Molly Notkin’s interrogation (pp. 791–792)

Gertrude's insufficient fidelity, stated flat and total. Molly Notkin relocates the intolerable pressure that drove Jim to self-erasure away from art and audience and onto the marriage: the wife enmeshed "with just about everything with a Y-chromosome" for years — the film-student daughter's own account, the endocrinologically-compelling Moms of the whole book's rumor-machinery — "including possibly with the Auteur's son," the incest-whiff that keeps all of Vienna humming. This is the Gertrude frame in its ugliest key: not the mother's insufficient mourning but the wife's boundless enmeshment, the marriage as an open secret everyone at the pressure-sealed table declined to see. The system's central secret, named by the one witness with nothing invested in keeping it.