Homer & Langley (10 page)

The couple needed no instruction, they found things for themselves and what they couldn’t find—a mop, a pail, brown soap, whatever it was—they went out and bought with their own money, turning in the sales slips to Langley for reimbursement. Their sense of order was relentless, I would feel a hand on my arm, gently ordering me to rise from my piano bench when it came time to dust the Aeolian. They arrived punctually at eight a.m. every morning and left at six in the evening. Oddly enough, their presence and unflagging industry gave me the illusion that my own days had some purpose. I was always sorry when they departed, as if my animacy was not my own but an allotment of theirs. Langley approved of them for a different reason: they treated his various collections with respect, for instance his hoard of broken toys, model airplanes, lead soldiers, game boards, and so on, some of them whole, some of them not. Langley, once he brought something into the house, didn’t bother to do anything with it but throw it in a carton along with everything else he’d found. What they did, the Hoshiyamas, was curate these materials, setting them out on furniture or in
bookshelves, these odd jumbles of used and discarded children’s things.

So, as I say, we were once again a household up and running though matters were to become complicated once the Second World War began. The Hoshiyamas lived in Brooklyn but one morning they arrived for work in a cab and unloaded several suitcases and a trunk and a bicycle built for two. We heard all this clumping around in the front hall and came downstairs to see what was going on. We are in fear for our lives, Mr. Hoshiyama said, and I heard his wife weeping. The Japanese air force having bombed Pearl Harbor, you see, the Hoshiyamas had been threatened by their neighbors, local merchants refused their patronage, and someone had thrown a brick through their window. We are Nisei! Mrs. Hoshiyama cried, meaning they had been born in the United States, which under the circumstances of course was totally irrelevant. To hear this composed and self-disciplined couple in such states of anguish was unsettling. And so we took them in.

They moved into the room that had been Siobhan’s on the top floor and though they wanted to pay rent or at least renegotiate their salaries downward, we would not hear of it. Even Langley, whose miserliness increased exponentially with every passing month, couldn’t bring himself to take their money. It astonishes me now to think how well he got along with this couple whose sense of order and cleanliness should have driven him mad. Every evening now there were two shifts at dinner: Grandmamma would serve us and then she and the Hoshiyamas would sit down to their dinner. A diplomatic problem did
arise when it turned out that the Hoshiyamas followed a diet not in Grandmamma’s realm of expertise and so took to preparing their own food. She said to me she had to turn away the first few times when these people sliced up a raw fish and laid the slices over balls of cooked rice and that was their dinner. Nor could Grandmamma have enjoyed all the traffic in her kitchen, a large high-ceilinged room with its white tiles and open shelves of dinnerware, its butcher-block counters and a big window through which the morning sun shone. This was where she spent most of her waking hours. I said to her, Grandmamma, I know it must be difficult, and she admitted it was, though she felt bad for these people, she knew what it meant to have rocks thrown through your window.

THE WAR WAS BROUGHT
home to us in many ways. We were told to buy War Bonds. We were told to save scrap metal and rubber bands, but that was nothing new. Meat was rationed. Draperies had to be pulled across the windows at night. As titular owner of a car, Langley was entitled to a book of gas-ration tickets. He put his “A” sticker on the windshield of the Model T, but having given up the idea of using its engine as a generator, he sold his tickets to a local garage mechanic, a bit of black marketeering which he justified in terms of our financial situation.

Langley’s newspaper project seemed to be right in step with what was happening. He read the papers every morning and afternoon in an inflamed state of attention. For good measure we listened to the evening news on the radio. At times I thought
my brother took a grim satisfaction from the crisis. Certainly he understood its business opportunities. He contributed to what was called the War Effort by selling off the copper rain gutters and chimney flashing of our house. That gave him the idea of also selling the walnut wood paneling from the library and our father’s study. I didn’t mind losing the copper gutters but walnut paneling didn’t seem to me relevant to the War Effort, and I told him so. He said to me, Homer, many people, general officers for instance, thrive on war. And if some muck-a-muck sitting on his keister in Washington wants walnut paneling for his office, it will be relevant to the War Effort.

I DID NOT REALLY
fear for our country though for the first year or so the news was mostly bad. I couldn’t believe we and our Allies wouldn’t prevail. But I felt completely out of things, of no use to anyone. Even women had gone to war, serving in uniform or replacing their husbands in the factories. What could I do, save the tinfoil from chewing-gum wrappers? These war years found me sinking in my own estimation. The romantic young pianist with the Franz Liszt haircut was long gone. When I wasn’t sluggish, I was harshly self-critical as if, no one else noticing that I was a useless appendage, I would warrant that I was. Langley and I disagreed about this war. He didn’t see it in the same patriotic terms, his view was Olympian, he scorned the very idea of it apart from who was right and who was wrong. Was this a lingering effect of the mustard gas? War to his mind was only the most obvious indication of the fatal
human insufficiency. But there were specifics to this Second World War, where evil could justifiably be assigned, and I thought his contrarian attitude was misguided. Of course, we didn’t argue, it was a characteristic of our family, going back to our parents, that if we disagreed with each other about a political matter, we simply avoided talking about it.

When Langley went out on his nightly forays, I sometimes played the piano till he got back. The Hoshiyamas were my audience. They brought up two straight chairs and sat behind me and listened. They were familiar with the classical repertoire and would ask me if I knew this Schubert or that Brahms. I would play for them as if they represented a full house at Carnegie Hall. Having their attention brought my spirit out of the doldrums. I found myself particularly responsive to Mrs. Hoshiyama, who was younger than her husband. Though they spoke Japanese as they worked it was clear to me that he directed her. I wouldn’t ask to touch her face, of course, but my sense of her was of a trim little being with bright eyes. I listened as she walked about—she took very feminine, short, shuffling steps and I decided that she was pigeon-toed. When husband and wife worked together in one of the rooms and talked their Japanese talk, I would hear her laugh, probably at something of Langley’s newly acquired on one of his nightly rambles. Her laughter was lovely, the melodic trill of a young girl. Every time I heard it, there in our cavernous house, images of a sun-filled meadow flashed in my mind, and if I looked hard enough I could see us, Mrs. Hoshiyama and me, as a kimonoed couple in a wood-block print having a picnic under a cherry blossom tree.
When the three of us were together in the evening and the formality of our daytime relationship was suspended, I felt that it was only my deep respect for Mr. Hoshiyama that prevented me from stealing his wife. On such gentle fantasies do men like me survive.

ONE NIGHT, WITH LANGLEY
out for the evening, the bell rang and there was at the same time a peremptory knock on the door. It was quite late. Two men who said they were from the FBI were standing there. I felt their badges. They were polite and though they were already in the door they asked if they could come in. They were there to take the Hoshiyamas into custody. I was stunned. I demanded to know why. What is this about, I said. Has the couple done something illegal? Not that we know, said one of the men. Have they broken the law in any way? Not that we know, said the other. You will have to give me a good reason why this is happening, I said, they work for me. They are my employees. These are simple hard-working people, I said. They have served me well and honestly and had come to me, furthermore, with excellent references.

Of course I was an idiot about all of this, but I could think of no other way to forestall what was happening than by bringing up anything I could to break through the intolerable stubbornness of these FBIs, who were uncommunicative and impervious to reason. You come here in the night to take people away as if this is some police state? I wanted them to feel ashamed of
themselves, which was of course impossible. When men like this are carrying out government policies they are hard-shelled and cannot even be insulted. They are doing something that might seem momentous and horrifying to the people they have come for but is mere routine for them.

They did say one thing by way of justification: that they had gone to the couple’s Brooklyn domicile only to learn that the Hoshiyamas had fled. And as a result some effort was required to trace them. At this I flew into a fury. These people were not running away, I said. For their own safety they had to leave their home. They were being physically threatened. Did they even know you were looking for them? And now you are finding something guilty about the fact that they came here to avoid getting their heads bashed in?

I don’t remember how long I carried on this way but at some point Mr. Hoshiyama was touching my arm in a mute appeal for restraint. The Hoshiyamas were born fatalists. It was as if they and the FBI men seemed to understand one another so as to make me and everything I said irrelevant. They did not themselves protest, nor cry nor bemoan the situation. After a while Mrs. Hoshiyama came down the stairs with two valises, all they were allowed to bring with them. The couple put on their hats and coats—it was the winter of the first year of the war—the FBI men opened the door and a cold wind blew in from the park. Mr. Hoshiyama mumbled his gratitude and said they would write when and if they could and Mrs. Hoshiyama took my hands and kissed them, and they were gone.

——

WHEN LANGLEY CAME
home later that night and heard what had happened he was furious. Of course he knew what it was all about having read in his newspapers of the roundup of thousands of Japanese-American citizens for internment in concentration camps. Though I had told him that Mr. Hoshiyama had opened the door and that the agents asked if they could come in when they were already inside, my ineffectiveness, or stupidity, was demonstrated even so. This house is our inviolate realm, Langley said. I don’t care what kind of damn badge they flash. You kick them out and slam the door in their faces, is what you do. These people ignore the Constitution whenever they so choose. Tell me, Homer, how we are free if it’s only at their sufferance?

So for a day or two I did feel as Langley felt about warmaking: your enemy brought out your dormant primal instincts, he lit up the primitive circuits of your brain.

LANGLEY AND I
treasured the couple’s bicycle built for two, which they’d been forced to leave behind. It had an honored place under the stairs. I said we should ride it to keep it toned up for when the Hoshiyamas returned. And so we got into the habit of taking the bike out when the weather was fine.

I was much cheered by pedaling away. It was good to be getting some exercise. I had moments of doubt with Langley steering because he could be distracted seeing something of interest in the street or in a store window. But this only added to the
derring-do. We rode in and out of the side streets and took pleasure from the horns that blew behind us. This activity went on for one whole spring until a tire blew as we cut a corner too closely. Langley’s strategy for repairing the tire was to replace it. In wartime you could not find anything new that was made of rubber, so for a while he picked up secondhand bikes here or there to see if he could get a tire match. He never did, and the bicycle built for two has stood ever since on its handlebars in the parlor and with a few other bikes propped against the wall to keep it company.

The Hoshiyamas also left their collection of little ivory carvings—ivory elephants and tigers and lions, monkeys hanging from branches, ivory children, boys with knobby knees, girls with their arms round one another, ladies in kimonos and samurai warriors with headbands. None of the pieces was bigger than one’s thumb, all together it was a Lilliputian world amazingly detailed, revelatory to the touch.

We will save all their things for when they come back, Langley said, though they never did and I don’t know now where any of the little ivory carvings are—buried somewhere under everything else.

And so do people pass out of one’s life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

OUR FRONT DOOR
seemed to be a wartime attraction. We found ourselves answering to the knock of old men in black.
They spoke with accents so thick we couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. Langley said they were bearded and had curls of hair around their ears. Also dark haunted eyes and rueful smiles of apology for disturbing us. They were very religious Jews, we knew that much. They showed their credentials from various seminaries and schools. They held out tin boxes with slots in which we were asked to put money. This happened three or four times over the course of a month and we began to be annoyed. We were uncomprehending. Langley thought we should post a plaque next to the door: Beggars Not Welcome.

But they were not beggars. One morning it was a cleanshaven man who stood at the open door. He would be described to me as having close-cropped gray hair and a Victory Medal from the Great War pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket. He sported one of those skullcaps on his head that meant he too was Jewish. The man’s name was Alan Roses. My brother, who had a soft spot for anyone who had served in that war, invited him in.