The testimony on Avril: the abuse essay, "indictment-proof," and the closing warning

pivotal · Nov YDAU; resolves nothing

• When: November YDAU (the letter's answer 7 and coda)
• What: Bain's answer (7) builds from the vacuousness of the word "abuse" — "the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse" — through hypothetical parents (one of them his own dead father in disguise) to the riddle of unimpeachable parents raising ruined children, before naming his subject: "I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything." His exhibits: the "bizarrely furcated" response to S. Johnson's death (event 7) — lavish hidden mourning coupled with an increased love-and-support-bombardment of the son who killed the dog — sharpened into the question of whether such generosity was "for Orin’s sake, or for Avril’s own"; Orin's old party-stopper impression of Avril (the enormous warm smile moving in until the faces touch); and the repellent-philanthropist figure who needs recipients as "pieces of exercise equipment" for his own virtue. His summary judgment carries its own confession of groundlessness: "Everything Orin’s mother is about is always terribly well-ordered and multivalent. I suspect she was badly abused as a child. I have nothing concrete to back this up." The letter closes by warning its addressee — by now "Ms. Bainbridge" — that if Orin seems a magnificently giving lover, she should picture him imitating his dear Moms as philanthropist: "a person closing in, arms open wide, smiling." CRUX NOTE: this is the contested core of Bain's apparatus. Every claim about Avril here is BAIN'S attested reading — admittedly short on charity, admittedly without anything concrete — and the archive's live Avril questions (what her mothering was, what "Something just was not right" points at) are left exactly as the letter leaves them: open.