E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

ONE NIGHT, WITH LANGLEY out for the evening, the bell rang and there was at the same time a peremptory knock on the door. It was quite late. Two men who said they were from the FBI were standing there. I felt their badges. They were polite and though they were already in the door they asked if they could come in. They were there to take the Hoshiyamas into custody. I was stunned. I demanded to know why. What is this about, I said. Has the couple done something illegal? Not that we know, said one of the men. Have they broken the law in any way? Not that we know, said the other. You will have to give me a good reason why this is happening, I said, they work for me. They are my employees. These are simple hard-working people, I said. They have served me well and honestly and had come to me, furthermore, with excellent references.Of course I was an idiot about all of this, but I could think of no other way to forestall what was happening than by bringing up anything I could to break through the intolerable stubbornness of these FBIs, who were uncommunicative and impervious to reason. You come here in the night to take people away as if this is some police state? I wanted them to feel ashamed of themselves, which was of course impossible. When men like this are carrying out government policies they are hard-shelled and cannot even be insulted. They are doing something that might seem momentous and horrifying to the people they have come for but is mere routine for them.They did say one thing by way of justification: that they had gone to the couple’s Brooklyn domicile only to learn that the Hoshiyamas had fled. And as a result some effort was required to trace them. At this I flew into a fury. These people were not running away, I said. For their own safety they had to leave their home. They were being physically threatened. Did they even know you were looking for them? And now you are finding something guilty about the fact that they came here to avoid getting their heads bashed in?I don’t remember how long I carried on this way but at some point Mr. Hoshiyama was touching my arm in a mute appeal for restraint. The Hoshiyamas were born fatalists. It was as if they and the FBI men seemed to understand one another so as to make me and everything I said irrelevant. They did not themselves protest, nor cry nor bemoan the situation. After a while Mrs. Hoshiyama came down the stairs with two valises, all they were allowed to bring with them. The couple put on their hats and coats — it was the winter of the first year of the war — the FBI men opened the door and a cold wind blew in from the park. Mr. Hoshiyama mumbled his gratitude and said they would write when and if they could and Mrs. Hoshiyama took my hands and kissed them, and they were gone. — WHEN LANGLEY CAME home later that night and heard what had happened he was furious. Of course he knew what it was all about having read in his newspapers of the roundup of thousands of Japanese-American citizens for internment in concentration camps. Though I had told him that Mr. Hoshiyama had opened the door and that the agents asked if they could come in when they were already inside, my ineffectiveness, or stupidity, was demonstrated even so. This house is our inviolate realm, Langley said. I don’t care what kind of damn badge they flash. You kick them out and slam the door in their faces, is what you do. These people ignore the Constitution whenever they so choose. Tell me, Homer, how we are free if it’s only at their sufferance?So for a day or two I did feel as Langley felt about warmaking: your enemy brought out your dormant primal instincts, he lit up the primitive circuits of your brain.

LANGLEY AND I treasured the couple’s bicycle built for two, which they’d been forced to leave behind. It had an honored place under the stairs. I said we should ride it to keep it toned up for when the Hoshiyamas returned. And so we got into the habit of taking the bike out when the weather was fine.I was much cheered by pedaling away. It was good to be getting some exercise. I had moments of doubt with Langley steering because he could be distracted seeing something of interest in the street or in a store window. But this only added to the derring-do. We rode in and out of the side streets and took pleasure from the horns that blew behind us. This activity went on for one whole spring until a tire blew as we cut a corner too closely. Langley’s strategy for repairing the tire was to replace it. In wartime you could not find anything new that was made of rubber, so for a while he picked up secondhand bikes here or there to see if he could get a tire match. He never did, and the bicycle built for two has stood ever since on its handlebars in the parlor and with a few other bikes propped against the wall to keep it company.The Hoshiyamas also left their collection of little ivory carvings — ivory elephants and tigers and lions, monkeys hanging from branches, ivory children, boys with knobby knees, girls with their arms round one another, ladies in kimonos and samurai warriors with headbands. None of the pieces was bigger than one’s thumb, all together it was a Lilliputian world amazingly detailed, revelatory to the touch.We will save all their things for when they come back, Langley said, though they never did and I don’t know now where any of the little ivory carvings are — buried somewhere under everything else.And so do people pass out of one’s life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

OUR FRONT DOOR seemed to be a wartime attraction. We found ourselves answering to the knock of old men in black. They spoke with accents so thick we couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. Langley said they were bearded and had curls of hair around their ears. Also dark haunted eyes and rueful smiles of apology for disturbing us. They were very religious Jews, we knew that much. They showed their credentials from various seminaries and schools. They held out tin boxes with slots in which we were asked to put money. This happened three or four times over the course of a month and we began to be annoyed. We were uncomprehending. Langley thought we should post a plaque next to the door: Beggars Not Welcome.But they were not beggars. One morning it was a cleanshaven man who stood at the open door. He would be described to me as having close-cropped gray hair and a Victory Medal from the Great War pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket. He sported one of those skullcaps on his head that meant he too was Jewish. The man’s name was Alan Roses. My brother, who had a soft spot for anyone who had served in that war, invited him in.It turned out that Alan Roses and Langley had been with the same division in the Argonne forest. They talked as men do who discover a military kinship. I had to listen to them identify their battalions and companies and recall their experiences under fire. It was a completely different Langley in these exchanges — someone who accorded respect and received it in return.Alan Roses told us what the mystery was with these door-to-door appeals. It had to do with what was happening to Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. The idea was to buy freedom for Jewish families — Nazi officials were happy to use their racial policies as a means of extortion — and also to inform the American public. If the public was aroused the government would have to do something. He was very calm, and spoke in great and telling detail, Alan Roses. He was, by profession, an English teacher in the public school system. He cleared his throat often as if to swallow his emotion. I had no doubt that what he was saying was true, but it was at the same time so shocking as almost to demand not to be believed. Langley said to me afterward: How is it those old men who knocked on our door knew more than the news organizations?It was difficult under the circumstances for Langley to maintain his philosophical neutrality. He quickly wrote out a check. Alan Roses provided a receipt on the stationery of an East Side synagogue. We went to the door with him, he shook our hands, and he left. I supposed he would find another door to knock on and subject himself to more embarrassment — he had the reticence of someone doing something out of principle for which he was ill-equipped by nature.With each day’s papers, Langley searched the news columns. The story was coming out on the back pages in dribs and drabs with no appreciation of the enormity of the horror. This went right along, he said, with our government’s do-nothing policy. Even in war, deals are made, and if they can’t be made you bomb the trains, disrupt the operation — anything to give those people a fighting chance. Do you suppose this land of the free and home of the brave is just not that crazy about Jews? Of course the Nazis are monstrous thugs. But what are we if we let them go ahead and do what they do? And what happens then, Homer, to your war story of good versus evil? Christ, what I wouldn’t give to be something other than a human being.