Vincenzo Tempesta

Vincenzo Tempesta, the youngest brother of Domenico Tempesta, is remembered through a series of clashes with family authority, employers, and the law. His story moves from an unruly childhood in Sicily to precarious work in Three Rivers, Connecticut, and ends with his death from an infection after a police officer shoots him. His relationship with Domenico is marked by both estrangement and a final act of care: although Domenico declares that they are no longer brothers, he ensures that Vincenzo receives the last rites. The account comes through Domenico’s retrospective narration, whose indignation and self-justification shape how Vincenzo is presented.

Family and Early Conduct

While Domenico, their father, and Pasquale were away from home, Vincenzo remained with his mother and, as Domenico recalls, grew wild. Their mother could not make him obey or help her. Later, while working as an apprentice to the mason Nardo, Vincenzo again took advantage of a moment without supervision: he left his assigned work at a building project on an estate. The magistrate and a visiting church official came upon Vincenzo in a compromising encounter with the magistrate’s adult daughter. The incident brought immediate consequences for both apprentice and master. Nardo was dismissed, and the magistrate banished him and Vincenzo from the property.

The episode establishes a pattern that recurs in Domenico’s account: Vincenzo’s conduct draws public attention and exposes others around him to consequences. Nardo had been asleep during the incident, but lost his position along with his apprentice. He then hurried to report what had happened to the brothers’ father, bringing the conflict from the estate back to the family. Domenico’s narration treats the event as evidence of Vincenzo’s disorder, while also revealing how quickly a private breach became a matter of family standing and livelihood.

Work and Repeated Disruptions

After the brothers came to America, Vincenzo and Pasquale both worked at a mill, but neither remained there. Vincenzo was moved to the picking department, which Domenico identifies as a demotion, and was then dismissed for running a numbers game among the workers of the American Woolen and Textile Company. Some foremen had participated in the gambling, but denied their involvement when questioned by a police sergeant and an agent. Domenico emphasizes that he himself was not suspected and contrasts his interest in buying land with Vincenzo’s gambling.

Vincenzo next worked as a greengrocer at Hurok’s Market. Domenico describes his good looks and foolish antics as a source of disruption among the women customers, but the surviving account does not elaborate on what followed there. Across these jobs, Vincenzo’s employment is unstable: the mill ends in dismissal, and the market provides another setting in which his behavior attracts notice. The contrast with Domenico’s account of his own ambitions is pointed, though it is Domenico who supplies the judgment and frames the comparison.

Estrangement from Domenico

A later confrontation takes place in a boardinghouse, in the presence of a priest and other listeners. Vincenzo makes a sexual joke at Domenico’s expense. Domenico first tries to dismiss the remark as jest, then invokes his position as the eldest member of the Tempesta family and demands that Vincenzo model himself on him. Vincenzo rejects that demand with another joke. Domenico’s authority, which he presents as a defense of family reputation, fails to settle the dispute.

Domenico then slaps Vincenzo. Vincenzo raises his fists, and Domenico raises his own, but the confrontation stops short of a fight. Looking at his brother, Domenico recalls him as a small child and remembers their parents and the village they had left behind. That recognition does not undo the quarrel: unwilling either to continue the physical confrontation or to yield his pride, Domenico announces that he will forsake Vincenzo and never speak to him again. He later describes the sadness that follows, while also observing that keeping his vow of silence soon becomes easy. The emotional break is therefore real, but it is not a reconciliation; the next decisive change comes through Vincenzo’s death.

Death and Last Rites

Nine days after a police sergeant shoots Vincenzo, Vincenzo dies from an infection. Domenico recounts the shooting as the culmination of Vincenzo’s involvement with the sergeant’s wife. The police department investigates and exonerates the sergeant; Domenico reports this outcome with bitterness and presents the official inquiry as a form of protection for the officer. His account conveys the unequal consequences of the encounter without turning the investigation into a resolution: Vincenzo is dead, while the sergeant is cleared.

Pasquale and Father Guglielmo are with Vincenzo at his bedside in Signora Siragusa’s boardinghouse. Father Guglielmo gives him the Eucharist and extreme unction before he dies. Domenico stresses that he arranged this. The detail complicates the declaration of estrangement: he may have refused to speak to Vincenzo, but he intervenes to ensure that his brother receives religious rites at the end of his life. Domenico does not witness the funeral Mass and burial at St. Mary of Jesus Christ Cemetery. He learns from Pasquale that a crowd of young women of several nationalities attended, a final indication, in Domenico’s telling, of the attention Vincenzo had attracted.

Memory, Guilt, and Family Meaning

Vincenzo remains present in the family story after his death. In one of Domenico’s dreams, his wife Ignazia shares an intimate moment with the dead Vincenzo while Domenico sits nearby combing her hair. Domenico recalls feeling happy in the dream, then waking to humiliation at what it seemed to say about him; he imagines Vincenzo laughing at him from Hell. The dream gives Vincenzo a posthumous role in Domenico’s intimate fears, rather than allowing the dead brother to recede into the past.

Years later, Domenico tells Father Guglielmo that he believes his own temper and actions contributed to the family’s suffering. In that confession, he contrasts the priest’s bedside care for Vincenzo with what happened to Pasquale, and recalls having tried to find Pasquale a wife. The comparison makes Vincenzo’s final sacraments part of a larger burden of responsibility that Domenico carries for his brothers. Father Guglielmo urges Domenico to forgive those he believes have wronged him, explicitly including Vincenzo and his lust. Vincenzo thus occupies two positions in Domenico’s recollection: the brother whose behavior provoked anger and estrangement, and the brother for whom Domenico still took responsibility at the threshold of death. The unresolved tension between those roles gives Vincenzo’s brief, turbulent life its lasting importance in the family narrative.