Hal horizontal in V.R.5 — "Himself, for two years before his…"
Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke: I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking. […] The Moms was at pains to be completely approachable on all subjects except Himself and what had been going on between her and Himself as Himself withdrew more and more.
Context
Two failures of the household's perception, set side by side. Himself, in his last two years, could not hear Hal speaking — "I believed I was speaking and he believed I was not speaking" — and Avril has one sealed subject: herself and Himself, and the marriage's disintegration. She forbids nothing; she simply becomes "so pained and blurry-faced that you felt cruel asking her anything," a prohibition dressed as fragility. The frame is the family's engineered blindness — the same "they looked but did not see" the wraith will later charge them with — running in both directions at once: a father who cannot register his son's voice, a mother who has walled off the one region where the truth is kept. The system's central events are precisely the ones it has made unspeakable.