The army had court-martialed Joey as soon as he was released from the military hospital and sent him home with a dishonorable discharge. Despite his criminal act of self-mutilation, the Hartford veterans’ hospital offered him an operation to fix his arm at no cost. Joey declined the surgery; he was afraid that if he were able-bodied they would send him back to war. A pointless sacrifice—if only Joey had been smart enough to ask around a little, he’d have learned DDs were never redeployed.
Despite his long sojourn in the French hospital, Joey’s arm healed incompletely; the radius and ulna had both shattered on the bullet’s impact, and the arm had been somewhat sarcastically reset by a harried military surgeon who only suffered malingerers because of his Hippocratic oath. Joey had avoided jail time, but the dishonorable discharge together with his new physical impairment became a long, dark shadow over his life and prospects.
Furthermore, as was protocol for a noncitizen soldier who had been dishonorably discharged, the INS had terminated Joey’s naturalization application.
Tony dragged Joey down to the army office on Asylum Street to protest. He made Joey wear a suit. “You can’t do that,” Tony roared atthe soldier on desk duty. “He went to war for you! The paperwork, it’s already done. He’s a citizen.”
The soldier had no sympathy for cowards. He was cold and calm. “In the event of dishonorable discharge, they can put a stop to the naturalization application, even retroactively.”
“Retroactively?” Tony repeated.
“Meaning even if it’s already done. They can undo it.”
Joey stared at the linoleum as Tony became outraged. “He fought for your country!”
“My country?” the soldier said neutrally. “Look, Mr. Fortuna, your son committed a crime against the U.S. military during a time of war. He’s lucky to not be subject to more extreme disciplinary measures.” For clarity, he spelled it out: “You’re lucky he’s not in jail.”
That was the end of that negotiation. Tony stormed off to the bar without anything further to say to his son, who walked home alone.
If Joey had died during active duty, his whole family—parents, siblings—would have been immediately eligible for United States citizenship. But that was the root of the problem; Joey had been unwilling to die, or even get too close to risking death. And now he was a disgraced small-time criminal with no GI benefits and a bum arm.
Tony would never forgive his son for his cowardice. Tony, who’d spent four years in combat on one of the bloodiest battlefronts in human history and who’d never shot himself in the arm, resented the weakness he saw in Joey. A son was meant to be proof of a father’s manliness; Tony’s son was unmanly. He was soft and spoiled and scared, a man who could earn no respect. As long as both men lived they were never able to heal this breach. Tony ignored his son if they were in the same room. If they did speak to each other—if Joey, restless for drama, forced a conversation—it ended in shouting, taunting, and a xylophone of slamming doors.
Joey was physically unfit to perform many of the construction and factory jobs the other noncitizen immigrant men took, and the truth of his situation was a black mark against him, quickly sussed outby interviewers whose own boys were off being brave.You’re injured because you served, but you don’t have American papers or veteran benefits... ?After four or five anemic attempts to find a job, Joey gave up and spent his time in his room at Bedford Street. He drank from the time he woke up—usually around noon—until he eventually fell asleep. He went through gallons of Tony’s wine. Drinking was a habit he had picked up overseas, and he intended to live the rest of his life in a wine-dulled haze.
“You don’t need this,” Assunta would say to him when he sat down at the kitchen table in his undershirt and long johns. She’d say it as she poured him a tall glass of red wine from the jug she kept ready on the counter.
“Trust me, Ma, I do need it,” he’d reply. He’d wait for her to set a dish of breakfastpastinain front of him. “This is who I am now, your pathetic drunk failure of a son. This is how it’s gonna be.”
The presence of this replacement monster—a different person entirely from the mischievous, affectionate, pretty-faced Joey who’d gone to war—was a continuing shock to Stella. The sight of him at the wine-stained kitchen table—it made her feel sick. He was her brother, the baby she’d learned to hold when she was just a baby herself, who’d cried for a whole day when his favorite stray cat disappeared, who’d wink as he cracked open chestnuts for her with one sharp, deft bite. Her baby brother—still so handsome now, despite his red eyes and nasty smile. But he was a monster who didn’t care whom he hurt, as long as he could celebrate his own damage. She didn’t see his suffering, like her mother did. He was an agent of corruption in their house, a perfect thing that had rotted and was determined to rot everything around it.
Joey’s return was particularly annoying for Louie, who was fifteen and had had the boys’ bedroom to himself for three years. Louie was a straight shooter, neat and polite, with subdued manners his teachers appreciated. He was on track to graduate from high school—the first person in his family to do such a thing—and had done well on thefootball squad. The sour-smelling and maudlin older brother in his bedroom was cramping his teenage style. In the summer, when school was out, Louie started sleeping at friends’ houses and sometimes not coming home for days at a time.
Assunta cried about this, because Louie was her favorite. “You know he’s the best of you kids,” she would tell Joey as he sat at the table in a hanging-open bathrobe. “You let him take care of you like he’s the older brother.”
“I’m old in my heart, Ma,” Joey would say. “I’m so old I don’t have any reason to go running around doing shit to impress people. I know there’s no point.”
CARMELOMAGLIERI SOMETIMES TOOKJOEYout for a beer. It seemed to be what Joey needed, and he would come home in a better mood.
“You should marry him, Stella,” Joey told the whole family one night at dinner. “You know he’s got it for you. He’s been waiting for three years for you to come around.”
Tony looked up from his food, appraising his oldest daughter. Stella felt herself flush so violently the skin on her neck began to itch.
“Good for him,” she said shortly.
“Come on, Stella, you could do a hell of a lot worse.”
“Shut up, Joey,” she said in English. It sounded much stronger in English. “You’re an idiot.” She knew her father was still watching her.
“And you’re a snot.” Joey was shaking his head. “What about you you think is so great you could do better than Carmelo? Good-looking guy like that? Any one of the girls at the Society would say yes in a heartbeat.”
“Well, let them fight over him, then.” Stella focused on the cool air around her, willing away the burn in her face and neck.
“You should be thinking about your prospects, Stella,” Tony said. “You’re twenty-five. You never know who is going to come back from this war.”
“Papa, Tina hardly needs more of a reason to worry about Rocco,” Stella said. It was mean to turn the conversation that way, but the strategy revealed itself to be a stroke of genius. The focus was now on the latest news of Rocco Caramanico. No one said anything else about Carmelo Maglieri that night, but Stella knew the seed had been planted in her father’s head. Carmelo had just become her enemy.
CARMELO WORKED ATPRATT &WHITNEY,like Tony, but in the engine unit. After Joey brought up Stella’s marriage prospects at the dinner table, it somehow came about that Carmelo was picking up Tony in the morning and driving him to work in his Plymouth. Stella wasn’t sure if her father had sought out Carmelo or if Carmelo had made the offer. Either way it was bad news.
