Roy Watzka’s alcoholism and sobriety

Roy Watzka’s alcoholism and sobriety are not a simple passage from vice to reform. Drinking has helped make him a failure in Delphine’s eyes and has brought disorder into their family life; sobriety, when it comes, makes room for work, reflection, and renewed care. Yet it does not undo the past, nor does it turn Roy into a reliably self-sufficient man. His daughter’s tenderness remains entangled with disappointment, and his confession that he caused the deaths in his cellar tests whether her faith in his better self can survive the truth.

A Father Shaped by Drinking

Delphine knows Roy through a history of calamities associated with his drinking. His past is not an abstract grievance: she has learned to expect him to fail her, and she struggles to remember clearly just how poor a father he had been. That uncertainty matters. Her compassion may be real, but she suspects it can also protect her from the full force of what his behavior cost her.

When Delphine and Cyprian return to their room after she discovers Cyprian’s relationship with another man, the pair lie under the covers and hold hands in exhausted silence. The scene is not about Roy directly, but it shows how family trouble has entered Delphine’s intimate life: she thinks about the calamities her father’s drinking brought into the house, memories that return at night alongside older scenes of shame and betrayal. Her history with Roy is one strand in a wider pattern of losses she cannot simply put away.

Cyprian also understands that Roy’s drinking has made his household a place of practical need. The house requires cleaning and new blankets, and Delphine and Cyprian have spent money on schnapps for Roy as well as supplies. The expense belongs to the unglamorous work of trying to restore a damaged home; it also shows that care for Roy has continued even when his drinking has made that care burdensome.

Sobriety and a Changed Daily Life

After Roy is released from jail, Delphine sees a marked change in him. He has stopped drinking, but he does not regain his former boldness or talkativeness. Instead, he grows thin and physically diminished, with blurred eyes and a dreamy, forgetful manner. At times he seems disturbingly at peace. Sobriety has altered his presence rather than simply restoring him: the loquaciousness associated with drink gives way to a quietness that Delphine finds difficult to interpret.

Even in this weakened condition, Roy works. He spends mornings at the shop doing whatever needs doing, taking ten cents and a slice of sausage as his pay before moving on to an afternoon’s labor with Step-and-a-Half. The arrangement makes sobriety visible in repeated, ordinary actions: showing up, accepting small payment, and continuing through the day. Roy and Step-and-a-Half collect scraps around town, and he constructs a useful cart from broken crates, bent hardware, and bicycle tires. His contribution is concrete, though it does not make his recovery a triumphant or effortless transformation.

The partnership unsettles Delphine. She is glad that Roy has found honest work, yet troubled that his companion’s unusual appearance and reputation may expose him to more talk. She also suspects Step-and-a-Half resents her for seeming to have taken Eva’s place behind the shop counter. Roy’s sobriety therefore brings him into a new working relationship without removing the strain between the people who care for him. His more settled routine is a real change, but Delphine remains alert to its social and emotional costs.

The Cellar Case and Delphine’s Loyalty

Roy’s sobriety does not prevent his arrest. When Delphine visits him in jail, she sees a frail man whose hands shake and whose steps have become a shuffle. He has been sober and thoughtful, and she cannot reconcile that version of her father with the accusation against him. The timing sharpens her distress: she wonders why he has landed in the worst trouble of his life just when he seems to be living as a good man.

The jail scene makes the conflict between Delphine’s knowledge of Roy’s past and her hope for his present explicit. She tells him that she knows he did not do it and promises to find a lawyer. Roy answers that he did do it and that everyone saw him. His admission breaks through the explanation Delphine has tried to hold onto. His sobriety cannot be treated as proof of innocence, and her affection cannot make his responsibility disappear.

Clarisse offers to help get Roy out, but Delphine resists her suggestion that he might have done it. She calls him a drunk while insisting that he would not deliberately do something so cruel, then points to the fact that he had been strictly sober. Clarisse replies by recalling how often Roy has fallen off the wagon and disappointed Delphine; Delphine answers that he has never disappointed her. The exchange exposes a contradiction she has to live with: she recognizes his history of relapse and failure, yet defends him in absolute terms when his guilt is at stake.

The contradiction gives Roy’s sobriety its uneasy meaning. It is neither a clean erasure of the past nor a guarantee that Delphine’s trust is justified. It marks an actual change in his conduct and gives him a more thoughtful, working life, while his confession forces his daughter to face what he has done. The narrative keeps both facts in view: Roy has become more than the drunk Delphine remembers, but he remains answerable for the harm that sobriety did not prevent.