Mae and Sarah

Mae and Sarah’s bond is one of tenderness repeatedly strained by rejection, grief, and Sarah’s conviction that she is responsible for her mother’s unhappiness. Mae loves and comforts her daughter, but the wounds inflicted by Alex Stafford’s refusal to acknowledge Sarah become entangled with Mae’s own sorrow. After Mae dies, Sarah’s childhood conclusion that she should never have been born returns in adulthood as a belief that she must surrender the possibility of a family of her own to protect Michael.

Love Under Rejection

Sarah first meets Alex Stafford hoping to please the father she longs to know. Mae presents her proudly, asking whether Sarah is beautiful, but Alex responds with anger rather than welcome. In a later argument, Mae challenges him for having spent virtually no time with his daughter and for making Sarah’s existence something to deny. Alex says that he already has legitimate children and did not want another; Mae answers that Sarah is his own flesh and blood. His rejection reaches Sarah not as an abstract dispute between adults but as a verdict on whether she is wanted.

Mae’s sorrow is visible to Sarah even when its causes are beyond the child’s understanding. Sarah decides that everything is her fault and wonders whether Alex will return. When she asks whether he will, Mae sharply forbids the question, then softens and insists that none of this has anything to do with Sarah. She draws Sarah into her arms and tells her that she loves her more than anything or anyone in the world. Sarah accepts the embrace but privately fears that Alex could someday make her mother choose between them.

Grief and the Child’s Self-Blame

The story places Mae’s reassurance beside signs of a suffering Sarah cannot interpret. One night Sarah finds her mother in the moonlit garden, tearing up the flowers and cutting the roots of her beloved rose bushes as she weeps. The scene gives physical form to Mae’s distress, while Sarah can only witness it without understanding or remedying it.

When Sarah is eight, Mae becomes ill and refuses a doctor, saying she needs rest as her breathing grows more labored. She asks Rab to care for her little girl, smiling as she had long ago, and dies the next morning with her rosary in her hands. Sarah initially cannot cry; she lies beside her mother and begs her to wake, then weeps and asks to go with her. Hearing Rab say that Mae is free from unhappiness, Sarah turns the remark against herself: she imagines her mother would have been alive and happy if Sarah had never been born. The rosary left in her lap becomes a tangible remnant of the bond, but it does not undo the conclusion she has drawn from loss.

The Bond’s Afterlife

In adulthood, Sarah—now known as Angel—describes her memories of Mae as something she tries to suppress. She lets the curtain fall and forces the past back down, preferring emotional emptiness to the pain of remembering. The remembered promise that things would be different for her has not erased the earlier losses; instead, the memory returns alongside her fear that Michael will abandon her as others did.

Mae’s reassurance that Sarah was not to blame stands in sharp contrast to the daughter’s enduring self-accusation. When Angel sees Elizabeth pregnant and hears her say that Angel’s time will come, the moment stirs wistfulness rather than comfort. At Christmas, she tells Michael that the child he wants is the one thing she cannot give him, and wishes that Duke had not ruined her and that she could be like Miriam. She later tells Miriam that she cannot have children and that she is leaving because Michael deserves them. As the coach departs, she urges Miriam to love Michael and give him the children she believes she cannot. The adult sacrifice repeats the logic of the bereaved child: Sarah once imagined Mae would have been happier without her; Angel now imagines Michael will be better off without her. Both judgments arise from love, but each is burdened by a self-blame Mae had tried to dispel.