New York

New York is both the place where Frank McCourt’s family began and the lost destination that shadows its years in Ireland. The city first means his parents’ meeting and marriage, then a departure from America that leaves the children growing up amid poverty and bereavement; much later, Frank chooses a return crossing for himself.

Family Beginnings and Return to Ireland

Frank’s retrospective account begins with a counterfactual: his parents should have remained in New York, where they met, married, and where he was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when Frank was four, Malachy was three, and the twins, Oliver and Eugene, were barely one. Their sister Margaret had already died. New York therefore enters the family story not simply as a birthplace but as the home they left before the children could establish lasting memories of it.

Angela had arrived in New York during the first Thanksgiving of the Great Depression, after leaving Ireland as a young woman. She met Malachy at a party given by Dan MacAdorey and Minnie MacAdorey on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. Malachy had recently spent three months in jail after a botched truck hijacking: he and his friend had expected canned pork and beans but found cases of buttons. The city thus frames the beginnings of the marriage in which Frank was born, against the economic hardship and precarious circumstances of his parents’ early lives.

Departure and Bereavement

After Margaret’s death, the family’s departure from New York becomes a concrete act of separation. Grandma Sheehan sent money to Philomena Flynn and Delia Fortune, who bought tickets, found a steamer trunk through the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and hired a van to take the family to the Manhattan pier. They put Angela and the children aboard, said goodbye, and left. The practical arrangements made the family’s passage possible, but the scene also registers how completely the children depended on relatives and charitable help to leave.

As the ship pulled away, Angela pointed out the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, naming the landmarks associated with immigrants arriving in America. She then leaned over the rail and vomited; the Atlantic wind blew it over the family and other passengers admiring the view. The departure places a familiar image of arrival beside the family’s own forced movement away from the city. New York’s immigrant gateway is visible from the ship, but for the McCourts it marks the place receding behind them.

The losses that followed in Ireland sharpen the contrast between the family’s departure and its hopes of survival. When Margaret dies, the doctor takes her body away for examination, while Angela begs for a few more minutes with her baby. Later, after Oliver dies, Frank tries to light the fire because the family is hungry. His father answers by naming the children they have lost: Margaret in America and Oliver in Limerick, with the surviving children still at risk from want. New York remains present in the family’s grief as the place of one death as well as the place of Frank’s birth.

England, Remittances, and the Deferred Return

New York is not the family’s immediate route out of poverty once it is back in Ireland. When America enters the war, Malachy agrees to take factory work in Coventry, England, and tells Frank that he must become the man of the house. The move to England is a separate labor migration, undertaken for wages rather than a return to the family’s former home. Its promise initially reaches the children as credit at a local shop and then as a first three-pound money order, which Frank imagines converting into fish and chips, sweets, and trips to the cinema. No further money order arrives on the following Saturdays.

The contrast between these crossings matters: Malachy goes to England for work, while New York remains part of Frank’s imagined family future. Years later, Frank tells his father that he wants him at home but hopes he can return after the war so the family can all go to America. Malachy replies that he will go to England after Christmas, reasoning that the American entry into the war makes the cause just. The hope of America is therefore repeatedly deferred by war, employment, and the family’s immediate needs, rather than realized through the father’s journeys.

Frank’s Planned Crossing

Frank eventually makes a practical plan to reach America himself. At O’Riordan’s Travel Agency, he learns that flying would require travel to London first and would cost a fortune. The agent offers a passage on the Irish Oak, leaving from Cork in a few weeks: nine days at sea, thirteen passengers, his own cabin, and a fare of fifty-five pounds. Frank says he has the money. The route makes his departure distinct from his parents’ earlier return: after a childhood spent in Ireland and years marked by his father’s movements between Ireland and England, he is preparing to cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction.

When Frank tells his mother he will leave in a few weeks, she cries; his younger brother Michael asks whether they will all go someday. The question brings the family’s earlier migration story into Frank’s present decision. New York began as a shared home the family abandoned, became a remembered point of origin entangled with loss, and now stands at the far end of Frank’s own departure. The city’s significance lies in this recurring pull between belonging and separation: each crossing changes who remains behind and what America can promise.