Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #7
IT WAS CARMELO MAGLIERI’S BAD LUCK that he met Stella only a few months after she started to have her nightmare.
In a different version of this story, a version where the window stayed unboarded for a cross-breeze, or where Stella’s catechismal education had allowed her to believe there could be a difference between sex and rape, or where the miasma of Tracci hadn’t followed Antonio Fortuna halfway around the world—in those versions of this story, maybe Carmelo Maglieri wouldn’t have been the villain.
STELLA AND TINA WENT BACK to the laundry in September.
The leaves on the maples turned yellow and the leaves on the oaks turned brown and the air grew frighteningly cold, just as it had last year.
Stella knew the parade of American festivals now; she was looking forward to Christmas.
Stella knew what to expect from America; she had gotten used to it.
Then, in December, came Pearl Harbor.
THE OUTbrEAK OF WAR WAS TERRIFYING, even though no one was surprised.
Now that the U.S. had declared war on Italy, Italian Americans had a lot to talk about.
At the Italian Society there were men who wanted to go home and fight for Mussolini and those who sent money to support his war effort.
There were men who were glad to be in America, far away from Mussolini’s fascism.
On both sides of the argument people worried about their families back home.
But the time for discussion was over—Italian Americans lived in and hailed from enemy states. They had to pick.
For the Fortunas, the only choice was America.
Tony, their patriarch, had no love for his homeland and was proudly naturalized.
He would never take them back to Ievoli.
The world had already been changing when the immigrants left, and now the change had accelerated, the bombs dropping on ancestral villages and obliterating their old way of life.
Stella feared the Ievoli she loved existed only in the rubble of her memory.
At night, airplanes roared overhead. The Fortunas lay in their beds wondering if bombs were going to fall.
Like their neighbors, they put up blackout curtains so they wouldn’t make their building a target.
Hartford was a munitions production capital, and the Fortunas lived only ten minutes’ walk from the Colt Armory, which operated twenty-four hours a day.
The experience of Hartford at war was spooky, the abandoned streets, the furtive energy behind blackout curtains.
Streetlights were against regulation; the girls had to walk to and from night school along unlit city streets.
It was too bad Stella and Tina hadn’t become citizens already.
Now all the Fortunas except Tony were enemy aliens.
They had to go down to City Hall and register as such, have their picture taken for enemy alien ID cards, and get fingerprinted.
If they were stopped and could not show their new identification, they would be in big trouble.
They could be searched or interrogated at any time; police could come into their house and confiscate their belongings.
Any letter they received from Italy could incriminate them.
Some Italians were rounded up and sent to prison camps far away.
They couldn’t keep a radio anymore, because the police might think they were using it to communicate with German submarines.
“What would we tell a submarine?” Joey argued. He was angry he wouldn’t be able to listen to Crime Doctor or Jack Benny, Louie’s favorite.
For young men, there was one quick way out of enemy alienhood, one way to citizenship and all its perks: enlistment.
If you were willing to risk death for the United States of America, you could get yourself naturalized lickety-split.
Half a million Italian American men enlisted during the war.
Which brings us to the next important moment in our story.
* * *
THE FIRST TIME STELLA FORTUNA spoke to Carminantonio Maglieri, it was snowing. The Fortuna sisters were walking home from Hartford High after a night school class; it was January 1942. The blackout-dark streets were covered in a film of ice.
Carmelo—although of course Stella had no idea who he was at the time—slowed down his car, keeping pace with the girls, which made them nervous. Both he and the man in the passenger seat were dressed in olive-green U.S. Army uniforms.
Carmelo rolled down the window and called out, “Would you like a ride?” Those were his first words to Stella.
Her first words to him were “Go away.”
But he didn’t go away; instead he leaned head and shoulders out the window, a friendly smile on his face.
Stella watched warily as wet snow clusters embedded themselves in his waxed black curls.
Her stomach turned at the thought of men following her and Tina in a car.
The girls were on Farmington Avenue, still twenty minutes from home, and the hard black heels of their shoes skidded on the slick pavement.
“Come on, hop in,” Carmelo said. He spoke Italian with the generic southern accent some immigrant men adopted in order to communicate with speakers of many regional dialects; he could have been from anywhere in Italy.
“Pretty girls shouldn’t have to walk in the snow, in the dark like this. Let us take you home.”
“No, thank you,” Tina said. “We absolutely do not accept rides from strangers.” She tugged Stella’s arm and they resumed their slippery march, elbows linked, leaving wet snow to pool in the exclamation points of their footprints.
Carmelo rolled the car forward, catching up. “Very smart, not to take rides from strangers. But ladies! This weather is too much.”
Neither Tina nor Stella replied, and the car tailed them as they shuffled on in silence.
The cardboard shanties they passed were unsettlingly silent, the snow collecting on their pulping eaves.
The moon was bright but diffuse, nestled among the storm clouds.
Every night they made this trip Stella wavered between wishing it were better lit, so they would be able to see an assailant coming, and wishing it were darker, so they would have a chance of hiding.
“Come on, ladies,” the man hanging from the window tried again.
“It’s not safe out here. I promise we’ll take you straight home.
On our honor as soldiers.” He smiled and his cheeks became glossy marbles of joviality.
Stella had twin thoughts that his face was handsome and that it was smarmy.
He caught her gaze and she narrowed her eyes at him so he wouldn’t mistake any invitations there.
“We know all about soldiers,” Stella told him. She regretted it immediately; she didn’t want to give him any ideas he didn’t already have.
But he had ducked back into the car to consult the man in the passenger seat. After a moment, the curl-covered head popped back out again. “Your father,” he said. “Tony Fortuna, right?”
“How did you know?” Tina said reflexively, and Stella elbowed her so hard Tina had to cling to her sister to keep her balance.
“So we’re not strangers!” said the smiling young man, smiling afresh.
“Your father knows us. Ask him when you’re home, which will be in just a few minutes.
He’ll tell you all about us. I’m Carmelo Maglieri, and this is Rocco Caramanico.
” He indicated his companion with his thick thumb.
“I worked with your father. We all worked together,” he amended.
He was so excitable he hadn’t gotten his own story straight.
“We’re not getting in the car,” Tina insisted as Stella was saying, “Worked together where?” The cold had evaporated her mistrust. She wanted to get in the warm car.
“Construction, G. Fox,” he said. “Two years ago, in the summer.”
It was true, Tony had worked on the G. Fox site. But Tina said, “If you really knew our father, you would know he would never let us get in your car.”
“Come on, Tina,” Stella said. Her ankles hurt from walking on the ice. “This is stupid. They’re just going to give us a ride home.”
“Stella!”
“Fine, walk. I’m taking the ride.” Stella made for the curb, and the driver—Carmelo—stopped the car. “Try not to slip and break your neck,” she told her sister.
“But Stella!” The expression on Tina’s face was simple despair. Her red lipstick appeared much darker in the dimly moonlit street, and with the snow catching on her hair Tina looked like a still from a movie.
Stella slid across the car’s tan leather seat and called, “Come on, Tina. Get in.” Then again, more tenderly, “Get in. It’s going to be fine.” And Tina got in.
THE GIRLS ARRIVED HOME WITHOUT INCIDENT and their father did not even yell at them about it. The trouble is, no matter how cold and dark the night, if you accept a ride from a man, you are allowing your entire circle to start gossiping. Stella made her own bed by getting in that car.
YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN WAITING for Carmelo Maglieri to make his appearance ever since his father, Tomaso, met Tony all those years ago on the railroad.
Well, Stella wasn’t waiting for him—she’d never heard of him.
Nevertheless, I should tell you a little more about him here, since he won’t be going away, no matter what Stella told him or how many times.
Carminantonio Maglieri, known as Carmelo, was born in March 1921 in an Abruzzi mountain village called Sepino, a maze of medieval cobblestone alleys that sits on top of the ancient Samnite city of Altilia.
Despite the Abruzzi’s rich history and adorable brand of stone-and-flower idyll, there was no work there.
During Carmelo’s entire childhood, his father, Tomaso, had been sending home money from America.
But in 1935 Tomaso was almost sixty years old; he wouldn’t be able to support the family with his own physical labor for much longer.