“Take it back?”
“Oh, yes, to the ‘Home.’ Bennie isn’t our real brother; he’s a foundling. You see, when the last baby died in the winter my mother took Bennie from the Home and now we all love him and they want to take him back.”
Mrs. Ruletti breaks in. “They say to me, ‘You have no milk now, bring Bennie back.’ But I feed him bread, meat, oh! he can eat soon. I no want him to go; like loosa my own baby.”
In the Italian household the daughter of fourteen is expected to bear a full share of the mother’s responsibilities. She keeps the house, cooks, washes, dresses and disciplines the children. Laura Tuzzoli, with her old little face and her maternal air, is a not unusual type. Going to call for the first time I paused before the tenement, uncertain as to their floor. A group of dark-eyed children around an ash can nearby watched me curiously. One tiny four-year-old flashed a quick smile of friendliness and a brilliant glance from her black eyes, then edged a little away from her companions. Asked where Laura Tuzzoli lived, she straightened her slight, ragged shoulders and informed me that she was also a “Tuzzoli.” She slipped her mite of a hand into mine and led me up the dirty, unsteady stairs to “our house.”
There the fourteen-year-old sister was presiding in the mother’s absence. She had just begun to bathe the one-year-old baby, having finished cleaning their three rooms. The windows had been washed as had the gilt-framed, cracked mirror which hung proudly in the space between them. On a shelf beneath a picture of the Virgin stood a clean jelly-glass filled with water on which floated a cork bearing a freshly lighted candle.
Presently little Lizzie Tuzzoli came in from school carrying her books and papers for “home work.” Fourteen-year-old Laura put her through a rapid fire of questions about her behavior and whether she had “made up” with a certain Mamie. Lizzie suddenly dived into her bag and produced from it a wonderful pink pencil of the screw variety. Pride of possession shone in her eyes as she displayed it.
“I got it off Lena Perella,” she announced. Laura seized the pencil, touched it carefully, then gave Lizzie a sharp look. “Did she give it to you?” she demanded.
Lizzie squirmed a little. “Yes. She—I found it and didn’t know it belonged to her, and Carrie Bussi said Lena didn’t want it anyway, so——”
Laura handed the pencil back with a scorching glance and a dictum whose tone permitted no rejoinder, “You take that back to school tomorrow and give it to Lena, d’ye hear?” Then she became the gracious hostess again.
The bond between Zappira Blondi and her mother was of another sort. When Zappira was twelve years old her father had sailed away to America leaving his family in the little village near Naples to wait until he could earn a home for them in the new country. But work was harder to find than he expected. After a year’s absence he wrote a letter home filled with discouragement and reporting dreary failure. Zappira, who was the oldest of the children, shared in her mother’s keen disappointment. The two put their heads together and laid a plan whereby they could earn their passage. The mother borrowed a sum of money sufficient to stock a small store in their village. This she and Zappira proceeded to conduct so successfully that at the end of the year the small debt had been repaid and the passage money laid aside. Their venture had been kept a secret from the father, and when they were all ready to make the journey they wrote him the good news and named the date when he should meet them at Ellis Island. Great was the joy of the family at being together, but hard work still lay ahead of these brave women. They took two small rooms in Mott Street, and for a year mother and daughter worked in a factory, eking out a bare living. The girl was now sixteen, old enough to be married, and though the family could ill afford to lose her wages her father did not fail in what he considered his duty. He soon found a husband for her. Although so young, Zappira had, through years of close partnership with her mother, already acquired many of the sober qualities of middle age.