In some ways America was better than Ievoli, even if it wasn’t what Stella had been imagining. In the bathroom was a toilet with a flush; water was somehow pumped all the way up to the third floor and swirled everything away. They ate meat twice a week—Tony insisted. Assunta had no experience with cooking meat; she had never eaten beef in her life before arriving in America. Pina Cardamone, Zu Tony’s wife, accompanied the Fortuna women to the frightening huge grocery store and showed them how to pick from the pink and red orgy of dead flesh at the butcher counter. Za Pina taught Assunta and Tina how to pan-fry a beefsteak and oven-fry pounded chicken cutlets. At first the meat menus were nerve-racking—one small mistake would ruin the whole expensive piece, and Assunta cooked in fear of Tony taking the strap to her. But she acclimated. She was an excellent cook, because she liked to eat and knew how to taste. Tina was another natural cook and would make some man a good wife—Za Pina liked to repeat that, especially and pointedly in Stella’s hearing. Stella smiled and waved Za Pina off—she didn’t let the teasing get to her. But she wasn’t going to fry a beefsteak no matter how many blood vessels Za Pina burst trying to teach her.
The otherziawho came over to give them lessons was Filomena Nicotera. She tried to coach the Fortunas through her U.S. citizenship handbook; she and her husband, Zu Aldo, ran a delivery service and their English was very good. She was frequently accompanied by her daughter, Carolina, who was sixteen. Carolina Nicotera had a pointy chin and flashing dark eyes, which she rolled in an American fashion at her pushy mother. Carolina bundled Stella and Tina up in woolly scarves and took them on excursions along Front Street, teaching them the rules. She brought them a bottle of nail polish and showed them how to cut their cuticles.
Luigi was enrolled in an American school. Schooling was mandatory here until age sixteen—Stella couldn’t even imagine what children could study for that long. Luì was so small that it was months before he realized he was two years older than most of his second-grade classmates. He was “Louis Fortuna” now, but in American, the nickname “Louie” sounded just like what they had always called him anyway.
THE WINTER INHARTFORDwas like nothing Stella had ever imagined. It snowed almost every day, fat white clusters so heavy-looking, Stella couldn’t understand why it took them so long to fall out of the sky. From their drafty bedroom the girls watched a burly ragged man with a plywood board sweep snow off the buckling roofs of the shanties in the back lot.
Closed off in the dingy little apartment, Stella sought distractions from her intense homesickness. She was cold and miserable and she missed her grandmother, herciucciu,her sweet little house on the top of the mountain. Her chest ached with longing—sometimes her throbbing heart felt so sore she would have to lie down to catch her breath. But she couldn’t let her mother or siblings know. If she didn’t hold it together, none of the others would be able to, and she’d be blunting their progress into their new life. She corralled her brothers into playing card games at the kitchen table, where it was warmer than the sitting room. She organized Assunta and Tina into crocheting blanketswith her to supplement the meager cotton ones Tony had on the beds. She tried to keep them all chatting so their minds wouldn’t dwell on what they’d left behind; when she couldn’t think of anything to talk about, she sang songs Nonna Maria had taught her, hoping her mother and sister would join in; if her throat was too constricted to sing, she hummed.
The cold was unrelenting, and noses were always running. Stella learned about the unrelievable misery of chapped nostrils, endemic in Hartford in February and March. The air was not the same air she had breathed in Ievoli—it pierced her lungs and her throat when she inhaled. It carried illnesses the Fortunas had never suffered before—coughing that sounded like the barking of a dog; sweating fevers that lasted for four days, head-clouding pain behind the eyes. Strangers coughed their diseases into the air at church, on the bus, in the streets, filling the wind with the malice of their individual suffering.
None of the Fortuna children owned clothing that was warm enough. Their first month, January 1940, was a parade of visits from cousins andpaesan,people Tony knew from Sacred Heart Church and the Italian Society. Women brought bags of old clothes, coats, mittens, sweaters. Wearing secondhand dresses made Stella concentrate on how much her life had changed. The fabrics had been stitched together by machines, sized to fit someone else; they were tight around the shoulders or long in the arms. They were old, something someone else had thrown away, but they were still nicer than anything she had owned.
IN THE NINE YEARS SINCEthe Fortunas had last seen Tony, Assunta and her children had been poor but free; now they were prisoners of his will and whims. Tony had all the money; he was the only one who could speak English; he controlled every aspect of their lives.
Stella had never taken to being controlled by anyone, ever since she was a little girl and had told her Za Violetta she didn’t respect her. Stella Fortuna was a grown-up woman now but clung to the same basic beliefs about who was worth her respect. Her father did not meet therequirements. He drank, he shouted, he was secretive about his comings and goings.
“What did you bring us here for?” Stella would shout at her father during their many rows. She fought back her fear of him and gave him lip whenever she could, for the sake of morale. “You lock us up all day like prisoners. You took us away from our home, ourpaese,ournonna,our relatives and friends, why? What was it all for?”
Antonio never answered her question. He would smack her face or her ass and tell her to shut up. Or he would say offhandedly, “If you like it so much better there, why don’t you go back?” But of course that wasn’t an option. Italy was at war; the Fortunas had escaped just in time.
TONY’S PRESENCE MADE THEM ALL NERVOUS.Assunta would crack her children on the behind with her fat wooden spoon if they broke one of her rules, but it was dispassionate justice and they always knew they deserved it. Tony’s justice was mystical and anything but dispassionate, especially when he was drinking.
There was relief on the two nights a week, on average, that Tony didn’t come home at all.
The first time was in late January, when Assunta and her children had been living in Hartford for four weeks. Assunta had fixed supper and they’d waited for Tony. When he hadn’t come home by nine o’clock, Assunta gave up and served the cooled pasta. The children ate quickly. When the boys had cleaned their plates, Stella sent them to bed. Normally Giuseppe would have made trouble, but tonight they just filed out, taking the kitchen radio with them.
“Where’s Papa?” Tina asked again when the boys were gone—she had asked four times already, as if Stella knew anything more than she did.
She suppressed her irritation with her sister. This wasn’t Tina’s fault.
“Don’t worry about Papa,” Stella said. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a big man.” She watched her mother eat the last pieces of macaroni.Assunta’s cheeks were wet, but her eyes were small and angry. Stella picked at her ugly memory from the summer when she was nine years old—watching as her father mounted her mother from behind, grunting like an animal. She shut the memory off before it could run its full course. How had this man, with such manly appetites, made do in the decade he’d spent away from his wife? The thing Stella must have already known in the back of her mind clicked into place, and any sense of worry vanished.
Tina was looking at her with that willfully stupid expression. She was waiting for Stella to tell her what to think, how to feel.
Stella stood. “Tina, why don’t you go wash the plates now?”
“But what about Papa?”
“Papa can feed himself when he gets home.” Stella squeezed past her father’s empty chair. “Never mind, stay there. Sit,” she warned her mother, who had started to rise. Stella had an idea.
Shivering with nerves—she had never done something like this before—she took down three short glasses from the cupboard and the jug of her father’s wine from the sideboard. She set the glasses on the table and filled them nearly to the brim.
“There,” she said.
Her sister and her mother were looking at her expectantly. She knew what they were thinking—What is this? We don’t do this—because this was what men did, drinking after dinner, like smoking a pipe. Stella passed a glass to Tina and took one for herself.“Salut’,”she said. She waited until the other women lifted their glasses, still watching her with misgiving.“Salut’,”Stella said again, and took as large a swallow as she could. Almost immediately she felt better, as if the wine were a calming medicine.
“Salut’,”Assunta echoed, and took her own large gulp. With no reason left not to, Tina followed suit.
Late into the night the women drank and playedbriscola. The tension eased as the wine opened up their respective angers and affections.Stella noted the feeling of the drunkenness setting in, reveling in it as the cards became harder to count and their mistakes became increasingly funny. The dining room had ceased to feel uncomfortably cold; she now appreciated the draft, which rippled sensuously up her arms. So this is why they drink, she thought. This happy softness.
“I don’t care if he wants to go see aputtana,” Assunta said between deals. She hadn’t cried since they started on the wine. “Oh, Madonn’, you think I’m jealous of what some other woman is having done to her?”
Stella would never have been able to say the words sober, but here they were, tumbling out of her mouth: “What’s it like, Mamma? When he does the job to you?”
Assunta waved her hand, dispelling the unpleasant thought. “Oh, just a big hassle, you know? Part of being a wife. You gotta be there for him when he wants to do it, doesn’t matter how you’re feeling, and then sometimes it makes a baby.” Assunta was staring at the table, her eyes glazed, but she kept speaking, candidly—Stella tried not to move a muscle, afraid that any disruption would make her mother clam up. “And even if you think to yourself, we have enough babies, I don’t want to be pregnant again, you can’t say no to your husband.”
The candle on the table between them flickered. Stella’s heart was racing. Her imagination was damply alive with the alcohol and she couldn’t stop a progression of visions, putting herself in her mother’s place.
