American Pie Read Online Free PDF Page A

listened to Stefan's soft snore. A tear spilled from her eyes and dropped to the mattress.
    She had not expected that she and Stefan would live in luxury or splendor. But neither had she expected squalor. As poor as they were, the villages in Wlad had fresh clean air and plentiful sunshine. And flowers on the sills. No one lived above an outhouse or piled garbage in his yard.
    It was also true there was no hope for change in Wlad, no opportunity for a young man or woman to better themselves. Inheritance had carved the land into smaller and smaller plots and each year the soil seemed less fertile than the year before, the harvest less plentiful. People went to bed hungry in Wlad and shivered before empty grates when the snows came. And always there was the fear of the soldiers who might swoop through the village burning and pillaging for an evening's amusement.
    Life would be better in America. But Lucie stared into the darkness and remembered the faces in Elizabeth Street. She knew those faces. Faces frozen by anxiety, faces holding fear inside. Hungry faces, ill faces, faces reflecting the uncertainty of tomorrow. Had they arrived in the land of plenty as filled with hope and excitement as she? What had happened between Ellis Island and Elizabeth Street?
    Was America no more than a golden myth? No, she thought with a shudder of rejection. No soldiers would come in the night. No tax collector would appear in the morning. Her belly was full and she had two rooms to call her own. Stefan had work and so would she. They were young and strong and willing to wait for the opportunity mat would surely come, as it never would in Wlad.
    Lying in the darkness, listening to the sounds of Stefan's snores and the noise within and beyond the walls, Lucie finally let herself remember the Irishman whose dark eyes had made her shiver in the sunlight. Where was he tonight? Would she ever see him again? It didn't seem possible that fate had brought them together only to cast them apart.
    She recalled the exhilaration she had felt when she met Jamie Kelly, followed by the shock and disappointment of seeing where she and Stefan would live. Her first day in America had been strange and bewilderingand not at all what she had expected.
     
    In the morning she fried the last of the bread for Stefan's breakfast and sent him downstairs to empty the slop bucket and join the line waiting to pump fresh water for coffee and washing.
    Shortly after Stefan departed for work, a sliver of sunlight slipped across the window's broken pane and Lucie stared at the light, mesmerized, suspecting it would be the last sunshiny brightness she would see today.
    Before Stefan returned, bringing bread, cheese and sausage for their supper, she had replaced the linen on the mattresses with the sheets she brought from home, had scrubbed the rooms from floor to ceilings, had polished the lamp chimneys and had restored a semblance of respectability to the stove.
    The next day, marshaling her courage, she donned her hat and gloves and timidly ventured outside determined to explore her new world. The bewildering array of streets and cross streets and back alleyways overwhelmed her but she made herself swallow the fear that lodged in her throat. The trick was to proceed slowly, memorizing her steps, progressing a bit farther each day.
    By the end of the week she discovered the Hester Street market and learned the best buys could be made late in the day when the stall owners and pushcart vendors prepared to close shop for the evening. She found the station for the elevated, though she didn't dare venture inside, and made herself stand and watch and listen to the hideous shriek of hot metal until she no longer felt like running from the noise and belching cinders. She located the corners where the red horse cars stopped and examined the wares offered by the pushcarts in every streetsecondhand clothing, secondhand food and scissors, eyeglasses and scraps of wood and old nails.