Infant mortality

Infant mortality is a recurring reality in Frank McCourt’s account of childhood: the deaths of his sister Margaret and brothers Oliver and Eugene make bereavement inseparable from poverty, hunger, and the work of keeping the surviving children alive. The losses are not presented as a single episode but as a sequence that reshapes family life, leaves children carrying adult responsibilities, and returns years later in Frank’s recollection of what troubles him.

Losses Across Two Countries

The family’s history of infant death begins before its return to Ireland. Frank recalls that his parents met and married in New York, where he was born, and that the family went back to Ireland when he was four. Margaret had already died; his brothers Malachy and the twins, Oliver and Eugene, were very young. That opening places loss inside the family’s account of its own beginnings, before the later deaths in Limerick.

In Brooklyn, the children’s daily care is already shaped by exhaustion and scarcity. After a long walk, they eat eggs, toast, and jam; the twins fall asleep, and Angela sends Frank to rinse their dirty diapers in the lavatory so they can be hung up and reused. Malachy helps wash them. The scene gives care a practical, repetitive form: food and sleep are followed by washing, changing, and preparing the same necessities for another day. The family’s financial insecurity becomes explicit when their father loses his job the following week.

Margaret’s Death and the Children’s Care

When Margaret dies, a doctor examines her and tells the family she is gone. He asks whether there has been an accident or whether the boys played too roughly with her, but the scene provides no answer that explains her death. Angela asks for more time with the baby before the doctor takes her away for examination. Their father, who has returned with the doctor, says little; after Margaret is taken, he tells Frank he is going out for cigarettes.

The family’s care responsibilities immediately fall in part to the children. The twins are hungry, while Angela remains in bed. Frank and Malachy find stale bread and cold sausages, and Frank tries to feed the twins with a mixture of sour milk, bread, and sugar. They reject it at first, then eat once he adds enough sugar to mask the sour taste. The episode places a small act of ingenuity beside a death that the children cannot understand: feeding the living continues, but with whatever food and attention are available.

Later, Angela wakes in the night and says that Margaret has died alone in her pram, only seven weeks into her life. She blames herself for not watching the baby and wonders whether she could have picked her up. Mrs. Leibowitz comforts her, saying that babies sometimes die. The exchange shows the difference between consolation and explanation: the neighbor offers a familiar response, but Angela’s distress remains fixed on the possibility that her own attention might have changed the outcome.

Oliver and Eugene: Grief Repeated

The deaths continue in Limerick. At one point, Frank wakes to his father calling him to care for his younger brothers. Angela is crying, and their grandmother has gone to arrange a coffin and carriage. When Frank tries to light the fire because the children are hungry, his father tells him that Oliver and Margaret are dead and that Eugene is dead as well. Their father then embraces him; the family cries together, while Eugene remains quiet. He takes Frank out to ask shopkeepers for food for a family that has lost two children in a year and fears for the children still at home. Many refuse, directing him instead to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul or public assistance.

Oliver’s death is followed by a brief hope that Eugene might be helped through the loss by his brothers’ company. That hope fails: six months after Oliver’s death, the family wakes on a November morning to find Eugene dead beside the other children. Dr. Troy diagnoses pneumonia and asks why the child was not brought to the hospital earlier. He warns Angela to bring Frank or Malachy to him at any sign of cough or rattling in the throat, and to keep them dry, observing that the family seems to have a weakness in the chest. His explanation makes the conditions of care part of the story: illness is recognized, but the doctor’s warning comes after another death.

The family prepares Eugene for burial through the combined efforts of relatives. Their grandmother washes him, and Aunt Aggie obtains a white gown and rosary beads; they lay him by the window where he used to look out for Oliver. Their father attributes the twins’ deaths to dampness from the River Shannon, while their grandmother tells him to stop because his words are making the household nervous. She sends Frank with him to collect a prescription and pray for the dead children. She also gives their father money for stout, hoping it will ease his grief, and asks Frank to make sure that he does not spend the money drinking in the pub all night. Mourning, practical errands, religious observance, and concern about alcohol occupy the same aftermath.

Aftermath and Recurrence in Memory

The losses affect how Frank understands responsibility and survival, but the account does not turn them into a simple lesson. When his own typhoid fever becomes severe, Angela fears she may lose the whole family. Dr. Troy rushes him to the Fever Hospital at the City Home, where he receives a transfusion of blood from Sarsfield Barracks; the nurse says an exception has been made to let Angela stay because his condition is critical. The episode is distinct from the earlier infant deaths, yet its urgency shows how quickly illness brings the family back to the possibility of another loss.

Years later, Frank names Margaret, Oliver, and Eugene among the subjects that trouble him when he speaks to Saint Francis. Their deaths recur beside other memories of family abandonment, shame, and religious fear. The list preserves the losses as unresolved parts of his remembered childhood rather than as events left safely in the past. Infant mortality is thus both a material condition of the family’s life and a structure of memory: each death is followed by care for those still living, while the dead remain present in Frank’s account.