“I have a house already,” Assunta said again. She stood and began stacking the children’s dirty dishes. “I fed your children for years when you didn’t send any money. We have everything we need right here.”
Antonio laughed angrily. “You think I needyou? You think there aren’t plenty of women in l’America? I have all the women I want over there. Women who give me less trouble.”
Assunta looked as if she had been struck. She placed one hand on her belly, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps making a point.
Stella felt the masticated paste of the pasta congealing into an uncomfortable clump in her gut. She was only ten, but she knew what her father meant. She had the picture in her mind, the shining buttocks waving in the moonlight, his expression of concentration fixed on the back of some woman besides her mother.
Antonio understood that he had behaved badly, but he was not a weak man, as he would show them, and it was his prerogative to upset them when there was disorder and his wife spoke back to him. He stood up so that his stool fell and he gripped his wife’s chin with one hand.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t need you and you don’t need me. Butyoupromised God to obey and serve me.” He released her chin and she took a step back. “I’m offering to take care of you and of our children,which is the right thing to do. Nowyoudecide. You can come be my wife in America, or you can stay here and not be my wife. But I’m not going to argue about it anymore.”
And he left to go drink with his friends.
Stella did not need to say good-bye to her father because the carriage for Napoli took him away so early in the morning she could pretend she was still asleep. She assumed, relieved, that she would never have to see him again.
Part II
Youth
I wanted to come to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I learned three things: One, the streets weren’t paved with gold. Two, the streets weren’t paved at all. Three, I was expected to pave them.
—“OLD ITALIAN STORY,” ELLIS ISLAND
Cchi vue, a vutte chjina o la mugliere mbriaca?
Which do you want, a full bottle or a drunk wife?
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Death 4
Drowning
(Immigration)
DECEMBER 9, 1988, when she was just short of sixty-nine years old, was when Stella Fortuna almost died for the eighth and final time, the episode our family refers to as the Accident. As you already know, some things were never the same after her lifesaving lobotomy. Since her prefrontal cortex had been removed, she no longer had inhibitions or impulse control. When she pinched an adorable child’s cheek, she might draw blood. She refused to wear any color but red. She developed a compulsive need to mop up standing liquid—so, for example, one must not leave her unattended with a bowl of soup, or she’ll ball up her paper napkin and stick it right in. Worst of all, Stella woke up from her coma in a furious rage at her sister, Concettina.
I have a lot more to say there, but that’s for later. For now I want to tell you one strange little story.
Since they’d arrived in America and learned that a birthday was a thing to be celebrated, the Fortunas had always celebrated Stella’s birthday on January 12, the birthday listed on her passport and her social security card. When she woke up from her coma, she was adamant that her birthday be changed to January 11. She struggled with the words to explain; her language skills were coming back only slowly. She got frustrated, clammed up, and scowled. She told them she wouldn’t go if they held a party on January 12. The family had rented Mount Carmel hall; they would have to eat the deposit. “My birthday is the eleventh,” Stella said. End of conversation.
Crazy Stella, with her red outfits and her perforated reality. Everyone threw up their hands; they moved the birthday party up one day. What were they going to do, argue with her? Every year since then, for the last thirty years, they’ve laughingly gathered for “Stella’s new birthday” on January 11. They tap their temples and roll their eyes. “Who knows what goes on up there.”
In Ievoli, I went to thecomuneoffice to pull the family genealogy. The registrar officer was most generous with her time, photocopying the whole long family record, which dated back to 1826.
You, clever reader, know already what I saw next, in the eeriest moment of my life. There, on that registry next to the nameMariastella Fortuna (seconda): the birth date11 Gennaio 1920.
Stella Fortuna had been born on January 11, not January 12. So after her Accident, Stella woke up crazy. Except on this one point, her birthday—a point on which she was correct, and everyone else was wrong.
Why had she let her family make that mistake for all those years? And what, after the Accident, made her finally put her foot down and correct it?
I visited Auntie Tina after I returned from Calabria and asked her if she had any recollection of when or why her sister Stella’s birthday was changed.
“It was always January twelve,” she told me. The fact that the birth registry mistake matched crazy Stella’s new birthday, she said, was just a coincidence.
But it wasn’t a coincidence. Tina misremembered. Which can happen, when a person lives with a revised history for so long it erases its antecedent.
Stella, crazy Stella, knew the truth, when no one else took her seriously. What other truths were locked in her head? What else were we misremembering?
