Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #8
After mass, they stopped by Za Filomena and Zu Aldo’s house for lunch.
It was a beautiful day and the boys played in the front yard with Carolina’s two-year-old daughter.
Assunta headed back to Bedford Street first to start preparing her Sunday dinner; the rest of them followed half an hour later when Nino started to get fussy.
Stella could hear the shrieking before she set foot on the porch. At first she wondered if it was some trapped animal or the squealing of a malfunctioning pipe. But no. Mamma.
Stella thrust Nino into Carmelo’s arms and waddle-rushed up the porch stairs—she was only four months along but carrying large this time.
The unlocked door swung open on a dark and fetid hallway—the stench hit her immediately.
When Stella pressed the light switch it took her a long moment to figure out what she was looking at.
There was her mother, hyperventilating on the floor of the front hallway, where she was kneeling beside a pool of vomit.
Bloody bald patches of scalp showed through her wild hair; later Stella would find the clumps she tore out by the sink in the kitchen.
There was something dark smudging one side of her face, which Stella would learn all too soon was diarrhea.
There was fecal matter smeared on the walls, about waist-high, as if Assunta had crawled up and back down the hall on her hands and knees, trailing her soiled hands on the wallpaper.
Above the shit were the scuffmarks where Queenie and Louie, in their haste, had betrayed their operation.
She did it, Stella thought, almost triumphantly, but that thought passed quickly.
Tina dropped to the floor by Assunta, saying, “Ma, what happened?”
As the sobbing started again Stella stepped over the vomit and made her way through the house, taking inventory.
Queenie must have leapt out of bed the minute they all left for mass—playing sick, the little crook—and started loading up a moving truck; God knows where she’d found a moving company that was open on Sunday.
In the four short hours the Fortunas had been away, Louie and Queenie had taken everything—every stick of furniture in the living room and dining room as well as out of the bedroom.
They took the pots out of the kitchen cupboards and the soap out of the soap dish in the bathroom.
The only sign they left of themselves was the faint sun stain around the spot on the living room wall where Louie’s framed diploma had hung.
“Malandrina,” Antonio kept saying. No better than a highway robber, that Queenie.
Maybe she wouldn’t have stolen all your furniture, Stella thought, if you hadn’t stolen a few free peep shows, you dirty old jerk.
But whatever sympathy Stella felt for Queenie was poisoned by Assunta’s reaction to this calamity—over the top, certainly, but Stella didn’t think it was a performance.
Assunta actually thought she might not live through this: her favorite son taken away from her, her house ripped apart, her family in shambles.
There was no Sunday sauce that night; Queenie hadn’t left a pot to cook in. “She took my pasta strainer,” Assunta kept saying, as if this were the most inhuman injustice of the entire day. “My pasta strainer. She could have at least left me something to strain my pasta.”
Carmelo tried to herd them all out of the hollow apartment for dinner upstairs.
But Assunta couldn’t be left alone. Stella had bullied her into the shower, scrubbed the shit off her and gently rinsed her bloody scalp, then put her to bed.
Assunta, drunk on her own grief, carried on with her hysterical weeping. Tina cried quietly in solidarity.
“Forget it, Carm,” Stella told him. “It’s hopeless.”
In the end, Carmelo brought down a pot of pasta he cooked upstairs in the Maglieri kitchen. The ones who were fit to eat ate it sitting on the bare carpet in the living room. The boys ran in circles in all the empty space, and Nino knocked over the cheese.
FOUR DAYS LATER, Queenie’s speciously proper change of address card arrived in the mail, lettered in her secretarial hand.
On Saturday, Stella left the children with Tina and made Carmelo drive her to the new house, which was on the West Hartford town line.
The house was small, just one story, with redbrick siding and a square hedge.
Louie and Queenie must have been saving assiduously for this, or maybe Queenie’s parents had given her money.
Stella told Carmelo to wait in the car. “This won’t take long,” she said. She didn’t want his sociability and compassion bogging her down.
Louie wasn’t home, but it was just as well, because Stella’s bone to pick was with her sister-in-law.
“Shame on you,” she said when the pretty young woman answered the door. Queenie was wearing a flower-printed pink housedress that cinched at what Stella thought was an unrealistically narrow waist. “Shame on you for what you did to my mother. She’s been nothing but kind to you.”
“I don’t have a problem with your mother.
I think she’s a nice woman, even if she is a little unbalanced.
” Queenie spoke quickly and forcefully, so Stella caught up with her meaning after it was too late to react effectively.
“But your father’s a pervert, your brother Joey is a loser, and his wife is a lazy tramp with no education.
I’m not bringing children into that house. ”
Stella was bristling with anger, but there was nothing Queenie had said that, strictly speaking, Stella disagreed with.
“You didn’t need to leave like that,” she said finally. “It was cruel.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.” Queenie’s hard little face softened. “Your mother never would have let us go, Stella. And your brother Louie would never have the courage to fight with her.”
TONY WENT DOWN TO SEE MR. GREENBURG, the Jew on Franklin Avenue, and bought furniture for the whole house again. Mr. Greenburg’s prices were good and he gave credit. Pay what you want now, he always said, and then just give me a little more each week as you can.
“You could have made Queenie give you back all your furniture, Pa,” Stella said.
Tony waved it off. “They’re just kids. They don’t have any money to spend. Anyway, your mother can enjoy picking out new furniture.”
Stella wondered if he felt guilty but didn’t think her father had that capacity. This was his version of a papal indulgence for his sins, only the pope was Assunta.
MICKEY’S BABY WAS BORN IN JULY, a little girl they named Betty. Tina and Rocco stood up as her godparents at the baptism. Stella was relieved Mickey hadn’t asked her and Carmelo.
On the second Sunday of October, Mickey wasn’t feeling well and stayed home from church. Joey stayed home with her to take care of the baby. When the rest of them got home, Stella was more disgusted than she was surprised to find the first-floor apartment had been emptied of all the furniture.
“Again?” Tina whispered to Stella.
“What a pig,” Stella said, not bothering to whisper back. She was so pregnant she didn’t have energy to do anything but lean against the picture-stripped wall. “Raised in a barn, like I always thought.”
“I don’t think she needed to make it all a surprise again,” Tina said.
“Of course she didn’t. She just wants everyone to talk about her like she’s something special.
” From where she stood, Stella surveyed the damage, the empty room, the chip that had been taken out of the doorframe by undisciplined movers.
“You know what, though? Serves them right. Now they’ll have to pay their own goddamn rent and cook their own food and clean up after their own baby. ”
“Oh, the poor baby,” Tina said, and before the waterworks could start, Stella chided her, “Relax. You’ll see her plenty, just watch.
” How would they get by, though, she wondered?
Joey had been unable to get back his job at the electric company and had spent the last six months sweeping clippings off the floor at a barbershop.
This time Assunta was angry, to Stella’s great relief. “There was no need to fool us like that,” she said.
“She’s just a witch, Ma,” Stella said. “A drama queen. She wants attention.”
Assunta banged the cupboards one by one, ascertaining that the Joseph Fortunas had, indeed, taken her every last pot and even her new pasta strainer. “We would have given them whatever they wanted. We know how much Joey makes; we would have bought him his own house. He didn’t need to steal ours.”
“We wouldn’t have bought him nothing,” Tony interrupted. “This is the end for him. It’s time for him to grow the hell up and be a man.”
Now Assunta looked upset. “But Tonnon—”
“No,” he said. “It’s like the Americans say. They stole their bed, now they can lie in it.”
IN NOVEMBER 1953, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to a third living baby, a girl this time, whom they named Bernadette, after the saint in that movie Stella had seen during the war, the girl from France who saw the Virgin on the hill. Carmelo’s brother, Gio, and his wife stood up as the baby’s godparents.