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life in the slum tenements a few short blocks from the docks where he worked. Oh, he had made her shed many tears. The money for food he had always given, but the rest of his pay, savings-to-be, he spent on wine and gambling with his friends. Never a penny for herself. He had committed such an act of generosity in bringing Lucia Santa to the new country and his bed, beggar that she was without linen, that he had no need to be generous again. One deed served a lifetime.
    Lucia Santa remembered all this with a vague resentment, knowing it was not all truth. His daughter had loved him. He had been a handsome man. His beautiful white teeth chewed sunflower seeds and the little Octavia would accept them from his mouth as she never did from her mother. He had loved his daughter.
    The truth was simple. He had been a kind, hard-working, ignorant, pleasure-loving man. Her feeling had been the feeling of millions of women toward improvident husbands. That men should control the money in the house, have the power to make decisions that decided the fate of infants—what folly! Men were not competent. More—they were not serious. And she had already begun the struggle to usurp his power, as all women do, when one terrible day he was killed.
    But she had wept. Oh, how she had wept. A grief compounded with terror. Not grief for departed lips, eyes, hands, but a wail for her shield against this foreign world, a cry for the bringer of her children’s bread, the protector of the infant in her womb. These widows tear their hair and gash their cheeks, scream insane laments, do violence, and wear mourning for the world to see. These are the real mourners, for true grief is thick with terror. They are
bereaved.
Lovers will love again.
    His death was comically grotesque. While a ship was being unloaded, the gangplank had given way high above the water, plunging five men and untold tons of bananas down into the river mud. Human limbs and banana stalks buried together. Never rising once.
    She dared herself to think it: he had given them more dead than alive. In the darkness, now, years later, in mockery of her younger self, she smiled grimly. At what her younger self would think of such thoughts. But the court had awarded each of the children a thousand dollars—even Vincent not yet born but only too visible to the world. The money in trust, because here in America there was wisdom; not even parents were given charge of their children’s monies. She herself had received three thousand dollars that no one on the Avenue knew about except Zia Louche and Octavia. So it was not all in vain.
    Not to be spoken of, not to be thought of even now, were those months with the child in her belly. A child whose father had died before he was born, like the child of a demon. Even now she was struck with a terrible superstitious fear; even now, thirteen years later, tears sprang beneath her eyelids. She wept for herself as she was then, and for the unborn child, but not for the death of her husband. Her daughter Octavia could never know or understand.
    And then the most shameful: only a year after her husband’s death, only six months after the birth of that dead husband’s son, she—a grown woman—had for the first time in her life become passionate about a man, the man who was to become her second husband. In love. Not the spiritual love of young girls or priests; not the emotion for heroes in romances that could be told to a young girl. No; love was the word for the hot flesh, the burning loins, feverish eyes and cheeks. Love was the feel of turgid, spongy flesh. Ah, what madness, what foolishness for the mother of children. Thank Jesus Christ in heaven she was beyond that now.
    And for what? Frank Corbo was thirty-five, never married; slender, wiry, and with blue eyes; considered odd for being unwedded at that age, odd also in his reticence, his silent nature and lonely pride—that pride so ludicrous in those who are helpless before society and fate. The