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through without bumping the shoulders of each woman she passed. When she was a young woman, her size had shamed her, but life had worn her vanity like water on rock. It had been years since Elsa had given any thought at all to her appearance. She was the shape of the container into which she was poured. It wasn’t a fact on which to linger.
    When she passed into the light, she saw Clara’s eyebrow lift slightly, wondering, Elsa knew, if Elsa was old enough to be the mother of most of the girls in the room. Of course, she was. There was nothing she could do about that.
    Elsa settled into the chair and Clara turned her attention back to the room. “This brings me, ladies, to the matter of requirements. You simply must be at least twenty-one years of age—I will consider no exceptions to this rule. And you must provide a certificate from a physician of your fitness to travel. Winter in Nebraska, I am told, is a good deal colder and longer than the one we have here in Manhattan City, and I’d be surprised if this town has a doctor. Those of you with fortitude are the ones who will be chosen.”
    A few potential brides shifted in their seats, and Elsa found herself hoping they would follow the other timid women right out the door. She was bewildered by how suddenly fierce her desire was to secure one of the spots. The feeling had come on as if out of the blue. So I’m to go then, Lord? Elsa shook her head in surprise.
    She wasn’t a bit afraid of a place without medical care—of that she felt sure. A physician had examined Elsa only once in her life, in the steerage deck of her ship when it first touched North America at Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence River. There had been reports of illness on board. The immigration officials would quarantine every passenger, ensuring that those who were not yet ill would contract the disease, if they found even one confirmed case of cholera.
    The physician had lined up the children first, the girls and boys together, and made them strip to their underclothes. Twelve-year-old Elsa stood with her arms crossed in front of her, her fingertips pressing into the ample flesh that ringed her ribs. She felt the eyes of the boy on her right skim her freckled shoulder. He was less than half her size. Elsa stared straight ahead, afraid to look in the doctor’s direction to see what he was doing to the other children. Her hair was the whitest blond then, parted down the center and scraped into tight braids by her Tante Gretchen’s comb. As the immigration physician made his way down the row, Elsa felt a crease forming in her forehead that pulled painfully on the strands of hair at her temples.
    She had had no English then. The doctor’s words had the pinched and severed sounds of her own Deutsch , the ein and eck and ach , but the content made little sense. When he finally reached Elsa, he put his icy fingertips on either side of her jaw and lifted her face. He looked from one eye to the other and back again, but never into them, then pinched the skin on her shoulder and watched to see how quickly the impression of his fingertips subsided. She could feel breath shudder in and out of her lungs, as if it consisted of a sludge of mud and pebbles instead of air. The doctor slid his hand over her collarbone then and down inside the front of her shift. Elsa felt hot tears well around the lower rim of her eyes. She knew he was feeling for her heartbeat, but he ran his rough knuckle over her nipple one too many times, and even at her age she knew there was something wrong. He grunted once, quietly, as his fingertips moved over the little knob, hard in the freezing cold of the ship, then pressed the heel of his hand into her chest and looked at the ceiling, listening.
    “It beats very quickly,” he said.
    Elsa blinked at him, understanding none of his words, and released tears in two slick ribbons down her cheeks.
    “Please complete and return this form to me as soon as possible,” Clara said, snapping