Frank is fired after the Harrington incident

Frank is fired after the Harrington incident when a telegram delivery to a bereaved Englishman turns into a disputed encounter, a humiliating escape, and the loss of the job Frank needs to save for America. The episode exposes how little authority a young telegram boy has when an employer’s word outweighs his, while its eventual, priest-mediated reprieve keeps him at the post office only until his sixteenth birthday.

The delivery and its expectations

Before the Harrington visit, Frank has heard the older post-office boys describe how to obtain a tip from a grieving household. Sympathy telegrams, they say, often bring little reward: a messenger might be invited to pray beside the deceased but offered no food or drink. Their cynical advice turns mourning into a performance, prescribing gestures that might persuade a family to tip. That advice forms the background to Frank’s delivery, but he has already visited the Harrington house on earlier occasions, when Mr. Harrington was away on insurance business and his wife was generous with tips.

Mrs. Harrington has now died, and Mr. Harrington answers the door. He asks Frank whether he is Irish, although Frank is standing in Limerick with telegrams in hand. He admits him, asks him to leave the telegrams in the hall, and locks the door, putting the key in his pocket. Mr. Harrington then leads him to see his wife and accuses the Irish of having caused her death through tuberculosis. The combination of hospitality, suspicion, and confinement makes the visit unlike Frank’s earlier deliveries to the house.

The locked house and the misunderstanding

Mr. Harrington brings ham sandwiches and bottles upstairs. When he offers Frank a drink, Frank asks for lemonade; Mr. Harrington insists on sherry, describing it contemptuously as coming from Catholic Spain. Frank drinks, and his employer refills his glass. Mr. Harrington goes to pour himself whiskey, discovers the bottle is empty, and leaves for the pub to get more. He tells Frank to stay and not move, while the door remains locked.

Alone with the dead woman and dizzy from the sherry, Frank thinks about her Protestant faith and recalls the teaching that there is no salvation outside the Church. He connects the possibility of baptizing her to his own guilt about Theresa Carmody, whom he fears he has sent to hell. Unable to leave the locked room, he takes sherry and attempts to baptize Mrs. Harrington. Mr. Harrington returns and catches him beside his wife, interpreting the act as an assault on her. The religious act Frank imagines as a possible rescue therefore becomes, in Mr. Harrington’s eyes, the cause of a new offense.

Mr. Harrington pushes a ham sandwich into Frank’s mouth. Frank becomes sick and vomits out of the window, prompting Mr. Harrington to accuse him of soiling his wife’s rosebush. When Mr. Harrington lunges and falls, Frank climbs out of the window and drops onto the rosebush below. He injures his ankle in the fall and is struck with a whiskey bottle as Mr. Harrington calls after him and asks him to stay with him for an hour. Frank then escapes, while Mr. Harrington throws glasses and objects from his wife’s dressing table after him. The sequence leaves Frank dazed and hurt, but the decisive consequence is not merely his flight: Mr. Harrington will report the incident to the post office.

Dismissal and Frank’s attempt to explain

Frank wobbles through Limerick on his bicycle with the telegrams still part of the day’s unfinished work. Mrs. O’Connell confronts him over the seven telegrams assigned to one address and his long absence. She has already heard Mr. Harrington’s version: that the refined Englishman let Frank in to pray for his wife, only for the boy to leave with the sherry and ham. She calls him drunk and accuses him of bringing shame on his mother.

Frank says Mr. Harrington made him eat the ham and drink the sherry, but Mrs. O’Connell refuses to accept this explanation. Treating Mr. Harrington as a reliable witness and Frank as an untrustworthy employee, she orders him to hand in his telegram pouch and bicycle. Frank protests that he needs the job so he can save money and go to America. Mrs. O’Connell rejects that appeal too, saying America should not admit people like him. The dismissal thus threatens more than his immediate wages: it interrupts the plan that has given the job a purpose.

After losing his place, Frank considers going back to throw a brick through Mr. Harrington’s window, then decides against it out of respect for the dead. He thinks instead of crossing Sarsfield Bridge and lying in bushes by the river, unable to face telling his mother what has happened. He recognizes that she would worry if he stayed away all night, however, and goes home. The impulse to hide gives way to the need to return and explain himself.

The priest’s letter and a conditional return

Frank’s mother begs the post office to take him back, but the staff initially refuse. They repeat the allegations that he mauled a corpse and fled with ham and sherry, and insist he will never work there again. A letter from the parish priest changes the decision. The post office agrees to let Frank remain until his sixteenth birthday, but makes clear that the reinstatement has a fixed endpoint.

Mrs. O’Connell frames the episode through Irish history, arguing that, given what the English did to Ireland over eight hundred years and the Great Famine, Mr. Harrington had little right to complain about a small amount of ham and sherry. She imagines her late husband would have called Frank’s behavior a blow struck on Ireland’s behalf. Her defense recasts a disputed workplace incident as a symbolic answer to English authority, even as Frank’s continued employment depends not on that argument alone but on the parish priest’s intervention. The return is therefore both a reprieve and a reminder of his precarious standing: he keeps the job for a limited period, not through the post office’s restored confidence.

Consequences and narrative significance

The incident brings together several pressures already present in Frank’s life. He needs the telegram-boy position to save for America, yet he has little control over how a delivery is interpreted once a more powerful adult accuses him. His attempt to baptize Mrs. Harrington arises from religious fear and remorse connected to Theresa Carmody; the result is a misunderstanding that intensifies the conflict rather than relieving his guilt. The sherry, ham, locked door, and priest’s letter each shape the chain of events: hospitality becomes confinement, food and drink become evidence against Frank, and ecclesiastical authority becomes the means of his limited return.

The episode also pivots between the post office’s practical judgment and Mrs. O’Connell’s nationalist interpretation. She first dismisses Frank’s account and fires him, then defends him by comparing Mr. Harrington’s complaint with the history of English rule and famine. Her reversal does not erase the dismissal or restore the job permanently. Instead, the priest’s letter sets the boundary of Frank’s reprieve: he may stay only until his sixteenth birthday. That condition leaves his American plan alive, but again uncertain.