the maternal line's frozen drinker
My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk.
Context
The disease running down Avril's side of the family too, told to Mario as ancestral fact: a great-grandfather who could feel only when drunk and threw his son through a window four times a year, and a grandfather who drank ale in his chair until he simply fell out of it for the last time. The inheritance the novel tracks through the Incandenza men has a maternal tributary — the alcohol as the only door to a frozen man's emotions, and the door that finally killed him.