Gately and the wraith (pp. 837–838)
The wraith confesses that he had, at one time, blamed the boy’s mother for his silence. But what good does that kind of thing do, he said, making a blurred motion that might have been shrugging.
Context
The seam sentence — where the ghost-father's account of his disappearing son turns, for one clause, onto the mother. Grieving the boy who "open[ed] his mouth and have nothing come out," the wraith confesses he had, at one time, "blamed the boy's mother for his silence," then shrugs it off: what good does blame do. It's the Gertrude charge made and half-retracted in the same breath — the ghost-father naming the mother as the cause of the son's muteness and then declining to press it, the way Hamlet's ghost warns the son against tainting his mind against the queen even while indicting her. The whole family-frame pivots on this near-buried aside: the silence at the center of the Incandenza system (Hal's aphonia, the book's opening) laid, tentatively, at Avril's feet by the one figure with standing to lay it there, and then let go — because in this system, as in Boston AA, resentment is the number-one offender and blame is a shell game. The accusation the anthology keeps circling gets spoken once, by the dead, and immediately disowned.