Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #14
Tony would never forgive his son for his cowardice.
Tony, who’d spent four years in combat on one of the bloodiest battlefronts in human history and who’d never shot himself in the arm, resented the weakness he saw in Joey.
A son was meant to be proof of a father’s manliness; Tony’s son was unmanly.
He was soft and spoiled and scared, a man who could earn no respect.
As long as both men lived they were never able to heal this breach.
Tony ignored his son if they were in the same room.
If they did speak to each other—if Joey, restless for drama, forced a conversation—it ended in shouting, taunting, and a xylophone of slamming doors.
Joey was physically unfit to perform many of the construction and factory jobs the other noncitizen immigrant men took, and the truth of his situation was a black mark against him, quickly sussed out by interviewers whose own boys were off being brave.
You’re injured because you served, but you don’t have American papers or veteran benefits .
. . ? After four or five anemic attempts to find a job, Joey gave up and spent his time in his room at Bedford Street.
He drank from the time he woke up—usually around noon—until he eventually fell asleep.
He went through gallons of Tony’s wine. Drinking was a habit he had picked up overseas, and he intended to live the rest of his life in a wine-dulled haze.
“You don’t need this,” Assunta would say to him when he sat down at the kitchen table in his undershirt and long johns. She’d say it as she poured him a tall glass of red wine from the jug she kept ready on the counter.
“Trust me, Ma, I do need it,” he’d reply. He’d wait for her to set a dish of breakfast pastina in front of him. “This is who I am now, your pathetic drunk failure of a son. This is how it’s gonna be.”
The presence of this replacement monster—a different person entirely from the mischievous, affectionate, pretty-faced Joey who’d gone to war—was a continuing shock to Stella.
The sight of him at the wine-stained kitchen table—it made her feel sick.
He was her brother, the baby she’d learned to hold when she was just a baby herself, who’d cried for a whole day when his favorite stray cat disappeared, who’d wink as he cracked open chestnuts for her with one sharp, deft bite.
Her baby brother—still so handsome now, despite his red eyes and nasty smile.
But he was a monster who didn’t care whom he hurt, as long as he could celebrate his own damage.
She didn’t see his suffering, like her mother did.
He was an agent of corruption in their house, a perfect thing that had rotted and was determined to rot everything around it.
Joey’s return was particularly annoying for Louie, who was fifteen and had had the boys’ bedroom to himself for three years.
Louie was a straight shooter, neat and polite, with subdued manners his teachers appreciated.
He was on track to graduate from high school—the first person in his family to do such a thing—and had done well on the football squad.
The sour-smelling and maudlin older brother in his bedroom was cramping his teenage style.
In the summer, when school was out, Louie started sleeping at friends’ houses and sometimes not coming home for days at a time.
Assunta cried about this, because Louie was her favorite. “You know he’s the best of you kids,” she would tell Joey as he sat at the table in a hanging-open bathrobe. “You let him take care of you like he’s the older brother.”
“I’m old in my heart, Ma,” Joey would say. “I’m so old I don’t have any reason to go running around doing shit to impress people. I know there’s no point.”
CARMELO MAGLIERI SOMETIMES TOOK JOEY out for a beer. It seemed to be what Joey needed, and he would come home in a better mood.
“You should marry him, Stella,” Joey told the whole family one night at dinner. “You know he’s got it for you. He’s been waiting for three years for you to come around.”
Tony looked up from his food, appraising his oldest daughter. Stella felt herself flush so violently the skin on her neck began to itch.
“Good for him,” she said shortly.
“Come on, Stella, you could do a hell of a lot worse.”
“Shut up, Joey,” she said in English. It sounded much stronger in English. “You’re an idiot.” She knew her father was still watching her.
“And you’re a snot.” Joey was shaking his head. “What about you you think is so great you could do better than Carmelo? Good-looking guy like that? Any one of the girls at the Society would say yes in a heartbeat.”
“Well, let them fight over him, then.” Stella focused on the cool air around her, willing away the burn in her face and neck.
“You should be thinking about your prospects, Stella,” Tony said. “You’re twenty-five. You never know who is going to come back from this war.”
“Papa, Tina hardly needs more of a reason to worry about Rocco,” Stella said.
It was mean to turn the conversation that way, but the strategy revealed itself to be a stroke of genius.
The focus was now on the latest news of Rocco Caramanico.
No one said anything else about Carmelo Maglieri that night, but Stella knew the seed had been planted in her father’s head. Carmelo had just become her enemy.
CARMELO WORKED AT PRATT the man was hardly starving and could easily charm some other doting mother into feeding him.
Carmelo gossiped with Tina like they were old girlfriends.
He taught Louie card games. On nights Carmelo came over, Tony and Joey would both stay in, and the men would play cards at the kitchen table—a rare rapprochement between Joey and his father.
This was the year Tony began to go out less in the evenings; it might be when his relationship with that other, unknown woman ended.
As much as Stella resented Carmelo’s infiltration of her family, she knew her mother was happier, free of the anxiety and sadness she’d had to rally against every night her husband hadn’t come home.
Carmelo read and wrote well in both Italian and English; he read the newspaper every morning, he told them, and that was how he learned everything he’d ever known.
It was Carmelo who enabled the Fortuna girls to pass their citizenship tests, at last, in July 1945.
Carmelo read the study questions aloud, interpreted them into Italian, and quizzed the sisters until, finally, it felt like Stella was memorizing something she understood.
He spoke to Tina in English, knowing she struggled with the language, prompting her kindly.
Carmelo now used Calabrese expressions he must have picked up from the Fortunas. Was he working so hard to fit in with them that he even changed his speech? Stella wondered, was he doing it on purpose or subconsciously? And—which would be worse?
IT WOULD COME EVENTUALLY, the direct confrontation. “Eventually” turned out to be the week after Stella had become a United States citizen.
“With your father’s permission,” Carmelo had said during dinner, in front of the whole damn family, “I would like to take you out on a date, Stella.”
“A date,” Antonio said, repeating the American word. “What kind of date?”
“Dinner and a movie on Saturday night,” Carmelo said.
He seemed calm and confident. Meanwhile Stella was full of dread, looking down at her plate of pasta as the rest of her family stared at her.
Their glee was palpable; it filled the dining room and clamped around her like an invisible vise.
How could she fight against his charisma?
“Well, Stella?” Tony said.
“No, thank you,” she replied in her politest voice. She could not break down under this pressure. She would not be subjugated. “I don’t go on dates.”
“Now’s a good time to start,” Tony said. “Or you’re going to be an old maid.”
“No, thank you,” she repeated, sitting up straight and looking her father in the eye. “I do not date. I am mourning my lost fiancé.”
“Horseshit,” said Joey in English. Assunta would have smacked him if she’d understood.
“Enough!” Tony had escalated to his roaring mode already. “She accepts your invitation,” he said to Carmelo. “You can pick her up here on Saturday at six o’clock.”
Stella’s hands were vibrating in fury. She was not in control of this situation. What could she do? “Tina, you’ll come with me as a chaperone,” she said.
Tony said shortly, “You’re twenty-five years old. You don’t need a chaperone.”