He couldn’t ask her on a date in front of Bill, so he memorized the address and as soon as his workday was over he biked back over. She was in the front yard, reading a book while she supervised a gaggle of boys who were playing a war game around the crab apple tree.
“You have to get out of here,” Queenie said to him. “My father will kill you.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Louie said.
“Well, I am, and I don’t want him to kill me, either.” She stood up, put her book down on the chair, and crossed her arms.
“I’m just here to ask you out on a date,” Louie said. “If your father wants I can ask his permission first.”
“I don’t date,” she said, but Louie could tell she was checking him out.
Louie asked, “Why not? How old are you?”
“I’m eighteen. But my family’s old-fashioned.” Her broad American voice sounded anything but old-fashioned to him. “My father doesn’t believe in dating. Only courtship, you know, like in Italy, with chaperones, and only when you’re planning to get married.”
“What if we wanted to get married, though?” Louie said, before he had thought out the words, and then quickly decided he might as well see it through. “Could we go on a date if we were getting married?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said.
“I’ll learn,” he said. “Do we have to get engaged before we can talk to each other? I can propose right now.”
Queenie shook her head. “I’m in junior college. When I’m done and have a secretary job, I’ll start thinking about settling down.”
By now, one of her brothers had shaken loose from the group of boys. He came over and stood by Queenie’s shoulder, which he just about came up to, and crossed his arms just like her. “You’d best be moving along, young man,” he said, exactly like a very short version of John Wayne might have said.
“That’s what I was telling him,” said Queenie.
Louie moved along, but he stopped by the Lattanzi house on his bicycle every day on his way home from work.
“You’ve got to cut this out,” Queenie would tell him. “You can’t just keep coming by like this. You’re going to get me in big, big trouble.”
“I’ll quit coming by if you agree to go out with me,” Louie would reply. But she hadn’t agreed yet.
When Louie told his mother and sisters about his predicament, Stella said to him, “You’re as bad as Carmelo. Don’t you know some women should just be left alone?”
“She wants to get married,” Louie said. “If it weren’t for her father she’d say yes and go out with me right now, I know it.”
“You all know it, don’t you,” Stella said, but no one minded her. She looked down at little Tommy. “Are you going to be like that someday?” she asked him. “Justknowingyou’re the best thing ever and that you should always, always get what you want, as long as you’re pushy enough?”
“You’re one to talk, aren’t you, Stella,” Louie said.
“Your father will have to call her father and we’ll invite them all over for dinner,” Assunta said. “That’s the proper way to do this.”
“Yeah, bring her over here,” Stella said. “Papa will make her get engaged to you whether she likes it or not.”
LOUIE GOT ENGAGED TOQUEENIELATTANZIin June 1950. They wouldn’t get married until she’d graduated and found a job. “It’s much harder for married ladies to find jobs,” Queenie explained to Stella.“They think you’re just going to quit to have a baby. So you have to look while you’re still a Miss So-and-So.”
Queenie’s parents had been in America for a long time. Her old-fashioned father was a well-respected carpenter whose furniture was carried in all the best stores. He had finished his third-grade education in Italy—“The furthest you could go there, you know,” Queenie would add defensively—and was a big proponent of schooling, which was why he was paying for Queenie’s professional course.
Queenie herself had never been to Italy. She spoke perfectly fine Italian but made it clear that she looked down on people who made no effort to live in an American way. She had an Italian woman’s wherewithal and an American girl’s self-confidence. Now that she and Louie were engaged, she visited Bedford Street two or three times a week, bossily advising her future in-laws about how they could better their lives. They needed to install electric ceiling fans; this wasn’t the village anymore. They needed to get a television for their living room; a person needed to keep up with the news. They had to clip coupons from the paper to save money at the store. They had to paint the walls of their house and hang art; no American lived in empty white rooms. And this—this was a much better recipe for blueberry muffins than the one Tina had been using.
The Fortunas all liked her, even if she was a little know-it-all. She was, Stella found, generally correct. She was correct, for example, about Tony, even if she was willing to say what no one else was.
IT WASQUEENIE WHO SPOTTEDsomething was wrong with baby Tommy, because even though she was young and unmarried she was the only one with context about what American babies were supposed to do.
“He’s more than a year old,” Queenie said. “He should be walking by now.”
“Is that true, Ma?” Stella asked Assunta later.
