Weston texture: the Green Babies, the grandmother, and Hal's reliance on Mario's memory

texture · Weston childhood; recalled 20 Nov YDAU

• When: Weston childhood; Himself's mother died "shortly before Mario's surprise birth" (~B.S. 1990).
• What: Himself's mother died of emphysema shortly before "Mario's surprise birth"; Mrs. Clarke still pales when Mario asks about that grandmother. Mario can recall the violet-lit ferns of the Moms's "Green Babies" in the Weston living room. Hal repeatedly notes he cannot separate his own Weston memories from Mario's detailed reports of his ("I do not have Mario's head for remembered detail"). One Weston-era note catches the two brothers' epistemic styles in miniature: when Pemulis years later exposed family friend "Vector-Field" Rickey's vest-removal trick as "a cheap parlor-trick-exploitation of certain basic features of continuous functions," Hal "mourned in a Santa's-not-real type of secret way" — while "Mario simply ignored [the revelation], preferring to see the vest thing as plain magic" (n3 p. 0983).