Homer & Langley (11 page)

It turned out that Alan Roses and Langley had been with the same division in the Argonne forest. They talked as men do who discover a military kinship. I had to listen to them identify their battalions and companies and recall their experiences under fire. It was a completely different Langley in these exchanges—someone who accorded respect and received it in return.

Alan Roses told us what the mystery was with these door-to-door appeals. It had to do with what was happening to Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. The idea was to buy freedom for Jewish families—Nazi officials were happy to use their racial
policies as a means of extortion—and also to inform the American public. If the public was aroused the government would have to do something. He was very calm, and spoke in great and telling detail, Alan Roses. He was, by profession, an English teacher in the public school system. He cleared his throat often as if to swallow his emotion. I had no doubt that what he was saying was true, but it was at the same time so shocking as almost to demand not to be believed. Langley said to me afterward: How is it those old men who knocked on our door knew more than the news organizations?

It was difficult under the circumstances for Langley to maintain his philosophical neutrality. He quickly wrote out a check. Alan Roses provided a receipt on the stationery of an East Side synagogue. We went to the door with him, he shook our hands, and he left. I supposed he would find another door to knock on and subject himself to more embarrassment—he had the reticence of someone doing something out of principle for which he was ill-equipped by nature.

With each day’s papers, Langley searched the news columns. The story was coming out on the back pages in dribs and drabs with no appreciation of the enormity of the horror. This went right along, he said, with our government’s do-nothing policy. Even in war, deals are made, and if they can’t be made you bomb the trains, disrupt the operation—anything to give those people a fighting chance. Do you suppose this land of the free and home of the brave is just not that crazy about Jews? Of course the Nazis are monstrous thugs. But what are we if we let them go ahead and do what they do? And what happens then,
Homer, to your war story of good versus evil? Christ, what I wouldn’t give to be something other than a human being.

LANGLEY’S CONTRARIANISM
was to evolve. How could it not? When we learned that Harold Robileaux had joined up—this was sometime later, I don’t remember what year of the war this was—we displayed one of those little blue-star pennants that people hung in their windows to indicate that we had a family member in the service. Harold had gone and applied to the Army Air Forces and been trained as an airplane mechanic, this musician of all sorts of gifts and capabilities, and by the time we knew any of this he was overseas with an all-Negro pursuit squadron.

So now our spirits were lifted, we were as prideful as any family in the neighborhood. For the first time in this war I felt a part of things. The times had brought people together and in this cold city of impassive strangers where everyone was out for himself a sense of community was like a surprisingly warm spring day in the middle of winter, even though it took a war to do that. I would go out for a stroll—I used a cane now—and people would greet me or shake my hand or ask if they could help me, under the impression that I had been blinded fighting for my country. “Here, soldier, let me give you a hand.” I didn’t think I looked that young but maybe I was perceived as an officer of formerly high rank. Langley exchanged greetings with home guards from the neighborhood on their way to the rooftops of their buildings to scan the sky for enemy planes. He
bought War Bonds on our behalf, although I have to say not purely from patriotism but because he believed they were sound investments. There may have been a European battlefront and a Pacific front, but we were the Home Front, as important to the War Effort, as we canned the vegetables from our victory gardens, as G.I. Joe himself.

Of course we knew there was a powerful propaganda machine behind all of this. It was calling on us to tamp down the fear of the maleficent enemy that resided in our hearts. I would go to the movies with Grandmamma just to hear the newsreels—the boom of our battleship guns, our grinding tank treads, our roaring flights of bombers taking off from English airfields. She would go in hopes of seeing Harold sitting in an airplane hut and looking up from one of the engines he was fixing to smile at her.

We had no victory garden, our backyard had been given over to storage—things accumulated over the years that we had bought or salvaged in expectation of their possible usefulness sometime in the future: an old refrigerator, boxes of plumbing joints and pipes, milk-bottle crates, bedsprings, headboards, a baby carriage with missing wheels, several broken umbrellas, a worn-out chaise longue, a real fire hydrant, automobile tires, stacks of roof shingles, odd pieces of lumber, and so on. In an earlier time I had enjoyed sitting in that little yard where a shaft of sunlight visited briefly toward noon. There was some sort of weed tree there that I liked to think of as an offshoot of Central Park, but I was happy to give up the yard just to get some of these things out of the house because every room was becoming
a kind of obstacle course for me. I was losing my ability to sense where things were. I was no longer the young man with the infallible antennae who could blithely circumnavigate the household. The Hoshiyamas when they were with us had brought up furniture from the basement with every intention of restoring things as they had been, but of course that was impossible, everything was different now. I was like a traveler who had lost his map, Langley couldn’t have cared less where anything went, and so the Hoshiyamas had used their own judgment and, as well meaning as they were, inevitably had gotten things wrong, which only added to the confusion.

Oh Lord, and then one terrible day, the phone rang and it was this tiny tearful girl’s voice, barely audible. She was Ella Robileaux, Harold’s wife, calling long-distance from New Orleans, and she wanted to speak with his Grandmamma. I hadn’t known Harold had married. I knew nothing about it, but I had no reason to doubt her identity, this child of the tremulous voice, and it took me a moment to collect myself, for I understood without being told why she was calling. When I shouted back to the kitchen for Grandmamma to come to the phone my voice broke and a sob escaped from my throat. This was wartime, you see, and people didn’t make expensive longdistance calls just to chat.

BEFORE HE WAS
shipped overseas, Harold Robileaux had made one of those little Victory records that soldiers sent home in the mail so their family could hear their voice. Little three-minute
recordings on scratchable plastic records the size of a saucer. Apparently there were these recording studios in the same penny arcades near the army bases where you got four photos for a quarter or a bearded mechanical fakir in a glass case would lift his hand and smile and send your printed fortune out of a slot. So Harold had sent Grandmamma his V-record though it took some months to reach us. Until Langley thought to check the postmark it was unnerving to have found something from Harold in our mailbox. You understand this was after Grandmamma had heard from Ella Robileaux that Harold had been killed in North Africa. Perhaps the army censors had to listen to every one of these V-records just as they read every letter the soldiers wrote, or perhaps the post office in Tuskegee was overwhelmed. In any case when this record arrived in the mail Grandmamma thought Harold was alive after all. Thank you, Jesus, thank you, she said, crying for joy. She clapped her hands together and praised the Lord and would not hear from us anything about a postmark. We sat with her in front of the big Victrola and heard him. It was a tinny-sounding record but at the same time it was Harold Robileaux, all right. He was well, he said, and excited to have been promoted to tech sergeant. He couldn’t tell us where he was going or when but he would write when he got there. In that soft New Orleans lilt, he said he trusted that Grandmamma was well and to please give his regards to Mr. Homer and Mr. Langley. It was all what you’d expect from any soldier in the circumstance, nothing unusual, except, being Harold, he had his cornet with him. And being Harold, he put it to his lips and played taps as
if offering the musical equivalent of a photograph of himself in uniform. The quality of that cornet’s sound overcame the primitive nature of the recording. A clear pure heartbreaking sound, every phrase lifted to its unhurried perfection. But why did he play the elegiac taps rather than, say, reveille, to indicate his affiliation with the army? Grandmamma asked Langley to play the record over, and then again three or four more times, and though we didn’t have the heart to discourage her, maybe it was that solemnly reflective dirge, the mournful tones filling all our rooms over and over, as if Harold Robileaux was prophesying his own death, that made her admit to herself, after all, that her grandson was gone. The poor woman, having been made to suffer his death twice, could not control her tears. God, she cried, that was my blessed boy you took, that was my Harold.

Langley went out and bought gold-star pennants for the front windows of all four storeys, gold being the star for soldiers who had made what the politicians called “the ultimate sacrifice,” there being presumably a sequence of sacrifices a soldier could make—arms, legs?—before the ultimate one. Usually a single pennant with one star of blue or gold in a window was enough advertisement or consolation for a household, but Langley never did anything like everyone else. My brother’s sorrow was indistinguishable from rage. With the death of Harold Robileaux his whole attitude toward the war had changed and he said that when he finally prepared the front-page war dispatches for his eternally current and always up-to-date newspaper, its advocacy would be explicit. I look at all these papers, he said, and they may come at you from the right or the left or the
muddled middle but they are inevitably of a place, they are set like stone in a location that they insist is the center of the universe. They are presumptively, arrogantly local, and at the same time nationally bullish. So that is what I will be. Collyer’s One Edition for All Time will not be for Berlin, or Tokyo, or even London. I will see the universe from right here just like all these rags. And the rest of the world can go on with their dim-witted daily editions, whereas without their knowing it, they and all their readers everywhere will have been fixed in amber.

GRANDMAMMA’S GRIEF FILLED
the house. It was silent, monumental. Our condolences were met with indifference. One morning she announced that she was leaving our employ. She intended to go to New Orleans and find Harold’s widow, whom she did not know, a young girl, she said, who might need her help. Apparently an infant child was involved. Grandmamma was resolute and it was clear to us that these were relationships she would foster, putting together what was left of her family.

The day of Grandmamma’s departure she made breakfast for us in her traveling clothes and then washed the dishes. She was taking a Greyhound bus from the terminal on Thirty-fourth Street. Langley pressed traveling money upon her, which she accepted with a regal nod. We stood on the sidewalk as Langley waved for a cab. I was reminded of the day we stood here like this to say goodbye to Mary Elizabeth Riordan. There were no tears and no parting words from Grandmamma as she got into
the cab. Her mind was already under way. And so as she rode off the last member of our household was gone, and Langley and I were left to ourselves.

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.

WHEN THE WAR ENDED
with the victory over Japan it was one of those oppressively close August days in New York. Not that anyone minded. Cars paraded along Fifth Avenue, drivers blowing their horns and shouting out the windows. We stood at the top of our stoop like generals taking review, because people were running by as closely as in ranks, thousands of footsteps scuttling downtown looking for the party. I had listened to the same excitement, the laughter, the running feet like the whir of birds’ wings, on Armistice Day 1918. Langley and I crossing the street to the park found strangers dancing with one another, ice cream vendors tossing Popsicles to the crowds, balloon sellers letting go their inventory. Unleashed dogs ran in circles, barking and yelping and getting underfoot. People were laughing and crying. The joy rising from the city filled the sky like a melodious wind, like a celestial oratorio.

Of course I was as relieved as anyone that the war was over. But underneath all this gaiety I found myself in an awful sadness. What was the recompense for the ones who had died? Memorial days? In my mind I heard taps.

We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

WHILE THE WAR WAS
on I had come to feel my life was purposeful, if only in its expectations for the future. But with peace I found there was no future, certainly not in any way to distinguish it from the past. In the light of naked truth I was a severely disabled man who could not expect for himself even the most normal and modest of lives—for instance, as a working man, a husband, and a father. This was a bad time in the midst of everyone’s joy. Even my music had lost its appeal. I was restless, slept poorly, and in fact was often afraid to go to sleep, as if to sleep was to put on one of the gas masks Langley had brought home in which I could not hope to breathe.

Have I not mentioned the gas masks? During the war he’d acquired a crateful. He saw to it that two were hung on nails in every room of the house so that wherever we happened to be, if the Axis powers did attack New York, and gas bombs were dropped, we were prepared. Given his lifelong cough and shredded vocal cords, his company having been without masks in 1918 when the fog rolled in, I did not demur. But he insisted that I practice putting on a mask so that when and if the time came I would not die fumbling around. To have my nose and mouth covered in addition to being in the dark was frightening. It was as if the sense of smell and taste, too, were being taken from me. I found it hard to breathe through the canister, which meant I could avoid dying of poison gas only by dying of suffocation.
But I made the best of it and did not complain, even though I thought a German gas attack on Fifth Avenue highly unlikely.