Mario's birth and defects (pp. 315–316)
revealed that Himself had designed and built and legally willed (in a codicil) to be gaily wrapped and forwarded for Mario’s thirteenth Xmas a trusty old Bolex H64 Rex 5 tri-lensed camera bolted to an oversized old leather aviator’s helmet
Context
The father hands down the craft the way his own father handed down a name: posthumously, by codicil. Himself designed and built a head-mounted Bolex so that a boy with no prehensile grip could shoot film hands-free, willed it to be forwarded for Mario's thirteenth Christmas, and thereby made his least tennis-capable son the only child to inherit the actual instrument of the father's art. Where the male line otherwise transmits its dipsomania and its stairway deaths, this single deliberate bequest transmits the work — routed, tellingly, through a lawyer's office and a gaily wrapped package the father never lived to hand over in person. The closest the son gets to the father's love is a machine the father engineered for the son's exact body, arriving after the father is gone.