Things that were difficult included sitting up or down, or any other action that put any pressure at all on her perineum. Going to the toiletwas torture, reviving the agony of the not-yet-healed flesh the doctor had sliced to admit his forceps. The vagina is an organ of trauma, though, and as intense as this misery was, when it healed it did so completely.
During her days, Stella lay in bed, the skin on her arms browning in the late-morning light and her sore, hardened nipples leaking unused milk into the souring fabric of her nightgown, and unpacked and repacked her thoughts. Tina would come up before work with a plate of frittata or a muffin and a cup of coffee and put it on a chair by Stella’s bed. Tina never said anything, and Stella usually pretended she was still asleep.
Carmelo made Stella dinner every night, hot food with meat so that she could rebuild her blood. But Stella often heard him talking to Tina in the kitchen, and she knew that many parts of the dinner her husband brought her were her sister’s secret offerings. She recognized Tina’s oven-fried chicken cutlets and knew the taste of her sister’s tomato sauce, which was spicier and not as sweet as Carmelo’s.
Assunta, whose legs had been inflamed with arthritis and who hadn’t been able to work all year, sat with Stella and crocheted. Mostly they didn’t talk, except the time Stella blurted out, “Mamma, what if it never gets better?”
Assunta’s soft cheeks drooped sadly. She wrapped her hand around Stella’s ankle under the blanket. “I know how you feel, my Stella. I lost my first baby, too.” She was quiet for a moment. “But then God gave me you. My greatest gift.” She gave Stella’s ankle a gentle squeeze. “Maybe he has an even greater gift for you.”
THE FUNERAL WASCARMELO’S IDEA.Antonio said it was a waste of money, buying a plot of land and a headstone for a baby who had never even taken a breath in this world, but Antonio didn’t make decisions for Stella anymore.
They held the funeral two weeks after Stella came home from the hospital. She wasn’t supposed to be out of bed, but it was only a fewhours, a graveside service and the burial of the tiny casket with the embalmed body of baby Bob Maglieri.
“What kind of name is Bob?” her brother Joe had scoffed. “It’s not a name at all. Why didn’t you name him Robert, at least?”
Stella didn’t owe anyone any explanations, and certainly not her good-for-nothing drunk of a brother. But she had named her dead baby Bob so that he would never have to share his name with any living child.
STELLA WORE A NEW BLACK DRESSto the grave service. She walked between Tina and Assunta, each of them holding one of her arms, just like Assunta had walked to her own child’s funeral on the arms of her own mother and sister thirty years earlier.
Stella threw dirt onto the lowered coffin—the bald, mustachioed funeral director had to explain to them what to do. Afterward the mourners would assemble at Bedford Street for a luncheon.
As their friends departed the graveside, Tina said, “Stella, can you forgive me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Stella said. “Forgive you for what?” She looked at her sister sideways, wondering if Tina had to say more. She did.
“For... for being jealous.” Tina’s voice broke.
“Tina. You don’t really believe any of that old-world bullshit.” Stella threaded her arm through her sister’s and pressed away the dread in her own heart. “The doctor made a mistake. No one else is to blame for anything. You can’t listen to those stupid old cows who say things like that. They’ll ruin your life.”
AS THEY WALKED BACK TOWARD THEIR WAITING CAR,Za Pina said to Assunta, “What’s the matter with Stella? She doesn’t cry at her own son’s funeral?”
“You don’t know my Stella,” Assunta said. “She has never cried in her life, not even when she was a little girl and she had her guts ripped open by pigs.”
CARMELO SLEPT ON THE COUCHuntil Stella had her stitches taken out. He moved back to their bed in September, when she was mobile enough to change the sheets with her mother’s help. Carmelo would lie carefully on his side of the bed, afraid of accidentally hurting her during the night. He sometimes stroked her hair until he fell asleep.
Another month passed. Stella’s healing flesh had closed all its gaps. The only pain she now carried was the metaphysical one.
Carmelo knew to wait long enough before asking. And when he did ask her, “Stella, can we try again?” one night in October, maybe because the ache she had to heal most desperately was the one in her heart, she said yes.
FOR THE REST OF HER SEXUAL LIFE,which would last fifteen years, Stella gave her body to her husband without resistance or comment, even when she was so pregnant she thought her spine would snap or when she was so tired she fell asleep in the middle. As time passed, Stella learned complete separation of her mind and her interrupted body. She learned to crouch in the window of her mind, gazing out past the shantytown of her subconscious and far beyond, to the silvery blue of the Tyrrhenian marina and the mountain crowned by the Ievoli churchchiazza,where the Most Blessed Madonna of the Sorrows stood, ever patient, ever beatified, her golden heart bleeding for her dead son.
***
IN APRIL 1949,TINA HAD BEEN MARRIEDto Rocco Caramanico for two and a half years. Stella was four months pregnant when her sister told her the definitive news.
“We will never have children. There’s something wrong.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, after all this time trying, but somehow Stella was shaken. “I thought you said the tests...”
Tina brought over two cups of coffee to the kitchen table. Even though it was Stella’s apartment, it was Tina who acted like the hostess. She set the cups down on either side of the jelly jar of violets Carmelo had picked for Stella yesterday.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Tina said, not without some satisfaction. “It’s Rocco. When he was in New Guinea he got mumps, and it made his, you know.”
“Sterile? It made him sterile?”
“Yes.” Tina’s face was red. “His thing, you know, it works fine.” Stella had more observational evidence than she needed on that front already. “But what’s inside hasn’t got any... you know. No babies. He’ll never be able to make babies.”
The sisters sat through an uncomfortable moment of silence as the scatology dispelled and the finality of the situation settled in.
