As Paul and Pauline were advancing rapidly in Cato’s social circles, Pina went into the limbo of abandoned women. Her husband had gone west, promising to send for her and the children, but had disappeared completely. Pina, like Umbertina, became a woman without a man, and though she was taken care of out of the business her status was irretrievably fallen. She couldn’t leave her children to resume work at the Wholesale, so Carla was pressed into leaving school and taking Pina’s place at the office.

“We need you at the Wholesale,” Jake kept saying. “Sara can’t manage alone, and that other girl who kept the books was making mistakes that looked like fraud. We can’t prove anything, but it’s better to have one of the family doing that work, anyway.”

“But I want to finish high school . . . I want to go to college,” Carla told him.

“Listen, Carla, we’ll give you whatever you want. You can open charge accounts at all the stores downtown: Marvin Miller’s, Grant’s Bookstore—everywhere. You can have that whole set of Dickens you wanted; you help us out and you won’t regret it.”

It was Umbertina who made the decision. “You help your brothers,” Umbertina told her. “We’re living in Jake’s house and he’s head of the family now. And don’t talk foolishness about college. No daughter of mine is going off to sleep out of town under strange roofs. Girls should be married.”

Before she was married, Carla Longobardi had two fur coats and several Paris gowns from Marvin Miller all charged to S. Longobardi & Sons. She and Sara spent every Saturday afternoon going downtown shopping, and on their way they would always stop for a minute at the shrine of St. Rita in St. John’s Church to pray for good fortune in courtships. Good fortune was all around them; all they needed was to have it provide them the right man.

Jake had bought the house on Rutger Street with $7,000 in cash and then ordered three Stearns-Knight automobiles for the three brothers. Everything prospered, the Longobardis were known all over Cato and the other towns of the Mohawk valley, and Umbertina was even interviewed by a woman reporter from the Cato Citizen-Press for a Columbus Day feature on the achievements of the town’s Italians.

Carla was there to explain and interpret when the reporter, an emancipated young woman with bobbed hair and the hard, brittle look of plucked eyebrows and bright lips, came to the house.