Homer & Langley (19 page)

Presidential malfeasance in these years was another entry for his conditional file. Until another president subverted the Constitution he was sworn to uphold, it couldn’t be considered as seminal. But I’m waiting, he said.

ONE DAY MY BROTHER
came in with his morning papers and without saying a word he went to the windows and began pulling the shutters together and locking them. I heard the banging of the shutters slamming in place like heavy doors and watched the patina of lighter darkness receding from my eyes. The house air became cooler. A strange strangled sound came from my brother’s throat that I only slowly realized was his effort not to break down.

An awful feeling, a constriction of the heart, caused me to rise from my piano bench. What is it? I said.

He read to me: The bodies of four American nuns in a remote Central American village had been found in shallow graves. They had been raped and shot to death. Their names had not yet been released.

I didn’t want to believe what I knew. I insisted that without the names we couldn’t be sure that Mary Elizabeth Riordan was one of the nuns.

Langley climbed upstairs and found the little tin box where we kept her letters. She had written us from time to time as her order moved her about the world: she had gone from one African country to another, and then to South Asian countries
and, after some years, to villages in Central America. The letters were always the same wherever she was, as if she was on a world tour of destitution and death. Dear friends, she had written in her last letter, I am here in this bereft little country torn by civil war. Just last week soldiers came through and took away several men of the village and killed them for being with the insurgency. They were only poor farmers trying to feed their families. It is only old men, women, and children now. They cry out in their sleep. Three of my sisters are here with me. We provide what solace we can.

The letter had been written a few months before from the same village named in the newspaper.

I AM NOT A
religious person. I prayed to be forgiven for having been jealous of her calling, for having longed for her, for having despoiled her in my dreams. But in truth I have to admit that I was numbed enough by this awful fate of the sister to be not quite able to connect it with my piano student Mary Elizabeth Riordan. Even now, I have the clean scent of her as we sit together on the piano bench. I can summon that up at will. She speaks softly in my ear as, night after night, the moving pictures roll by: Here it’s a funny chase with people hanging out of cars … here the hero is riding a horse at a gallop … here firemen are sliding down a pole … and here (I feel her hand on my shoulder) the lovers embrace, they’re looking into each other’s eyes, and now the card says … “I love you.”

——

AFTER SOME DAYS
of silence in our house I said to Langley: This is martyrdom, this is what martyrdom is.

Why, said Langley, because they were nuns? Martyrdom is a religious invention. If it isn’t, why do you not say the four little girls murdered in their Sunday school in Birmingham are martyrs?

I thought about this. I could see the possibility that the sister would have forgiven her abuser and touched his face with two fingers as he brought his gun up to her temple.

There is a difference, I said. The nuns’ religious beliefs put them in harm’s way. They knew there was a civil war, that armed savages roamed the land.

You idiot! Langley shouted. Who do you think armed them! They’re our savages!

But now I am not sure when all of this happened. Either my mind is turning in on itself and its memories are eliding, or I have finally understood the prophecy of Langley’s timeless newspaper.

OUR SHUTTERS WERE
never again to be opened. Langley made arrangements with the newsstand where he got his papers to have them delivered to our front door. The early editions of the morning papers arrived usually at about eleven at night. The evening papers were left at our door by three in the afternoon.
When Langley did go out, it was always at night. He did our marketing at a small grocery store that had opened just a few blocks north of us and that sold day-old bread. He made a point of patronizing this store, of buying more than we needed, actually, because a local free newspaper that covered embassy receptions, and fashion shows, and ran interviews with interior decorators reported that the store owner was Hispanic. My heavens, Langley shouted, run for your lives, they’re here!

In truth that was one sign of a changing city—a slow, almost imperceptible lapping of a tide from the north—but something like a little grocery store, or a couple of Negro faces seen on the street, was enough for our neighbors to throw up their hands. And, of course, inevitably, my brother and I were deemed the First Cause—it was the Collyers, to the manner born, who had fomented this disaster. Whatever animosity had been directed at us since the fire in our backyard—no: that had been building since the time of our tea dances—was now in full cry.

Fairly regularly we received unsigned letters of vilification. I remember a day when the envelopes slid through the mail slot and fell on the floor in a way to make me think of fish flopping out of a net. We were threatened, we were cursed, and one day an envelope we opened had for its message a dead cockroach. Was that a little hieroglyph to represent us in the view of the correspondent? Or did that mean we were held responsible for infesting the neighborhood with vermin? It is true that we had cockroaches—had had them for as long as I could remember. They never bothered me, I would feel something crawling on my ankle and brush it away as I would a fly or a mosquito.
Langley respected cockroaches as having a kind of intelligence, or even personality, with their cunning evasiveness, and their bravery, as when under attack they would leap off a counter into the unknown. And they could indicate their displeasure with a hiss or a squeak. Nevertheless we did have traps set out for them and of course it was nonsense to blame us for the infestation of other houses. People in this neighborhood were embarrassed to admit their own distinguished homes were pest-ridden. But cockroaches had been city residents since the days of Peter Stuyvesant.

Langley had set aside his newspapers, stacking the dailies for future reading, because his legal studies with the mail-order law school now took most of his time. This was not a mere academic exercise. He was attempting to hold off not only the utilities and other creditors, but also the Health and Fire Departments, both of whom were demanding entry, in order to find things to alarm them. He was able to find a city statute that complicated things for them when they threatened to get court orders. He had also gone out and secured a Legal Aid Society lawyer, who, for no fee, was prepared at Langley’s instruction to make various legal motions, as impediments, when and if things progressed to the next stage, as we assumed they would. Overall we would take the position that a mere cursory examination by that Fire Department inspector after the backyard fire—which is what had set off all this hullabaloo—was not sufficient cause to violate the constitutional sanctity of a man’s home.

It was clear to me that Langley relished all this, and I was glad to see that he was engaged in a practical enterprise for a
change. It brought a here-and-now component to his life, an immediacy, and the promise, good or bad, of an outcome, which was not the case with his eternal, never-to-be-achieved, Platonic newspaper. My only contribution was to listen every now and then to an example he had found of legal reasoning that seemed to him to have come out of an insane asylum.

It certainly didn’t help us in our relations with the neighbors and contretemps with the city bureaucracies that all of New York at this time was experiencing a deterioration in the civil order: municipal services breaking down—uncollected garbage, graffitied subway cars—street crimes rising, drug addicts abounding. I understood too that our professional sports teams were doing badly in the standings.

Under these circumstances, our closed shutters and the two-by-four bolt on our front door seemed to make sense. My life now was entirely in the house.

IT WAS AROUND
this time that I noticed my precious Aeolian was off by a half tone in the middle octaves. The bass notes and the treble notes seemed all right, and this is what I found strange, that the piano would have gone out of tune in that discretionary manner. I thought, well of course, since the shutters had been closed, the house had become noticeably musty, and with everything gathering dust in every room, everything you could imagine piled almost to the ceiling, as well as the newspaper bales that served as walls for our mazelike pathways, it was no wonder that a delicate instrument would be affected. On a
rainy day the dampness was palpable and the odor of the basement mildew seemed to come up through the floor.

There were other pianos of course, or piano innards. Some were definitely out of tune in the usual way, as why would they not be—but I began to be alarmed when I turned on the player piano, which I had kept covered with a plastic sheet, and heard that same sharpness in the middle octaves. Then I groped around till I found the little portable electric piano, a computer actually—with different settings it would sound like a flute or a violin or an accordion, and so on—that Langley had recently brought into the house. I remember being grateful that it could sit comfortably on a table. Because Langley’s first computer was the size of a refrigerator, a huge bulky thing with vacuum tubes that he had been able to buy—for a song, he said—only because it was an obsolete model. He was not able to put it to the test and see if it did whatever computers did—something in the nature of calculations, he said, and when I asked calculations of what, he said of anything—because by the time he would figure out what to do with it we would have no electricity. So I didn’t understand how this little computer that looked like a keyboard and that worked on batteries did whatever calculations it had to do to play music, except that it did. And when I flicked on the switch, and played a scale, this instrument, with nothing like strings to go out of tune, was out of tune in the middle register, just like my Aeolian.

At that moment I understood it was not any piano but my hearing that was off-key. I was hearing a C as a C-sharp. That was the beginning. I shrugged and persuaded myself that I
could live with it. The pieces in my repertoire I could hear by memory as if nothing was wrong. But over time it would become not just a matter of pitch, of an off-key sound, but of no sound at all. I didn’t want to believe that was happening even as I understood that it was, slowly but surely. Months were to go by before, decibel by decibel, the world would grow muffled and I would lose my prideful hearing entirely and so be worse off than Beethoven, who could at least see.

If it had happened all of a sudden that I was to lose the last sense that connected me to the world, I would have screamed in terror and found some way as quickly as possible to end my life. But it came upon me gradually, allowing me progressive degrees of acceptance, with hope that every degree of loss would be the last, until, in the growing quiet of my despair, I resolved to accept my fate, having been taken by an odd impulse to find out what life would be like when my hearing was completely gone and, without sight or sound, I had only my own consciousness to amuse me.

I did not tell Langley about any of this. I don’t know why. Perhaps I thought that he would instantly add ears to his medical practice. It had reached the point where for the recovery of my eyesight he had prescribed for breakfast every morning seven peeled oranges and with lunch two eight-ounce glasses of orange juice and with dinner an orange cordial instead of my preferred glass of Almaden wine. If I had told him my hearing was awry he would have surely found some Langleyan cure for that. Under the circumstances I kept my own counsel and distracted
myself with the problems we were having with the outside world.

I’M NOT SURE WHEN
our battles with the Health and Fire Departments, the bank, the utilities, and everyone else who was demanding some kind of satisfaction attracted the notice of the press. I will not pretend to a precision of remembrance as I try to tell of our life in this house in these last few years. Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away. I feel I have not the leisure to tax myself for the right date, the right word. The best I can do is put things down as they occur to me and hope for the best. Which is a shame for as I’ve kept to this task I’ve developed a taste for an exact rendering of our lives, seeing and hearing with words if with nothing else.

The first reporter who rang our bell—a really stupid young man who expected to be invited in, and when we wouldn’t permit that, stood there asking offensive questions, even shouting them out after we had slammed the door—made me realize it was a class of disgustingly fallible human beings who turned themselves into infallible print every day, compounding the historical record that stood in our house like bales of cotton. If you talk to these people you are at their mercy, and if you don’t talk to them you are at their mercy. Langley said to me, We are a story, Homer. Listen to this—and he read this supposedly factual account about these weird eccentrics who had shuttered
their windows and bolted their doors and run up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills though they were worth millions. It had our ages wrong, Langley was called Larry, and a neighbor, unnamed, thought we kept women against their will. That our house was a blight on the neighborhood was never in question. Even the abandoned peregrine nest up under the roof ledge was held against us.

I said to my brother: How would you run this in Collyer’s forever up-to-date newspaper?

We are sui generis, Homer, he said. Unless someone comes along as remarkably prophetic as we are, I’m obliged to ignore our existence.

THE ATTENTION FROM
the press was not continuous, but we had become a stop on the beat, as it were, a reliable source of wonder for the reading public. We could laugh about this, at least at the beginning, but it became less funny and more alarming as time went on. Some of these reporters published the details of our parents’ lives—when they bought the house and how much they paid for it—all matters of public record if you had nothing better to do than go downtown and dig through city archives. And they found out from old census reports and ship manifests when our ancestors arrived on these shores—it was early in the nineteenth century—and where they lived, their generations, artisans risen to the professions, the marriages made, the children begotten, and so forth. So now all of that was public knowledge but what was the point except to indicate
the decline of a House, the Fall of a reputable family, the shame of all that history in that it had led to us, the without-issue Collyer brothers lurking behind closed doors and coming out only at night.