Philadelphia

Philadelphia becomes the destination for Richard Flynn’s family after his father’s sudden death, but not a home for Richard himself. His mother and brother settle there while he leaves for college, and their new address marks a painful break with the Brooklyn life he had understood as home.

The Family’s Move

Richard’s father dies of a heart attack at work in early spring. After the burial at Evergreen, his mother decides, at the beginning of summer, to move to Philadelphia with Richard’s brother, Eddie. Her younger sister, Cornelia, lives there. The timing places the move alongside Richard’s departure for a new year of college at Princeton, New Jersey: as he leaves for school, the family home he might have returned to is disappearing.

The belongings Richard does not take with him go to a two-room apartment on Jefferson Avenue, near Central Station. He visits his mother and brother soon after they move, but recognizes immediately that the apartment will never be home to him. The new address is practical; emotionally, it makes the loss of the Brooklyn apartment where he had spent his life harder to reverse.

A Place That Does Not Become Home

Richard experiences the move as part of a larger dispossession. He had already been forced to recognize that he could return to Brooklyn only as a guest. With his mother and Eddie now in Philadelphia, the family’s relocation gives that realization a concrete form: his childhood home is no longer the place where his family lives, and the Philadelphia apartment cannot replace it.

The move also changes the family’s financial circumstances. Their income has shrunk, and Richard’s grades are not strong enough to earn him a scholarship. He therefore has to find part-time work to pay his way through graduation. Philadelphia is not described as the cause of this financial pressure; rather, the reduced family income is one of the consequences accompanying the family’s separation and his continued education elsewhere.

Later Connection and Narrative Significance

Philadelphia remains the place where Eddie lives in Richard’s later account, although Richard sees his brother very rarely. Richard, by contrast, describes himself as born and raised in Brooklyn and, in adulthood, living in Manhattan. The difference between his brother’s settled address and his own life elsewhere preserves the distance opened by the move without suggesting that Philadelphia ever became Richard’s home.

In Richard’s recollection, the city is thus less a developed setting than the address of a family reorganization. Its significance lies in the contrast between a place his mother and brother can inhabit and the childhood home Richard feels he has lost. The relocation makes the past harder to return to even as it leaves a lasting connection to his family through Eddie’s continued residence there.