LITMIR.BIZ

      FAITH COVINGTON HAD never seen her parents cry, not in all her thirteen years on this planet. Instinctively, she turned away. But there was no easy way out. When she looked to her left, then to her right, she saw only the cause of their misery. Shanties made of scrap lumber and cardboard boxes, bits of plastic and canvas tarpaulins extended along the banks of New York’s mighty Hudson River for as far as she could see.

      The year was 1934 and America was mired in the worst economic depression the country had ever seen. The men and women and children who lived in the shanties—and there were thousands upon thousands of them—had nowhere else to go. Evicted from their apartments and homes, they’d drifted to the river and erected whatever shelters they could. Trying to make a life out of nothing.

      Faith felt like she was supposed to cry, too, like crying was expected. But right at that minute, she was feeling lucky. She’d escaped the fate of the dirty-faced children playing alongside the shanties, of the stooped women who bent over small fires, trying to ready whatever meal they’d scrounged from poorly stocked food pantries. Faith and her mother were going to live with an aunt in Pennsylvania. She had never met this aunt, but she’d have a real bed, a roof that kept her out of the rain, and food on the table. Not that her new life would be normal. No, there was no getting back to normal.

      It had all happened so fast. Thomas Covington was an accountant, employed for many years at Alexander and Associates, one of the largest accounting firms in New York City. He’d owned the small row house they lived in, sent his daughter to private school, and was the first man on their block to buy a new car. He regularly treated his family to restaurant meals on Sundays after church, going so far as to place his daughter in a class for young ladies so she’d know which fork to use and where to place her knife.

      That life was gone. And even if her father found work next week, even if he made a million dollars, there was no going back anyway. Not to Faith’s way of thinking. All the certainty—the expectation that one day would follow another and the routine would never change, that she was safe and protected and secure—had vanished. First their bank, Empire National City Bank, had gone out of business, taking the family’s life savings with it. Then Thomas Covington had arrived at work one morning to find laborers carting off the desks, chairs, adding machines, typewriters, and file cabinets—everything. Alexander and Associates was officially out of business, fifty years of continual operation and service wiped out in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

      Now, standing next to her parents at the ferry dock, Faith wasn’t sad, or even frightened. She was mostly numb, and her mind kept returning to a single image, a maple tree in Central Park that she and her mother had come upon during a walk after a bad storm. A lightning bolt had split the tree in half, exposing its inner core, its very heart. Faith felt that way now, as if every secret part of her was exposed. As if there was nothing left to hide.

      Or just plain nothing left.

      “It won’t be for long, my Little Apple. I’ll be on my feet before you know it and we’ll be together again.”

      Faith looked up when she realized that her father was talking to her. She reached out to take his hand. That was expected. But she had no words of encouragement and she felt a deep regret, as if their future somehow depended on her making a little speech. She looked out over the flat water of the Hudson River, to a clock tower a mile away and the word LACKAWANNA written in gigantic letters across the face of a stone building wide enough to accommodate six ferry docks.

      Lackawanna, Faith knew, was shorthand for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. She was looking at the railroad’s New Jersey terminal, as impressive as Penn Station or Grand Central, or so her mother, Margaret Covington, insisted. Maybe you had to take a ferry to get there, instead of a taxi or the subway, but once inside the station, you could board a train to anywhere in the country, even to faraway California.

      But Faith and Margaret weren’t going to California, which would at least be an adventure. They were going to someplace called the Pocono Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania, a four-hour trip that would leave them in...

      But that was just it. Faith had no clear picture of where she was headed. She had no idea what her life would be like. She was just along for the ride and wasn’t expecting any adventures.

      Finding nothing to say, Faith put her arms around her father’s waist. Thomas Covington looked so much older now. His eyes were swollen with sorrow and fatigue, and his shoulders were slumped. For the past six months, he’d gone out every day except Sunday, searching for a job opportunity that just wasn’t there. The unemployment rate, trumpeted in every newspaper, was above thirty percent, which was unheard of. All across the great city, men and women lined up four and five deep, tens of thousands of them, waiting for a single bowl of soup or a slice of bread.

      There at the ferry, on her way to her new life, the only time Faith felt like crying was when she looked into her father’s face.

      As Faith stared across the water, a ferry left one of the station’s slips and began its journey across the river toward them. In a few minutes, she and her mother would be on board for the return journey to the New Jersey station.

      As she waited, the line for the ferry began to grow and a few children from the homeless encampment wandered over. The children were young, no more than five or six. They approached with their dirty hands outstretched, but they didn’t speak and their eyes were as solemn as the eyes of hungry animals. A pair of policemen—big and burly—moved to intercept them, to shoo them away from the good citizens, the ones with the price of a ferry ride in their pockets. A few people threw pennies, which the children scrambled to retrieve.

      “Don’t be fooled,” one of the policemen admonished. “They’d as soon pick your pocket as look at ya.”

      Faith ignored the comment. She’d begun preparing herself weeks ago—ever since her mother told her they would have to stay with her Aunt Eva on a farm in Pennsylvania—for this moment of parting, when she would step onto the ferry and leave her father behind. She couldn’t let anything distract her from that now. Not the kids. Not the cops. Instead, she set her jaw, determined not to cry. Her father was burdened enough—her mother, too—without her adding to their misery.

      The effort left her dizzy. Inside, in her heart, the tears were now falling, and her bravado vanished like the country’s prosperity. But she somehow managed a smile and her voice shook only slightly when she finally spoke.

      “Don’t worry about us, Daddy. We’ll do okay. Me and Mom, we’re tough apples.”

      The words brought

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