“Padrone,” said Serafino, “I want to work. I need money for the pick and shovel.”

“Here,” said the man, his face wrinkled in disgust at the heat and stench of the room they stood in. “This will come out of your first pay. The month’s rent here is $10 and that will come out of your pay, too. Then there’s the $2 each month you owe me for finding you work. Agreed?”

“Can I not agree?” said Serafino, overwhelmed at the news of the high rent for that miserable room.

“Agreed then,” said the padrone. “You’ll have credit at the saloon downstairs and at the groceria–just tell them you’re working for me.” As he left, he turned back and said, “I guarantee credit for all my men as long as there’s no trouble.”

Serafino watched him leave. In his head he had figured up already that almost half of what he could earn in a month would be gone between the rent and the padrone.

Umbertina understood that before they had even started their American life they were mortgaged to a padrone. How would Nuova York have been built, she wondered, if there hadn’t been people desperate enough to enslave themselves in its building? Still, they had shelter of sorts, and after the padrone left, Umbertina went down to the old courtyard in the rear of the house to the hand pump to get water for them. Where a garden and orchard had stood in the house’s better days, the high brick walls of a rear tenement now encroached. The sheds in the back of the old house had been turned into outhouses, whose stink lay trapped in the heavy air between buildings. The space between buildings was clotted with wash hanging from lines strung between walls–banners of defiance against a harsh lot that hung there in brave and touching statements.

The women in the courtyard, who were washing over stone-slab sinks, looked up as Umbertina came to the pump. Dirty children and bony dogs ran among the dripping clothes, and the cramped space was crowded with heaps of refuse, tubs, pails, sacks of rags and bones and bottles from the scavengers’ rounds, and empty pushcarts. Umbertina worked the hand pump vigorously, but no matter what the effort only a trickle came out.

“It always happens in the summer when we need it most,” a woman called out to her in the familiar dialect of Calabria.

“What do you do?” Umbertina asked.

“There’s always stale beer, no shortage of that,” another woman laughed grimly.

And Umbertina, gathering what she could from the trickling pump, thought of the clean air and sun in the hills above Castagna and the taste of the clear spring-water in which she used to bathe her face on summer days, kneeling and cupping her hands to fill them with the cool, sweet water that ran its way down to the valley.

It was in the courtyard, among the women at their wash, that Umbertina learned many things. She heard how the woman who was there constantly, washing load after load, was a widow whose husband had been killed on a construction job and who now, to feed herself and four children, did laundry for 35¢ a load—out of which she had to deduct the cost of coal, soap, starch, and blueing—and then walked uptown to deliver the wash at the back doors of the rich. Other women took in single men as lodgers for 75¢ a week. Umbertina was shocked at this violation of family privacy and said so.