When Maria Tuttoilmondo’s older brother was arrested in the slums of Rome in the first year of the twentieth century for stealing meat, their mother slapped the one-way ticket to New York, intended for him, into Maria’s hand. The ten-year-old girl knew not to argue with her mother, but she refused to go to this strange city alone. Maria scooped up a kitten in the Roman ruin near their tenement and stowed its frail form in a bag slung across her hip under layers of clothes.

Any cat was a gift to a ship, but a Roman cat with black fur and six toes on each paw was seen as holy. The superstitious sailors would not touch the kitten or the girl traveling with it. Maria held the cat against her chest like a sacred talisman as she arrived at Ellis Island. After hours of waiting, the doctor listened to Maria’s heart and the kitten’s heart. He checked her gums and the kitten’s gums. When a uniformed man put the pair onto a ship that pulled into a Manhattan wharf, Maria knew she had made a mistake. She wouldn’t be sent home, as she had believed, for sneaking a cat into New York. Her first lesson in America: She needed to understand the rules before she could break them.

Maria went to stay with a distant cousin in the worst neighborhood in the best suburb north of New York City because her mother wanted her far from the stench of the tenements. The ten blocks of industrial buildings and low-rise homes where she now lived could have been plucked from any of New York’s outer boroughs, except for the wealthy suburban neighborhoods that encircled them like a moat. Maria would never escape her mother’s dream or her brother’s mistake, but the kitten could at least be free. She let it go before Midnight Mass at St. Joseph’s church, the small black shadow sliding away down the alley. The cat would never wander far.