Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #19
Stella had seen many American weddings by now, and she knew what to expect. But seeing Tina come down the aisle looking so serene, so holy, she felt her heart pound with melancholy. Tina was leaving Stella to make her own family.
Carmelo Maglieri hadn’t come from Chicago to be Rocco’s best man, but he sent the newlyweds a card with eight dollars in it.
In Carmelo’s place, Rocco asked another paesan of his, a squirrelly young man named Jack Pardo.
Among Rocco’s other groomsmen were Joey, Mikey Perri, and, excitingly, a Portuguese man named Jimmy whom Rocco worked with at his new factory job.
Rocco and Tina had Jimmy escort Josie Brandolino, Tony’s boss’s daughter, who wasn’t very pretty and who they assumed would be grateful for a date even if he wasn’t Italian.
Fiorella Mulino caught the bouquet, but she wouldn’t be the next to get married.
In fact, she would never get married at all.
She would die of breast cancer two years later, when she was twenty-six years old.
She must have already been sick at the wedding, although the girls didn’t know it yet.
In the bridal party photo that still hangs on Tina Caramanico’s wall, Fiorella’s eyes are ever bright, her sweet smile full of youthful perfection.
In the evening, the new Mr. and Mrs. Rocco Caramanico rode away in a limousine to a fancy hotel near the train station. Their bags were already packed and waiting for them there; the next morning they would board a train for Washington, D.C., for their weeklong honeymoon.
That night, for the first time in her life, Stella slept alone. She woke up many times during the night and would have to struggle out of her sleepy confusion to remind herself why Tina wasn’t there.
WASHINGTON WAS VERY HOT, APPARENTLY, and full of large white buildings. But that wasn’t what anyone cared about.
“It hurt so much, Stella,” Tina told her. “I was so scared. And then he wanted to do it so many times, every night and sometimes in the morning.”
Stella wasn’t surprised Rocco had turned out to be a goat with all those sexual appetites.
She wasn’t sure how much more of Tina’s honeymoon gossip she wanted to hear—she was as curious about Tina’s experience as Tina was eager to discuss it, but the details made Stella’s stomach roil.
She didn’t say anything, just let Tina continue.
“He made me take off all my clothes, even my brassiere.” Tina hadn’t ever worn a brassiere, or even heard of one, until she came to America, but now that the girls knew what the undergarment was for, the thought of not wearing one was perverse.
“He wants to suck on my nipple, like a baby.” Tina’s deep-set eyes were round with scandal.
“Have you heard of that? A grown man sucking like a baby?” Stella grimaced.
She imagined grown men did all kinds of abhorrent things.
“And then, when he puts his liquid in you, it’s all sticky and it makes your skin itch.
You want to wash it off because it smells, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to wash it off, because maybe then I won’t get a baby.
Then sometimes I can smell it on myself even outside, when we’re walking around, and I wonder if other people can smell it, too. ”
“That’s disgusting,” Stella said.
“Yes,” Tina said, chastised, and her face assumed a propitiating expression. “Maybe if I get pregnant soon he’ll stop.”
ROCCO CARAMANICO HAD A GOOD JOB working at the Gillette factory, where he was a foreman on the production floor, but he didn’t have the money yet to buy the house he had promised his new bride. In the meantime, the Caramanicos moved in with the Fortunas to save money.
The sleeping arrangements needed to be reorganized.
The newlyweds required their own room, certainly, with a door.
The only solution was the room the sisters had shared.
But where would Stella go? She couldn’t sleep with the boys, and Assunta’s living room was not an option.
All the fancy things Assunta had made Tony buy for her were on display there, the doily-covered marble coffee table, the gold upholstered couch—all the symbols of her better life here in America, the things that set her apart from the dirt-sweeping village girl she’d been.
No one would be sleep-sweating or drooling on that couch.
“If you would just get married and move out, this wouldn’t be a problem,” Tony told Stella, both with humor and without.
Assunta was hoping the tenants on the second floor would move out soon so that the Caramanicos could take over up there and Stella could have her room back.
The Bedford Street house was designed for three families; if Assunta managed it right, she could have all her children living under her roof indefinitely.
But she couldn’t just kick the current paying tenants out, especially with Tony so tight for money, what with his only working part-time and with all the wedding expenses.
“You could sleep with me on the bed and your father can sleep on the cot in our room,” Assunta offered. Tony hadn’t been allowed connubial rights since the last miscarriage, doctor’s orders.
“No way in hell, Ma,” Stella said, and Assunta smacked the back of her hand because of her bad language. Assunta didn’t know about Stella’s nightmare about her father. But Stella would have rather joined the shantytown behind Front Street than shared a bedroom with Tony.
Instead, Stella slept in the kitchen on the trundle bed.
The house was noisy and stinky with too many bodies.
At night Stella couldn’t set up her bed until everyone had gone to sleep, or she would be underfoot in the kitchen.
She was sleep-deprived and always on edge.
She had no privacy at all, and now there was an extra man walking around the house.
Stella had nowhere to keep her clothes in the kitchen, so they stayed in Rocco and Tina’s room.
Dressing in the morning became a quadrille of awkwardness, Stella trying to dart in to reclaim her clean underwear during the slender margin of time in which Rocco took his militarily efficient shower.
She hated when he caught her alone in the bedroom, felt his searching eyes on her nightdress as he stood in his bathrobe.
Rocco’s muted lasciviousness made her nervous.
He was the type of man who had never trained himself not to stare at a woman’s breasts, and she’d noticed his eyes wandered over whatever female parts they were presented with.
Having had this thought—that her sister’s husband had thought about her body, and that the man had access to her any time he liked—Stella found it difficult to let herself fall asleep at night.
She would start awake, feeling terribly vulnerable.
In her perpetual haze of half-sleep, the nightmare came back. The days began to run together in a sleepy smear. Stella’s work at the factory became listless and imprecise.
This, she thought, living like this might wear me down.
AT THIS MOMENT OF WEAKNESS, the worst thing that could possibly happen happened—it was like the footfall of God stamping out Stella’s future. She saw it descending on her, but there was nowhere to jump out of the way.
January 12, 1947, the Fortunas were celebrating Stella’s twenty-seventh birthday.
Tina had baked a lemon pound cake. Stella was warm with wine and pleased with the party.
Everyone—the Fortunas, the Caramanicos, Zu Ottavio and Za Caterina Perri, the entire Nicotera family—was crowding around the dining room table, which had been set with Assunta’s nice yellow glass dessert plates, when the doorbell rang.
Joey stood up to get the door, and then he was bursting back into the dining room, shouting, “Look who’s here!”
There he was, wielding a dozen hothouse roses like a knight’s sword.
His cheeks were cold-bright, and snow ridged the shoulders of his overcoat and the brim of his fedora.
Perhaps it was only the swath of cold air he brought in with him, but it felt like witchcraft when the temperature in the dining room dropped enough for goose bumps to rise on Stella’s arms. You’re a cold woman, Stella—she remembered his words the last time she’d seen him, a curse laid on her skin.
“Carmelo!” Assunta couldn’t contain herself and burst into joyful tears. “What’s the matter, Joey? Take his coat, he must be freezing, he must be soaked! Carmelo, what are you doing here? Give Joey your coat! Come sit down, get warm!”
“These are for you, Stella,” Carmelo was saying, the arm of roses extended toward her as Joey wrestled the partially removed coat off Carmelo’s other shoulder, scattering snow across the rug. “I apologize for disrupting your birthday party. Auguri, tanti auguri.”
Stella took the flowers from him, stunned, numb, her mind soft. A wine-rich smile was stretched across her face, and she only realized when it was too late, when Carmelo beamed his cherry-cheeked smile back at her, that she must have looked like she was happy to see him.
She didn’t need to say anything, thank God, because everyone was falling on Carmelo with kisses and hugs and handshakes and shoulder slaps.
Was he back? Was he just visiting? Stella sat quietly in the middle of the hubbub and rubbed a rose petal between her thumb and index finger, wishing the silky fibrousness would recall her to reality.
Assunta brought an extra stool and Carmelo was installed at the table with a slice of yellow cake as wide as a building brick. With a typical amount of audience interruption, this was the story he told.