“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.