Francis McGahern proposes to Margaret

Francis (Frank) McGahern’s proposal to Maggie came soon after Susan McGahern’s death, when grief, the care of the children, and the customs of mourning still governed family life. Maggie did not accept him: she invoked the customary year of mourning to delay any further discussion, and the narrator reads her carefully worded answer as a restrained rebuke. The episode also reveals the precarious position of a widowed family and the competing meanings of marriage—as care for children, a scarce practical security for women, and a means of control.

Background and timing

The proposal followed the funeral and a dispute over where the children would live. Francis had first demanded that Maggie take the two youngest children, including the baby and Dympna, instead of Margaret and Monica, whom she had agreed to keep. When Maggie refused the altered arrangement, he took the two older girls from her, bringing all seven siblings together again. The letter in which Maggie answered the proposal was written soon after he had taken Monica and Margaret away, and it began with the clothes he wanted returned.

Marriage was especially charged at this point because customary mourning was expected to last a year. People wore a black mourning diamond on their suits, avoided dances and parties, and stayed at home; a wedding or engagement already arranged was generally deferred. When death was imminent, by contrast, weddings were sometimes hastened. Francis’s haste to marry after his wife’s death therefore struck the narrator as extraordinary, as did his choice of Maggie, given the antipathy between them.

The letter and its answer

Maggie’s reply began with practical details: she had found Monica’s coat and had two school bags and two stockings, one set for Monica and one for Margaret. She regretted that she could not supply a pair of stockings for each girl, recalling how busy Susan had been knitting and sewing for the children in her spare time. In the same letter Maggie dealt with photographs and negatives Francis had requested, probably for a memorial card, before turning to a visit to Drumderg.

The visit appears to have been partly for advice about the proposal. Maggie described the three children of Jimmy and Bridie Keegan as well and happy, then observed that their mother was heartbroken beneath an outward show of composure. Only after these household and family matters did Maggie address Francis’s suggestion, which he had raised in his second-last letter and pressed again after she initially disregarded it or seemed not to believe he was serious.

Maggie said that he should not think of marrying for at least twelve months; if he still wished to do so after that, he could mention it then. She prayed that God would send him a suitable person if marriage were for the best, questioned how he could be so eager to marry again if he had loved Susan, and added that her chief worry was that Susan’s children should not be forgotten. Her answer was measured rather than openly confrontational, but it placed the children and the dead woman’s memory at the centre of the decision.

Mourning, kinship, and power

The narrator was surprised that Maggie entertained the proposal at all, while his sisters understood it differently. Maggie had been devastated by Susan’s death; she struggled to sleep and found that painful memories and questions crowded in when she tried to pray at the grave, so she had to enter the church to pray. The sisters also saw a social and material logic to the match: the deceased wife’s sister sometimes married the widower, helping safeguard the children and keeping a potentially hostile stepmother out of the household. Positions for women were scarce, and Maggie had a shop, probably some money, and qualities Francis might have found attractive. In the sisters’ view, marriage would also have placed her in his power.

Maggie later summed up her own position with the remark, “I might have been hard up but I wasn’t that hard up.” The narrator does not believe she ever took the proposal seriously. He suggests that she used the year-long mourning convention as she had used custom on another occasion: to avoid a spectacle while delivering a rebuke. If Francis renewed the proposal after the year had passed, Maggie refused it. The letter preserves the tension between a convention that could constrain women and one that Maggie could also use to set terms without a direct quarrel.

The parallel courtship

While waiting for Maggie’s answer, Francis was courting Mollie Waters, the beautiful sister of Mrs Cannon, who was visiting them in the Bawn. The two sisters were with Katie in the barracks each day, and Francis was often nearby, behaving at his most charming. In the late evenings he dressed carefully, told the children to behave themselves in Mollie’s presence, and went in uniform to the Bawn.

The children could imagine that it might be strange and flattering to have a beautiful stepmother, but the thought of anyone taking Susan’s place brought heartbreak. This parallel courtship sharpens the episode’s uncertainty: Francis’s proposal to Maggie was not the beginning of a settled new family arrangement, and the children’s hope or fear about a stepmother existed beside the fresh loss of their mother.