The splendid old days of getting on and up in the world had stopped with marriage, and real life had begun; there was housework and child-rearing in a new place and in a new era called the Depression. Hard times coincided with a fire at Sam’s place, and were something quite different from the bustling times of Carla’s girlhood when they were all working hard to get ahead and the expectations were positive. Now, as a woman, Carla learned that there was an end to expectations, to going forward, to always succeeding and wrestling destiny to the ground. And it didn’t depend on one’s character, as Umbertina had led them to believe by belittling the old-country people who didn’t get ahead—it depended also on outside forces before which they were powerless.

There was one event to look forward to that took on a kind of mythic quality in Carla’s life: the annual picnic at a meadow on the shores of Lake Petulia, midway between Cato and Gloversville. Umbertina’s children and grandchildren gathered together there to celebrate themselves as a family, to meet and eat and pay homage to Umbertina, the old lady in black who sat under a tree and was served food all day and given babies to kiss.

For Umbertina the picnic scene was her lifetime spread before her. She sat in the meadow on the shore of the lake under the shade of a large leafy elm tree, dressed in black on a warm summer day as she was always dressed in black when she sat in the kitchen at Rutger Street and waited for the foreign children of her own half-foreign sons and daughters to come in and greet her with their mumbled, memorized phrases of unintelligible Italian. In the kitchen, when she wasn’t cooking, she sat immobile on a white chair, resting in thought. There in the meadow she sat on a folding camp chair that had been brought along for her. The others sat on the running boards of their Oldsmobiles and Buicks, or on blankets on the ground.

Umbertina’s older grandchildren, Jake’s and Ben’s sons and daughters, were young people in their twenties, teens. The older boys wore knickerbockers and played banjos or formed a group by themselves and played cards. The older girls gave a hand to their mothers and looked after their younger cousins.

Marguerite and Sammy were Carla’s small children. Both were foreign to Umbertina; was it the food, the air, the dress of the New World that produced grandchildren she could not recognize? She couldn’t speak to them, nor they to her, but they went through a ritual at each meeting.

Carla, with her beautiful wide smile, would lead her children by the hand to where her mother sat. “Say hello to Granma,” she would say.