Billy Quigley’s alcoholism

Billy Quigley’s alcoholism is presented not as an isolated habit but as a force threaded through his exhaustion, financial burdens, and uneasy friendship with William Henry Devereaux, Jr. His drinking accompanies a recurring cycle of accusation, apology, and renewed contact: Billy lashes out, then seeks forgiveness, while Devereaux’s patience gives the calls room to turn from hostility toward tenderness. The cycle is unstable, however. Alcohol brings Billy temporary oblivion, but it does not remove the pressures that make him feel close to exploding, and it can leave him unable to remember the reconciliation that followed.

Identity and Circumstances

Billy is fifty-seven, a professor with eight years left before retirement, and is described as worn out by the prospect of continuing until then. His drinking sits within a life of sustained work and heavy obligations. Irish and Catholic, he and his wife, a local woman he married young, have put ten children through private parochial schools and expensive Catholic colleges. Billy has helped pay for that education by teaching summer sessions and taking course overloads during regular semesters.

The family’s modest housing offers little relief from those costs. They still live in the shabby small house Billy bought about thirty years earlier, before the neighborhood deteriorated. The mortgage is only $150 a month, but the rest of his salary goes toward what the narration describes as mountainous loans. Their youngest daughter, Colleen, has just been accepted to Notre Dame with a music scholarship that will cover part of her expenses; Billy intends to pay the rest. These circumstances make his drinking legible as part of a life under pressure, but they do not reduce him to that pressure or excuse the hurtfulness of his calls. He remains a working father planning to meet his daughter’s costs even as he calls himself a drunk.

The Calls: Anger, Fear, and Forgiveness

Billy periodically calls Devereaux to berate and insult him, then ask to be forgiven. Devereaux says he always grants that forgiveness because he likes Billy and does not blame him for drinking himself into what the narration calls merciful oblivion. Their conversations follow a recognizable rhythm: an attack gives way to bargaining or personal grievance, and the aggression gradually ebbs. The repeated pattern makes the phone calls a measure of both Billy’s volatility and the persistence of their attachment.

One call turns on rumors of an impending faculty purge. Billy has heard that Gracie has beaten Devereaux in a departmental confrontation, and he hopes the report is true. He then calls Devereaux a sellout and insists that he must have placed Billy at the top of a layoff list. The accusation is bound up with fear: Billy wants reassurance about his job, but Devereaux recognizes that he would not believe reassurance even if it were offered. Instead, Devereaux answers the imagined betrayal with a joke about selling the department for full price. Lily regards his habit of turning Billy’s accusations into a running gag as evidence that he treats everything as a joke; Devereaux’s account is that humor often works on Billy. The joke does not resolve the insecurity, but it helps the call move through its familiar stages rather than fixing Billy in anger.

Billy’s anxiety also attaches itself to Devereaux’s family. He argues that Devereaux could at least send his children to school, using his own willingness to support Colleen’s education as a comparison. Devereaux eventually tells him that bringing up his children has gone too far. Billy accepts the boundary: he admits that he should not have said it and describes sometimes feeling as if he is going to explode. The admission complicates the insults. His anger is real, and he acknowledges its excess, but the call also becomes a rare occasion when he names the pressure beneath it.

Drinking, Shame, and Their Friendship

The exchange does not end with either man pretending the insult never happened. As the conversation winds down, Devereaux distinguishes Billy from the label he has given himself: Billy is a drunk, he tells him, but not just a drunk. The distinction is affectionate without denying the drinking. Billy’s response is a quiet pause; he has covered the receiver, and when he speaks again Devereaux can tell that he has been crying. Billy asks why Devereaux keeps listening rather than hanging up. Devereaux says he does not know, and adds plainly that Billy is beginning to annoy him and should not bring up his children. Forgiveness, in this friendship, does not require pretending that no boundary has been crossed.

Billy’s apology retains the roughness of his usual speech, but humor has returned to his voice. He admits that he went too far, then says he has to leave to grade more papers. The ordinary work waiting for him follows the moment of tears without erasing it. His drinking and exhaustion coexist with his responsibilities as a professor and father; the calls make visible the strain between the labor he continues to perform and the anger he cannot reliably contain.

Memory and the Recurrent Pattern

A later morning encounter shows that the reconciliation does not necessarily endure in Billy’s memory. After spending the previous night fending off calls, Devereaux tells Rachel over the intercom that he has stepped out, then actually leaves his office. He does not want to speak with anyone so early. In the corridor he meets Billy, who looks as though he emptied a bottle around three in the morning and remained awake another hour or two. Billy asks whether Devereaux is coming or going; Devereaux answers with a joke and invites him for coffee at the student center. Billy refuses the coffee and asks whether he will get an extra section the next fall.

Devereaux reminds him that they discussed it the previous night and that he will do what he can. Billy asks what Devereaux means by last night. The narration identifies this as a frequent consequence of his drinking: Billy often does not remember having called. His puzzled, belligerent expression suggests that he has lost not only the earlier argument but also its amicable, even sentimental conclusion. The next exchange is brief and pointed. Devereaux wishes him a nice day; Billy returns the wish with a curse. The morning does not repeat the previous night’s reconciliation. Instead, it exposes how easily the call’s emotional resolution can be severed from the next encounter, leaving the relationship to begin again amid the same demands and suspicions.