“A dream? Adream?”
Stella swallowed a mouthful of blood. “A bad dream.” She felt the burly arms closing around her naked rib cage again. “There was a... a bad man, and I was trying to get away.”
“She was going to jump out the window, and I stopped her,” Tina put in. “She was about to fall, and I pulled her back down.”
From Antonio’s disgusted expression, Stella could tell he didn’t quite believe them. “What kind of idiot are you, Stella?” he said finally, still loud enough to be heard down the hall. “You going to kill yourself over a bad dream?”
A sunflower of yellow fury burst in her mind, and she blurted, “A man came into this room to rape me, Papa.” The word “rape” had the effect she intended; Antonio’s forehead tightened in a fur of eyebrows. She stood, pulling down her nightgown and rubbing her sore shoulder. “I was scared to death. I have a right to get away from a man who’s trying to rape me.”
Stella could see that Antonio was turning this over. She forced herself to meet his eye steadily.
“Ah,mannaggia.” If he was swearing, the violence was over. “What was all the screaming?”
“That was Stella,” Tina said. “That’s what woke me up, thanks to God, or I wouldn’t have seen her about to fall out the window.”
Assunta came into the tiny bedroom then, her field kerchief already knotted over her hair. “What’s happening? What’s the matter?”
Tina had conquered her tears. “Stella dreamed she got raped, Ma. She tried to jump out the window.”
“Raped?” Her mother’s voice was shrill enough to cut through Stella’s nausea.
“It was a dream, Ma.”
“Who was it?” Assunta was patting Stella on her shoulder and breasts, verifying she was still intact.
“Yes, who was it?” Tina echoed.
The sisters’ eyes caught like magnets. The sparkle in Tina’s eyes struck Stella as lascivious. She averted her gaze, stared into her lap at the bruised heel of her left hand. This was the kind of conversation that could escape her control.
“Who was it?” Tina said again. She had never been artful in her voyeurism. “Was it a colored man?”
At the words “colored man” the dream appeared again in Stella’s mind’s eye. She saw the rapist’s dark eyes flashing, the stretch of flannel over his shoulders. And the words were right there; it was so easy to deflectthe truth, she did what so many other Italian Americans before and after her have done: she blamed a black man. “Yes,” she said. “A colored man.”
“Who?” Excited, Tina knelt beside Stella, clasping her shoulders. “Was it the delivery man from the shop?”
“Was it one of the Jamaicans from the truck?” her mother suggested. “Was it that man Donny?”
“No.” Stella felt sick enough already from this ordeal; she didn’t want to think about what would happen if her mother and sister fixed on a name for the imaginary culprit. “Just some regular colored man.”
Antonio began to shout again. “You’re never to talk to colored men. If I catch—”
“Papa!”The room fell silent at her shout, and Stella was relieved. She was on the verge of vomiting. “Get out of our room. We have to get ready for work now, or we’ll miss the truck.”
For a moment, Antonio looked like he might raise his hand to show her what speaking like that to her father got her. Instead he turned for the door, and Assunta followed, sniffling faithfully. As Tina closed the door behind them, their father called, “I’m gonna nail that window shut.”
As the sisters stood near the blue mirror, Tina dabbing at the cut on Stella’s cheek with the wet washcloth, Tina whispered, “Tell me the truth, Stella. Who was it? Was it Donny?”
“I don’t know who it was, Tina,” Stella lied. “Stop asking.”
She dressed as quickly as possible, trying not to feel the rapist’s eyes on her naked back. What she didn’t tell Tina was that the man in the dream—a dream she would relive again and again over the next decade, a dream that would terrorize her sleeping patterns and haunt her waking relationships—the man in that dream who had pinned her naked in the bedroom window hadn’t been a colored man at all. It had been her father.
THAT WAS THE FIFTH TIMEStella Fortuna almost died—that was the time she almost committed suicide by jumping out of a third-story window.
The first time Stella had the nightmare was in the summer of 1941, eighteen months after she arrived in Hartford. Those eighteen months had been the easiest and the hardest of Stella’s life.
Tony Fortuna, as he was known here, lived in a tenement apartment in downtown Hartford, not the house he had promised his wife. The apartment consisted of a living room; a kitchen with a gas stove, which had to be explained; and three narrow bedrooms. There was no garden anywhere on the street—nowhere to grow tomatoes. Assunta had to buy them from the peddlers who parked their wooden carts along Front Street.
Tony said the tenement arrangement was temporary. There was a house he was going to buy on Bedford Street, in a nicer part of the Italian East Side. The owner, an old Napolitano, had promised to give Antonio two years to save up the agreed-upon two thousand dollars. “He likes me,” Antonio said. “He trusts me.”
