Homer & Langley (3 page)

Even though I was giving him a nice packet of send-off money, he had the ill grace to curse me and leave by the front door, which he slammed for good measure.

But as I say it took some working out to settle my father’s estate with his lawyers and to arrange some means of dealing with boring household management. I enlisted one of the junior clerks at the family bank to do the bookkeeping and once a week I put on a suit and slapped a derby on my head and set off down Fifth Avenue to the Corn Exchange. It was a good walk. I used a stick but really didn’t need it having made a practice as soon as I knew my eyes were fading of surveying and storing in my memory everything for twenty blocks south and north, and as far east as First Avenue and to the paths in the park across the street all the way to Central Park West. I knew the length of the blocks by the number of steps it took from curb to curb. I was just as happy not to have to see the embarrassing Renaissance mansions of the robber barons to the south of us. I was a vigorous walker and gauged the progress of our times by the changing sounds and smells of the streets. In the past the carriages and the equipages hissed or squeaked or groaned, the drays rattled, the beer wagons pulled by teams passed thunderously, and the beat behind all this music was the clopping of the hooves. Then the combustive put-put of the motorcars was added to the mix and gradually the air lost its organic smell of hide and leather, the odor of horse manure on hot days did not
hang like a miasma over the street nor did one now often hear that wide-pan shovel of the street cleaners shlushing it up, and eventually, at this particular time I am describing, it was all mechanical, the noise, as fleets of cars sailed past in both directions, horns tooting and policemen blowing their whistles.

I liked the nice sharp sound of my stick on the granite steps of the bank. And inside I sensed the architecture of high ceilings and marble walls and pillars from the hollowed-out murmur of voices and the chill on my ears. These were the days I thought I was acting responsibly, carrying on as a replacement of the previous Collyers as if I was hoping for their posthumous approval. And then Langley came home from the World War and I realized how foolish I had been.

DESPITE THE ASSURANCES
of his letter, my brother returned was a different man. His voice was a kind of gargle and he kept coughing and clearing his throat. He had been a clear tenor when he left, and would sing the old arias as I played them. Not now. I felt his face and the hollowness of his cheeks and the sharpness of his cheekbones. And he had scars. When he removed his uniform I felt more scars on his bare back, and also small craters where blisters had been raised by the mustard gas.

He said: We are supposed to go on parade, marching in lock-step, one battalion after another, as if war is an orderly thing, as if there has been a victory. I will not parade. It is for idiots.

But we won, I said. It’s Armistice.

You want my rifle? Here. And he thrust it into my hands.
This heavy rifle actually fired in the Great War. He was supposed to have stowed it at the armory on Sixty-seventh Street. Then I felt his overseas cap fitted on my head. Then suddenly his tunic was hanging off my shoulder. I felt ashamed that for all the accounts of the newspapers’ war that Julia read to me in her Hungarian accent at the breakfast table each morning, I had still not understood what it was like over there. Langley would tell me through the following weeks, interrupted occasionally by poundings on the door by the army constabulary for he had left his unit before being legally mustered out and given his discharge papers, and of all the difficulties with the law we were to endure in the years to come, this one, the matter of his technical desertion, was like the preview.

Each time I answered and swore that I hadn’t seen my brother, and that was no lie. And they would notice me looking at the sky as I spoke and would beat a retreat.

And when the Armistice Day parade was held, and I could hear the excitement in the city, people hurrying past our house, the cars crawling, their horns blowing, and through all of that the distant strains of military march music, I heard from Langley, as if antiphonically, of his experiences. I would not have asked him about it, I wanted him to be his old self, I recognized that he needed to recover. He had not known till he came back that our parents had succumbed to the flu. So that was another something he had to deal with. He slept a lot and didn’t take any notice of Julia, at least at first, although he might have found it odd to see her serving dinner and then sitting down to join us. So with all of that, without any prompting, while the
city turned out for the victory parade, he told me about the war in his hoarse voice, which would at times drift into a whisper or a wheeze before recovering its gravelly tone. At moments it was more as if he was talking to himself.

He said they couldn’t keep their feet dry. It was too cold to take off your shoes, there was ice in the trench, ice water and ice. You got trench foot. Your feet swelled and turned blue.

There were rats. Big brown ones. They ate the dead, they were fearless. Bite through the canvas sacks to get at the human meat. Once, with an officer in his wood coffin and the lid not fast, they nosed it back and in a minute the coffin was filled with a hump of squealing rats squirming and wiggling and fighting, a wormy mass of brown and black rat slime turning red with blood. The officers shot into the mass with their pistols with the rats pouring over the sides and then someone leapt forward and slammed the coffin lid back down and they nailed it shut with the officer and the dead and dying rats together.

Attacks always came before dawn. First there would be heavy bombardment, field guns, mortars, and then the lines advancing out of the smoke and mist to go down under the machine-gun fire. Langley learning to lean back against the front wall of the trench so as to catch the Kraut with his bayonet as the man leapt over him, like the bull goring the bullfighter in the buttocks or in the thigh, or worse, and even losing hold of the rifle when the poor fool took the bayonet with him as he fell.

Langley was almost court-martialed for seeming to threaten an officer. He had said, Why am I killing men I don’t know? You have to know someone to want to kill him. For this aperçu
he was sent out on patrol night after night, crawling over a furrowed blasted plain of mud and barbed wire, pressing himself to the ground when the Very flares lit up the sky.

And then that one morning of the yellow fog that didn’t seem to be much of anything. It hardly smelled at all. It dissipated soon enough and then your skin began to burn.

And to what purpose, Langley said to himself. You watch, you’ll see.

As I have, simply by living on.

On the day Langley went by himself up to the Woodlawn Cemetery to visit our parents’ graves, I placed his Springfield rifle on the fireplace mantel in the drawing room and there it has stayed, almost the first piece in the collection of artifacts from our American life.

THE FACT THAT
I had taken up with Julia had not sat well with the senior maid, Siobhan, who was used to giving the orders in their household world of designated responsibilities. Julia, risen from my bed, had assumed an elevated status for herself and was disinclined to be ordered about. Her attitude amounted to insurgency. Siobhan had been in our employ far longer and as she told me tearfully one day, my mother had not only found her work exceptional but had come to feel about her that she was like a member of the family. I had known nothing of this. I knew Siobhan only by her voice, which, without thinking much about it, I had found unattractive, a thin high whiny voice, and I knew she was a stout woman by the way she
breathed from the slightest exertion. Also there was a smell about her, not that she was unclean but that her pores produced a kind of steambath redolence that remained in a room after she had left it. However, with Langley’s return I was intent on keeping peace in our house, for his gloomy presence and irritability with every little thing had unbalanced us all, including, I might say, the Negro cook, Mrs. Robileaux, who prepared what she wanted to prepare and served what she wanted to serve without advice from anyone, including Langley, who kept pushing his plate aside and leaving the table. So there were undercurrents of dissatisfaction coming from all directions—we were a household already far removed from that of my parents, of whose orderly administration and regally stolid ways I found myself newly appreciative. But not having the faintest idea of how to deal with any of this emotional disorder, I made a mental distinction between anarchy and evolutionary change. The one was the world falling to pieces, the other was only the inevitable creep of time, which was what we had now in this house, I decided, the turning over of the seconds and minutes of life to show its ever new guise. This was my rationalization for doing nothing. Langley was privileged by his veterancy and Mrs. Robileaux by her cooking skills. I should have done something to support Siobhan but instead found my own guilty solace in looking away and accepting Julia on her own terms.

The girl was amatory in a matter-of-fact way. I had heard about Europeans that they didn’t make as much of a fuss about lovemaking as our women did, they just went ahead and accepted it as another appetite, as natural as hunger or thirst. So
call Julia naughty by nature, but more than that, ambitious, which is why, having achieved my bed, she began to lord it over Siobhan as if in practice for the position of lady of the house. I knew that of course, I am only blind of eye. But I admired the immigrant verve of her. She had come to America under the auspices of a servant supply agency and had made a life for herself working first for a family my family knew, and then after they had moved themselves to Paris, arriving at our door with excellent references. I am sure Julia was older than I by some five or six years. However languorously attentive she was at night, she was up promptly at dawn and returned to her household responsibilities. I would lie there in the still warm sheets where she had lain and compose her image from the lingering tangy smell of her and from what my hands had learned of her person. She had tiny ears and a plump mouth. When we lay head to head, her toes barely reached my ankle bones. But she was generously proportioned, the flesh of her shoulders and arms giving under the lightest pressure of my thumbs. She was short-waisted, high-breasted, and with a firm backside and sturdy thighs and calves. She did not have an elegant foot, it was rather wide and, unlike the smooth soft rest of her, somewhat rough to the touch. Her straight hair when unbound fell below her shoulders—she would arrange herself on all fours above my recumbent form and flip her hair over her face so as to brush my chest and belly, sweeping her hair one way and then the other with a shake of her head. At such times she would murmur sentences which began in English and drifted into Hungarian. Like you this, sir, does the sir like his Julia? And somewhere
along the line without my realizing it she would have reverted to her Hungarian, whispering her quizzical endearments as to whether I liked what she was doing so that I imagined I was literate in the Hungarian language. I would pull her down so as to get the same brushing effect from her nipples while her hair lay about my face and in my mouth. We did lots of creative things and kept each other amused well enough. The inside of her fit me rather well. She told me her hair was very light, the color of wheat—she said
veet
—and that her eyes were gray like a cat.

It was Julia’s warm and compliant body and immigrant murmurings that persuaded me to put out of mind the slow grinding away of Siobhan’s honor as her and Julia’s places in the household scheme of things were reversed and Siobhan was the one who found herself taking orders. This good woman had only two recourses, to quit our employ or to pray. But she was a single Irishwoman of middle or even late middle age, with no family as far as I knew. The years of employment in this house had been her life. In such circumstances people cling however unhappily to their jobs and save their money, coin by coin, against the time when they hope to have a decent burial. I did remember that when my mother died, it was Siobhan who wept piteously at the grave, she, Siobhan, as sentimental about death as only the deeply religious can be. And so, finally, prayer would be the means by which she would endure the profound offense to her pride of place and sense of possession of the house that a good servant has who is responsible for its upkeep. And if her prayers looked toward her restoration or, at moments of bitterness that would later have to be confessed to the Father, to
vengeance, whatever the Lord might saith, I would have to say that they were answered in the Protestant form of Perdita Spence, a friend of Langley’s from childhood whom he had escorted at her coming out, and who now appeared for dinner one night at his invitation.

For as the weeks had passed Langley had begun to emerge from his doldrums. Not that you would hear him whistling or finding a reason to be excited about something, but his acerb intelligence was honing up as in the old days. Perdita Spence had stood in his consideration ever since their teens and that I suppose was the closest he could come to an outright feeling for her. I had seen her in our home once or twice before my eyes darkened and I projected that memory now, adding mentally to her age by listening to her conversation. I remembered her main features, which were a long nose and eyes set too close together and shoulders that looked as if she wore epaulets under her shirtwaist. I seem also to have an image in my mind of Miss Spence marching arm in arm with the suffragettes down Fifth Avenue, but that may be an embellishment of my own making. I do know that she was a comfortable height for Langley, who was a six-footer. So she was tall for a woman and, as I listened to her remarks before dinner about the society of which our two families had been a part, I thought that she was the perfect social match as well—someone who in her person invoked the life Langley had lived before he went to war, and so just what he needed to palliate the dark instincts of his own mind.