Above Peekskill she saw the rounded hills of the Hudson Highlands and the higher crests of the Catskill Mountains. The river was majestic and beautiful; she thought of the little streams that had met at Cosenza and been called rivers; she thought of the even smaller stream in the valley below Castagna. But here, she thought, everything is bigger—the rivers, the cities, the men, the greed, the hopes. It was as if in a new country one had to express everything in nature and in man in a larger way. Somewhere between Peekskill and Poughkeepsie they passed a castle on an islet near the shore. Again and again a pretty little town, or a glimpse of a fine home and expanse of smooth grass. After Poughkeepsie there were some factories, and in the river there was a lighthouse that was a real home, with a mansard roof set on a pile of cement blocks. Then she saw something that remained impressed on her mind ever after: a whole islet of bricks—jettisoned bricks that had come ashore on the islet and lay there, useless and wasted. In a light thicket were the ruins of various brick buildings. It seemed to her as if a brick factory had been there and then had stopped and all the bricks had been left, dumped in the river. But why? Why such waste? It was her first experience of willful waste—of seeing things abandoned that might be recovered and used—and it shocked her.

Everything was a first experience. She had seen a Negro porter for the first time on the train. She had been timid about looking directly at his black face, but he helped her and the children, and when she nodded to him her thanks he smiled and said something back. It took her aback—he spoke English and she did not.

She had taken the children to the lavatory on the train and it was clean and unsmelling. Everything is better, she thought. It is true that you can start fresh.

And her optimism was confirmed by what she saw from the window; this was truly a new, fresh world. Ci siamo! she thought. We’re here.

Surely now they would not be preyed upon. She had seen good country all around her and people who lived in little towns. Surely now there would be an end to the interpreters who had been needed at every step of the way and who had preyed on their ignorance and trust—from Ranucci their paesano, who had warned them against putting their savings in an American bank, to the Italian priest who had threatened them if they let their children go to the Evangelists in the summer school mission tent where they would be taught to read and write English, and the brewery agents who sold them beer by telling them that the air in America was so strong that they all had to drink beer—children, too—to survive the hard winters.