Homer & Langley (22 page)

A few blocks north of us there was an old water post from the days when water was made available for horses. The water
post, a heavy-gauge faucet built into a low concave stone wall whose base was a cement trough, stood at the curb. Langley jammed the carriage up against the trough and positioned the milk can at a tilt under the faucet so that he wouldn’t have to lift it out of the carriage. When the can was full, we filled each of the bottles and capped it with aluminum foil. The trip back was the difficult part, water weighing a lot more than I would have thought. To avoid the curbs at the ends of each block we went along in the street. There were no cars at this hour. I brought up the rear of our procession by keeping the folded carriage hood in touch with Langley’s back. I think we both enjoyed a kind of boyish excitement there in the first light of morning, when nobody was abroad in the land except us and the freshness of the air was carried on a soft breeze redolent of a countryside, as if we were not pushing our carriages down Fifth Avenue, but along a back road.

We brought home our contraband through the basement door under the front steps. We would have enough water for drinking, and all our meals thenceforth would be on paper plates and with throwaway plastic utensils, though we didn’t exactly throw them away, but water for commode flushing and for bathing was another matter. It was the ground-floor guest bathroom that we would try to keep functioning, which was just as well, as the upstairs bathrooms had long since served also as storage areas. But sponge baths were the order of the day and after a couple of weeks of turning ourselves into water carriers, the sense of triumph, of having put one over on the city, had given way to the hard realities of our situation. Of course there
was an ordinary drinking fountain not far into the park across from our house and we used that to fill our thermoses and army canteens, though sometimes as the weather grew warmer we had to wait our turn as flocks of children with a perverse interest in water fountains pretended to be thirsty.

I DON’T KNOW IF
any of the children who took to throwing stones at our shuttered windows were the same who had seen us come for water in the park. Most likely the word had spread. Children are the carriers of unholy superstition, and in the minds of the juvenile delinquents who’d begun to pelt our house Langley and I were not the eccentric recluses of a once well-to-do family as described in the press: we had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in. Not able to see myself or hear my own footsteps, I was coming around to the same idea.

At unpredictable times through the summer the assault would begin, the operation planned and the ordnance collected beforehand, because the clunks and thwacks and thuds came as a barrage. I could feel them. Sometimes I could hear the bel canto cries. I figured their ages to be from six to twelve. The first few times, Langley made the mistake of going out on the stoop and shaking his fist. The children scattered with screams of delight. So of course the next time there were even more of them and more rocks flew.

We had no thought of calling the police, nor did they of
their own volition ever appear. We settled back and endured these sorties as one would wait out summer showers. So now, it’s even their children, Langley said, having assumed the little beasts lived in the surrounding houses and might have been inspired by their parents’ opinion of us. I said my understanding of people of the class of our nearest neighbors was that they were not given to breeding. I said I thought it was a wider recruitment and the children’s staging area was probably the park. When one day the rocks seemed to have a heftier impact, and I heard a shout in a deeper post-pubescent register, Langley lifted one of the shutter slats, peered out, and informed me that some of them were easily teenagers. So you are right, Homer, this may be citywide, and we have the rare privilege of an advanced look at the replacement citizenry for the millennium.

Langley began to think of a military action in response. He had collected a few pistols over the years and decided to take one and stand on the steps and wave it at the hoodlums to see what would happen. Of course it is not loaded, he said. I said he could do that—menace children with a deadly weapon—and that I would be happy to visit him in prison if I could find a way to get there. I was not inclined to fret over these stone throwers. The shutters had been well pocked and some of the brownstone frontage had been chipped but I knew the children would vanish when the weather grew cold, as they did, it was strictly a summer sport, and soon enough the thuds of rocks against the shutters were replaced by autumnal winds blowing through them and shaking our windows.

——

BUT ONE NIGHT SOMETHING
Langley had said came back to me as I tried to sleep. He said everything alive was at war. I wondered if the diminution of my senses, even as I was terrified of an enlarging consciousness slowly displacing the world outside my mind—if it was possible that I was becoming progressively unaware of the truth of our situation, the magnitude of it, protected in my insensitivity from the worst of its sights and sounds. As I reflected, the stoning of our house by children, rather than being an episode incidental to our major concerns—our increasing isolation, losing by our own doing or the doing of others the ordinary services of an urban civilization, no running water, I mean, no gas, no electricity—and finding ourselves in a circle of animosity rippling outward from our neighbors to creditors, to the press, to the municipality, and, finally, to the future—for that was what these children were—rather than being of minor significance, well, that was the most devastating blow of all. For what could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke? How could we cope, once dead and gone, with no one available to reclaim our history? My brother and I were going down and he, lung-shot and half insane, knew that better than I. Our every act of opposition and assertion of our self-reliance, every instance of our creativity and resolute expression of our principles was in service of our ruination. And he, apart from all that, had as his burden the care of an increasingly disabled brother. I will not criticize him then for the paranoia of that winter when he began to devise from the hoarded
materials of our life in this house—as if everything here had been amassed in response to a prophetic intelligence—the means of our last stand.

In the old days there was another poet he liked to quote: “I’m me, and what the hell can I do about it! … I, the solemn investigator of useless things.”

MY OWN RESPONSE
has been to press on with my daily writing. I am Homer Collyer and Jacqueline Roux is my muse. Though in my weakened state I am not sure if she ever returned as she said she would, or if I only needed the thought of her to begin this writing, a project comparable in its overreaching to Langley’s newspaper. At this point I can’t be sure of anything—what I imagine, what I recall—but she did come back, I’m almost sure of that, or let us say she did, and that I met her at the front door, having been groomed and turned out in some reasonable state by my understanding brother. Sitting in the chill of this house, I feel the warmth of a hotel lounge. Jacqueline and I have had dinner. There is a fireplace, arrangements of upholstered armchairs, small low tables for drinks, and a pianist playing standards. I remember this one from the time of our tea dances: “Strangers in the Night.” I can tell from the stiffness of the playing that this is a classically trained pianist trying to make a living. Jacqueline and I laugh at the chosen song—the lyrics describing strangers exchanging glances, which is not possible between us, and ending up as lovers for life. That too is funny though in a way to stifle the laughter in my throat.

Then, on my second glass of the best wine I have ever tasted, I am impelled to sit at the piano after the hired help has withdrawn. I play Chopin, the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, because it is a slow chord-heavy piece that I can be reasonably sure of, not being able to hear it very well. Then I make the mistake of going into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” which requires a digitally meandering right hand: a mistake, because I understand from the touch on my shoulder—this is the lounge pianist stopping me—that I’m doing the sequence as Bach wrote it but I have started off on the wrong piano key. It is like a mockery of Bach. I am corrected and finish capably enough, but am led back to Jacqueline in total humiliation that I try to dissemble by laughing. What wine will do!

In her room I confess to my misery, a blind man going deaf.

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.