Nursing her bad feeling, Bernie walked down the yellow-papered hall and to the last room on the left. Doing her best not to picture her grandfather in any of his states of dishabille, she knocked on the door and called through it, “Ey. Have you seen Penny?”
There was a long moment of silence before Tony’s voice came through the door: “Forget the little beech. She shoo’ run into the road. We don’ need no more puppies around here.”
Typical.Mean old man. But Bernie was going to be late for work. She would have to worry about the dog later. She let herself out the back door so she wouldn’t have to say good-bye to her aunt or cousin.
Later, standing behind her register and waiting for the occasional customer to come through with their produce, Bernie would turn over what her grandfather had said to her, and she’d realize he hadn’t told her he hadn’t seen the dog.
THE REASONMICKEY ANDJOEYwere living in 4 Alder was because their apartment in Hartford had burned down in the summer of 1967. Not only had they lost all of their worldly possessions, insurance was refusing to honor the claim, because Joey had purchased the coverage too recently, or something like that.
The truth was, the insurance company had told Joey they would commission an investigation if he requested one, but that if they did so he needed to be prepared for whatever their inspector might find. In other words, if the inspector found certain kinds of evidence, Joey should be prepared to go to jail for arson and insurance fraud.
“What are you afraid of, Joe?” Stella had asked her brother. “If you didn’t burn down your own house then there’s no evidence they could hold against you.”
Joey waved her off. “They’re all a bunch of crooks. They’ll fix it all up so they don’t have to pay, even if that means I go to jail for no reason.”
“Crooks,” Stella repeated, disgusted. Her brother pretended not to catch her sarcasm.
Meanwhile, the Joseph Fortunas were homeless. The late 1960s, when the John Lennon was the most popular hairstyle, weren’t a heyday for barbershops, and Joey barely brought home enough money to feed his kids. By the time of the fire, in 1967, Joey and Mickey had five girls: Betty, then fourteen; Mary, eleven; Janet, nine; Barbie, five; and Pamela, three. Joey didn’t see any reason his parents shouldn’t help him out in this time of need.
“You’ve got that whole house, Pop,” Joey had argued. “Two extra bedrooms you aren’t doing nothing with. We’d just stay with you for a little while, till we get the money together to buy a new place.” Joey and Tony both knew there never would be a new place, that Joey and Mickey would never get the money together. But Assunta didn’t know that, or chose not to know it, and cried and begged and fretted until Tony said yes. Tony didn’t have the stamina that he used to for arguing with his wife.
So Joey and Mickey and their five daughters moved into Tony’s house at 4 Alder Street, across the road from the Maglieris and the Caramanicos. So many boy cousins on one side of the street, so many girls on the other. Joey and Mickey took the small bedroom, and in the style of the Maglieri boys they stacked two sets of bunk beds in the larger room for their daughters.
Now three years had gone by. It didn’t seem like Joey and Mickey were any closer to moving out—more like their new plan was to wait until they inherited the house they were already living in.
Stella tried not to go over there unless she couldn’t help it.
ACROSS THE STREET AT NUMBER 3,Stella had finished pulling the laundry out of the washing machine and pinning it on the pulley line that ran between the Maglieris’ and the Caramanicos’ houses. She left her basket on the porch and went back inside; maybe she would watch some television. But first she opened the refrigerator to survey. She could use something to settle the acid in her stomach.
There was one bowl of cold pasta with sauce, leftover from supper the night before. She pulled the bowl out and put it on the table, then, before sitting down with her fork, poured herself her second glass of wine for the morning. By the time she finished the pasta, she had also finished her third. She could feel her brain shrinking away from her skull, could hear her heart pounding in the back of her throat, against the cavern of her consciousness, but the hangover had started to recede into the softer, more forgiving feeling of drunk.
She remembered that first time she’d learned what wine could do to her, that day in the cold winter of 1940, that first year in Hartford, the day Tony hadn’t come home. She remembered how she’d sat with her mother and sister and they’d poured one another tall glasses of wine until they were too drunk to play cards.
Stella gazed across her kitchen at the framed photo taken in 1918, her mother and father standing on either side of the dead baby Mariastella—the photo hung by Stella’s refrigerator now. Assunta was so young in that picture, only nineteen, so beautiful, Stella had realized as an adult—beautiful in her ordinariness, in her unflattering directness, in her strength. These were things you didn’t see about your mother when you were a child.
Thinking of Assunta now, she poured herself a fourth.
AYEAR AND A HALF EARLIER,in December 1968, was when she went.
Tony and Assunta had been sitting at the kitchen table eating supper while Tina washed dishes at the sink. There was a thunk and Tina turned around to look and there was Papa but not Mamma. Assunta had slid right under the table, hitting her head on the radiator on the way down. Tina rode with her in the ambulance all the way to the hospital, but the doctor said she was already dead.
They gave it a fancy English name no one could remember. In short, there had been something wrong with her heart—perhaps the same thing that had killed her father so young.
When the paramedics opened Assunta’s dress to try to perform emergency resuscitation, a bundle of mint, bound together with a bread bag tie, fell out of her brassiere.
STELLA HAD NOT BEEN WITH HER MOTHERin her last minutes, and Tina had—there was something Stella could never have back.
TINA HAD GOTTEN LAID OFFfrom Silex that summer; the company was being bought out and many of the assembly-line workers lost their jobs. She was forty-eight, and it was a strange age to not have a job; it took her almost a year to find another factory job she could do without passing a literacy test. In the meantime, she stayed at home with Tony and Assunta. Tony still took some odd construction jobs in the summer, but he had diabetes trouble, and keeping up with his diet was too much for Assunta, especially with all those granddaughters in the house. Mickey was hardly a help. She was more the type to be cooked for than to cook for others.
Meanwhile, Stella had decided to go back to work when Artie started kindergarten. She got a job on a corporate cleaning crew in the Families First insurance building. Carmelo told her over and over she didn’t need to work—she suspected it was a blow to his pride to have his wife working as a cleaning lady. But Stella loved being productive again, loved having a place besides her house to go to and belong, and a cleaning crew was as good as anything else she could get, at her age and without having held a job in twenty years. The shift went from 3 to 8P.M. so that they wouldn’t get too much in the way of the nine-to-five insurance agents. Some of the crew were Jamaicans, who made Stella remember the ladies she’d met at the tobacco farm all those years ago, from whom she’d learned her earliest English. But most of Stella’s fellow cleaners were Puerto Ricans, who spoke fast, energetic-sounding Spanish to one another and who would giggle with surprise when Stella chimed into their conversation—she usually had no idea what they were saying, but other times the words they used meant almost the same thing in Calabrese.
THE DAYASSUNTA COLLAPSED,no one at Alder Street knew how to reach Stella. The cleaning ladies moved from office to office; there was no way to locate them until the shift was over. Bernadette called the cleaning company’s central dispatch, but they told her they had no way of passing on the message.
BERNADETTE WAS WAITING FORSTELLAwhen she got home.
“It’s Grandma,” she said. She was already crying. “Grandma’s dead.”
Bernie was not a liar or a joker; Bernie did not make mistakes. But Stella thought she must have been lying or joking or mistaken. It took Bernie half an hour to make her mother understand—a hamster wheel of a conversation so excruciating she was almost laughing by the end of it. Stella had marveled at her daughter’s wrongheaded persistence. Papa was the one who was sick, not Mamma. Mamma was only sixty-nine years old. Assunta wouldn’t drop dead behind Stella’s back like this, giving her no chance at all to prepare.
