Roy Watzka's alcoholism

Roy Watzka’s alcoholism is both a recurring illness and his answer to a loss he cannot resolve: he drinks to fill the emptiness left by Minnie, his lost love. The explanation comforts him by turning private grief into a universal human condition, but it also gives drinking the force of a personal creed. After a period of sobriety, he returns to alcohol, hides the relapse from Delphine, and suffers consequences that draw her back into the role of caretaker. His later decline makes clear that neither the language of emptiness nor the brief routines of abstinence have overcome the damage.

The Emptiness and the Drink

Roy often explains his drinking by saying that he drinks to fill the emptiness. Delphine resents the line and once tells him that everyone does things to fill their own emptiness. He takes her response in two ways: it makes his grief feel less singular, while giving him a sense of kinship with other people who feel empty. In time, he turns the thought into a drinking toast to the great void.

During the long period of sobriety after Eva’s death, Roy treats Delphine’s remark as an earnest instruction: everything he does is an attempt to fill the emptiness. Yet the narrator makes the limits of that effort plain. Nothing works for him as well as alcohol. The contradiction is central to his condition: sobriety lets him act on his daughter’s insight, but it cannot erase his grief or displace the drink’s appeal.

The Return to Drinking

At a gathering of Fidelis Waldvogel’s singing companions, Roy gives a speech about the ache of the abyss and the forms of relief he believes might answer it: love, alcohol, or religious faith. He says he no longer has Minnie’s love and cannot believe in the Lutheran or Catholic God, nor invent a faith of his own. He then describes people as having a hollow left in them, with fermented spirits made to fill it. The others listen without answering, wary of prompting another expansive monologue. They recognize where his argument is leading: toward relapse.

The return begins with small quantities of beer and grows into heavier drinking. Roy lies to Delphine, saying he is working with Step-and-a-Half, while drinking in the bum’s jungle, on the back steps of the pool hall that will no longer admit him, or wherever else will have him. The pattern is not simply a private indulgence: it requires deception, keeps him away from home, and makes his daughter’s understanding of his condition depend on what he conceals.

Concealment and Delphine’s Discovery

Roy tries to stay away from his house both to keep Delphine from discovering the relapse and to avoid the spirits of the Chavers family, who leave him alone when he avoids the place where they died. He still manages two or three sober days in some weeks. On those days he stays with Delphine and becomes unusually attentive: he cooks substantial breakfasts, washes his own clothes, and scrubs the floors. Because this industriousness is unlike the pattern she has known from him, it helps conceal the drinking rather than reassure her of a lasting change.

Delphine discovers the truth only after returning from Chicago and looking for work. When she confronts the matter, she insists that Roy is not drinking and that he has changed, while Step-and-a-Half tells her that Roy was recently turned away from the shop drunk and warns that he does not change. The exchange exposes the painful gap between Delphine’s hope and the evidence available to her: she has believed in his sobriety, but his attempts to hide the relapse have kept her from seeing it clearly.

Crisis and Medical Care

The relapse eventually brings Roy into a public crisis. Delphine pursues him through town, catches him near the school, and helps bring him home with the assistance of a gym teacher. She gives him water with sugar and salt, puts him to bed, and calls Doctor Heech. The episode also costs Delphine a possible job at the lumberyard: after tending to Roy, she returns to find that the position has been filled, and the employer warns her that Roy must not sleep among the lumber piles because he might set them alight.

Doctor Heech tells Roy that his drinking has seriously damaged his liver and warns Delphine that his physical condition is grave. He refuses to predict whether Roy will survive, but insists that Roy must live long enough to show consistent goodness to his daughter. He instructs Delphine to taper him off and gives her cough syrup for Roy. His concern is direct, if characteristically severe: he makes Roy’s continued survival a matter of responsibility to Delphine, rather than treating it as a private outcome.

Decline and the Meaning of Sobriety

Later, Doctor Heech prescribes prolonged rest to relieve Roy’s liver and keep his cough from worsening. At first, Roy and Delphine understand his hours of sleep as a sign of healing. Delphine gradually sees the sleep differently: it seems less restorative than like preparation for death. Roy eats very little, growing weaker and quieter, and asks for pictures of Minnie, which he places where he can see them from his bed. Delphine fears that he may die while she is at work and checks his face when she comes home and when she wakes.

Roy’s course does not permit a simple distinction between recovery and relapse. He has known a long sober period, and the domestic work he performs during brief sober stretches is real; so is the drinking he conceals, and so are its costs to his health and to Delphine’s independence. The recurring language of emptiness makes alcohol appear to Roy as an answer, but the narrative follows that answer into secrecy, crisis, dependence, and physical decline. Sobriety can temporarily reorder his days. It does not, by itself, resolve the loss around which his drinking has formed.