The Longobardi girls, known in Cato, like an order of rich novices, as the Sisters of Longobardi, dressed elegantly and had callers who vied to be seen with them. Yet Carla’s most importunate suitor, Stanos Saxenian, a recent graduate of Colgate College and the one with the most highly directed ambition, made her uncomfortable with the intensity of his drive, his dark looks, his damp handshake, and the pressures he laid upon her by encouraging her self-education. On her twenty-first birthday he gave her a set of the Harvard Classics and in a note said that this was the first step toward her getting her high school diploma and then going on to even more. He said that if they married, they would honeymoon in New York, where he would be in law school and she could take undergraduate courses at New York University. They would live in The Village, where she would become acquainted with artists and writers and new social thought. The prospect frightened her exceedingly, but she was flattered by his attentions and the natty way he dressed when he came to call. “Greasy spats,” her nephews at Rutger Street snickered when they saw him coming up the front steps; and in her heart she agreed that he was greasy, and ludicrous, too, with the spats he wore over his shoes.

She was more comfortable with Sam Scalzo, who was quiet and undemanding; he was making good money without ever having finished school himself, and he looked at her in a gentle, appealing way that touched her. No matter how successful his Gloversville business might become, he would never outdo the celebrity and success of the Longobardis in Cato, and this reassured her. She accepted, not Stanos the prospective lawyer, but Sam.

Sam Scalzo had been a self-made man from the age of twenty and head of his business at what he called The Place. Sam stood in no awe of the Longobardi brothers. He dealt with them in business but they didn’t own his soul, he said. He had made his way alone, whereas there were three of them and they had had the first boost from Umbertina.

Sam had a precise notion of duty and how to discharge it. When his mother had lain dying he made up his mind to leave for California right after her death; she was the only thing holding him in upstate New York, and with his own small reserve of cash and his knowhow he could set himself up wherever he wanted to be, which was out West. But his mother—a handsome, melancholy, strong-featured woman in her forties—had called him to her deathbed and in a few words had set his life. “You’ve always been a good boy, Samuele. Promise me when I’m gone you’ll take care of your brothers and sisters. I can’t trust your father . . . promise me you’ll make a home for them.”