Homer & Langley (9 page)

Like what?

Well take that song where he says sometimes he’s happy sometimes he’s blue.

“… my disposition depends on you.”

Yes, well what if she’s saying the same thing at the same time?

Who?

The girl, I mean if her disposition depends on him at the same time his disposition depends on her? In that case one of
two circumstances would prevail: either they would lock together in an unchanging state of sadness or happiness, in which case life would be unendurable—

That’s not good. And what’s the other circumstance?

The other circumstance is that if they began disynchronously, and each was dependent on the other’s disposition, there would be this constantly alternating mood current running between them, from misery to happiness and back again, so that they would each be driven mad by the emotional instability of the other.

I see.

On the other hand there’s that song about the man and his shadow?

“Me and My Shadow.”

That’s the one. He’s walking down the avenue with no one to talk to but his shadow. So there’s the opposite problem. Can you imagine a universe like that, with only your own shadow to talk to? That is a song right out of German metaphysics.

At that moment some drunk began to cry and moan. Then other voices began shouting and yelling at him to shut up. Then just as suddenly it was quiet.

Langley, I said. Am I your shadow?

In the darkness I listened. You’re my brother, he said.

A WEEK OR SO
after our night in jail we went with Grandmamma Robileaux to a hearing in which our lawyers moved to have the charges against us dismissed. As to operating a business
in a residential zone they provided Langley’s accounts to show that the small profits of each dance were absorbed by the expenses of the dance following so that in a sense it was true that our tea dances were a public service. As to resisting arrest, that charge was only applied to me, a blind man, and Mrs. Robileaux, a stout Negress of grandmotherly age, neither of whom could be reasonably expected, even reacting in fear, to have put up anything which New York’s Finest could claim as resistance. The judge said his understanding was that Mrs. Robileaux whacked a serving tray over the head of an arresting officer. Did she deny that? Oh no, Mr. Judge sir, I most certainly don’t deny anything I did, Grandmamma said, and I would do it again as a respectable woman to defend myself from the hands of any white devil who would have his way with me. The judge considered this answer with a chuckle. As to the last charge, serving alcoholic beverages without a license, surely a drop of sherry, said our lawyer, could not be seriously considered a crime in this regard. At this point the judge said, Sherry? They served sherry? For goodness’ sakes I like a drop of that myself before lunch. And so the charges were dismissed.

IN THE AFTERMATH
of the police raid, the house seemed cavernous. The rooms having been emptied for the dance, we had somehow not gotten around to unrolling the rugs, bringing up the furniture, and putting everything back where it belonged. Our footsteps echoed, as if we were in a cave or an underground vault. Though the library still had books on the
shelves and the music room still had its pianos, I felt as if we were no longer in the home we had lived in since our childhood, but in a new place, as yet unlived in, with its imprint on our souls still to be determined. Our footsteps echoed through the rooms. And the odor of Langley’s stacks of newspapers—they had, like some slow flow of lava, brimmed out of his study to the landing on the second floor—that odor was now apparent, a musty smell that would be especially noticeable on days of rain or dampness. There was a lot of rubble to clean up, all the broken records, smashed phonographs, and so on. Langley treated it all as salvage, inspecting everything for its value—electric cords, turntables, split chair legs, chipped glasses—and filing things according to category in cardboard boxes. This took several days.

Naturally I didn’t understand it as such, but this time marked the beginning of our abandonment of the outer world. It was not just the police raid and the neighborhood’s negative view of our dances, you understand. Both of us had failed in our relations with women, a specie now in my mind seeming to belong either to Heaven, as my dear unattainable piano student Mary Elizabeth Riordan, or to Hell, as surely was the case of the thieving seductress Julia. I still had hopes of finding someone to love but felt as I had never before that my sightlessness was a physical deformity as likely to drive away a comely woman as would a hunch of the back or a crippled leg. My sense of myself as damaged suggested the wiser course of seclusion as a means of avoiding pain, sorrow, and humiliation. Not that this would be my consistent state of mind, eventually I would rouse
myself to discover my true love—as you must know, my dear Jacqueline—but what was gone from me by then was the mental vigor that comes of a natural happiness in finding oneself alive.

Langley had long since reworked his post-war bitterness into an iconoclastic life of the mind. As with the inspiration of the tea dances, he would from now on give full and uninhibited execution to whatever scheme or fancy occurred to him.

Did I mention how vast the dining room had become? A high-ceilinged voluminous rectangle that had always had a hollowness to it, even in the pre-dance days of its Persian rug, its tapestries and sideboards and torch-shaped sconces, its standing lamps and its Empire dining table and eighteen chairs. I had never really liked the dining room, perhaps because it was windowless and situated on the colder north side of the house. Apparently Langley had similar feelings because the dining room was where he elected to install the Model T Ford automobile.

HAVING TAKEN TO MY
bed with the grippe, I had no idea what he was up to. I heard these strange noises downstairs—clanking sounds, shouts, metallic shivers, clatterings, and one or two tympanic crashes that shook the walls. He had brought the car in disassembled, the parts hauled up from the backyard by winch and rope, carried through the kitchen, and now being put together in the dining room as if in a garage, into which indeed the dining room was eventually transformed, complete with the smell of motor oil.

I made no attempt to investigate, preferring to compose an image from the sounds I heard as I lay in my bed. I thought it might be some bronzed sculpture, so huge that it came in parts that had to be assembled. An equestrian figuration, for example, such as the statue of General Sherman at the foot of Central Park at Fifty-ninth and Fifth. There were at least two other men’s voices, lots of grunting and hammering, and above all my brother’s rasp raised to a degree of uncharacteristic excitement verging on joy, so that I knew that here was his new major enterprise.

After a day or two of this Grandmamma Robileaux knocked on my door and before I could say, Come in, she was standing by my bed with a soup of her own prescription. I can smell it now almost as if I was inhaling its spices—a brew thick with okra, turnips, collard greens, rice, and marrowbones, among other ingredients of her arcane knowledge. I sat up in bed and the tray was put across my lap. Thank you, Grandmamma, I said.

I couldn’t tuck in because she stood waiting to say something.

Don’t tell me, I said.

I knew when he came home from that war your brother’s mind weren’t right.

That was the last thing I wanted to hear. It’s okay, I said. You needn’t worry.

No sir, I must dispute that. She sat herself down at the foot of my bed, thus sending the tray into a steep list. I grabbed it and waited for her to continue but I heard only a sigh of resignation
as if she was sitting with her head bowed and her hands folded in prayer. Grandmamma had taken to me in a proprietary or even maternal way ever since Harold Robileaux had gone back to New Orleans. Perhaps it was because he and I had played music together, or perhaps for her own sake as the only remaining member of the staff since the death of Siobhan, she needed to find communion with someone in this house. I could understand why Langley was not a candidate.

And now she unburdened herself. Her floor all tracked up with their boots, the back door off its hinges, black mechanical things, automobile things, swinging through the window like clothes on a line. And not just that, she said, that is just the worst. This whole house is dirty and beginning to smell, nobody around to keep it up.

I said: Automobile things?

Maybe you can tell me why that isn’t a man out of his mind would bring a street automobile into his house, she said. If it is an automobile.

Well is it or isn’t it? I said.

More likely a chariot from Hell. I thank the Lord the Doctor and Miz Collyer are safely in their graves, for this would kill them worse than what did.

She sat there. I could not let her see my astonishment. Don’t let it depress you, Grandmamma, I said. My brother is a brilliant man. There is some intelligent purpose behind this, I can assure you.

At that moment of course I hadn’t the remotest idea of what it might be.

At this time, the end of the thirties, early forties, cars were
streamlined
. That was the word for the latest up-to-date thing in auto design. Streamlining cars meant warping them, not showing a right angle anywhere. I had made a point of running my hands over cars parked at the curb. The same cars that made purring sounds on the road had long low hoods and sweeping curved fenders, wheel covers and built-in humpbacked trunks. So when I was well enough to come downstairs I said to Langley, If you were going to bring a car into the house, why not a modern up-to-date model?

This was my joke as I sat in the Model T and added exclamation marks with two quick squeezes of the rubber-bulb horn. The honks seemed to bounce around the room and dispense clownish echoes all the way to the top floor.

Langley took my question seriously. This was cheap, just a few dollars, he said. No one wants something this old that has to be cranked up.

Ah, that explains everything. I told Grandmamma Robileaux there was a rational explanation.

Why should this concern her?

She wonders why something from the street has to be in the dining room. Why something made for the outside is inside.

Mrs. Robileaux is a good woman but she should stick to cooking, Langley said. How can you make an ontological distinction between outside and inside? On the basis of staying dry when it rains? Warm when it’s cold? What after all can be said about having a roof over your head that is philosophically
meaningful? The inside is the outside and the outside is the inside. Call it God’s inescapable world.

The truth is that Langley couldn’t say why he’d put the Model T in the dining room. I knew how his mind worked: he’d operated from an unthinking impulse, seeing the car on one of his collecting jaunts around town and instantly deciding he must have it while trusting that the reason he found it so valuable would eventually become clear to him. It took a while, though. He was defensive. For days he brought the matter up, though no one else did. He said, You wouldn’t think this car was hideous to behold on the street. But here in our elegant dining room its true nature as a monstrosity is apparent.

That was the first step in his thinking. A few days later as we dined one evening at the kitchen table, he said, out of the blue, that this antique car was our family totem. Inasmuch as Grandmamma Robileaux couldn’t be more displeased having someone now eating regularly in her kitchen, I understood the remark as something made for her benefit, because presumably, being from New Orleans, a city of primitive beliefs, she would have to respect the principle of symbolic kinship.

All theoretical considerations fell by the wayside the day Langley, having decided our electric bills were outrageous, proposed to set up the Model T’s engine as a generator. He ran rubber piping from its exhaust out through a hole he had a man drill in the dining room wall and tied in to the basement wiring board via another hole drilled through the floor. He struggled to get it all working, but succeeded only in making a racket, the
running engine and the smell of gasoline together sending Grandmamma and me out the front door one particularly intolerable evening. We sat across the street on a bench at the park wall and Grandmamma announced, as if describing a boxing match, the struggle between Langley and the prevailing darkness, the lights in our windows flickering, sputtering, flaring, and then finally going down for the count. All at once the evening was blessedly quiet. We could not keep from laughing.

Thereafter, the Model T just stood there accumulating dust and cobwebs, and filling up with stacks of newspapers, and various other collectibles. Langley never mentioned it again, nor did I, it was our immovable possession, an inescapable condition of our lives, sunk to its wheel rims but risen from its debris as if unearthed, an industrial mummy.

WE NEEDED SOMEONE
to clean house, if only to keep Grandmamma from leaving. Langley fretted about the cost, but I insisted and he finally gave in. We used the same agency that had supplied Julia and we hired the very first people they sent over, a Japanese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hoshiyama. The reference sheet gave their ages as forty-five and thirty-five. They spoke English, were quiet, businesslike, and totally uninquisitive, accepting everything about our bizarre household. I’d hear them talking as they went about their work, they communicated with each other in Japanese, and it was a lovely music they made, their reedy voices at a third interval, the long vowels punctuated with sharp expulsions of breath. At times I felt myself living in
a Japanese wood-block print of the kind on the wall behind the desk in my father’s study—the thin tiny cartooned people dwarfed by the snow-covered mountains or making their way under their umbrellas across a wooden bridge in the rain. I attempted to show the Hoshiyamas those prints, which had been there since my childhood, to indicate my judicious approach to ethnicity, but it turned out to be a wrong move, having just the opposite effect I intended. We’re American, Mr. Hoshiyama informed me.