“Oh, Ma, you’re so practical! Didn’t Poppa ever give you a gift or do anything nice for you?”

“Yes, he came back from America for me.” Umbertina’s flushed chin was the only sign of her embarrassment and emotions.

“What about that tin heart you have? Did he give you that?”

“No,” said Umbertina, “that was someone else.”

She said no more. But for Carla there was conjured up the shadowy figure of some other man and of something uncompleted in her mother’s life. Why else was the useless tin heart still with her mother, except as a memory of something not done—some reminder that not everything in her life had been a direct line of advance, that compromise also is progress of a sort.

“Were you happy with Poppa?” Carla went on, trying to fathom before her marriage what lay ahead of her.

What innocent and simple children she had, Umbertina thought; listen to this girl speaking of love and happiness as if they were the things that counted in this world! But she was the baby, come late in life when the worst was over. She saw a table with food and slept in a clean bed and warm room at night. She didn’t know about survival so she dreams of love and happiness, as if such things could come bound up in any one man.

Happiness was not that, Umbertina knew. It wasn’t a prize you were given and could hold on to, but a feeling of satisfaction that receded or advanced according to each day’s design. Her happiness was in being part of something entire, something that was you and more than you.

“The important thing,” she told her daughter, “is to find your place. Everything depends on that. You find your place, you work, and like planting seeds, everything grows. But you have to be watchful and stick to it.”

“What about Paul? He was always moving around and trying out different things. He’s never worked like Jake and Ben.”

“Never mind about Paolo. He is different, but now he, too, is settled down and working. His place is here with the others.”

“And my place?”

“Where your husband will be.”

The hardest thing about marriage for Carla was that it took her from Cato and from being a Longobardi.

Marriage, Carla soon found out, was more than just the distance from Gloversville to Cato; it was exile from laughter—from the warm, high spirits and joking and good times of Longobardi life, first at Catherine and Broad streets, then at Rutger Street with Jake’s family—to the gloomy, dark, Sicilian moodiness of Sam’s family.