Charlie Dunlop’s alcoholism

Charlie Dunlop’s alcoholism turns the household he shares with Eileen into a place organized around his drinking, changing moods, and need for care. What Eileen once regarded as ordinary beer drinking becomes, after her mother’s illness and death, a worsening pattern that reaches into his police work and everyday routines. Her retrospective account shows both the practical burden of living with him and the emotional performance required to remain dutiful while wanting to escape.

Early Drinking and Escalation

Eileen remembers Charlie Dunlop as having once seemed like a conventional drinker. Before her mother became ill, he drank beer with friends from the X-ville Police Department at O’Hara’s, and sometimes whiskey on cold mornings. She did not then interpret these habits as evidence of a larger problem. Her account marks her mother’s illness as a turning point: Charlie began taking time off, drinking at home, wandering around town at night, and falling asleep on neighbors’ porches. His drinking also reached into working hours. He drank in the mornings and on the job, and his conduct included totaling a squad car and accidentally firing his gun in the police locker room.

The department did not openly discuss these incidents. Eileen attributes the silence to Charlie’s seniority and the affection his colleagues felt for him. Rather than face public consequences, he was encouraged to retire early with a pension. In her account, retirement did not end his need for supervision: as his difficulties increased, he was watched and cared for more closely. The contrast is sharp between his respected standing as a local officer and the domestic and professional disruption associated with his drinking.

Eileen also recalls a change in what he drank. He had gone to O’Hara’s with colleagues, but after he pulled a gun on the owner he was no longer welcome there. At home, he generally drank gin, though he also drank beer and, on Christmas, sherry. The explanation Eileen offers for his preference for gin is explicitly uncertain: she wonders whether its scent recalled her mother’s perfume, then immediately allows that this may be wrong. The speculation conveys how little she could know about his reasons, even while his drinking became a central fact of her life.

The Household Organized Around Drinking

After her mother’s death, the house remained crowded with her belongings and was not maintained as it had been before. Charlie slept in an armchair dragged from the den into the kitchen; Eileen slept in the unfinished attic, apart from the lower floors. These details place his drinking within a wider household decline, though Eileen does not reduce every hardship in the home to alcohol alone. She describes his drinking as a strain that left her tense and watchful, wondering what she would find when she returned from work and how long he might live.

At night, Charlie sometimes lit the stove and oven and drank while watching the flames. He said he was cold, although Eileen notes that he wore very little. On one winter evening, she found him sitting barefoot on the stairs with a cigar and sherry. He greeted her with contempt, part of a pattern in which he treated her as pathetic and unattractive. Eileen loathed him, but also describes herself as dutiful: in the house, it was just the two of them. When she wanted to quiet or distract him, she could hand him a bottle and leave the room. This small practical routine stands in for any resolution of the underlying conflict.

Eileen’s Care and Resentment

The demands of Charlie’s drinking recur in the Sunday morning preparations for Mass. Eileen wakes hungover herself, after drinking whiskey and taking laxatives the previous night, and he calls for her help. She buttons his shirt and holds a bottle to his lips because his hands are shaking. When he indicates that he needs a shave, she lathers his face and shaves him in the kitchen, beside dirty dishes and other signs of the household’s neglect. Her account presents care as an ordinary task performed under strained conditions, not as reconciliation.

Charlie’s moods make that care emotionally fraught. During the shave, he tells her she smells bad. Eileen is angry and sometimes feels she could not bear him, yet she says nothing about how deeply his words affect her. She is determined not to let him know that he can make her miserable or how much she wants to leave. Her restraint is not simply affection or patience: it is also concealment, a way of keeping her plans and vulnerabilities from him.

She imagines that leaving might prompt Charlie to use his police connections to search for her, but recognizes that this fear is largely fantasy. She expects he will forget her once she is gone. To make departure seem possible, she tells herself that responsibility for him could pass to someone else: his sister might hire help, and Joanie could make an effort. The thought that not everything is her responsibility offers a counterweight to years of caretaking, even though she remains uncertain about what will happen to him.

Departure and Retrospective Meaning

At the time she tells the story, Eileen looks back on her father’s drinking from a life in which she lives alone. She says that living with alcoholic men taught her that worrying, asking why, or trying to help cannot change who they are. This is a conclusion formed across later experience, not a claim that she understood Charlie clearly while she was young. Her recollection repeatedly distinguishes the girl who worried about his future and managed his immediate needs from the older narrator who can name the limits of that work.

The final farewell retains the practical shape of their relationship. Eileen gives Charlie gin; after drinking it, he grows sleepy, and she helps him to her mother’s bedroom and lays him down. She kisses his hand and says good night, then closes the door. She has already understood that Rebecca will not come back, and she does not wait for her. The quietness of the scene is significant: Charlie’s drinking does not end in a dramatic confrontation or a change of heart. Eileen leaves after one last act of care, carrying the accumulated weight of a household in which his alcoholism had made her both caretaker and prisoner of her own sense of duty.