UNDER THE CHURCH IN THE CENTRAL PIAZZAof Sepino, Carmelo Maglieri’s hometown, there is a grotto dedicated to Santa Cristina, the patron saint. The shrine is lined with gilded chambers illustrating the stages of her life, her miracles, and her martyrdom, each chamber endowed by an emigrant far away. One of those grotto chambers bearsCarmelo Maglieri’s name on a gold plaque. It is an old cliché about Italian American immigrants that they kept the homeland in their hearts, but Carmelo never stopped thinking of Sepino, even when it was clear he would never return.
What can I say. Carmelo was a little bit of a sap. The type of guy who would tear up when his grandchildren came to visit. He was the opposite of Tony Fortuna in every way—well, in almost every way. Maybe this is why the betrothal joke was such a terrible one, if women are supposed to marry men who remind them of their fathers.
THE SECOND TIMESTELLA ANDCARMELOmet was the night Rocco decided to marry Tina.
“You want the one with the mole on her lip,” Rocco’s older sister, Barbara, advised him. The Fortuna sisters were wearing matching blue dresses, so the mole was the best way to distinguish them.
“The one with the mole is Concettina,” Rocco said. It was two days after he and Carmelo had picked up the girls on Farmington Avenue. Rocco had asked Tony’s permission to call again—it was plain he wanted to see about the sisters. On this second visit, he’d brought Barbara along as his consultant, and to represent his parents in Italy. Carmelo Maglieri had come along in support, or maybe with motives of his own.
Rocco meant to ask Tony’s permission to marry one of the Fortuna girls before he left the Front Street tenement that very night. Rocco and Barbara had discussed this matter. In four days’ time, Rocco would be sent to the Pacific with his unit, and it was best to have someone waiting at home for him, someone who could send him letters and care packages.
Now Rocco and his sister were standing in the doorway to the Fortunas’ kitchen for this private conference. All the Fortunas, turned out in their Sunday best, sat or stood around the folding table Antonio had set up in the living room, less than ten feet away, pretending they weren’t wondering what the Caramanico siblings were discussing.
“Concettina has the makings of a wife,” Barbara said. “You can tell she is hardworking just by looking at her.”
Brother and sister watched the nervous party scene for a few minutes. Tina, who was indeed hardworking to look at, stood at her mother’s elbow, shoveling pasta onto plates and refilling wineglasses. Tony sat at the head of the table; then came Joey, nineteen, and Louie, eleven, and Tony’s friend Vito Aiello, whose wife was in Italy and who sometimes came over to play cards. Carmelo Maglieri was telling a story that had the boys laughing. Like Rocco, Carmelo had come in his full army uniform. Stella, the only woman sitting at the table, had her mouth set in a pout. Rocco saw his irresistibly charming buddy failing to charm her, and it made him want to try.
“They are both hardworking,” Rocco told Barbara. “They work six days a week at the laundry. They give all their money right to their father, he’ll tell you.” Rocco always took Barbara’s advice obediently; she was sixteen years older and she looked after him well. He was pushing back now because some little spark inside him was interested in Stella Fortuna, not in Tina. He was hoping Barbara would change her mind.
Barbara was not to be convinced. “But see how Stella is sitting while her mother and sister do all the work?” Yes, he saw; it was hard not to see. “Tina there, she’s obedient. Those sturdy Calabrese legs,” Barbara pointed out, and from this vantage Tina’s calves in particular looked quite sturdy. “She’ll bear you lots of sons and then still be strong enough to run after them.” Barbara would be wrong about the first part, although Tina would run after many other people’s children.
Rocco made one more stand. “I prefer Stella. Stella is prettier.”
“Listen to me, Rocco. You don’t choose the woman you are going to spend your whole life with by what she looks like. That’s thinking like a man.” When Barbara said “thinking like a man,” she meant “thinking with your cock,” but she would never have said the word “cock.” “Pretty girls are for running around with. Strong, hardworking girls are for marrying.” Maybe she was proud of being the marryingtype herself. Or maybe some sisters set aside their female sympathies and hope for a docile caretaker wife for their baby brothers. “You’re about to go off to war,” Barbara reminded Rocco. “You want the one who is still going to be waiting for you when you get back.”
The table was completely obscured by piles of whatever food Assunta had been able to produce on such short notice: an eighteen-inch bowl of freshtagliatelleshe and Tina had rolled out that morning; a plate ofpizzelleleft over from last weekend. There was an array of pickles: the last of the wood mushrooms Assunta had picked over the summer; a jar of yellowlupini;roasted peppers in garlic oil. There was a bowl of egg-size beef and pork meatballs, soaking in still-hot tomatoraù. They were dense with cheese and perfectly fried. It was hard to imagine that their maker had never seen a meatball only two years earlier. How quickly and completely things change, and then change again. Later Stella would remember these as some of the last meatballs they ate, without any special appreciation, before wartime meat rationing.
Stella was enjoying the party, but complacently. She watched Rocco across the table as Tony told him a long story. She tried to imagine whether the girls at the Italian Society would think he was a catch—she personally did not find him attractive, although he certainly was well-groomed, his clothing impeccable. His hair was clipped short on the side and tightly curled. She detected a hardness in him, a nervous energy—she guessed he would reveal himself to be a strict personality, a perfectionist. He was like her father in those ways. She wondered if her father would like Rocco for those reasons, or dislike him.
With the men’s conversation humming around her—mostly they spoke about soldiering: the boys’ enlistment, Tony Fortuna’s time in the Alps, the strangeness of young men going to war against Italy when their fathers had fought for Italy only twenty-five years earlier—Stella made herself think about whether or not she was nervous. It was the first time someone had come to talk to Tony Fortuna about his daughters. Stella was twenty-two and Tina twenty; it was only a matter oftime before this happened. She wasn’t sure what her father’s response would be, whether he would scare suitors away, or whether he would want to speed his daughters out of his house to the first respectable interested party. Maybe he would wave off courting requests in the American way and say it was up to his daughters. In which case Stella would say no, and that would be that.
What if Rocco was here for Tina, not Stella? Would he take Tina away? Stella imagined sleeping alone in the bed they’d always shared, Assunta standing alone in the kitchen over the steaming pots. But thatwouldhappen eventually. Tina would get married; she would make her life with a man and have lots of babies. And Stella would be left behind. Because she wanted to be left behind—didn’t she?
Having worked this through in her head, Stella ate silently, drawing herself back into the atmosphere of the party. Carmelo Maglieri, who sat next to her, was telling Louie and Joey stories about basic training. Joey was saying he was thinking about enlisting, which was the first Stella had heard of it. Her brother seemed transfixed by Carmelo’s charisma. Compared to his stiff, careful friend Rocco, Carmelo was expansive, pink-cheeked and energetic. He was handsome, indisputably; his black hair was thick and glossy, and his eyes were a brilliant light blue—the kind of blue eyes all the Italian girls talked about wistfully. Yes, he was handsome. Stella would admit that. Not that she cared; she was not interested in men. Butcouldshe like him? If there were reason to?
She thought back, deliberately, to her first ambivalent impression of him, head, neck, and shoulders hanging out of the car window that snowy night. She let herself remember and savor her wave of distrust—there are no good good-looking men, for no good-looking man needs to be good. This old adage settled comfortably into her consciousness. He was here as part of his buddy’s game.
“And how are you tonight, Mariastella?” Carmelo asked, turning the conversation on her.
“Just fine,” Stella answered, sitting up straight and narrowingher eyes. She had been being too friendly before. “And call me Stella. Mariastella is my dead sister.”
She watched as his face softened in compassion. “Your sister died? I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said after a moment, relenting under Joey’s critical gaze. “And I never knew her.” As she said the words, denying her little ghost, cold air rippled up the skin of her burnt arm. But she was sitting by the window, and it was likely just the January night air.
“Stella almost died, too,” Louie told Carmelo. “Five different times.” Joey snorted.
“What? Five times?” Carmelo raised his bushy black eyebrows to prompt the boy to tell more.
Stella listened as her kid brother bragged about her bad luck—the favorite family story.Attacked by an eggplant! Pigs, intestines... Lying there like she was dead for four days... We all could have drowned, actually... Didn’t even know she was about to jump...Louie was able to dwell on the grossness and the danger, the most entertaining pieces, without any concern for his listeners’ discomfort. Carmelo made the expected horrified faces and Stella waved it all off, smiling. Louie’s accent had lost most of its Calabrese inflection as he spoke to Carmelo, as though he had picked up the young man’s neutral accent over the last hour.
“What do you expect?” Joey said to help Louie wind it all up. “What do you expect, with a name like Stella Fortuna?”
“Stella Fortuna,” Carmelo repeated. “What a name.”
Now that Stella had been drawn into the conversation, Carmelo focused his attention on her. He asked her about her work at the laundry, about whether she and Tina ever went to the Saturday dances at the Italian Society. She couldn’t decide if he was being courteous or flirtatious, so she leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms on top of her belly, and answered coolly.
Joey enjoyed this less than when he had been the center of attention. “What about your buddy, eh?” he said. “Kissing up to my father over there. Did he come to try to court my sisters or only my father?”
