E. Doctorow: Homer & Langley

ONLY AFTER JULIA HAD packed and left did I feel really stupid. As if her absence brought her into moral clarity. While consorting with her I’d had no idea of who she was — she was a presence fragmented by my self-satisfaction — but now, as I reflected on her frustrated ambition, the almond smell of her and the places on her body that I’d held in my hands coalesced into a person by whom I felt betrayed. This immigrant woman with her strategies. She had set forth on this domestic field of battle with a battle plan. Rather than maid-servant who in fear of being thrown out in the street gives in to her master’s desires, she was in service only to herself, an actress, a performer, playing a role.I asked Langley to describe her appearance. A sturdy little thing, he said. Brown hair much too long, she had to wind it around and pin it up under that cap and of course it didn’t quite work and so with strands and curls hanging about her face and neck she drew attention to herself as a servant never would who knows her place. We should have had her cut her hair.But then she wouldn’t have been Julia, I said. And she told me her hair was the color of wheat.A dull dark brown, Langley said.And her eyes?I didn’t notice the color of her eyes. Except that they glanced around constantly as if she was talking to herself in the Hungarian language. We had to fire her, Homer, she was too smart to trust. But I’ll give you this: it is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year. We had to fire the girl, but in fact she demonstrates the genius of our national immigration policy. Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?She didn’t even say goodbye.Well there you have it. She’ll be rich someday.

FOR CONSOLATION I DOVE into my music, but for the first time in my life it failed me. I decided the Aeolian needed tuning. We summoned Pascal, the piano tuner, a prissy little Belgian drenched in a cologne that lingered in the music room for days afterward. Il n’y a rien mal avec ce piano , he said, as I assemble him in my bad French. By calling him to review his unerring work I had insulted him. In fact the problem was not the piano, it was my repertoire, which consisted entirely of works I had learned when I could still read music. It was no longer enough for me. I was restless. I needed to work on new pieces.A society for the blind had gotten a music publisher to print works in musical Braille. So I ordered some music. But it was no use — though I could read Braille, my fingers wouldn’t translate the little dots into sounds. The notations would not combine, each somehow stood alone, and anything contrapuntal was beyond me.Here is where Langley came to the rescue. He found at some estate auction a player piano, an upright. It came with dozens of perforated paper scrolls on cylinders. You fitted the cylinders on two dowels, the scroll running athwart, you pumped the foot pedals, the keys depressed as if by magic, and what you heard was a performance of one of the greats, Paderewski, Anton Rubinstein, Josef Hoffmann, as if they were sitting right there beside you on the piano bench. In this way I added to my repertoire, listening to the piano rolls over and over until I could place my fingers on the keys precisely at the moment they were mechanically pressed. Then finally, I could turn to my own Aeolian and play the piece for myself, in my own interpretation. I mastered any number of Schubert impromptus, Chopin études, Mozart sonatas, and I and my music were in accord once again.The player piano was the first of many pianos Langley was to collect over the years — there are a good dozen here, in whole or in part. He may have had my interests in mind when he began, possibly he believed that there had to be somewhere in the world a better-sounding piano than my Aeolian. Of course there wasn’t though I dutifully tried each one he brought home. If I didn’t like it he stripped it down to its innards to see what could be done and so came to see pianos as machines, music-making machines, to be taken apart and wondered at and put back together. Or not. When Langley brings something into the house that has caught his fancy — a piano, a toaster, a Chinese bronze horse, a set of encyclopedias — that is just the beginning. Whatever it is, it will be acquired in several versions because until he loses his interest and goes on to something else he’ll be looking for its ultimate expression. I think there may be a genetic basis for this. Our father collected things as well, for along with the many shelves of medical volumes in his study are stoppered glass jars of fetuses, brains, gonads, and various other organs preserved in formaldehyde — all apropos of his professional interests, of course. Still, I can’t really believe that Langley doesn’t bring to his passion for collecting things something entirely his own: he is morbidly thrifty — ever since we’ve been running this household ourselves he’s worried about our finances. Saving money, saving things, finding value in things other people have thrown away or that may be of future use in one way or another — that’s part of it too. As you might expect of an archivist of the daily papers, Langley has a world view and since I don’t have one of my own I have always gone along with what he does. I knew someday it would all become as logical and sound and sensible to me as it was to him. And that has long since come to pass. Jacqueline, my muse, I speak to you directly for a moment: You have looked in on this house. You know there is just no other way for us to be. You know it is who we are. Langley is my older brother. He is a veteran who served bravely in the Great War and lost his health for his efforts. When we were young what he collected, what he brought home, were those thin volumes of verse that he read to his blind brother. Here’s a line: “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle …”

MY EXPANDED REPERTOIRE came in very handy when I took a job playing piano for silent movies, where I had to improvise pieces according to the nature of the scene being shown. If it was a love scene I would play, say, Schumann’s “Träumerei,” if it was a fight scene, the fast movement of a furious late Beethoven, if soldiers were marching, I’d march with them, and if there was a glorious finale I could improvise the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.You will ask how I could know what was up on the screen. It was a girl we had hired, a music student who sat beside me and told me sotto voce exactly what was going on. Now a funny chase with people falling out of cars, she would say, or here comes the hero riding a horse at a gallop, or the firemen are sliding down a pole, or — and here she would lower her voice and touch my shoulder — the lovers are embracing and looking into each other’s eyes and the card says “I love you.”Langley had found this student in the Hoffner-Rosenblatt Music School on West Fifty-ninth Street, and because in this time I am describing, the diminishing legacy of our parents due to some unfortunate investments had become apparent to us — which is why I had taken the job at this movie theater on Third Avenue, playing three complete shows from late afternoon into the evening, every weekend from Friday to Sunday — we did not pay her, my movie eyes, this girl Mary, only in coinage, we supplemented her small salary with free lessons given by me in our home. Since she lived with her grandmother and younger brother across town, on the far West Side, in Hell’s Kitchen in fact, in what had to be modest circumstances, her grandmother was only too happy not to have to pay for Mary’s lessons any longer. They were an immigrant family that had suffered major misfortune, both the girl’s parents having died, her father from an accident at the brewery where he worked, and his widow having succumbed to a cancer not long after that. And of course, eventually, to save her the streetcar fare, and because Siobhan had taken a liking to the girl, almost as if she were a daughter, Mary came to live with us. Her name was Mary Elizabeth Riordan, she was sixteen at the time, a parochial school graduate, and from all accounts the prettiest thing, with black curly hair and the fairest skin and pale blue eyes and her head held high with a straight proud posture, as if her slight frame should not indicate to an observer that here was a weakness that could be taken advantage of. But when we walked together to and from the movie theater, she held my arm as if we were a couple, and of course I fell in love with her, though not daring to do anything about it, being in my late twenties by now and beginning to lose my hair.I wouldn’t say Mary Riordan was an outstanding student of the piano, though she loved playing. In fact she was more than competent. I just felt her attack was not assertive enough, though when she worked on something like Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral, her sensitive touch seemed justified. She was just a gentle soul in all her ways. Her goodness was like the fragrance of pure unscented soap. And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe.How easily and with such grace she accommodated herself to her situation. After all, what an odd household we were, with these many rooms that must have seemed daunting to a child from the tenements, and a serving woman who had instantly adopted her and given her chores as a mother would do, and a cook whose characteristic glower did not change from morning till night. And a blind man whom she led to and from his job, and an iconoclast with a loud cough and a hoarse voice who rushed out every day, morning and evening, to buy every newspaper published in the city.Often when I sat next to her for her lesson I would fall into a reverie and just let her play without any instruction at all. Langley fell in love with her too — I could tell by his tendency to lecture when she was present. Langley’s improvised theories of music did not persuade the two of us, who could transmogrify instantly into the sinuous skein of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” He would insist, for example, that when prehistoric man discovered that he could make sounds by singing or beating on something or blowing through the end of a fossilized leg bone, his intention was to sound the vast emptiness of this strange world by saying “I am here, I am here!” Even your Bach, even your precious Mozart in his waistcoat and knee britches and silk stockings was doing no more than that, Langley said.We listened patiently to my brother’s ideas but said nothing and, when nothing further was said, went back to our lesson. On one occasion Mary couldn’t quite suppress a sigh, which sent Langley mumbling back to his newspapers. He and I were competing for the girl, of course, but it was a competition neither of us could win. We knew that. We didn’t talk about it but we both knew we suffered a passion that would destroy this girl if we ever acted upon it. I had come dangerously close. The little movie theater was right under the Third Avenue El. Every few minutes a train would roar overhead and on one occasion I pretended I couldn’t hear what Mary was saying. Still playing with my left hand, I took my right hand off the keys and pressed her frail shoulder till her face was close to mine and her lips brushed my ear. It was all I could do not to take her in my arms. I was almost made ill by my heedlessness. I atoned by buying her an ice cream on the way home. She was a brave but wounded thing, legally an orphan. We were in loco parentis, and always would be. She had her own room up on the top floor next to Siobhan’s and I would think of her sleeping there, chaste and beautiful, and wonder if the Catholics were not right in deifying virginity and if Mary’s parents had not been wise in conferring upon her frail beauty the protective name of the mother of their God.