It astonished Umbertina to see such a lady in her attic room the first day Anna Giordani came to call on her. From the start, Anna respected Umbertina. She saw in her the stubbornness of not wanting to succumb to the tenements, of being determined to leave them behind.

“Brava, signora” she said encouragingly. “Things will get better for you because you want them to.” And she admired the bedspread from Castagna, which shone like an ensign of hope in the dingy room.

It was Anna Giordani who helped Umbertina get Paolo through that critical first summer. She showed Umbertina how to get to the East River with the baby and children so they’d get a breath of moving air to fill their deprived and pinched bodies. Umbertina was still nursing Paolo, but she would buy milk for the other boys and take them all to the river, where they would watch the boats with their cargoes of garbage being picked over by Italian ragpickers for what they could scavenge; or they would see the unmarked coffins of the poor being taken on barges to Potters’ Field, where they would be dumped in a trench at city expense, crowded in death as they had been in life to save space that had more value for the city than their lives; or, from the new piers on the East River, they’d watch the naked boys who swam from them until the police came to chase them away.

Once she saw tramps and vagrants and a group of lunatics being taken by guards out to the penal workhouses and asylums on the islands in the East River, which looked green and inviting with their trees and which her eyes strained toward. In Calabria the harshness of life had made people sick in body; here, she saw, the life sickened the heart and soul.

She was learning the American story—money was the key to everything. If you were fortunate enough to keep your health and reason in the midst of the purgatorial tenements you were forced to pass through in the New York sojourn, you might be able to get to some other place with the money you saved.

But the tenement got and kept most lives; it made people into its own image, lower than when they had arrived. Anna Giordani was always exclaiming, “Why do you Italians put up with the worst conditions, take the worst jobs, and then either send your money back to Italy or let yourself be robbed of it by a padrone!”

“My money won’t go back,” Umbertina told her fiercely. “It’s to get us out of here. We are not like the napoletani on Mulberry Street. They came from the slums of Naples and are happy in the slums of New York. But we are country people. We don’t live like this.”

That winter and the next they froze, trying to keep warm in the attic room with whatever coal or wood Umbertina and the boys were able to scavenge from the streets. Serafino’s gang work stopped when the snow came, so that all he could earn during the winter was whatever he got from shoveling snow. The children loved the sight of snow falling out of the sky, and Umbertina, too, found peace in its softness and the quiet it brought. It seemed right that Christmas should come in such softness. She learned from her neighbors to make a granita di caffè with the freshly fallen snow, some coffee, and sugar. But soon the white blanket turned to black slush, making the streets worse than ever and clinging to her skirts.