After two months in bed, nursed by his mother, he began to recover. He was now twenty years old. Later he was to describe the period of his convalescence as one of the happiest of his life, a time of gardening, of talking, and wandering through the woods bordering the Magra. The happiness was brief, for his mother developed cancer and after three agonizing months died. Vanzetti cared for her as she had cared for him. He remained at her bedside day and night. For the last two months of her life he did not even undress. She died in his arms. In after years he recalled that death in all its immediacy: _It was I who laid her in her coffin, I who accompanied her to the final resting place, I who threw the first handful of earth over her bier. And it was right that I should do so, for I was burying part of myself ... the void left has never been filled._ It was in the days following her death that he decided to go to America, to that land across the ocean where the past might be erased. On June 9, 1908, he left Villafalleto, accompanied far down the road by his tearful relatives and neighbors. After traveling across France he embarked at Le Havre in the packed steerage of a giant liner. New York, the impersonal sky-swept metropolis, seemed to him from the huddled deck both inviting and threatening. In his autobiography one can sense the bewilderment of the immigrant coming down the gangplank. _How well I remember standing at the Battery, in lower New York, upon my arrival, alone, with a few poor belongings in the way of clothes, and very little money. Until yesterday I was among folks who understood me. This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land where my language meant little more to the native than the pitiful noises of a dumb animal. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer. The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me._ That depression year of 1908 was a sorry time for a friendless stranger to arrive in the United States. Like all immigrants facing the unknown, Vanzetti sought out his fellow countrymen; one of them found him a job in a fashionable restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher and slept in a vermin-infested garret. Three months later he moved on to a similar job at Mouquin’s. As in so many such places the glittering dining room bore little relation to the squalid kitchen. The scullery where Vanzetti worked was windowless.