A Decent Girl Always Goes to Mass on Sunday

Angela, a young Italian-American girl, poorly educated and woefully naïve, works in a shoe factory along with her best friend Rose. Theirs is a peculiar friendship based not upon affection and trust, but upon self-interest. When a too-handsome, mysterious one-armed Korean War veteran becomes the new factory foreman, he precipitates a bitter rift in the friendship and, at the same time, creates chaos in the factory.
This is a serio-comic novel which takes place in the fifties after the last "good" war and the first "bad" war, a time of transition when we'd lost our innocence but weren't ready to plunge into the dark world of cynicism or the bright world of a new idealism, both brought about by the divisive Vietnam War.