“Take a look at yourself, Doug. Take an honest look at yourself standing there with your hair falling in your eyes. You really could do with a trim and a shave.” He paused, coughed, inhaled one of his racking breaths. He resumed, “You need some new clothes. Those clothes you’re wearing don’t even fit you. Who wears a corduroy jacket anymore? You don’t even stand straight, Doug. You slouch. You’ve always slouched. You have the posture of a weak person.”
Times like these make me promise myself — always after the fact, of course — to skip these evenings and do something constructive instead, reacquaint myself with the more recondite heraldic literature, or sketch out, for future notation, a few pen-and-ink “family tree” line drawings. You can never have too many pristine family trees.
“Doug, it’s a good thing Father isn’t around anymore to see what’s become of you.”
Did I present such a sorrowful picture? It is true that I slouch a bit. I try not to hunch over, but I’m not getting any younger, and my shoulders ache after a wintry night sitting in a straight-backed library chair, straining my eyes over water-stained property deeds, blurry date-of-death certificates, illegibly written ships’ registries. When I get up, I’m bushed and I stoop. I don’t think my hair is that bad. My hair is naturally fine and growing thin on top, it’s a fact, and for this reason I leave it long on the sides — just below the ears. Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t wear a “comb over.” There is nothing more vulgar on a mature man than a comb over. I brush my hair in the morning and, after that, pretty much let it fly where the wind blows it. My clothes, I admit, are a few seasons out of date. What about this? I’ve never followed fashion and I don’t trust men — I’m thinking of the twins with their colorful, expensive matching sweaters — who heed the latest styles. It may be that this particular outfit of mine — navy corduroy jacket with patch pockets, my worsted wool “duck hunting” trousers with their frayed and grimy cuffs, clothes I’m comfortable wearing — would seem, to a bystander, small and rather tight, possibly even constricting. I admit I have recently put on an inch or two around the middle. Like I said, I’m not getting any younger. Of course, midbody weight gain will naturally force a garment to shift. These coat sleeves could be let out. It probably would not hurt to have a tailor cut down the lapels. I suspect that Hiram would have had less to say about my general appearance and demeanor if there had not been so much blood — Maxwell’s blood — staining my tie and shirtfront.
I said to Hiram, “The fact that I haven’t shaved this week means nothing. I only want to help. I want everyone to get along. I want us all to be happy again.”
How did this sound? Woeful? Tender? I should explain that, in spite of antipathy toward our eldest brother, toward his more hateful manifestations, it was still not uncommon — and I believe this has been true for each of us in our relations with the man — to hope for some kindness or gentleness, even a hint of his admiration for the odd opinion or sentiment, whatever. You see, in his presence we felt like children, children caught in precisely those worst moments of growing up, those times of clear and terrifying appreciation of one’s utter smallness in the world; and this smallness is excruciating to feel in adulthood because it is a form of regression and therefore humiliating. For this reason, and in spite of mean feelings — in spite of everything — we all craved our aged brother’s esteem.
He heaved himself up and gasped another painful breath. It hurt to listen to him. “Comport yourself like a man. Take full responsibility for your pernicious thoughts and immoral behavior.”
Hiram could only have been referring to one thing. I believe I mentioned earlier that our brother Andrew, a sweet guy with a heart full of caring for the world’s less fortunate, has lately been in the habit of passing the hat for donations to aid the itinerant people crowded in the open meadow beyond our high stone walls. The “hat” is a well-worn homburg, gray felt with narrow brim and a deep crown lined in dark material stained darker, long ago, by someone’s hair oil. Into this receptacle go the bills and coins from our pockets. The hat travels from hand to hand. Wallets get opened. Andrew’s take can become substantial by night’s end.
Once in a while, the hat of money will rest on a table. Someone might set it down, and it might then be overlooked for an instant if something diverting is happening elsewhere, a quarrel breaking out or Gregory solemnly lighting one of his splendid, cognac-drenched, flaming desserts.
Let’s just say for now that I know exactly the amount that I have borrowed — over time — from the hat, and that it is only just roughly less than eight hundred dollars.
“I’ve been short on cash lately! What’s the big deal? I’m going to pay it back!” I cried at Hiram.
To underscore the point, and to further illustrate the essential humility of my character, I walked forward two steps and, abruptly, dramatically, as if swooning, collapsed before Hiram’s feet. I dropped to my hands and knees and reached out for those broken lilies. As I have, I believe, already observed, several pale blooms had come to rest directly atop Hiram’s large black wing-tip shoes. This banal but evocative white-on-black color symbolism was not lost on me as I plucked up one, then another and another ruined flower. Human beings in stressful relationships will frequently behave in ways that contradict or even reverse their own most certain expectations. The fact remained that I had, in a moment of pride, demolished a gift bouquet. I recollect this now, not to defend my sorrowful deeds, my kneeling, my submission, that night before Hiram, but to articulate a postulate: once an authentic conflict reaches its climax, then time will seem suddenly interrupted and the adrenaline will flow in your blood and your head will feel hot and cold at the same moment, because you’ve got to choose the upright thing to do. I believe that the patriarchal succession leaves in its wake a readable trail — clues to the formation of character and personality — as generation after generation adapts to the pain and suffering of family life.
The first Doug on record in the New World died during birth, in the backcountry, in 1729.
Another Doug, a cousin of the first, was by all accounts an intelligent and sensitive child, but was thrown from a horse and killed at an early age.
The next Doug reached puberty before succumbing to injuries sustained in a plummet from a roof.
That Doug’s nephew and namesake was lost at age five in a boating accident on the black river that snakes through the mountains to the west.
After that there were no more Dougs for a while. In 1854, one materializes among the rolls of a preparatory academy run by a Scotsman who believed in the godliness of child labor and freezing baths. Need I say more? In the decades that followed, the name Doug became identified with an array of superstitions and death anxieties.
This brings me to the situation as it stood that night in the red library with Hiram and those flowers. How could I, a fully grown Doug descended from a worthy line in which previous Dougs were squandered so beautifully before their primes, forgo this chance to establish a magnificent and honorable behavioral precedent, a fine example for all my brothers and for any Doug who might one day thrill to call me his ancestor? I do not consider my prostration before Hiram a surrender. Not in the least. Kneeling down for flowers was a triumphal revelation of willingness to quit a meaningless standoff in favor of community and concord. It felt good to get on the floor.