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.
