The ladies laughed. “Money, girl,” the thinner one said. “Same as you.”
The money in question was sixty cents a day per person, two quarters and a dime. The foreman paid them as they boarded the truck at the end of the day. Zu Vito had warned them they’d be easy robbery targets when they got off the truck in Hartford at sunset, obviously coming home from day labor, so they walked quickly and kept their eyes down. When they’d made it safely to the Front Street tenement, they filed through the kitchen and dropped their coins into a washed-out bean can on the narrow shelf where Assunta had perched the photo of the first Stella. When all the Fortunas had made their daily deposit in the bean bank, Stella counted up the total, making a tally mark foreach accrued dollar on a paper ledger she tucked in the can. She kept the can where they could all see it to inspire them; she maintained the ledger as ostentatiously as she did so that Giuseppe—or Joey, as he was going by now—would know he couldn’t steal from it for candy or cigarettes.
On Friday night after dinner, Stella and Tina stacked the week’s quarters and dimes and rolled them into the paper wrappers the bank gave out. There were forty quarters in a ten-dollar deposit roll, and every week the Fortunas made at least one such roll. Five-dollar rolls of dimes were rarer accomplishments, a roll every other week. On Saturdays, while her children worked a sixth day at the tobacco farm, Assunta went to the bank to make the weekly deposit in their house savings account.
The whole cycle should have been miserable, toiling away in the sun to save money for the house they’d thought their father had already bought them. But... no. That sound of the coins echoing hollowly in the empty can, less and less hollowly as the can filled—it had become Stella’s favorite sound. Assunta and her children were buying themselves their own house. They were a little army led by a haphazard but lovable general, and together they were taking care of business.
START TO FINISH,the tobacco season lasted four months, and by the beginning of September there was no more work. Then Stella and Tina were back to being stuck in the Front Street apartment all day.
To make matters worse, the news that Nonna Maria had died finally reached Hartford. It came in a letter from Antonio’s younger brother Zu Egidio, who wrote to relate his intentions to emigrate to Australia, and who in passing offered condolences. Maria must have died months earlier; Za Violetta had not gotten around to sending them a letter.
As one would expect, the news was debilitating for Assunta. She had been sure that by leaving Ievoli she had written her mother’s death sentence, and now her guilt was irrefutable. She vacillated betweensilent, sobbing prayer and hysterical anger. In her grief, Assunta’s awe of her husband vanished. She blamed Tony for snatching her away in a time of need. She shouted into his face, and when he struck her to silence her she shouted more. The neighbors downstairs banged on their ceiling when the fighting got too loud; the blond-bunned woman who lived on the other side of the third-floor landing came over armed with a rolling pin to say she’d appreciate it if “you screaming wops” could keep it down. Assunta did not care about being called a wop, but Tony did, and it made him even angrier.
Stella wanted to comfort her mother, to mourn and pray for Nonna Maria together, but she wasn’t going to step into the battle between her parents. Instead, she and Tina hid in their bedroom, crocheting and watching the shantytown dwellers move among their bonfires. Stella crossed her eyes at the dismal façades of the tenements behind thesciantinas,pretending that beyond them on the obscured horizon was her little mountain overlooking the marina, that in a stone house at the little mountain’s peak there was a bowl of olives sitting on the table and waiting for her to bite into their tender green flesh. Stella thought of the first Mariastella. With Nonna Maria gone, there would be no one left to remember the baby or to clean her grave.
STELLA ALSO RECEIVED A LETTERfrom Stefano’s mother in Sambiase. Stefano was still away in Africa. She begged Stella to send a letter she could save for him.
Stella was torn between guilt at not having written—she owed it to Stefano; he had no other girl to write to him while he was at war—and misgivings about not knowing what to say to this man she had realized she would never marry. In the end she had little Louie, who had learned good penmanship in the American school, write a message for her.Dear Signora, We are praying for Stefano every day, and for your family. We are well here but we are working hard and we think of our family in Calabria. We send you our best wishes. Sincerely, Stella Fortuna.
After that, the war must have become more difficult, or perhapsthe censorship was stopping communication, because the Fortunas had no other letters for a long time.
STELLA ANDTINA WERE ONLYtrapped in their dingy tenement room for a few weeks before they found another job. One of their new friends from the Italian Society, a sweet, thin Pugliese girl named Fiorella Mulino, had found jobs for them in a laundry on Front Street. It was no good for Joey, because they only hired women, or for Assunta, who couldn’t be on her feet for ten hours, but Stella and Tina arrived with Fiorella the first Monday of October and the manager let them stay. They were put in Fiorella’s group, ironing and starching, up on the second floor.
Instead of paying a day wage like the tobacco farms, the laundry paid by the piece, which put a kind of performance pressure on their employment. Stella liked it. Each shirt starched and ironed was worth two cents. After a frustrating first day, she got the knack—dipping the shirt, stretching it across the board, pressing and alternating irons. She experimented with stroke rotations to permeate the heat more quickly and evenly through the cloth. She could fit four or even five shirts in an hour, and sometimes came home with eighty or ninety cents a day.
Tina, on the other hand, did not respond well to the time pressure. She was a person who liked to do things thoroughly—whatever anyone else did, Tina did it more, and harder. For example, she had once washed Assunta’s good ceramic pitcher so energetically that the handle had broken off in her hand. This aggressive task approach did not combine well with the anxiety of counting accomplishments against the clock; under pressure, Tina could not harness the required finesse. The first time she got in trouble was for a shirt so stiffly starched it had to be rolled to crack it, then sent down to the first floor and rewashed. Tina starched for four days, her face an arterial pink and streaming sweat, which descended her jaw like tears and spattered the bosom of her dress. On the fourth day, she overcompensated for her slowness bypressing too hard on the shirt she was ironing, leaving a devastating iron-shaped burn mark. The manager was enraged, but yelling at Tina was never any good, because she sobbed so thoroughly—as thoroughly as she scrubbed pitchers—that after a while you felt stupid yelling and ended up doing whatever you could to get her to stop. So Tina was sent home at three o’clock with no pay; she wasn’t fired, although it took Stella all evening to convince Tina she hadn’t been. Stella didn’t tell her sister that she’d given the manager the seventy-four cents she’d earned that day to pay for the ruined shirt so he wouldn’t count it against her little sister. Tina could come back to work the next day, but she had to be on the washing team on the first floor, with the Polish ladies. That was less desirable work to the Italian girls, but at least Tina couldn’t accidentally ruin anything in the washing room. Maybe with her vigor she’d be able to get some of the tougher stains out.
Seeing his daughters had a taste for work, Tony harassed them to study English harder. He tried to impress them with the fiscal advantage of having papers—if they naturalized, they could apply for factory jobs. “I make five times as much money as you in one week,” he said.
But the citizenship test was an insurmountable obstacle. Stella and Tina took turns carrying the study book around, but after months of turning the pages it was no more legible than it had been in the beginning. With much concentration, Stella could sound out the English words and guess their meanings, but Tina had had so little schooling in Ievoli that she could barely remember how any of the letters were supposed to sound even in Italian, never mind in this strange foreign language where nothing sounded the way it looked. Ten months in the United States had given them only a little English. They were surrounded by Italian speakers. Stella was shy of her accent; even when there was a chance to speak to an American—say, at the store—she found herself doubting words she’d been sure of a moment before, and resorted to pointing or blurting out Italian instead.
Nevertheless, she quizzed her sister like she used to for catechism.“You know this one,” she’d say, then read in English, ‘Where is the Statue of Liberty?’”
“I don’t know,” Tina said hopelessly.
“Yes, you do! You saw it yourself.” Stella raised her arm and made a fist in the air, like the green lady with the torch. She repeated in slow English, “Statue of Liberty.”
“New York!” Tina smiled. She got one!
“‘What is the name of the president?’” Stella read out carefully.
A pause for thought. “Rosa Vela,” Tina answered. This meant “pink sail” in Italian, which Stella had thought up so Tina could remember Roosevelt’s name. “Picture a fancy boat with pink sails,” Stella had suggested. “It’s so fancy the president sails on it.”
But then things became very opaque, and the book’s answers didn’t help the girls understand the questions.
“Why does the American flag have thirteen stripes?” Stella spread the book between them so Tina could see the picture of the flag.
“What is ‘stripes’?”
“Strisce.”Stella pointed to the alternating white and gray in the sketch. Tina was silent. “It says here there are thirteen stripes because there are thirteen ‘colonies.’”
“What is ‘colonies’?”
“You know, likecolonia,” Stella said. “Cologne, perfume.” This didn’t seem right, but it was the best she had for Tina. “Maybe America has thirteen famous perfumes?”
The questions only got harder, full of words Stella had never even heard the Italian equivalent of. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence. How can an American participate in their democracy. What is the role of Congress. Under our Constitution, what powers are given to the federal government. How many times has the Constitution been amended. It was very hard to help Tina memorize the answers when Stella couldn’t explain what the questions were asking.
Fiorella Mulino reminded them she had passed the citizenship testby attending night school at Hartford High. Classes were free; they started at seven, so you could come after work.
