the professional conversationalist (pp. 28–29)

The theme's origin image, and the family's native mode named on page 28: to reach his own silent son, Himself doesn't show up as a father — he stands up a whole cover profession. There is a blank door with nothing on it, no diplomas in view, and behind it "a professional conversationalist" who insists he is no fly-by-night shingle-hanger but a "fully accredited limited partnership" with "support staff" and "[r]esearchers at my beck" who "delve full-bore" into the psyches of the people they book. It is a private intelligence apparatus mounted against a ten-year-old. And the "conversation" he delves into is an interrogator's dossier read aloud — the Québec liaison, DuPlessis, "the malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P———," the maternal "assignations" — family secrets weaponized into espionage-patter. Before the novel has a single real spy in it, the disguised-parent gambit has already established the grammar every later operation speaks: the only way in is under cover, and the cover is a watching, delving, file-keeping service. It prefigures Steeply's "Helen" persona whole.