Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #7
Now Stella was worried and made Carmelo drive them to the hospital.
The doctor was unhappy with what he saw.
Stella couldn’t understand all the difficult medical language, but she could see there were terrible possibilities the doctor was not taking off the table.
Tommy’s poor little body—too little, the doctor said; it was not growing correctly—was subjected to measurements, tapping, stretching, and bending.
For three sleepless weeks Stella wondered if God was going to take away another child from her.
The tests came back negative—little Tommy did not have cancer.
He had a very rare condition that caused him to grow benign but growth-inhibiting tumors all over his body.
He would always be small-boned; he would never make a sports team or hold his own if he got bullied.
They had to be careful with this one—keep him close to home and out of trouble as long as possible.
As it turned out, “as long as possible” was “forever.” Tommy would never move farther than across the street from his mother’s house.
He would be thirty-nine when Stella would have her incapacitating Accident.
He might have gotten married, pursued his own dreams, but instead he would stay to take care of her.
ON MAY 28, 1951, Stella gave birth to a second living son, Antonio “Nino” Maglieri, named for his maternal grandfather.
Despite his namesake, he would turn out to be Stella’s favorite, the last boy whose childhood she still had the mind and heart to enjoy before there were just too many babies spilling and spitting and crashing and crying.
Louie and Queenie stood up as his godparents, even though they weren’t married yet.
Nino would grow up to be a robust and jovial child with lots of friends and an easy manner for talking his way out of trouble.
He was his older brother’s protector and best friend; no one messed with Tommy in the schoolyard because no one messed with Nino anywhere.
Without Tommy’s medical woes to protect him from the draft, Nino would be called up in the ninth batch of the 1970 draft lottery.
At least as Stella nursed her beautiful chocolate-eyed infant she had no way of imagining that when he would be just nineteen years old his perfect body would be blown apart by a landmine in a South Vietnamese forest.
WHEN THEY GOT HOME from their honeymoon in April 1952, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Fortuna, as they were now, moved into the ground-floor apartment on Bedford Street, into the bedroom Stella and Tina had once shared. Queenie was not circumspect about her displeasure with the arrangement.
“There’s just so little privacy here,” she said to Stella and Tina. “We’re newlyweds. It’s not right to have people living right on top of us, opening the doors at any time.”
“You know we all did it,” Tina said. “Just until you save up some money.”
“I’m not like you,” Queenie said. “I grew up American, and in America we don’t put up with what you did in the old country.” She didn’t say this meanly, but was she ever blunt.
“It’s just for a while,” Stella said to soothe, before Tina got upset. “Think of it as free rent.”
“Hardly free.” Queenie snorted. “Your father thinks because it’s his house he can come right into my room anytime he wants. Anytime.” Her meaning was plain, but she spelled it out anyway. “Stella, he comes in whenever he hears us in the middle of, you know.”
“Of doing the job?” Tina asked, aghast. Stella was disgusted but not surprised. At least Tina didn’t seem to know Tony used to spy on her and Rocco, too. How glad Stella was for the lockable doors and the flight of stairs between her married life and her father.
“And I’ve caught your mother going through my stuff,” Queenie added.
“No,” Stella said. “Mamma wouldn’t do that.” Queenie had had Stella’s sympathy as long as she wanted to complain about Tony, but Stella was not going to let this little Kewpie doll spread malice about Assunta.
“No way,” Tina chimed in.
“Wouldn’t she,” said Queenie.
“Maybe to help with your laundry, or something like that,” Stella said. “But she would never snoop or take anything. If you think she would, you don’t know her at all.”
“Well,” said Queenie. She sat back in her chair and didn’t say anything else about that. Queenie might always be right, but she had also learned that when Stella took a position it was unbreachable.
* * *
WHOSE FAULT WAS WHAT HAPPENED LATER, REALLY? Well, it was Tony’s fault—only Tony is to blame for what he did. But that doesn’t mean other people weren’t responsible, or complicit.
It was Assunta, for example, who brought Mickey into the family.
In July 1952, when Louie and Queenie had been back from their honeymoon for three months and, Stella surmised, the first-floor apartment was feeling a little crowded, Assunta made an announcement: it had been twelve years since she had seen her people in Ievoli, and she wanted to go back.
She wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Madonna at Dipodi, to celebrate the festival of the Assumption, and to see her mother’s grave.
In fact, Assunta had hatched a plan to make her straggler, Joey, grow up and start a family.
He would never get a wife the way he was going, because he spent all his salary at the bar and with puttane.
Assunta had tried crying and nagging, to no avail; now she’d decided maybe things had to happen in the opposite order: if he had the wife at home to support, he would have to settle himself down.
She just had to trick him into getting married.
Well, there wasn’t much she could do here in Hartford, because she didn’t understand girls like Queenie or how to impress them, and besides, she needed to get Joey away from his bad habits and from all the people who knew about those habits.
In Ievoli, though, she’d be able to control the situation.
The pilgrimage scheme came together quickly. When she made her announcement to the family at Sunday dinner, she added that she would need a chaperone and begged Joey to come with her. It would just be for a couple of months.
“A couple of months? No way, Ma. I’d have to quit my job.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Assunta said, although of course he would. A good pensioned job that he’d only just nailed down. “Anyway, I already bought the tickets for us.”
It was obvious to everyone what the plan was; Assunta was not skilled at subterfuge. Stella was only surprised that her father seemed to shrug the whole thing off.
“Women’s business,” he said. Tony had despaired of managing his son and maybe he figured Assunta’s plot was worth a shot.
Joey and Assunta left on July 27. In the middle of September, Tony received a letter in Joey’s badly spelled combination of English and Italian saying they were enjoying their visit, that they were going to stay in Ievoli for Christmas but then they would be bringing home his new wife, Michelina, whom he referred to as Mickey.
You did it, Ma, Stella thought. She was impressed.
She wondered where Assunta had procured a willing female and what measures had been taken to force the two into holy wedlock.
She hoped this Michelina was strong enough to make something of Stella’s layabout brother.
At mass Stella said a special prayer to the Virgin that her mother had picked well; after all, Assunta would only be able to pull this wife-assigning trick the once.
JOEY AND HIS NEW brIDE, Mickey, moved into the boys’ old room on the ground floor of the Bedford Street house in January 1953. Mickey was already visibly pregnant, which said to Stella that this was a woman who got down to business.
Mickey, who had just turned eighteen, had grown up in Nicastro, although Assunta enumerated all her Ievoli connections—her mother was a first cousin of Za Violèt from Pianopoli; her older brother had married the Fortuna girls’ school friend Marietta.
Mickey was tall and had long smooth legs, which everyone knew because she walked around the house in little silk nightgowns.
Stella wondered how things could have changed so completely in Calabria that it had produced this wanton creature.
Mickey laughed loudly and flirted with any man around her—her brother- or father-in-law or anyone at all—touching their arms when she talked to them, sitting next to them on the couch and resting her head on their shoulders.
Stella was darkly amused by how awkward Mickey made Carmelo, Louie, and Rocco, but Queenie was obviously not amused, and Queenie was the woman who had to put up with Mickey the most. Stella was looking forward to the day Mickey got some good manners smacked into her.
“I just can’t do this,” Queenie told Stella and Tina at least once a week. “I can’t go on living with this woman. It was bad enough before, but now . . .”
Tina leaned in and lowered her voice. “What are you going to do?”
Queenie grunted. Stella, who was crocheting, darted a glance up to see Queenie’s face. It was a sneer of fed-uppedness.
“Are you going to move out?” Tina asked.
“How could I?” Queenie said. “Your mother would never allow it.”
Stella didn’t have anything to say to console her. She was just glad she and Carmelo had a lock and door between them and all that.
IN EARLY MAY 1953, Mickey threw herself a baby shower, at the behest of her new friends from church, who came over and gobbled up pastries and brought all kinds of adorable miniature presents.
It was chilly and rainy; Mickey directed them to Queenie and Louie’s room to leave their wet coats on Queenie’s bed.
This was the last straw, although Queenie must have been planning for a long time.
ON THE LAST SUNDAY IN MAY, the Fortuna clan headed out together for eleven o’clock mass. Queenie wasn’t feeling well, so she and Louie stayed home. Walking to church, Assunta and Tina speculated about whether there might be a baby on the way.