She was dying of a heart condition, her life embittered by a husband who hadn’t gotten ahead in America and who, it was known, had taken up with another woman. “Be the ever-present instrument of my justice!” the dying woman seemed to be saying, her dark eyes burning with the eloquent passion of retaliation as she laid the burden of it upon her eldest child, the son who revered her.

Sam’s mother was a simple woman and he saw in Carla qualities that reminded him of her; she was trusting and had the accepting nature of a basically honest and modest person. Appealingly, Carla was without the dark part of his mother’s nature: the intense pride and melodramatic sense of wrongdoing and betrayal that were in her Sicilian blood.

If Sam hadn’t identified Carla with his mother he might have courted Sara, the family beauty, as would have been more seemly since she was the elder and by Umbertina’s rule no younger sister could be married before the older ones had husbands. Sara, however, snubbed Sam and even tried to persuade Carla to choose Stanos, a college man, over him. Carla’s engagement to Sam went on for almost a year until Sara married a handsome insurance salesman related to Gino Gualtiero who almost immediately began to mistreat her.

In their wedding picture Sam and Carla are a handsome couple. She is attired in an expensive gown with a veil of handmade lace; her eyes are demurely downcast into her bridal bouquet; and her hair is marcelled into row upon row of waves. Her eyes are brown and his are too, but hers are the brown of docile, romantic dreaminess and his are restless and sharp, with a depth of melancholy. He smoked cigars, hoping they would create a businesslike look for him. He was all wrapped up in The Place. He disapproved of his father and wished to live up to his mother’s expectations. Responsibility was to shape his life forever. For him, love was duty. For Carla, love was a Gloria Swanson movie.

And what had love been for Umbertina? She reacted as if to an indecent question when Carla, teasing, asked her if she had been in love with her husband.

Umbertina’s firm round chin turned pink. “Faccia tostal!” she scolded. “What has that to do with anything? He was a good man—a little sentimental, but good; and I did my duty. That’s what marriage is, not all this love and romance. Marriage is to start a family, it’s not a carosello, a merry-go-round. It’s a woman’s duty!”

Umbertina’s fair skin flushed at what she considered the undue intimacy of this talk. She was a reticent woman, she did not discuss emotions. Carla, she said, read too much. It gave her foolish ideas of the world and people.