Umbertina’s fourth son came before the answer to her letter. Named Rocco for the saint of the impossible, the child was born in June. Anna Giordani had helped at the birth and then found the wet-nurse for the baby, because Umbertina, having nursed Paolo through his second summer, had no more milk.

Anna had been there to visit Umbertina on the day when Serafino learned that their savings were gone. Ranucci’s store hadn’t opened one day because he had taken all the money from his bank and gone back to Italy.

Umbertina, already weakened, felt defeated by the news. She resigned herself to sinking like the others into the life of the slums, not making the effort any longer to get out.

There was too much to fight against. Despite the wet-nurse the baby was wasting quickly, and Paolo himself, never strong, was sickly and pale. I have mocked God, Umbertina thought as she watched Rocco whimper and struggle for air. I wanted to change our place in the order of things and to be something more than what God wished. And God is punishing me with these calamities.

But if that is true, her stubbornness told her, what kind of God is He?

Chapter Six

The children sat wide-eyed and quiet next to Serafino, impressed by the importance of being in a train.

Umbertina sat impassively with Paolo in her lap, her excitement abated by the thought of the dead infant left behind. Only Serafino, guileless and open-natured, showed pleasure looking out the train window as they left New York and began the journey upstate to Cato.

Umbertina was thinking that for the rest of her life she wouldn’t be able to cast off the feel of the room where she had given birth to Rocco: Her memory would always reverberate with the roar of the elevated train that was the expression of the city’s blind, onrushing unconcern as it hurtled over the streets of the poor in a city built by pick-and-shovel men like Serafino—Italian laborers, Anna Giordani had told her, whom the Americans despised and treated worse than the black people. “You take the lowest wages, the worst housing, the most loathsome jobs, and you are the worst citizens,” she would go on and on, sermonizing relentlessly, her thin lips drawn in disapproval, her dress and person a statement of fanatic neatness and cleanliness with which to detach herself from the reeking surroundings she plunged into each day, only to emerge at five or so in the afternoon to rejoin civilization on Twenty-third Street. “And why? Because you stay ignorant!”

“We are poor, signorina,” Umbertina would patiently point out to her.

Anger made Anna Giordani’s voice cold as she retorted, “And you will stay that way unless you educate yourselves.”

“What can we do?”

“You can at least let Giacomo, and even Benedetto, come to the mission tent for free reading and writing lessons.”

“Ah, the vangelisti!” Umbertina replied with a frown.

“Protestants are not devils; we are Christians like you, despite what your Catholic priest tells you,” Anna would answer.