Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #6
Joey had a job, too, finally. Carmelo had introduced him to the hiring manager at the electric company.
The manager, who liked Carmelo, had found Joey a position.
Stella hoped her brother respected his job enough not to do anything stupid.
She didn’t want Carmelo to get in trouble for a bad referral.
ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1949, Stella gave birth to a baby boy, six pounds, six ounces. The birth was natural and uncomplicated, although—it must be said—not that much less painful than the time she had almost died in childbirth.
They named the baby Thomas, after his paternal grandfather, but with the American spelling. A healthy boy to carry on the family name. Of course Tina and Rocco stood up as the baby’s godparents at the baptism.
THIS IS WHERE THINGS STARTED to speed up for Stella.
It began with the hours mixing together so that the days lost any discretion.
Mealtimes were meaningless; Stella ate when she was hungry, which was all the time, because the baby sucked her dry like an adorable cannibal.
The only thing Stella let herself care about was him, Tommy, until she felt the next one coming alive inside her and then her caring was divided, and then there would be a third, and it was divided again, and so on and so on until she was so fractioned and diluted by her own caring that every other thing in the world receded into winking stars on a peripheral horizon.
Fifteen years later, when the bearing was finally over, she would look at the forty-four-year-old woman in the mirror and struggle to itemize what had happened in the lost interim.
ONE THING THAT HAPPENED WAS QUEENIE. Cute as a button, she seemed, but in retrospect there were plenty of warning signs.
On a Tuesday evening in May 1950, Stella was sitting in her mother’s kitchen, nursing baby Tommy, when Louie burst in, the screen door to the garden banging behind him.
He ignored Tina, who was peeling carrots and whom he almost hit with the door, and Stella, who tsked him as she pulled a cloth over her bare breast and Tommy’s pinched, concentrating little face.
Assunta was standing at the stove moving the pasta around with her wooden spoon so it wouldn’t stick to the pot. “Mommy,” he said to her back. “I want to get married.”
Assunta turned around and looked at her son. “Okay, Louie,” she said. “You going to find a girl?”
“I found one,” he said. “And I asked her to marry me, but she said no.”
Assunta and Tina both gasped and Stella hid a smile by turning her face into Tommy’s blanket. “You proposed to a girl without bringing her here first?” Tina exclaimed as Assunta smacked him on the shoulder with the dripping spoon.
“What’s the matter, you go so fast.” Assunta smacked him again, harder. “Are you in trouble?”
“No trouble,” Louie said. “She’s a good girl—very strict father.
” The drooping bags under his eyes—he’d had them since he was a little boy—gave him a canine affect that made him look particularly earnest. “I had to say something because I didn’t want her to get away.
I didn’t want her thinking I wasn’t serious. ”
“Sounds like you better tell us about this girl,” Stella said. “And we better get our stories straight before Papa gets home.”
Two weeks ago, Louie had accompanied Bill Johnson on a house call in West Hartford.
It was the family’s oldest daughter who let them in and explained the problem with the fuse box.
She spoke perfect, fast English and Louie hadn’t had any idea she was Italian until he noticed the wooden plaque over the doorframe—the pastel face of Jesus over the words DIO BENEDICA LA NOSTRA CASA.
The pretty girl stayed and watched their work sharply.
Louie was sweating with panic because he didn’t want to jeopardize his job, but he couldn’t leave without saying something.
In the end, the only thing he managed to ask her was her name. Pasqualina Lattanzi—a big name for a tiny person, as Louie described her, only this high and with a face like a doll’s. Everyone, he would learn, called her Queenie instead.
He couldn’t ask her on a date in front of Bill, so he memorized the address and as soon as his workday was over he biked back over. She was in the front yard, reading a book while she supervised a gaggle of boys who were playing a war game around the crab apple tree.
“You have to get out of here,” Queenie said to him. “My father will kill you.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Louie said.
“Well, I am, and I don’t want him to kill me, either.” She stood up, put her book down on the chair, and crossed her arms.
“I’m just here to ask you out on a date,” Louie said. “If your father wants I can ask his permission first.”
“I don’t date,” she said, but Louie could tell she was checking him out.
Louie asked, “Why not? How old are you?”
“I’m eighteen. But my family’s old-fashioned.” Her broad American voice sounded anything but old-fashioned to him. “My father doesn’t believe in dating. Only courtship, you know, like in Italy, with chaperones, and only when you’re planning to get married.”
“What if we wanted to get married, though?” Louie said, before he had thought out the words, and then quickly decided he might as well see it through. “Could we go on a date if we were getting married?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said.
“I’ll learn,” he said. “Do we have to get engaged before we can talk to each other? I can propose right now.”
Queenie shook her head. “I’m in junior college. When I’m done and have a secretary job, I’ll start thinking about settling down.”
By now, one of her brothers had shaken loose from the group of boys. He came over and stood by Queenie’s shoulder, which he just about came up to, and crossed his arms just like her. “You’d best be moving along, young man,” he said, exactly like a very short version of John Wayne might have said.
“That’s what I was telling him,” said Queenie.
Louie moved along, but he stopped by the Lattanzi house on his bicycle every day on his way home from work.
“You’ve got to cut this out,” Queenie would tell him. “You can’t just keep coming by like this. You’re going to get me in big, big trouble.”
“I’ll quit coming by if you agree to go out with me,” Louie would reply. But she hadn’t agreed yet.
When Louie told his mother and sisters about his predicament, Stella said to him, “You’re as bad as Carmelo. Don’t you know some women should just be left alone?”
“She wants to get married,” Louie said. “If it weren’t for her father she’d say yes and go out with me right now, I know it.”
“You all know it, don’t you,” Stella said, but no one minded her. She looked down at little Tommy. “Are you going to be like that someday?” she asked him. “Just knowing you’re the best thing ever and that you should always, always get what you want, as long as you’re pushy enough?”
“You’re one to talk, aren’t you, Stella,” Louie said.
“Your father will have to call her father and we’ll invite them all over for dinner,” Assunta said. “That’s the proper way to do this.”
“Yeah, bring her over here,” Stella said. “Papa will make her get engaged to you whether she likes it or not.”
LOUIE GOT ENGAGED TO QUEENIE LATTANZI in June 1950.
They wouldn’t get married until she’d graduated and found a job.
“It’s much harder for married ladies to find jobs,” Queenie explained to Stella.
“They think you’re just going to quit to have a baby.
So you have to look while you’re still a Miss So-and-So. ”
Queenie’s parents had been in America for a long time.
Her old-fashioned father was a well-respected carpenter whose furniture was carried in all the best stores.
He had finished his third-grade education in Italy—“The furthest you could go there, you know,” Queenie would add defensively—and was a big proponent of schooling, which was why he was paying for Queenie’s professional course.
Queenie herself had never been to Italy.
She spoke perfectly fine Italian but made it clear that she looked down on people who made no effort to live in an American way.
She had an Italian woman’s wherewithal and an American girl’s self-confidence.
Now that she and Louie were engaged, she visited Bedford Street two or three times a week, bossily advising her future in-laws about how they could better their lives.
They needed to install electric ceiling fans; this wasn’t the village anymore.
They needed to get a television for their living room; a person needed to keep up with the news.
They had to clip coupons from the paper to save money at the store.
They had to paint the walls of their house and hang art; no American lived in empty white rooms. And this—this was a much better recipe for blueberry muffins than the one Tina had been using.
The Fortunas all liked her, even if she was a little know-it-all. She was, Stella found, generally correct. She was correct, for example, about Tony, even if she was willing to say what no one else was.
IT WAS QUEENIE WHO SPOTTED something was wrong with baby Tommy, because even though she was young and unmarried she was the only one with context about what American babies were supposed to do.
“He’s more than a year old,” Queenie said. “He should be walking by now.”
“Is that true, Ma?” Stella asked Assunta later.
Assunta looked down at Tommy, who was crawling awkwardly across her kitchen floor.
Her mouth was pulled to one side; Stella could tell she felt bad for not knowing the answer.
“It’s true,” she said finally, “you all were walking before one year old, I think. But maybe things are different here. Children aren’t outside as much. ”