Homer & Langley (2 page)

Did my friend gasp, did she tug at my hand to pull me away? If she did I would not have noticed. But when I was sufficiently recovered in my senses I turned and she was nowhere to be seen. I ran back the way we had come, and on this moonlit night, a night as black and white as the film, I could see no one on the road ahead of me. The summer had some weeks to go but my friend Eleanor never spoke to me again, or even looked my way, a decision I accepted as an accomplice, by gender, of the male performer. She was right to run from me, for on that night romance was unseated in my mind and in its place was enthroned the idea that sex was something you did to them, to all of them including poor shy tall Eleanor. It is a puerile illusion, hardly worthy of a fourteen-year-old mind, yet it persists among grown men even as they meet women more avidly copulative than they.

Of course part of me watching that tawdry little film felt no less betrayed by the adult world than did my Eleanor. I don’t mean to imply that my mother and father were among that audience—they weren’t. In fact when I confided in Langley, we agreed that our father and mother were exempt from the race of the carnally afflicted. We were not so childish as to think our parents indulged in sex merely the two times it took to conceive us. But it was a propriety of their generation that love was practiced in the dark and never mentioned or acknowledged at any
other time. Life was made tolerable by its formalities. Even the most intimate relationships were addressed in formal terms. Our father was never without his fresh collar and tie and vested suit, I simply don’t remember him dressed any other way. His steel gray hair was cut short, and he wore a brush mustache and pince-nez quite unaware that he was aping the look of the then president. And our mother, with her ample figure girdled in the style of that day, with her abundant hair swept up and pinned cornucopically, was a figure of matronly abundance. The women of her generation wore their skirts to the ankles. They did not have the vote, a fact that my mother found not at all disturbing, though some of her friends were suffragettes. Langley said about our parents that their marriage was made in Heaven. He meant by this not a great romance, but that our mother and father in their youth had conformed their lives dutifully to biblical specifications.

People my age are supposed to remember times long past though they can’t recall what happened yesterday. My memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past, even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognized. They are fixed in their own time, which has rolled down behind the planetary horizon. They and their times and all its concerns have gone down together. I can remember a girl I knew slightly, like that Eleanor, but of my parents, for instance, I remember not one word that either of them ever said.

——

WHICH BRINGS ME
to Langley’s Theory of Replacements.

When it was first expounded I’m not sure, though I remember thinking there was something collegiate about it.

I have a theory, he said to me. Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents’ replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation. All these herds of bison they are slaughtering out west, you would think that was the end of them, but they won’t all be slaughtered and the herds will fill back in with replacements that will be indistinguishable from the ones slaughtered.

I said, Langley, people aren’t all the same like dumb bison, we are each a person. A genius like Beethoven cannot be replaced.

But, you see, Homer, Beethoven was a genius for his time. We have the notations of his genius but he is not our genius. We will have our geniuses, and if not in music then in science or art, though it may take a while to recognize them because geniuses are usually not recognized right away. Besides, it’s not what any of them achieve but how they stand in relation to the rest of us. Who is your favorite baseballer? he said.

Walter Johnson, I said.

And what is he if not a replacement for Cannonball Titcomb, Langley said. You see? It’s social constructions I’m talking about. One of the constructions is for us to have athletes to admire, to create ourselves as an audience of admirers for baseballers. This seems to be a means of cultural communizing
that creates great social satisfaction and possibly ritualizes, what with baseball teams of different towns, our tendency to murder one another. Human beings are not bison, we are a more complex species, living in complicated social constructions, but we replace ourselves just as they do. There will always be in America for as long as baseball is played someone who serves youth still to be born as Walter Johnson serves you. It is a legacy of ours to have baseball heroes and so there will always be one.

Well you are saying everything is always the same as if there is no progress, I said.

I’m not saying there’s no progress. There is progress while at the same time nothing changes. People make things like automobiles, discover things like radio waves. Of course they do. There will be better pitchers than your Walter Johnson, as hard as that is to believe. But time is something else than what I’m talking about. It advances through us as we replace ourselves to fill the slots.

By this time I knew Langley’s theory was something he was making up as he went along. What slots? I said.

Why are you too thick in the head to understand this? The slots for geniuses, and baseballers and millionaires and kings.

Is there a slot for blind people? I said. I was remembering, just as I said that, the way the eye doctor I’d been taken to shined a light in my eyes and muttered something in Latin as if the English language had no words for the awfulness of my fate.

For the blind, yes, and for the deaf, and for King Leopold’s slaves in the Congo, Langley said.

In the next few minutes I had to listen carefully to see if he
was still in the room because he had stopped talking. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. At which point I understood that what Langley called his Theory of Replacements was his bitterness of life or despair of it.

Langley, I remember saying, your theory needs more work. Apparently he thought so too, for it was at this time that he began to save the daily newspapers.

IT WAS MY BROTHER
, not either of my parents, who was in the habit of reading to me once I could no longer read for myself. Of course I had my books in Braille. I read all of Gibbon in Braille.
In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind …
I still believe that is a sentence more deliciously felt with one’s fingers than seen with one’s eyes. Langley read aloud to me from the popular books of the day—Jack London’s
The Iron Heel
, and his stories of the Far North, or A. Conan Doyle’s
The Valley of Fear
, about Sherlock Holmes and the fiendish Moriarty—but before he switched to newspapers, reading to me of the war in Europe to which he was destined to go, Langley used to bring back from the secondhand bookshops slim volumes of poetry and read from them as if poems were news. Poems have ideas, he said. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. That makes poems far more interesting than your novels, Homer. Which are only stories.

I don’t remember the names of the poets Langley found so
newsworthy, nor did the poems stick in my mind but for a line or two. But they pop up in my thoughts usually unbidden and they give me pleasure when I recite them to myself. Like
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod / And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil…
—there’s a Langleyan idea for you.

WHEN HE WAS GOING
off to war, my parents had a dinner for him, just the family at table—a good roast of beef, and the smell of candle wax and my mother weeping and apologizing for weeping and my father clearing his throat as he proposed a toast. Langley was to embark that night. Our soldier in the family was going over there to take the place of a dead Allied soldier, just according to his theory. At the front door I felt his face to memorize it at that moment, a long straight nose, a mouth set grimly, a pointed chin, much like my own, and then the overseas cap in his hand, and the rough cloth of his uniform, and the puttees on his legs. He had skinny legs, Langley. He stood straight and tall, taller and straighter than he would ever be again.

So there I was—without my brother for the first time in my life. I found myself as if vaulted into my own young independent manhood. That would be tested soon enough because of the Spanish flu pandemic that hit the city in 1918 and like some great predatory bird swooped down and took off both our parents. My father died first because he was associated with the Bellevue Hospital and that’s where he came down with it. Naturally, my mother soon followed. I call them my father and
mother when I think of them dying so suddenly and painfully, choking to death in a matter of hours, which is the way the Spanish flu did people in.

To this day I don’t like to think about their deaths. It is true that with the onset of my blindness there had been a kind of a retrenchment of whatever feelings they had for me, as if an investment they had made had not paid off and they were cutting their losses. Nevertheless, nevertheless, this was the final abandonment, a trip from which they were not to return, and I was shaken.

It was said that the Spanish flu was taking mostly young people though in our case it was the opposite. I was spared though I did feel poorly for a while. I had to handle the arrangements for Mother as she had handled them for her husband before she too went and died, as if she couldn’t bear to be away from him for a moment. I went to the same mortician she had used. Burying people was a roaring business at this time, the usual unctuous formalities were dispensed with and corpses were transported speedily to their graves by men whose muffled voices led me to understand they were wearing gauze masks. Prices had risen too: by the time Mother died the exact same arrangements she had made for Father cost double. They had had many friends, a large social circle, but only one or two distant cousins turned up for the obsequies, everyone else sitting home behind locked doors or going on to their own funerals. My parents are together for eternity at the Woodlawn Cemetery up past what was the village of Fordham, though it is all the Bronx now, and of course unless there’s an earthquake.

At this time of the flu, Langley, gone to war in Europe with the AEF, was reported missing. An army officer had come to the door to deliver the news. Are you sure? I said. How do you know? Is this your way of saying he’s been killed? No? Then you are not saying anything more than that you don’t know anything. So why are you here?

Of course I had acted badly. I remember I had to calm myself by going to my father’s whiskey cabinet and taking a slug of something right from the bottle. I asked myself if it was possible for my entire family to be wiped out in the space of a month or two. I decided it was not possible. It was not like my brother to desert me. There was something about Langley’s worldview, firmly in place at his birth, though perhaps polished to a shine at Columbia College, that would confer godlike immunity to such an ordinary fate as death in a war: it was innocents who died, not those born with the strength of no illusions.

So once I persuaded myself of that, whatever state I was in, it was nothing like a mourning state. I was not grieving, I was waiting.

And then of course, through the slot in the front door, a letter from my brother from a hospital in Paris dated a week after I had received the official visit telling me he was missing in action. I had Siobhan our maid read the letter to me. Langely had been gassed on the western front. Nothing fatal, he said, and with certain compensations from attentive army nurses. When they tired of him, he said, he would be sent home.

Siobhan, a pious Irishwoman of a certain age, did not like to read of the attentions of army nurses, but I was laughing with
relief and so she relented and had to admit how happy she was that Mr. Langley was alive and sounding just like himself.

UNTIL MY BROTHER
got home, there I was alone in the house but for the staff, a butler, a cook, and two maids, all of whom had rooms and one bath on the top floor. You will ask how a blind man handles his business affairs with servants in the house who might think how easy it would be to steal something. It was the butler I worried about, not that he had actually done anything. But he was too slyly solicitous of me, now that I was in charge and no longer the son. So I fired him and kept the cook and the two maids, Siobhan and the younger Hungarian girl Julia, who smelled of almonds and whom I eventually took to bed. Actually he was not just a butler, Wolf, but a butler-chauffeur and sometime handyman. And when we still had a carriage he would bring it around from the stable on Ninety-third street and drive my father to the hospital at the crack of dawn. My father had been very fond of him. But he was a German, this Wolf, and while his accent was slight he could not put his verbs anywhere but at the end of the sentence. I had never forgiven him for the way he whipped our carriage horse, Jack, than whom no finer or more gallant a steed has ever lived, and though he had been in the family’s employ since I could remember, Wolf, I mean, and while I could tell from his footsteps that he was no longer the youngest of men, we were, after all, at war with the Germans and so I fired him. He told me he knew that was the reason though I of course denied it. I said to him,
What is Wolf short for? Wolfgang, he said. Yes, I said, and that is why I’m firing you because you have no right to the name of the greatest genius in the history of music.