After everyone had eaten, Carmelo opened the black box he’d brought and revealed a concertina. “May I play you a song, Signora Fortuna?” he asked loudly, because people had already started to assemble to see what was going to happen.
Assunta was giggling at the attention; she actually had to press her hands to her mouth to contain herself. “Oh, Carmelo, don’t be so formal. You can call me Assunta.”
“Well, lovely Zia Assunta, may I play you a song?” He had shouldered the concertina’s strap and pressed a few chords—the living roomwas full of the anticipation of live music. “I know just the one I want to play. It runs through my head every time I see you.” He made moon eyes and covered his heart. What a ham, Stella thought.
Assunta, still giggling, nodded. Carmelo’s foot tapped triple time on the wooden floorboards, and before he even played the opening chord Stella already knew what he was going to sing. Her heart was pounding in her ears; she knew her face was red with emotion. The words were a little different than the words Stella knew, a dialect more southern sounding than the one spoken in Ievoli, but they were Calabrese—where had Carmelo learned to sing in Calabrese?
I saw her at the water doing her washing
My Calabrisella, with her dark eyes
By the time he had reached the second line, everyone was squealing and clapping with joy, because “Calabrisella Mia” was every Calabrese’s favorite song here, so far from home. Even cranky old Zu Aldo was smiling. Carmelo had won over a whole room of stubborn, distrusting Calabresi with one song on his concertina. Stella’s heart was still pounding, caught in the memory of thefhestain Nicastro all those years ago, dancing around the bonfire among the swirlingpacchianeand the Gypsies, the night she thought of as the happiest in her life. The song had taken her home.
Carmelo’s voice was clear and sweet, and was completely overwhelmed when the entire room joined him for the chorus:
Tirulalleru lalleru lala! Sta Calabrisella muriri mi fa!
As the last bar to the song closed and all the gathered friends were clapping and cheering, Carmelo turned to Stella and winked.
FIORELLA HAD A NEW JOBin the fall of 1942, in a factory where she made mortar shells. They paid her thirty cents an hour—twelvedollars a week, since they were strict and only let you work eight hours a day. “If you get tired and don’t put the pieces together exactly right, someone can get killed,” Fiorella explained. But anyway, twelve dollars a week! She would never go back to the laundry.
Hartford—home to Pratt & Whitney, which produced aircraft parts, and munitions factories like Colt—had converted itself into a war engine. The factory owners were desperate to fill their payrolls so they could meet their government contracts. They were hiring girls galore, and even girls had to be paid minimum wage for these jobs.
Stella and Tina, meanwhile, were enemy aliens and were not even allowed inside any factory related to the war effort. Their four dollars a week from the laundry, which they turned over to their father, seemed especially paltry now.
Antonio, who had given up his construction job to go work at Pratt & Whitney building propellers, said to them, “Don’t you wish you’d listened to me, and studied and gotten your papers?”
ROCCOCARAMANICO WROTE TOTINAregularly from his post in New Guinea. He wrote two or sometimes even three times a week, which the girls could tell by the dates at the top, but the letters arrived in packets about once a month. If there was a gap in correspondence, Tina knew it was because the letters were lost, not because he wasn’t writing them; he had revealed himself to be a consistent young man. If too much time went by between packets, Tina assumed Rocco was dead, and Stella would have to console her sister with reminders that he hadn’t been dead any of the previous times.
The letters were always addressed to “My Friend Tina”:
To My Friend Tina,
Thank you for sending me presents. It was very kind of you. The cookies were very good. Only a little stale, although I think you must have mailed them more than a month ago. Thank you formaking them for me. It is raining here right now and I should go to sleep. Please give my regards to your family.
Your friend, Rocco Caramanico
Louie showed them where New Guinea was on a map from his geography textbook—farther away than they had been able to imagine, near Australia—and translated unfamiliar words that pertained to army life, like “mess” and “KP duty.”
“That’s Kitchen Patrol,” Louie explained. “So he cooks for the other soldiers.”
Rocco wrote often about KP, and especially about boxes of chicken parts. The chicken arrived in a box that had once been frozen, although by the time it came to Rocco it was a collection of thighs and organs and pieces of congealed blood sloshing around in a slimy yellow liquid. Rocco’s job was to dump the box into a pot and cook it all together as it was, and that was what the unit ate, day in and day out. Sometimes he found feathers still in the box.
The letters never mentioned combat, enemies, or what work his chemical engineering corps was doing. The women had no way of knowing to what degree he was censoring himself so the letters could get through to them.
Barbara, Rocco’s sister, found the idea of her brother in a kitchen hard to believe. “Rocco doesn’t know how to cook anything,” she said. He was very traditionally minded about those things; it was one of the reasons it was so important he found a wife who could cook and keep house.
Tina and Barbara put together care packages that they sent to New Guinea at the beginning of every month, homemade cookies and knitted socks and whatever else they could think of that would survive the journey.
Of the thirty packages they sent during the years Rocco was at war, he received eight.
INOCTOBER 1942,the Fortunas received a letter bearing the Nicastro postmark. Stefano Morello from Sambiase had been killed in North Africa.
Tina only waited for Tony to finish reading before bursting into noisy tears. “He was such a nice boy,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry, Stella, I’m so sorry, he was such a nice boy.” Assunta, too, had begun to cry, lifting her apron to wipe her face.
Stella, who of course could not cry, even now, held her mother and her sister and stroked their backs as they took turns sobbing into the bosom of her dress. In her heart she’d known she would never marry Stefano, but after six years of letting people believe she’d intended to, she was overwhelmed with melancholy. She thought of the day they’d met at the Nicastrofhesta,of his winter visits to Ievoli, gathering snow in the garden forscirubettaand feeding little Luigi with his spoon.
Stefano had died never knowing she’d intended to break off the engagement.
