This apportionment wasn’t contemplated out of meanness, or the desire to slight her daughters, who had also worked in the family business right along. Rather, she had the conviction that family property should stay with the family name, and that the husbands of her daughters should be expected to provide for them after they had brought their marriage dowries to their new homes. That was the way things were done in a right and ordered world.

By the time they moved to Rutger Street, Umbertina no longer kept a horse and wagon to go to the fields in Muskieville, and her gardening was done in the back of Jake’s house, where she laid out her rows of pole beans, tomatoes, and corn.

With Serafino gone, Umbertina’s life changed; Jake became the visible head of the family and she who had always bossed her sons now consulted with them. The grocery had been closed out and the family business was now completely at the Wholesale, which was moved from Broad Street to a warehouse down near the station, where, in huge letters, “S. Longobardi & Sons” greeted train travelers coming and going through Cato. She had no work now, except in the garden, and though she made the kitchen her domain, things were not the same. Nor could they ever be again.

Umbertina was still a strong woman, in good health, and with a clear mind and undiminished ambition. But now her sons, as was right, were in the forefront, and she spoke only to keep loyalty and solidarity among them. She became the grandmother in the kitchen, the old woman dressed in black with wispy gray hair straggling down from the knob on top of her head, a household fixture standing at the stove stirring sauces or sitting in her white chair listening to the station in Schenectady on the radio.

“Gia-nee!” she would call her grandson Johnny, Italian fashion, bossing him and his brothers around as she no longer could her grown sons. She made them come and help her weed the garden or make conserva while the boys fumed and fussed, wanting to get away and play ball. Disrespectful, she would call them, and they didn’t know what she meant.

Sometimes in the kitchen she would sit still and think; she would think how strange it was that although Serafino hadn’t worked for years and all the early decisions and planning had been hers, it was his name which triumphed and it was his presence, as a man, which had been necessary to give her the standing from which to command.