Pages 682–686
14 November, a Portuguese restaurant window on Prospect St. in Cambridge's "Little Lisbon." The man eating soup alone is new on the page: Matty Pemulis — Michael Pemulis's older brother, who until now existed only as a pair of hand-me-down Wallabies (p. 550). "Matty Pemulis was a prostitute and today he was twenty-three." The scene alternates between what passes across the window and a long descent into his childhood. A plain heads-up, folded in: the middle of this scene recounts, in unblinking detail, his father's sexual abuse of him from age ten.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Little Lisbon (p. 683) — Inman Square's Portuguese-and-Brazilian character is real Cambridge geography.
- Louth in Lenster (p. 683) — County Louth, in Ireland's Leinster province; the text's spelling is as printed.
- the boa and red leather coat (p. 684) — Poor Tony Krause's signature kit, unchanged since pp. 128–135.
- rictusized (p. 686) — from rictus: a fixed, involuntary grimace.
- endnote 278 (p. 686) — one sentence, in a voice the apparatus almost never uses; flip it last.
After you read: three things
1. The window works like a screen. Between descents into memory, figures cross the glass and exit the frame: the bag lady, the squaring-off Brazilians, two underweight girls — and Poor Tony Krause, "sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready," still "making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space" (pp. 683–84). You've been tracking him in single sightings since pp. 299–307, most recently a library stall on p. 655; this is the next frame.
2. Matty is the book's counter-case on memory. Bruce Green's catastrophe had to be "strip-mined" out of repression (p. 578); Matty "had complete recall of the whole thing.... He remembered every inch and pimple of every single time" (p. 684). Watch how the narration inhabits the father's rhetoric — the sentences that break off at "As if the Da were a." — the trap that made the boy's own fear the provocation. And the sentence that undoes the trap, years later: "his Da'd have fooked him in t'boom no matter what he'd done" (p. 685).
3. Count who else is in the room. "Micky just five." Mickey in the cot, "face to the wall and hidden.... Never a word between them" (pp. 684–85). The scene never says more than that about the brother you know — the yachting cap, the Eschaton, the lab-ready Visine — and it doesn't need to. Then the ending: the death by blood, the "rictusized grin," and Matty still toasting "the man's final memory with his first shot, whenever he indulged" (p. 686).
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.