E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

The first reporter who rang our bell — a really stupid young man who expected to be invited in, and when we wouldn’t permit that, stood there asking offensive questions, even shouting them out after we had slammed the door — made me realize it was a class of disgustingly fallible human beings who turned themselves into infallible print every day, compounding the historical record that stood in our house like bales of cotton. If you talk to these people you are at their mercy, and if you don’t talk to them you are at their mercy. Langley said to me, We are a story, Homer. Listen to this — and he read this supposedly factual account about these weird eccentrics who had shuttered their windows and bolted their doors and run up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills though they were worth millions. It had our ages wrong, Langley was called Larry, and a neighbor, unnamed, thought we kept women against their will. That our house was a blight on the neighborhood was never in question. Even the abandoned peregrine nest up under the roof ledge was held against us.

I said to my brother: How would you run this in Collyer’s forever up-to-date newspaper?

We are sui generis, Homer, he said. Unless someone comes along as remarkably prophetic as we are, I’m obliged to ignore our existence.

THE ATTENTION FROM the press was not continuous, but we had become a stop on the beat, as it were, a reliable source of wonder for the reading public. We could laugh about this, at least at the beginning, but it became less funny and more alarming as time went on. Some of these reporters published the details of our parents’ lives — when they bought the house and how much they paid for it — all matters of public record if you had nothing better to do than go downtown and dig through city archives. And they found out from old census reports and ship manifests when our ancestors arrived on these shores — it was early in the nineteenth century — and where they lived, their generations, artisans risen to the professions, the marriages made, the children begotten, and so forth. So now all of that was public knowledge but what was the point except to indicate the decline of a House, the Fall of a reputable family, the shame of all that history in that it had led to us, the without-issue Collyer brothers lurking behind closed doors and coming out only at night.

I admit to feeling at secret times, usually just before falling asleep, that if one held to conventional bourgeois values he could read the Collyer brothers as end-of-the-line. Then I would get angry with myself. After all, we were living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention — could we not be a supreming of the line, a flowering of the family tree?

Langley said: Who cares who our distinguished ancestors were? What balderdash. All those census records, all those archives, attest only to the self-importance of the human being who gives himself a name and a pat on the back and doesn’t admit how irrelevant he is to the turnings of the planet.

I wasn’t prepared to go that far, for if you felt that way what was the use of living in the world, of believing in yourself as an identifiable person with an intellect and desires and the ability to learn and to affect outcomes? But of course Langley liked to say these things, he had been saying them all our adult lives, and for someone who had no regard for his own distinctiveness, he was certainly putting up a struggle, holding off the city agencies, the creditors, the neighbors, the press and relishing the battle. Oh and then one night he thought he had heard something scurrying about the house. I could hear it too when he brought it to my attention. We stood in the living room and listened. A clicking sound that I thought was above our heads. He thought it was inside the wall. Was it one creature or more than one? We couldn’t tell but whatever it was, it was weirdly busy, busier than we were. Langley decided we had mice. I didn’t tell him I thought it might be something larger. By this time I wouldn’t have heard mice. The sound was not that of something small, and not of a timid interloper, but of something living in our house impertinently, without our leave. This was a creature with clear intentions. Listening to its busy click click click I imagined it as arranging things to its satisfaction. It was unnerving, how presumptive the sound was, almost as to make me think I was the interloper. And if it was inside the walls or between the floors, how could we hope it would stay there without venturing into the house proper?

Langley went out that night and came back with two stray cats, and set them out to catch whatever it was, and when that didn’t bring immediate results he added another three or four, all of them strays — tough street cats with loud voices — until we had a half dozen roaming among our crowded rooms like sentries, cats that had to be fed and spoken to and with litter boxes that had to be emptied. My brother, who had no regard for the pretensions of the human race, turned out to have the feelings of a fond father for these feral cats. They climbed upon the jumbles or piles or stacks of things and liked to leap down onto our shoulders. I would sometimes trip over one, for they had lengthy rest periods and lay about, upstairs and down, and if I stepped on a tail and produced a hissing protest Langley would say, Homer, try to be more careful.

So now we had cats on patrol, slinking everywhere around and under everything, and I still heard the toenail clicks in the ceiling at night as I lay in bed, and sometime a scratching at the walls. But this was not an exclusively nocturnal animal — I could hear it running about in the daytime as well, particularly when I stood in the dining room. I don’t think I have mentioned the elaborate crystal chandelier that hung in the dining room. Apparently the mysterious creature or family of creatures — for I was coming to believe that more than one was involved — had so befouled their residence over the dining room that the sodden ceiling buckled, looking, said Langley, like the bottom of the moon, and down came the chandelier — like some sort of parachute on a cable — shattering against the Model T, the pendant crystals flying off in every direction and scattering the yowling cats.

I remembered seeing, as a child, one of my mother’s maids standing on a ladder under that chandelier and removing each crystal, cleaning it with a cloth, and hanging it back on its hook. She had let me hold one. I was surprised at how heavy it was — it was shaped like two slender pyramids with their bases stuck together and when I told her that she had smiled and said what a smart boy I was.

OUR DIFFICULTIES WITH the bank that held our mortgage — by now the Dime Savings Bank, for these things are traded about, just as the banks themselves undergo metamorphoses, the original Corn Exchange of which I was so fond having become the Chemical Corn Exchange, with maybe the seeds of a potent hybrid crop secreted within its vaults, and then the Corn disappeared, perhaps burned away by its chemical components, and lo, it was the Chase Chemical and then the chemistry was gone and it was the rock-hard Chase Manhattan, and so on, in the endless process of corporate mutations in which nothing changes or is improved, according to Langley — but anyway, our difficulties with the Dime Savings culminated in a contretemps at the top of our front steps, with an actual banker — accompanied by a city marshal to suggest what an eviction would feel like — standing there and waving a summons in my face and, presumably, Langley’s as well.

We were, the four of us, standing at the top of the steps, the brothers confronting the two unwelcome guests, who, with their backs to the street, were, militarily speaking, in an indefensible position. I listened to the banker intone our dire fate — he was a baritone with a supercilious Park Avenue diction — and thought, If he breezes those papers in front of my nose one more time I shall give him a shove and listen to the fracturings of his skull as he goes down backward on our granite stoop. It was unlike me to contemplate violence — I was surprised by it myself and not entirely displeased — but Langley, from whom one would expect something that radical, said, Just wait a moment, and withdrew inside to emerge a minute later with one of his mail-order law books in hand. I heard the shuffle of the pages. Ah yes, he said, all right then, I accept your summons — give it here — and will see you at court — let’s see — the hearing should be in about six to eight weeks, as I understand these matters.