Mario's birth and defects (pp. 312–313)
Mario had been given the name of Dr. James Incandenza’s father’s father, a dour and golf-addicted Green Valley AZ oculist who made a small fortune, just after Jim grew up and fled east, by inventing those quote X-Ray Specs! that don’t work but whose allure for mid-’60s pubescent comic-book readers almost compelled mail-order, then selling the copyrights to New England novelty-industry titan AcméCo, then promptly in mid-putt died, Mario Sr. did, allowing James Incandenza Sr. to retire from a sad third career as the Man From Glad in sandwich-bag commercials during the B.S. 1960s and move back to the saguaro-studded desert he loathed and efficiently drink himself to a cerebral hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway.
Context
The male Incandenza line laid out as a series of deaths near stairs and bottles, and the newest son is named backward into it. Mario carries the name of the great-grandfather oculist who dropped mid-putt; that death freed the grandfather (James Sr., the failed Man From Glad) to drink himself into a hemorrhage on a Tucson stairway — and the scene has already told us, at the moment Avril's water breaks on the maple staircase, that James's "own father had dropped dead on a set of stairs," which is why he thinks his wife is dying in front of him. Stairways and alcohol run down the line like a name does, generation to generation, and the birth that opens the scene is immediately annotated with the deaths it descends from. An optical inventor, a novelty huckster, a dipsomaniac filmmaker — the inheritance is a way of dying as much as a name.