It wasn’t a perfect marriage,she tells her nieces and nephews.We had our ups and downs like any couple. But I really think he was the best of them.
Stella doesn’t cry at Louie’s funeral. But that’s only because Stella doesn’t cry.
WHENCARMELO DIES,more than six hundred people sign the logbook at the wake.
It is anyone’s guess how Stella feels at the funeral. She registers no emotion. They had been married sixty-three years, twenty of which passed after she had her mind cut out. They had raised ten children together. They had attacked each other—they had broken each other in different ways. They had buried their hatchets and found peace, only to have their peace medically disrupted. They had stuck it out.
Everyone besides Stella cries like hell. I cry like hell. I loved Carmelo. I’m crying now thinking about him.
But no one else had to forgive him for the things Stella had to forgive him for.
NOW IT’S ONLY THE WOMEN LEFT.How it started, how it will end.
TOMMY NOW OWNS THE HOUSEat 4 Alder that used to belong to his grandfather. Tony left the house to Tommy in a surprise bequest that fractured the Fortuna family forever. People-pleasing Tommy tried to make it right, invited Joey and Mickey to stay in the house they thought they’d inherit, offered them money, which they took. But Joey died the next summer while the blood was still bad; thirty years have passed, but the cousins don’t speak.
Tommy moves Stella across the street when Carmelo dies. It will be easier to take care of her there, since number 4 is only one story. And walking through number 4 none of the Maglieri children have to picture their absent father, who should have been sitting there reading a paper and sipping a Michelob Light.
NINETY-FIVE IS VERY OLD,and the days are soft and run together. Stella can’t always hold on to the number ninety-five. Sometimes she tells people she is one hundred, or one hundred twenty. It doesn’t seem unrealistic.
Whenever someone comes to visit, she takes them to her bedroom and points at the studio photo of her ten children, taken when Artie was three.Those are my twenty children,she says. The photo is positioned in front of a wall mirror, so in fact there are twenty children there, sort of. No one is sure if she really thinks she had twenty children or if she is pulling their leg.
AN OLD WOMAN COMES TO VISIT.Stella knows her from somewhere, but can’t quite place her—maybe from church? The church is where most of the old women are. Her hair is white and wispy on top and underneath is charcoal-gray.
“What are you making today?” the old woman says. She talks loud enough that Stella can hear her, so Stella smiles.
“It’s a blanket for my daughter, Bernadette,” Stella says. The old woman’s face tightens. Is she jealous? “You know my daughter, Bernadette?” Stella asks cagily. Theinvidiais evil; she will test this old woman. “She’s very smart. She has a beautiful house on top of a hill. Her husband built it for her.”
“He didn’t build it, Ma,” the old woman says. “But I’m glad you like it.”
STELLA SPENDS HER DAYS CROCHETINGin her armchair in front of the bay window. She can see straight across Alder Street into the bay window of her jealous sister, Tina, who has put new pruned shrubbery in front of her house, thinking wasting money on landscaping will make people like her more.
Tina is sitting in her own armchair, staring wistfully right back.
***
NOWIHAVE TOLD YOUwhat I know about my grandmother, Stella Fortuna, everything I’ve been able to dig out of public and private records. It is your turn to decide what you believe. Maybe you, as an outsider, can see something that we who are too close cannot.
I have come to understand Stella as a woman of incredible will and strength, of charisma, of innate intelligence. She was not a woman of her time, and she was made to pay a high price for her unwillingness to conform. If only Stella had been allowed to live her life on her own terms, how might things have been different? I wouldn’t exist, it’s true—would I write myself out of this if it would spare her the suffering? No, I wouldn’t, selfish girl. So I’ve written myself into it, instead.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER SHE DIED,I went in search of the first Mariastella Fortuna. I went to Ievoli, at the summit of the little mountain overlooking the olive valley and the two seas. The village is all but empty; there isn’t even a mailbox in it, because the post doesn’t come here anymore.
Ievoli is a ghost town, but I could not find Mariastella’s ghost. If it clings unhappily to this earth, I don’t know if it could haunt anyone. I know little of the occult, but it seems to me that a ghost must be remembered to do any haunting. No one remembers the first Stella anymore. The only photo of her must have been destroyed; no one has seen it in years. When I started writing this account, I knew what the first Stella looked like. Now I can’t really remember much of her face, only the round black eyes. After me, maybe no one will remember anything.
I went to the Ievoli cemetery, to see if I could find her. I said a prayer, even though I don’t believe in a god. I walked through the uniform mausoleums and I touched their cool marble walls, pressed my face to the protective glass façades of the burial vaults, peered through petals of real and silk flowers to try to make out names that might behers. But of course she isn’t there. She has no loving survivors, no one to light her candles or pick away the clover sprouts that found purchase in the cracks of her tomb. That is, if she even has a tomb; who can say that her bones haven’t been moved and the space recycled during the hundred years that have passed with no one to look out for her.
There are no Fortunas left in Ievoli—or maybe anywhere else; I haven’t been able to find any. They are gone, eradicated, the monstrous men driven away to the farthest parts of the globe, California, Argentina, Australia, where they have been absorbed one way or another, the women quietly married out into new families and new names. Mariastella Fortuna, if she still lurks somewhere among the living, is the last of her kind, a little ghost with a bad name.
Epilogue:
Hic Jacet
IT IS THESATURDAY BEFORECHRISTMASand I have a cooking date with Auntie Tina. I park my car strategically in Stella’s driveway and visit with her first so she won’t give me the silent treatment. She is watching Turner Classic Movies in bed; I lie down on the white duvet next to her and she holds my wrist between her silky fingers. For forty-five minutes we watchThe Bad Seedtogether—for some reason it’s always on when I visit. Stella is not feeling talkative today; from the way she keeps wriggling her jaw I can tell she’s not wearing her teeth. But periodically she turns to give me her squashed close-lipped smile and stroke my arm. I’m not sure she knows who I am, but she loves me anyway.
I kiss her good-bye when I notice her eyes are spending more time closed than open. As I cross the street I can still feel the spongy pads of her fingertips pressing gently on my arm. I think of how much love she has to give and feel that familiar tiny heartbreak that even now, in their dying years, she cannot give any of it to her sister.
Auntie Tina is in the basement kitchen when I arrive. She is already kitted out in her once-yellow apron and her hair kerchief—I assume she has been cooking since dawn, judging by the hundreds of hockey-puck-esquetotòcookies lined up on the three prep tables.She is clammy with sweat when I kiss her cheek. Last year she went to a new doctor for her general physical and he was so alarmed by how much she sweats that he made her do a whole battery of lymphoma tests. No ninety-seven-year-old woman should sweat like that, he said. Yeah, well. Joke was on him.
“You go see you grandma?” is the first thing Auntie Tina asks me.
