You did it, Ma, Stella thought. She was impressed. She wondered where Assunta had procured a willing female and what measures had been taken to force the two into holy wedlock. She hoped this Michelina was strong enough to make something of Stella’s layabout brother. At mass Stella said a special prayer to the Virgin that her mother had picked well; after all, Assunta would only be able to pull this wife-assigning trick the once.
JOEY AND HIS NEW BRIDE,Mickey, moved into the boys’ old room on the ground floor of the Bedford Street house in January 1953. Mickey was already visibly pregnant, which said to Stella that this was a woman who got down to business.
Mickey, who had just turned eighteen, had grown up in Nicastro, although Assunta enumerated all her Ievoli connections—her mother was a first cousin of Za Violèt from Pianopoli; her older brother had married the Fortuna girls’ school friend Marietta. Mickey was tall and had long smooth legs, which everyone knew because she walked around the house in little silk nightgowns. Stella wondered how things could have changed so completely in Calabria that it had produced this wanton creature. Mickey laughed loudly and flirted with any man around her—her brother- or father-in-law or anyone at all—touching their arms when she talked to them, sitting next to them on the couch and resting her head on their shoulders. Stella was darkly amused by how awkward Mickey madeCarmelo, Louie, and Rocco, but Queenie was obviously not amused, and Queenie was the woman who had to put up with Mickey the most. Stella was looking forward to the day Mickey got some good manners smacked into her.
“I just can’t do this,” Queenie told Stella and Tina at least once a week. “I can’t go on living with this woman. It was bad enough before, but now...”
Tina leaned in and lowered her voice. “What are you going to do?”
Queenie grunted. Stella, who was crocheting, darted a glance up to see Queenie’s face. It was a sneer of fed-uppedness.
“Are you going to move out?” Tina asked.
“How could I?” Queenie said. “Your mother would never allow it.”
Stella didn’t have anything to say to console her. She was just glad she and Carmelo had a lock and door between them and all that.
IN EARLYMAY 1953,Mickey threw herself a baby shower, at the behest of her new friends from church, who came over and gobbled up pastries and brought all kinds of adorable miniature presents. It was chilly and rainy; Mickey directed them to Queenie and Louie’s room to leave their wet coats on Queenie’s bed.
This was the last straw, although Queenie must have been planning for a long time.
ON THE LASTSUNDAY INMAY,the Fortuna clan headed out together for eleven o’clock mass. Queenie wasn’t feeling well, so she and Louie stayed home. Walking to church, Assunta and Tina speculated about whether there might be a baby on the way.
After mass, they stopped by Za Filomena and Zu Aldo’s house for lunch. It was a beautiful day and the boys played in the front yard with Carolina’s two-year-old daughter. Assunta headed back to Bedford Street first to start preparing her Sunday dinner; the rest of them followed half an hour later when Nino started to get fussy.
Stella could hear the shrieking before she set foot on the porch. Atfirst she wondered if it was some trapped animal or the squealing of a malfunctioning pipe. But no.Mamma.
Stella thrust Nino into Carmelo’s arms and waddle-rushed up the porch stairs—she was only four months along but carrying large this time. The unlocked door swung open on a dark and fetid hallway—the stench hit her immediately. When Stella pressed the light switch it took her a long moment to figure out what she was looking at.
There was her mother, hyperventilating on the floor of the front hallway, where she was kneeling beside a pool of vomit. Bloody bald patches of scalp showed through her wild hair; later Stella would find the clumps she tore out by the sink in the kitchen. There was something dark smudging one side of her face, which Stella would learn all too soon was diarrhea. There was fecal matter smeared on the walls, about waist-high, as if Assunta had crawled up and back down the hall on her hands and knees, trailing her soiled hands on the wallpaper. Above the shit were the scuffmarks where Queenie and Louie, in their haste, had betrayed their operation.
She did it, Stella thought, almost triumphantly, but that thought passed quickly.
Tina dropped to the floor by Assunta, saying, “Ma, what happened?”
As the sobbing started again Stella stepped over the vomit and made her way through the house, taking inventory. Queenie must have leapt out of bed the minute they all left for mass—playing sick, the little crook—and started loading up a moving truck; God knows where she’d found a moving company that was open on Sunday. In the four short hours the Fortunas had been away, Louie and Queenie had taken everything—every stick of furniture in the living room and dining room as well as out of the bedroom. They took the pots out of the kitchen cupboards and the soap out of the soap dish in the bathroom. The only sign they left of themselves was the faint sun stain around the spot on the living room wall where Louie’s framed diploma had hung.
“Malandrina,”Antonio kept saying. No better than a highway robber, that Queenie.
Maybe she wouldn’t have stolen all your furniture, Stella thought, if you hadn’t stolen a few free peep shows, you dirty old jerk.
But whatever sympathy Stella felt for Queenie was poisoned by Assunta’s reaction to this calamity—over the top, certainly, but Stella didn’t think it was a performance. Assunta actually thought she might not live through this: her favorite son taken away from her, her house ripped apart, her family in shambles.
There was no Sunday sauce that night; Queenie hadn’t left a pot to cook in. “She took mypasta strainer,” Assunta kept saying, as if this were the most inhuman injustice of the entire day. “Mypasta strainer.She could have at least left me something to strain my pasta.”
Carmelo tried to herd them all out of the hollow apartment for dinner upstairs. But Assunta couldn’t be left alone. Stella had bullied her into the shower, scrubbed the shit off her and gently rinsed her bloody scalp, then put her to bed. Assunta, drunk on her own grief, carried on with her hysterical weeping. Tina cried quietly in solidarity.
“Forget it, Carm,” Stella told him. “It’s hopeless.”
In the end, Carmelo brought down a pot of pasta he cooked upstairs in the Maglieri kitchen. The ones who were fit to eat ate it sitting on the bare carpet in the living room. The boys ran in circles in all the empty space, and Nino knocked over the cheese.
FOUR DAYS LATER,Queenie’s speciously proper change of address card arrived in the mail, lettered in her secretarial hand. On Saturday, Stella left the children with Tina and made Carmelo drive her to the new house, which was on the West Hartford town line. The house was small, just one story, with redbrick siding and a square hedge. Louie and Queenie must have been saving assiduously for this, or maybe Queenie’s parents had given her money.
Stella told Carmelo to wait in the car. “This won’t take long,” she said. She didn’t want his sociability and compassion bogging her down.
Louie wasn’t home, but it was just as well, because Stella’s bone to pick was with her sister-in-law.
“Shame on you,” she said when the pretty young woman answered the door. Queenie was wearing a flower-printed pink housedress that cinched at what Stella thought was an unrealistically narrow waist. “Shame on you for what you did to my mother. She’s been nothing but kind to you.”
