Homer & Langley (16 page)

The sister had enclosed a photograph of herself and some
little children in front of what looked to be the village church. It is not much more than a stone hut with a cross over the door, Langley said. And she looks different.

How so?

This is a mature woman. Maybe it’s because she’s wearing a sun hat. You see just her hairline and her face. She looks heavier than I remember.

Good, I said.

Nor is the letter that of a girl. This is a grown woman talking. How old do you suppose she is?

I don’t want to hear it, I said.

Past fifty, I should think. But isn’t it interesting that someone in the grip of such a monstrous religious fantasy—believing she is doing the Lord’s work—is doing the work that the Lord would be doing if there was a Lord?

I could not be as philosophical as Langley about my sweet girl’s chosen life. I will not here detail the lascivious proposals of my imagination, the arch seductions that I composed at night from my memory of her slight figure, the modest indications of her form in the simple dresses she wore, or from the touch of her hand on my arm as we strode to the movie theater where she told me what was on the screen. The lips and eyes I had traced with my fingertips I now kissed, and from the shoulder that had brushed mine as we sat together at the piano I now let loose the strap of her shift. This went on for some nights, she in her shy acquiescence and I gently but firmly teaching her her pleasure and seeing to the conception of our child. How sad
that I was reduced to these expedients till all my anguish was dissolved in futility and the tactile image of what had been Mary Elizabeth Riordan had faded from my mind.

I don’t know how Langley truly felt about her letter. He would rather hide behind some philosophical bon mot than reveal what love he had kept for the girl. It would not be in character for my brother to identify with Quasimodo. But it happened that the next period of our lives saw an uncharacteristic sociability akin to recklessness on both our parts, as we opened our house to the strange breed of citizen now springing up around the country. If there was a thin edge of bitterness to what we were doing, if we were moving as far away as we could from the saintliness of Mary Elizabeth Riordan, disinheriting her in our minds and consigning ourselves to hellish reality by looking for her replacement, we were not conscious of it.

Of course that another damnable war had sprung up was enough to strip away any residual inhibitions I may have had. Was this country unexceptional after all? I was at this point in my life as close in spirit to Langley’s philosophical despair as I had ever been.

WHAT HAPPENED WAS
that an antiwar rally was held in Central Park on the Great Lawn and we thought we’d have a look at it. We could hear it long before we got there, the sound of the hoarse loudspeakered voice throbbing in my ears though the words were indistinct, and then the cheers, a flatter broader un-amplified sound, as if the speaker and the audience were in different
realms—a mountaintop, perhaps, and a valley. And the blurred oration again for a line or two and the cheers again. This was early in October of that year. It was a warm afternoon, with an autumnal light that I felt on my face. You will say that was the warmth of the sun I felt, but it was the light. It lay on my eyelids, it was the golden light of the low quarter that comes with the dying of the year.

We stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to a folk music group performing a song in earnest praise of peace with that willed naïveté that goes along with such music. The audience joined in at the chorus and that turned out to be the last of it, there was a round of cheers by way of conclusion, and people began to file past us on their way out of the park.

Not everyone was willing to give up the occasion, among them Langley. We wandered among the groups sitting on the grass, or on lawn chairs, or blankets, and I was stunned to hear my brother exchanging pleasantries with strangers. An oddly convivial feeling came over me. The Collyers—principled separatists, recluses—and here we were, just two more of the crowd. And I don’t quite remember how it happened, but some young people there welcomed us into their company and what with one thing or another we were soon sitting with them on the Great Lawn and taking swigs from their wine bottles and breathing the fine acrid scent of their marijuana cigarettes.

I realized later that it was our dress, our comportment that these children responded to. Our hair was long, Langley wore his like a tied horse tail down the back, and I just let mine fall over the sides of my head to my shoulders. And our clothes
were casual to the point of dereliction. We had on our old boots and Levi’s, we wore our work shirts and holey sweaters under well-used and torn-at-the-elbows jackets that Langley had picked up at a flea market, and from these garments our new friends were persuaded that we were of their way of life.

By the time it drew dark, police came driving their cruisers there on the grass, running their sirens at a low growl, nudging people to their feet, telling us all to move on. Our new friends simply assumed they were to come home with us and we didn’t even make a point of acquiescing, as that would have been in bad form. It was as if—without knowing any of them or which of them belonged to which name—we’d been inducted into a relaxed and sophisticated fellowship, an advanced society, where ordinary proprieties were
square
. That was one of their words. Also
crash
, meaning, as I was to learn, boarding with us. We’d been recognized, is how I felt, as did Langley I could tell, as if with an honorific. And when these children—there were five who peeled off from the larger group and walked up the steps into our house, two males and three females—saw of what a warehouse of precious acquisitions it was comprised, they were moved beyond measure. I listened to their silence and it seemed to me churchlike. They stood in awe in the dim light of the dining room looking upon our Model T on its sunken tires and with the cobwebs of years draped over it like an intricate netting of cat’s cradles, and one of the girls, Lissy—the one I was to bond with—Lissy said, Oh wow! and I considered the possibility, after drinking too much of their bad wine, that my brother and I were, willy-nilly and ipso facto, prophets of a new age.

——

IT TOOK ME A DAY
or two to sort them all out. I call them children, though of course they weren’t really. Eighteen or nineteen, on average, and one of them, JoJo, the heavyset bearded one, was twenty-three, though his age didn’t give him any privileged status. He was in fact the most childlike of them all, a fellow given to buffoonery and laughingly tall tales which you were not expected to believe. JoJo turned serious only when he sat down to smoke, marijuana putting him in a philosophical state of mind. Brotherhood was his theme. He called everyone, whatever their gender, “man.” When you refused his offer of a toke it was as if you had delivered a fatal wound. Ah, man, he would say, his grief inexpressible, ah, man. Unlike Connor, the other male, he didn’t seem to be romantically attached to any of the girls, perhaps because of his weight. I had known fellows like him at school, who, given their girth, chose to be no more than boon companions to the ladies. But it was JoJo who would, in time, work like a stevedore to bale Langley’s newspapers and set up the labyrinthian pathways of those impacted blocklike bales according to Langley’s instructions.

Connor, or Con, was monosyllabic and from what I could infer a cadaverous figure with a long neck and thick eyeglasses. He wore no shirt but a denim jacket open over his hairless torso. He spent his time drawing comic strips in which men’s feet and women’s breasts and behinds were greatly exaggerated. Langley told me the strips were quite good in their appalling way. A touch surreal, he said. They seemed to celebrate life as a
lascivious dream. I asked Connor what he intended in his drawings. Dunno, he replied. He was quite busy, having cleared out a place for himself in a corner of the music room, and setting himself up at an antique schoolroom desk my mother had gotten for me when I was too small to go to real school.

Two of the girls—Dawn and Sundown were their chosen names—hovered over Connor utterly transfixed by the obscene adventures of his characters. Of course he had modeled his busty females after them. One day Langley told me that Connor had incorporated us as well into his strips. Ah the ruthlessness of art that consumes the world and everyone in it, he said. What do we look like, I said. What is he having us do? We are old gray-haired lechers with little heads with bulging eyes and buck teeth and our legs get wider as they reach the ankles and our feet are fitted with enormous shoes, Langley said. We like to dance with our index fingers pointing to the sky. We pinch ladies’ bottoms and hold them upside down so that their dresses fall over their heads. How insightful, I said. I’m going to buy these strips when he’s finished with them, Langley said. Museums will bid for them one day.

Langley told me Dawn and Sundown were nice but had not much going in the way of thought. They wore long skirts with boots, and fringed jackets, and beaded headbands and bracelets. They were taller than Connor and looked almost like sisters, except that their applied hair colors were different, blond in one case, auburn in the other. I thought at first they would be in some kind of competition for him which they would not disgrace themselves to acknowledge. But it was not like that at all.
In the spirit of the times they shared him, and he was dutifully shareable and slept with each of them in turn as one would imagine to be the case in any polygamous and diurnally observant household. All of that was audibly apparent after I retired as I lay in my bed upstairs and heard them going at it in the basement room where they had chosen to bunk themselves.

Where any of them came from, who their families were, I never found out, except that Lissy did tell me she grew up in San Francisco. I pictured all of them from their voices and their footsteps—and perhaps even from the volume of air they displaced. The brightest of them was Lissy. She was usually the one who thought up the things for them to do from what she found by rummaging through the house. She came up with the dressmaker’s dummy lying under some other things in the drawing room and for a half day the three girls were dress designers, cutting and refitting some of our mother’s old evening dresses from the closet of her room. I didn’t mind. Lissy was a petite thing with short curly hair whose own frock went down to her ankles. She had made it herself, she told me in her sweetly cracked voice, it was tie-dyed in patterns of yellow and red and pink. Do you know what the color is when I mention it? she asked me. I assured her I did.

All told they would be living with us for a good month, these hippies. They were in and out of the house in no discernible pattern. They would go off to some rock-and-roll band concert and be gone for a couple of days. They would take menial jobs, make a few dollars, quit till their money ran out, and then find some other job. But for one stretch some astrological influence
held sway, for they all went off to work in the morning—Lissy, a clerk in a bookshop, and Dawn and Sundown waitressing in a diner, the boys as phone solicitors for an insurance agency—and came home in the evening, just as if we were a typically square bourgeois household. That peculiar conjunction of the stars lasted almost a week.

I gathered, with the occasional overnight stays of more like them, that the word having gone out, we were part of a network of hostel-like places or pads where people could lay their heads for a night. But I was sure ours was the only pad on upper Fifth Avenue, which gave us some distinction.

Living as they did, these kids were more radical critics of society than the antiwar or civil rights people getting so much attention in the newspapers. They had no intention of trying to make things better. They had simply rejected the entire culture. If they attended that antiwar rally in the park it was because there was music there and it was pleasant to sit on the grass and drink wine and smoke their joints. They were itinerants who had chosen poverty and were too young and heedless to think what the society would eventually do to them by way of vengeance. Langley and I could have told them. They had seen our house as a Temple of Dissidence, and made it their own, so even if we had said, Look at us, look at what you might become, it wouldn’t have meant anything.

In fact we were too charmed and flattered by these people to have said anything to discourage them. You would think Langley would go crazy the way they made themselves at home. They took over the kitchen at mealtimes—Dawn and Sundown
would cook up great batches of vegetable stews, for of course none of them ate meat—and they slept wherever there was some space. They could at one time occupy all the bathrooms in the house, but they interested us, we attended to their diction like parents of children who were just learning to speak, and would make sure to report to each other when a word or phrase popped up that we hadn’t heard before. A
put-down
was a remark to chasten or humiliate. Not to be confused with what one does to a terminally sick animal. A
turn-on
was a state of arousal—an odd electronic locution, I thought, for this vegetarian earth-loving crowd.

Fat JoJo had one day come in from his wanderings with an electric guitar and a speaker. All at once the house reverberated with awful earsplitting sounds. Fortunately I was upstairs at the time. JoJo twanged some thunderous chord and as it died out he’d sing a line from a song, and laugh, and twang another wavery chord and sing another line, and laugh. After a while I got used to JoJo’s guitar—he knew he was no musician, it was a game he played, a fancy that he made fun of even as he gave himself to it. He handed it to me one day, this guitar. The strings were more like cables and they were stretched of a solid piece of wood shaped like a car with fins. I would not have thought to call it a musical instrument. Its sound made me think of those old-time vaudevillians who played a saw by bending it this way and that and running a violin bow across it.