It was to prepare for weddings that long sessions in the kitchen with the McCutcheon’s salesman took place, since no one store in Cato had linens fine enough for Umbertina’s taste. The long table in the kitchen, where ten of them now sat to meals, was cleared and a clean cloth set out upon which the contents of his suitcase could be shown. The girls would sit there occasionally interpreting while their mother questioned, inspected, rejected, or approved. Umbertina, who couldn’t sew a seam or do a stich of embroidery, knew instinctively, however, how things should be; she had an absolute feel for biancheria and knew what kind of mitering was right, what types of linens should accompany a woman in life, how fine the hemstitching should be, what monogramming was suitable, and what quality of material was appropriate. Always it was the best and most expensive quality that she ordered, and the most obsolete: dream stuff of another way of life that included damask dinner cloths with banquet-size monogrammed napkins, exquisite Madeira tea sets, blanket covers and tray sets for breakfast in bed, napkin envelopes with cutwork, and linen hand-towels with long strands of flax fringe which, she told Sara and Carla, were to be used by the doctor when he washed his hands after a home visit; they also required, after laundering, the patient combing-out of fringe strands that no daughter of hers, in their modest homes, was ever to have time for.

She insisted on ordering for them several beautifully embroidered and hand-stitched capelets, called matinées, which were to be worn over garments for the morning brushing of the hair. Even though their hair was bobbed after the war and the girls didn’t spend time brushing and tending it, Umbertina, by not accepting new ways, seemed to think she had eliminated them. Imperturbable in her convictions and in the revenge she plotted over the loss of her tenement days, she continued to buy and store up linens for her daughters and send out the sheets and pillowcases to be hand-monogrammed by her countrywoman, old Vincenzina, who had been taught handwork in a convent and with whom not even McCutcheon’s could compete.

Umbertina often told her daughters the story of her dowry bedspread and its loss during the hard times in New York; and she had told them that the bed-linen and spreads she provided must remain with them and then he passed on to their own daughters. She was never as concerned with furniture as with what she believed were the real, substantial bases of life: eating well and sleeping well. The business she had built up and the property she had worked to accumulate would be for the sons, but her daughters would get the finest biancheria possible.