E. Doctorow: Homer & Langley

WHEN MONTHS WENT by and I did not hear from Jacqueline Roux, I began to think of her as an exotic accident, in the same sense that bird-watchers whom in past years I’ve chatted with in the park have informed me that birds discovered out of their normal range — a tropical specie for instance ending up, say, on a beach in North America — are called “accidentals.” So perhaps Jacqueline Roux was a French accidental who happened to land on the sidewalk in front of our house for a rare one-time-only sighting.

I couldn’t avoid feeling let down. I went over our conversation that day in the park and wondered if, in some cunning professional writer’s way, she had led me on, and that I would be portrayed in her French newspaper as a total idiot. Perhaps I had been so grateful to be treated like a normal person that I had been overly enthralled with her. As time passed, and Langley and I became increasingly occupied with the war being waged against us by just about everyone, she, Jacqueline, began to figure in my mind as someone with flighty foreign ideas who had no place in our embattled world. The haircuts I got and the new suit of clothes I had bought in anticipation of her return were like any other played-out fantasies of mine. How pathetic — that I would think there was any possibility in my disabled life for a normal relationship outside of the Collyer house.

I was so hurt with disappointment that I could no longer think happily of Jacqueline Roux. There were mental shutters too and mine were closed tight as I turned back to what I could rely on, the filial bond.

AT THIS TIME MY brother was also down in the dumps. Only something as decisive as paying off a mortgage could have put him there. Whereas I was relieved that we no longer had to worry about losing our home, he felt amortization, militarily, as a defeat. I had thought his aplomb in dealing with the bank was praiseworthy, but he could think only of the end result: the money was gone. And so he was depressed and not very good company. The daily papers went unread. He would come back from his nighttime salvage operations empty-handed.

I didn’t know what to do about this turn of events. I claimed, by way of cheering him up, that I thought my hearing was better — a lie. The portable radio by my bedside had stopped working, as well it might have at its advanced age — it was one of those heavy early portables with a handle for carrying that had been a great technical advance in radios fifty years before when it was imagined that a beach or a lawn were ideal places to hear the news. Can you replace this? I asked, thinking it might get him out of the house on one of his expeditions. Nothing.

By a perverse bit of good fortune, though, a registered letter was delivered one morning from a law firm representing “Con Edison”—the new slick name of the Consolidated Edison Company that we thought appropriately confessional and self-defining. I wanted to express my gratitude to these people: as Langley read aloud this egregiously rude and menacing letter, I could sense him rising like a lion from its slumber. Can you believe this, Homer? Some wretched legal clerk daring to address the Collyers in this manner?

Our struggle with the utility had gone on for years given our practice of paying bills in a desultory way as a matter of principle, and now, with Langley’s foglike gloom suddenly lifting I felt everything returning to normal. Pacing about and swearing his undying hatred for this electromonopoly, as he called it, he proceeded to mail back the letter with his grammatical corrections in a nice neat packet of several years’ of unpaid bills, altogether weighing, he claimed, a good quarter of a pound. Homer, he would later tell me, I felt privileged to pay the postage.

Never again would we be subject to Con Edison’s intimidation because quite abruptly the lights went out. I knew this because I was waiting for the electric coffeemaker to finish its ritual when it gurgled, spat a blot of hot water in my face, and died. We were liberated, though without light. Apparently some dim rays came through the louvered shutters, but not enough for Langley to find any candles. We had a goodly supply of candles of every shape and kind, from dinner-table candles to sacramental candles in glasses, but of course they were under something, somewhere in the house, and though I could blunder about more easily than Langley neither of us could remember where to even begin looking, and so an investment was required. He went out and bought marine lamps, wilderness lamps, long-handled searchlights, propane lamps, mercury lamps, hurricane lamps, pocket flashlights, high-intensity beam lamps on poles, and for the upstairs hall with its clerestory window, a battery-powered sodium lamp which went on automatically as daylight faded. He even dug up an old buzzing sunlamp meant to tan the skin that we had once used to keep our mother’s plants alive, burning them to death in the process, so all that remained of her beloved nursery were stacks of clay pots and the soil they held.

When these lights were turned on all over the house, I imagined great looming shadows angled off in different directions, some streaming along the floor and bouncing up against the bales of newspapers, others shooting upward at the ceiling to illuminate each drop of a particular leak. Not much had changed as far as I was concerned, and I was diplomatic enough not to ask Langley the initial cost of our investment in independent power — to say nothing of the ongoing expense of battery replacements. The key thing here was our self-reliance and I was just as happy that we hadn’t found the candles, which, what with one thing or another in our congested rooms, would no doubt have set something on fire — the piles of mattresses, the bundles of newsprint, the stacks of wooden crates my oranges came in, the old hanging tapestries, spillages of books, dust bunnies, the congealed puddle of oil under the Model T, God knows what — and brought us a return visit of the firemen with their rampant hoses.

THEN, AS IF INSPIRED by the malevolent electric company, the city turned off our water. Langley greeted this setback with relish. And I found myself participating with a kind of grim joy in the system we set up to provide ourselves with water. The hydrant at the curb was of no use — you could not circumspectly wrestle with a hydrant. What a psychological boost for me, then, to be working with my brother, a co-conspirator, as just before dawn every other morning or so we set out with two baby carriages in tandem, his with a ten-gallon milk can long since acquired with the idea that it might someday prove useful, and I with a couple of segmented crates filled with empty milk bottles gathered from our stoop when milk was delivered each morning to one’s door with two or three inches of cream in the neck of the bottle.

A few blocks north of us there was an old water post from the days when water was made available for horses. The water post, a heavy-gauge faucet built into a low concave stone wall whose base was a cement trough, stood at the curb. Langley jammed the carriage up against the trough and positioned the milk can at a tilt under the faucet so that he wouldn’t have to lift it out of the carriage. When the can was full, we filled each of the bottles and capped it with aluminum foil. The trip back was the difficult part, water weighing a lot more than I would have thought. To avoid the curbs at the ends of each block we went along in the street. There were no cars at this hour. I brought up the rear of our procession by keeping the folded carriage hood in touch with Langley’s back. I think we both enjoyed a kind of boyish excitement there in the first light of morning, when nobody was abroad in the land except us and the freshness of the air was carried on a soft breeze redolent of a countryside, as if we were not pushing our carriages down Fifth Avenue, but along a back road.