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streets so fast her breath stabbed her. Fortunately, she didn’t bother with corsets and those stays American women wore. They couldn’t bend over or lie down in them or even sit comfortably. She wove her way through groups congregating around every stoop, gathered in the street, men smoking, women gossiping, kids chasing each other or looking for something to swipe. Street arabs like her friend Sammy were running errands or shooting craps or holding some toff’s horse while he visited a whore.
    Big Head’s apartment was in a rear tenement on Cherry Street, up on the top floor. He came and went across the roofs sometimes. She labored up the steep dark steps, hopping over puddles of urine and sticky stuff that looked like blood. Something was dripping at the back of the second-floor hall. The smell of cooked cabbage, rancid grease, unwashed bodies made her put her hand up to her nose, although she ought to be used to it by now. Back in the shtetl, she could always step outside and the wind would carry the evergreen scent of the woods. Here outside smelled as bad as inside. She had to walk to the river to smell something fresh, and even then, half the time it smelled like sewage or slaughterhouses or tanneries.
    Big Head wasn’t home, but his wife Pearl opened the door. She was pregnant again, wearing a loose wrapper with a stained apron over it. “Another three months to go, eh?” Freydeh eyed Pearl’s belly. She had helped deliver enough babies to know.
    “What you want, anyhow, coming around here all of a sudden after the way you moved out!” Pearl tossed her red hair and turned to plump her behind into a chair.
    “Big Head said he got a letter for me. I came for it.” She slid past Pearl into the kitchen and stood, hands on her hips.
    “He said, you pay us the three dollars you owe us and then I give you the letter.”
    “Two dollars. And he took my necklace.”
    “Three dollars. Big Head says you got to pay interest from owing it so long.”
    “Two dollars is all I got.” She took the greasy dollars from her pocket and flattened them out to show Pearl.
    “Big Head says three.”
    “Okay, well I tried. The letter is probably nothing but a series of complaints anyhow, it rained too much, the winter was too long, our cow died, I got rheumatism. To read somebody’s stale grief isn’t worth money I don’t got.”
    Freydeh gave the woman a big false smile showing all her strong teeth and then swung on her heel, marched out slowly but steadily and slammed the door. Then she stood outside it, her heart tapping its hammer on her breastbone, her clenched hands wet with sweat. She took another three steps, trying to hear if Pearl was moving behind the paper-thin wall, but there was too much noise.
    The door flung open. “Well, all right, all right. Don’t keep me standing here,” Pearl yelled. “Out of the goodness of my heart, I’m giving you the letter for the original two dollars you owe us. Now give me the money and take your dirty letter. Oh, and this is one of yours that came back. See, I saved it for you.”
    Freydeh grabbed the two letters and ran down the stairs. She did not dare stop to read the letter—it was dark already and the gas lamps that weren’t broken gave a faint illumination to the unpaved streets. Fortunately a lot of people were out. The night was mild for early April. She ran the five blocks to the Silvermans’, and not until she was in their front room did she dare take the letter and tear it open. Mrs. Silverman and the two older girls were at the table making flowers, as usual. They wouldn’t be able to stop till they fell asleep, they got so little for each piece.
    She moved near their candle and read. It wasn’t her mother’s writing. Her mother always wrote the letters. This hand was more ragged than her mother’s neat tiny writing. Her father? No, the letter was signed by Shaineh. Why Shaineh? By the light of the flickering candle, she leaned to read. Her hands were