heads on Summer Street, and unsettled Gina.
Salvo didn’t come home for Christmas, his absence a black sore at the table. Mimoo and Gina didn’t discuss it. Mimoo prayed more than usual, which is to say, nearly all day. It was Christmas, after all, she said. Prayers were in order. But on Christmas Eve she couldn’t help herself, she accused Harry of heartlessness in abandoning his family.
“Do you not see me?” she said to him, having had too much holiday cheer in the form of red port. “I don’t have my son on Christmas. I weep with despair. You don’t think your father and your sister feel the same about not having you with them on Christmas?”
“No, I don’t think they do.”
“You’re blind inside your soul!”
“Mimoo, they threw me out,” Harry said in self-defense. “I didn’t leave like Salvo, of my own free will. They forced me out, told me I would never be welcome in their home again. My father disowned me. He stopped my access to our family accounts. They did this because I had the gall to marry your daughter.”
Mimoo harrumphed in agreement. “He felt betrayed by you. He lost his temper.”
“My father never loses his temper. He said exactly what he meant. He did exactly what he intended. He told me he didn’t have a son anymore.”
“You’re a fool, Harry. Gina, you married a fool. Do you know how impossible what you’re saying is? A father cannot abandon his children.”
Gina tried to comfort her mother. “Mimoo, they’re not like us,” she said. “They don’t feel the same way about their children.”
Mimoo staggered from the table. “You don’t think a man feels most deeply about his only son?” she said. “Are you even my daughter? Think what you’re saying. His only son!”
“Honestly, Mimoo, believe him.”
“A man who doesn’t feel deeply about his son feels deeply about nothing.”
“Well, then, Mimoo,” said Harry, “perhaps you’ve answered your own question.”
Holding on to the railing, the old woman slowly climbed the stairs, refusing Gina’s help. “You are both blind. Because you haven’t had children. Just you wait. Wait till August. Then you’ll understand.”
They rang in the New Year of 1912 with champagne and roast pig. Arturo told Angela that maybe this summer, if all went well, they could be married.
Mimoo snorted all the way up the stairs, loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“Mimoo, you’re embarrassing him,” said Angela after the men had left. “You know he can hear you, right?”
“I hope the dead can hear me. Madre di Dio. Do you hear me? Did he give you a ring?”
“He doesn’t have the money right now.”
“He has money to spend on his cigarettes and train rides all across the country, doesn’t he? And every time I see him he’s wearing a new suit.”
“Rings are expensive,” Angela said, calling downstairs to her cousin. “Gina, how much was your ring?”
In the kitchen cleaning up the wine glasses, Gina inquisitively tapped at Harry, reading the paper. “How should I know?” he said with a shrug. “I walked into the jewelers and picked out the largest stone. My father got the bill.”
Gina stared at the fourth finger on her left hand. The two-karat princess-cut diamond sparkled. She cleaned it every morning, even before she cleaned her teeth. It was like something out of someone else’s life.
“He says it wasn’t that expensive, Mimoo,” Gina yelled up to the bedroom.
“Is he going to lure you into a pretend marriage,” Mimoo asked Angela, “like that Harry with my daughter?”
“Mimoo, we are not in a pretend marriage!” Gina called from downstairs. “And also, Harry can hear you.”
“No, Mimoo,” said Angela, sitting on the corner of the bed and smiling. “Unlike Harry with Gina, Arturo is going to marry me properly, in a church. Because as you know, the Italian atheist rhetoric is all for show. There is no such thing as an Italian atheist.”
Downstairs, Harry glanced up from his newspaper to catch Gina’s eye for a reply to the truth of that. She crossed herself and bowed in assent before kissing him with champagne on her lips.
“There is also no ring,” an implacable Mimoo pointed out upstairs.
Gina waved her ring hand at Harry, wondering how much her rock was worth and if she pawned it, would she ever be able to get together the money to buy it back.
Two
RIGHT AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, in the first week in January, the Lawrence women returned to work. Five days later, when they received their paychecks, they discovered there had been a small error. They got paid half a dollar less than the previous week.
Arturo asked Angela to perform some simple math. And lo! It turned out that, yes indeed, they were working two hours less a week, just as they had requested. But now they were getting two hours less pay.
That Friday night Arturo paced around the Summer Street parlor like a self-satisfied peacock, saying, “I told you. I told you. I knew they were up to no good, and I was right.”
Two hundred women, Angela at the forefront, dragging with her a desperately reluctant Gina, showed up the next Monday in front of the red doors of Wood Mill at the T-junction of Union and Essex, loudly demanding that the accounting error be corrected immediately since they were not returning to work until it was.
The manager of American Woolen, Lester Evans, a small polite man, came outside to talk to Angela and Gina.
“Why are you ladies upset?” he asked calmly, dressed in his tailored finery. “Stop shouting. What is the problem? Do you think you should be getting paid the same for less work?”
“YES!” came the defiant cries. Gina stayed quiet.
“But you all received a generous raise when you negotiated your last contract barely four months ago. Are you saying it’s not enough?”
“SHORT PAY!”
“Why would we pay you more for working less? That hardly seems fair.”
“NO CUT IN PAY! NO CUT IN PAY!”
“What’s not fair is the cut in pay,” Angela shouted into Lester’s face, strengthened by the yelling women at her back, like a sail in the tail winds.
“But you didn’t receive a cut in pay,” Lester said amiably.
“Yes, a cut in pay!”
“You’re playing with the big boys now, Annie LoPizo,”
