Hal horizontal: Accomplice!, the blizzard, Weston
Orin had liked also to recreate for us the spooky kyphotic hunch of Himself’s mother, in her wheelchair, beckoning him closer with a claw, the way she seemed always caved in over and around her chest as if she’d been speared there. […] When the nurse was off, a small silver bell was apparently hung from an arm of the old lady’s wheelchair, to be rung when she could not breathe. A cheery silver tinkle announcing asphyxiation upstairs.
Context
Blizzard morning: the Incandenza body-ledger gets its oldest entry — JOI's own mother, known to Hal only through Orin's cruel party-piece impressions. Kyphotic hunch, wheelchair, claw: the grandmother is drawn with exactly the anatomical kit the book elsewhere gives Mario (claw) and the A.F.R. (wheelchair), and the silver bell — a cheery domestic object repurposed as an asphyxiation alarm — is pure Incandenza-household gothic. Deformity runs up the family tree, not just down it.