E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

All you need do to avoid foreclosure, said the banker, somewhat disconcerted — for he had not expected any legal knowledge of us and a court hearing meant lawyers for the bank and endless protraction of the dispute before any eviction could occur — all you need do, sir, is retire the months in arrears and the bank will consider our customer relationship as in the past and there will be no need for a court hearing. We have had a long and amenable relationship with the Collyer family and have no wish to have it end badly.

Langley: No that’s all right. Even if a judge rules in your favor, which is not at all certain given your usurious four-point-five percent interest rate, he will issue a lis pendens , which as you know is a redemption period of another three months. Let’s see, on top of the two months until we appear in court that’s almost a half year before we have to do anything, or retire anything. And who knows, we might before the final bell decide to pay off the whole damn mortgage, or maybe not. Who can tell? Good day to you, sir. We do appreciate your taking time out of your busy banker’s day to personally call on us but now, if you don’t mind, take your marshal with you and get the hell off our property.

BY THE FOLLOWING spring we did pay off the mortgage. As I believe I’ve mentioned, Langley decided to do that in person. After having advised the bank by mail when he would appear, he walked from our house on upper Fifth Avenue to the Dime Savings on Worth Street in the Financial District, a distance nearly half the length of Manhattan.

Typically, the press got it wrong: my brother wasn’t trying merely to save carfare — that was a secondary consideration. Really he wanted to keep the officers of the Dime Savings in a state of suspense.

WITH LANGLEY ON his way that morning, I decided to get some air. I put on a clean shirt, an old but very comfortable cashmere sweater, my tweed jacket, and a reasonably unworn pair of trousers. If any reporters were hanging about I assumed that Langley would have drawn them off and I could get across to the park without incident. Also, it was fairly early in the day when the curiosity seekers were less likely to be found lingering in front of the house. That is what the newspaper stories had done for us, you see, made our home something to stare at, and there were times, usually on the weekends, when a small crowd would have gathered to look at our boarded-up windows, hoping for one of the maniac brothers to step outside and shake his fist at them. Or they would point at the gap in the cornice where the marble corbel had fallen to the sidewalk — have I mentioned that? — almost hitting someone walking past at that moment, except that it hadn’t and he had to be content with a suit claiming a small chip of the marble had flown up and damaged his eye. But with all these people coming around — if two or three were standing there and a passerby wondered what was going on, he would stop as well — they would engage in conversation, some of which I could hear when I stood behind the shutter of a window that was open a crack. It amazed me how proprietary some of these people felt — you’d think it was their house falling to pieces.

But at this time everything sounded quiet enough. I walked out into a warm spring morning and stood at the curb waiting for a lull in the traffic. My hearing at this point having lost a degree of its brilliance I thought the moment had come, and I’d already stepped off the curb when a woman called out No! — or Non! — for this was Jacqueline Roux, the about-to-be dear friend of my end of life — even at the same time as I heard tires screech and horns blow, perhaps even fenders creasing, but in any case I stood transfixed, having stopped traffic. Through all of this, footsteps approaching, and the same confident voice behind me saying, All right, now we may go, and her arm through my arm and her hand gripping my hand as, despite the shouts and curses, we walked unhurriedly across Fifth Avenue like old friends out for a stroll. And in this way, and not the only time, did Jacqueline Roux save my life.

I AM IN THE DARKNESS and silence deeper than the poet’s sea-dingle but I see that morning in the park and hear her voice and remember her words as if I was back outside of myself and the world was before me. She found us a bench in the sun, asked me my name and told me hers. I thought she must be remarkably self-assured to take charge of a blind man and then, having done the good deed, to sit down to talk with him. People who help you usually make a quick exit.

This is so perfect, she said.

A match was struck. I smelled the acrid smoke of one of her European cigarettes. I heard her inhale to get the smoke as far into herself as she could.

Because you are just the man I was coming to see, she said.

Me? You know who I am?

Oh yes, Homer Collyer, you and your brother are famous now in France.

Good God. Don’t tell me you’re a reporter.

Well, it’s true, I write sometime for the papers.

Look, I know you’ve just saved my life—

Oh, poof—

— and I should really be more gracious, but the fact is my brother and I don’t talk to reporters.

She didn’t seem to hear me. You have a good face, she said, good features, and your eyes, even so, are rather attractive. But too thin, you are too thin, and a barber would be advisable.

She inhaled, she exhaled: I am not here to interview you. I am to write about your country. I have been everywhere because I don’t know what I am looking for.

She had been to California and the Northwest, she had been to the Mojave Desert and to Chicago and Detroit, and to Appalachia, and now here she was with me on a park bench.

If I am a reporter, she said, it is to report on my own self, my own feelings for what I discover. I am trying to get this country — is that how you say it, to get something is to understand it? I have leave for a very impressionist Jacqueline Roux commentary for Le Monde —yes a newspaper, but my commentary is not to be where I’ve been or who I’ve talked to, but what I have learned of your secrets.

What secrets?

I am to write about what cannot be seen. It is difficult.

To take our measure.

All right, yes, that. When I found your address I looked at your house with its black shutters. In Europe we have shutters for the windows, not here so much I should have thought. In France, in Italy, in Germany, the shutters are because of our history. History makes it advisable to have heavy shutters on the windows, and to close them at night. In this country the homes are not hidden behind walls, within courtyards. You have not enough history for that. Your homes confront the street unafraid, for everyone to see. So why do you have black shutters on your windows, Homer Collyer? What does it mean for the Collyer family to have the shutters closed on a warm spring day?

I don’t know. Maybe there is enough history to go around.

With your views of the park, she said. Not to look out? Why?

I come out to the park. As now. Must I defend myself? We’ve lived here all our lives, my brother and I. We do not neglect the park.

Good. In fact your Central Park is what drew me to New York, you know.

Oh, I said, I thought it was me.

Yes, that is what I am doing here besides meeting with strange men. She laughed. Walking in Central Park.

At that moment I wanted to touch her face. Her voice was in the alto register — a smoker’s voice. When she had taken my arm, from the feel of her sleeve on my wrist — the material might have been corduroy — I had the impression of a woman in her late thirties, early forties. As we had walked across Fifth Avenue I thought her shoes might be what were called sensible, just from the sound of the heels hitting the ground, though I was no longer as confident of my deductions as I had once been.