...And Never Let HerGo

confusing because so many of their first names had come down from prior generations.
    There always seemed to be someone who tried to help the young Faheys, although their new existence was a pale imitation of the home that their mother had made for them. The Irish community included them in many activities. Along with all of her siblings, Anne Marie took Irish dancing lessons, and one of the other families who took lessons, the Mulherns, had seven children. The first summer after her mother died, Anne Marie visited often with the Mulherns.
    “She would go over there for maybe five or six days in a row,” Brian recalled, “and then come back for a couple, and that went on all summer.”
    With seven children already running through the house, one lonely little girl didn’t make that much difference, and the family’s hospitality was a godsend. Even so, Anne Marie must have begun to see the difference between those who had a
real
home and children like herself and her siblings, who lived on the edges of other people’s lives.
    Things at the Fahey house continued to crumble, despite the efforts of the older children to help out. The McDaniel Crest house wasamong the first things to go, but with help from friends they moved to a bigger house on Nichols Avenue shortly after their mother died.
    There were so many things that a family with six children needed, and they all were determined to get an education. But Robert Sr. had come to a point where he wasn’t working at all. Their only real income came from insurance payments and pension plans he had purchased in better days. Those would not last forever.
    The mortgage payments were still due every month, and so were other bills, for utilities and groceries and clothing. Robert Fahey seemed simply to have given up. Concerned friends and family members continued to help out, thinking that surely he would get himself together before he lost everything.

Chapter Two
    T HE I RISH MIDDLE - CLASS community in Wilmington had burgeoned in the fifties and sixties—as had the Italian. It was a splendid time, with opportunities for everyone willing to grasp them. Robert Fahey Sr. had done well until he was too overwhelmed with grief and the responsibility of six children to reach out. Louis J. Capano Sr. was a few years older than Robert Fahey, a family man too, but fortune had been kinder to him. As the Faheys faltered, the Capanos were thriving.
    Louis Capano Sr. was born in a tiny mountain village in Calabria, Italy, in 1923. After his parents emigrated to Delaware in 1930, Louis and his brothers, Frank and Vincent, grew up in a whole new world. Joseph Capano, their father, was a bricklayer, and there was plenty of work for a man with his skills, even in the depths of the Depression. The young Capano family settled in New Castle, a few miles south of Wilmington on the Delaware River. Their relatives the Rizzos had a little construction business there and welcomed them. New Castle is the oldest town in America, where even today the cobbled streets and old houses that seem to lean together for support give the impression of stepping back in time hundreds of years. The Capanos lived, however, in a working-class part of town.
    Immigrants from Calabria were sometimes looked down upon by other Italians who had come to America. When they heard that someone was
calabrese,
first-generation Italians from other regions often raised their eyebrows and made the deprecating gesture of aknife across their necks. Calabrese were said to be a hardheaded and stubborn bunch, and some said they were cutthroats. The Capanos, like most Calabrese, were stolid, hardworking, and clannish with family: they ignored the prejudice and set their minds to succeeding in America. Each Capano son chose a trade; Frank became a bricklayer like his father, Vincent a plumber, and Louis a carpenter. Louis was required to serve as an apprentice for four years before he could join the union, and then was hired by the Canterra Construction Company, working long hours summer and winter.
    Family lore has it that Louis’s first job was to build an outhouse, and that he was proud to do it. He was a short, solidly built man who took great pride in his workmanship. Early on, he was known for his honesty and his desire to do a job to the satisfaction of his foreman—and later, for his own customers. He didn’t have a particularly good head for business; he was, instead, an artisan, who loved to see the perfect curve of