the Port Washington meet — "Schtitt calls Hal Incandenza his ‘revenant,’…"
Schtitt calls Hal Incandenza his ‘revenant,’ now, and sometimes points his pointer at him in an affectionate way from his observation crow’s nest in the transom, during drills.
Context
The coach sees the dead father returning in the son. Since Hal's competitive explosion, Schtitt has taken to calling him his "revenant" — one who comes back, a ghost of the returned — and points his pointer at him fondly from the transom. The word does quiet double work: it marks Hal's game as risen from the near-dead, but in the mouth of the man who was Himself's great tennis intimate (scene 026), on the son of the suicide, "revenant" also names what Schtitt is half-watching for — the founder walking back onto his own courts in his boy's body. The substitute father greets the real one's return in the grandson-generation of the game. (The raw gives only the one word "revenant" and the affectionate pointer-gesture; the wraith/return-of-the-father reading is inference on top of that, flagged as such.)