Homer & Langley (13 page)

My thrill at having once met a famous gangster was indicative of how bored I was by my own life. When, a few weeks later, a news bulletin came over the radio that Vincent had been shot while dining in an East Side restaurant, it was a weird pride I felt—the sense of being a privileged insider, an I-knew-him-when feeling that was quite insensitive to the extremity of his situation. After all, I was a fellow who sat most of the day in his house, living without the normal complement of friends and associates, and with no practical enterprise to occupy his days, a man with nothing to show for his life but an overworked consciousness of it—who can blame me for acting like a fool?

It was that testimony he gave, I said to Langley. The crime
families don’t like publicity. The Mayor feels pressure to do something, the D.A. gets busy and the cops start pulling them in.

All at once, you see, I was the expert criminologist.

I waited by the radio. Diners had seen Vincent being carried to his limo and driven away. Was he alive or dead? I was left with a vague sense of expectation. That is something less than a premonition but can be just as unsettling. Jacqueline, when you read this, if you do, you might think, Yes, at this point of their lives poor Homer was losing his mind. But forget the oracular power I imputed to a TV set and you are left with an improbability that had a certain logic to it. I think now what happened I had wanted to happen, though what I will describe here was finally only one more passing event in our lives—as if our house were not our house but a road on which Langley and I were traveling like pilgrims.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG
I was sitting by the table radio in our father’s study. I was startled. Nobody ever called us. Langley had gone to his room to type the day’s news précis for his filing system. He came running downstairs. The phone was in the front hall. I answered. A man’s voice said, Is this the archdiocese? I said, No this is the Collyer residence. And the line went dead. The archdiocese? Maybe a minute later there was a pounding at the door. You understand this was a barrage of loud sudden sounds, a ringing phone, a pounding at the door, that rendered us totally responsive. When we opened the door three men barged in carrying another under the arms and legs, and that was the actual
Vincent, whose outflung arm knocked me aside, and left a wet streak on my shirt that turned out to be his blood.

What interests me—I discussed this many times with Langley over the years—was why we stood at the open door as these killers came past us, and instead of leaving the house to them and running off to find the police we responded dutifully to their shouts and orders, shutting the door and following them where they bumblingly wandered with Vincent howling when they stumbled over things, to settle in my father’s study, where amid the books and the shelves of bottled fetuses and pickled organs they sat him down in an armchair.

We were curious, Langley said.

One of the trio of henchmen would turn out to be Vincent’s son. Massimo, his name was. He had been the voice on the phone. The other two were the same men who had driven us home from the nightclub so many years before. I would never hear them speak more than a word or two, usually mumbled. I thought of them as granitelike—hard, verging on inanimate. Vincent’s left ear had been shot away and lest whoever was after him could finish the job—a cartel of New York crime families, if I had judged right—one of the granite men had remembered our house and, perhaps after driving around desperately looking for someplace to hole up, had realized nothing was more unlikely for the pursuit to imagine than a residence on Fifth Avenue, and so found our phone number to see if we were still in residence (as opposed to the archdiocese?) and voilà, there we were, a newly designated safe house for a famous criminal bleeding from what remained of his ear.

——

WITH THEIR BOSS
deposited in the chair, and Massimo kneeling beside him and holding a bloodied restaurant napkin to the afflicted ear, the gangsters seemed unable to think further what must be done. There was this silence except for the soft moaning of Vincent, who, I must say, was totally unconnected in my mind to the man of my memory. There was none of the cool suave self-assurance that I remembered and that I expected of him now. It was disappointing. Possibly a bullet tearing off a chunk of ear might have left him with tinnitus, but really it was a minor wound in terms of what is essential to life. So his problem was no more than cosmetic. Do something, he muttered, do something. But his men, perhaps stunned by the array of our father’s collection of human organs and fetuses floating in jars of formaldehyde, the tons of books spilling artfully out of the shelves, the old wooden skis in the corner, the side chairs piled one on top of another, the flowerpots filled with the earth of my mother’s botany experiments, the Chinese amphora, the grandfather clock, the innards of two pianos, the tall electric fans, the several valises and a steamer trunk, the stacks of newspapers piled in the corners and on the desk, the old cracked black leather medical bag with the stethoscope hanging out of it—all of it evidence of life well lived—as I say, in the face of all this the men seemed unable to move. It was Langley who took charge, assessing the nature of Vincent’s wound and finding in a drawer of my father’s desk right there rolls of gauze, adhesive tape, cotton
balls, and a bottle of iodine, which he judged to be at its maximum potency given the years of its aging.

Vincent’s yowls as he was treated apparently alerted his men for I felt something pressed under my ribs that I assumed was a gun barrel. But the critical moment passed—Here, I heard Langley say, wrap this around his head—and in short order the yowls had given way to a reprised moan.

THE MEN RECONNOITERED
and decided to bring their boss into the kitchen. Upstairs he might be caught like a rat in a trap. The kitchen, being closest to the back door, offered a fast escape in the event pursuit came up the front steps. They brought down from Siobhan’s old room her mattress and two pillows. So there, propped on what had been Grandmamma Robileaux’s big, thick-planked, turned-leg farm table—I remember my mother had wanted a country look in the kitchen—was our celebrity criminal, petulant, self-pitying, demanding, and—heedless of the presence of strangers—abusive to his son.

Massimo seemed to have the rank of a gangster in training and nothing he did was right according to his father: if he wanted to summon the family doctor, that was stupid, if he ran out for cigarettes or something to eat, he was too goddamn slow. Massimo didn’t look like his father, or like I remembered his father: he was a roly-poly fellow and entirely bald with a rotund head and an ample double chin, as I suspected even before we were chummy enough for him to let me trace his features,
and altogether unfortunate for a fellow not yet thirty. I would find myself trying to make him feel not so bad. Your father is in pain, I said, and doesn’t deal well with it. It’s no different than always, said Massimo.

I remember thinking that as a replacement for his father Massimo would never make the grade. I was wrong, though. Some years later, when Vincent was finally shot to death, Massimo became the head of that crime family and was even more feared than his father had been.

WE WERE BROUGHT
into the kitchen when Vincent had calmed down enough to have a look at us. It was like being given an audience. Who are these people, he said with his whistly voice. Street bums looking for a handout? Massimo said, They live here, Pop. It’s their place. Don’t tell me, Vincent said. They got hair like they never seen a barber. And this one staring into space like some doper. Oh I see, he’s blind. Jesus, what comes out of the woodwork in this town. Get ’em outa here, I got enough troubles without having to look at these cretins.

I was shocked. Should I have told Vincent that we had met some years before? But that would have been to affirm my humiliation. I felt like a fool. As with any celebrity or politician, the man was your best friend until the next time around when he has no recollection of ever having met you. Langley being present had the good grace never after to remind me of my idiocy.

——

WE WERE TO HAVE
our houseguests for four days. Pistols were trained on us just at the beginning. I wasn’t afraid and Langley wasn’t afraid either. He was furious to the point where I was sure that he would burst a blood vessel. Massimo, on orders of his father, tried to pull the phone cord out of the wall. It wouldn’t give. Langley said, Here, I’ll do it for you, we have no use for the damn thing, never have. And he yanked on the phone so hard that I heard pieces of plaster coming out of the wall with it and then he flung the whole thing across the study and broke the glass on one of our father’s bookcases.

My brother and I had to stay at all times where we could be seen. If we left the room, one of the thugs had to go with us. By the second day, this vigilance relaxed and Langley simply went back to his newspaper project, and in fact was helped in this by the men, who took turns going out in the morning and evening to pick up the papers so as to see what was being said about the shooting and Vincent’s disappearance.

The men were dumbfounded by the state of the hideaway they had chosen. They couldn’t understand the absence of a recognizable means of sitting down anywhere. In their minds we were a household given to strange otherworldly furnishings—like the stacks of old newspapers in most of the rooms and on the stair landings. But when they came upon the Model T in the dining room, if it had been up to them they would have departed immediately. It may be that their bewilderment is what saved us from harm, for I heard them talking among themselves
as to how glad they would be to escape from this place—
madhouse
, I think, is the word they used.

HERE I SHOULD
mention the typewriters. Sometime before this, Langley had decided he needed a typewriter to begin to bring order to his master project, the single newspaper for all time. He first tried the one our father had used. It sat on the Doctor’s desk—an L. C. Smith Number 2. It wasn’t the engreased dust that bothered Langley, but that the ribbon was dried out and the keys required great pressure of the fingers. I think even if he had found the machine to be in perfect order Langley would have gone out, as he eventually did, to find some others because, as in all such matters, one would not do where an assortment might be had. Consequently after a while a battery of machines were in our possession—a Royal, a Remington, an Hermès, an Underwood, among the standard models, and, because he was delighted to locate it, a Smith-Corona that had been fitted with keys in Braille. That is the one I’m using now. So for a while, as Langley worked his way through the imperfections of each of the machines, there was a new music in my ears of key clacks and bell dings and slamming platens. I was surprised that he eventually found a model to satisfy him. The rest were accorded museum status, untended and forgotten, like everything else, with the exception of one beauty he found in a shop in the West Forties, a very old Blickensderfer Number 5, which felt to my touch like a metallic butterfly with its wiry wings in full flight. This was given an honored place on the washstand in his bedroom.

As the third day came around with no sign of Vincent’s departure—he slept most of the time—my brother and I slowly went back to the daily routine of our lives with no interference from the gangsters, and this bizarre situation took on a semblance of normality. Langley typed away on his project and I resumed my daily practice sessions at the piano. It was as if two separate households were sharing the same space. They brought in their food and we took care of ourselves, though after a while we ran out of most everything we had in the pantry and they began to leave things for us. Their cuisine came in white cardboard boxes and was quite good—Italian specialties brought in at night—theirs was a one-meal regimen—and in return we made coffee in the mornings and sat with them on the steps to the second floor. When Vincent awoke, he proceeded to complain from his kitchen bed and demand and curse and threaten everyone in sight. He turned us all into a kind of oppressed fraternity, he’d become a universal burden, and so finally there was a sort of bonding—the two brothers and the three hoodlums.

I should have thought his men preferred Vincent asleep to Vincent awake but they were increasingly nervous as they waited fitfully for their next orders. They wanted to know now what retaliation lay in store. They wanted to know what was to be done.

ON THE FOURTH MORNING
I heard a terrible crash. It had come from the kitchen. The men ran in there. I followed. There was no sign of Vincent.

They kicked open the pantry door and found him cowering in the corner. You hear that? Vincent said. You hear that?

I heard it, we all heard it. The men were on alert now, their guns drawn, one of them prodding me in the ribs. Because there it was, the rat-a-tat of something relentlessly mechanical, like the deadly sputter of a tommy gun. Vincent had fallen or rolled off his makeshift kitchen bed having been startled awake by that sound, presumably familiar to him in his long life of crime. This was a delicate moment and I knew if I laughed it would be the end of me. I merely pointed at the ceiling and let them work it out for themselves that it was Langley at his typewriter, Langley being a very fast typist, his fingers racing to keep up with his thoughts, and his room located directly overhead. What typewriter he was using I didn’t know—the Remington, the Royal, or perhaps the Blickensderfer Number 5? He had set it up on a fold-out card table that was not quite steady and the clacking keys as transmitted through the spindly legs of the table, and through the floor, picked up a darker hammering tone that, I suppose, if you were a sleeping gangster who had recently been shot at, could have sounded like another attempt on your life.