Of course this is routine social behavior and everyone is familiar with it. Nor does the comparison with cocktail parties hold absolutely, since, as yet, that night in the red library, no cocktails had been poured.

Battle lines were forming anyway. Fielding in his rage had done Jeremy the valuable service of converting him from playful culprit to injured victim, two qualities practically everybody can empathize with.

Fielding had, in the process, gone too far in two directions. His anger was alarming, his reflexive petition for charity, sentimental. Here was the pathos of a man struggling to identify himself through artistic creation understood as a service, a gift to others—admittedly a beautiful and romantic formulation, though also abstruse and quixotic and, however sincerely expressed (our brother’s earnestness in this matter was not, I think, at issue), difficult to sympathize with in any really tangible way; and Fielding’s violence had without a doubt already made him a distinctly uncompelling object for sympathy or pity; and who among us wants love thrown in his face anyway? Jeremy’s crying was growing louder and louder (he did seem badly hurt, Jeremy, rolling around on bare floor, as a man will when in spectacular pain), so that, in the end, after what seemed a long while, but was, actually, probably less than half a minute’s worth of our standing there self-consciously wondering whom to blame for what and how to feel okay about it—in the end, our brother Fielding, who on any other night might have found twenty or thirty eager to champion his supposedly heartfelt artistic martyrdom—brother Fielding was, this night, pretty much without a prayer.

“Your movies are bad!” a voice called at him from the far side of the room.

“You use people and things and you don’t care who gets hurt! Is that your idea of love?” heckled an unidentifiable other from the darkness over by Sociology.

“My camera! Oh, my poor camera. Look at my camera,” the filmmaker grieved.

From the vicinity of the fireplace came a voice harsh and familiar to us all:

“Knock it off.”

Who else but Hiram. Here he came on his walker, haltingly one-handing it along, lame and clattering and now giving, I thought, uncharacteristically generous counsel: “Look here, Fielding, it’s not the end of the world. What is broken can be mended. A lot of people don’t have movie cameras and they don’t complain, they’re happy. Perhaps you might take this opportunity to exercise some self-control. Stand tall and be a leader. Set an example the rest of us can follow.” And then, gesturing toward Jeremy: “Someone help this unfortunate young person off the floor. Can’t you see his suffering? Can’t you hear his crying? How many nights have I spent listening to the dry whimpering of the young in this house? How many mornings have I woken to thoughts of death, the pounding of boots in the hall. I would offer our brother assistance myself, but, as you can see, this is not possible”—pausing to lean on his walker and wheeze a few breaths before raising his injured wrist for all to witness—“tonight I was almost murdered, and my hand has been destroyed.”