INOCTOBER 1954,STELLA GAVE BIRTHto her fourth living baby, her third son. Stella and Carmelo debated who to ask to be godparents. They weren’t on speaking terms with Joey and Mickey yet. Instead, they asked Franceschina Perri, who was now Mrs. Carapellucci, and her husband, Frank.
Carmelo had picked out the name Gaetano, after a friend of his from the railroad who had died in the war. Gaetano—“Guy”—would grow up to be the wealthiest of Stella and Carmelo’s sons, eventually running four successful restaurants, a bowling alley, and a vending machine supply company. Most of his brothers would work for him in some capacity, except for Tommy, who would always work at the electric company with his dad. Although he would never attend college himself, Guy would meet his future wife, Annabelle, a semiprofessional tennis player and the daughter of a congressman, at a Wesleyan sorority party that his motorcycle-riding buddies decided to crash. Everyone liked her an awful lot, although she would break Carmelo’s heart by turning his son into a Republican.
INDECEMBER 1954, JUST BEFORE THE FIRST SNOWFALL,Rocco and Tina moved into their new house. They had a spare bedroom for guests—an American luxury. Usually Tina would keep the door tothis room locked so the boys wouldn’t go tramping through and eating the cookie arrangements she had made for somepaesan’s upcoming baby shower.
From the street, the two-story Maglieri house and the Caramanico ranch looked like they were the same height, since Rocco had had his house built on an artificial hill. For the next sixty years, whenever it rained hard, the Maglieri basement would flood, leaving a fetid stink it would take Carmelo days of airing to get rid of. The boys loved the flooding, because they would splash down the cement stairs and play water-war games in the seepage, although one time Johnny stepped on a screwdriver that was hidden under the dark water and ended up getting stitches in his foot.
Sometimes Stella would sit on her screened-in back porch and stare up the hill at her sister’s clean white house and militaristically neat garden and wish she had a clean house and a dry basement and that all these muddy children were someone else’s. But she didn’t say anything to anyone about that, of course, because she was sure Tina sometimes sat next to Rocco in that lawn chair and looked down the hill at the puddle-filled grass of the Maglieri backyard and thought, I would trade this house and everything else I have for just one of those children.
NOW THE HOUSE ONBEDFORDStreet was empty, all of the grown Fortuna children moved out. Stella thought Tony would rent it again, but instead he put it on the market.
Stella remembered how the Fortunas had fought to buy that house, counting their nickels into that tin can. It had only lasted them one decade.
“Aren’t you sad to be leaving, Ma?” she asked Assunta.
“It’s too far from the grandchildren,” her mother said. She meant Stella’s children, not Joey’s; Tony had not spoken to Joey since their exodus and Mickey was retaliating by not letting Assunta come visit the baby.
Looking at it another way, Stella realized, she and Carmelo had become the core of the family—everyone else had gathered around them, restructured their lives around the Maglieris’. Was that what they all owed her? They had put her where they wanted her, and now they made her their queen.
Louie and Queenie came over for the occasional Sunday dinner, but still had not started a family of their own. When Assunta had taken Queenie aside to ask her if there was a problem, Queenie had looked her in the eye and said, “Not that I know of, God willing. We’re just waiting until we have more money.”
“What does she mean, waiting?” Assunta had whispered to her daughters as they were washing dishes after Louie and Queenie had left.
Stella laughed, but her heart felt cold. She bounced baby Guy on her knee to make the chill pass. The thought flashed through her mind—Queenie had pulled off a trick Stella hadn’t been able to. But the thought flickered away as if it had been someone else’s memory of a distant past life.
“You know what I heard,” Tina said. Her face was already red and Stella knew something wonderful or disgusting was coming. “If you don’t want to get pregnant, you can have your husband put it...” She hesitated, excited for her revelation but scared to pick out the words. “In thecul’.He can do whatever he wants there and it won’t make a baby. Or he can put it here,” she said, making an evocatively thrusting gesture in the direction of her armpit. “Or he can put it in your mouth.”
“Tina! Shh!” Rocco, Carmelo, and Tony were drinkingamaroin the living room, not necessarily out of earshot, with the three older children corralled on the floor with their trucks and dolls. If there was ever something Stella didn’t want Carmelo hearing, it was what Tina had just said. “Who did you hear that from, anyway?”
“The ladies at Silex,” Tina said, secure in the authority of her American and Polish assembly-line friends.
“These are the same ladies who say you can tell the size of a man’sthing by how long his nose is,” Stella said, but Tina didn’t hear her sarcasm.
“Yes, it’s true.” Tina sounded wistful.
“How would any of them ever know that, Tina? Unless they have seen more than one and can compare,” Stella teased. “I think your Silex friends must be loose.”
“No.” Tina’s face defensively flared even pinker. “They heard fromtheirfriends.”
Assunta was still stuck on the predilections of her youngest son. “Tina, you mean Queenie lets Louie put it... put it in hercul’?” She eyed her daughter, concentrating on this new idea. “Or her mouth?”
“Ma!” Stella barked. The chatter from the living room had grown frighteningly quiet. “Ask her yourself the next time you see her.”
Lying sleeplessly in bed that night, her breasts aching because Guy was already weaning himself, Stella turned the thought over and over. Would she let Carmelo put his thing in her mouth, if it meant she didn’t have to get pregnant again? The thought made her want to throw up, and she couldn’t make herself come to the answeryes.
***
STELLA CALLED GARDEN MENto plant a hedge at the front of her property to stop the children from running into the road when they were playing in the backyard. She enjoyed watching the men in their dirty close-fitting jeans dig holes and bend over pots. The whole job only took a few hours and boom, there was a lush green curtain separating Stella’s private business from the rest of the world.
Carmelo was furious, claiming he could have installed the hedge himself and saved them a lot of money. Stella pooh-poohed his ire. “When would you have had time?”
Several months later, when she was feeling particularly fed up with Carmelo, Stella called painters and had them paint the house bright pink while he was at work. He would learn better than to make her mad.
LATER, MUCH LATER,after she went crazy, Stella would chop down the hedge herself with a pair of garden clippers. Her grown sons would marvel at the strength the destruction must have required.
THEIR FIRST SUMMER ONALDERSTREET, 1955, Carmelo turned over the spongy dirt in the backyard, pumped out the water, and filled in the soil for a garden. He got up to weed in the earliest light of dawn before work. He planted zucchini, tomatoes, and peas. He planted two gooseberry bushes, unique Balkan varietals that had been smuggled past customs by an Albanian buddy from the electric company. He planted two grape trellises, one along the garden and one overhanging a picnic table.
Stella looked at the perfect leafy stakes and considered how Carmelo’s garden looked like it could have been transplanted from a mountain terrace in Ievoli. They had come from distant villages, she and Carmelo, but in the United States their backgrounds looked almost the same.
