It was a brown-shingled structure, large, ungainly, and absolutely without embellishment. It stood three stories high in strident ugliness, its only gesture toward amenity being the protruding street entrance that supported small porches for each of the floors above. It was frontier-type housing, made to consolidate good fortune and provide maximum space with minimum show for both business and living quarters. The ground floor would house the grocery on one side and the ticket agency and bank on the other; the first and second floors would have two apartments, each on either side of the stairway. It would be, under Umbertina’s direction, the Longobardis’ last endeavor to practice thrift and plain living. “You don’t go around showing your fortune to the world,” Umbertina said of her quasi-palazzo.

When it was completed, they all moved in: Jake and Ben and their families in their own apartments on the third floor, and Serafino’s family on the second, with the extra apartment rented out.

Carla was only a child of eight at the time, but even so, moving from the Broad Street house to Catherine Street impressed her as a ruinous and improper idea. Although she used to mind being teased by her girl friends when they came over to Broad Street after school and asked why she lived in a “church,” nevertheless she loved the old house with its imposing door and large rooms and nooks for disappearing into when her mother or sisters called.

The year Carla started school at Mount Carmel was the twentieth anniversary of the church’s founding, and Sister Carmela, in appreciation of Umbertina’s continual remembrances and the Longobardi donations over the years, chose Carla to be a flower girl in the pageant commemorating the occasion.

From their first meeting Carla had been awed by the nun’s beauty and bearing. The dignified way she talked in a low, unhurried voice, the fine script of her handwriting, the delicate ceremonies with flowers and candles and embroidered cloths before the classroom shrine of the Virgin all spoke to the child of something beyond the everyday things of life. And the house on Broad Street was like that, too. So she couldn’t understand why her mother was making them move to the ugly place on Catherine Street where they’d have a plain apartment with no dining room and no upstairs or attic.

“We don’t need such a big house,” Umbertina told her. “Such places are just show for people like the vanitose. We bought it for little and now we can sell it for more. What really matters is good food on the table and not what room the table is in.”