The baby was not her own. It was a little Jewish foundling she had taken from the “Home” to nurse when her last baby died seven months ago. Four children had died before that when “so leetle.” Over the mantelpiece hung a large, shiny photograph of the last baby lying in its casket. The, casket had been very expensive, but it had been a great comfort to the mother to put so much money into it, quite unconscious that the living children were paying its heavy price in lowered health and vitality.
The Morellis’ three rooms had none of the air of prosperity that characterized the Colletti home. They were bare, and would have been dingy except for the bright bedspread, the gayly colored wall decorations, and advertising calendars, pictures of the royal family, the pope, the saints, and the Holy Virgin. Under this last a candle burned, an offering for Tony’s return. In the tiny dark box of a room back of the kitchen a cot and two chairs served Rose and the two younger girls as sleeping accommodations. A shakedown in the kitchen had been Tony’s bed. It was still there, unused. No one else would have thought of sleeping in it. It would have been an acknowledgment that he might not need it again.
As Rose went on talking of their “trouble” to her friends, they responded with quick sympathy. They lamented with the Morellis as sincerely as they had rejoiced with the Colletti family. They felt with Rose as keenly and genuinely as with Mary and Lucy. Sympathy is the keynote of the Italian community. It binds together not only members of the same family but relatives of all degrees, friends, fellow-tenants, speakers of the same dialect, those from the same Latin town. It extends to the little foundling, the tiny boarder, whose frequent presence in the home is such sad evidence of the high infant mortality in the Italian families. The $10 which the foster mother receives from the institution as board money does not prevent her from loving her little nursling with the same passionate abandon with which she loves her own.
Whether a girl comes from the higher income group like the Collettis, whose home runs the whole depth of the house and has circulation of fresh air, or from the group that feels the pressure of bare living in three choking, dark rooms as do the Morellis, she is touched by the same deep influence of family bonds and customs. A tying-up of the individual with the group, an identity of interests with those of one’s kin--these are the factors which dominate the lives of the family into which the Italian girl is born and which present a valiant front to the forces of personal independence that meet her in her American life, at school, in industry, and in recreation.