The Irish-immigrant Allston home and the abusive father

texture · UNDATED (childhood, B.S. era, Allston MA / Southie)

• When: UNDATED (Michael's childhood, ~B.S. era; his brother Matty is three-or-four when their Da immigrates in 1989, and Michael ("Micky") is ~five in the abuse memories)
• What: Michael grew up the younger son of a hard-drinking Irish immigrant dockworker in Allston/Southie. Per his brother Matty (scene 131, Matty's POV): their Da came over from Louth in Leinster in 1989, coiled rope on the Southie docks, and sexually abused Matty from age ten, the two boys sharing one small bedroom — "Mickey over in the cot by the window always silent as a tomb, on his side, face to the wall and hidden." The Da died of pancreatic complaints when Matty was seventeen. Matty is now, as of 14 Nov YDAU, twenty-three and a prostitute working the Inman Square / Combat Zone area. Elsewhere the family register is the same working-class one: Pemulis "had never once seen his own Da in anything other than a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms" (n324), and his standing motto is that "Mrs. Pemulis raised no dewy-eyed fools" (scene 048). His middle name is "Mathew" (sic), per deLint (n332); his father is elsewhere referred to as the "late father Mr. Pemulis" (scene 160). One dark, unremarked resonance: Michael is among the E.T.A. upperclassmen who have patronized the Combat Zone (scene 122) — the Inman Square / Cambridge district where Matty now works (scene 131) — though the text never has the brothers recognize the overlap. [Attribution note: scene 131 is Matty's POV and centers Matty's abuse; the silent child in the cot is named only "Mickey"/"Micky" (both spellings in the raw), and the identification Micky = Michael Pemulis is INFERRED, not stated — Michael is never named in the scene; the inference rests on the brother-pairing with Matty and the roster's assignment, and the age arithmetic (~5 when Matty was 10; Matty 23 in YDAU) is approximately consistent. Included as the sole in-range window on Pemulis's family and origins, per the roster; flag carried in Dating notes.]