From her mother’s bedroom, Bernie dialed next door. Auntie Tina and Uncle Rocco were at work, of course, so no one answered. She tried the number for her grandfather’s house across the street, but no one answered there, either. They had probably unplugged their phone. She would have to go in person.
Swallowing the last of her dry bread breakfast, Bernie crossed Alder Street and knocked on the door of number 4, then let herself in. Sure enough, everyone was home, although the house was almost silent. Auntie Mickey and her daughter Betty, seventeen, were sitting on the couch, watching the television at a very low volume. The other girls must have been asleep, or maybe out in the backyard.
“Hi, Auntie Mickey,” Bernadette said. “Hi, Betty. Have you guys seen Penny?”
“Hi, honey,” Mickey said in her nasal, accented English. “We saw your penny?”
“Penny, our dog.” On the television, Captain Kangaroo was singing. “Did our dog come over here?”
“No, honey, I haven’t seen no dog,” Mickey said. “Not over here.”
Betty regarded Bernie with no expression. They should have been friends—they were almost the same age—but Bernie had never seen her cousin exhibit any personality. For example, here she was with nothing to do but watch television on a Friday morning. Betty was supposedly training to be a hairdresser, but she had some nervous problems and no one seriously thought she would ever hold down a job.
Well, Bernie might as well be thorough and ask her grandfather. Grandpa Tony was never nice about the family pets, seemed to find it amusing that the children became so attached to animals—to teach them a lesson last summer, he had killed Stella’s white pet goat and roasted her in the backyard, cackling as he ate her. That was such a shocking story; Bernie had gotten a lot of mileage out of it with her girlfriends. But the fact that Grandpa Tony didn’t love family pets didn’t mean he hadn’t seen Penny. In fact, it might mean he knew exactly where Penny was. Bernie felt a tickle of suspicion. “Where’s Grandpa Tony?”
“In his room, honey.” Mickey’s eyes were fixed on Captain Kangaroo.
Nursing her bad feeling, Bernie walked down the yellow-papered hall and to the last room on the left. Doing her best not to picture her grandfather in any of his states of dishabille, she knocked on the door and called through it, “Ey. Have you seen Penny?”
There was a long moment of silence before Tony’s voice came through the door: “Forget the little beech. She shoo’ run into the road. We don’ need no more puppies around here.”
Typical. Mean old man. But Bernie was going to be late for work. She would have to worry about the dog later. She let herself out the back door so she wouldn’t have to say good-bye to her aunt or cousin.
Later, standing behind her register and waiting for the occasional customer to come through with their produce, Bernie would turn over what her grandfather had said to her, and she’d realize he hadn’t told her he hadn’t seen the dog.
THE REASON MICKEY AND JOEY were living in 4 Alder was because their apartment in Hartford had burned down in the summer of 1967. Not only had they lost all of their worldly possessions, insurance was refusing to honor the claim, because Joey had purchased the coverage too recently, or something like that.
The truth was, the insurance company had told Joey they would commission an investigation if he requested one, but that if they did so he needed to be prepared for whatever their inspector might find. In other words, if the inspector found certain kinds of evidence, Joey should be prepared to go to jail for arson and insurance fraud.
“What are you afraid of, Joe?” Stella had asked her brother. “If you didn’t burn down your own house then there’s no evidence they could hold against you.”
Joey waved her off. “They’re all a bunch of crooks. They’ll fix it all up so they don’t have to pay, even if that means I go to jail for no reason.”
“Crooks,” Stella repeated, disgusted. Her brother pretended not to catch her sarcasm.
Meanwhile, the Joseph Fortunas were homeless. The late 1960s, when the John Lennon was the most popular hairstyle, weren’t a heyday for barbershops, and Joey barely brought home enough money to feed his kids. By the time of the fire, in 1967, Joey and Mickey had five girls: Betty, then fourteen; Mary, eleven; Janet, nine; Barbie, five; and Pamela, three. Joey didn’t see any reason his parents shouldn’t help him out in this time of need.
“You’ve got that whole house, Pop,” Joey had argued. “Two extra bedrooms you aren’t doing nothing with. We’d just stay with you for a little while, till we get the money together to buy a new place.” Joey and Tony both knew there never would be a new place, that Joey and Mickey would never get the money together. But Assunta didn’t know that, or chose not to know it, and cried and begged and fretted until Tony said yes. Tony didn’t have the stamina that he used to for arguing with his wife.
So Joey and Mickey and their five daughters moved into Tony’s house at 4 Alder Street, across the road from the Maglieris and the Caramanicos. So many boy cousins on one side of the street, so many girls on the other. Joey and Mickey took the small bedroom, and in the style of the Maglieri boys they stacked two sets of bunk beds in the larger room for their daughters.
Now three years had gone by. It didn’t seem like Joey and Mickey were any closer to moving out—more like their new plan was to wait until they inherited the house they were already living in.
Stella tried not to go over there unless she couldn’t help it.
ACROSS THE STREET AT NUMBER 3, Stella had finished pulling the laundry out of the washing machine and pinning it on the pulley line that ran between the Maglieris’ and the Caramanicos’ houses. She left her basket on the porch and went back inside; maybe she would watch some television. But first she opened the refrigerator to survey. She could use something to settle the acid in her stomach.
There was one bowl of cold pasta with sauce, leftover from supper the night before. She pulled the bowl out and put it on the table, then, before sitting down with her fork, poured herself her second glass of wine for the morning. By the time she finished the pasta, she had also finished her third. She could feel her brain shrinking away from her skull, could hear her heart pounding in the back of her throat, against the cavern of her consciousness, but the hangover had started to recede into the softer, more forgiving feeling of drunk.
She remembered that first time she’d learned what wine could do to her, that day in the cold winter of 1940, that first year in Hartford, the day Tony hadn’t come home. She remembered how she’d sat with her mother and sister and they’d poured one another tall glasses of wine until they were too drunk to play cards.
Stella gazed across her kitchen at the framed photo taken in 1918, her mother and father standing on either side of the dead baby Mariastella—the photo hung by Stella’s refrigerator now. Assunta was so young in that picture, only nineteen, so beautiful, Stella had realized as an adult—beautiful in her ordinariness, in her unflattering directness, in her strength. These were things you didn’t see about your mother when you were a child.
Thinking of Assunta now, she poured herself a fourth.
A YEAR AND A HALF EARLIER, in December 1968, was when she went.
Tony and Assunta had been sitting at the kitchen table eating supper while Tina washed dishes at the sink. There was a thunk and Tina turned around to look and there was Papa but not Mamma. Assunta had slid right under the table, hitting her head on the radiator on the way down. Tina rode with her in the ambulance all the way to the hospital, but the doctor said she was already dead.
They gave it a fancy English name no one could remember. In short, there had been something wrong with her heart—perhaps the same thing that had killed her father so young.
When the paramedics opened Assunta’s dress to try to perform emergency resuscitation, a bundle of mint, bound together with a bread bag tie, fell out of her brassiere.
STELLA HAD NOT BEEN WITH HER MOTHER in her last minutes, and Tina had—there was something
Stella could never have back.
TINA HAD GOTTEN LAID OFF from Silex that summer; the company was being bought out and many of the assembly-line workers lost their jobs. She was forty-eight, and it was a strange age to not have a job; it took her almost a year to find another factory job she could do without passing a literacy test. In the meantime, she stayed at home with Tony and Assunta. Tony still took some odd construction jobs in the summer, but he had diabetes trouble, and keeping up with his diet was too much for Assunta, especially with all those granddaughters in the house. Mickey was hardly a help. She was more the type to be cooked for than to cook for others.
Meanwhile, Stella had decided to go back to work when Artie started kindergarten. She got a job on a corporate cleaning crew in the Families First insurance building. Carmelo told her over and over she didn’t need to work—she suspected it was a blow to his pride to have his wife working as a cleaning lady. But Stella loved being productive again, loved having a place besides her house to go to and belong, and a cleaning crew was as good as anything else she could get, at her age and without having held a job in twenty years. The shift went from 3 to 8 P.M. so that they wouldn’t get too much in the way of the nine-to-five insurance agents. Some of the crew were Jamaicans, who made Stella remember the ladies she’d met at the tobacco farm all those years ago, from whom she’d learned her earliest English. But most of Stella’s fellow cleaners were Puerto Ricans, who spoke fast, energetic-sounding Spanish to one another and who would giggle with surprise when Stella chimed into their conversation—she usually had no idea what they were saying, but other times the words they used meant almost the same thing in Calabrese.
THE DAY ASSUNTA COLLAPSED, no one at Alder Street knew how to reach Stella. The cleaning ladies moved from office to office; there was no way to locate them until the shift was over. Bernadette called the cleaning company’s central dispatch, but they told her they had no way of passing on the message.
BERNADETTE WAS WAITING FOR STELLA when she got home.
“It’s Grandma,” she said. She was already crying. “Grandma’s dead.”
Bernie was not a liar or a joker; Bernie did not make mistakes. But Stella thought she must have been lying or joking or mistaken. It took Bernie half an hour to make her mother understand—a hamster wheel of a conversation so excruciating she was almost laughing by the end of it. Stella had marveled at her daughter’s wrongheaded persistence. Papa was the one who was sick, not Mamma. Mamma was only sixty-nine years old. Assunta wouldn’t drop dead behind Stella’s back like this, giving her no chance at all to prepare.
Then it clicked. The world was swallowed.
THE WAKE WAS AN AWFUL THING. Assunta had been loved too much by too many people who were too surprised by her loss. Even the hooligans were subdued in their scuffed-elbowed jackets and mediocrely knotted ties. Little Artie, the wicked imp, cried through all four hours of hand-shaking and registry-signing, just as his late grandmother would have—tears rolling silently down his round cheeks and blotting the silk of his tie.
Stella did not go to her mother’s wake. She was not fit for a receiving line. She barely was able to go to the funeral. She had not shed a tear in forty-five years. She had not shed a tear when her own baby died. Now it was beyond her control—Stella who could control the world with her will could not even control herself. She sobbed like a hysterical child, her chest heaving until her ribs were sore, her throat so raw she tasted blood. She cried so hard, she wondered through her delirium if she was haunted by Assunta’s ghost already—Assunta the emoter, whose weeping could wash away even the worst things. This was the worst thing, and Assunta wasn’t here to wash it away.
Stella shuttered the venetian blinds in her bedroom and drew the blankets up over her head. She didn’t eat or drink any water or go to the toilet—there was nothing to pass because she was so dehydrated. The bedroom became dank with the smell of her unsloughed skin and tears and unwashed hair.
In her darkness, she remembered how Assunta had collapsed when Louie and Queenie left—how she had torn out her hair and vomited and smeared her feces in animal desperation. Stella had been disturbed by her mother’s behavior, had thought that manifestation of grief barbaric—inhuman. Now she understood. She wished she could shit out her own grief, pull it out by its roots. But she couldn’t—she wasn’t Assunta. All her life Stella had thought she was so strong, but now she learned that it was Assunta who had been the strong one—Assunta who had been truly in control of herself. Stella, meanwhile, had no means to excise her own demons.
The wound was unhealable. Stella could never say good-bye. There was no chance for redemption. There was only “never again,” the beginning to so many sentences now. Never again would she see her mother’s mischievous smile, hear her girlish laugh. Never again would she sit with Assunta on the back porch and tell stories. Never again would she taste her mother’s raù. Never again would she feel her mother’s cool hand on her forehead as she chanted the unfascination, or her warm hand on her shoulder blade to steady her when she was rattled by the rush of the world around her.
BERNADETTE HAD NEVER SEEN HER MOTHER LIKE THIS. No one had.
She tried to get Stella to drink some water or soup. Bernadette was crying herself; she had loved her grandmother. Stella realized, with the dissociation afforded by her grief, that she was not being a good mother right now. She didn’t care.
“Mommy,” Bernadette sobbed. “You’re scaring me.”
The world is a scary place, Stella thought. She stared out the window at the street, on the other side of which was the house her mother no longer lived in. The world is a scary place, and you’re all alone in it, and you might as well learn that now.
NOW STELLA DRANK WHENEVER SHE WANTED.
SHE HAD LOST BOB—that had been a terrible thing. She hadn’t known if she would live through that. And then she had lost Assunta. She hadn’t known there was a place so dark as the one she tumbled into after she had lost her mother.
Of course, she didn’t know yet in the summer of 1970 that there would be another layer of darkness coming. In half a year’s time she would lose her Nino somewhere in the jungles of far-off Vietnam. She didn’t know now that she had already seen him for the last time, before he shipped out this past spring when his draft number was called.
SO ASSUNTA WAS GONE; Tony was a cranky goat-slaughtering diabetic. Stella was descending willfully into alcoholism. Alder Street was overrun with Joey and Mickey’s shabby girl progeny, and with Carmelo’s obnoxious teenage sons with their motorbikes and thunk-engine used cars.
Stella still went to church with Carmelo on Sundays to receive Communion, but she didn’t pray anymore. Praying made her feel as foolish as getting caught talking to herself in the grocery store.
AT GARDENER’S, BERNIE’S HANDS SHOOK with nervous energy as she counted out customers’ change. She had become fixated on the fate of the dog. If Penny was dead, there was nothing Bernie would be able to do about it, but she needed to know one way or another. She needed to go home and to challenge her grandfather—she was convinced now that he knew what had happened.
When she couldn’t bear it even one more minute, she made one of the produce boys cover her register so she could seek out the manager, who was back in the deli. “I have to go home, Mr. Fastiggi. I don’t feel well.” As long as there was some truth to it, and there was, she could look him in the eye when she said it.
He looked her up and down. “You look okay to me.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” Bernie said. Again, not a lie—her stomach did feel funny with the nerves.
The manager sighed. The two deli boys exchanged looks; they thought the girls always got off easy. But so what? “Can you make it until twelve thirty? Then Janice can cover for you when she gets in.”
Bernie’s watch said twelve fifteen. Fifteen minutes wouldn’t make any difference in whether the dog was alive or dead, would it? “All right,” she said. Then, remembering to seem a little desperate, she added,
“I’ll try.”
THE CLOCK ON THE MANTEL above the television chimed twelve thirty and Stella lurched awake. She had fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, but it couldn’t have been for long, because her head buzzed softly, still happy with the morning wine. Her crocheting had fallen to the floor and the needle had come out. She picked it up and thought about what she would eat for lunch.
As she rose, her gaze fixed on the empty driveway of 4 Alder. Mickey must have gone out; Stella wondered whether she’d taken the little girls. Sometimes Mickey left them with their grandfather for hours as if she genuinely thought he was babysitting. Tony wouldn’t even remember to give them anything to eat; he could hardly feed himself.
Stella didn’t like going over there but decided she was going to be a good aunt today. She could make the girls sandwiches while she made one for herself. She didn’t have anything else to do.
Sliding through the last of her morning drunk, Stella looked both ways perhaps overzealously before crossing the street. The grassy lawns, electric green from the week’s rare summer rain, shimmered for her in the midday heat. There was no breeze, but at least outside the sun dried away her layers of sweat.
Stella let herself in the back door without knocking. There was no one in the kitchen. She followed the sound of the television to the living room, but no one was there, either. Apparently Mickey had taken all the girls with her this time. Having crossed through the whole house, Stella opened the front door to let herself out that way, but happened to see little Pammy sitting on the floor of the hallway, her bare legs crossed Indian-style, making an old Chatty Cathy doll walk up and down the floorboards in front of her. Had Mickey left her here by herself?
“Allo, Pam,” Stella said.
Pam looked at her silently. None of Joey’s girls were big talkers, Stella figured because their mother didn’t give them a chance to say anything.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 38