Domenico marries Ignazia

Domenico marries Ignazia in a civil ceremony in Brooklyn on May 12, 1916, after agreeing to a bargain that treats her marriage as a transaction. The episode’s decisive contrast is between his hope that marriage and a home of his own will secure her love and the distress and distance that greet him instead. Recounted retrospectively under the date August 9, 1949, the scene presents the wedding not as a mutual beginning but as the continuation of a choice made under pressure, whose consequences are visible in the couple’s first journey and evening together.

The bargain before the wedding

Before the ceremony, Domenico offers Nunzio four hundred for Ignazia. Ignazia rejects the proposal in desperation and threatens to harm herself rather than accept it. Nunzio raises the price to five hundred and stipulates that Domenico take another woman as well. Domenico repeats the offer and accepts. The exchange ends with Nunzio shaking his hand and drawing him inside, while Rocco opens wine to celebrate. Domenico barely drinks: nausea leaves him able only to wet his lips. Ignazia continues crying out from a side room, and Prosperine Tucci watches from the doorway, smoking and glaring.

The staging makes the unequal meanings of the agreement plain without treating the celebration as a shared one. The men seal it with a handshake and drink; Ignazia remains apart and protests, while Prosperine’s silent glare registers opposition. Domenico’s own physical reaction also cuts against the apparent festivity: he has secured the outcome he pursued, yet cannot share the brothers’ easy celebration. The arrangement binds the marriage to a bargain made over Ignazia’s objections, and the scene gives no indication that her resistance has been resolved before the wedding.

The civil ceremony and train journey

Domenico’s later account specifies that the wedding took place in Brooklyn on May 12, 1916, as a civil ceremony. Prosperine and Domenico’s cousin Vitaglio witnessed it. The brief factual record sits beside a more revealing detail about the return journey to Connecticut: there were not three seats together, and Ignazia wanted to sit with Prosperine rather than with her new husband.

From across the aisle and several seats away, Domenico can see Monkey-Face but only the blue velvet wedding hat worn by Ignazia. The hat bears red strawberries that shake as the train moves. That limited view captures the separation between the newlyweds: the ceremony has made Ignazia his wife, but their physical arrangement places her beside the person she wants near her, while Domenico watches from elsewhere. He consoles himself with the expectation that she will love him once she sees his home. The thought gives the journey a forward-looking hope, but it also reveals how much he assumes that the house will change a feeling she has not freely offered.

The house as promise and disappointment

On arriving, Domenico lights the lamps and leads Ignazia through the house by the hand, with the other woman following behind them like a shadow. He takes Ignazia upstairs to a window and shows her the backyard garden, which he regards as his little piece of Sicily. He remembers the full moon and presents the house as her new home, asking how she likes it. Her shrug wounds him. The gesture is small, but it answers his expansive hope with no sign of the welcome he expected.

Domenico has prepared embroidered sheets sent by Signora Siragusa as a wedding present. He regards the marriage as an opportunity to possess the intimacy he has long desired, describing his passion as having unsettled his sensible nature. That expectation belongs to his point of view; the scene does not present Ignazia as sharing it. Rather than depicting the marriage bed as a moment of reunion, the narrative places her and Prosperine together while Domenico waits outside in the backyard garden. Through an open upstairs window, he sees Prosperine combing Ignazia’s hair and hears Ignazia sobbing as Prosperine murmurs comfort.

Meaning of the marriage scene

The episode follows a series of mismatches between what Domenico imagines and what Ignazia does. He treats the payment and marriage as a means of bringing her into his life; she protests the arrangement, chooses Prosperine’s company on the train, and responds to his home with a shrug. His garden, associated in his mind with Sicily and the promise of a home, cannot by itself make the new household a place of shared attachment. The wedding establishes their legal relationship, but the immediate aftermath emphasizes the emotional distance within it.

The retrospective form sharpens that contrast. Domenico recounts the date, civil status, and witnesses with documentary precision, then recalls the strawberries on Ignazia’s hat, the space between their seats, and the women together at the window. Those concrete details make the marriage’s beginning both a recorded family event and an account of failed expectation. The ceremony is completed; affection is not. The final image leaves Domenico outside, separated from Ignazia’s distress and from the comfort Prosperine offers her, while the hope he had invested in the house remains unanswered.