“Bad luck,” said Seamus. “Who kicked you? We’ll get him on the team.”

“Hiram.”

“Hmn. Hiram was an excellent ball carrier at one time, but he’s too frail for contact sports now.” These words were followed by silence between us, respectful contemplation of the sage man’s gridiron days, I suppose. Finally Seamus announced, “We’re all going to grow old and die.”

Why bring this up at dinner? I asked my brother, “Do you feel you’ve lived a good life so far? I mean, if your time came, if you had a terminal illness, or fell from a height, do you think you would feel proud of the things you’ve said and done?”

“Yes,” he announced, then appeared to deliberate. “And also no. Kind of yes and no. Same as everybody.”

I stayed quiet. After another moment Seamus said something I could not make out above raucous dining noises. This racket of men eating was made louder by the acoustic properties of the room. The high ceiling vaults throw echoes in every direction. It can be difficult, when forks and knives are ringing out against plates, to determine direction and proximity of sounds, especially voices, which seem to bubble up for an instant, excitedly declare something unqualified by any context—“I know everything there is to know about the rotator cuff!” I heard one exclaim, and another asked, “Seriously, though, what did Maxwell mean when he said, ‘The God is above us’?”—then recede again into the muddle and roar, our party in full swing.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Seamus.

“What?” the man asked.

“That echo?”

We listened, but the sound—it was the hushed noise of someone crying, softly, softly—had faded. Seamus said, “See if you can get in three sets of twenty wind sprints before Sunday’s game, Doug.”

“Will do.”

I wanted to hear the crying again. That sound didn’t come back. A black bat darted quickly through the air over the oak table, pursued to table’s edge by a triplet lunging over place mats with his net. People weren’t sitting in their assigned seats. The Doberman barked again—he’d emerged from the stacks and was pacing anxiously around chairs. Apparently he’d spied the bat. A voice in the crowd suggested opening windows for the bat, or bats, to fly out of. Brothers put down plates and went to do this. Several tall windows were painted shut, but most were not. One near the head of the table was unlatched, then raised, with difficulty, by Brice. He had to struggle to budge it. The window sash was warped; going up, rotted wood scraped in the ancient frame. Other windows went up in the same rough way, and winds swept into the library. The winds blew manuscript pages from a table near the African masks. These papers sailed up into the room, and the dog, excited, saw them and ran in circles, around and around below soaring white sheets, eyeing them as they drifted, huge confetti fluttering down, page after page settling around Gunner on the floor.