had assured her it was correct to believe, and then she knew them beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But Tina had an answer this time, after a moment’s hesitation. “I know there’s a God, because if there isn’t, what’s the point of all of the bad things? There would be no point, so there must be a God.”
After Tina left, Stella turned over this thought, so close an echo of her own. If her sister’s answer had been any more sanguine, it would have been no help to Stella at all. But as it was, it was just enough to get her through.
HER MOTHER HAD TOLD HER IT WOULD HAPPEN—that when it was her own child, she would understand, that there would be nothing she would love more. She had told her mother she was different. She had been wrong.
The connection happened on Ash Wednesday, 1948. Stella was sitting in the evening mass, hunger stirring in her bulging belly, and then the stirring wasn’t hunger anymore, it was something else—something in addition to the hunger, a little sloshing wave of life. There was a baby inside her, asserting itself, and the baby was hungry, too. It seemed that, with this show of solidarity, the baby was telling her, I’m your ally.
It was not the most rational thought of her life—she recognized that even as she had it—but she was sitting on a hard church pew after a long day of factory work and she was tired and hungry and no one else cared. Well, the baby cared.
After that, she felt the baby every day. Now that she’d understood the proverbial spark of life inside of her, she couldn’t forget it. Even when the baby wasn’t moving, she knew it was there and thought about it. Stella could barely bring herself to talk to Carmelo, but she could talk to the baby, for many hours. She had never been able to sing very well, but now whatever songs she thought of came out just fine. Her voice bounced pleasantly off the apartment walls, and the echo she heard sounded happy.
Carmelo was stupid with joy at becoming a father. He rubbed his wife’s belly and bragged about how big his son was getting to anyone who would listen. Let him brag. Stella had stopped caring about Carmelo. She still hated him, but the heat was gone. Her body was tired from the pregnancy and she needed to focus her energy.
Stella wondered about God’s tricks in this matter of the baby. This had been the thing she had wanted least in her life, and God had changed her heart to make her want it more than anything. At least, that was her mother’s explanation for Stella’s attachment. Stella thought it was more like an infection in her mind; her thoughts were not her own anymore, no more than her body was hers. She remembered—vividly—that only months ago she had not wanted to live; now not only had that shadow fled her psyche but she was also desperately devoted to making something else live, as well. Her richness and her darkness had been filed down to one fist-size glowing globe she carried in her womb.
TINA SMILED. TINA THREW HER A BABY SHOWER. Tina loved Stella and stroked her stomach. But Tina had an honest face and couldn’t hide her envy even when she smiled.
Stella knew it was confusing to Tina—it was confusing to Stella, too. Tina had spent her whole life training to be a mother, wanted that life so much. Stella had not wanted it at all, had walked a dark road to motherhood, lived through days when she would rather have died. And here she was, swollen and beatific, the change accomplished within moments of the consummation of her marriage, while Tina tried and tried and nothing came. The doctor had run tests but hadn’t found anything wrong with her.
Behind Tina’s back—and sometimes not—the women would ask Stella whether it was Tina’s fault or Rocco’s. It was usually the woman’s, everyone knew. Stella was tongue-tied by the question, although it was not an uncommon one. How could people be so stupid and cruel? Did they not see how much they hurt Tina? Did they want to hurt her, on some level? Make her pay for not making the sacrifices they had?
When Tina’s face betrayed her—sad, confused envy—Stella would squeeze her sister’s hand. “You are going to be the best aunt,” she told her. Tina smiled harder, and Stella added, “It’s too bad. My children are going to love you more than me. They’ll say, oh, Mommy can’t cook anything, we want to go to Auntie Tina’s house instead.”
Tina laughed and looked down at her skirt. “Well, Carmelo can cook for them.”
“He better be planning on it,” Stella said, snappishly to make Tina laugh again.
Stella loved Tina because those thoughts weren’t her fault, and also because there was no room in Stella’s heart now for any coldness or resentment.
Assunta saw Tina’s envy, too. She made the unfascination on Stella’s forehead at least once a day. She came up to the third-floor apartment to hang mint in the windows.
“First baby,” she would say. “The most vulnerable time.”
CARMELO WANTED STELLA TO QUIT HER JOB at Silex as soon as she knew she was expecting, but she loved to work. She managed to defer until May, by which time she was so large that the factory work had become unpleasant.
On Stella’s last day, Tina brought a small portable party: a stacked-high plate of starchy S-shaped cookies and a tray of cold ravioli. The ladies of the assembly line picked the raviolis up out of the pan with their fingers, taking tiny bites and catching the sauce in their paper napkins. Everyone giggled like crazy. Stella had put together thousands of coffeepots with these women, but most of them she would never see again.
STELLA WENT INTO LABOR on the morning of July 24. Down in her mother’s kitchen, she walked in circles while they waited for the expected things to happen: the cramps accelerating, becoming more painful. Stella was cranky with hunger; Assunta wouldn’t let her eat anything, on doctor’s orders. It was an infuriating, endless day of bouts of intense pain and miserable summer heat, wet-hot with Connecticut humidity. She had just stepped into Assunta’s bathtub to splash cool water on herself when her water broke, so at least she didn’t make a mess.
This was when they called Carmelo. He rushed Stella to the hospital, where there was more painful, sweaty waiting. The hospital was as uncomfortable as Stella had anticipated it would be, as was being handled by an English-speaking male doctor.
Miserable, boring hours passed in repetitive agony. They laid her down on a paper-covered hospital bed and put her feet in stirrups. Stella had not been prepared for that. She was horrified to have herself on display, but the humiliation was completely overwritten by the intensity of her pain. The thought of her mother giving birth like an animal on her minty bed in Ievoli flashed through Stella’s mind. She didn’t feel like an animal, she felt like a monster, a monster tearing her own self apart with her claws. At least there were only strangers around her and no one she loved could see her this way.
The time dragged on, and the contractions, and the pain. Stella had lost any sense of how long, how many, how much. Being trampled by the pigs—it hadn’t been this bad, had it? It couldn’t even hurt this much to die. The window on the far side of the paper curtain was dark. It was night, and night would never end.
“You need to push, Stella,” the doctor said to her.
“I am push,” she said, scrabbling for English words that wouldn’t come out. “I doing push.”
This is the end of what Stella remembered.
LATER STELLA AND CARMELO’S CHILDREN would tell the story of what happened that night. The doctor left the surgery room to ask Carmelo whose life he wanted to save, his wife’s or his son’s.
“There is no choice,” Carmelo had answered. “I want them both.”
I REMEMBER HEARING THAT STORY when I was a kid, about how Grandpa had to pick between Grandma and the baby, and he told the doctor no way, give me both. And I remember thinking, Wow, Grandpa, he’s so tough and loyal, such a family man. A hero. No compromises.
Now I think about that story and I feel furious. He risked my grandmother’s life for his stubbornness and pride; he valued a baby he knew nothing about over the woman he supposedly loved. And my heart breaks for Stella, who had to live in that marriage. How lucky I am that I can’t imagine being married to a man who wouldn’t immediately pick me.
STELLA DID NOT DIE THAT DAY, FOR THE SIXTH TIME.
WHEN SHE WOKE UP, she burned in that way a body burns after surgery, every capillary straining to reconnect, to seal, to fight infection. The pain was familiar to her, but not its magnitude. Her body had been exhausted by the hours of pushing, by th
e removal of so much matter, by the loss of so much blood.
The hospital room was pink and her mind was as fuzzy as yarn. She saw her mother sleeping in a low chair with wooden arms. She turned her chin and saw the pink gown stretched over her own bosom. She struggled to figure out why she was in the hospital, and then when she reached her answer she began to panic, her mind sharpening, because she was not pregnant anymore. The feeling of the baby pulsing inside her was gone, a hole she now, abruptly, noticed. Gripping her deflated abdomen, she lurched up in her bed, or tried to, but was blinded by a wave of pain so intense she lost the hospital room for a flash—maybe for minutes, or hours, who could know.
She opened her eyes again, eventually, and tried to call out to her mother, but her mouth was dry. A tube ran into her arm; the skin around the needle prickled with bruise. She focused on that tiny discomfort, tried to build a wall between herself and the rest of her body. It was daylight; light came in pinkly through that damn paper curtain.
“Mamma,” she said. Her voice was the sound of a piece of paper being crumpled in a fist. But Assunta was awake this time, and there was Tina, too, standing beside the bed. “Mamma. Where is my baby? My baby.”
Tina helped Stella drink juice from a paper cup and Assunta sobbed, grasping Stella’s hand so tightly both of their knuckles were creased with red and white.
“Mamma,” Stella said again, but Assunta only had air for tears and for her circular prayer, thank you God thank you Madonna thank you God thank you Madonna.
Stella swallowed, and Tina helped her drink again. Her pelvis ached, an onion of ache. She tried her sister this time. “Tina,” she said. Her voice, was that her voice? It sounded strange. “Tina. Where is my baby? Did they take away my baby?”
Tina looked at their mother, but Assunta was sobbing into Stella’s hand. She was going to let Tina do this dirty work. Half of Stella’s mind understood before Tina could say it; the other half couldn’t understand it even after it had been said.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 33