E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

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.The couple needed no instruction, they found things for themselves and what they couldn’t find — a mop, a pail, brown soap, whatever it was — they went out and bought with their own money, turning in the sales slips to Langley for reimbursement. Their sense of order was relentless, I would feel a hand on my arm, gently ordering me to rise from my piano bench when it came time to dust the Aeolian. They arrived punctually at eight a.m. every morning and left at six in the evening. Oddly enough, their presence and unflagging industry gave me the illusion that my own days had some purpose. I was always sorry when they departed, as if my animacy was not my own but an allotment of theirs. Langley approved of them for a different reason: they treated his various collections with respect, for instance his hoard of broken toys, model airplanes, lead soldiers, game boards, and so on, some of them whole, some of them not. Langley, once he brought something into the house, didn’t bother to do anything with it but throw it in a carton along with everything else he’d found. What they did, the Hoshiyamas, was curate these materials, setting them out on furniture or in bookshelves, these odd jumbles of used and discarded children’s things.So, as I say, we were once again a household up and running though matters were to become complicated once the Second World War began. The Hoshiyamas lived in Brooklyn but one morning they arrived for work in a cab and unloaded several suitcases and a trunk and a bicycle built for two. We heard all this clumping around in the front hall and came downstairs to see what was going on. We are in fear for our lives, Mr. Hoshiyama said, and I heard his wife weeping. The Japanese air force having bombed Pearl Harbor, you see, the Hoshiyamas had been threatened by their neighbors, local merchants refused their patronage, and someone had thrown a brick through their window. We are Nisei! Mrs. Hoshiyama cried, meaning they had been born in the United States, which under the circumstances of course was totally irrelevant. To hear this composed and self-disciplined couple in such states of anguish was unsettling. And so we took them in.They moved into the room that had been Siobhan’s on the top floor and though they wanted to pay rent or at least renegotiate their salaries downward, we would not hear of it. Even Langley, whose miserliness increased exponentially with every passing month, couldn’t bring himself to take their money. It astonishes me now to think how well he got along with this couple whose sense of order and cleanliness should have driven him mad. Every evening now there were two shifts at dinner: Grandmamma would serve us and then she and the Hoshiyamas would sit down to their dinner. A diplomatic problem did arise when it turned out that the Hoshiyamas followed a diet not in Grandmamma’s realm of expertise and so took to preparing their own food. She said to me she had to turn away the first few times when these people sliced up a raw fish and laid the slices over balls of cooked rice and that was their dinner. Nor could Grandmamma have enjoyed all the traffic in her kitchen, a large high-ceilinged room with its white tiles and open shelves of dinnerware, its butcher-block counters and a big window through which the morning sun shone. This was where she spent most of her waking hours. I said to her, Grandmamma, I know it must be difficult, and she admitted it was, though she felt bad for these people, she knew what it meant to have rocks thrown through your window.

THE WAR WAS BROUGHT home to us in many ways. We were told to buy War Bonds. We were told to save scrap metal and rubber bands, but that was nothing new. Meat was rationed. Draperies had to be pulled across the windows at night. As titular owner of a car, Langley was entitled to a book of gas-ration tickets. He put his “A” sticker on the windshield of the Model T, but having given up the idea of using its engine as a generator, he sold his tickets to a local garage mechanic, a bit of black marketeering which he justified in terms of our financial situation.Langley’s newspaper project seemed to be right in step with what was happening. He read the papers every morning and afternoon in an inflamed state of attention. For good measure we listened to the evening news on the radio. At times I thought my brother took a grim satisfaction from the crisis. Certainly he understood its business opportunities. He contributed to what was called the War Effort by selling off the copper rain gutters and chimney flashing of our house. That gave him the idea of also selling the walnut wood paneling from the library and our father’s study. I didn’t mind losing the copper gutters but walnut paneling didn’t seem to me relevant to the War Effort, and I told him so. He said to me, Homer, many people, general officers for instance, thrive on war. And if some muck-a-muck sitting on his keister in Washington wants walnut paneling for his office, it will be relevant to the War Effort.

I DID NOT REALLY fear for our country though for the first year or so the news was mostly bad. I couldn’t believe we and our Allies wouldn’t prevail. But I felt completely out of things, of no use to anyone. Even women had gone to war, serving in uniform or replacing their husbands in the factories. What could I do, save the tinfoil from chewing-gum wrappers? These war years found me sinking in my own estimation. The romantic young pianist with the Franz Liszt haircut was long gone. When I wasn’t sluggish, I was harshly self-critical as if, no one else noticing that I was a useless appendage, I would warrant that I was. Langley and I disagreed about this war. He didn’t see it in the same patriotic terms, his view was Olympian, he scorned the very idea of it apart from who was right and who was wrong. Was this a lingering effect of the mustard gas? War to his mind was only the most obvious indication of the fatal human insufficiency. But there were specifics to this Second World War, where evil could justifiably be assigned, and I thought his contrarian attitude was misguided. Of course, we didn’t argue, it was a characteristic of our family, going back to our parents, that if we disagreed with each other about a political matter, we simply avoided talking about it.When Langley went out on his nightly forays, I sometimes played the piano till he got back. The Hoshiyamas were my audience. They brought up two straight chairs and sat behind me and listened. They were familiar with the classical repertoire and would ask me if I knew this Schubert or that Brahms. I would play for them as if they represented a full house at Carnegie Hall. Having their attention brought my spirit out of the doldrums. I found myself particularly responsive to Mrs. Hoshiyama, who was younger than her husband. Though they spoke Japanese as they worked it was clear to me that he directed her. I wouldn’t ask to touch her face, of course, but my sense of her was of a trim little being with bright eyes. I listened as she walked about — she took very feminine, short, shuffling steps and I decided that she was pigeon-toed. When husband and wife worked together in one of the rooms and talked their Japanese talk, I would hear her laugh, probably at something of Langley’s newly acquired on one of his nightly rambles. Her laughter was lovely, the melodic trill of a young girl. Every time I heard it, there in our cavernous house, images of a sun-filled meadow flashed in my mind, and if I looked hard enough I could see us, Mrs. Hoshiyama and me, as a kimonoed couple in a wood-block print having a picnic under a cherry blossom tree. When the three of us were together in the evening and the formality of our daytime relationship was suspended, I felt that it was only my deep respect for Mr. Hoshiyama that prevented me from stealing his wife. On such gentle fantasies do men like me survive.