“Seamus is asleep again,” I whispered to Arthur passing by on the long march toward the bar. Arthur turned to James, next in line, and advised him, “Seamus is asleep. Watch out.”
In this manner word went out and Seamus was given leeway to swing his arms wildly. The sight of this filled me with guilt for all the things I could not put right simply by loving my brothers as they tottered about or collapsed to the library floor. Max, for one, had not budged from his spot on the carpet. There he was on his back with arms flung out and with shoes half on and half off. The blood had dried and Max was resting comfortably, watched over by Bertram waiting patiently for me to bring him a seltzer.
Close by was Virgil. Virgil had drawn himself into a cozy ball around that embroidered pillow I’d given him earlier. I could not see whether he was trembling. He hugged his pillow and looked contented.
Not so our Barry. Barry’s whole head was bruised. He made intermittent, quite loud gurgling noises. His glasses had settled unevenly across the ruby bridge of his nose. Coins had spilled from Barry’s trouser pockets and were scattered brightly around on the carpet.
No one at large paid these three men any attention. That’s because — it should be plain by now — someone or other is always falling sick or having a spiritual awakening, and it’s nothing unusual to step over that person lying on the rug and clutching a pillow as if for sweet life. This is not to say that if we must occasionally step over each other, we do not also cherish each other. On the contrary. Large families are a lot like small communities. We exist in relation to others. One learns to respect or at least tolerate one’s neighbor’s way of life, and also to refrain, whenever possible, from imposing oneself and becoming a nuisance. Otherwise, things get too appalling. For instance: Seamus, his arms waving hysterically for balance, deep asleep with eyes closed tight. Off Seamus went, out across the Bokhara, blazing a crooked trail around wide-backed mahogany chairs, in and out of that packed queue, his mates on their way to get more drinks. How can Seamus know his way to the bathroom? I can’t answer that question except to venture that it seems likely that the sleeper’s unconscious mind holds introjected “maps” of well-known environments; perhaps, in this way, Seamus dreams his way to the bathroom. That night, Porter, Andrew, Foster, and a half dozen others all swiftly leapt clear of their brother’s oncoming fists; and Porter, jumping backward, knocked over a card table. The table tipped; men’s voices cried out; Porter stumbled; the table crashed, and Seamus vanished into Civilizations and Empires of the Late Middle Ages; more voices; a new round of barking. Appalling, as I was saying. Noises came from everywhere, and the chandelier bulbs overhead flashed off, on, off, on, like playhouse lobby lights signaling act one. What a sad theater ours would be, with its inaccessible bar and its fire-hazard electrical circuitry and the cracked ceiling vaults and ripped curtains and the cigarette-burned seats, and the people and things constantly tumbling over and breaking on the floor. It’s enough to make you hate mankind. I sometimes imagine our red library as a kind of bleak and unruly interpersonal anxiety zone. Emotions heat up and tempers break out in real disputes that have their roots in a hundred contingent histories of the standard childhood competitions, degradations, reparations, punishments, tortures — all the gory excitements of pain and power that seem, in retrospect, so ineluctably linked with childish fantasies about manhood. Screaming and crying were the routine bedlam of our bedtimes, drowning out the crickets and the pounding wind outside, but never the voices of older brothers who taunted, “Had enough, you little worms? Father can’t help you now!” It was Zachary who perfected the art of the red belly, that scrubbing technique, the wire hairbrush on Virgil’s bare white skin. Poor Virgil, pinned down by Zachary’s hands to our shared bunk bed’s bottom mattress. I held my eyes closed and pretended to sleep and did nothing, night after night. It grieves me to think back now over old boyish stuff, all the bad times made more bitter in memory by the absence in this strangling red library of a serene corner to hide out in, of a comfy chair that gets enough light for reading without strain, of a taste of unstale air to breathe. It’s shocking, isn’t it, how the dreadful circumstances of one’s life grow to feel, simply because one knows them, perfectly normal. Lost games, stolen toys, handed-down clothes that never fit. I love my brothers and I hate their guts. Me! Me! our voices all seem to shout — as if we were not a true community united in blood and spirit, instead a common mob intent on nothing more than the next drink, the next mouthful of food. I love my brothers and I hate my brothers. Most of all I hate myself, when, during an evening, I find myself alone in the crowd, without a dear old comrade to help me through the terrors. I try not to feel oppressed but I cannot help my feelings, whenever I gaze along one of our interminable shelves of books trailing off into the library’s gray regions. Titles on books’ spines can hardly be read even in adequate light. Age and the damp have faded the authors’ names.
“Gin and tonic! Gin and tonic!” This abruptly from Albert in his old-fashioned horsehair chair shoved hard against a far wall. The companion pair of earless caribou heads stared vacantly down as Albert swung that retractable cane of his, rapping things and creating a fuss. Three loud raps, then: “I wonder if one of you gentlemen might bring me my Gilbey’s. Jack! Is that Jack I hear? A Gilbey’s and tonic with a twist. Don’t sip any on the way back, Jack. I can tell when people have been drinking my drink. Jack, speak up. Where did you go?” Albert called more or less in the direction of the young man who stood only a foot or so outside the reach of Albert’s red-tipped cane. As always, the blind man had heard correctly: it was Jack beside him. Albert thrashed around with the cane. Jack held back. Jack is one of those ridiculous men who wear safari outfits in town and at home. Albert chastised, “I know you’re near, Jack. I smell you,” and Jack raised a finger to his lips — playful silent warning for the rest of us to remain quiet and go along with the old mischief of seeing how close you can get to Albert before he hits you with the cane.
Jack has been willing on occasion to stalk Albert for over an hour at a stretch. Everybody knows it’s all in good fun. Back and forth crept Jack, keeping safe distance while waiting for the right moment to close in on Albert waving the cane feebly and begging for someone to please make his brother go away and leave him alone.
And here came Hiram rattling across the carpet toward where the action was. At Hiram’s rate of travel he could expect to arrive at the porno cabinet in roughly two to four minutes, depending on variations in clearance between chairs and tables, and the speed with which other men could remove lamps and ashtrays and cachepots from the tabletops before relocating the furniture sufficiently for Hiram’s walker to squeeze by as he shouted, “Where’s dinner? It’s time for dinner! Which of you gentlemen is in charge of our dinner?”
Who else but Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah? Already these three were folding the napkins (Jason), counting out knives (Joshua), and polishing, with a dry cloth, the surface of the extremely long, rectangular, oak table (Jeremiah). We can’t quite all fit around that table, but with enough folding card tables and petit writing desks appended at corners, and with our chairs pulled in tight or angled out just so, we can manage. No person has to feel banished to a chaise lounge, and everyone can pretty much get at the food, and no one is forced to eat off his lap. The downside is the Seating Plan in its particulars — the who-sits-next-to-whom of it all — with its impossible problems of left- and right-handed eaters placed in elbow-knocking proximity; of belligerent vegetarians always wanting to sit at a remove from meat; of equitable distribution of the red and the white wines; of the distasteful cliques — twins and young fathers come to mind — who insist on confederation to the point of pressuring others out of chairs; of old bitter hatreds and severe grain allergies and who drinks tea and who won’t bear salt and how long it will take before some drunken comedian at the end of the table throws the first dinner roll. No ideal Plan has ever been devised. We would dispense with the Seating Plan altogether, but this has been tried and the outcome was not good. So the Seating Plan exists, is drawn up then drawn again, modified then reviewed, edited then erased, smudged, annotated, corrected, and drawn up one more time, in colored pencil on construction paper, by Jeremiah with his velvet-covered box of silver place cards engraved with names. You’re supposed to sit where your place card tells you to sit. If you don’t want to sit where your place card tells you to sit, you’re supposed to inform Jeremiah, so that he can say, “Well, then, sit wherever the fuck you want.”