In the first year of the new century, Umbertina was middle-aged when her last child, Carla, was born and baptized in the grand new stone edifice of Mount Carmel, built on the site of the old wood structure and completed with Italian money. In that year it seemed to her that a design, like the rich intricacy of the long-lost matrimonial spread, was complete. Her life’s pattern was outlined, and it was satisfying and beautiful to her. It was in that year, 1900, that she and Serafino moved out of the Hollow and put $1,500 of patiently saved money into the purchase of a $4,000 property, an old stone mansion on Broad Street in what had once been the finest part of Cato. That move, hallowed by the fact that the American bank on Main Street had given them a mortgage, was a proud day in Umbertina’s life. It was the transaction involving money that made her feel American; she had never cared much for the rhetoric that she sometimes heard in church or that Ben read from Cato’s Italian paper, La Luce, about such vague things as patriotism, justice, and liberty. As far as she was concerned, all of what America stood for was the fact that she and Serafino could go to a bank that looked like a temple and not be treated like animals but be received, seated, and given a mortgage based on their hard work and thrift. Figurati in Italia!—Yes, just imagine such a thing in the old country.

The stone house was a former mansion on grounds where trees of magnificent girth and height and age still stood, and where there was a carriage house in the rear for keeping Bessie, the horse, and the wagon. Across from the property were the businesses that had ruined it as a residence: the Cato Paving Company and the sheds of the Mohawk Trolley Company, whose conductor’s cap and brass-buttoned uniform Jake now wore as an employee.

That same year S. Longobardi & Sons became an importing business, and Jake and Ben spent all day at the business, which was expanding into a private neighborhood bank and steamship-ticket agency as well. At night Jake went to his trolley job and Ben worked as an insurance salesman; what money they made went into the common till to build up the family business. Umbertina’s triumph was complete. Her sons had not entered the cotton mills, as the sons of other immigrants were doing, and soon they would be working entirely for themselves, the family.

She could not write, but she yearned to tell them in Castagna of her progress. Of how work had succeeded. Often, in the New York tenements, she had sent her thoughts and longings back in her imagination, but she was glad now that she hadn’t been able to write of her despair and sorrow at that time. Why send the record of defeat and humiliation?