Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #20
The store in Chicago hadn’t worked out so well.
The business was good, people in and out all day, lots of sales, constantly restocking, but Carmelo’s brother, Gio, was too generous, letting people buy on credit, and the brothers were barely breaking even.
After a year and a half, Carmelo knew enough about running a business to realize he’d been wrong about wanting to.
He decided to sell off his share and come back to Hartford.
Gio was selling his share in the store now, too, and would follow in a couple months.
Carmelo had come back to Hartford before Christmas. He needed a job, though, and he wasn’t getting anywhere asking around. Jobs were hard to find, with all the boys back from the war and the factories done with their war contracts. He was running out of ideas when he got very lucky.
He was walking down Franklin Avenue at five thirty in the morning—he’d gone out early to get a paper and check the wanted ads—and passed a bunch of men milling around a chain-link fence, a pile of shovels and picks beside them.
On a whim he took off his long wool coat and left it by the fence, then strolled up and joined the men.
He was freezing cold but less conspicuous without the coat.
The timing was perfect, since the foreman hadn’t given out assignments yet, and Carmelo grabbed a pick and followed where the guy pointed, to a white line painted on the crumbling concrete.
He watched a couple other men set about work, watched how they wrestled up the old concrete and dug straight down on the white line, making narrow, carefully defined canals in the road—they were laying space for underground electrical wires.
Carmelo dug and dug; hours passed, the other men on the line chatting with him but no one asking where he’d come from or getting suspicious that there were too many men.
He was just beginning to get into the swing of the work, beginning to feel like he was good enough that maybe he could talk them into letting him stay on, when he hit what turned out to be a live wire—someone had mispainted the line he was following.
“Suddenly I wasn’t cold anymore!” Carmelo slapped his thigh and everyone at the table around Stella laughed or cooed in horror.
He woke up flat on his back in the hospital, nearly electrocuted to death, and that’s when it came out—when they tried to do the paperwork for the hospital bills—that Carmelo Maglieri wasn’t even a United Electrical employee.
Everyone got very nervous about lawsuits and seemed relieved to learn Carmelo wasn’t intending to take anyone to court—as long as they could give him a job.
A job they gave him, and a slightly gratuitous chunk of change to cover his medical expenses.
Joey poured all the men more wine as the story wound down.
Tina was smiling as she gathered plates.
Her joy at seeing Carmelo was simple and pure; her friend was back.
For once, Stella helped her take the dirty dishes to the kitchen.
Seeing her sister so happy, Stella felt guilty knowing she had driven Carmelo to leave, taken him from people who cared about him.
But Tina didn’t think of things in those terms. At least, Stella hoped she didn’t.
Over the sink, where Tina was running hot water into the basin, Stella whispered, “I can’t believe he’s here, Tina. I thought we were done with him.”
“But he likes you, Stella.” Tina slammed down the tap and squeezed the excess water out of the dishrag with two hands; her usual unnecessary force. “Can’t you see that? He’s here because he still likes you even after how mean you were.”
Stella swallowed. “I wasn’t—”
“He’s a good man, Stella,” Tina interrupted her. “You should stop teasing him. He doesn’t deserve it.”
Tina dropped the rag in the sink and left Stella alone in the kitchen.
* * *
IN FEbrUARY 1947, Tina had been married six months.
The first three, the ladies at the Sacred Heart socials joked about Tina’s robust good health and how a little one was probably on the way, but when Tina blushed and waved them off they left her alone, because everyone knows it’s bad luck to talk about a pregnancy before the mother is showing.
By the holiday season, though, Tina was fair game.
She’d been married long enough, and all the ladies who’d already had to go through it wanted a turn at her, to make sure she had to go through it, too.
They’d come up to her after mass and pat her belly, right there in the church, and ask her if there was something cooking.
“We’re trying,” Tina would say, turning her dark pink.
The ladies would cackle and say, “You have to try harder!”
Now that half a year had passed, people asked Tina point-blank what she was waiting for, or if something was wrong.
Tina didn’t know how to answer these questions and became flustered and downtrodden.
It was upsetting to watch. When she could, Stella would step in and change the subject; usually this meant offering herself as a sacrificial lamb, because most ladies were more disgruntled that Stella wasn’t married than that Tina wasn’t pregnant.
On Ash Wednesday, Tina made a huge dinner for the whole family, hot boiled ricotta polpette, parsley-baked fish, fresh linguine she had cut before work.
But her six-month anniversary had just come and gone and she was so distraught by that milestone that she couldn’t eat her own feast. Six months of being a wife and she hadn’t been able to do the most important thing.
Stella rubbed her sister’s back while Tina cried in the Caramanico bedroom. “What’s wrong with me, Stella?” Tina asked, as if Stella could possibly have the answer.
“You know it can take time,” Stella said. “You’ve heard all the same stories I have. It’s only been six months.”
“Maybe I did something wrong and God doesn’t want me to be a mother.” Speaking these words made Tina start sobbing again.
“Tina. Enough. You’ve never done anything wrong in your life.” Stella scratched gently at Tina’s scalp, which had always soothed her since she was a little girl. “Just give it time, little bug, and pray to Santa Maria. I promise I will pray for you, too. Va bene?”
Stella did not want to see Tina suffering like this. But she also wanted Tina to conceive as quickly as possible for selfish reasons; if there was a grandchild for Tony and Assunta to concentrate on, there would be less pressure on Stella to marry Carmelo.
NO ONE COULD ACCUSE TINA of not working that particular chore as thoroughly as she worked any other.
She had told Stella more than once that she hoped Rocco’s enthusiasm would eventually wane, but behind their closed bedroom door Tina seemed not to suffer inordinately while paying her marital debt.
That very night, only hours after she had cried too hard to eat her own polpette, Tina made so much noise, soft cries like a little baby’s, that Stella, tiptoeing to the bathroom, paused in the hallway to listen in disgusted amusement.
Rocco’s voice was a low, coarse rumble, his words obscured, but Tina’s were not.
Stella shouldn’t have, but she did: she took a careful, silent step toward the door of her old bedroom and laid her ear against the wood.
“That’s nice,” Stella heard, then Rocco’s low murmur, then “That’s nice” again.
It was not the first time Stella had overheard the Caramanicos in the act—it would have been impossible not to, with Stella’s sleeping just around the corner in the kitchen—but she still found it horrifying and fascinating, almost unbelievable, that her good-girl sister seemed to enjoy having such an awful thing done to her.
Breathing shallowly, the door cool against her too-hot ear, Stella tried to guess what the sounds she heard could mean.
She felt the familiar knot in her stomach, the ball of nausea that always accompanied her dream, as she imagined what Tina must be letting Rocco do.
Stella was so focused on not betraying herself by making any noise that she failed to notice her father’s approach until his musty, garlicky night breath landed on her neck. “Jealous, eh?”
Stella coughed in surprise, choking on her own spittle as she whirled around, bringing herself eye level with a sweat-matted T of curling lead-gray chest hair.
Tony chuckled. “I always knew you were a little whore. You can barely hide it.” Before Stella’s half-asleep brain even caught up with what was happening, her father reached out and cupped her left breast in his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you some pistola real soon.”
FOR THE FIRST TIME, Stella thought of leaving Bedford Street.
An unmarried woman leaving her parents’ home—it wasn’t done, but how could she go on living here?
Once the idea had crossed her mind, she thought about it constantly.
She just had no idea how she could do it, short of marrying Carmelo Maglieri, but that would be taking her body out of the jaws of one wolf and putting it naked into another’s.
Becoming a nun seemed like a terrible idea to Stella—nothing but housework and praying all day, a prisoner locked away from everything that was interesting and delightful in the world.
But how else did a woman make it on her own?
She had no education and very little English.
The problem was larger than Stella’s limitations, though.
In the world where the Fortuna girls had been raised, a woman never left her father’s house until she was married.
To run away was the same thing as to become a whore.
If she did run, she would risk breaking herself away from her world forever.
She would be shunned in church. Her friends might not be allowed to see her anymore.
Her mother’s heart might break. Stella shoved aside the dread of what Assunta’s reaction would be—Stella couldn’t worry about her mother right now.