Hal, Mario, Coyle; the Weston memories — "Orin had liked also to recreate…"
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.
Context
The family's maternal lineage runs back into gothic. Himself's mother — the grandmother who gave the onyx coffee table as a wedding gift and "died of emphysema shortly before Mario's surprise birth" — is remembered through Orin's impression as a kyphotic wraith in a wheelchair, "beckoning him closer with a claw," so dehydrated she seemed to "osmosize moisture from whoever came near," her asphyxiation announced by "a cheery silver tinkle" from an upstairs bell. Behind her, the Moms's own dead: a birth-mother gone of an infarction at eight, a father gone in her sophomore year "under circumstances none of us knew," the dwarf Mrs. Tavis still alive in Alberta. The generation before the marriage is all early death, hidden circumstance, and a hunched clawing maternal figure — the morbid substrate the Death-as-mother cosmology draws on, planted in the family's actual grandparents.