the persona built to deny his mother

Orin's other cover is aimed at his own mother. Against Avril's "chirpily quotidian" letters he deploys not silence but a fabricated correspondent — a fake, illiterate PR-flack persona ("Jethro Bodine, Assistant Mailroom Technician") whose "grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies" (the diegetic misspellings — "Cordjally," "Inclosed," "how important you're letter" — are the persona's, not the text's) let him deny her contact while feigning mere celebrity-mail volume. The mask is deniable and private ("A private chuckle. She'd never get it"). The estrangement's emotional freight is family-hamlet's; what is ours is the craft — an invented identity interposed to control who can reach whom.