Death 6 Exsanguination （Motherhood） #11
Sometimes Stella couldn’t bear the idea of another wedding.
At first she would play sick, but then, increasingly, she would just not get ready and Carmelo would know he was on his own.
He was no better at controlling the hooligans than Stella was, but Stella knew no chiding women came up to him to complain about his sons’ behavior, which was only one of the reasons she felt no guilt.
On these evenings, blessedly free, with only the littlest babies on her watch, she would bring a flask of wine up from the cellar and drink it alone on the porch, watching the sun drop behind the oaks in the marsh.
IN JANUARY 1958 CAME GIOVANNI, named for his paternal uncle and godfather.
On the heels of his too-soft brother Nicky, Johnny would grow up to be rambunctious enough for two.
He would be the son who brought the most chaos into the Maglieri house, starting with the time he got kicked out of fourth grade for carrying a knife, but as an infant he was one of the easiest, from Stella’s perspective. No goddamn colic.
Then, in fall of 1958, there was a miscarriage.
Stella hadn’t been very far along, less than four months, and this time she felt no grief, just a sense of hollow distaste as she flushed the globs of pink tissue down the toilet.
Honestly, she didn’t feel much of anything anymore; when she did, she drank until the feeling was gone.
ASSUNTA AND TINA CAME OVER to sit with Stella after work.
The sisters would crochet while Assunta looked through Tina’s anniversary trip photo album, which lived at Stella’s house just for this purpose.
Rocco had taken photos of Tina surrounded by pigeons in Piazza San Marco in Venice; Tina on the Spanish Steps in Rome, like Audrey Hepburn in the movie where she is a runaway princess; Tina in front of St. Peter’s cathedral in the Vatican, so close to His Holiness the Pope.
It was nice to think the beautiful things in the photos were their cultural legacy as Italians, even if Hartford had more in common with Ievoli than did the Venetian lagoon.
Assunta turned the pages with so much wonder, it was hard to believe she had been doing the same thing every day for the last two years.
The evening quorum of Fortuna women lasted until Rocco or Tony came home from work and wanted dinner.
Carmelo, of course, would not be home from his shift at the bar until eleven at the earliest. So Stella had the evenings to herself—herself and her seven children—and to fill this unsupervised time she usually brought a bottle of Carmelo’s wine up from the basement.
WHEN DOMENICO WAS BORN IN FEbrUARY 1960, he was everyone’s favorite, maybe because for a while people thought he would be the last. As an adult he would be everyone’s least favorite Maglieri boy, because he would destroy his good marriage with alcoholism and waste the rest of his short life as a drug addict.
But he sure was an adorable baby, with a round face and a full head of fluffy black hair.
They called him Mingo, or just Ming, after Carmelo’s uncle.
Joey and Mickey stood up as his godparents.
Carmelo thought asking them would heal the family rift.
Life hadn’t been easy on the Joseph Fortunas.
They were living in the same apartment they had run away to in 1953.
Mickey still dressed like a tramp, but motherhood had mellowed her out; Stella could tolerate her through a Sunday dinner.
Joey and Mickey had two little girls, and Mickey was cooking up a third.
Stella wasn’t sure whether Mickey’s daughters were normal, since Stella lived in a world of small boys, but the Fortuna girls seemed savage to her, wild eyed and undergroomed.
No wonder, Stella thought, since their mother was just a large child herself.
The girls would dismantle Bernie’s toys while Bernie looked on with condescension.
Stella had to explain to her daughter that her grubby cousins didn’t have toys at home.
She had to teach Bernie to hide the good dolls in her pillowcase so the poor little Fortuna girls wouldn’t ruin or steal them.
IN JULY 1961, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to her ninth living baby, Enrico “Richie” Maglieri. He was eight pounds and popped right out after only forty-five minutes of labor, God bless him. Queenie and Louie would stand up as his godparents.
Richie would grow up to be a perpetual bachelor.
He would never find a way to reconcile his sexual orientation with his macho Catholic family’s values, and so never told anyone—never had any kind of partner at all.
Maybe I should look at the bright side here; maybe his reticence saved his life, vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis that took two dear friends from his community theater group.
Meanwhile, his brothers act like Richie just never got his act together to woo a lady.
Even now they’ll say, “Poor Richie, he never found the right girl. Who knows, maybe he still will.” If anyone suggests anything about the closet the family will jump down your throat defending him.
But that’s just it, isn’t it? If gayness is a slander to be defended against, there’s not a lot of room for a man like Richie, who wouldn’t wish to cause anyone any hurt and who doesn’t admire boat-rockers, to say anything at all.
ASSUNTA CAME OVER ONE SATURDAY MORNING in April 1963 to find a box of dried pasta spilled across the kitchen linoleum.
Baby Richie, who had learned to stand, was holding himself up by the garbage can, his fingers gripping the slimy liner bag, and Mingo was prising open a second box of pasta, which Assunta took away from him, leaving him mopey.
Where the other boys were was anyone’s guess.
Stella was on her knees in front of the downstairs toilet. Her hair bun was sleep-styled to reveal just how much white had come in.
“I’m forty-three years old, Ma,” Stella said. She felt like a cabbage you find in the bottom of your vegetable crisper two months after you forgot it there. “How can I still be getting pregnant?”
Assunta rubbed her daughter’s back and helped her stand so she could flush away her nausea. “Women in my family are strong,” Assunta told Stella, pinching her hip. She added in English she had learned from the television, “Built to last.”
ON JANUARY 4, 1964, STELLA GAVE BIRTH to a final baby boy, whom they named Arturo.
Artie was the second son to inherit Carmelo’s blue eyes.
He was such a liar you couldn’t believe a word he ever said, but a lovable scamp nonetheless.
When he was only twelve, he would save up his lawn-mowing money to buy a beat-up shell of a Mustang for two hundred dollars, then restore the whole thing all by himself—a crooked little genius with an engine, that one.
He would marry his high school sweetheart, Nancy, who was mixed Sicilian and Cherokee.
They would have four daughters, half of whom grew up to be scrupulously honest and the other half of whom took after their father.
ARTIE WAS AN ENORMOUS BABY, almost eleven pounds, Stella’s biggest. He came out naturally after two exhausting hours of pushing. It was not a pleasant experience. It was a week before Stella’s forty-fourth birthday and she had had just about enough of this goddamned nonsense.
When her husband came in to see her in the hospital room after the delivery, Stella said to him, “I’m done, Carmelo. You can sleep with whoever you want, but it’s not going to be me anymore.”