Serafino died toward the end of the war, when the Wholesale had grown and profits were so large that Ben had closed out the paralyzed steamship and banking operations and joined Jake. They started dealing in sugar and flour at the war’s beginning, and then, when the influenza epidemic broke out, they foresaw the call for lemons and contracted for carload lots so that each lemon was like a nugget of gold on the market. When, as La Luce put it, Serafino passed to a better life, the family was secure, its fortune started.

As was customary, his obituary credited him with the business success and his wife only with having been his working companion. The piece in La Luce read, “Serafino Longobardi knew how, with his honest and untiring work, to launch his sons into business and open for them the way to that excellent place in everyone’s esteem that the Longobardi family enjoys today. Of scrupulously upright character, gentle and affectionate toward all, he leaves a great emptiness in all who had the fortune of knowing him. To his stricken family—to Signora Umbertina his good companion, and especially to his sons Giacomo, Benedetto, and Paul, who have so worthily followed the paternal example—we offer our most sincere condolences.”

He was laid to rest under a large polished granite monument that bore his name and dates as well as Umbertina’s unconcluded ones, and was topped by a winged seraph in honor of his saint. His monument stood in the center of the cemetery plot, a plot that was in itself another visible proof of earthly success. Who in the old country would have had the money to have such a piece of good land just for burial? The angel that recalled his name looked toward the city below.

It is a good place to lie, Umbertina thought as she watched the casket be put to earth. “Rest, rest, old man,” she said to him. He was more than her husband and the father of her children; he was her friend, the only true companion of her adventure and laboring. He had brought her to the New World, and now, despite her sons and daughters and the grandchildren, she was alone.

The cemetery was a high place—almost as high as the village they had come from, and from which they had looked down to the valley where the river ran and the ruined abbey stood on its banks. But here there were no ruins; there was a city still growing fast and work still to be done.

18. Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten