Mario’s night walk past Ennet House

Mario lies awake in the HmH living room and, when the shrill drawn-out scream comes down from the upstairs where C.T. and the Moms have their rooms, "listens closely for whether the sound ends up as Avril laughing or Avril screaming." The night terrors are real (they afflict adults who eat the day's biggest meal before bed), but the image does something the theme keeps circling: it makes Avril's affect fundamentally undecidable, a sound her own son has to parse to tell terror from mirth. It's the Gertrude question in the dark — a mother whose laughter and whose screaming are acoustically the same — and it's sited exactly where the succession lives, the two rooms upstairs, C.T.'s and the Moms's, the uncle and the widow under one roof with the boy listening from below.