“What?” asked one.
“Above the table. See?”
“Where?”
“There,” pointing out, to Vincent, Bob, and Frank, the silhouette on the ceiling, the face blemished by scattered black holes. “I don’t see a thing,” Bob said; and Vincent, squinting to see past lights, asked, “Do you mean that cement about to drop in the salad?”
“To the left of that. One vault over. Watch the chandelier swing this way and you’ll see it. Wait a minute. There it is. Notice the chin?” I continued to point and soon others joined in and peered up. Their heads tilted back and their eyes searched for the angry face that came and went with every changing shadow.
“I think I see. It’s right up there! It’s France,” exclaimed our Bob.
“France?” I said.
“Sure. The hole in the middle is Paris, and that joint compound would be the English Channel.”
“That is not the English Channel,” I told Bob.
“It looks like a big wet spot to me!” Frank said, and laughed. Others laughed along, and Clay, true to form, blurted an off-color joke about prostate glands. Clearly none of these men could see what was right before their eyes. It’s understandable, in a way, and typical among men in this family, men everywhere in our culture, I suppose, that they’ll resort to hilarity in the face — no pun intended — of sorrow.
“They don’t want to see the face on the ceiling, Doug,” said a voice behind me. I turned to greet this person. It was Benedict. I was glad to see him. He looked me up and down. “What happened to your eye, Doug?”
“I got kicked.”
“Who kicked you?”
“Hiram.”
Benedict nodded at this. What more needed saying? Together we resumed looking up at the ceiling, its elaborate shadows, the clustered lights. “Uncanny resemblance, isn’t it?” said Benedict.
“Yes.”
“I remember when we were children and Father got mad at us for some inconsequential thing or other. Don’t play in the rose garden! Don’t steal your brothers’ money! Quit beating up on Virgil! Father always looked exactly like that. Cigarette and all.”
“You remember him well?”
“Not that well.”
Benedict took a drink from his wineglass. He stuck his nose in the glass, inhaled deeply like the connoisseur he was. I watched him swirl what remained in the glass.
“But you remember things about him?”
“It’s hard to say. We were so young then, and there were so many of us, practically all ages, you know, running all over creation.”
I pressed him: “You must have had some interaction with the man. You were always a top student. You were head of the class, year after year. He must have been proud of you. You won all the prizes. You got everything, didn’t you? You didn’t have to worry about anything. It all went your way, didn’t it? Doors opened for you. You were like some prince, practically. Shit.”
At that moment a distant brother’s high voice rose loudly above all others in the crowd. It was hard to say whom the voice belonged to. We ignored this shouting, and Benedict said, “Personal memories have questionable value, Doug.”
This was something I couldn’t agree with and I told him so, adding, “Our memories may not constitute exact and faithful historical records. However, they are, I think, fairly accurate indicators of perceptions and emotions. Our feelings tell us how things are with us! Wouldn’t you agree with that? We each accumulate memories and insights and feelings, and these are ours to interpret and understand as we choose.”
“You’re right as usual. I can’t argue with that,” said Benedict.
“Of course it all gets to be a muddle after a while, particularly in families.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Everyone has his own private past.”
“Hmn.”
“A hundred different stories. A thousand different dinners.”
“The math is discouraging.” Benedict swirled his wine. The shouting at the dinner table had grown in volume. A fight had apparently broken out between hostile table companions wedged too closely together. It was unclear whether anyone had struck anyone yet. Probably — I’m basing this on past evenings and the absolute regularity with which some drunk hits another sitting a chair or two away — one brother had reached out and, in one of those routine moments of bitter frustration, smacked another. It was impossible to know for certain because of the gathered onlookers swarming, backs blocking the view. These backs were shoulder to shoulder, pressed tight, lined up and swaying gently as the spectators craned forward to get a better look. Noises escaped the crowd, and it was difficult to say which gasps came from the audience, which came from fighters. Someone cried out in what sounded like pain. The object of the violence was likely either food or a dredged-up childhood unhappiness. Contestants surrounded by voyeurs shouted vulgarly. I raised my own voice, hollered over the fight’s sounds, “Think about it, Benedict! All of us with our private memories! People! Places! Feelings!”
“Yes, yes,” Benedict agreed. “Tell me, Doug, what do you remember?”
“Me?”
I had to meditate on this. So many things came briefly to mind. Coconut cake. The taste of dirt. Asthma attacks. Father’s shoes and the sound at night of Virgil crying in his bed.
“Our rose garden in bloom,” I said to Benedict, “and the games we played as children on warm summer afternoons. Remember the rose garden, Benedict? Those red and those dull pink blossoms? And the yellow grass in the meadow beyond the wall, the wildflowers blowing in the wind? Remember tree leaves whispering in the breeze? Do you remember, Benedict, how starlings flocked to our trees, how they suddenly, inexplicably, took flight? Whirling black tornadoes of birds. Birds by the thousand. Fantastic. Where have they gone? The starlings? It’s all crows and homeless people now. What were our games? Do you remember our games? There was hide-and-seek, though it’s true that there were never very many hiding places in the rose garden. We preferred blindman’s bluff, because it gave us a chance to tie a scarf over Virgil’s eyes and lead him with our calls into a thorny bush. We never got tired of that, did we? Virgil was so trusting. Sometimes we had a ball and then we played kill-the-man-with-the-ball. Do you remember kill-the-man-with-the-ball, Benedict? Someone was always getting ground into the dirt and crushed practically to death beneath a pile. We broke Irv’s collarbone. He took it like a man. That was one of my favorite games. Or dodgeball! Remember dodgeball? You threw the ball as hard as you could at your opponents. What was the point of that game, anyway? Were there rules at all? Younger boys cried with fear when we played dodgeball. They could never run fast enough to get away. They didn’t have the physical coordination to escape being hit. The object, I recall, was to run them down and slam the ball into their heads. Do you remember? Do you remember the games we played together in the rose garden? All those games! We were young! We didn’t mean any harm! Not really. We were always sorry when someone got hurt. We were only playing. Do you remember, Benedict? Do you remember how the starlings took flight from the trees and everyone stopped playing and stared up into the sky above the meadow? That was when you could really slam the ball into someone’s head. Do you remember our beautiful rose garden in bloom?”