New York is the setting of Sarah’s childhood after Mae’s money runs out, a port city where the family’s unstable housing and dependence on men expose Sarah to insecurity and social stigma. Its docks offer her a vivid view of the sea and ships, but the shack near them also becomes the center of her memories of poverty, loss, and rejection.

The family’s precarious refuge

After selling her ruby ring and pearls, Mae lived with Sarah in an inn until their money was gone. She then sold her music box, and the two stayed for a time in an inexpensive boardinghouse. Proceeds from the Crystal swan supported a longer stay in a rundown hotel; eventually Mae settled with Sarah in a shack near New York’s docks.

The move to the waterfront did not end their insecurity. Men visited Mae at the shack, and she sometimes asked Sarah to wait outside. Their visits were brief, but Sarah noticed that Mae acted cheerful while they were present and then cried and drank whiskey after they left. The domestic space thus offered shelter without providing stability or protection from the strain of poverty.

The waterfront through Sarah’s eyes

Sarah finally saw the sea in New York. Although garbage floated in it, she liked it: she went to the wharf to sit, enjoying the salt smell, the cargo ships, the water beneath the pilings, and the seagulls overhead. The harbor’s movement and sounds formed a contrast with the family’s narrow, uncertain life in the shack.

That contrast did not make the city a place of uncomplicated freedom. At seven, Sarah wondered whether Cleo had been partly right about God’s truth. Her question arose in a childhood shaped by material hardship and by what she saw of Mae’s visitors, rather than from any resolution of the family’s circumstances.

Rab, care, and loss

Rab came to live with Mae and Sarah, and Sarah thought things improved: fewer men visited, though they still came when Rab had no coins. Mae described him as kind-hearted and as someone who tried to provide for them, while acknowledging that he could not always do so. Sarah slept on a cot while Mae and Rab shared the bed.

After Mae’s death, Sarah tried to care for Rab. When he was drunk and asleep, she covered him with a blanket and sat beside him, telling herself that she would find a way to look after him. Rain falling outside and the sound of drops in her tin cans briefly occupied her attention; she also told herself she was glad no one would come knocking. Her words register the immediate quiet after loss, not a secure future.

A remembered geography of exclusion

Years later, Sarah connected New York’s docks with the social hostility she encountered elsewhere. She recalled that a boy had insulted her and Mae because his father visited the shack. When Sarah told him where his father went on Wednesdays, he later confirmed the truth; rather than leaving Sarah and Mae alone, he and his friends threw garbage at her when she went to market. She also remembered seeing those boys dressed for Mass with their parents. The memory helps explain her refusal to attend church: New York’s neighborhood life had tied public respectability to private cruelty in her experience.

New York also remained part of Sarah’s account of repeated rejection. Comparing the city’s docks with a muddy California hillside, she said that the children in both places seemed alike in their treatment of her. The city therefore persists in the story not merely as an early residence, but as one point in a wider geography of stigma that Sarah carries into adulthood.