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Her powers of observation unabated despite faltering eyesight, onslaught of age, and general indifference, Mimoo continued to call them as she saw them.
    So when Mimoo heard about the job Harry finally found, the only thing she said was, “I pray that Bill doesn’t make you his financial secretary, Harry.”
    Gina glared at her impervious-to-glares mother.
    When Angela had first brought Arturo home in the palm of her hand like a shiny display of male greatness, Mimoo took one look at him and barely waiting until he had left, said to her niece, “Angie, are you a fool? Do you not see that awful man is no good for you?” With Angela’s immediate family back in Sicily, Mimoo had taken it upon herself to be a surrogate mother to the young woman.
    Angela kissed her. “You think no one is good enough for me, Mimoo. I love you.”
    “No,” Mimoo said calmly. “Just him.”
    “But he is wonderful! He writes poetry. He studied to be a seminarian . . .”
    “Is he in the seminary now?”
    “Well, no . . .”
    “Exactly.”
    In 1908 Emma Goldman had been scheduled to speak on the Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama. Gina had asked Harry if he wanted to go and he said, “I don’t want to go to Boston right now. Or possibly ever again. Anarchism and socialism are like two magnetic norths. You go. Take Angela with you.”
    “You never want to come with me anywhere anymore,” Gina said. “You used to come to all my meetings before we were married.”
    “That was courtship,” Harry replied. “Listening to anarchic blather equating marriage to slavery. Nodding my head at sermons against subjugated women. That’s the way I got you to marry me.”
    “You’re teasing me, mio sposo .”
    “Am I? Are you married to me or no?”
    Angela started going with Gina instead, like Verity once used to. Together they listened to “The Economic Crisis: Its Cause and Remedy,” “Syndicalism: A New Phase of the Labor Struggle,” “Woman Under Anarchism,” and “The Relation of Anarchism to Trade Unionism.”
    The last was the speech that changed Angela’s life, though according to Mimoo not for the better, because that’s when she met Arturo Giovannitti.
    Arturo had emigrated from Naples in 1901, barely speaking English. He was tall, good-looking, arrogant, loud. He had indeed studied briefly at the Theological Seminary. Heavy-set, thick-browed Angela, friendly, happy, for years waiting for a suitable man, was smitten. She never had a chance. “Like me, Harry,” Gina had said, nonplussed when he didn’t reply right away. “You mean like me,” he said to her, upon further nudging.
    Arturo described himself as a union leader, a socialist, a poet, and he brought with him to the conference center his friend, Joe Ettor, “Smiling Joe” of the Industrial Workers of the World. Joe cast his eyes on the dark-haired, tall, and dramatic Gina, who flashed her wedding ring and invited him back to Lawrence to meet her husband. Joe got the hint, but came for dinner anyway. He and Harry hit it off—that evening and many evenings that followed—expounding on Marx’s dialectical materialism and on economic development being the foundation of all life. Evening after joyful inebriated evening they played cards, told jokes, and dreamed of a true socialist state, one that didn’t yet exist, where money, prices, and markets were abolished, and all capitalist property confiscated and divided among the people.
    Joe and Arturo became fascinated by Lawrence, the woolen and worsted production center of the world, a flourishing yet deeply troubled textile town. Joe had worked as a waterboy on railroads, filed saws at lumber mills, was a barrel maker, a shipyard worker, and had been last employed at a cigar factory. He began his work with the IWW as a community organizer and became an outstanding public speaker. He spent years taking Arturo with him, traveling the country and organizing miners, migrant laborers, and foreign-born workers. Twice