Eileen's father

Eileen's father is an alcoholic whose inability to recognize his own illness makes him both the focus of Eileen's last rescue fantasy and the person she finally leaves behind. In the account of their final night in X-ville, she imagines that a terrible shock might make him see the truth, then helps him to bed, says goodbye, and departs without expecting him to change or waiting for Rebecca Saint John.

Identity and Condition

Eileen regards her father's drinking as an entrenched condition, not a temporary lapse. She has wanted him to stop drinking for good and become the father she needed, but concludes that nothing she could do would bring about that transformation. Her account emphasizes that he cannot see how ill he is; the obstacle is not simply her failure to persuade him, but his inability to acknowledge what is happening to him.

His dependence on alcohol is present in the closing domestic scene as well as in Eileen's broader reflections. On the night she leaves, he drinks the gin she gives him, becomes sleepy, and loses track of the bottle. Eileen leads him to her mother's bedroom and lays him down. The ordinary sequence of drinking, sleep, and care makes visible the condition that her imagined intervention is meant to interrupt, even as the scene shows how familiar their roles have become: he is vulnerable, and she attends to him.

His perception of the world is also marked by delusion. After waking, he tells Eileen that something has been watching the house from behind it and rejects the idea that it is a hoodlum, proposing instead that it may be a wolf. The account gives no confirmation that an animal is there. His interpretation therefore remains part of the scene's uncertainty, distinct from the practical business of Eileen's departure and from the earlier delusions that she expects the police to recognize.

Eileen's Hope for His Reform

Eileen's last plan involving her father is built around the possibility that he might mistake the circumstances of Rita Polk's death. She imagines that if he believed he had killed an innocent woman, the shock might finally force him to acknowledge his condition and change his ways. Her reasoning is both an attempt to imagine help for him and a way of imagining an outcome in which she can leave without abandoning him entirely.

She anticipates that, if questioned, her father might talk about her and Leonard “Lee” Polk, perhaps identifying Leonard as her boyfriend. She expects the police to recognize from his explanation that he has lost touch with reality. In her imagined aftermath, he might go to prison, but she considers a hospital more likely, where he could receive care and regain some clarity. These are Eileen's predictions, not events confirmed by the passage: the hoped-for shock and subsequent treatment belong to the future she pictures while preparing to disappear.

That fantasy also gives her a particular emotional reward. She imagines being gone while her father, once more aware of himself, misses her and regrets what he put her through. The envisioned reform is thus tied to recognition between them: she wants him to understand both his illness and the harm in their relationship. The passage does not establish that this change occurs. Instead, it records the limit of her hope, as she leaves without waiting to see whether the imagined crisis could alter him.

The Last Night at Home

On the cold morning of Christmas Day, Eileen parks the Dodge car in the driveway with Rita Polk slumped in the passenger seat, then goes into the house. She knows these are her last moments there but does not pack a suitcase. The detail marks her departure as abrupt and final rather than a carefully prepared move. She goes into the attic and puts the gun and all the cash she has into her purse; she has not emptied her father's bank account or cashed her last paycheck.

Her father wakes as she comes down from the attic. His report of something outside shifts the exchange toward his deluded suspicions, but Eileen does not stay to investigate them. She gives him gin, and when he grows sleepy she supports him by the arms and takes him into her mother's bedroom. She lays him down and kisses his hand. This brief act of care sits beside the concealment and flight that define the same night: she tends to him, but does not disclose that she is leaving for good.

Eileen's farewell is made through small, conclusive actions rather than a confrontation. She watches him fumble with the empty bottle, drop it, and drift off, then closes the bedroom door. Her father is not shown responding with a revelation or apology. For Eileen, there is no grand finale; he remains her father, but that fact alone does not give her a reason to remain in the house.

Separation and Narrative Significance

Eileen later considers whether she might inherit the house after her father dies. After a decade or two, assuming he has died, she decides to forget the possibility. She does not identify anything in the house that she wants enough to return and claim. Her choice turns the abandoned home into more than a missed inheritance: it is a place she declines to reclaim, even when time has made its practical value imaginable.

She describes herself as dead in X-ville, a ghost and a lost soul, framing disappearance as the identity she leaves behind in her former town. The language is her account of separation, not evidence that her father has died or that he has received the hospital care she once imagined. His fate after her departure remains unknown in these passages. What is certain is Eileen's refusal to return for the house, the money she did not take from his bank account, or a later reconciliation.

The final account also keeps affection and disappointment in the same frame. Eileen's kiss and careful assistance show tenderness, while her decision to leave and her judgment that he could not become the father she wanted register the relationship's limits. Her father is neither transformed into a rescuer nor reduced to the sole explanation for her escape. In the ending, he is the person she briefly cares for, the person she hoped a shock might reform, and the person she leaves behind without waiting for a different outcome.