Eileen’s father’s alcoholism

Eileen’s father’s alcoholism shapes both the limits of Eileen’s hope for him and the last scene they share in X-ville. She sees his drinking as an illness he cannot acknowledge and imagines that only a devastating shock might make him change. Yet the departure that follows offers no evidence of recovery: Eileen gives him gin, settles him in bed, and leaves, carrying with her the hope that he might one day understand what he has lost.

The illness and its limits

Eileen describes her father as unable to recognize how sick he is. She has come to believe that nothing she does can make him stop drinking permanently, become clear-headed, or become the father she wanted. The account gives no clinical diagnosis and does not trace the beginnings of his drinking; what it does establish is Eileen’s sense of its persistence and of her own inability to alter it through personal effort. Her father’s illness is therefore present not as a problem she can solve, but as a condition that has exhausted her ordinary hopes for change.

That limit becomes explicit in her speculation about what might reach him. Eileen thinks that only a massive shock could wake him up. She imagines the police asking why he shot Rita Polk and him giving an explanation that implicated Eileen and Leonard “Lee” Polk, whom he might mistake for her boyfriend. In her imagined version of events, the police would see that he had lost his mind. This is a contingency in Eileen’s thinking, not an account of what the police actually do or of what her father truly believes. Its importance lies in the reform she attaches to it: she hopes that the shock might lead him to recognize his condition, accept treatment, and have a change of heart.

The imagined possibility of treatment

Eileen’s fantasy of intervention contains both punishment and care. She allows that her father might be sent to prison, but thinks it more likely that he would be taken to a hospital, treated well, and nursed back to health. She imagines being gone by then, but wants him to have enough presence of mind to miss her, regret what he put her through, and wish to make amends. The imagined hospital is not a reported outcome; it is the future she hopes might emerge from the shock. Her plan depends on her father experiencing consequences severe enough to make him confront his illness, while also depending on others to provide the care she cannot make him accept from her.

This imagined future does not amount to confidence that he will recover. Eileen describes it conditionally: he might see the truth of his condition and might change. The distance between that possibility and the evidence of their final encounter is stark. The narrative records no lasting sobriety, acceptance of treatment, or reconciliation. Instead, Eileen’s hope for his awakening remains bound to a crisis she expects to leave behind, and to his possible recognition of her absence only after she is gone.

Their last Christmas morning

On a cold Christmas morning, Eileen parks the Dodge car in the driveway and leaves Rita Polk slumped in the passenger seat. She hurries through the snow and enters the house, knowing that these are her last moments there. She has not packed a suitcase. In the attic, she gathers 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 the attic stairs. The scene places the immediate preparations for departure beside the familiar domestic fact of his drinking, rather than showing the hoped-for crisis producing reform.

Eileen finds a bottle on the floor, picks it up, and tells him to get into bed. He drinks the gin quickly and grows sleepy. When he murmurs about mice, she leads him into her mother’s bedroom and lays him down. She kisses his hand before leaving him there. These actions are care, but they do not constitute an attempt to sober him up: in this final encounter, Eileen gives him alcohol and makes him safe in bed for the moment. The scene does not state that this will be his last drink or describe what happens to him after she leaves. It does make clear that Eileen is departing while he is asleep and unable to understand the full significance of her leaving.

Departure, memory, and consequence

Before going downstairs for the final time, Eileen looks at photographs from her childhood and caresses the faces in them. She kisses herself in the mirror, a gesture she remembers from childhood. She considers bringing back shoes from the car and leaving them in the foyer as a parting gift, imagining that they might provoke her father into creating havoc. She does not do it. The abandoned idea makes visible the anger and wish for a reaction that coexist with her care for him, without turning either into a successful means of changing him.

Eileen recalls her father earlier that morning, making his way through the snow in his large coat on their trip to the liquor store. She remembers him as looking like a little boy, but without joy and with panic in his eyes. Her account connects that memory to her recognition that he had lost his mind and that he had now lost his daughter. This is Eileen’s retrospective judgment, not confirmation of a medical diagnosis or a later account of his fate. She wonders for years whether she will inherit the house after her father dies, then eventually assumes he has passed away and decides not to return. She says that nothing in the house is worth claiming and considers herself dead in X-ville. His alcoholism thus belongs to the life she abandons, while the narrative leaves his eventual recovery and their possible reconciliation unresolved.