“These hands, Mary, […] these are a man’s hands. They’ve become calloused and they’ve been split sometimes, and bleeding. But they’ve never dawdled over a keyboard while you and the children suffered.”

Stefan Grondowski is the son of musicians and shares his wife’s love of music. However, he has decided that he can’t afford the luxury of music in these economically depressed times. Ironically, music becomes a lifeline for his son Josh, who lands two piano gigs while he and Joey are on their own. One underlying message here is that people should follow their passions and use the talents they have regardless of the challenges.

“That afternoon we were practicing something I had composed. It was a fluid, changing tone-story, a theme that I improvised upon according to my mood, an outpouring of feelings that were inside me and changed with the quality of sunlight or the lack of it, with the dreams that sometimes seemed to be possible, with the despair that was a part of the times.”

Throughout the story, Josh uses his music to express his emotions and to lift his spirits when he’s down. At this point, his dream of making a living from his music seems a remote fantasy, but as the novel progresses, it becomes a reality.

“It was strange what poverty and fear of hunger could do to a sense of decency.”

After scolding Joey for using a nickel to buy milk for a starving alley cat, Josh reflects on how hard times have affected his sense of compassion for helpless creatures. Josh and Joey soon learn that while some people are generous and share what little food they have, others, like the mob of angry men with pitchforks in one town, treat them and the other hungry people like unwelcome alley cats.