Mario’s night walk past Ennet House — "Avril’s never come right out and…"

Politeness roulette at its most recursive and, aimed at Mario, its most poignant. Avril worries about her disabled son wandering the bad neighborhood at night but will not say so — because naming it would make a special issue of his deficits, or look inconsistent beside the free rein she gives Hal, or in any way inhibit Mario's autonomy by making him worry about her worrying. So the worry goes unspoken, and travels anyway: Mario, who feels it perfectly well, keeps to a limited area "out of deference to Avril's worry," and worries, "rather a lot," about her worrying about him. The control operates precisely by never being articulated — the never-spoken concern still steering the son, still absorbed by him as guilt, the whole loop turning without a single word ever being said. It's the surveillance-love complex distilled to its purest mechanism, and the softest, because both parties are only trying to spare each other.