Summary

Tony Cusack begins Chapter 4 by wondering if he should contact Robbie O’Donovan’s family about his death. In this first section, the reader learns that the man Maureen killed was Robbie, Georgie’s boyfriend, who had frequented the same pubs as Tony. Tony goes back and forth between thinking the O’Donovan family deserves to know about Robbie’s fate and fearing Jimmy’s reaction to learning that Tony knew the man Maureen killed.

The narrator then takes a short interlude to describe Tony’s marriage to Maria, the mother of his six children. By the time of their marriage in Naples, the couple already had two children together. Maria’s Neapolitan family was “relatively jolly” at the wedding, especially compared to Tony’s Irish family, who “spent the day wrinkling their noses as if, roused by foreign tradition, each...