E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

BUT NOW I WILL mention Langley’s last painting — the last one he did before he went back to his newspapers. It was inspired not by the astronauts’ first flight to the moon, but by their subsequent commutes. He had me touch it. I felt a sandy surface embedded with rocks and cratered with mounds of what seemed to be some sort of sanded epoxy glue. I wondered if he had reverted to representation, for I thought it felt much like the moon would feel if I bent down to touch it. But it was a huge canvas, the largest he had done, and as I moved my hand about, I found adhered to the surface some sort of stick, and as I moved my hand down along this stick it became thinner and suddenly veered into a right-angled chunk of metal. What is this, I said, it feels like a golf club. That’s what it is, Langley said. And then at other places on the canvas small books had been affixed by the spine and individual pages, stiff with glue, were sticking up as if blown by the wind — three or four of these in various sizes. Is there wind on the moon? I said. There is now, my brother said.I thought the moon painting wasn’t very good — I had no trouble visualizing it, was the problem. Perhaps Langley realized it was a failure because that was the last one he did. Or maybe it was those moon walks of our astronauts that made Langley give up painting as insufficient to his rage. Can you imagine the crassness of it, hitting golf balls on the moon? he said. And that other one, reading the Bible to the universe as he circled around out there? The entire class of blasphemies is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the other stupidly presumptuous.For my part, I was awestruck, and I said to him, Langley, this is almost unimaginable, going to the moon, it is like some dream, it is astounding. I would forgive those astronauts whatever they did.He wasn’t having any of it. I’ll tell you the good news about this space venture, Homer. The good news is that the earth is finished, or why would we be doing this? There is a great subliminal species perception that we are going to blow up the planet with our nuclear wars and must prepare to leave. The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.If that is the case, I said, what will happen to your eternal always up-to-date newspaper?You’re right, he said, I must make room for a new category — technological achievement.But technological achievements succeed one another — which one could stand for all?Ah my brother, don’t you see? The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we’ve made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we’ll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

I’M RECALLING NOW that tale of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame — this poor defective and how he loved a beautiful girl and would ring the great cathedral bells in his anguished passion. In my longing for a lover I wondered if that was me. Or could I, after all, find some woman who would take up with me from some genius of her own loving spirit. The model I had in mind for this person was Mary Elizabeth Riordan, my piano student of yore. Actually it was Mary Elizabeth Riordan herself I wished for. I had kept my feelings for her as one keeps a precious object hidden away in a box. I fantasized that someday she would return to us a grown young woman newly sensitive to the history of my diffident and formerly imperceptible courtship. It was a cruel coincidence or malign alignment of spiritual forces that even as I was thinking of her she was writing to us for the first time in many years.Langley brought her letter in from the front hall. It had come slipped into the usual packet of bills, lawyers’ letters of warning, and Building Department notices that the mailman always thoughtfully bound with a rubber band. Well look at this, Langley said. A Belgian Congo stamp. Who is Sr. M. E. Riordan?My God, I said, is that my piano student?Her long silence was explained: she had taken vows, she was a sister in some worthy order. She was a nun! Dear friends, I know I should have written before this, I heard her say in Langley’s voice, but I hope you will forgive me.Dear friends? What had happened to Uncle Homer and Uncle Langley? People didn’t just take vows, they took dictions. I asked Langley to read the letter over again: Dear friends, I know I should have written before this, but I hope you will forgive me and pray for these poor people who I am privileged to serve.She explained that in her order the sisters were missioners, they went around the world where the people were poorest and most miserable and they lived among them and tended to them.I am in this impoverished and drought-ridden country living in a village among the poor and oppressed, she wrote. Just last week army troops came through and killed several of the men of the village for no reason at all. These people are poor farmers wresting their food crops out of a harsh rocky hillside. Two of my sisters are here with me. We provide what sustenance and medicine and solace we can. I feel blessed by God in my work. The only thing I miss is a piano and I pray for the Lord to forgive me for this weakness. But sometimes in the evening when they have one of their village ceremonies, they bring out their hand drums and sing, and I sing with them.I had Langley read the letter to me for several days running. I was trying to acclimate. The children are undernourished, she wrote, and they get sick a lot. We are trying to start a small school for them. Nobody here knows how to read. I ask my God why in some places people can be so poor and wretched and uneducated and yet love Jesus with a purity that transcends whatever might be possible in New York, a city so far away just now, so heedless, that huge city where I grew up.It is a shameful thing to confess but, with the news of what Mary Elizabeth Riordan had done with her life, I felt betrayed. Her passion was for others, countless others, it was a dispensed passion, a love for anyone and everyone, whereas I wanted it to be for me. In all these years had she ever thought of me? I could match in neediness any broken-down indigent of the Congo. And if things were so godless in New York, what better place for a missioner?The sister had enclosed a photograph of herself and some little children in front of what looked to be the village church. It is not much more than a stone hut with a cross over the door, Langley said. And she looks different.How so?This is a mature woman. Maybe it’s because she’s wearing a sun hat. You see just her hairline and her face. She looks heavier than I remember.Good, I said.Nor is the letter that of a girl. This is a grown woman talking. How old do you suppose she is?I don’t want to hear it, I said.Past fifty, I should think. But isn’t it interesting that someone in the grip of such a monstrous religious fantasy — believing she is doing the Lord’s work — is doing the work that the Lord would be doing if there was a Lord?I could not be as philosophical as Langley about my sweet girl’s chosen life. I will not here detail the lascivious proposals of my imagination, the arch seductions that I composed at night from my memory of her slight figure, the modest indications of her form in the simple dresses she wore, or from the touch of her hand on my arm as we strode to the movie theater where she told me what was on the screen. The lips and eyes I had traced with my fingertips I now kissed, and from the shoulder that had brushed mine as we sat together at the piano I now let loose the strap of her shift. This went on for some nights, she in her shy acquiescence and I gently but firmly teaching her her pleasure and seeing to the conception of our child. How sad that I was reduced to these expedients till all my anguish was dissolved in futility and the tactile image of what had been Mary Elizabeth Riordan had faded from my mind.I don’t know how Langley truly felt about her letter. He would rather hide behind some philosophical bon mot than reveal what love he had kept for the girl. It would not be in character for my brother to identify with Quasimodo. But it happened that the next period of our lives saw an uncharacteristic sociability akin to recklessness on both our parts, as we opened our house to the strange breed of citizen now springing up around the country. If there was a thin edge of bitterness to what we were doing, if we were moving as far away as we could from the saintliness of Mary Elizabeth Riordan, disinheriting her in our minds and consigning ourselves to hellish reality by looking for her replacement, we were not conscious of it.Of course that another damnable war had sprung up was enough to strip away any residual inhibitions I may have had. Was this country unexceptional after all? I was at this point in my life as close in spirit to Langley’s philosophical despair as I had ever been.