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the dirt and smeared with something. But her letter and the last money order were still inside. It was amazing that no one had pilfered it, torn it open, taken the order and cashed it, some Pale version of Big Head. There were enough of them. When times were hard, there were always crooks to make it still harder.
    She put her head in her hands in despair. Shaineh, her beautiful youngest sister, had come to New York alone and no one had met her. So what had happened to Shaineh? All that could go wrong swirled in Freydeh’s head. She had to find Shaineh, but how?
    All right, the first thing was to find out when the ship had come in andwhether Shaineh had truly been on it. She needed to talk Yonkelman into letting her leave work to go down to Castle Garden and make inquiries. Even the prospect of dealing with the immigration people gave her a stomachache, but she must do it, and soon. If she could afford a lawyer, this would be easier, but she couldn’t, no use fussing about it. Her English was just not good enough. She had been studying and studying, sometimes even in the pharmacy during slow times. The Silverman girls helped her. They didn’t even have accents. Of course, who could hear their own accent? She would still sound like a greenhorn, she didn’t doubt it.
    She could take one of the street kids from the neighborhood with her. That kid Sammy she sometimes shared a little bread with or gave a penny for an errand, he was bright. Sammy was a good kid—as good as he could manage to be. She’d get Sammy to go down to Castle Garden with her and then she would be sure the immigration people and the people from the Hamburg line would understand her and she would understand them. It was a plan. Not much of one, but the best she could do. She had to find Shaineh, and so she had to start someplace.
    She knew that in part she was involving Sammy because she had feelings for him—barefoot in all weather, half starved, getting by on garbage and luck, filthy, ragged, scorned, invisible like thousands of others who lived on the streets of this city. They broke her heart. She wanted a child so passionately, and there were all these children just thrown away. She’d look for Sammy right now—even though it meant going down to the street. She knew where he slept—the passageway between two tenements the locals called Pig Alley. She stood up, made her explanation to the Silvermans. Mister had gone to bed with their son. The youngest girl had fallen asleep with her head on the table. Missus and the two older girls were still making flowers, their fingers bleeding as usual by day’s end. When the candle guttered out, they would finally go to bed. In the meantime, she would find Sammy and persuade him to accompany her down to the Battery on her quest for real, hard information about Shaineh. It was a weak plan, but she could not see where else to start. She had to find her sister, and she was months late looking. Anything could have happened to Shaineh, anything.
    O VER THE YEAR and five months she had been living at the Silvermans’, she had come to know Sammy. Boys grew up fast on these streets. They slept where they could. Their bodies turned up in the mornings and were hauled away and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Nobody saidgoodbye. Nobody missed them, except perhaps a younger kid whom they protected or an older kid who had protected them. There were thousands in these streets, sleeping in alleys, in filthy second basements, in halls and by fences or in sheds. Everywhere she went in the city, there they were, the unwanted, the sloughed-off kids.
    Pig Alley was a narrow unpaved slot between the six-story tenements that lined the street. Sammy had built himself a little hut against a wall, cobbled out of builders’ scraps and boxes, with a horse blanket he had probably stolen for his bed. He was huddled there, sucking on a bone he had found someplace—a bare bone but better than nothing. She approached him