Homer & Langley (23 page)
Authors: E. L. Doctorow
Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #Biographical, #Brothers, #Eccentrics and eccentricities, #Recluses
My brother has taken pains to describe the snares and traps in the other rooms of the house. He is very proud of what he has done. Sometimes he puts my finger on the Braille keys for hours it seems like. Upstairs, he has so piled things up in pyramidal fashion that the least nudge of any one thing—rubber tires, an iron pressure cooker, dressmaker’s dummies, empty bureau drawers, beer kegs, flowerpots—I almost take pleasure from visualizing the possibilities—and the whole assemblage will fall on the interloper, the mythical trespasser, the object of Langley’s stratagems. Each room has its own punishing design of our things. Washboards greased with soap are laid on the floor for the unwary to step on. He is constantly busy working to improve the balance of the weights, and the snares and traps until he is sure they are perfect. One of his problems is the rats that have now come out of the walls. They pass through here at my feet regularly. He is at war with them. He bashes them with a shovel or takes up his old army rifle from the mantel and clubs them. I sometimes think I can hear something of what’s going
on. Once or twice a rat has fallen prey to his traps. For every dead rat he draws an invisible notch on my arm.
WITHAL, MY SENSE
is of an end to this life. I remember our house as it was in our childhood: a glorious elegance prevailed, calming and festive at the same time. Life flowed through the rooms unencumbered by fear. We boys chased each other up and down the stairs and in and out of the rooms. We teased the servants and were teased by them. We marveled at our father’s jarred specimens. As little boys we sat on the thick rugs and pushed our toy cars along the patterns. I took my piano lessons in the music room. We peeked from the hall at our parents’ resplendent, candlelit dinner parties. My brother and I could run out the front door and down the steps and across to the park as if it was ours, as if home and park, both lit by the sun, were one and the same.
And when I lost my sight he read to me.
There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. If I could go crazy, if I could
will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful is this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother’s hand to know that I am not alone.
JACQUELINE, FOR HOW
many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E. L. D
OCTOROW
’s work is published in over thirty languages. His novels include
The March, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks
, and
City of God
. He has published two short story collections,
Lives of the Poets
and
Sweet Land Stories
, and three volumes of essays, the most recent of which is
Creationists
. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York.
Homer & Langley
is a work of fiction. Apart from the actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by E. L. Doctorow
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Doctorow, E. L.
Homer & Langley: a novel / E. L. Doctorow.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-897-3
1. Collyer, Homer Lusk, 1881–1947—Fiction.
2. Collyer, Langley, 1885–1947—Fiction.
3. Brothers—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
4. Recluses—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
5. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.O3H66 2009 813′.54—dc22 2009006959
Title-page photograph: view of a portion of the Collyer mansion © Bettmann/Corbis
v3.0
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