“At least none of you have such a pretty sister.” Tina said it as if she were joking, but she wasn’t. “I’ll always only be Stella’s sister. People will always say, oh! Pretty Stella is your sister? That’s surprising.”
The girls laughed again, protested—no, silly, you’re so pretty, you two look exactly alike.
Stella, feeling complacent, smiled at her sister. “Don’t be jealous, little bug. Jealousy will rot your heart.”
“It’s all right.” Fiorella patted Tina’s arm with her thin, smoothing hands. She winked at Stella and declared, “You’re the good sister, Tina. Everyone knows that.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1941,Stella and Tina went back to work in the tobacco fields. Fiorella thought they were crazy to give up the laundry jobs.
“But this way we can be with Mamma,” Stella explained. “And really it’s actually more money, because it’s three people’s salary instead of two.” Assunta hadn’t worked all winter because of swelling in her legs. She had also miscarried a baby, and Za Pina had persuaded her to go to an American doctor. The doctor told her she had better not have any more children and had diagnosed early stages of rheumatoid arthritis as well as varicose veins. Assunta, forty-two, was an old woman.
THE SWELTERING SUMMER OF 1941,when Stella had been living with her father’s flying fists and leering sneers for a year and a half, was when the nightmare started—when she almost killed herself by jumping out the window. Who can say what poison had entered her mind and planted the dream there; maybe she’d brought down the Evil Eyeon herself, showing off her prettiness too much, breaking too many hearts. Stella’s life had been so comfortable, so happy lately. She must have been due for some pain. It had, after all, been six years since the last time fate had taken a crack at her.
It was like the nightmare had broken down a dam in her mind, because once she’d had it, the dream came back to her again and again—her father backed her into a corner, night after night, to molest her. The details changed; sometimes the dream took place in the tobacco barn, or in their old house in Ievoli. The story was the same every time, though—Stella was exposed, trapped, and touched; as the dream blossomed over time, she was presented with a male organ, which was rubbed against her. The dream never lasted long enough for her to know what happened after that. But she woke with a real knowledge of being touched in a way she didn’t want to be. She woke sweating, in terror and disgust.
Tony did as he’d promised and nailed boards over the girls’ bedroom window so that Stella couldn’t try to jump out again, but other than that, the episode was mostly reduced to a joke. I’ve always wondered why no one took it more seriously; why later, when Stella told them, over and over, that she never wanted to get married, no one remembered that time her subconscious chose to die rather than be violated by a man.
ONCE THE WINDOW WAS BOARDED UP,the summer nights were stifling long hours of insomnia. Stella became a victim of her own subconscious, so tormented by her exhaustion she couldn’t tell when she was drifting in or out of sleep. Even as the nightmare became familiar to her, she never got used to it, or overcame her paralyzing dread as the man extended his calloused hand. Her ten-hour days of field labor were an aching haze of misery; once she was so tired she had to miss work.
Stella would lie next to Tina in their narrow bed and press her fingernails into her palms, trying to keep awake. She prayed to theVirgin for respite, and also to the ghost of the first Mariastella, whom she’d realized she had not left behind in Ievoli. “Please make it stop,” she’d whisper, over and over. “I know you’re there. I know you did this. Please make it stop. Please let me be.” But the dreams didn’t stop.
What were they for? Punishment for being alive?
Or were they some kind of warning?
Stella couldn’t talk about the nightmare to anyone, not even to Tina, because the words were too ugly. It had already taken its toll on her; she shouldn’t let it take a toll on anyone else. So she kept it to herself. But the dream had an enormous and permanent effect on Stella’s life. It taught her that some wounds couldn’t be stitched up, that some bad things happen not once but again and again. This was the year Stella learned to smile with her lips closed, so no one would see the two missing teeth she’d knocked out in her fall. This was when she began to feel an uncontrollable revulsion for her father, to dread when he came too close to her, put his hand on her shoulder, let his eyes pass over her curves, as they so often did. Some days she trembled just sitting across the dinner table from him.
If Tony noticed his daughter’s changed behavior, he never let on.
IT WASCARMELOMAGLIERI’S BAD LUCKthat he met Stella only a few months after she started to have her nightmare. In a different version of this story, a version where the window stayed unboarded for a cross-breeze, or where Stella’s catechismal education had allowed her to believe there could be a difference between sex and rape, or where the miasma of Tracci hadn’t followed Antonio Fortuna halfway around the world—in those versions of this story, maybe Carmelo Maglieri wouldn’t have been the villain.
STELLA ANDTINA WENT BACKto the laundry in September. The leaves on the maples turned yellow and the leaves on the oaks turned brown and the air grew frighteningly cold, just as it had last year. Stella knew the parade of American festivals now; she was looking forwardto Christmas. Stella knew what to expect from America; she had gotten used to it.
Then, in December, came Pearl Harbor.
THE OUTBREAK OF WAR WAS TERRIFYING,even though no one was surprised. Now that the U.S. had declared war on Italy, Italian Americans had a lot to talk about. At the Italian Society there were men who wanted to go home and fight for Mussolini and those who sent money to support his war effort. There were men who were glad to be in America, far away from Mussolini’s fascism. On both sides of the argument people worried about their families back home. But the time for discussion was over—Italian Americans lived in and hailed from enemy states. They had to pick.
For the Fortunas, the only choice was America. Tony, their patriarch, had no love for his homeland and was proudly naturalized. He would never take them back to Ievoli. The world had already been changing when the immigrants left, and now the change had accelerated, the bombs dropping on ancestral villages and obliterating their old way of life. Stella feared the Ievoli she loved existed only in the rubble of her memory.
At night, airplanes roared overhead. The Fortunas lay in their beds wondering if bombs were going to fall. Like their neighbors, they put up blackout curtains so they wouldn’t make their building a target. Hartford was a munitions production capital, and the Fortunas lived only ten minutes’ walk from the Colt Armory, which operated twenty-four hours a day. The experience of Hartford at war was spooky, the abandoned streets, the furtive energy behind blackout curtains. Streetlights were against regulation; the girls had to walk to and from night school along unlit city streets.
It was too bad Stella and Tina hadn’t become citizens already. Now all the Fortunas except Tony were enemy aliens. They had to go down to City Hall and register as such, have their picture taken for enemy alien ID cards, and get fingerprinted. If they were stopped and couldnot show their new identification, they would be in big trouble. They could be searched or interrogated at any time; police could come into their house and confiscate their belongings. Any letter they received from Italy could incriminate them. Some Italians were rounded up and sent to prison camps far away. They couldn’t keep a radio anymore, because the police might think they were using it to communicate with German submarines.
“What would we tell a submarine?” Joey argued. He was angry he wouldn’t be able to listen toCrime Doctoror Jack Benny, Louie’s favorite.
For young men, there was one quick way out of enemy alienhood, one way to citizenship and all its perks: enlistment. If you were willing to risk death for the United States of America, you could get yourself naturalized lickety-split. Half a million Italian American men enlisted during the war. Which brings us to the next important moment in our story.
***
THE FIRST TIMESTELLAFORTUNAspoke to Carminantonio Maglieri, it was snowing. The Fortuna sisters were walking home from Hartford High after a night school class; it was January 1942. The blackout-dark streets were covered in a film of ice.
Carmelo—although of course Stella had no idea who he was at the time—slowed down his car, keeping pace with the girls, which made them nervous. Both he and the man in the passenger seat were dressed in olive-green U.S. Army uniforms.
Carmelo rolled down the window and called out, “Would you like a ride?” Those were his first words to Stella.
Her first words to him were “Go away.”
But he didn’t go away; instead he leaned head and shoulders out the window, a friendly smile on his face. Stella watched warily as wet snow clusters embedded themselves in his waxed black curls. Her stomach turned at the thought of men following her and Tina in a car. The girls were on Farmington Avenue, still twenty minutes from home, and the hard black heels of their shoes skidded on the slick pavement.
