The May-December marriage to Avril, and the remote paterfamilias: Le Masque, the "fifth wall," the light-gift, the delusion of silence

pivotal · UNDATED (B.S. era into Subsidized; met at a U. Toronto conference; the silence-delusion "two years before his death")

• When: UNDATED (B.S. era); they meet at a U. Toronto conference on "Reflective vs. Reflexive Systems"; first child Orin born partly to expedite Avril's immigration; the domestic decades run through Weston ("Volvoland") and then the Headmaster's House at E.T.A., up to the death; the silence-delusion is dated by Hal to "two years before his death"
• What: The "tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking" JOI married Avril Mondragon, the only female to hold the Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage at McGill's Royal Victoria College — "extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling and classy." The romance was complicated by visa/Green-Card tribulations over Avril's grad-school ties to the Québecois-Separatist Left (her name on the R.C.M.P.'s surveillance list); "the birth of the Incandenzas' first child, Orin, had been at least partly a legal maneuver." Avril's half- or adoptive brother Charles Tavis ("C.T.") — who will succeed JOI at E.T.A. and move into the Headmaster's House days after the death (event 18) — enters the family here. From outside eyes (Joelle, via Orin, scene 150) and inside eyes (Hal), JOI appears a man of near-total affective hiddenness: "missing the part of the human brain that allowed for being aware enough of other people to disapprove of them," opening himself "only to the mother," his face "any room's fifth wall," the blank expression Avril named in French "Le Masque," so hidden Orin came to see him "as like autistic, almost catatonic"; the whole Thanksgiving table "inclined very subtly toward Avril... like heliotropes" while he drank and "got up to go freshen his drink and never returned." Hal's Weston memories are warmer but no less remote (JOI "stirring a gin and tonic with his finger," "teaching Orin to shave against the grain, upward," slumped on windowsills while "the Moms... told him she'd long-since abandoned any reasonable hope that he could hear what she was telling him," scene 179). His one uncontested gift of intimacy was optical: the E.T.A. and Weston "full-spectrum cove lighting" was "a labor of love from Himself to the Moms," who had "an ethnic Canadian's horror of fluorescent light" (scenes 170, 179). Late, the estrangement curdled into a literal hallucination: "Himself, for two years before his death, had had this delusion of silence when I spoke" (scene 170; Mario "averred that Himself had never accused him of not speaking" — the twin of the conversationalist delusion, event 15). Orin's darker home data feed the record (the fogged-Volvo-window "smeared prints of nude human feet," scene 170 / n269; the Weston mold-and-Rototiller apocalypse, n234). Grim gloss on the marriage, as printed: JOI drunk grades it "a C" (scene 080) and Hal calls the parents "basically estranged" by the end, while Orin insists "Poor old Himself never had eyes for anybody but the Moms" (064) — yet here he is functionally absent even to her. One endnote preserves the marriage actually sparring: "Some of her and Jim's best arguments had been over the connotations of 'Everybody's a critic,' which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge" (n306 p. 1062). [Bears on the death and its open motive: the estrangement is the affective ground of the death, resolved nowhere.]