E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

IN THESE MANY years since the war Langley had still not found a companion in love. I knew he was looking. For a while he was very serious about a woman named Anna. If she had a last name I would not hear it. When I asked him what she looked like he said, A radical. I first knew of her existence when he began bringing home nothing from his nighttime explorations but handfuls of pamphlets, which he slapped down on the side table just inside the front door. I measured the seriousness of his passion by the uncharacteristic grooming ritual that he performed before going out in the evening. He would call to Siobhan when he couldn’t find a tie or wanted a washed shirt.But he never got anywhere with this courtship. He returned home one evening rather early and came into the music room, where I had been practicing, and sat himself down to listen. So of course I stopped, turned on the bench, and asked him how the evening had gone. She has no time for dinner or anything else, he said. She will see me if I come to a meeting with her. If I stand on a corner with her and give out flyers to passersby. Like I have to pass these tests. I asked her to marry me. You know what her response was? A lecture about how marriage is a legalized form of prostitution. Can you imagine? Are all radicals that insane?I asked Langley what sort of radical she was. Who knows, he said. What difference does it make? She’s some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you’re one of them you can’t tell exactly what any of them are. When they’re not throwing bombs they’re busy splitting into factions.Not long after this Langley asked me one evening if I’d like to go with him over to a pier on Twentieth Street to see Anna off to Russia. She was being deported and he wanted to say goodbye. Let’s go, I said. I was curious to meet this woman who had so interested my brother.We hailed a taxi. I couldn’t help thinking of the time we children saw our parents off to England on the Mauretania . I’d stopped crying when I saw the massive white hull and four towering red-and-black smokestacks. There were flags everywhere and hundreds of people at the rail waving as this huge ship began with some seemingly great and noble intelligence of its own to slip away from the dock. When her basso horns blew I nearly jumped out of my skin. How wonderful it all was. And nothing like the scene as we arrived at the Twentieth Street pier to say goodbye to Langley’s friend Anna. It was raining. There was some sort of demonstration going on. We were pushed back by a police line. We couldn’t get close. What a sad-looking tub, Langley said. Her passengers were deportees, a whole boatload of them. They stood at the rail shouting and singing “The Internationale,” their socialist anthem. People on the pier sang along, though unsynchronized. It was like hearing the music and then its echo. I don’t see her, Langley said. Whistles blew. I heard women crying, I heard cops cursing and using their clubs. In the distance a police siren. It was sickening to sense from the tremors in the air the application of official brute behavior. And then I heard thunder and the rain turned into a downpour. It seemed to me it was the river water swirled into the sky to drop down on us, so rank was the smell.Langley and I went home and he poured us shots of scotch whiskey. You see, Homer, he said, there’s no such thing as an armistice.

THEN CAME A PERIOD when my brother would bring home a woman from one of our nightclub sprees and after enduring her for a week or a month, he would kick her out. He would even marry a lady named Lila van Dijk, who would live with us for a year before he kicked her out.Almost from the beginning he and Lila van Dijk did not get along. It was not just that she couldn’t bear the stacks of newspapers — most women would feel that way who like their ducks in a row. Lila van Dijk had a mind to change everything. She would rearrange the furniture and he would put it all back the way it was. She complained about his coughing. She complained that cigarette ash was everywhere. She complained about Siobhan’s cleaning, she complained about Mrs. Robileaux’s cooking. She even complained about me: He’s just as bad as you are, I heard her say to Langley. She was an imperious little woman who had one leg shorter than the other and so wore a built-up shoe that I would hear tapping up and down the stairs and from one room to another as she went on her tours of inspection. I had intuited nothing about Langley’s Anna — an indistinct voice in a shipboard chorus. I knew more than I wanted to know about his Lila van Dijk.They had married at her parents’ estate in Oyster Bay, and though I dressed for the occasion in my summer ducks and blue blazer, Langley stood before the pastor in his usual baggy corduroys and an open shirt with the sleeves rolled. I had tried to dissuade him but to no avail. And though the van Dijks handled it with dignity, pretending to believe their about-to-be son-in-law was dressed in some sort of bohemian Arts and Crafts style, I could tell they were furious.Lila van Dijk and Langley practiced their debating skills on a daily basis. I’d go to the piano to drown them out, and if that didn’t work I’d go for a walk. What brought on the final break between them was our cook Mrs. Robileaux’s grandson, Harold, who had arrived from New Orleans with one suitcase and a cornet. Harold Robileaux. Once we realized he was in the house we converted a basement storage room into a place for him to stay. He was a serious musician and he practiced for hours at a time. He was good too. He would take a hymn like “He walks with me / And He talks with me / And He tells me I am His own …” slowing the tempo to bring out the pure tones of his cornet, a mellower sound than you’d ever expect from something made of brass. I could tell he really understood and loved this instrument. The music rose up through the walls and spread through the floors so that it seemed as if our house was the instrument. And then after he had gone through a verse or two, which was enough to make you repent of your pagan life, he’d up the tempo with little stuttering syncopations — as in He waw-walks with me, and taw-talks with me and tells me, yes he tells me I’m his own de own doe-in — and from one moment to the next it became a fervently joyous hymn that made you feel like dancing.I had heard swing on the radio and of course frequented the clubs where there was a dance orchestra, but Harold Robileaux’s hymnal improvisations in our basement were my introduction to Negro jazz. I would never master that music myself, the stride piano, the blues, and that later development, boogie-woogie. Eventually Harold, who was very shy, was persuaded to come upstairs to the music room. We tried to play something together but it didn’t quite work, I was too thick, I didn’t have the ear for what he could do, I could not compose as he could, taking a tune and playing endless variations of it. He would try to get me to join in on this or that piece, he was a gentle fellow of endless patience, but I didn’t have it in me, that improvisatory gift, that spirit.But we got along, Harold and I. He was short, portly of figure, and with a round smooth face with that brown coloration that feels different from white skin, and plump cheeks and thick lips — a perfect physiognomy, breath and embouchure, for his instrument. He would listen to my Bach and say, Uh-huh, tha’s right. He was soft-spoken except when he played, and he was young enough to believe that the world would be fair to him if he worked hard and did his best and played his heart out. That’s how young he was, though he said he was twenty-three. And his grandmother, why, the minute he was set up in the house her whole personality changed, she adored him and looked on the rest of us with a new forbearance and understanding. We had accepted him without a moment’s hesitation even though, as was her wont, she had brought him in and tucked him away for a few days without bothering to inform us. The first we knew of our boarder was when we heard his cornet, and that’s when she was reminded to come to us and tell us Harold Robileaux would be staying for a while.I liked to listen to him play, as Langley did — this was a new feature of our lives. Harold went out every evening to Harlem and eventually he got together with some other young musicians and they formed their own band and came to our house to rehearse. We were all very happy about this except for Lila van Dijk, who couldn’t believe that Langley would actually permit the Harold Robileaux Five to come play their vulgar music in the house without consulting her. Then one day Langley opened the front door and let passersby come up who had stopped at the foot of the front stoop to listen, and despite the music and the crowd gathered in the drawing room and the music room — for Langley had opened the sliding doors between them — right in the middle of all that, with the cornet leading and the snare drum and tuba keeping the beat, and my commandeered piano and the soprano saxophone riffling along, and people snapping their fingers in time, I heard with my acute hearing the screeches upstairs of Lila van Dijk and the growly cursing responses of my brother, as they formally went about ending their marriage.This will cost us a pretty penny, Langley said after Lila was gone. If she’d cried just once, if she had showed any vulnerability whatsoever, I would have tried to see things from her point of view if only out of respect for her womanhood. But she was intractable. Stubborn. Willful.Homer, maybe can you tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself.