In seconds, the horses were upon the woman. The edge of the cart knocked her clear across the street, her body landing in a heap.
People gaped at the spectacle but continued on their way without offering a hand. Those who lived in this neighborhood had seen far worse. Vandals and gangs and whores.
Alma rushed to the woman without thinking. She could have broken bones—she could have been killed. Panting, Alma crouched beside her. “Are you all right?”
The woman replied in a string of sentences that might as well have been gibberish. A small gash streaked her forehead with blood. Many of her teeth were missing, and the skin around her eyes and mouth creased like she’d spent her days exposed to the elements. When she finally stopped talking, she stared at Alma as if waiting for a reply. When none came, she clutched her ankle.
“Is it broken? Do you need a doctor?” Alma gestured to the woman’s foot.
“Alma, stop this!” Greta hissed, running to her side. “They should have watched where they were going! You’re embarrassing us.”
She ignored her sister and helped the stranger to her feet. The woman’s face crumpled in pain, and she launched into another unintelligible stream of conversation.
“What the hell are you doing, Alma?” Her stepfather’s angry voice reached her before she saw him. Robert Brauer rushed to her side, out of breath. He scowled with disgust. “Leave her,” he said. “She’s not your concern.”
Alma’s heart sank. So he had returned from his business uptown. There would be no language practice, no hour of blissful freedom today. She looked back at the woman and tried speaking to her again, this time in Italian to see if she understood—to no avail.
Robert stared at Alma in surprise. “I thought I told you not to speak that foul language. I said, leave her! What has gotten into you, girl?”
Alarmed by Robert’s tone, Alma glanced at him, noting the vein bulging in his forehead, and wondered the same. What had gotten into her? The woman was just another immigrant who had made living in the tenements more and more unbearable for their family. Suddenly feeling foolish, Alma stood.
At that moment, the woman’s friends encircled her, everyone talking at once and fawning over her injury.
Robert placed one hand on Alma and the other on Greta and steered them away from the scene.
“Are you trying to ruin my reputation, Alma?” Greta demanded, stepping over a black puddle littered with garbage. “Paul Vanderveen is across the street. He could have seen us! Those women were disgusting.”
Alma bit back a sarcastic comment. It was just like Greta to think only of herself and some boy, when the woman could have been killed. And that’s why Alma had helped, she suddenly realized. She couldn’t leave an injured woman in the street alone, no matter how uncomfortable it made her to help an immigrant.
“Greta is right,” Robert agreed, moving swiftly along the street as they neared their tenement building. “This is the last thing we need. It’s the last thing you need.” He pointed a finger in Alma’s face. “No wonder no man wants you for his wife.”
She held her tongue, knowing anything she could say would make his temper worse.
“This is the priest’s fault,” he continued. “He’s put ideas into your head.”
Alma cringed at the memory of her stepfather’s belt on her arm when he’d caught her returning from a meeting with Father Rodolfo, long after he’d told her not to go back there. Whether she liked it or not, Robert had every right to forbid her to see the priest while she lived under his roof.
An image of Papa arose in her mind, the way he’d take her on his knee in front of the fire with a book while Fritz practiced his mathematics at the table. A lump formed in the back of her throat. It had been fourteen years since Papa’s passing, yet the pain never seemed to go, not completely. Her stepfather’s open disdain for her didn’t help matters. Her very presence and that of her older brother, Fritz, seemed to make him feel threatened. Robert Brauer couldn’t abide the thought of his beloved wife having another man’s children.
“Well, your concern for those people will make my news easier for you,” Robert said, eyes stormy.
“What do you mean?” Alma asked. “What news?”
He didn’t reply, and they bounded down the steps to their bierhaus below the street.
“Johanna!” He slammed the door behind them. “Johanna!”
Mama rushed into the room. “Christ, Robert, why the shouting? What is it?”
He filled a stein with fresh brew until it frothed at the rim. “I have good news. No one is interested in the property but us. We need more cash, but they say they’ll hold it for us, if we can scrape the money together by autumn. They really want another German family to move in.” He drank deeply from his mug. Wiping his mouth with his arm, he said, “This is where you come in, Alma.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, hanging up her overcoat.
“You’re going to help pay the bills. I’ve just gotten you a job. Given how you carried on in the street just now, I think you’re the perfect person for it.”
Alma froze. He would send her away from home to work? Sweatshops and harassment, low pay and long hours—she’d read all about it in the newspapers. Her monotonous day would be made worse, and she’d never have a chance to study.
Swallowing hard, she said, “Where, Father? Where am I to work?”
He grinned smugly. “Ellis Island. You begin Monday.”
Alma gasped. Ellis Island? She looked at her mother, who said nothing and appeared overly busy stacking clean beer mugs. Had Mama agreed to send Alma off to work among a horde of unruly, dirty immigrants? It would ruin her reputation for possible suitors, surely—something her mother worried about a great deal, even if Alma didn’t. Ellis Island must be out of the question!
“Mama?” she pleaded. “Am I really to work among the…the immigrants?”
“Your father made a very good case for it last night, liebling,” Mama said.
A good case for it? She couldn’t imagine what that could possibly be. Wouldn’t her work there reflect poorly on the family? “But Father,” she began. “I—”
“You’re a burden, Alma,” he said. “Another mouth to feed. And since no man will have you, and you’ve managed to scare off the few we’ve tried to set up for you, it’s time you earned your keep.”
They thought so little of her as to banish her to the immigration station? Knees weak, she dropped into a chair. What would she be doing? Corralling the immigrants they all despised? She looked at Greta who, for the first time ever, had a piteous look on her face. And in that moment, Alma was forced to believe it. This was really happening.
As shame burned through her, one thought played over and over in her mind. The infamous name for Ellis Island:
Tr?nen Insel, Island of Tears.
3
Cheers erupted somewhere on the steamship. Francesca bolted upright in her bunk and smacked her head on the low ceiling. She grumbled and rubbed the spot on her forehead. Had they arrived, or was it another drunken brawl in the smoking room?