And yet the girls had all helped out in the stores and offices and had helped build the Longobardi & Sons business. Perhaps the fault had been hers, Umbertina’s: She had chosen their dowries, taught them about the importance of good food and good linens, bossed them and demanded obedience. She had never allowed them to be stronger than she was; it was always she who had spoken and they who had listened, even when they had gone to school and become educated and she had remained illiterate.

She looked at her two daughters-in-law Amelia and Jenny, poor dead Cristina Muzzi’s children. They were good wives to her sons Jake and Ben. Amelia had given Jake nine children, and Umbertina the command of her house. A dark, worn little woman, Amelia was always smiling and agreeable. Jenny was sharper featured, but she, too, was mild-tempered and patient. Both so unlike that whining Cristina who had died still unsatisfied and complaining, unable, at least, to pass the curse of discontent on to her daughters.

They were submissive women; they often cried. Carla, for instance, her youngest, a married woman with two children and a good husband who was working hard in his own business to get ahead, was always homesick and missing her old family—she who lived only fifty miles from Cato and came for visits each Sunday! What did she know of real uprooting? Of leaving your birthplace and family to put an ocean and three thousand miles and no possibility of return between you? Of depriving yourself of your native air and sun and food and language in order to live in the land of strangers where even your grandchildren could not speak to you?

That Umbertina missed the haranguing and needling of the querulous old Domenico Saccà, now many years dead, was surprising to her but true. She could imagine him there looking about skeptically and saying, “You call this success, Tinuzza, but in Italy there’s a different benessere and the word is more gracious, not so materialistic. Well-being of the total person—not just money, but spirit, too. How crude is the success of money compared with real benessere.” Ah, Domenico, she thought, this is well-being.

As she sat and watched she remembered the first prosperous years when she had sent her photos back to Castagna. Now, she wondered, who do I have to tell my story to?