Poor Tony's seizure (pp. 304–305)
the sudden and incongruous smell of Old Spice Stick Deodorant, Classic Original Scent—unbidden and unexplainable, his late obstetric Poppa’s brand, not smelled for years […] He’d become, at puberty, violently allergic to the smell of Old Spice.
Context
As the seizure gathers, the dead father arrives first as an odor — the exact drugstore scent of the man, unsmelled for years, breaking through the codeine. The detail that makes it a father-wound rather than nostalgia is the allergy: Poor Tony's body turned violently against the father's smell at puberty, the same threshold at which the obstetrician decided what his son had become. So the scent that heralds the convulsion is one he is medically unable to tolerate — the father returning through the one sense the son's own adolescence sealed against him. It rides in on the same tide as the montage of the "sonless father" the withdrawal keeps replaying: removing the training wheels, checking his pager, tearing his shirt, sinking into a bronze casket, lowered under the snow at Mount Auburn seen through dark glasses from a distance.