“Yes, sir.”
Damn. Here I was again in the old unconscious complicity with Hiram’s authoritarian posturing. This happens every time I engage with Hiram — it happens to a lot of us when we engage with him; we feel infantilized — and I invariably promise myself, after taking orders from Hiram, that next time I’ll stand up to him, not obey, and let him get angry if he wants. Tiptoeing around Hiram’s anger resolves nothing and only serves to perpetuate a strained and uneasy state of affairs in which one personality — Hiram’s — overwhelmingly influences the general quality of feeling in the room as a whole. Would it be going too far to imagine my own bad moods, my terrors and despairs and so on, as personalized responses to this room-wide “Hiram-centric” emotional atmosphere? Could it then follow that Hiram is himself responsible, in large part — unwittingly, presumably — for whatever uncomfortableness we brothers experience when we congregate? Might it be possible — if, in fact, Hiram is the root cause of our squabbles and disputes (it would make sense that the firstborn, Hiram, might faithfully embody the rages and pathologies of the preceding generation and, by extension, the generations before that, retreating backward in time; no single person, acting alone, is ever truly a “root cause” of inherent family dilemmas. It would be better to imagine the “root cause” as a set of psychic wounds handed down through the ages. In this way Hiram could be said to resemble that insane ancestral king about whom we know so little save that he was, as I believe I can show if I someday unearth the correct documents, our likely progenitor) — might it be possible to drive a wedge through this ancient and pervasive household trepidation—I don’t know what else to call it — by meeting Hiram’s anger with anger? It was in this absurd spirit of revolt against destiny that I now hurled the flowers to the floor before Hiram’s walker, before Hiram’s feet caged inside the walker’s clackety aluminum framework, and said, “Find a vase yourself, you sadist.”
Instantly I regretted my actions and wanted, needed, to recant and beg forgiveness.
Hiram leaned forward on his walker. He was little and bent over and liver spotted and lame, and I was startled to realize once again that I was intensely afraid of him. Throwing the flowers was nothing more than an act of self-disempowerment, an emotional demonstration of the sort that Hiram would never allow himself. Nothing I ever did seemed to have much impact on Hiram’s total ability to intimidate and shame.
As for the poor lilies, scattered across the floor, they were broken; pallid white blooms had come apart on impact, and smears of pasty white pollen stained the rug in places. A few petals settled at rest around the walker’s legs and on the black toes of Hiram’s wing tips. Suddenly I wanted to apologize to the flowers themselves, even to William, who had brought them. I felt awful when Hiram said:
“Pick them up.”
It was one of those familiar, deplorable moments. I wished for the dinner bell. No such luck yet. It wasn’t time for this signal for a hundred adult men to rush from every corner of the room to grab plates and serving spoons and fight it out over the steam trays. In the meantime, there stood Denzil, and next to Denzil was Saul, and next to Saul, and more or less directly behind Hiram, were Aaron and Pierce. Here came Joe as well, tramping up from over by the porno cabinet. Joe had in his hand a broadsheet of our taboo art; and he was attempting to share this with Denzil and Saul and Aaron and Pierce; and of course there were other brothers standing around, looking on; and no one among these men wanted to get too close to a fight involving Hiram.
Hiram leaned forward over the frame of the walker, out over the metal frame. He had me in his sights. He said, “You’re full of hate, aren’t you, Doug?”
“No.”
“You keep it all bottled up inside, your scorn and your contempt for people, and when you can’t control it any longer, it comes flying out and we have one of our little tragic scenes. Isn’t that right?”
“No.”
“This is a family full of love, Doug. We all love one another here. This whole room is full of love. Too bad you can’t feel it, Doug. You can’t participate in love because you’re busy tearing everybody down. You want to tear us down and you want to discredit our forefathers.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s not enough for you to tear down the living, you have to go after the dead.”
“No.”
“Don’t say no to me, boy. I’ve seen you in your same chair by the big window, night after night, rooting through the old books and papers. You think that if you find sickness in others, you’ll be healthy. You think if you find weakness in others, you’ll be strong. Does throwing a bunch of flowers at an old man make you feel strong, Doug?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Speak louder.”
“No.”
“Pick up the flowers, Doug.”
They were all watching me, Pierce and Aaron and Denzil and Saul and Joe with his old-fashioned erotic drawing that no one was looking at. Across the way, Jack in his safari costume stalked the blind Albert. Albert’s white cane swept the air, though ineffectively. “Help me, someone. Oh, help me!” cried Albert as Jack, the expert hunter, gained on his chair.
Then the twenty chandeliers blinked off again and everything became a shade darker for an instant. It was like a negative form of lightning, perfect accompaniment to the routine thunder of wind hitting windows. Gunner barked and barked. The Doberman had managed to unsnarl his leash from the overturned art nouveau armchair, and so he was free at last and sprinting in wider and wider circles around the furniture. “Settle down, fellow,” Gunners owner, Chuck, called to the racing dog.
Around and around tore Gunner with paws skittering. When the Doberman hit carpet, his claws hooked the weave for traction and the shabby fabric popped and ripped.
I prayed for Gunner to dash toward Hiram and knock him down.
Here, boy.
Instead Gunner charged between couches. Men sidestepped to avoid the onrushing dog. Gunner jumped a coffee table then disappeared into a narrow aisle of shelves housing Geology, Natural History, and Mineral Sciences. “Don’t make a mess in there,” Chuck called to his beloved Doberman. Could Chuck possibly have known Gunner’s plans to relieve himself behind a stack of unshelved crystal spectrography manuals?
But wait. I had begun, a moment or two ago, to describe, in plain terms, the situation as it stood that night with the lilies and with Hiram — our little semipublic showdown that wasn’t, in fact, so little. I always charge off the track at moments like these — the bitter moments, I guess you’d call them — and instead begin rendering the scenery and all the extraneous misbehavior of my brothers and their abysmal pets. As if anyone cares. Conflict is the really interesting thing, I’ve found. Conflict! Conflict is always so difficult to recount. By difficult I suppose I mean painful. But also I mean demanding. The technical aspects of describing true conflict are daunting. First, you have to establish your antagonists. It is important to avoid cozy oversimplifications, and to bear down instead on all the obscure and intractable problems of identity and desire that make our lives and our needs so various and dissimilar. The problems in describing a person are essentially problems of knowing a person. One of the sad features of most close relationships is the decay of intimacy as a function of time, turmoil, and all the little misunderstandings that inevitably occur between people, leading them, year in and year out, toward the same tired conclusions: conversation falters; friendships fail.
That said, allow me to concede that my brother Hiram is an incredible asshole. He’s just a complete jerk. He finds your worst insecurities and then tortures you until you’ll do practically anything to escape his voice’s dry wheezing and the spectacle of bony fists clutching that walker. It is true that Hiram’s voice trembles. Hiram is ninety-three, his breathing is irregular, and his voice naturally shudders and cracks. It is fair to guess that he may have felt, that night with flowers at his feet and with a crowd of younger men gathered as observers, uneasy about his effectiveness as a figure of potency and strength. He needn’t have.