Summary
I know when Dad does the bad thing. I
know when he drinks the dole money and Mam is desperate and has
to beg . . . but I don’t want to back away from him and run to Mam.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Frank is ten years old and preparing for his Confirmation.
Peter Dooley, whom everyone calls “Quasimodo” because of his hunched back,
offers to let Frank, Billy Campbell, and Mikey Molloy pay a shilling
to look at his naked sisters. The day before their Confirmation,
they go to Peter’s house. Mikey Molloy climbs the drainpipe to see
the girls, but, as he masturbates, he starts to have a fit and falls off
the pipe. Quasimodo’s mother appears, shuts Quasimodo in the coal
cellar, and berates the boys for looking at her daughters. She tells
Angela that Frank should go to Confession before his Confirmation
the next day, but Angela says she won’t have him prevented from
being Confirmed just because “he climbed a spout for an innocent
gawk at the scrawny arse of Mona Dooley.” She drags Frank home and
makes him swear in front of the picture of the pope that he didn’t
see Mona naked.
The next day, Frank is Confirmed. Afterward, he gets
a nosebleed that will not stop. He feels too sick to make his Collection. Some
days later, the doctor visits Frank at home and diagnoses him with
typhoid fever. Frank goes to the hospital, and for days he drifts in
and out of consciousness. He is close to death and is given the
rites of Extreme Unction. However, a few days later a doctor farts
in front of him, and Frank realizes that he will live, thinking
that a doctor would never fart in front of a dying boy.
Frank’s father visits him and kisses him on the forehead
for the first time in his life, which makes the boy so happy that
he feels like “floating” out of bed.
During his stay in the hospital, Frank meets a girl named
Patricia Madigan, who is dying of diphtheria. The two children befriend Seamus,
an old man who cleans the hospital. Patricia lends Frank a history
book, in which he reads his first two lines of Shakespeare. The
beauty of Shakespeare’s language overwhelms Frank. He says speaking
the lines is like “having jewels in [his] mouth.” Patricia recites
part of Alfred Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman.” The nurse is infuriated
to find the two children talking, and she tells the nun in charge,
who moves Frank into another ward, saying, “Diphtheria is never
allowed to talk to typhoid.” Frank overhears the nurse talking to
Seamus about all of the children who died of starvation in that very
ward during the potato famine. She also tells Seamus that Patricia
does not have long to live. Two days later, Seamus tells Frank that
Patricia died as she was trying to make her way to the bathroom.
Frank asks Seamus to find out what happens at the end
of “The Highwayman.” Seamus asks around at the pub, finds someone
who knows the poem, and memorizes it so he can report to Frank.
It turns out that at the end of the poem, both the hero and his
lover die. During the rest of his stay in hospital, Frank reads
books.
Frank is allowed to return home fourteen weeks after
his eleventh birthday and is greeted warmly by the people in his
street. On his return to school in November, Frank is disappointed
to learn that he has to repeat the fifth year instead of moving
up to the sixth with his friends. Although he is barely strong enough
to walk there, Frank clings to walls and eventually reaches the
statue of St. Francis of Assisi, where he gives a penny to light
a candle, and prays to be moved to the sixth form. Shortly thereafter,
he writes an impressive essay on what would have happened had Jesus
grown up in Limerick, which persuades Mr. O’Dea to move him up to
the sixth class. Frank is amazed by his new teacher, Mr. O’ Halloran,
who encourages questions and admits that the Irish, as well as the
English, committed atrocities during the Battle of Kinsale. Frank
concludes his teacher must be telling the truth because he is also
the headmaster.
