In the fall of 1927, the apartment building on Bank Street was scheduled to be torn down, so Cather and Lewis took up what they thought would be temporary residence at the Grosvenor Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Because of a string of Cather family crises, however, they were to live at the Grosvenor for five years.
The first crisis came in March 1928, with the death of Cather’s father, to whom she’d been very close. In December, her mother, who was living with Douglass in California, had a paralytic stroke and was placed in a Pasadena sanatorium. For two and a half years, Cather worried as her mother grew increasingly feeble. Mrs. Cather died during the summer of 1931, a month after Shadows on the Rock was published, while Cather was living on Grand Manan Island. With both parents gone, so died, in a sense, the Red Cloud home. Charles and Jennie Cather were the strong ties that bound the family together, the magnet that kept the siblings returning to Nebraska year after year. That Christmas, Cather made her final visit to Red Cloud. She opened up the old home and stayed there with a former family housekeeper while visiting old friends and family for the last time. The loss of her parents and the breaking up of the Red Cloud home dredged up enough bittersweet memories of her childhood and family to produce two more books: a short story collection, Obscure Destinies (1932), and a novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).
In 1932, Cather and Lewis moved into an apartment on Park Avenue. People criticized her for forsaking her roots, abandoning the immigrants and country folks who peopled her fiction, and even her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wondered if either Neighbour Rosicky or Old Mrs. Harris, two well-known characters from Cather’s short stories, could have gotten past the Park Avenue doorman. But the real reason for Cather’s move was seclusion: Her work was being constantly interrupted by the telephone, which she had begun turning off during her working hours, and by people dropping in. She did not have the cold indifference of the self-made woman that Sergeant suggested. In fact, during the Great Depression, she serialized Lucy Gayheart for money to help old friends back in Nebraska buy seed and make mortgage payments. She also contributed to a secret fund for the impoverished S. S. McClure, her former boss.
While working on Lucy Gayheart, Cather developed a painful inflammation of the tendons in her right wrist. This ailment would plague her for the rest of her life. For months at a time, she would wear a steel and leather brace, which made signing her own name difficult and writing almost impossible.
Throughout most of 1935, Cather cared for Isabelle (McClung) Hambourg, who had become seriously ill with kidney disease. Cather made all of the arrangements to settle Isabelle into a hospital and visited her daily for weeks. When Isabelle died in October 1938, Cather said that she believed all novelists wrote for only one person; for her, this person had been Isabelle.
In April 1938, Cather returned to Willow Shade, in Virginia. She found the countryside drastically changed. The new owner of the farm had cut down the willow trees and destroyed the high box hedges that Cather had loved as a child. The house had so deteriorated that she couldn’t bring herself to go inside. These changes, however, lit a fire in her, and she used the energy to complete Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), her only novel set in Virginia, based in part on her family history.
During Cather’s last years, when she was able to do little creative writing, she took more and more pleasure in corresponding with her readers, dictating letters to her secretary. During World War II, Cather and Lewis couldn’t go to Grand Manan because most of the workmen on the island were either in the service or working in other industries, and transportation to and from the island became difficult. Thus she set to work on a novel about ancient Avignon. She’d visited the south of France several times, and Avignon had made a major impression on her. After her death, the manuscript was destroyed in accordance with her wishes. She wrote her last story, “The Best Years,” for her brother Roscoe, but upon finishing it and preparing to send it to him, she received a telegram informing her of his death.
Although Cather suffered from many ailments in the latter part of her life, she was never an invalid. She rarely let her illnesses depress her, and her mind remained sharp. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947, and was buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Engraved on her headstone are these lines from My Ántonia: “. . . that is happiness; to be dissolved in something complete and great.”
