Another thing no one had told Leah was that everything in New York came in wrappers. Candies wrapped in paper, walls wrapped in wallpaper and paint, expensive things in shops wrapped in packages, hatboxes, shoe boxes, all sorts of crates and boxes everywhere lining the streets, which were in turn wrapped in layer upon layer of cobblestones and pavement. As if people were afraid to touch things. Bread came in paper sacks, medicines in bottles wrapped with sticky printed labels pasted on them. No one lived just behind a door—even the dankest slum apartments were wrapped within other homes, carefully embedded in a series of stoops, front doors, second doors, vestibules, hallways, foyers. Even soap came in a box. To Leah, sometimes the entire city seemed like a child’s game, a series of blocks fitted one inside another like a puzzle, and you went to open one box only to find another box inside it, and then another, and then another, and you got more and more excited about what must be within the innermost box, the very center of the world, the holy of holies, but when you at last reached the final box, you would open it to discover that it was empty—someone had opened it before you, taken out the contents, and discarded them, leaving you with nothing but a pile of empty boxes.

As she stumbled through streets, failing to speak English, Leah realized she had also never been told that in America the only thing that anyone cared about was how. Not why—that never interested people anywhere, really, unless something horrible had happened. Not where, either, and certainly not who. When mattered, as did what, but mostly how. Carriages raced along the mathematical streets, trains rumbled along their tracks, and new buildings rose up as if emerging from the sea, planting their iron feet on that narrow slip of land that barely held their weight. But no one seemed to care where people were going on those trains, or who would live in those buildings, or even what went on in them. In Europe, people built houses so they could live in them, then hired carriages to take them from one place to another. Here, though, the only thing that mattered was how the house would be built, how you would move in, how you would move out. Leah’s parents, bludgeoned on all sides by clocks and boxes and wrappers and four younger children who spoke incomprehensible English after only six months in town, had stopped asking who or why or where and now asked only how: how they would make a living, how they would feed the children, and, of course, how they would find a husband for Leah. It didn’t much matter who.