Whereupon Umbertina made it clear to Beppino that he could, until he was settled elsewhere, have a room in the big house and eat at her table. But not forever. “This is a country where there’s room for everyone; we don’t have to stay all together as in our father’s house,” she told him.

“No matter what country, your tongue is always the same, Umbertina,” he answered, offended.

Now, in front of her eyes, as if to show her disrespect, there was Beppino courting Grazia.

“Disgraziato,” Umbertina muttered under her breath as she watched him. It bothered her that Beppino had not had to undergo the same baptism of pain as she; he had always worked and saved for himself without sharing and now here he was in Cato starting out in comfort and courting one of the Saccà family.

For Domenico Saccà, despite his preaching and book learning, an alliance with the Longobardis was now desirable. Though he had arrived first with the advantage of his trade, he had seen himself bypassed. Hard work and canniness had made the cafoni businessmen. The Longobardi family had become importers; Samuele Muzzi, a onetime railroad-tie cutter and handyman, was now a building contractor; the Gaultiero family had gone into real estate. Peddlers opened stores, and Calabrians like the Micheluzzi changed their names to Michaels, married into Irish families, and from stone-masonry went into construction. Yet Domenico had not even remained a shoemaker; with the growth of shoe factories, his custom-shoe trade had dwindled and he was now left with only shoe repairing.

His bitterness was taken out in polemics against the ignorant in high places and in inveighing against the inequities of government, taxes, and politics in general—to the vast annoyance of Umbertina, who still understood nothing about politics but everything about being better off.