“Tell Minguccio we’ll be coming,” he told Zeno.

“Don’t forget to come, Serafì,” said the others.

Umbertina realized then that when they departed the last connection to the old home would be gone. They would be alone.

Serafino made his way toward the Labor Exchange and there he found who he was looking for, a padrone. “There he is,” he said to Umbertina, pointing to a dark, short man with wide mustaches who was wearing a black bowler, the first hat of that kind she had ever seen. “He is the man who can get me work.”

Umbertina stood back with the children, as was proper, while Serafino engaged in some words with the short man around whom were collected several strong-looking young immigrant men who had been on the ship. They looked dazed and wondering; they were alone, without families, and needed work. All of them needed the padrone and Umbertina could tell already that he would simply be an agent, like the baron’s fattore, living and getting rich off the labor of others by taking from them part of what they worked for. Her brows knit in a frown of disapproval as she looked sharply at the man in the strange hat. Good, she thought to herself with her ironic bent, we have crossed the ocean to trade the fattore for a padrone.

Serafino was, as usual, trusting. “He will get me work,” Serafino told Umbertina. “He knows the American bosses. They are building an underground railroad in New York and he can get me work.”

“You did not want to work ever again on the railroad,” she said irrationally, knowing as she did that there was no choice now.

“It is only until we have the money to leave for Cato,” he said. “A few months.”

In the Rotunda the sorting out of the silent and stoic-looking immigrants by the padroni from various regions was still taking place. They were claiming workers according to where they came from in the old country and what dialect they spoke. Now these little groups of people, mostly men but some with women and a few children, left Castle Garden, each behind its leader.

Out in the open Umbertina’s eyes were assaulted by a throng of buildings all around them. The steeple of old Trinity Church could be discerned down the end of a street, and the large seven-story Washington building and Produce Exchange loomed above them. There seemed to be a forest of ships’ masts at anchor in the harbor, and the tugs and ferries still were going back and forth frenetically. Never had she seen such busyness, heard such noises and clamor, and felt such a press of buildings around her. The eyes of all the newcomers, glazed with seeing so much, darted around as if in search of some still center on which to locate. But everything was moving.

Serafino and Umbertina got into the padrone’s open, horse-drawn wagon with the children and bundles, and the others of his clienti, and began the trip from the docks on the Battery at the end of the island some forty blocks across town up Broadway. They were headed for Mott Street where it ended in Bleecker, just a block or so west of the Bowery. Umbertina had Paolo in a sling across her chest, while her hands still gripped the end of the bundle, flung over her back, that contained their clothing and what bread remained. Her eyes ached with the endlessness of buildings that shut out the sky and sun, with the crowds of people, wagons, and carriages. They passed horse-drawn street sprinklers, warehouses with bales and barrels of goods spilling out into the streets, a forest of telegraph poles and wires, horse-drawn trolleys, awninged storefronts, and fine large Renaissance or Gothic buildings that housed banks.