Charles Dunlop’s alcoholism

Charlie Dunlop’s alcoholism governs daily life in the Dunlop home and binds Eileen Dunlop to a role that combines care, fear, resentment, and responsibility. His drinking is not presented as an isolated habit: it accompanies household disorder, unpredictable demands, and incidents that draw the attention of the police, while a doctor warns that either continuing or stopping may carry grave danger. Eileen’s efforts to imagine leaving—and her occasional interpretation of Charlie’s actions as protective—show how difficult it is to separate the burden of his dependence from the father-daughter bond.

Household Dependence and Care

Eileen describes herself as responsible for much of the practical work of keeping the household going. Charlie’s needs include alcohol, and she understands gin as the one thing he reliably requires from her. She also shaves him in the kitchen, amid dirty dishes and other signs of neglect. The task is ordinary care performed in a strained domestic setting: Charlie is cold and expects assistance, while Eileen remains alert to his moods and to the possibility of displeasing him.

Their relationship is governed less by agreed rules than by Charlie’s rages and the punishments he invents during them. He may bar Eileen from the kitchen or order her to walk to Lardner’s and back in the rain. He treats her pursuit of pleasure or independence as a betrayal of her daughterly duties, although Eileen recognizes that she is an adult and has no formal curfew. His dependence therefore places a practical burden on her while his demands also narrow the space in which she can act for herself.

Drinking and Public Disturbance

Charlie’s condition reaches beyond the home. Eileen recalls that, except when his sister accompanies him to church on Sundays, seeing him wear shoes can signal trouble. His episodes outside include falling asleep on someone’s lawn, disturbing a gum-ball machine, and shouting at cars on Main Street; on other occasions he throws rocks at dogs. The police repeatedly find him and bring him home. Eileen’s account presents this pattern as a recurring source of embarrassment and apprehension, as well as another responsibility that returns to the household.

The home itself carries signs of his impaired routines. On one occasion, Eileen sees him asleep in his kitchen chair while the refrigerator door stands open. She also recounts an earlier episode in which he fell on the attic stairs while insisting that mobsters were in the cellar. Eileen helped him to the car and drove him to the emergency room. These incidents place his drinking alongside behavior that is disordered and frightening to her, though the narrative does not reduce every aspect of his conduct to alcohol alone.

Medical Warning and Continuing Use

At the emergency room, a doctor gives Eileen a stark account of Charlie’s condition: stopping drinking could itself be fatal, while continuing would also eventually kill him. The warning leaves no uncomplicated course of action. Eileen returns to the house and resumes its routines; when Charlie comes home with a cane and bandage, he tends his wound with increasing attention and demands more rubbing alcohol. Eileen, too, tastes some of it when he is not looking and nearly chokes. The episode shows alcohol’s presence extending from Charlie’s gin to another household substance, without suggesting that Eileen shares his established pattern of dependence.

Eileen also describes the emotional cost of living around Charlie’s drinking and anger. She can be afraid of displeasing him, or deliberately try to provoke him in return, while withholding how much she wants to leave. She imagines that he might use police connections to search for her, then judges that fear to be largely fantasy and expects he will forget her after she is gone. She tells herself that his sister could hire help and that Joanie might take on more responsibility. These imagined alternatives expose the unequal care arrangement: Eileen has been made to feel indispensable, yet she tries to recognize that his needs need not determine her entire life.

Ambivalence and Narrative Significance

One episode complicates Eileen’s resentment. After she has passed out in her car, she realizes that Charlie had removed the keys from the ignition. She wonders whether this may have kept her from carbon monoxide poisoning, but also acknowledges that he may simply have wanted shoes from the trunk. The evidence cannot settle his intention. Eileen chooses to imagine that a fatherly impulse to protect her overcame his other limitations, preferring that account to one based on luck or coincidence.

That uncertainty gives Charlie Dunlop’s alcoholism its particular significance in Eileen’s account. His drinking contributes to a life of care obligations, humiliating punishments, and repeated public incidents, while the possibility of one protective act keeps the relationship from resolving into a simple judgment. Eileen’s wish to leave coexists with her lingering hope that Charlie can still act as her father; neither hope nor resentment erases the practical burden she has carried.