The Man From Glad and the mattress
In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for those times, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.
Context
Here is the middle panel of the family's three generations of performing fathers, seen by the son who will become the next one. James Sr. — the failed tennis player turned Man From Glad — is a father whose performance-self never comes off: he does the mattress chore still in his white commercial tunic and orange television makeup and rigid white wig, and at night sits up alone declaiming his disturbing fan mail to an empty living room. The whole scene is narrated by young Jim, who will grow up to be a director of unwatchable films who dies performing his own disappearance — the son absorbing, in real time, what it looks like for a father to be permanently on, authoritative in a costume, applauded by strangers and unreachable at home. The performing father hands the son the performance and the isolation both.