Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #18
Still not sure how much Tina had heard, Stella decided she didn’t want to hear the proposal itself, so she walked through the living room, nodding coolly at her father, who looked irritated and confused, and joined her mother in the kitchen, where the women silently poured, toasted, and each drank down a tall glass of wine.
* * *
THE WEDDING WOULD BE ON AUGUST 17, 1946, a ceremony at Sacred Heart and a reception at the Italian American Home on Platt Street.
Tony Fortuna paid for everything, as the father of the bride should.
He accompanied Tina to the G. Fox bridal boutique to pick out the dress and the veil.
They were one hundred dollars and twenty-five dollars, respectively.
The dress was made of stiff white linen; although silk wasn’t rationed anymore, it was still expensive, so Tina hadn’t even tried on any silk dresses.
Stella would have at least tried one on.
Stella would be the maid of honor, of course.
She swam through a strange mix of emotions, heart-twisting pride and excitement to help her baby sister in this wedding, even though Stella had private misgivings about the marriage Tina was making.
It was the second time Stella would be maid of honor, after Franceschina Perri’s wedding to Frank Carapellucci last fall, so Stella had some good ideas about how to celebrate her sister.
She spent fifteen dollars, carefully saved from her factory pay and hidden from her father in a pink sock she kept in her underwear drawer, to throw Tina a beautiful shower luncheon.
She bought pastries from Federal Bakery on State Street and even made tiny “tea” sandwiches like the ones they sold at the café at G.
Fox, triangles of American bread with cheese or jam inside.
It was the closest Stella had ever come to cooking anything; she wouldn’t have done it for anyone but Tina.
All the ladies who attended cooed over their daintiness.
Stella had spent a month of evenings making party favors—a handkerchief with a multicolor crocheted lace edge.
She bought herself and Tina both new summer dresses, as well as new shoes, to wear to the party.
And finally, Stella got Joey to buy her a bottle of anisette, which the ladies passed around after their tea.
Everyone was laughing as they kissed Tina good-bye, and everyone left a cash-stuffed envelope in a pile on the table.
A grand success of a shower; Stella was satisfied she wouldn’t be shown up as an East Side hostess for a long time.
Stella’s maid of honor dress was yellow and mimicked Tina’s in its puffed shoulders and sweetheart neckline.
The other bridesmaids would wear an identical dress but in baby blue.
For the bridesmaids, Tina had Fiorella Mulino, Carolina Nicotera, Franceschina’s younger sister Loretta, and a girl named Josie Brandolino, who was the daughter of Tony’s new Abruzzese boss.
Tony had been laid off from his factory job in March—they had to make room for the boys coming home—and he was working odd jobs for a construction company.
He wanted to make a good impression on his new boss there and made Tina invite Josie to be a bridesmaid even though the Fortuna girls barely knew her.
Tony booked a band and arranged the catering, sandwiches and pizza. Stella would have wanted to weigh in on her own wedding menu, but Tina didn’t complain. Tony was paying, and he could choose whatever food he wanted.
Good for him, Stella reminded herself. This was the only wedding he’d get to host.
Rocco’s sister Barbara volunteered to make the cake, a four-tier fruitcake dense with raisins, figs, prunes, and honey, sweet work-arounds to the ongoing sugar rationing.
Barbara needed all the sugar she could get her hands on to frost the three-foot-tall sixty-pound behemoth a suitably angelic bridal white.
This was not Barbara’s first wedding cake—it was a gift worth at least thirty-five dollars, and she’d become a specialist over her years in Hartford.
But decorating, she felt, was not her forte, and she conscripted Stella to help.
Two Thursdays before the wedding, Barbara and Stella walked down to State Street and stood on the sidewalk outside of Federal Bakery for two hours, watching the white-aproned professionals decorate a wedding cake in the front bay window for everyone to see, as they did each morning.
Stella shifted on her sore feet—she’d worn her nice shoes so they might convincingly pass as actual shoppers, not just snoopers—while Barbara stared, unabashed, and murmured things like “Aha! Did you see what she just did with the knife?” and “Well, we’re not going to be able to make flowers like that at home, are we, Stella? ”
The week after he proposed, Rocco had bought Tina an American-style engagement ring, a band of yellow gold with a half-carat diamond in the middle.
She wore it everywhere, even to work at the coffeepot factory, every day for the rest of her life, until the day she was washing dishes and the diamond dropped out of the setting and down her sink.
She had her nephew Artie take the pipe out, but they never found the diamond.
This happened in April 2006, months shy of her sixtieth anniversary, and two weeks after Rocco had died.
THE WEEK BEFORE TINA GOT MARRIED, Louie, who had just turned sixteen, went into the woods by Keney Park with two of his friends from school, Bobby Minghella and Danny Peach.
Danny’s father, a Hartford police officer, had either given Danny his handgun to try out or had left the gun unattended where Danny could find it—this part of the story fluctuated—and the boys were going to practice firing at squirrels.
They didn’t even get off a single practice shot before the gun misfired—either Danny or Bobby had been trying to load it—and the bullet lodged in Louie’s heart, in the muscle wall between his left and right ventricles.
It was a precision accident; a quarter of an inch in any direction and the bullet would have stopped his heart.
Bobby and Danny panicked at the sight of the gushing heart’s blood, a surprisingly dark maroon color.
They dropped the gun and ran, assuming Louie was as good as dead, although they did stop the first person they met in the park—a middle-aged man who was walking his German shepherd—and pointed him toward the clearing where they’d left the body.
The dog walker rushed back to his house and called an ambulance in time to save Louie’s life.
He was pumped full of other people’s blood, sedated and bandaged, but there was nothing else that could be done.
The doctor explained that if he tried to take the bullet out, the surgery had a 50 percent chance of killing the boy.
They could only wait and pray. The heart with the bullet in it would probably never work quite right, but it might heal over with careful convalescence.
Forty-three years later, Louie would undergo a triple bypass during which his cardiac surgeon would pull out the old bullet, no problem.
In the end, it wouldn’t be Louie’s heart but his kidneys that would kill him.
So, although the Fortuna-Caramanico wedding had been much anticipated, in the making for four years, in the end it was just one confusing day in a stressful week. Tina thought maybe they should cancel the wedding, but everything had been paid for and Tony wouldn’t hear of it.
Assunta refused to leave Louie’s side. She slept in a chair that was terrible for her circulation and she kept a vase of mint on the bedside table—she performed countless incantations every day; this was a fairly classic example of the Evil Eye at work.
After a week in the hospital ward, she hadn’t even been home to change her clothes.
The night before the wedding, Stella, who had spent the whole day helping Barbara embed a lace pattern of tiny silver balls in the cake frosting using a pair of tweezers and whose hair still smelled like confectioner’s sugar, came to collect her mother and sister at the hospital, but Assunta wouldn’t leave.
Louie’s doctor tried to step in helpfully, to reassure Assunta everything would be fine while she was gone.
The scene escalated quickly, Assunta weeping and the doctor yelling.
It was plain to Stella, watching with the dawning embarrassment of the newly bilingual, that Louie’s doctor thought her mother was crazy, an insane and dirty peasant with childish ideas about witchcraft who rejected his commonsense medical advice.
Tina, who should not have been allowed to come to the hospital on the eve of her own wedding, realized her mother would not be attending and collapsed on the floor, which must have been covered in who knows what kinds of diseases.
Tony brought an end to the spectacle by saying to his wife, “It’s fine.
You stay here with Louie. Tina doesn’t need you.
” Assunta quieted down right away, cowed into hiccups.
That night she came home to Bedford Street, bathed, set her hair in rag curls, and slept in her own bed, then got up in the morning to fix the girls breakfast before they got ready for the photographer. The pronouncement that her daughter didn’t need her seemed to have done the trick.
In all the drama of Louie’s accident, Tina had been completely distracted and so had forgotten her panic about her impending sexual encounter with her husband-to-be. Which was just as well. Stella had been about at the end of her rope listening to her sister speculate and fret.
THE WEDDING WENT SMOOTHLY, and there were many compliments paid to Tony Fortuna, who had hosted a lovely event.