Homer & Langley (15 page)

I should say that there was nothing wrong with me—I felt fine, never better in fact, and I didn’t mind the exercise at all—but not wanting to hurt my brother’s feelings I went along with this dietary nonsense. Besides which I was moved by his concern for my welfare. That I was become one of his projects pleased me in some way.

Among his collectibles that I had come across in the parlor was a bas-relief of a woman’s head that he’d hung from a nail on the wall. It was like a large cameo. I felt her features, the nose, the forehead, the chin, the waves in her hair, and it gave me tactile pleasure to run my fingers over this raised half face even as I knew the piece was of no great value, a reproduction perhaps of something hanging in a museum somewhere. But Langley had seen me, and it must have been on this occasion that he was inspired to do something about my woeful deprivation as a person to whom the fine arts were inaccessible.

At first he brought in from his wanderings some miniature bone ivory netsuke carvings of Oriental couples making love. They were of the same proportions as the miniature ivories that the Hoshiyamas had left behind but we couldn’t have found those even if we had looked. I was invited to feel these small depictions of sexual bliss and figure out just what intricate positions the pairs of tiny heedless lovers had gotten themselves into. There were also masks of smooth-faced plaster of Paris
creatures, and fearsome African deities carved from wood, that he had picked up at some flea market or auction. So in this manner what I called Langley’s Museum of Fine Arts began to distinguish itself from everything else of the inanimate world that, over the years, we had come to live with. And I was now engaged in a course of tactile art appreciation. But this wasn’t art for art’s sake: Langley had read up on the anatomy and pathology of the eye in our father’s medical library. Rods and cones are what make the eye see, he told me. They’re the basis of everything. And if a damn lizard can grow a new tail why can’t a human being grow new rods and cones?

So just like my breakfast of Mongolian ground nuts, my course in art appreciation was a means of restoring my sight. It’s a one-two punch, Langley said. Herbal restoratives from the inside and physical training from the outside. You have the material for rods and cones and you train your body to grow them from the fingers on up.

I knew better than to protest. Each morning I squinted my eyes into the morning light to see if things were any different. And each morning Langley waited for my report. It was always the same.

After a while I grew irritable. Langley counseled patience—It’ll take time, he said.

There was a week with children’s finger paints, those little tubs of dyed glop, which he had me smearing over sheets of paper to find out if I could learn to tell the color by touch. Of course I couldn’t. I felt degraded by the exercise. Another scheme had me going about the house and running my hands
over paintings that I remembered from when I could still see: Horses on the bridle path in Central Park. A clipper ship at sea in a storm. My father’s portrait. That portrait of my mother’s great-aunt who had ridden a camel across the Sudan for no reason that anyone could determine. And so on. The worst part of this assignment was getting to the walls. Twice I tripped and fell. Langley had to move things, throw them out of the way. I knew each painting by its placement, but visualizing it by touch was another matter, I felt only brushstrokes and dust.

None of this made much sense to me. I was beginning to feel oppressed. Then one day Langley opened the door for a delivery of art supplies—canvases stretched on frames of various sizes, a big wooden easel, and boxes of oil paints and brushes. And now I was to play the piano while he painted what he heard. The theory was that his painting would be an act of translation. I was not to play pieces, I was to improvise and the resulting canvas would be the translation to the visual of what I had rendered in sound. Presumably, when the paint dried, in some synaptic flash of realization, I would see sound, or hear paint, and the rods and cones would begin to sprout and glow with life.

I considered the possibility that my brother was insane. I wished heartily that he would go back to his newspapers. I played my heart out. Never since I had first lost my sight had I felt so deprived, so incomplete as I felt now. The more he tried to improve things for me, the more aware I became of my disability. And so I played.

I should have known that, having taken up art on my behalf,
Langley would devolve into an obsessive amateur artist with all thoughts of my reclamation put aside. What did I know if I didn’t know my brother? I had only to wait. He did not limit himself to oil paints for his compositions, but attached to the canvas any manner of things as the spirit moved him. Found objects he called them, and to find them he needed only to look around, our house being the source of the bird feathers, string, bolts of cloth, small toys, fragments of glass, scraps of wood, newspaper headlines, and everything else that inspired him. Presumably he was making the work as tactile as he could for my sake, but really because dimensionality pleased him. Breaking rules pleased him. Why after all did a painting have to be flat? He would plant a canvas in front of me and have me touch it. What is the subject, I would say and he would answer, There is no subject, this piece does not represent anything. It is itself and that’s enough.

How blessed were these days in which Langley had half forgotten why he had taken up painting. I would hear him at his easel, smoking and coughing, and I would smell the smoke of his cigarettes and his oil paints, and I would feel like myself again. Somehow those episodes in which he’d had me improvising on the piano had left me with an awakened sense of my possibilities as a composer, and so now I was improvising to forms—working up études, ballades, sonatinas and, being unable to write them down, fixing them in my memory. Langley in the other room understood what was going on with me because he went out and brought back a wire recording machine, and then, later, a couple of improved machines that recorded on
tape, and so I was able to listen to myself and make changes, and think of new themes and record them before they got away from me, and I felt that neither of the Collyer brothers had ever been happier than at this time.

My brother’s canvases from those days are stacked against the walls, some of them in our father’s study, some in the front hall, some in the dining room with the Model T. Some he hung on the staircase wall leading to the second and third floors. I can still smell the oils even after all this time. The recordings I made are somewhere in the house, buried under God knows what. My venture into composing was a finite thing, as was his life as a painter, but it would still be interesting, were I able to look for those tapes, those spools of wire, just to hear what I had done. I envision unwound tapes lying entangled among everything else, besides which I would not know where to look for the machines to play them. And finally my hearing … my hearing is not what it used to be, as if this sense too has begun to retreat to the realm of my eyes. I am grateful to have this typewriter, and the reams of paper beside my chair, as the world has shuttered slowly closed, intending to leave me only my consciousness.

BUT NOW I WILL
mention Langley’s last painting—the last one he did before he went back to his newspapers. It was inspired not by the astronauts’ first flight to the moon, but by their subsequent commutes. He had me touch it. I felt a sandy surface embedded with rocks and cratered with mounds of what seemed to be some sort of sanded epoxy glue. I wondered if he
had reverted to representation, for I thought it felt much like the moon would feel if I bent down to touch it. But it was a huge canvas, the largest he had done, and as I moved my hand about, I found adhered to the surface some sort of stick, and as I moved my hand down along this stick it became thinner and suddenly veered into a right-angled chunk of metal. What is this, I said, it feels like a golf club. That’s what it is, Langley said. And then at other places on the canvas small books had been affixed by the spine and individual pages, stiff with glue, were sticking up as if blown by the wind—three or four of these in various sizes. Is there wind on the moon? I said. There is now, my brother said.

I thought the moon painting wasn’t very good—I had no trouble visualizing it, was the problem. Perhaps Langley realized it was a failure because that was the last one he did. Or maybe it was those moon walks of our astronauts that made Langley give up painting as insufficient to his rage. Can you imagine the crassness of it, hitting golf balls on the moon? he said. And that other one, reading the Bible to the universe as he circled around out there? The entire class of blasphemies is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the other stupidly presumptuous.

For my part, I was awestruck, and I said to him, Langley, this is almost unimaginable, going to the moon, it is like some dream, it is astounding. I would forgive those astronauts whatever they did.

He wasn’t having any of it. I’ll tell you the good news about this space venture, Homer. The good news is that the earth is
finished, or why would we be doing this? There is a great subliminal species perception that we are going to blow up the planet with our nuclear wars and must prepare to leave. The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.

If that is the case, I said, what will happen to your eternal always up-to-date newspaper?

You’re right, he said, I must make room for a new category—technological achievement.

But technological achievements succeed one another—which one could stand for all?

Ah my brother, don’t you see? The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we’ve made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we’ll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

I’M RECALLING NOW
that tale of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame—this poor defective and how he loved a beautiful girl and would ring the great cathedral bells in his anguished passion. In my longing for a lover I wondered if that was me. Or could I, after all, find some woman who would take up with me from some genius of her own loving spirit. The model I had in mind for this person was Mary Elizabeth Riordan, my piano student of yore. Actually it was Mary Elizabeth
Riordan herself I wished for. I had kept my feelings for her as one keeps a precious object hidden away in a box. I fantasized that someday she would return to us a grown young woman newly sensitive to the history of my diffident and formerly imperceptible courtship. It was a cruel coincidence or malign alignment of spiritual forces that even as I was thinking of her she was writing to us for the first time in many years.

Langley brought her letter in from the front hall. It had come slipped into the usual packet of bills, lawyers’ letters of warning, and Building Department notices that the mailman always thoughtfully bound with a rubber band. Well look at this, Langley said. A Belgian Congo stamp. Who is Sr. M. E. Riordan?

My God, I said, is that my piano student?

Her long silence was explained: she had taken vows, she was a sister in some worthy order. She was a nun! Dear friends, I know I should have written before this, I heard her say in Langley’s voice, but I hope you will forgive me.

Dear friends? What had happened to Uncle Homer and Uncle Langley? People didn’t just take vows, they took dictions. I asked Langley to read the letter over again: Dear friends, I know I should have written before this, but I hope you will forgive me and pray for these poor people who I am privileged to serve.

She explained that in her order the sisters were missioners, they went around the world where the people were poorest and most miserable and they lived among them and tended to them.

I am in this impoverished and drought-ridden country living
in a village among the poor and oppressed, she wrote. Just last week army troops came through and killed several of the men of the village for no reason at all. These people are poor farmers wresting their food crops out of a harsh rocky hillside. Two of my sisters are here with me. We provide what sustenance and medicine and solace we can. I feel blessed by God in my work. The only thing I miss is a piano and I pray for the Lord to forgive me for this weakness. But sometimes in the evening when they have one of their village ceremonies, they bring out their hand drums and sing, and I sing with them.

I had Langley read the letter to me for several days running. I was trying to acclimate. The children are undernourished, she wrote, and they get sick a lot. We are trying to start a small school for them. Nobody here knows how to read. I ask my God why in some places people can be so poor and wretched and uneducated and yet love Jesus with a purity that transcends whatever might be possible in New York, a city so far away just now, so heedless, that huge city where I grew up.

It is a shameful thing to confess but, with the news of what Mary Elizabeth Riordan had done with her life, I felt betrayed. Her passion was for others, countless others, it was a dispensed passion, a love for anyone and everyone, whereas I wanted it to be for me. In all these years had she ever thought of me? I could match in neediness any broken-down indigent of the Congo. And if things were so godless in New York, what better place for a missioner?