The Enfield Marine units — "since Gately graduated treatment and took…"
since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up in his Staff cellar bedroom down by the pay phone and tonic machine and looks out the sooty ground-level window by his bed and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.
Context
The chintz-mother memory, and the first crack in Gately's interior gate: suppression caught in the act, the memory named in the very sentence that records his refusal of it. The seed of the whole sobriety-returns-the-memories arc (092's sank-without-bubbles, the St. E.'s flood): the memory is already back; only the association is still being fought.