“That’s disgusting,” Stella said.
“Yes,” Tina said, chastised, and her face assumed a propitiating expression. “Maybe if I get pregnant soon he’ll stop.”
ROCCOCARAMANICO HAD A GOOD JOBworking at the Gillette factory, where he was a foreman on the production floor, but he didn’t have the money yet to buy the house he had promised his new bride. In the meantime, the Caramanicos moved in with the Fortunas to save money.
The sleeping arrangements needed to be reorganized. The newlyweds required their own room, certainly, with a door. The only solution was the room the sisters had shared. But where would Stella go? She couldn’t sleep with the boys, and Assunta’s living room was not an option. All the fancy things Assunta had made Tony buy for her were on display there, the doily-covered marble coffee table, the gold upholstered couch—all the symbols of her better life here in America, the things that set her apart from the dirt-sweeping village girl she’d been. No one would be sleep-sweating or drooling on that couch.
“If you would just get married and move out, this wouldn’t be a problem,” Tony told Stella, both with humor and without.
Assunta was hoping the tenants on the second floor would move out soon so that the Caramanicos could take over up there and Stella could have her room back. The Bedford Street house was designed for three families; if Assunta managed it right, she could have all her children living under her roof indefinitely. But she couldn’t just kick the current paying tenants out, especially with Tony so tight for money, what with his only working part-time and with all the wedding expenses.
“You could sleep with me on the bed and your father can sleep on the cot in our room,” Assunta offered. Tony hadn’t been allowed connubial rights since the last miscarriage, doctor’s orders.
“No way in hell, Ma,” Stella said, and Assunta smacked the back of her hand because of her bad language. Assunta didn’t know about Stella’s nightmare about her father. But Stella would have rather joined the shantytown behind Front Street than shared a bedroom with Tony.
Instead, Stella slept in the kitchen on the trundle bed. The house was noisy and stinky with too many bodies. At night Stella couldn’t set up her bed until everyone had gone to sleep, or she would be underfoot in the kitchen. She was sleep-deprived and always on edge. She had no privacy at all, and now there was an extra man walking around the house. Stella had nowhere to keep her clothes in the kitchen, so they stayed in Rocco and Tina’s room. Dressing in the morning became a quadrille of awkwardness, Stella trying to dart in to reclaim her clean underwear during the slender margin of time in which Rocco took his militarily efficient shower. She hated when he caught her alone in the bedroom, felt his searching eyes on her nightdress as he stood in his bathrobe.
Rocco’s muted lasciviousness made her nervous. He was the type of man who had never trained himself not to stare at a woman’s breasts, and she’d noticed his eyes wandered over whatever female parts they were presented with. Having had this thought—that her sister’s husband had thought about her body, and that the man had access to her any time he liked—Stella found it difficult to let herself fall asleep at night. She would start awake, feeling terribly vulnerable.
In her perpetual haze of half-sleep, the nightmare came back. The days began to run together in a sleepy smear. Stella’s work at the factory became listless and imprecise.
This, she thought, living like this might wear me down.
AT THIS MOMENT OF WEAKNESS,the worst thing that could possibly happen happened—it was like the footfall of God stamping out Stella’s future. She saw it descending on her, but there was nowhere to jump out of the way.
January 12, 1947, the Fortunas were celebrating Stella’s twenty-seventh birthday. Tina had baked a lemon pound cake. Stella was warm with wine and pleased with the party. Everyone—the Fortunas, the Caramanicos, Zu Ottavio and Za Caterina Perri, the entire Nicotera family—was crowding around the dining room table, whichhad been set with Assunta’s nice yellow glass dessert plates, when the doorbell rang.
Joey stood up to get the door, and then he was bursting back into the dining room, shouting, “Look who’s here!”
There he was, wielding a dozen hothouse roses like a knight’s sword. His cheeks were cold-bright, and snow ridged the shoulders of his overcoat and the brim of his fedora. Perhaps it was only the swath of cold air he brought in with him, but it felt like witchcraft when the temperature in the dining room dropped enough for goose bumps to rise on Stella’s arms.You’re a cold woman, Stella—she remembered his words the last time she’d seen him, a curse laid on her skin.
“Carmelo!” Assunta couldn’t contain herself and burst into joyful tears. “What’s the matter, Joey? Take his coat, he must be freezing, he must be soaked! Carmelo, what are you doing here? Give Joey your coat! Come sit down, get warm!”
“These are for you, Stella,” Carmelo was saying, the arm of roses extended toward her as Joey wrestled the partially removed coat off Carmelo’s other shoulder, scattering snow across the rug. “I apologize for disrupting your birthday party.Auguri, tanti auguri.”
Stella took the flowers from him, stunned, numb, her mind soft. A wine-rich smile was stretched across her face, and she only realized when it was too late, when Carmelo beamed his cherry-cheeked smile back at her, that she must have looked like she was happy to see him.
She didn’t need to say anything, thank God, because everyone was falling on Carmelo with kisses and hugs and handshakes and shoulder slaps. Was he back? Was he just visiting? Stella sat quietly in the middle of the hubbub and rubbed a rose petal between her thumb and index finger, wishing the silky fibrousness would recall her to reality.
Assunta brought an extra stool and Carmelo was installed at the table with a slice of yellow cake as wide as a building brick. With a typical amount of audience interruption, this was the story he told.
The store in Chicago hadn’t worked out so well. The business was good, people in and out all day, lots of sales, constantly restocking, butCarmelo’s brother, Gio, was too generous, letting people buy on credit, and the brothers were barely breaking even. After a year and a half, Carmelo knew enough about running a business to realize he’d been wrong about wanting to. He decided to sell off his share and come back to Hartford. Gio was selling his share in the store now, too, and would follow in a couple months.
Carmelo had come back to Hartford before Christmas. He needed a job, though, and he wasn’t getting anywhere asking around. Jobs were hard to find, with all the boys back from the war and the factories done with their war contracts. He was running out of ideas when he got very lucky.
He was walking down Franklin Avenue at five thirty in the morning—he’d gone out early to get a paper and check the wanted ads—and passed a bunch of men milling around a chain-link fence, a pile of shovels and picks beside them. On a whim he took off his long wool coat and left it by the fence, then strolled up and joined the men. He was freezing cold but less conspicuous without the coat. The timing was perfect, since the foreman hadn’t given out assignments yet, and Carmelo grabbed a pick and followed where the guy pointed, to a white line painted on the crumbling concrete. He watched a couple other men set about work, watched how they wrestled up the old concrete and dug straight down on the white line, making narrow, carefully defined canals in the road—they were laying space for underground electrical wires.
Carmelo dug and dug; hours passed, the other men on the line chatting with him but no one asking where he’d come from or getting suspicious that there were too many men. He was just beginning to get into the swing of the work, beginning to feel like he was good enough that maybe he could talk them into letting him stay on, when he hit what turned out to be a live wire—someone had mispainted the line he was following.
“Suddenly I wasn’t cold anymore!” Carmelo slapped his thigh and everyone at the table around Stella laughed or cooed in horror.
He woke up flat on his back in the hospital, nearly electrocuted to death, and that’s when it came out—when they tried to do the paperwork for the hospital bills—that Carmelo Maglieri wasn’t even a United Electrical employee. Everyone got very nervous about lawsuits and seemed relieved to learn Carmelo wasn’t intending to take anyone to court—as long as they could give him a job. A job they gave him, and a slightly gratuitous chunk of change to cover his medical expenses.
Joey poured all the men more wine as the story wound down. Tina was smiling as she gathered plates. Her joy at seeing Carmelo was simple and pure; her friend was back. For once, Stella helped her take the dirty dishes to the kitchen. Seeing her sister so happy, Stella felt guilty knowing she had driven Carmelo to leave, taken him from people who cared about him. But Tina didn’t think of things in those terms. At least, Stella hoped she didn’t.
Over the sink, where Tina was running hot water into the basin, Stella whispered, “I can’t believe he’s here, Tina. I thought we were done with him.”
“But he likes you, Stella.” Tina slammed down the tap and squeezed the excess water out of the dishrag with two hands; her usual unnecessary force. “Can’t you see that? He’s here because he still likes you even after how mean you were.”
