“I don’t have a problem with your mother. I think she’s a nice woman, even if she is a little unbalanced.” Queenie spoke quickly and forcefully, so Stella caught up with her meaning after it was too late to react effectively. “But your father’s a pervert, your brother Joey is a loser, and his wife is a lazy tramp with no education. I’m not bringing children into that house.”
Stella was bristling with anger, but there was nothing Queenie had said that, strictly speaking, Stella disagreed with.
“You didn’t need to leave like that,” she said finally. “It was cruel.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.” Queenie’s hard little face softened. “Your mother never would have let us go, Stella. And your brother Louie would never have the courage to fight with her.”
TONY WENT DOWN TO SEEMR.GREENBURG,the Jew on Franklin Avenue, and bought furniture for the whole house again. Mr. Greenburg’s prices were good and he gave credit. Pay what you want now, he always said, and then just give me a little more each week as you can.
“You could have made Queenie give you back all your furniture, Pa,” Stella said.
Tony waved it off. “They’re just kids. They don’t have any money to spend. Anyway, your mother can enjoy picking out new furniture.”
Stella wondered if he felt guilty but didn’t think her father had that capacity. This was his version of a papal indulgence for his sins, only the pope was Assunta.
MICKEY’S BABY WAS BORN INJULY,a little girl they named Betty. Tina and Rocco stood up as her godparents at the baptism. Stella was relieved Mickey hadn’t asked her and Carmelo.
On the second Sunday of October, Mickey wasn’t feeling well and stayed home from church. Joey stayed home with her to take care of the baby. When the rest of them got home, Stella was more disgusted than she was surprised to find the first-floor apartment had been emptied of all the furniture.
“Again?” Tina whispered to Stella.
“What a pig,” Stella said, not bothering to whisper back. She was so pregnant she didn’t have energy to do anything but lean against the picture-stripped wall. “Raised in a barn, like I always thought.”
“I don’t think she needed to make it all a surprise again,” Tina said.
“Of course she didn’t. She just wants everyone to talk about her like she’s something special.” From where she stood, Stella surveyed the damage, the empty room, the chip that had been taken out of the doorframe by undisciplined movers. “You know what, though? Serves them right. Now they’ll have to pay their own goddamn rent and cook their own food and clean up after their own baby.”
“Oh, the poor baby,” Tina said, and before the waterworks could start, Stella chided her, “Relax.You’ll see her plenty, just watch.” How would they get by, though, she wondered? Joey had been unable to get back his job at the electric company and had spent the last six months sweeping clippings off the floor at a barbershop.
This time Assunta was angry, to Stella’s great relief. “There was no need to fool us like that,” she said.
“She’s just a witch, Ma,” Stella said. “A drama queen. She wants attention.”
Assunta banged the cupboards one by one, ascertaining that the Joseph Fortunas had, indeed, taken her every last pot and even hernew pasta strainer. “We would have given them whatever they wanted. We know how much Joey makes; we would have bought him his own house. He didn’t need to steal ours.”
“We wouldn’t have bought him nothing,” Tony interrupted. “This is the end for him. It’s time for him to grow the hell up and be a man.”
Now Assunta looked upset. “But Tonnon—”
“No,” he said. “It’s like the Americans say. They stole their bed, now they can lie in it.”
INNOVEMBER 1953,STELLA GAVE BIRTHto a third living baby, a girl this time, whom they named Bernadette, after the saint in that movie Stella had seen during the war, the girl from France who saw the Virgin on the hill. Carmelo’s brother, Gio, and his wife stood up as the baby’s godparents.
Bernie would be Stella’s only daughter and would grow up unintimidated by the prospect of telling whole roomfuls of men what to do. She would turn up her nose at the various pitfalls of adolescence as she watched her brothers make every mistake in the book; she would eventually become the first person in her family to graduate from college, for which her proud father would insist on paying. Her no-nonsense personality perfectly suited her career as an accountant at a large Hartford insurance conglomerate, where she would eventually be made a VP. After years of insisting she never wanted to settle down—just like her mother—she would eventually change her mind, for which I am grateful, since she is my mother. She would marry an ethnically German computer programmer she met in a business development course at UConn—that’s my dad, the blue-eyed, blond reason I barely pass for Italian.
My mom is a lone renegade branch on the Maglieri family tree, the only offshoot to move out of the Italian ghetto and into the suburbs, to read science fiction novels, and to refuse to baptize her children. But you would only have heard this story from a quasi-outsider, you know? A real Maglieri would never have written this down.
INMAY 1954, AFTER MONTHSof planning and, most importantly, with Assunta’s hard-won blessing, Stella and Carmelo Maglieri moved from Bedford Street to a house Carmelo had bought one town over, in Dorchester. Front Street was a crumbling wreck, and the Maglieris weren’t the only ones heading out.
The new house was about twenty years old and cube shaped, like a bright blue birthday present waiting to be unwrapped. There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a closed-off back porch that overlooked the marshy grass Carmelo would turn into his arbor and vegetable garden. There was a carpeted staircase Stella’s boys would charge up and then go sliding down on their bellies for the next twenty years. Alder Street, the road was called, after a kind of tree, Stella would learn—ontanoin Italian, a tree so common in Ievoli but which Stella had never once seen in America.
Eventually the second bedroom would be built out with two sets of bunk beds, a third set of bunk beds would be installed in the landing, and a fourth where the dining room table had been ousted—it wasn’t like they ever used it; the boys usually ate standing up in the kitchen, and Sunday dinners were always at Tina’s. Stella would convert her walk-in closet into a bedroom for Bernie, so that her daughter wouldn’t have to share space with the hooligans. Still, the Maglieris would be perpetually one bed short, but there was always a shirtless teenage boy draped over the couch, stinky sock feet hanging off the end, or dozing on his belly on the carpet in front of the TV. Sometimes there were multiple empty beds, in fact, because some combination of boys hadn’t come home all night, but with that many who can really keep track of them all. Certainly not Stella.
THE HOUSE ONALDERSTREEThad a neighbor on its left, but to its right was an empty plot of land, which Rocco and Tina bought. Rocco didn’t like the marshy quality of the ground and was paying good money to have it filled in with truckloads of soil. Then they would build a house exactly to their specifications.
They would always be right next door so Tina could help with the babies.
WITH THE MORTGAGE AND THE BABIEShe had to buy new shoes for all the time, Carmelo got a second job, working barback at Charlie’s Restaurant & Bar. He would work at the electric company from six until three, come home, fix some pasta, change out of his uniform, and head to Charlie’s to open the bar at five. Eventually Carmelo would also take on a third job, working weekends for a landscaping company, mowing lawns and trimming hedges. But ends would always meet, if sometimes just barely.
