The air here was too moist, and the winter too cold, but on a hotday in June if Stella lay on her back in the tick-infested grass by the garden and looked up through the bean leaves, translucent lime-green in the sun, she could imagine she was home again.
FOR THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS,on afternoons as they worked in their respective gardens, Carmelo would call up the hill to Tina, or she would call down to him—do you have any extra rags so I can tie my beans? Did Freddy mow your lawn like I told him? Is your wife’s vacuum cleaner still broken? Do you want to come have a glass of wine?
THE GOOSEBERRIES AND THE GRAPE TRELLISESwould get chopped down, too, and the beautiful fifteen-foot fig tree, after Stella went crazy.
INAUGUST 1955, LITTLE KNOB-KNEEDTOMMYstarted kindergarten. School was awful for Tommy. He was tiny and he couldn’t run well or throw a ball—he had never learned that from his father, who didn’t know anything about balls himself. The worst thing about the whole school situation was that he couldn’t understand a word anyone said to him, because he’d never learned any English in the bosom of his Italian home. Tommy was a nonconversant runt, and that is a painful way to be forced to join society.
Tommy, as the oldest child of two immigrant parents, had it the worst. When Nino started kindergarten the next year, things were tough but not as tough, because at least he had Tommy. And then by the time Bernie went to school, two years after that, she was so used to hearing her older brothers speak English at home, and so used to the English-speaking television in their front room, that it was almost no trauma at all.
INOCTOBER 1955,STELLA GAVE BIRTH TOFEDERICO.Carmela and her husband, Paolo, took the train down from Montreal to stand up as godparents.
Freddy would be the most handsome of Stella’s sons, with his glossy black hair (before it all fell out) and his grandmother’s down-turned chocolate eyes, the unusual Mascaro eye shape that had made Assunta the beauty of Ievoli, and which here in America got Freddy nicknamed “the Jap.” He would inherit his father’s musicality and eventually become the frontman in a local band.
Freddy, the fifth baby, would also be the breaking point for poor Stella’s mind, which could no longer conceive of her children as individuals versus as a mass. Maybe four would have been all right, but five was just too many, and by the time the oldest were teenagers their name had becomeTommyNinoGuyFreddy!Bernie, obviously, was an exception, what with her being a princess instead of a hooligan.
NEXT UP WASNICOLA,“NICKY,”in August 1956, less than a year after Freddy. No one was really ready for Nicky. Stella hadn’t even believed she could be pregnant until she was almost six months along; she’d become so inured to morning sickness over the last eight years that she hadn’t managed to distinguish it from a hangover. Stella and Carmelo didn’t know who to ask to be godparents on such short notice, so Tina and Rocco stood up again. The Maglieris had to wait to have the baptism until after the Caramanicos got back from their ten-year anniversary trip to Italy, which they had been planning for a lot longer than Stella had been planning on having Nicky. But at this point Stella and Carmelo were willing to cut a few corners, and they were sure God would understand.
Luckily Assunta now lived across the street. She was still working in the tobacco fields but could stay home on the worst days and help Stella with the two new infants. As much as Stella was annoyed by her father’s proximity, she was grateful for her mother’s.
Nicky, one of only two sons who would inherit Carmelo’s famous blue eyes, would grow up to be the gentlest of the Maglieri boys. He loved animals, and Stella was always catching him slinking up the stairs with his jacket zipped around a suspiciously squirming bulge.Stella would have to go chasing him and banging on his door—“Nicky! What do you have in there!”—lest she find another squirrel he’d tried to save from a cat bleeding in his bedding, or another green garden snake coiled up in the bathtub. Nicky would be too gentle for the world, though, and would retreat into a cave life, spending his adulthood watching television in the bedroom he’d once shared with his brothers, stretching various disability checks to cover a medicating supply of weed and grape soda.
WHEN YOU COME FROM A LARGEITALIAN FAMILY,not only do you simply have more relatives numerically than many American families do, but you also keep in closer touch with them. This means a socially obedient Italian American will have more special occasions than their non-Italian friends can conceive of. Funerals and baptisms, anniversary and graduation parties, babies’ birthdays, but worst of all weddings, weddings, weddings, and the showers and fittings and shoe-dyeings that precede them.
Carmelo was a socially obedient Italian, and for better or for worse, Stella was married to him. This was why she spent what felt like every Saturday at a wedding. Carmelo made her go shopping for nice dresses, thinking that would make her feel better, but she hated being trussed up in sequins or silk when her breasts were leaking or her stomach swollen tight against the fabric. The music and small talk made her tired, as did picking out gifts from registries and smiling for people whose names she couldn’t recall. She remembered how she used to love the Septemberfhestain Ievoli, the Italian Society dances during the war, but it was a different person who had been doing the dancing then than the one who was doing the remembering now.
Italians, in case you did not know, invite children to all occasions. This meant every week or so the hooligans had to be wrestled into their little suit pants, which were just the right material for sliding across newly waxed floors. The boys were the life of their own party, even if that meant dismantling the bride and groom’s;no one knew whether to laugh at them because they were adorable in their tiny matching suits or to actually call the police. Nino, who had the practical mind of an engineer, was famous for coordinating drag races with empty serving carts stolen from venue kitchens. They never smashed a wedding cake, but they did once get a plate of marinara dumped on a bride’s train.
It was around this time, 1958 or 1959, that Stella gave up and just let them do whatever they wanted. “Those are wild kids, Stella,” people would say to her, in their reprimanding but unhelpful Italian style.
“What am I supposed to do?” she’d say back. “There’s too many of them. I’m outnumbered.” Let anyone who wanted to look down on her take the matter up with her Catholic husband. God had given her all these children; there must be a reason He had not given her the ability or desire to keep up with them.
Sometimes Stella couldn’t bear the idea of another wedding. At first she would play sick, but then, increasingly, she would just not get ready and Carmelo would know he was on his own. He was no better at controlling the hooligans than Stella was, but Stella knew no chiding women came up to him to complain about his sons’ behavior, which was only one of the reasons she felt no guilt. On these evenings, blessedly free, with only the littlest babies on her watch, she would bring a flask of wine up from the cellar and drink it alone on the porch, watching the sun drop behind the oaks in the marsh.
INJANUARY 1958 CAMEGIOVANNI,named for his paternal uncle and godfather. On the heels of his too-soft brother Nicky, Johnny would grow up to be rambunctious enough for two. He would be the son who brought the most chaos into the Maglieri house, starting with the time he got kicked out of fourth grade for carrying a knife, but as an infant he was one of the easiest, from Stella’s perspective. No goddamn colic.
Then, in fall of 1958, there was a miscarriage. Stella hadn’t been very far along, less than four months, and this time she felt no grief,just a sense of hollow distaste as she flushed the globs of pink tissue down the toilet. Honestly, she didn’t feel much of anything anymore; when she did, she drank until the feeling was gone.
ASSUNTA ANDTINA CAME OVERto sit with Stella after work. The sisters would crochet while Assunta looked through Tina’s anniversary trip photo album, which lived at Stella’s house just for this purpose. Rocco had taken photos of Tina surrounded by pigeons in Piazza San Marco in Venice; Tina on the Spanish Steps in Rome, like Audrey Hepburn in the movie where she is a runaway princess; Tina in front of St. Peter’s cathedral in the Vatican, so close to His Holiness the Pope. It was nice to think the beautiful things in the photos were their cultural legacy as Italians, even if Hartford had more in common with Ievoli than did the Venetian lagoon. Assunta turned the pages with so much wonder, it was hard to believe she had been doing the same thing every day for the last two years.
The evening quorum of Fortuna women lasted until Rocco or Tony came home from work and wanted dinner. Carmelo, of course, would not be home from his shift at the bar until eleven at the earliest. So Stella had the evenings to herself—herself and her seven children—and to fill this unsupervised time she usually brought a bottle of Carmelo’s wine up from the basement.
WHENDOMENICO WAS BORN INFEBRUARY 1960,he was everyone’s favorite, maybe because for a while people thought he would be the last. As an adult he would be everyone’s least favorite Maglieri boy, because he would destroy his good marriage with alcoholism and waste the rest of his short life as a drug addict. But he sure was an adorable baby, with a round face and a full head of fluffy black hair. They called him Mingo, or just Ming, after Carmelo’s uncle.
Joey and Mickey stood up as his godparents. Carmelo thought asking them would heal the family rift. Life hadn’t been easy on the Joseph Fortunas. They were living in the same apartment they had run awayto in 1953. Mickey still dressed like a tramp, but motherhood had mellowed her out; Stella could tolerate her through a Sunday dinner.
Joey and Mickey had two little girls, and Mickey was cooking up a third. Stella wasn’t sure whether Mickey’s daughters were normal, since Stella lived in a world of small boys, but the Fortuna girls seemed savage to her, wild eyed and undergroomed. No wonder, Stella thought, since their mother was just a large child herself. The girls would dismantle Bernie’s toys while Bernie looked on with condescension. Stella had to explain to her daughter that her grubby cousins didn’t have toys at home. She had to teach Bernie to hide the good dolls in her pillowcase so the poor little Fortuna girls wouldn’t ruin or steal them.
INJULY 1961,STELLA GAVE BIRTHto her ninth living baby, Enrico “Richie” Maglieri. He was eight pounds and popped right out after only forty-five minutes of labor, God bless him. Queenie and Louie would stand up as his godparents.
Richie would grow up to be a perpetual bachelor. He would never find a way to reconcile his sexual orientation with his macho Catholic family’s values, and so never told anyone—never had any kind of partner at all. Maybe I should look at the bright side here; maybe his reticence saved his life, vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis that took two dear friends from his community theater group. Meanwhile, his brothers act like Richie just never got his act together to woo a lady. Even now they’ll say, “Poor Richie, he never found the right girl. Who knows, maybe he still will.” If anyone suggests anything about the closet the family will jump down your throat defending him. But that’s just it, isn’t it? If gayness is a slander to be defended against, there’s not a lot of room for a man like Richie, who wouldn’t wish to cause anyone any hurt and who doesn’t admire boat-rockers, to say anything at all.
ASSUNTA CAME OVER ONESATURDAY MORNINGin April 1963 to find a box of dried pasta spilled across the kitchen linoleum. Baby Richie, who had learned to stand, was holding himself up by the garbage can, his fingers gripping the slimy liner bag, and Mingo was prising open a second box of pasta, which Assunta took away from him, leaving him mopey. Where the other boys were was anyone’s guess.
Stella was on her knees in front of the downstairs toilet. Her hair bun was sleep-styled to reveal just how much white had come in.
“I’m forty-three years old, Ma,” Stella said. She felt like a cabbage you find in the bottom of your vegetable crisper two months after you forgot it there. “How can I still be getting pregnant?”
Assunta rubbed her daughter’s back and helped her stand so she could flush away her nausea. “Women in my family are strong,” Assunta told Stella, pinching her hip. She added in English she had learned from the television, “Built to last.”
