Tony stood, too. He said soberly, “All right. I will buy the lightbulbs. Two for each room.”
“The lightbulbs,andthe lamps,” Rocco said.
“Yes,” Tony said quietly. “Lightbulbs and lamps.”
Rocco and Barbara did not stay for dinner. It would have been excruciating to have to sit through a meal after that, and for the girls not to be able to rehash. And Joey might have emerged stinking from the boys’ bedroom at any time; Stella was relieved he hadn’t chosen to do so during the shouting earlier, since he was sometimes drawn out for drama. Instead, Rocco asked Tina to join him in the hallway for a private conversation. They had to pass Stella in the hallway, but Rocco didn’t seem to notice her.
Still not sure how much Tina had heard, Stella decided she didn’t want to hear the proposal itself, so she walked through the living room, nodding coolly at her father, who looked irritated and confused, and joined her mother in the kitchen, where the women silently poured, toasted, and each drank down a tall glass of wine.
***
THE WEDDING WOULD BE ONAUGUST 17, 1946,a ceremony at Sacred Heart and a reception at the Italian American Home on Platt Street. Tony Fortuna paid for everything, as the father of the bride should. He accompanied Tina to the G. Fox bridal boutique to pick out the dress and the veil. They were one hundred dollars and twenty-five dollars, respectively. The dress was made of stiff white linen; although silk wasn’t rationed anymore, it was still expensive, so Tina hadn’t even tried on any silk dresses. Stella would have at least tried one on.
Stella would be the maid of honor, of course. She swam through a strange mix of emotions, heart-twisting pride and excitement to help her baby sister in this wedding, even though Stella had private misgivings about the marriage Tina was making. It was the second time Stella would be maid of honor, after Franceschina Perri’s wedding to Frank Carapellucci last fall, so Stella had some good ideas about how to celebrate her sister. She spent fifteen dollars, carefully saved from her factory pay and hidden from her father in a pink sock she kept in her underwear drawer, to throw Tina a beautiful shower luncheon. She bought pastries from Federal Bakery on State Street and even made tiny “tea” sandwiches like the ones they sold at the café at G. Fox, triangles of American bread with cheese or jam inside. It was the closest Stella had ever come to cooking anything; she wouldn’t have done it for anyone but Tina. All the ladies who attended cooed over their daintiness. Stella had spent a month of evenings making party favors—a handkerchief with a multicolor crocheted lace edge. She bought herself and Tina both new summer dresses, as well as new shoes, to wear to the party. And finally, Stella got Joey to buy her a bottle ofanisette,which the ladies passed around after their tea. Everyone was laughing as they kissed Tina good-bye, and everyone left a cash-stuffed envelope in a pile on the table. A grand success of a shower; Stella was satisfied she wouldn’t be shown up as an East Side hostess for a long time.
Stella’s maid of honor dress was yellow and mimicked Tina’s in its puffed shoulders and sweetheart neckline. The other bridesmaids would wear an identical dress but in baby blue. For the bridesmaids, Tina had Fiorella Mulino, Carolina Nicotera, Franceschina’s younger sister Loretta, and a girl named Josie Brandolino, who was the daughter of Tony’s new Abruzzese boss. Tony had been laid off from his factory job in March—they had to make room for the boys coming home—and he was working odd jobs for a construction company. He wanted to make a good impression on his new boss there and made Tina invite Josie to be a bridesmaid even though the Fortuna girls barely knew her.
Tony booked a band and arranged the catering, sandwiches and pizza. Stella would have wanted to weigh in on her own wedding menu, but Tina didn’t complain. Tony was paying, and he could choose whatever food he wanted.
Good for him, Stella reminded herself. This was the only wedding he’d get to host.
Rocco’s sister Barbara volunteered to make the cake, a four-tier fruitcake dense with raisins, figs, prunes, and honey, sweet work-arounds to the ongoing sugar rationing. Barbara needed all the sugar she could get her hands on to frost the three-foot-tall sixty-pound behemoth a suitably angelic bridal white. This was not Barbara’s first wedding cake—it was a gift worth at least thirty-five dollars, and she’d become a specialist over her years in Hartford. But decorating, she felt, was not her forte, and she conscripted Stella to help. Two Thursdays before the wedding, Barbara and Stella walked down to State Street and stood on the sidewalk outside of Federal Bakery for two hours, watching the white-aproned professionals decorate a wedding cake in the front bay window for everyone to see, as they did each morning. Stella shifted on her sore feet—she’d worn her nice shoes so they might convincingly pass as actual shoppers, not just snoopers—while Barbara stared, unabashed, and murmured things like “Aha! Did you see what she just did with the knife?” and “Well, we’re not going to be able to make flowers likethatat home, are we, Stella?”
The week after he proposed, Rocco had bought Tina an American-style engagement ring, a band of yellow gold with a half-carat diamond in the middle. She wore it everywhere, even to work at the coffeepot factory, every day for the rest of her life, until the day she was washing dishes and the diamond dropped out of the setting and down her sink. She had her nephew Artie take the pipe out, but they never found the diamond. This happened in April 2006, months shy of her sixtieth anniversary, and two weeks after Rocco had died.
THE WEEK BEFORETINA GOT MARRIED,Louie, who had just turned sixteen, went into the woods by Keney Park with two of his friends from school, Bobby Minghella and Danny Peach. Danny’s father, a Hartford police officer, had either given Danny his handgun to try out or had left the gun unattended where Danny could find it—this part of the story fluctuated—and the boys were going to practice firing at squirrels. They didn’t even get off a single practice shot before the gun misfired—either Danny or Bobby had been trying to load it—and the bullet lodged in Louie’s heart, in the muscle wall between his left and right ventricles.
It was a precision accident; a quarter of an inch in any direction and the bullet would have stopped his heart. Bobby and Danny panicked at the sight of the gushing heart’s blood, a surprisingly dark maroon color. They dropped the gun and ran, assuming Louie was as good as dead, although they did stop the first person they met in the park—a middle-aged man who was walking his German shepherd—and pointed him toward the clearing where they’d left the body.
The dog walker rushed back to his house and called an ambulance in time to save Louie’s life. He was pumped full of other people’s blood, sedated and bandaged, but there was nothing else that could be done. The doctor explained that if he tried to take the bullet out, the surgery had a 50 percent chance of killing the boy. They could only wait and pray. The heart with the bullet in it would probably never work quite right, but it might heal over with careful convalescence. Forty-threeyears later, Louie would undergo a triple bypass during which his cardiac surgeon would pull out the old bullet, no problem. In the end, it wouldn’t be Louie’s heart but his kidneys that would kill him.
So, although the Fortuna-Caramanico wedding had been much anticipated, in the making for four years, in the end it was just one confusing day in a stressful week. Tina thought maybe they should cancel the wedding, but everything had been paid for and Tony wouldn’t hear of it.
Assunta refused to leave Louie’s side. She slept in a chair that was terrible for her circulation and she kept a vase of mint on the bedside table—she performed countless incantations every day; this was a fairly classic example of the Evil Eye at work. After a week in the hospital ward, she hadn’t even been home to change her clothes. The night before the wedding, Stella, who had spent the whole day helping Barbara embed a lace pattern of tiny silver balls in the cake frosting using a pair of tweezers and whose hair still smelled like confectioner’s sugar, came to collect her mother and sister at the hospital, but Assunta wouldn’t leave. Louie’s doctor tried to step in helpfully, to reassure Assunta everything would be fine while she was gone. The scene escalated quickly, Assunta weeping and the doctor yelling. It was plain to Stella, watching with the dawning embarrassment of the newly bilingual, that Louie’s doctor thought her mother was crazy, an insane and dirty peasant with childish ideas about witchcraft who rejected his commonsense medical advice. Tina, who should not have been allowed to come to the hospital on the eve of her own wedding, realized her mother would not be attending and collapsed on the floor, which must have been covered in who knows what kinds of diseases. Tony brought an end to the spectacle by saying to his wife, “It’s fine. You stay here with Louie. Tina doesn’t need you.” Assunta quieted down right away, cowed into hiccups.
That night she came home to Bedford Street, bathed, set her hair in rag curls, and slept in her own bed, then got up in the morning to fix the girls breakfast before they got ready for the photographer. Thepronouncement that her daughter didn’t need her seemed to have done the trick.
In all the drama of Louie’s accident, Tina had been completely distracted and so had forgotten her panic about her impending sexual encounter with her husband-to-be. Which was just as well. Stella had been about at the end of her rope listening to her sister speculate and fret.
THE WEDDING WENT SMOOTHLY,and there were many compliments paid to Tony Fortuna, who had hosted a lovely event.
Stella had seen many American weddings by now, and she knew what to expect. But seeing Tina come down the aisle looking so serene, so holy, she felt her heart pound with melancholy. Tina was leaving Stella to make her own family.
Carmelo Maglieri hadn’t come from Chicago to be Rocco’s best man, but he sent the newlyweds a card with eight dollars in it. In Carmelo’s place, Rocco asked anotherpaesanof his, a squirrelly young man named Jack Pardo. Among Rocco’s other groomsmen were Joey, Mikey Perri, and, excitingly, a Portuguese man named Jimmy whom Rocco worked with at his new factory job. Rocco and Tina had Jimmy escort Josie Brandolino, Tony’s boss’s daughter, who wasn’t very pretty and who they assumed would be grateful for a date even if he wasn’t Italian.
Fiorella Mulino caught the bouquet, but she wouldn’t be the next to get married. In fact, she would never get married at all. She would die of breast cancer two years later, when she was twenty-six years old. She must have already been sick at the wedding, although the girls didn’t know it yet. In the bridal party photo that still hangs on Tina Caramanico’s wall, Fiorella’s eyes are ever bright, her sweet smile full of youthful perfection.
In the evening, the new Mr. and Mrs. Rocco Caramanico rode away in a limousine to a fancy hotel near the train station. Their bags were already packed and waiting for them there; the next morningthey would board a train for Washington, D.C., for their weeklong honeymoon.
That night, for the first time in her life, Stella slept alone. She woke up many times during the night and would have to struggle out of her sleepy confusion to remind herself why Tina wasn’t there.
WASHINGTON WAS VERY HOT, APPARENTLY,and full of large white buildings. But that wasn’t what anyone cared about.
“It hurt so much, Stella,” Tina told her. “I was so scared. And then he wanted to do it so many times, every night and sometimes in the morning.”
Stella wasn’t surprised Rocco had turned out to be a goat with all those sexual appetites. She wasn’t sure how much more of Tina’s honeymoon gossip she wanted to hear—she was as curious about Tina’s experience as Tina was eager to discuss it, but the details made Stella’s stomach roil. She didn’t say anything, just let Tina continue.
“He made me take off all my clothes, even my brassiere.” Tina hadn’t ever worn a brassiere, or even heard of one, until she came to America, but now that the girls knew what the undergarment was for, the thought of not wearing one was perverse. “He wants to suck on my nipple, like a baby.” Tina’s deep-set eyes were round with scandal. “Have you heard of that? A grown man sucking like a baby?” Stella grimaced. She imagined grown men did all kinds of abhorrent things. “And then, when he puts his liquid in you, it’s all sticky and it makes your skin itch. You want to wash it off because it smells, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to wash it off, because maybe then I won’t get a baby. Then sometimes I can smell it on myself even outside, when we’re walking around, and I wonder if other people can smell it, too.”
