Tina was watching her mother with wide eyes. “Does it hurt?” she blurted.
“No, it doesn’t hurt,” Assunta said. “Not all the time. Only when you really don’t want to. Or sometimes it hurts when he drinks too much, or if it takes a long time.” Stella’s mother wrinkled her chapped nose. “The best husbands are the ones who finish the job fast, and whosepistolaisn’t so big, so they don’t hurt as much.” She shrugged, her sheepishness overtaking her alcoholic immunity. “But you can’t know that before you get married. You just have to take your chances.”
Stella gulped down a glass of wine. She hoped she’d already taken all the chances she was going to have to in her life.
By the time they finished the bottle, they were too drunk to play cards anymore. It was one in the morning and Antonio still hadn’t come home. Stella and Tina helped their mother, giggling sleepily, to her bed, then huddled together in their own—the cold had seeped in again through the filmy wine-warmth. The girls whispered to each other in the dark. Tina’s breath was sweet and sour and thick; Stella wondered if her own was the same. Would Antonio beat them when he found out what they’d done? Why had he left to be with aputtanawhen his wife was right here? Should Stella be happy he wasn’t bothering Assunta, or offended he had broken God’s law and chosen another woman over his wife? How grotesque, to know your husband was also doing grotesque things to another woman. Did that other woman also have his children for him?
Stella thought about the money Tony must spend to keep aputtana. How much sooner might he have brought his family to America if he had saved that money—if he’d really wanted them there?
The darkness shrank and bulged around her. Stella was full of the memory of that hot summer night in Ievoli, of Antonio’s naked ass thumping into Assunta’s pushed-up skirts. She felt the pinch in her groin, the blood rising under her father’s fingernails. Stella felt sick to her stomach—a mixture of the wine, the memory itself, the indignity her sweet mother had endured because she owed her obedience to a brute.... Stella realized her thighs were throbbing; she was clenching them tightly together. That was never going to happen to her. Never.
***
SPRING BROKE ON 1940.Along the Fortunas’ walk to and from mass, the trees were still naked, but gray, dry bushes burst into yellow flowers, root to tip. Forsythia—they were everywhere, living wildly roadside or manicured into thick, square hedges that separated the houses. Stella would learn that forsythia was how you knew winter was over in Connecticut. The spring air was still colder than Christmas back home, and Stella couldn’t believe the flowers didn’t die. But they didn’t, and they were followed by more.
Home in Ievoli, Stella thought, the camellias and the daffodils would be blooming. She hoped someone picked a bouquet for Nonna Maria, who loved their smell.
THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH THE HOUSEAntonio was going to buy on Bedford Street. Although he’d been promised a terrific deal, there was no way he would ever have the two thousand dollars he needed. He made no mention of money he’d already saved before bringing his family to Hartford; Stella was certain no such money existed. He made eighteen dollars a week working his construction job. The rent on the Front Street tenement was six dollars a week; one dollar went into the church basket at mass. Five dollars went into the grocery jar on the kitchen counter. Even if Antonio was putting the remaining six dollars in the bank, which Stella doubted, he would only be able to save three hundred dollars a year.
His wife and children would have to find jobs.
This was how Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe found their way to the tobacco farm in the summer of 1940. Antonio’s friend Vito Aiello had worked there when he’d first arrived in the country, tenting and harvesting large-leaf shade tobacco, the kind they use for fancy cigar wrappers. In April, Antonio brought Zu Vito over for dinner to explain how it would work. They’d catch a truck on Farmington Avenue and it would take them to and from the farm, which was outside Hartfordin the countryside. The tobacco season ran from May through August. Anyone could show up for fieldwork; as long as you did a good job your first day, they let you come back again.
Tina cried in bed that night, little hiccupping sobs. Stella was swimming through her own confusion and dismay, thinking of the oranges she would be harvesting back home. She let Tina cry for a while, imagining the tears were tapering off, but they never did. Finally, tamping down her own nasty thoughts, Stella stroked Tina’s long hair and said, “Don’t be upset, little bug. Come on, stop crying. You’ll wear yourself out.”
Tina coughed to clear her teary throat. “I thought we were going to live real nice here,” she said. “We were going to live in a nice house, have nice clothes. But instead he made us give up our own house and come live where we have to share with other people, and he made us give up our own land and come work on someone else’s farm likecafoni.”
This was all true. Stella stroked her sister’s hair quietly for a few minutes. Don’t waste sadness on the problem, she scolded herself. Sadness is weak. Think of how to fix the problem, instead.
“We’re notcafoni,” Stella said. “It’s the opposite. Anyone can own land here in America.Yes, we’re going to work in a field, but then we’ll have money to buy our own house. All right? Forget Papa. We’re going to work hard and buy a house for Mamma.”
Tina’s blubbering had stopped. Stella guessed what her sister must be thinking—how surprising, the idea that girls like them, Tina and Stella, could buy a house. They had worked for chestnuts and olive oil, but they had never worked for money before.
“You really think we can buy a house?” Tina said eventually.
“We’re going to work really hard,” Stella said. “You know how good we are at working hard, little bug. We can do it.”
“We can do it, Stella,” Tina repeated. “We’ll buy Mamma a house.”
EACH DAY, IN THE TWILIGHT BEFORE DAWN,Assunta, Stella, Tina, and Giuseppe walked down to Farmington Avenue and waitedwith the other day laborers until the tobacco truck came; then everyone climbed up the metal steps to the flatbed and sat thigh to thigh on the splintering benches, clinging to their neighbors. The truck carried them out of Hartford on a wide, painted highway, then along narrower streets lined with magnificent houses, one after another, as if everyone here were some kind of minor nobility. And then on to the shade-leaf tobacco farms, acres of thin cotton tenting stretched between eight-foot-high stakes. In the summer breeze, the dark green leaves, wide as your hand, beat gently against the cloth cage, dancing shadows you could see from the road.
The sun would just be rising as the laborers were sorted into field hands and stitchers. The fieldwork involved pulling weeds, mending tents, and harvesting mature leaves, ten hours under the beating summer sun. The air was heavier and wetter here than it had been in Ievoli, and amplified the discomfort of the heat. The shade under the tobacco tents was no relief, it was so stifling and humid. Stella’s and Tina’s smooth pink cheeks burned so badly the skin cracked and peeled off in itchy sheets. Stella learned to look out for little green snakes in the dirt and for thin-legged brown spiders, sometimes as big as her palm, nesting near the holes in the netting, where the bug hunting was best.
In the barns, the leaf-stitching team sorted through the baskets brought in for drying and separated the leaves by size. Each leaf was strung into a graduated stack that would later roll into a single cigar. The foreman, who was courteous to the older ladies, never selected Assunta to do fieldwork, which was a blessing, what with her varicose veins.
Everyone else waiting for the truck in the morning was black. Stella was scared almost out of her wits the first day to be surrounded by black people, and none of the Fortunas would have gotten on the truck if Vito hadn’t been there with them.
“Just keep your hands and your eyes to yourself and they won’t bother you,” Vito told them. “Joe, you can take care of your mother and sisters, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Giuseppe said, although he was more of a symbolic chaperone. He was seventeen and still boyishly slender.
Fortunately, many of the black people were women, which was much less worrisome than being surrounded by black men, whom Antonio had warned his wife and daughters to be very afraid of, although Stella thought if it had really been so important to her father that their virtue not be subjected to strange men, maybe he shouldn’t have made them go to work in the fields in the first place. Many of the women were friendly and tried to chat with Assunta and the girls. Some of the black ladies were not Americans, either, Stella learned. They were Jamaicans, from an island they said was hotter than the hottest day of Connecticut summer.
“You make test?” Stella asked two of the ladies in the English Za Filomena had taught her. She never learned their names. “Forsitizenscippu?”
They shook their heads. They were only in America for the summer. When the tobacco season was over, they’d go back to their hot island. “That’s home, and we love it.”
Stella indulged in a short, jealous fantasy in which she would sail home to Ievoli at the end of the tobacco season. “Then why you come here? If you just go back home.”
