Hal supine, the blizzard, Accomplice!, the fatherly talk

One of the theme's cleanest transmission-images, and it went to Orin. The father stands behind the eldest son at the mirror and hands down the exact grammar of a paternal gesture — shave against the grain, upward — the kind of bodily inheritance that persists after the man is gone (Orin is later shown shaving "as he was taught," the father's hands still in his). The detail matters because of who's remembering it: Hal, cataloguing his father's transmissions and noticing, without saying so, that the ones with real intimacy in them tend to have Orin in the frame. Even the smell that anchors the memory — Noxzema — is the one Hal will name, a few pages on, as his own single most intimate sense-memory of the man. The father taught Orin to shave; what Hal got was the smell of the shaving cream.