Tax law, the marriage, the frail mother, the father's death — the Dewars descent

texture · UNDATED (adult life, B.S. into Subsidized era, pre-YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (his adult decades up to the YDAU bottom)
• What: Ewell recalls a tax-law career ("helping wealthy suburbanites two-step around their fair share") which he half-suspects was itself an instinctive attempt to bury the third-grade despicability "in an amber sea." He is married to a woman "who looks at me as if I were a dark stain at the back of her child's trousers," and who coined his private theology of the self: his soul she calls his "personality," the thing Dewars scotch brings the darkness out of. His father lost the I.B.E.W. account under the Weld administration and died in 1993; his very frail mother — a walker, arthritis that has "twisted her head nearly all the way around on her neck" — lives in a rest home believing Eldred is at a nine-month Banque-de-Genève tax-law symposium in the Alsace (his wife "jealously protects" the mother from the truth), and keeps knitting him ill-fitting skiwear. NOTE profession clash: in Pat's drop-in transcript (event 4) he calls himself "a reasonably successful personal-injury attorney for sixteen years," not a tax lawyer — cite both as written.