“Che vuoi? she was answered. “It helps pay the rent and it’s better than doing piecework for a padrona who gives you a few cents and then makes her own profit selling it to the Americans.”

Umbertina had to agree. If there was one thing she was learning about American life, it was the need to be her own boss.

“It’s worse for a woman,” said the washerwoman. “It takes a woman three days in a sweatshop—if she’s lucky and not fined—to get what a man does in one day.”

“That’s because there are too many people who want work,” said another. “The bosses don’t have to pay us to live, there are always more people coming in.”

It was also in the courtyard, some days later, that Umbertina learned that the true rent for their attic room was $7 a month, not $10, which meant the padrone was pocketing the difference. When she got Serafino to mention the rent difference to the padrone, Serafino suddenly found himself off the work-gang. The American boss wouldn’t rehire him without the padrone’s word, since he didn’t want troublemakers or anarchists on the job making everyone dissatisfied. To get back on the gang would now cost Serafino an extra $1 a month in kickback.

“We are in his hands,” Umbertina said when she learned how things had gone. “How will we save enough to get out?”

They ate frugally and Umbertina took in wash, and somehow every week they managed to save some of Serafino’s pay even after the debts were deducted. But Umbertina was wrong when she told the women with whom she washed that they would soon be leaving. It took them two years.

Chapter Five

From the first Umbertina had kept her marriage bedspread on the one bed of that room. It not only kept them warm in winter, it was her one thing of beauty in all that squalor; it was her remembrance of leaves and flowers and the sun overhead, just as it was the image of what they had come for—something better than they had known.

During their first summer, when babies in the tenements dropped like flies, the city’s summer doctors came with free advice and medicine; following them came nurses from the Board of Health’s Italian department. The visiting nurse who came to Umbertina’s block was an Italian woman named Anna Giordani. Her family had arrived in the earlier, political immigration of 1848 when Garibaldi himself had arrived in America after defeat in the siege of Rome. The Giordanis were northern Italians of the Protestant Waldensian sect; they were educated and had some money. Anna Giordani was a middle-aged spinster who was devoting her life to work among the new Italian immigrants, the southerners, who were as removed from her experience as the Negroes of New York were from the whites. She felt in conflict about these people, who, politically, she had to consider her countrymen, and spiritually her brothers. She never managed to like them, but she did her duty unflinchingly, as a kind of penance and discipline for her soul. She was tall, lean, fair-skinned, with watery light eyes and graying brown hair. She was fastidious; she wore white gloves and every bit of her person was clean and orderly when she came to work in the slum tenements.