E. Doctorow: Homer & Langley

Fairly regularly we received unsigned letters of vilification. I remember a day when the envelopes slid through the mail slot and fell on the floor in a way to make me think of fish flopping out of a net. We were threatened, we were cursed, and one day an envelope we opened had for its message a dead cockroach. Was that a little hieroglyph to represent us in the view of the correspondent? Or did that mean we were held responsible for infesting the neighborhood with vermin? It is true that we had cockroaches — had had them for as long as I could remember. They never bothered me, I would feel something crawling on my ankle and brush it away as I would a fly or a mosquito. Langley respected cockroaches as having a kind of intelligence, or even personality, with their cunning evasiveness, and their bravery, as when under attack they would leap off a counter into the unknown. And they could indicate their displeasure with a hiss or a squeak. Nevertheless we did have traps set out for them and of course it was nonsense to blame us for the infestation of other houses. People in this neighborhood were embarrassed to admit their own distinguished homes were pest-ridden. But cockroaches had been city residents since the days of Peter Stuyvesant.

Langley had set aside his newspapers, stacking the dailies for future reading, because his legal studies with the mail-order law school now took most of his time. This was not a mere academic exercise. He was attempting to hold off not only the utilities and other creditors, but also the Health and Fire Departments, both of whom were demanding entry, in order to find things to alarm them. He was able to find a city statute that complicated things for them when they threatened to get court orders. He had also gone out and secured a Legal Aid Society lawyer, who, for no fee, was prepared at Langley’s instruction to make various legal motions, as impediments, when and if things progressed to the next stage, as we assumed they would. Overall we would take the position that a mere cursory examination by that Fire Department inspector after the backyard fire — which is what had set off all this hullabaloo — was not sufficient cause to violate the constitutional sanctity of a man’s home.

It was clear to me that Langley relished all this, and I was glad to see that he was engaged in a practical enterprise for a change. It brought a here-and-now component to his life, an immediacy, and the promise, good or bad, of an outcome, which was not the case with his eternal, never-to-be-achieved, Platonic newspaper. My only contribution was to listen every now and then to an example he had found of legal reasoning that seemed to him to have come out of an insane asylum.

It certainly didn’t help us in our relations with the neighbors and contretemps with the city bureaucracies that all of New York at this time was experiencing a deterioration in the civil order: municipal services breaking down — uncollected garbage, graffitied subway cars — street crimes rising, drug addicts abounding. I understood too that our professional sports teams were doing badly in the standings.

Under these circumstances, our closed shutters and the two-by-four bolt on our front door seemed to make sense. My life now was entirely in the house.

IT WAS AROUND this time that I noticed my precious Aeolian was off by a half tone in the middle octaves. The bass notes and the treble notes seemed all right, and this is what I found strange, that the piano would have gone out of tune in that discretionary manner. I thought, well of course, since the shutters had been closed, the house had become noticeably musty, and with everything gathering dust in every room, everything you could imagine piled almost to the ceiling, as well as the newspaper bales that served as walls for our mazelike pathways, it was no wonder that a delicate instrument would be affected. On a rainy day the dampness was palpable and the odor of the basement mildew seemed to come up through the floor.

There were other pianos of course, or piano innards. Some were definitely out of tune in the usual way, as why would they not be — but I began to be alarmed when I turned on the player piano, which I had kept covered with a plastic sheet, and heard that same sharpness in the middle octaves. Then I groped around till I found the little portable electric piano, a computer actually — with different settings it would sound like a flute or a violin or an accordion, and so on — that Langley had recently brought into the house. I remember being grateful that it could sit comfortably on a table. Because Langley’s first computer was the size of a refrigerator, a huge bulky thing with vacuum tubes that he had been able to buy — for a song, he said — only because it was an obsolete model. He was not able to put it to the test and see if it did whatever computers did — something in the nature of calculations, he said, and when I asked calculations of what, he said of anything — because by the time he would figure out what to do with it we would have no electricity. So I didn’t understand how this little computer that looked like a keyboard and that worked on batteries did whatever calculations it had to do to play music, except that it did. And when I flicked on the switch, and played a scale, this instrument, with nothing like strings to go out of tune, was out of tune in the middle register, just like my Aeolian.

At that moment I understood it was not any piano but my hearing that was off-key. I was hearing a C as a C-sharp. That was the beginning. I shrugged and persuaded myself that I could live with it. The pieces in my repertoire I could hear by memory as if nothing was wrong. But over time it would become not just a matter of pitch, of an off-key sound, but of no sound at all. I didn’t want to believe that was happening even as I understood that it was, slowly but surely. Months were to go by before, decibel by decibel, the world would grow muffled and I would lose my prideful hearing entirely and so be worse off than Beethoven, who could at least see.

If it had happened all of a sudden that I was to lose the last sense that connected me to the world, I would have screamed in terror and found some way as quickly as possible to end my life. But it came upon me gradually, allowing me progressive degrees of acceptance, with hope that every degree of loss would be the last, until, in the growing quiet of my despair, I resolved to accept my fate, having been taken by an odd impulse to find out what life would be like when my hearing was completely gone and, without sight or sound, I had only my own consciousness to amuse me.

I did not tell Langley about any of this. I don’t know why. Perhaps I thought that he would instantly add ears to his medical practice. It had reached the point where for the recovery of my eyesight he had prescribed for breakfast every morning seven peeled oranges and with lunch two eight-ounce glasses of orange juice and with dinner an orange cordial instead of my preferred glass of Almaden wine. If I had told him my hearing was awry he would have surely found some Langleyan cure for that. Under the circumstances I kept my own counsel and distracted myself with the problems we were having with the outside world.

I’M NOT SURE WHEN our battles with the Health and Fire Departments, the bank, the utilities, and everyone else who was demanding some kind of satisfaction attracted the notice of the press. I will not pretend to a precision of remembrance as I try to tell of our life in this house in these last few years. Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away. I feel I have not the leisure to tax myself for the right date, the right word. The best I can do is put things down as they occur to me and hope for the best. Which is a shame for as I’ve kept to this task I’ve developed a taste for an exact rendering of our lives, seeing and hearing with words if with nothing else.