Saprogenic Greetings: the one-room Waltham life, the ACMÉ buy-up, and brother Kevin

texture · UNDATED (adult standing status, into Nov YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (standing adult circumstances; the novelty-concern buy-up is fresh news in Nov YDAU — "has just been bought up," n234)
• What: Adult Bain is the proprietor of Saprogenic Greetings, Inc. — motto "WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO LET A PROFESSIONAL SAY IT FOR YOU" — and he never leaves it: home and office are one room, "the converted Children’s Reading Room of what used to be the Waltham Public Library," the whole third floor of the BPL-Waltham Bldg., 1214 Totten Pond Road (he learned from Avril, Orin says, "how to minimize doorways to traverse"). He is not InterNetted, has "an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail," and — per Orin's warning to Steeply — "has problems with the number 2." The company has just been bought up by "a huge novelty concern": the letterhead's ACMÉ Family of Gags 'N Notions, whose Waltham facilities another endnote says truck out the "Saprogenic Greetings® treacly greeting and postcards" — and whose owner it identifies as "the Québec-sympathetic shadowy Albertan mogul" of anti-broadcast A.C.D.C. fame (n204, carried as printed; no inference drawn). Family: his older brother is Kevin Bain of Dedham, the Wharton M.B.A. whose Inner-Infant regression Hal stumbles into — "Just like his younger brother Marlon Bain, Kevin Bain is a short thick person with a dark swart face," with the same incredible sweat, Marlon having always looked to Hal "like a toad hunched moist and unblinking in humid shade" (scene 160); the endnote sourcing Kevin's marshmallow-cocoa datum is "(according to his sudoriferous and and agora-compulsive younger brother, M. Bain)" (n336, doubled "and and" as printed). The "innocent younger sister" of his letter is treated under events 12 and 16.