E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

A generous conversation ensues — practical, as if this is a problem to be solved. Why not write, then, she says. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

I am not persuaded.

You understand, Mr. Homer? You think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know — words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

The thought of life without my music is intolerable to me. I stand and pace. I blunder about and something goes over, a standing lamp. A bulb bursts. Jacqueline has my arm and sits me down on the bed. She sits beside me and takes my hand.

I say to her, Perhaps your French has music and so you think all language is musical. I do not hear music in my speech.

No, you are wrong.

And I have nothing to say. Given who I am what is there to write about?

Of course, your life, she says. Exactly who you are. Your life across from the park. Your history deserving of the black shutters. Your house that is a greater attraction than the Empire State Building.

And that is so sweetly and intimately funny that I cannot maintain my despair. It is overrun and we are laughing.

She allowed me to remove her glasses. And then the shivers of recognition as we lay together. This woman whom I barely knew. Who were we? Blindness and deafness was the world, there being nothing outside us. I don’t remember the sex. I felt her heart beating. I remember her tears under our kisses. I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.

I AM GRATEFUL THAT Langley from the very beginning encouraged me to write in lieu of my music. Did he receive his instructions from Jacqueline Roux? Or do I only imagine a conversation in which he was uncharacteristically respectful and submissive as she outlined the new plan for my life? The fact is, Langley has made it his mission to keep me going. At one point my typewriter broke down and he took it to a repair shop on Fulton Street. But then I had to wait two weeks for the repair to be done, so he saw to it that I would have another Braille machine — two, in fact: a Hammond and an Underwood and thus I have been able to continue. With the three machines set up on this table, and reams of paper in a crate on the floor beside me, I am endowed. It is she for whom I write. My muse. If she does not come back, if I never see her again, I have her in my contemplation. But she has promised to read what I’ve written. She will have to forgive the misspellings and the grammatical errors and the typing errors. I write in Braille and it is supposed to come out in English.

I have been at it for some time now. I have no clear sense of how long. I sense the passage of time as a spatial thing, as Langley’s voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked off down a long road, or is falling away in space, or as if some other sound that I can’t hear, a waterfall, has washed away his words. For a while I could still hear my brother as he shouted in my ear. At that time he devised a set of signals: he touches me once, twice, three times on the arm to mean he’s brought me something to eat, or that it is time to go to bed, or other such basic matters of daily life. But more complicated messages are communicated by his putting my index finger on the Braille keys and spelling out the words. To do this, he had to learn Braille himself, which he did quite efficiently. In this way I get what news there is, briefly, as in a headline.

But for a while now, I have lived in total silence, and so when he approaches and taps me on the arm I sometimes start, for I think of him always at a distance, someone small and far away, when suddenly he is standing here, loomed up like an apparition. It is almost as if the reality is his distance from me and the illusion is his presence.

Writing happens to coincide with my compensatory desire to stay alive. So I have kept busy in my own way while my brother goes about reconstructing the found materials of the house into an infernal machine. I have used the word paranoia to describe what he has done with the accumulations of decades. But in fact, almost with the first easing of the weather, he tells me a prowler did try to get through the back door at night. On another occasion he signaled that he heard someone moving about on the roof. I supposed we could anticipate more of the same: several of the newspapers from the very beginning of their stories about us had suggested that the Collyers, distrustful of banks, keep enormous amounts of cash stashed away. And for those street people and squatters who don’t read the papers, our dark and decaying building is an open invitation.

A COMPLICATION HAS arisen. Langley’s defensive strategy has made it unwise if not impossible for me to try to get around the house. For all practical purposes I am imprisoned. I am situated now just inside the doors of the drawing room with a single path to the bath under the stairs. Langley is also constrained. He has established himself in the kitchen with access in and out of the house through the back door to the garden. The front hall is completely blocked with boxes of books stacked to the ceiling. A narrow passageway between bales of newspaper and overhanging garden tools — shovels, rakes, a power drill, a wheelbarrow, all strung overhead by wire and rope from spikes he’s hammered into the walls — leads from his kitchen outpost to my enclave. He brings me my meals down this tunneled passageway. He tells me he navigates by flashlight over the trapwires strung at ankle level from wall to wall.

My bed is a mattress on the floor beside my typing table. I also have a small transistor radio that I hold up to my ear in hopes of hearing something sometime. I know it is spring only from the mildness of the atmosphere and because I no longer have to wear the heavy sweaters of winter or cower under the bedclothes at night. Langley’s bedroom is the kitchen and he sleeps, when he does, on the big table that once received our gangster friend Vincent.

My brother has taken pains to describe the snares and traps in the other rooms of the house. He is very proud of what he has done. Sometimes he puts my finger on the Braille keys for hours it seems like. Upstairs, he has so piled things up in pyramidal fashion that the least nudge of any one thing — rubber tires, an iron pressure cooker, dressmaker’s dummies, empty bureau drawers, beer kegs, flowerpots — I almost take pleasure from visualizing the possibilities — and the whole assemblage will fall on the interloper, the mythical trespasser, the object of Langley’s stratagems. Each room has its own punishing design of our things. Washboards greased with soap are laid on the floor for the unwary to step on. He is constantly busy working to improve the balance of the weights, and the snares and traps until he is sure they are perfect. One of his problems is the rats that have now come out of the walls. They pass through here at my feet regularly. He is at war with them. He bashes them with a shovel or takes up his old army rifle from the mantel and clubs them. I sometimes think I can hear something of what’s going on. Once or twice a rat has fallen prey to his traps. For every dead rat he draws an invisible notch on my arm.

WITHAL, MY SENSE is of an end to this life. I remember our house as it was in our childhood: a glorious elegance prevailed, calming and festive at the same time. Life flowed through the rooms unencumbered by fear. We boys chased each other up and down the stairs and in and out of the rooms. We teased the servants and were teased by them. We marveled at our father’s jarred specimens. As little boys we sat on the thick rugs and pushed our toy cars along the patterns. I took my piano lessons in the music room. We peeked from the hall at our parents’ resplendent, candlelit dinner parties. My brother and I could run out the front door and down the steps and across to the park as if it was ours, as if home and park, both lit by the sun, were one and the same.