“But he must have known he had had mumps before you got married,” Stella said. “He knew all this time.”
Tina shrugged. She was staring at her coffee cup. Her eyes were round and bald-looking.
Could Rocco really have done that? Could he have married Tina, knowing how badly she wanted children, and then let her go on all this time with false hope? Even Rocco couldn’t be that cruel and selfish—could he? But Stella couldn’t ask her sister that right now; that would be a different kind of cruelty.
“Tina,” Stella said finally. “I’m so sorry.”
“We could get the marriage annulled if I wanted to,” her sistersaid. “I could try again with someone else. The priest said there would be no problem in this case.”
“Do you want an annulment?” Stella asked carefully, her heart lifting.
“No,” Tina said quickly. “I said for better or for worse, didn’t I?”
“But Tina, that’s not fair, not if you didn’t know—”
“We have a good marriage,” Tina interrupted, her tone decisive. “We want to stay together even without children.”
Stella’s small hope that Rocco Caramanico might become part of her past vanished. But what did Tina even mean, a good marriage? Stella was speechless for a long moment as she tried to understand. What made a marriage good? Stella had never thought of marriage as anything but an arrangement to be endured in order to create children—an arrangement she had, for that very reason, done her best to avoid. How could Tina’s marriage be good if it prevented the one thing she had wanted most in life, to be a mother? Stella swallowed the lump in her dry throat, a clot of confusion and sadness.
“You could adopt,” she said, feeling futile.
Tina was already shaking her head. “We don’t need another person’s baby, with who knows what other person’s problems. We decided no, we’re happy the way we are. We don’t have to pray about this anymore.” She looked up and smiled. “It’s going to be okay, Stella. I am going to have all of your babies to take care of. And who knows how many you’ll have.”
THE ANSWER WAS TEN—TEN WHO SURVIVED THEIR CHILDHOOD.
INJUNE 1949,LOUIE GRADUATEDfrom Hartford High. Stella sat through the sweltering ceremony, fighting the urge to pee, and clapped loudly as her baby brother walked across the temporary stage under the basketball hoop to shake the hand of the principal. Tony had the diploma framed and hung it in the Fortuna living room.
Louie was spending the summer working for a friend of Zu TonyCardamone’s, a licensed electrician named Bill Johnson. Louie had to be at work in West Hartford by 6A.M. on the dot—time is money, and an electrician’s time is quite a lot of money. To get to and from work, Tony bought Louie a bicycle with shining black hubcaps. Carmelo took Louie aside and told him not to worry, he’d help him get a car.
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.
ONSEPTEMBER 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 STARTEDto 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 WASQUEENIE.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, whotsked 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 overthe wordsDIO 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, onlythishigh and with a face like a doll’s. Everyone, he would learn, called her Queenie instead.
