Stella had never had a life goal before, a specific precious thing she badly wanted, the way her father had wanted to be American, or her mother had wanted a house, or Tina wanted a baby. But now Stella had something else, the pure, irrefutable knowledge that there was nothing she wanted at all. Not only did she have nothing left to lose, she had nothing left to win, either.
WHENITHINK OFSTELLA’S LIFEduring this time, I grieve for her. But my relationship with her misery is nuanced, because I am a product of it. As you have surely figured out by now, Stella Fortuna is my grandmother. And as you’ll see if you stay with Stella even through this grimmest of passages in her story, my life is only one of many she spared by not ending her own.
***
TONY HAD BOUGHT THE THREE-FLOOR WALK-UPon Bedford Street with the notion that someday all three floors would be full of his progeny, apalazzoof Fortuna offshoot families. Now that those satellites were starting to come into being, however, Tony was having trouble getting rid of the tenants he’d rented to.
The family who had lived in the second floor had left peacefully as soon as they’d found somewhere else to go, and the Caramanicos had moved into that apartment just before Stella’s wedding. But the lady on the top floor, Miss Catherine Miller, would not leave.
“It’s my house,” Tony told her, “so if I tell you to leave you have to leave.”
“That’s not how things work here,” Miss Miller said, with the sanctimonious conviction of a retired schoolteacher. “I know my tenant rights. I can have my lawyer come down here and remind you of what they are.”
Both parties enjoyed an enraged battle, and she might never have left if she hadn’t had a stroke just before Christmas and been relocated to a care facility. In another circumstance Stella would have sympathized with Miss Miller; it came as no surprise to Stella that her father could make someone have a stroke. But she secretly resented Miss Miller for never sharing the secret of her independence. It was an irrational feeling of betrayal, because Stella had never gotten up the courage to speak to her except small talk about the milkman.
And Stella was acidly grateful to Miss Miller for her timing with her stroke, because now that she was pregnant and forced to visit it even more often, Carmelo’s shared bathroom was intolerable. If I died, she had actually thought—had begun to say out loud to Carmelo—if I died right now at least I wouldn’t have to use that toilet again.
“That’s just a stupid thing to say, Stella,” Carmelo would reply, but they moved into the third-floor apartment in the Bedford Street building the very same day that Catherine Miller’s nephew told Tonyhis aunt wouldn’t be coming back. Tony gave the nephew fifty dollars in cash for her larger furniture; Assunta and Tina packed her other belongings in boxes and stored them in the garage. Miss Miller would never come and retrieve them.
STELLA COULD PEE IN PRIVACY NOW,as often as she wanted, but now she had a toilet of her own she had to clean. She had a claw-foot bathtub now, but she never wanted to bathe. Her hair was short these days, but she still didn’t feel like washing it. She was always hungry, but she hated to feed the monster inside of her. She would eat and she would hate herself afterward, rubbing and scratching the greasy feeling of guilt off her face and neck, leaving red welts on her skin.
She watched as her body went through the first changes of the pregnancy ruination she had dreaded her entire life. She had been vain, she had thought she was beautiful, and now she was being punished for her vanity as, one by one, the features she had been proudest of were taken away. Her flat belly thickened; it would never be anything but swollen or vacantly sagging for the rest of her life. Her once-smooth bronze skin broke out in various rashes. Her eyes were dull in the mirror, the whites turned reddish-yellow. The dark under-eye bags would merge seamlessly into the facial sagging of age, so there would never be a moment between pregnancies when her pretty face was restored. Everything beautiful about Stella Fortuna’s life was over.
Worse than any of this physical humiliation was the fact that it did not make her husband stop desiring her body. He took her almost every night. Stella turned her face to the wall so she wouldn’t have to watch him. There was no more damage Carmelo could do to her—the child had already quickened in her womb—and yet for some reason that knowledge didn’t make her loathe and fear copulation any less. Staring at the wall, she fought off the smeared layers of associations—the nightmare, her father’s leather belt on her naked breasts, the marble sink in the Montreal hotel. When she closed her eyes she remembered the wisdom of her mother—the best husbandswere the ones who got the job done fast. Sometimes Carmelo was fast. Sometimes he was not.
She couldn’t fight off her nightmare, so she learned to escape into it. The rapist was coming toward her with his big rough hands, and she would climb into the window frame, where she’d be safe from him. As Carmelo’s penis bumped and scraped against her insides, she tried to build herself a vision of what was out that window, over the metal fence and beyond the shantytown. She pictured Ievoli, the glowing yellow-green of the citrus leaves in the April sun, the silver-blue of the September olive groves, the sunbaked July rows of bulging tomato stakes marching like soldiers along the terraced mountain.
Her world was a gray ache and she couldn’t live inside it.
They made her go down to Sunday dinner at Tony and Assunta’s, but she was ashamed to be seen by her family, knowing they looked at her and thought,How nice and quiet she is now, andSomeone gave her what she deserved. She could hear their thoughts ringing around the dinner table in the undercurrent of their solicitous questions about her health. Joey was the only honest one, cackling about her fertility every time he saw her. Joey was honest, but he was still the worst.
Carmelo gave her money and told her to go buy dresses, but she didn’t want to go outside. Her body hurt and disgusted her, and what was the point of buying a dress that wouldn’t fit next week? He told her to use the money on whatever she wanted, whatever would make her happy, but nothing would make her happy.
At night, when she could find no respite in sleep between her trips to the bathroom, Stella sometimes closed her eyes and pictured the face of the first Stella, the wretched little ghost who had haunted her for a quarter of a century. “Are you jealous of me still?” she’d whisper into the dark. “Are you jealous of this?” Because jealousy was two-sided, and the second Stella did not feel lucky to be the living Stella anymore.
On Saturdays when there was no work to go to, Stella would play sick while Tina went to the wedding showers for their Italian Societyfriends. When she got home she would come up to Stella’s dark room and try to cheer her up with smuggled cookies.
“Tina,” Stella asked her sister one day, “do you believe there’s really a God?”
“Stella! Of course there’s a God. What are you saying?” Tina whispered, as if that would stop her omnipotent deity from overhearing.
“But why do you think so?” Stella asked. “Just because the priest says so? How do you know for sure, Tina?”
“Of course I know,” Tina said.
“But how?”
Stella didn’t expect an answer. Tina only had answers other people had given her, the answers other people had assured her it was correct to believe, and then she knew them beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But Tina had an answer this time, after a moment’s hesitation. “I know there’s a God, because if there isn’t, what’s the point of all of the bad things? There would be no point, so there must be a God.”
After Tina left, Stella turned over this thought, so close an echo of her own. If her sister’s answer had been any more sanguine, it would have been no help to Stella at all. But as it was, it was just enough to get her through.
HER MOTHER HAD TOLD HER IT WOULD HAPPEN—that when it was her own child, she would understand, that there would be nothing she would love more. She had told her mother she was different. She had been wrong.
The connection happened on Ash Wednesday, 1948. Stella was sitting in the evening mass, hunger stirring in her bulging belly, and then the stirring wasn’t hunger anymore, it was something else—something in addition to the hunger, a little sloshing wave of life. There was a baby inside her, asserting itself, and the baby was hungry, too. It seemed that, with this show of solidarity, the baby was telling her,I’m your ally.
It was not the most rational thought of her life—she recognizedthat even as she had it—but she was sitting on a hard church pew after a long day of factory work and she was tired and hungry and no one else cared. Well, the baby cared.
