The portraitist was both a human being with a heart and also a businessman who saw when there was nothing more to be gained. “I’m so sorry,signora,” he said. “Listen, I will make you a present of thephoto as my condolence to you. Forget the other half of the fee.” He was pulling a brown paper packet out of his satchel. “No, it is nothing. You should have this photo of your daughter to remember her by.” He handed her the packet, tipped his hat, and left.
SOMEWHERE,ITHINK,a copy of the portrait might still exist, if the second Stella didn’t destroy it during the purge. It’s ingrained in my memory, although I admit it’s been many years since I’ve seen it.
In the portrait, nineteen-year-old Assunta casts the impression of a much older woman, with her full bosom and weathered face. She wears a long-sleeved black dress and the kind of hangdog expression one sees in so many photos of her immigrant contemporaries. She’d felt nervous during the sitting, disoriented by the photographer’s instructions. Antonio, meanwhile, is a vaudeville patriarch with his square-buttoned vest and handlebar mustache. The first Stella, the lostbambina,is strung between them like a rosary, her Christ-like pigeon toes propped over a small standing table. The photo is an eerie one: the first Stella’s face in the black-and-gray is melancholy and unbabyish, with deep shadows under her dark, unfocused eyes. She has the look of one who has passed through the vale of frivolous youth and is relieved she will not have to tire herself with it again.
Assunta and Antonio never again took formal portraits of their young children. It was expensive, for one thing, but more importantly they had learned their lesson: not to commemorate something that hadn’t yet committed itself to the flesh. Assunta couldn’t escape the idea that, by taking the first Stella’s picture, by which they would remember her, she and Antonio had doomed their daughter to die.
ASSUNTA WAS A WOMANof great faith. But at the death of her daughter she was challenged. She had lost the love and light of her life, the precious little girl into whom she had poured herself, the most beloved baby in all of Ievoli, who had delighted Assunta with her cleverness and affection, whom she had gone hungry for, who hadcuddled her in their lonely basement and been her companion for the long seasons she hadn’t known if her husband would return. Assunta could not conquer her grief, and so at this darkest hour of her life she lost not only her daughter but also, for a time, her God.
She was to believe that for baptized Christians, the paradise that awaited was vastly better than life here on this squalid earth. If she were truly faithful she’d have nothing to grieve, because her departed daughter must be endlessly happy now. She was to believe that God did as God willed in taking Stella, and God made no mistakes.
But she struggled with this, she struggled. She couldn’t stop herself; she missed her daughter bitterly, she could not shake the thought that Stella was gone forever, and no amount of praying gave her spirit any comfort. As a result Assunta feared her own faith, and that in turn made her fear the faith she had given her daughter, andthatmade her question whether either she or her baby would ever be allowed into paradise. Yet even with this urgent pressure to correct herself so she did not shut them both out of God’s heaven, Assunta could not make herself stop crying.
News had reached Ievoli of the influenza, which had appeared in the battlefields and spread all over Europe as soldiers trickled home, one last war-born misery to shred already suffering families. Suora Letizia explained the influenza to Assunta when she came to the Fortuna house to pray with the grieving mother. Two other Ievolitani succumbed to flu-like symptoms; the diagnosis made sense, considering Antonio might have carried the disease home with him.
“You must stop blaming yourself,” thesuorasaid. “It would have not made any difference at all if you had gone to Feroleto to get the doctor. Not even the smallest difference,” she repeated, because we Italians say things many times and with many words. “You might have caused yourself great harm, running around in the dark in the rain, with all the brigands in the woods who might have taken advantage of you or killed you or both.”
In an ungodly passage of soul-searching, Assunta wondered how,if her baby had died from influenza Antonio had brought back from the war, she would ever forgive her husband for surviving to come home. Why could he not have been one of the eleven Ievoli boys to fall on Asiago Plateau? If he had died, her Stella would still be alive.
Assunta lulled herself to sleep playacting in her head a negotiation with God, where she traded Him her husband in exchange for her daughter. She would have to explain this unwifely fantasy at confession someday, and would do grim penance, but until then she imagined and reimagined the scenario, just in case her mental fervency could somehow effect this kind of reconciliation in real life.
STARTING AGAIN AFTERWARD—it’s impossible, if you think about it.
“Don’t think about it,” Maria told her daughter. Maria had lost many children of her own—four beautiful full-term babies, every one lost during labor because before Suora Letizia came to Ievoli there was only the stupid doctor who didn’t know how to deliver breech babies. “Just do it. It’s the only way.”
Assunta did it. It was maybe the best way to get through, because it was the smallest change she could make—she didn’t even need to get out of bed, or change into clean clothes. Antonio took what he could get. Her body was sore with her sadness and she pressed her face into the pillow because she couldn’t look at her husband, who quickly learned it was easiest for everyone if he took her from behind, so they could each think about their own things. It was the most distasteful act Assunta could imagine, this loveless, angry offering of her body to her husband while her heart ached in her chest, but it was the only way that she could make another baby.
LIKE THIS, A YEAR PASSEDfor the Fortuna household. Neither wife nor husband was the person they had been when they got married, because they had each been through their own version of hell. But they got by. Assunta worked hard in her garden and her house and she prayed to the Most Blessed Virgin, who had also lost her child and whounderstood Assunta’s heart’s pain. Her sadness never went away, but she eased, without even noticing when the transition happened, into thinking also about the new baby growing inside her.
Antonio had come home from war a changed man. He was only twenty-one, but he was grizzled-looking, with lines in his forehead from squinting into the dry, cold Alpine air. He came home with a penchant for drink. A distaste for drunkenness is culturally typical in a place like Ievoli, where a man drinks wine in moderation all day long but would be humiliated to appear inebriated in public. War had banished this distaste; Antonio had learned to drink to blind himself.
Assunta was mortified by and afraid of this behavior. She asked him, “But what will people say?”
“I don’t give a goddamn what people say!” he roared. When she criticized him, Antonio enjoyed reducing his wife to tears, which was not difficult since she had an involuntary weeping response to raised voices. “You want to know something? Never once in history has anyone asked a rich man what people will say. No one tells a rich man to be ashamed of himself. So why should I!”
That was another change the war had brought about in her husband: a fresh and boiling hatred for the gentry. The officers he’d fought under had been rich, weak young gentlemen with no respect for the peasants they were sending to slaughter. They spat on men like Antonio, and Antonio spat right back.
“I’m fed up with this country and thestronziwho run it. There is nothing for us here.”
Antonio had his mind set on emigrating. Men from the Nicastro area were going to a place called Pennsylvania to build railroads. He arranged his passport paperwork so he could leave first thing in the spring, right after his son was born.
Assunta didn’t say so, but she was glad Antonio had decided to emigrate. She’d sworn to love him before God, and she wasn’t a woman to break an oath, but it would be much easier to love him if he didn’t live in her house. She wished he wouldn’t wait until the baby was bornto leave. On top of her other bad feelings, she found his presence irritating. Antonio shattered the harmony of her home with his bodily desires, his entitled voice, his farts, his mustache that shed short black hairs on the kitchen table.
ASSUNTA’S SECOND BABY WAS BORNin widow Marianina’s basement on the bitterly cold night of January 11, 1920. It was five years to the day after the first Stella Fortuna had been born.
Antonio was disappointed yet again; the baby was a girl. “Well, there you go,” he said to Assunta. “At least you have a new Mariastella now.”
Her heart pounding with that new-mother desperation, Assunta looked into the infant’s face for similarities. But even though she was just a baby, she looked very different from the last baby. “Are you my Stella, mypiccirijl’?” she asked, but she felt stupid as she said it. This wasn’t her Stella; this was a different person. This was a different Stella.
Assunta thought of all the love she hadn’t had a chance to give to the first Mariastella. This baby was her second chance. No more casual love—no more mistakes.
ANTONIO LEFT FOR L’AMERICAthree weeks after the second Mariastella was born, in early February 1920. He had signed apadronecontract to work on the railroad and stayed through the fall. In l’America, there was snow in the winter—snow as tall as a man some days—so the railroad work stopped until spring. He came home for this snowy time, when the second Stella was ten months old, but now that he had seen America, he couldn’t stand the idea of Ievoli, and stayed only through the winter. It was long enough to plant another baby in Assunta’s womb.
CONCETTINA, POOR THING,was a disappointment from the beginning.
First of all, she was an in utero trial to her mother. Unlike either of the Stellas, this baby had Assunta vomiting four times a day. Village ladies told Assù the vomiting would stop before she was halfway to term, and they were wrong about that. The second Stella, who was not even two years old but a precocious baby, learned to say tricky words like“Mamma malata”—Mommy’s sick—and to stroke her mother’s tummy to calm the wrath of the invisible sibling.
Assunta spent August bedridden in the sopping sweat of the afternoon, on her knees in the garden in the earliest hours of the morning in an attempt to weed while it was cool enough, leaning over to fertilize the potatoes periodically with another dribble of vomit. She sobbed to her mother that she hated Antonio, who had left her alone to die of his seed, that she would never survive this pregnancy. Maria rubbed Assunta’s back and reiterated her thesis that this was a strong, tough boy.
