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he had persuaded Harry, who just happened to be in between jobs, to go with him and Arturo to help them write their speeches. Both men looked up to Harry, revering his contemplative bookishness. Where they were brash, he was quiet, where they shouted, he spoke softly, where they were full of rhetorical passions, he engaged coolly in reasoned argument.
    Aided by Harry’s speechwriting, they had put together the Brooklyn shoe factory strike earlier in 1911. Buoyed by the success in Brooklyn, Joe and Arturo returned to Lawrence, rented two rooms off Lowell Street, close to where Angela now lived with her friend Pamela, and settled into intoxicated vigilance. They were convinced something big was going to happen in Lawrence, and they wanted to be there when it did.
    And so during Christmas of 1911, Arturo huddled with Angela, Harry, and Joe at the little round table like battle headquarters in the kitchen of Mimoo’s rented house on Summer Street and tried to make heads or tails of American Woolen’s recent actions. Gina stood by the kitchen sink and watched warily, nervous before, nauseated now. Why was she agreeing with Mimoo? Why did this agitation around Christmastime smell like nothing but a pot of trouble?
    The Lawrence mills were the world’s largest producers of textile products and needed vast numbers of laborers, mostly unskilled and underage women. After the invention of the two-loom system, the pace became grueling, the repetition and boredom dangerous, and the frequent injuries job-and-family-destroying. So after the textile union vigorously lobbied for two fewer hours of work a week, the Massachusetts legislature cut maximum hours from fifty-six to fifty-four. Fred Ayer and his son-in-law William Wood of American Woolen, who owned and operated all the mills in Lawrence, said with nary a complaint: ladies, you wanted it? It is done. Merry Christmas.
    American Woolen’s instant agreement prompted a sudden and direct action of the entire cauldron’s brew of the IWW to descend onto Lawrence in December of 1911 like it was Paris in 1789. The main question on every socialist’s mind was: why would American Woolen give in to the demands so quickly? This puzzled the four 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 can not 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,