“To a certain point—the deer also eat our plants,” Giovanni Muzzi told her.

“And deer are good to eat,” Gino added. But Umbertina thought that was one thing she would not eat.

She learned at the picnic that school would begin the next week. Most of the children from the Hollow went to the parochial school of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Father Di Simeone’s new Italian church at the end of Third Street. They were fortunate to have an Italian church; Emory or Schenectady didn’t yet, they said. “The only reason you have it,” said Domenico scornfully, “is that the Irish didn’t want you in their church—not even in their basement where you had to go to baptize your children as if they weren’t Christian enough for upstairs.” He started to laugh. “There’s a saying in town that so many Irish gave contributions to Mount Carmel that when the bishop came to dedicate the church he said to Father Di Simeone, ‘This seems to be a church erected by the Italians of County Cork.’”

Umbertina frowned at Domenico’s story; he was still dissatisfied, she thought.

“The Italians are always the worst off,” he was saying. “Other peoples came from Europe accompanied by doctors, priests, engineers, and teachers. But not the Italians! They came in a herd of peasants. Father Di Simeone is a rarity. He had to get special permission from the Church to come over and help the immigrants—no one in the government cared anything about them.”

“Weh! Domenico, esagerato!” the women muttered. “You exaggerate.”

Umbertina discovered that day that it was easier to be as she and Serafino were than to be Domenico in the New World.

The next day she went to the Convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which was a modest frame house next to the little wooden church that looked, to her eyes, quite miserable for the Lord’s House, not anywhere near as substantial as the banks and the business establishments of the town.

The nun who introduced herself as the teacher of the elementary grades surprised Umbertina. She was a young woman, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three perhaps, and she was tall and fine-featured, with a bearing that reminded Umbertina instantly of some of the signoras she used to glimpse in their carriages in Soveria Mannelli. This nun—whose name, she told Umbertina, was Sister Carmela, and who spoke Italian, not dialect—was not a southern Italian, but one from the North like Anna Giordani. Of good family, Umbertina could see immediately.

“Your name is like the Church,” said Umbertina, shy before the imposing presence of the beautiful nun who was not much younger than she, and not knowing what else to say.

“It is not my real name, of course. My parents were from Milan and would not have given me the name of girls from bassa Italia. My name was Chiara, but my brother used to call me Carmelooch to tease me and make me angry, since all the meridionali seemed to be named Carmela. When I entered the convent my superiors gave me the religious name of Sister Carmela and I thought, Oh, dear, now I’m Carmelooch for life! And now I’m here at the School of Our Lady of Mount Carmel—it all seems to have been intended by the Good Lord.”