Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #11
Into this mix came Carmelo Maglieri, for all the world like he was already part of the group.
He had brought with him a bulky black box, which he left by the coatrack.
Joey strolled Carmelo through the aunties and uncles, introducing him, and Stella eavesdropped on their friends’ reactions to the Abruzzese boy’s handsome smile and sparkling blue eyes.
The mothers with daughters were practically squealing in delight to find this shiny fish swimming in the pool.
“What’s the matter with you, Stella?” Franceschina Perri whispered.
The girls huddled together in the kitchen, watched over by Assunta’s somewhat sanctimonious new Blessed Virgin figurine, which stood on the wall shrine by the photo of the dead baby Stella.
“Why are you playing around? Someone else is going to snap him up.”
“Snap him up if you want him,” Stella said. She certainly didn’t want to get herself into a jam where her father thought she was encouraging Carmelo’s courtship. “I give him to you. My gift, you can thank me later.”
“Those eyes, though!” Franceschina clucked her tongue. “To die for.”
“In Calabria lots of men have blue eyes,” Stella said dismissively. “It’s nothing special to me. I prefer dark eyes anyway.”
After everyone had eaten, Carmelo opened the black box he’d brought and revealed a concertina. “May I play you a song, Signora Fortuna?” he asked loudly, because people had already started to assemble to see what was going to happen.
Assunta was giggling at the attention; she actually had to press her hands to her mouth to contain herself. “Oh, Carmelo, don’t be so formal. You can call me Assunta.”
“Well, lovely Zia Assunta, may I play you a song?” He had shouldered the concertina’s strap and pressed a few chords—the living room was full of the anticipation of live music.
“I know just the one I want to play. It runs through my head every time I see you.” He made moon eyes and covered his heart. What a ham, Stella thought.
Assunta, still giggling, nodded. Carmelo’s foot tapped triple time on the wooden floorboards, and before he even played the opening chord Stella already knew what he was going to sing.
Her heart was pounding in her ears; she knew her face was red with emotion.
The words were a little different than the words Stella knew, a dialect more southern sounding than the one spoken in Ievoli, but they were Calabrese—where had Carmelo learned to sing in Calabrese?
I saw her at the water doing her washing
My Calabrisella, with her dark eyes
By the time he had reached the second line, everyone was squealing and clapping with joy, because “Calabrisella Mia” was every Calabrese’s favorite song here, so far from home.
Even cranky old Zu Aldo was smiling. Carmelo had won over a whole room of stubborn, distrusting Calabresi with one song on his concertina.
Stella’s heart was still pounding, caught in the memory of the fhesta in Nicastro all those years ago, dancing around the bonfire among the swirling pacchiane and the Gypsies, the night she thought of as the happiest in her life. The song had taken her home.
Carmelo’s voice was clear and sweet, and was completely overwhelmed when the entire room joined him for the chorus:
Tirulalleru lalleru lala! Sta Calabrisella muriri mi fa!
As the last bar to the song closed and all the gathered friends were clapping and cheering, Carmelo turned to Stella and winked.
FIORELLA HAD A NEW JOB in the fall of 1942, in a factory where she made mortar shells.
They paid her thirty cents an hour—twelve dollars a week, since they were strict and only let you work eight hours a day.
“If you get tired and don’t put the pieces together exactly right, someone can get killed,” Fiorella explained.
But anyway, twelve dollars a week! She would never go back to the laundry.
Hartford—home to Pratt he had revealed himself to be a consistent young man.
If too much time went by between packets, Tina assumed Rocco was dead, and Stella would have to console her sister with reminders that he hadn’t been dead any of the previous times.
The letters were always addressed to “My Friend Tina”:
To My Friend Tina,
Thank you for sending me presents. It was very kind of you.
The cookies were very good. Only a little stale, although I think you must have mailed them more than a month ago.
Thank you for making them for me. It is raining here right now and I should go to sleep. Please give my regards to your family.
Your friend, Rocco Caramanico
Louie showed them where New Guinea was on a map from his geography textbook—farther away than they had been able to imagine, near Australia—and translated unfamiliar words that pertained to army life, like “mess” and “KP duty.”
“That’s Kitchen Patrol,” Louie explained. “So he cooks for the other soldiers.”
Rocco wrote often about KP, and especially about boxes of chicken parts.
The chicken arrived in a box that had once been frozen, although by the time it came to Rocco it was a collection of thighs and organs and pieces of congealed blood sloshing around in a slimy yellow liquid.
Rocco’s job was to dump the box into a pot and cook it all together as it was, and that was what the unit ate, day in and day out.
Sometimes he found feathers still in the box.
The letters never mentioned combat, enemies, or what work his chemical engineering corps was doing. The women had no way of knowing to what degree he was censoring himself so the letters could get through to them.
Barbara, Rocco’s sister, found the idea of her brother in a kitchen hard to believe. “Rocco doesn’t know how to cook anything,” she said. He was very traditionally minded about those things; it was one of the reasons it was so important he found a wife who could cook and keep house.
Tina and Barbara put together care packages that they sent to New Guinea at the beginning of every month, homemade cookies and knitted socks and whatever else they could think of that would survive the journey.
Of the thirty packages they sent during the years Rocco was at war, he received eight.
IN OCTOBER 1942, the Fortunas received a letter bearing the Nicastro postmark. Stefano Morello from Sambiase had been killed in North Africa.
Tina only waited for Tony to finish reading before bursting into noisy tears. “He was such a nice boy,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry, Stella, I’m so sorry, he was such a nice boy.” Assunta, too, had begun to cry, lifting her apron to wipe her face.
Stella, who of course could not cry, even now, held her mother and her sister and stroked their backs as they took turns sobbing into the bosom of her dress.
In her heart she’d known she would never marry Stefano, but after six years of letting people believe she’d intended to, she was overwhelmed with melancholy.
She thought of the day they’d met at the Nicastro fhesta, of his winter visits to Ievoli, gathering snow in the garden for scirubetta and feeding little Luigi with his spoon.
Stefano had died never knowing she’d intended to break off the engagement.
That evening, lying still in their bed after Tina had cried herself to sleep, Stella worked to construct a mental image of Stefano, of his hands, his hair, the way he dressed.
Even the face was indistinct to her. Maybe she would have thought of him more often if she’d had a memory aid, like her mother’s photo of the lost Mariastella.
Feeling a little bit disgusted with herself, she relaxed into a sense of relief.
Stefano had given her a gift by dying—an excuse for spinsterhood.
No one would expect her to let anyone court her; she was grieving.
Stefano had bought her time—perhaps enough time.
She could legitimately drag out the mourning for five years, she thought, and by then she would be twenty-seven. Far too old to marry.
She said a prayer for Stefano now.
THE CHRISTMAS EVE PARTY at the Society was the pivotal event of the year and had required much preparation.
Franceschina Perri had her eye on a boy named Frank Carapellucci and had enlisted all the girls to help her run him down.
Stella had never seen a girl go so unabashedly crazy for a boy like that.
But Franceschina was a red-blooded American girl; she pooh-poohed the rules of decorum the Italian girls had been raised to follow.
You did what you had to to get what you wanted.