Orin and Hal on the phone (pp. 1006–1007)
I recall pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window’s glass, trying to make my Filbert out somewhere behind the airplane’s impossible little bullet-hole windows. I cried like a fool every time, as of course I did all over again yesterday, embarrassing everyone but Mario, who also cried.
Context
The scene's frame is devastating before a word is spoken: Hal is reading a chirpy, warm, gossipy letter from Avril to Orin — "Dear Filbert" — that Mario the family archivist salvaged from a wastebasket, one of a run of letters whose very chattiness "seems to imply a context of regular inter-party communication, still," when in fact Orin never answers any of them. The mother writes into a void, sunnily, about Uncle Charles's cholesterol and the grammar campaign, to a son who has cut her off. And she hands the theme its central bird-image unbidden — "pressing the maternal beak to the terminal window's glass" to watch his plane leave, crying every time. The queen as a beaked thing at the glass, maternal love as something that presses against a window it can't get through: the surveillance-love and the enclosure both, self-described, mailed to a son who throws it away.