Homer & Langley (12 page)

By the time of war’s end, the productive might of the American economy having overproduced everything a soldier would need, we’d collected, besides the gas masks, enough military surplus to outfit an army of our own. Langley said G.I. stuff was so cheap in the flea markets that it presented a business opportunity. We had ammunition belts, boots, helmets, canteens, tin food containers with tin utensils, telegraph keys, or “bugs,” developed for the Army Signal Corps, a table-top full of olive drab trousers and Ike jackets, uniform fatigues, hard wool blankets, pocketknives, binoculars, boxes of service ribbons, and so on. It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war. Langley never did work out the details of any business opportunity. So along with everything else, all these helmets, boots, etc. ended up now where they had been deposited, artifacts of some enthusiasms of the past, almost as if we were a museum, though with our riches as yet uncataloged, the curating still to come.

Not everything would go to waste—when our clothes wore out we would take to wearing fatigues, both trousers and shirts. And boots too, when our shoes fell apart.

Oh, and the oiled M1 rifle that had never been fired. This was one of my brother’s prize acquisitions. Fortunately he hadn’t found the cartridges to go with it. He drilled a heavy nail into the marble mantel and we hung up the M1 by its shoulder
strap. He fancied his work so well that he did the same for the Springfield rifle that had been sitting there for almost thirty years. They dangled over the fireplace, the two rifles, like Christmas stockings. We never touched them again and though at this point I cannot get anywhere near the mantel, so far as I know they are still there.

I SHOULD MAKE
it clear that I did not wish for another war to lift my spirits. It seemed like just a few moments since V-J Day—that’s what the victory over Japan was called—and we were at it again. I thought how foolish we had all been that day of delirious celebration, the whole city shouting its joy to the heavens.

When I played piano for the silent movies the picture would end and the projectionist would stick his head out of the booth. The next feature will begin shortly, he’d say. A moment, please, while we change reels.

And so there we were at war in Korea, but, as if we needed something of more substance, we and the Russians were racing to build bigger nuclear bombs than the bombs dropped on Japan. Endless numbers of them—to drop on each other. I should have thought just a couple of superbombs to char the continents and boil the seas and suck up all the air would be sufficient to the purpose, but apparently not.

Langley had seen a photograph of the second atom bomb that had been used on Japan. A fat ugly thing, he said, not sleek and sharklike as you would expect a respectable bomb to be.
You’d think it was something to hold beer. The moment he said that I remembered the empty kegs and ponies he had brought into the house from a brewery that had gone out of business. He lugged these aluminum barrels up to the front door, somehow lost control, and they bounced down the stone steps clanking and booming and rolling across the sidewalk so that I now thought of the atom bomb as an implodable beer keg, lying on its side and spinning on its axis until it decided to go off.

The trouble with listening to the news with Langley was that he became agitated, he raved and ranted, he talked back to the radio. Langley, as an expert newspaper reader, reading all the papers every day, knew what was going on around the world better than the commentators. We’d listen to some commentator and then I’d have to listen to Langley commentating. He would tell me things I knew were true but which nevertheless I didn’t want to hear, all of it just adding to my depression. Eventually, he would stop giving me his political insights, which boiled down anyway to a hope that there would soon be a nuclear world war in which the human race would extinguish itself, to the great relief of God … who would thank Himself and maybe turn His talents to creating a more enlightened form of creature on a fresh new planet somewhere.

Whatever the news of the world, with Grandmamma Robileaux gone we were faced with the practical problem of how to feed ourselves. Homer, said my brother, we will take our meals out, and it will do you good to be up and about instead of sitting in a chair all day and feeling sorry for yourself.

We had our breakfast at a counter place on Lexington Avenue,
a brisk ten-or twelve-minute walk. I’m just thinking a moment about the food: they served fresh orange juice, eggs any style with ham or bacon, hash brown potatoes, toast, and coffee for a dollar and a quarter. I usually had my eggs as an omelet sandwich on the toast as that was easy to handle. For a breakfast it wasn’t cheap but other places charged even more. For dinner we went to an Italian place on Second Avenue, a twenty-minute walk. They had various spaghetti dishes, or entrées of veal and chicken, chopped salad, and so on. It wasn’t very good but the owner saved the same table for us every night and we brought our own bottle of Chianti and so it was passable. We skipped lunch entirely, but in the afternoon Langley would boil water and we’d have tea with some crackers.

But then he toted up the month’s dining bills and, forgetting he had prescribed our eating out as a way of improving my state of mind, he decided to cook at home. He sought at first to duplicate the restaurant meals we had had for breakfast and dinner. But I would smell things burning and weave my way to the kitchen, where he was cursing and tossing hot and hissing frying pans into the sink, or I would sit patiently at the table long past the usual dinner hour, starving and in suspense, until something unnameable was laid before me. Langley asked me one day why I supposed I was looking so peaked and thin. I didn’t say, How else should I look given the culinary experiences I have endured? Finally, he gave up and we began to eat out of cans, though he had decided that oatmeal was an essential constituent of good health and put up a batch of the gluey stuff for breakfast every morning.

It would take some time before his interest in healthful eating expanded and he would turn his attention to my blindness as something curable via nutrition.

WHAT LANGLEY DID
by way of cheering me up was to buy us a television set. I did not even try to understand his reasoning.

These were the early days of television. I touched the glass screen—it was square with rounded sides. Think of it as pictorial radio, he said. You don’t have to see the picture. Just listen. You’re not missing anything: what is static on a radio is like it’s snowing on the TV. And when the picture does clear, it tends to float up off the screen only to rise again from the bottom.

If I was not missing anything why bother with it? But I sat there in the interest of science.

Langley was right about the relation to radio. Television shows were structured like radio programs, coming in half-hour segments, or sometimes even whole hours, and with the same daytime soap operas, the same comedians, the same swing bands, and the same stupid advertising. There was not much point to my listening to television unless it was a news broadcast or a game show. The news was all about Communist spies and their worldwide conspiracy to destroy us. That was hardly cheering, but the game shows on television were another matter. We got into the habit of tuning them in mostly to see if we could answer the questions before the contestants did. And we were able to do that quite often. I knew the answer to almost
anything having to do with classical music and, because of my time playing records for the tea dances, I’d come up with a fair guess or two about popular music. And I was pretty good with baseball and literature. Langley knew history and philosophy and science to a fare-thee-well. Who was the first historian, the quizmaster asked. Herodotus! said Langley. And when the contestant was slow to answer, Langley shouted, Herodotus, you idiot! as if the fellow might hear him. That made me laugh and so it became our habit to call those people on the shows idiots. How far was the sun from the earth? Ninety-three million miles, you idiot! Who wrote
Moby-Dick?
Melville, you idiot! And even when a contestant happened to come up with the right answer, listening, say, to the opening phrase of Beethoven’s Fifth—Da-da-da-dum, the same three shorts and a long that in Morse code meant the V, which made it a popular piece during the war—and saying the composer was Beethoven, we’d shout, Good for you, you idiot!

Given our success rate with these game shows, we naturally considered offering ourselves as contestants. Langley did a little research as to how to go about it. Apparently there was a great demand for slots on these shows, and why not, as there was money to be made. One sent in a C.V. and had interviews and background checks, just as if the show was produced by the FBI. We gave ourselves a test listening to one half-hour show and we broke the bank. The trouble was, Langley said, that we were too smart. There would be no suspense. And Homer, these contestants who come on smiling like fools, they are an embarrassment.
When they win something, they jump up and down like marionettes on a string. Would it be worth the money to you to carry on like that? No? I said. I agree, he said. It’s a matter of self-respect.

And so we chose not to proceed. Of course I had some idea at the time that we were not sartorially typecast. He had told me the men predictably wore flannel suits and rep ties and crew cuts and women down-to-the-ankle skirts and blouses with big collars and bangy hairdos. Langley, who was now bald on top, had let the gray hair on the back of his head grow down to his shoulders. My own Lisztian fall from its center part was considerably thinned out. And our preferred dress was army greens and boots, leaving to the moths in the closets our old suits and blazers. We couldn’t have gotten past the front door.

CHRIST, IF THERE
was ever an invention nobody needed, Langley said. By then we had another couple of TVs that he had found somewhere. None of them had worked to his satisfaction.

When you read or listen to the radio, he said, you see the scene in your mind. It’s like you with life, Homer. Infinite perspectives, endless horizons. But the TV screen flattens everything, it compresses the world, to say nothing of one’s mind. If I watch any more I’d might as well take a boat down the Amazon and have my head shrunken by the Jivaro.

Who are the Jivaro?

They are this jungle tribe that likes to shrink heads. It’s their custom.

Where did you hear that?

Read it somewhere. After you decapitate the guy you make a slit from top of the head down the back of the neck and then peel the whole thing off the skull—neck, scalp, and face. Sew it into a pouch, stitch up eyelids and lips, fill it with stones, and boil the damn thing down till it’s the size of a baseball.

What does one do with a shrunken head?

Hang it by a hair along with the others. Tiny human heads in a row swinging gently in the breeze.

Good Lord.

Yes. Think of the American people watching television.

BUT BEFORE WE
unplugged the TV forever, it happened that they were televising the hearings of a Senate committee investigating organized crime. Let’s just look at that, Langley said, and so we tuned in.

Senator, a witness was saying, it’s no secret that in my youth I was a wild kid, and I grew up the hard way, meaning I did time. That juvenile rap is like a dead bird around my neck and so you subpoeny me here.

Are you denying, sir, that you are the head of New York’s leading crime family?

I am a good American and I sit down with you because I got nothing to hide. I pay my taxes, I go to church every Sunday,
and I give to the Police Athletic League, where they keep kids playin’ ball and out of trouble.

Good God, I said, do you realize who that is? It must be! I’d recognize that voice anywhere.

If it is he’s heavier, Langley said. Dressed like a banker. Most of his hair’s gone. I’m not sure.

Who doesn’t change in twenty-five years? No, it’s him. Listen to that: How many gangsters speak in a whisper with an attached wheeze in high C? That’s Vincent all right. He asked me how it felt to be blind. And now he’s at the top of his profession. He’s a big muck-a-muck in front of a Senate committee. He sent us champagne and girls, I said. And then we never heard from him again.

Did you hope to?

I was being idiotic, I know, carrying on about this hoodlum. I wasn’t the only one. I don’t remember what he actually testified to but after his appearance the tabloids were all over him. I had Langley read to me: “Vincent Rats!” they screamed in their headlines as if it was they who’d been betrayed. And then their accounts of the rackets he was alleged to be running, his competitors who had mysteriously died, the various courtroom trials from which he’d emerged with an innocent verdict, thus affirming a guilt so vast that the law could not get around it, and, what was most suspenseful, the arch enemies he was reputed to have made among the other crime families. I was very impressed.

Langley, I said, what if we had been a crime family? How
much closer we would have been to Mother and Father if we had all worked together running protection rackets, gambling syndicates, loaning money to people at exorbitant rates, committing every imaginable felony including murder though I think not prostitution.

Probably not prostitution, Langley said.

AFTER THE SENATE HEARINGS
, Langley had pulled the plug and thrown the TV set into a corner somewhere, and we were not to look at television again until a decade later when the astronauts landed on the moon. I never told my brother that in my own way I could see the television screen: I saw it as an oblong blur just a shade lighter than the prevailing darkness. I imagined it as the eye of an oracle looking into our house.