The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  In the end, the only thing he managed to ask her was her name. Pasqualina Lattanzi—a big name for a tiny person, as Louie described her, only this high and with a face like a doll’s. Everyone, he would learn, called her Queenie instead.

  He couldn’t ask her on a date in front of Bill, so he memorized the address and as soon as his workday was over he biked back over. She was in the front yard, reading a book while she supervised a gaggle of boys who were playing a war game around the crab apple tree.

  “You have to get out of here,” Queenie said to him. “My father will kill you.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” Louie said.

  “Well, I am, and I don’t want him to kill me, either.” She stood up, put her book down on the chair, and crossed her arms.

  “I’m just here to ask you out on a date,” Louie said. “If your father wants I can ask his permission first.”

  “I don’t date,” she said, but Louie could tell she was checking him out.

  Louie asked, “Why not? How old are you?”

  “I’m eighteen. But my family’s old-fashioned.” Her broad American voice sounded anything but old-fashioned to him. “My father doesn’t believe in dating. Only courtship, you know, like in Italy, with chaperones, and only when you’re planning to get married.”

  “What if we wanted to get married, though?” Louie said, before he had thought out the words, and then quickly decided he might as well see it through. “Could we go on a date if we were getting married?”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she said.

  “I’ll learn,” he said. “Do we have to get engaged before we can talk to each other? I can propose right now.”

  Queenie shook her head. “I’m in junior college. When I’m done and have a secretary job, I’ll start thinking about settling down.”

  By now, one of her brothers had shaken loose from the group of boys. He came over and stood by Queenie’s shoulder, which he just about came up to, and crossed his arms just like her. “You’d best be moving along, young man,” he said, exactly like a very short version of John Wayne might have said.

  “That’s what I was telling him,” said Queenie.

  Louie moved along, but he stopped by the Lattanzi house on his bicycle every day on his way home from work.

  “You’ve got to cut this out,” Queenie would tell him. “You can’t just keep coming by like this. You’re going to get me in big, big trouble.”

  “I’ll quit coming by if you agree to go out with me,” Louie would reply. But she hadn’t agreed yet.

  When Louie told his mother and sisters about his predicament, Stella said to him, “You’re as bad as Carmelo. Don’t you know some women should just be left alone?”

  “She wants to get married,” Louie said. “If it weren’t for her father she’d say yes and go out with me right now, I know it.”

  “You all know it, don’t you,” Stella said, but no one minded her. She looked down at little Tommy. “Are you going to be like that someday?” she asked him. “Just knowing you’re the best thing ever and that you should always, always get what you want, as long as you’re pushy enough?”

  “You’re one to talk, aren’t you, Stella,” Louie said.

  “Your father will have to call her father and we’ll invite them all over for dinner,” Assunta said. “That’s the proper way to do this.”

  “Yeah, bring her over here,” Stella said. “Papa will make her get engaged to you whether she likes it or not.”

  LOUIE GOT ENGAGED TO QUEENIE LATTANZI in June 1950. They wouldn’t get married until she’d graduated and found a job. “It’s much harder for married ladies to find jobs,” Queenie explained to Stella. “They think you’re just going to quit to have a baby. So you have to look while you’re still a Miss So-and-So.”

  Queenie’s parents had been in America for a long time. Her old-fashioned father was a well-respected carpenter whose furniture was carried in all the best stores. He had finished his third-grade education in Italy—“The furthest you could go there, you know,” Queenie would add defensively—and was a big proponent of schooling, which was why he was paying for Queenie’s professional course.

  Queenie herself had never been to Italy. She spoke perfectly fine Italian but made it clear that she looked down on people who made no effort to live in an American way. She had an Italian woman’s wherewithal and an American girl’s self-confidence. Now that she and Louie were engaged, she visited Bedford Street two or three times a week, bossily advising her future in-laws about how they could better their lives. They needed to install electric ceiling fans; this wasn’t the village anymore. They needed to get a television for their living room; a person needed to keep up with the news. They had to clip coupons from the paper to save money at the store. They had to paint the walls of their house and hang art; no American lived in empty white rooms. And this—this was a much better recipe for blueberry muffins than the one Tina had been using.

  The Fortunas all liked her, even if she was a little know-it-all. She was, Stella found, generally correct. She was correct, for example, about Tony, even if she was willing to say what no one else was.

  IT WAS QUEENIE WHO SPOTTED something was wrong with baby Tommy, because even though she was young and unmarried she was the only one with context about what American babies were supposed to do.

  “He’s more than a year old,” Queenie said. “He should be walking by now.”

  “Is that true, Ma?” Stella asked Assunta later.

  Assunta looked down at Tommy, who was crawling awkwardly across her kitchen floor. Her mouth was pulled to one side; Stella could tell she felt bad for not knowing the answer. “It’s true,” she said finally, “you all were walking before one year old, I think. But maybe things are different here. Children aren’t outside as much.”

  Now Stella was worried and made Carmelo drive them to the hospital. The doctor was unhappy with what he saw. Stella couldn’t understand all the difficult medical language, but she could see there were terrible possibilities the doctor was not taking off the table. Tommy’s poor little body—too little, the doctor said; it was not growing correctly—was subjected to measurements, tapping, stretching, and bending. For three sleepless weeks Stella wondered if God was going to take away another child from her.

  The tests came back negative—little Tommy did not have cancer. He had a very rare condition that caused him to grow benign but growth-inhibiting tumors all over his body. He would always be small-boned; he would never make a sports team or hold his own if he got bullied. They had to be careful with this one—keep him close to home and out of trouble as long as possible.

  As it turned out, “as long as possible” was “forever.” Tommy would never move farther than across the street from his mother’s house. He would be thirty-eight when Stella would have her incapacitating Accident. He might have gotten married, pursued his own dreams, but instead he would stay to take care of her.

  ON MAY 28, 1951, Stella gave birth to a second living son, Antonio “Nino” Maglieri, named for his maternal grandfather. Despite his namesake, he would turn out to be Stella’s favorite, the last boy whose childhood she still had the mind and heart to enjoy before there were just too many babies spilling and spitting and crashing and crying. Louie and Queenie stood up as his godparents, even though they weren’t married yet.

  Nino would grow up to be a robust and jovial child with lots of friends and an easy manner for talking his way out of trouble. He was his older brother’s protector and best friend; no one messed with Tommy in the schoolyard because no one messed with Nino anywhere. Without Tommy’s medical woes to protect him from the draft, Nino would be called up in the ninth batch of the 1970 draft lottery. At least as Stella nursed her beautiful chocolate-eyed infant she had no way of imagining that when he would be just nineteen years old his perfect body would be blown apart by a landmine in a South Vietnamese forest.

  WHEN THEY GOT HOME from their honeymoon in April 1952, Mr. and Mr
s. Louis Fortuna, as they were now, moved into the ground-floor apartment on Bedford Street, into the bedroom Stella and Tina had once shared. Queenie was not circumspect about her displeasure with the arrangement.

  “There’s just so little privacy here,” she said to Stella and Tina. “We’re newlyweds. It’s not right to have people living right on top of us, opening the doors at any time.”

  “You know we all did it,” Tina said. “Just until you save up some money.”

  “I’m not like you,” Queenie said. “I grew up American, and in America we don’t put up with what you did in the old country.” She didn’t say this meanly, but was she ever blunt.

  “It’s just for a while,” Stella said to soothe, before Tina got upset. “Think of it as free rent.”

  “Hardly free.” Queenie snorted. “Your father thinks because it’s his house he can come right into my room anytime he wants. Anytime.” Her meaning was plain, but she spelled it out anyway. “Stella, he comes in whenever he hears us in the middle of, you know.”

  “Of doing the job?” Tina asked, aghast. Stella was disgusted but not surprised. At least Tina didn’t seem to know Tony used to spy on her and Rocco, too. How glad Stella was for the lockable doors and the flight of stairs between her married life and her father.

  “And I’ve caught your mother going through my stuff,” Queenie added.

  “No,” Stella said. “Mamma wouldn’t do that.” Queenie had had Stella’s sympathy as long as she wanted to complain about Tony, but Stella was not going to let this little Kewpie doll spread malice about Assunta.

  “No way,” Tina chimed in.

  “Wouldn’t she,” said Queenie.

  “Maybe to help with your laundry, or something like that,” Stella said. “But she would never snoop or take anything. If you think she would, you don’t know her at all.”

  “Well,” said Queenie. She sat back in her chair and didn’t say anything else about that. Queenie might always be right, but she had also learned that when Stella took a position it was unbreachable.

  * * *

  WHOSE FAULT WAS WHAT HAPPENED LATER, REALLY? Well, it was Tony’s fault—only Tony is to blame for what he did. But that doesn’t mean other people weren’t responsible, or complicit.

  It was Assunta, for example, who brought Mickey into the family.

  In July 1952, when Louie and Queenie had been back from their honeymoon for three months and, Stella surmised, the first-floor apartment was feeling a little crowded, Assunta made an announcement: it had been twelve years since she had seen her people in Ievoli, and she wanted to go back. She wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Madonna at Dipodi, to celebrate the festival of the Assumption, and to see her mother’s grave.

  In fact, Assunta had hatched a plan to make her straggler, Joey, grow up and start a family. He would never get a wife the way he was going, because he spent all his salary at the bar and with puttane. Assunta had tried crying and nagging, to no avail; now she’d decided maybe things had to happen in the opposite order: if he had the wife at home to support, he would have to settle himself down. She just had to trick him into getting married. Well, there wasn’t much she could do here in Hartford, because she didn’t understand girls like Queenie or how to impress them, and besides, she needed to get Joey away from his bad habits and from all the people who knew about those habits. In Ievoli, though, she’d be able to control the situation.

  The pilgrimage scheme came together quickly. When she made her announcement to the family at Sunday dinner, she added that she would need a chaperone and begged Joey to come with her. It would just be for a couple of months.

  “A couple of months? No way, Ma. I’d have to quit my job.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Assunta said, although of course he would. A good pensioned job that he’d only just nailed down. “Anyway, I already bought the tickets for us.”

  It was obvious to everyone what the plan was; Assunta was not skilled at subterfuge. Stella was only surprised that her father seemed to shrug the whole thing off.

  “Women’s business,” he said. Tony had despaired of managing his son and maybe he figured Assunta’s plot was worth a shot.

  Joey and Assunta left on July 27. In the middle of September, Tony received a letter in Joey’s badly spelled combination of English and Italian saying they were enjoying their visit, that they were going to stay in Ievoli for Christmas but then they would be bringing home his new wife, Michelina, whom he referred to as Mickey.

  You did it, Ma, Stella thought. She was impressed. She wondered where Assunta had procured a willing female and what measures had been taken to force the two into holy wedlock. She hoped this Michelina was strong enough to make something of Stella’s layabout brother. At mass Stella said a special prayer to the Virgin that her mother had picked well; after all, Assunta would only be able to pull this wife-assigning trick the once.

  JOEY AND HIS NEW BRIDE, Mickey, moved into the boys’ old room on the ground floor of the Bedford Street house in January 1953. Mickey was already visibly pregnant, which said to Stella that this was a woman who got down to business.

  Mickey, who had just turned eighteen, had grown up in Nicastro, although Assunta enumerated all her Ievoli connections—her mother was a first cousin of Za Violèt from Pianopoli; her older brother had married the Fortuna girls’ school friend Marietta. Mickey was tall and had long smooth legs, which everyone knew because she walked around the house in little silk nightgowns. Stella wondered how things could have changed so completely in Calabria that it had produced this wanton creature. Mickey laughed loudly and flirted with any man around her—her brother- or father-in-law or anyone at all—touching their arms when she talked to them, sitting next to them on the couch and resting her head on their shoulders. Stella was darkly amused by how awkward Mickey made Carmelo, Louie, and Rocco, but Queenie was obviously not amused, and Queenie was the woman who had to put up with Mickey the most. Stella was looking forward to the day Mickey got some good manners smacked into her.

  “I just can’t do this,” Queenie told Stella and Tina at least once a week. “I can’t go on living with this woman. It was bad enough before, but now . . .”

  Tina leaned in and lowered her voice. “What are you going to do?”

  Queenie grunted. Stella, who was crocheting, darted a glance up to see Queenie’s face. It was a sneer of fed-uppedness.

  “Are you going to move out?” Tina asked.

  “How could I?” Queenie said. “Your mother would never allow it.”

  Stella didn’t have anything to say to console her. She was just glad she and Carmelo had a lock and door between them and all that.

  IN EARLY MAY 1953, Mickey threw herself a baby shower, at the behest of her new friends from church, who came over and gobbled up pastries and brought all kinds of adorable miniature presents. It was chilly and rainy; Mickey directed them to Queenie and Louie’s room to leave their wet coats on Queenie’s bed.

  This was the last straw, although Queenie must have been planning for a long time.

  ON THE LAST SUNDAY IN MAY, the Fortuna clan headed out together for eleven o’clock mass. Queenie wasn’t feeling well, so she and Louie stayed home. Walking to church, Assunta and Tina speculated about whether there might be a baby on the way.

  After mass, they stopped by Za Filomena and Zu Aldo’s house for lunch. It was a beautiful day and the boys played in the front yard with Carolina’s two-year-old daughter. Assunta headed back to Bedford Street first to start preparing her Sunday dinner; the rest of them followed half an hour later when Nino started to get fussy.

  Stella could hear the shrieking before she set foot on the porch. At first she wondered if it was some trapped animal or the squealing of a malfunctioning pipe. But no. Mamma.

  Stella thrust Nino into Carmelo’s arms and waddle-rushed up the porch stairs—she was only four months along but carrying large this time. The unlocked door swung open on a dark and fetid hallway—the stench hit her immediately. When Stell
a pressed the light switch it took her a long moment to figure out what she was looking at.

  There was her mother, hyperventilating on the floor of the front hallway, where she was kneeling beside a pool of vomit. Bloody bald patches of scalp showed through her wild hair; later Stella would find the clumps she tore out by the sink in the kitchen. There was something dark smudging one side of her face, which Stella would learn all too soon was diarrhea. There was fecal matter smeared on the walls, about waist-high, as if Assunta had crawled up and back down the hall on her hands and knees, trailing her soiled hands on the wallpaper. Above the shit were the scuffmarks where Queenie and Louie, in their haste, had betrayed their operation.

  She did it, Stella thought, almost triumphantly, but that thought passed quickly.

  Tina dropped to the floor by Assunta, saying, “Ma, what happened?”

  As the sobbing started again Stella stepped over the vomit and made her way through the house, taking inventory. Queenie must have leapt out of bed the minute they all left for mass—playing sick, the little crook—and started loading up a moving truck; God knows where she’d found a moving company that was open on Sunday. In the four short hours the Fortunas had been away, Louie and Queenie had taken everything—every stick of furniture in the living room and dining room as well as out of the bedroom. They took the pots out of the kitchen cupboards and the soap out of the soap dish in the bathroom. The only sign they left of themselves was the faint sun stain around the spot on the living room wall where Louie’s framed diploma had hung.

  “Malandrina,” Antonio kept saying. No better than a highway robber, that Queenie.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have stolen all your furniture, Stella thought, if you hadn’t stolen a few free peep shows, you dirty old jerk.

  But whatever sympathy Stella felt for Queenie was poisoned by Assunta’s reaction to this calamity—over the top, certainly, but Stella didn’t think it was a performance. Assunta actually thought she might not live through this: her favorite son taken away from her, her house ripped apart, her family in shambles.