Umbertina Longobardi had few words of advice to give her daughters before they married. She believed in good food on the table and good linen on the bed; all the rest of housekeeping was so much fronzoli for which she had neither time nor temperament. The importance of family and of loyalty to one’s husband, her daughters would have acquired from her example; anything else they had to know they would find out for themselves.

Pina was the first to marry, and her husband was the very dapper, nattily dressed son of Lucio Mazzello the tailor, about whom Umbertina shook her head, for the son gave no indication of being the serious man his father was. Soon after, Anna married a tall, good-looking northern Italian who had come from Connecticut for a visit to relatives in Cato and then returned to court Anna, to marry her, and to take her back to Chester. As children, Sara and Carla remembered their sisters selecting their trousseaux from the McCutcheon’s salesman who came with a suitcase full of beautiful linens from New York.

It wasn’t their turn to have linens until they got to the new house on Rutger Street, Jake’s house.

After Serafino’s death, Umbertina gave Jake notice. “I can’t stay alone in a flat with these unmarried girls,” she told him. “It’s not right without a man as head of the family. Your family is growing and you’ll have to find a larger place anyway, so what you have to do is get a house large enough for all of us—for your family and for the girls and me. I’ll buy the food and do the cooking and the girls will take care of the house. That will give Amelia time for the children.”

That was the bargain she made with Jake, and it could only have been with Jake and the amiable Amelia that such a household could have been set up, for the others were already moving in directions of their own. Catherine Street no longer suited the Longobardi prosperity. When Paul had come back from the West with his health restored, he and Pauline had bought a bungalow in a new part of town. Ben and Jenny were building a home in a residential section near Belleview Park. Jake would have moved long ago, but he had been too busy at the Wholesale to think about a house, and Amelia, who already had four children and was pregnant with the fifth, could never get away.

Finally Umbertina put her foot down and sent the two girls, Sara and Carla, now aged twenty and seventeen, to select Jake and Amelia’s house for them.