Margaret McCourt

Margaret McCourt is the infant daughter whose arrival briefly fills the McCourt household with delight and whose death at seven weeks deepens its history of bereavement. Remembered through her family’s affection, her father’s tender care, and the mother’s grief at losing her, she also becomes a measure of how abruptly love and ordinary domestic hope can be overturned.

Identity and Introduction

Margaret is born after Minnie MacAdorey has assured Frankie that he will someday have a little sister. Her arrival fulfills that prediction and Angela’s wish: the family names the new baby Margaret, and everyone loves her. The narrator describes her black curly hair and blue eyes, like her mother’s, and her waving hands and chirping sounds. Minnie imagines that heaven celebrated the day she was made; Mrs. Leibowitz marvels at the baby’s eyes and smile, saying that Margaret makes her dance.

The family’s first response to Margaret is not simply to welcome another child but to treat her as a source of happiness that radiates through the crowded household. Her small gestures—waving and chirping—are set against the family’s poverty and earlier losses without being made to erase them. The neighbors’ praise joins the family’s love, giving Margaret a place in a close communal world before illness and death abruptly narrow it.

Her Father’s Care

When Margaret’s father comes home from looking for work, he holds her and sings to her. He walks around the kitchen with her, talks about her curly black hair and her mother’s blue eyes, and imagines taking her to Ireland to walk the Glens of Antrim and swim in Lough Neagh. He promises that he will soon get a job and pictures her in silk dresses and shoes with silver buckles. These plans are hopes spoken to an infant, not events that come to pass; their abundance makes the family’s economic insecurity visible even within a moment of tenderness.

Singing soothes Margaret: the more her father sings, the less she cries, until she begins to laugh. Angela jokes about his two left feet as he tries to dance with the baby in his arms, and the family laughs with her. At night, when Margaret cries, her father gets out of bed at once, holds her, and slowly dances around the table, making sounds like a mother as he sings. Unlike the twins’ earlier crying, which their parents met with a hush and feeding, Margaret’s cries draw this urgent, intimate response.

The scene also marks a striking change in the father’s familiar emotional pattern. Frankie sees tears on his cheeks as he passes the window’s streetlight. His father has cried before while drunk and singing rebel songs, but now he weeps over Margaret without the smell of drink. The sober tears make the father’s attachment unmistakable: the child draws out a tenderness the narrator has rarely seen from him.

Death and Immediate Aftermath

Margaret becomes seriously ill, and her father returns with a doctor. The doctor examines her, raising her eyelids and checking her neck, arms, and legs, then shakes his head: she is dead. The doctor asks whether there was an accident, whether anyone dropped her, or whether the boys played too roughly with her. Her father shakes his head. The questions introduce the possibility of injury, but the passage establishes no accident or culpability; what it shows is the family confronted with a sudden death and a doctor who must take the baby away to examine her.

Angela reaches for Margaret, clutches her, and turns toward the wall. When the doctor says he must take the child, she begs for a few more minutes. Her husband eases the baby from her arms; the doctor wraps Margaret completely in a blanket, and Angela cries out that he will smother her. She then turns to the wall and makes no movement or sound. The twins are awake and crying from hunger, but their father stands staring at the ceiling, his face white, beating his thighs with his fists. He comes to Frankie’s bed and puts a shaking hand on his head before saying he is going out for cigarettes. The household’s practical needs continue beside an immediate, nearly wordless shock.

Later, Angela wakes in the night and realizes Margaret is dead in her pram near her bed. She tells Mrs. Leibowitz that the baby was seven weeks old and died alone in the middle of the night, then rocks back and forth and blames herself for not watching her. Mrs. Leibowitz holds and comforts her, saying that babies sometimes die and that God takes them. Angela cannot accept the consolation: she imagines that she could have picked Margaret up and prevented her death, and questions what God could want with little babies. Her anguish turns the loss into a painful collision between faith, explanations offered by others, and the unbearable thought of a child alone.

Family Memory and Narrative Significance

Margaret’s death belongs to a repeated sequence of losses in the family. Six months after Oliver dies, Eugene dies of pneumonia. Dr. Troy tells Angela and her husband that they did not know how ill their child was, warns them to bring the boys in at the slightest cough or rattle, and stresses that they must be kept dry. In the account of Eugene’s death, the father also beats his fists against his thighs. That recurring gesture echoes the helplessness witnessed after Margaret’s death, while the doctor’s warning makes the connection between illness, inadequate recognition, and the children’s vulnerability explicit without identifying Margaret’s illness or explaining its cause.

Later, when another baby is born, Angela says he is the spitting image of the sister who died: he has wavy black hair, blue eyes, and beautiful eyebrows. The family’s story of the Angel on the Seventh Step offers a childlike account of where a new baby comes from, but the comparison with Margaret gives the newborn’s resemblance a particular emotional weight. Margaret remains present in the household not through a long life of remembered actions, but through the grief at her death, her father’s exceptional tenderness, and the features her mother recognizes in the next child. Her brief life makes the family’s recurring experience of infant loss personal and concrete.