Mario's birth and body (p. 317)
It was Mario, not Avril, who obtained Hal his first copies of the unabridged O.E.D. at a time when Hal was still being shunted around for the assessment of possible damage, Booboo pulling them home in a wagon by his bicuspids over the fake-rural blacktop roads of upscale Weston, months before Hal tested out at Whatever’s Beyond Eidetic on the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory designed by a dear and trusted colleague of the Moms at Brandeis.
Context
From the Mario dossier's displaced closing movement: the origin story of Hal's O.E.D., and it's Mario — hauling the volumes home in a wagon by his teeth — not Avril, who supplies the instrument of the lexical prodigy. The sentence sits in a run of "It was X, not Y" constructions quietly reassigning credit inside the family, right as Hal tests off the top of the verbal-memory scale.