Marlon Bain’s letters (pp. 1049–1050)
a father who is extremely handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but gets so engrossed in his projects (the father) that he never thinks to explain to the son how the projects actually get done, so that the son’s “help” never advances past simply handing the father a specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost
Context
Bain builds three hypothetical "ambiguous" fathers to argue that "abuse" can't really be defined — the bed-ridden depressive who sits cleaning his revolver, the mathematician who gets so engrossed he does the son's homework himself, and this one, the handy father whose son never gets past handing him wrenches. The third is Bain's own, hidden in the third person: his parents died in the Jamaica Way helicopter crash he mentions earlier in the letter, the father "crushed into aspic," and he has smuggled his autobiography inside a rhetorical example. What lands is his definition of the worst father-wound — not cruelty but absorption, a father too lost in his own competence to pass any of it on, so that the injury is the instruction that never happened, the son inheriting inadequacy in the exact place skill should have gone. [dyad only; the letter's long Avril passage left to family-hamlet]