Except that such a marriage didn’t exist for the Scalzos. They insisted that she come back and do it properly—in their church and in a wedding gown with a reception at the club for all their friends. The correspondence about such a plan went on all summer until by fall Marguerite wrote, No, she wouldn’t come (she was pregnant and sick), but if it meant so much to them she and Alberto would be married again in a religious ceremony so that it could be announced in the Gloversville paper.

That event could have furnished the title for a film: The Bride Wore Black. It had the right bizarre ring of unexpected situations and acerbic irony. The marriage took place in a chilly, unadorned chapel into which she and Alberto were banished by the bishop for having given public scandal by contracting civil marriage six months earlier. It was a drizzly, dull November day; Marguerite, pale from morning sickness, wore a gray flannel suit with black accessories. When Carla Scalzo received the photos of that non-event, she wrote back to note that Alberto’s uncle, who had given the bride away, was on her wrong side, but probably in Italy they didn’t know how to do those things correctly, and in any case, wearing black at one’s wedding brought bad luck.

So it did. Immediately. At the wedding dinner overseen by Lauretta, the fish course had to be abandoned when everyone concurred that the fish had a peculiar taste (“Sa di fango”—it tastes of mud—they kept saying with what Marguerite thought a shocking lack of delicacy). And the tableware didn’t match because a cousin had made off with the silver to pawn it. A few days after the wedding they heard that the little boy who had served the mass had been run over and was in the hospital. A month or so later, Alberto’s uncle caught cold while marching hatless in a religious procession and died of pneumonia.

Despite the sinister auguries, Marguerite’s faith was in the future. And Alberto sensed that she was beginning to take form, take shape, in the way he desired. He had found almost embarrassing her lack of philosophical notions and her incapacity for stillness and contemplation. But now, with her pregnancy, he felt she would emerge a more reflective being.

Marguerite’s marriage to an Italian had unexpectedly brought into focus that fundamental American creed, present in the air at her birth and in her parents’ admonishments, that happiness was a noble and attainable pursuit. Her mistake was thinking that happiness could come through Alberto’s informed and caring guidance, instead of through her own sense of direction.