Homer & Langley (4 page)

Langley and I had both dressed for dinner and I had somehow imposed upon Julia and Siobhan an armistice of their own
so that they could together spruce up the place, which they did apparently, for I smelled the furniture polish on my Aeolian, and the hearth fires in the study and living room were without the choking fumes I had come to expect. Langley had said enough to Mrs. Robileaux to have her fulfill his menu, which consisted of oysters on the half shell, a sorrel soup, and a roast with potato soufflé and peas in the pod. And he had gone to the cellar for a white and a red. But all of Perdita Spence’s chatter ceased abruptly when Julia, after serving the first two courses, brought out the roast and joined us at the table. I heard the scraping of Julia’s chair, a delicate cough, and even, perhaps, her deferential smile.

After a long silence Perdita Spence said: How novel, Langley, to put your guests to work. But where is my apron?

Langley: Julia is not a guest.

Miss Perdita Spence: Oh?

Langley: When serving she is one of the staff. When seated she is Homer’s inamorata.

It’s a kind of hybrid situation, I said by way of clarifying things.

There was silence. I heard not even a wine sip.

And after all, said Langley, human identity is a mysterious thing. Can we even be sure there is something called the Self?

Miss Perdita Spence’s peroration, addressed only to Langley, the one person in the room high enough in her estimation to have her opinion, was actually quite interesting. There was not the umbrage you would expect from someone of her class finding herself at table with a servant. She said—and I can only paraphrase
after these many years—that given brother Homer’s deficient state she could understand his availing himself of whatever poor creature came to hand. But to sit this same creature at the dinner table was the boorish act of a pasha for whom it was not enough to exercise his power, he must also put it on display. Here was this immigrant woman, who had to bend to his will lest she lose her job, sat down to her obvious discomfort in order to advertise her total servitude. A woman is not a pet monkey, said Miss Spence, and if she is to be used to her shame at least let it be in the dark, where no one can hear her weeping but her abuser.

I’ll take you home, said Langley.

And so the dinner was left to my inamorata and me. Julia filled my plate and sat herself beside me. Not a word was spoken, we knew what we had to do. With Mrs. Robileaux coming out of the kitchen periodically to stand at the doorway and glare at us, we proceeded to eat for four.

I had no idea what Julia was thinking. Surely she had gotten the gist of Miss Spence’s critique, but I sensed her indifference as if she, Julia, couldn’t have cared less what this stranger had to say. She went about dinner with the same gusto with which she cleaned house or made love, refilling my wine glass, and then her own, serving me another cut of the roast before replenishing her own plate.

And now here is the sequence of thoughts I had, for I remember them quite clearly. I recalled that Julia had appeared unsummoned in my bedroom the evening of the day I had asked to touch her face. I had not meant anything by that, I
merely wanted information, I like to know what the people around me look like. I had felt her jaw, which was large, and her wide full mouth and her small ears and slightly splayed nose and her forehead which was broad, with a high hairline. And that same night she had slipped into my bed and waited.

Was Perdita Spence right—that this immigrant girl in order to keep her job was merely responding to what she thought was a summons? Langley hadn’t believed that—he had seen the assertiveness of the maid, who in a relatively short time had taken charge of the household and bedded his brother.

But now here is what happened: In the process of leaving a clean plate, I was working on the last of the pea pods, crunching them in my teeth and savoring their sweet green bitter-edged juices, and all at once I found myself thinking of the truck farm at the corner of Madison Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, where as a sighted child I would go along the rows with my mother in the early autumn to pick the vegetables for our table. I’d pull the carrot bunches out of the soft ground, pluck the tomatoes from their vines, uncover the yellow summer squash hiding beneath their leaves, scoop up the heads of lettuce with both hands. And we so enjoyed ourselves at these times, my mother and I, as she held her basket out for me to deposit what I had chosen. Some of the plants rose above my head and the sun-warmed leaves would brush my cheeks. I chewed the tiny leaves of herbs, I was made giddy by the profusion of vivid colors and the humid smell of leaf and root and moist soil on a sunny day. Of course, along with my sight, that farm had long since gone, an armory in its place, and I suppose it was the
wine that was allowing me to dredge from the depths of my unforgiving mind the image of my gracious mother when she was in such uncharacteristically loving companionship with her small son.

Taking hold of Julia’s capable hand in this emotional moment of recall, I found my palm resting not on flesh but on stone. It was a ring the maid wore and, as I circled it with three fingers the better to understand its size and shape, I realized it was the heavy diamond ring of my mother’s that had shot shards of sunlight into my eyes as she held the handle of our garden basket.

Julia murmured, Ah dear surr or something of the sort and I felt her other hand on my cheek as she gently tried to disengage and I just as gently wouldn’t let her.

And so this was the extraordinary sequence of events for which I suppose I have Miss Perdita Spence to thank, although she is at this date no longer among the living. Or perhaps it was my brother’s decision to invite her for dinner, or perhaps I should go further back to the war that had so changed him so that in his gruff uncompromising way he would only half admit to himself that he might mend, if mend he would, by marrying, and so begin his grudging quest by renewing his acquaintance with that tall sharp-shouldered schoolmate of his who did not condone the depraved doings in our household.

We had a trial, naturally, Langley and I the sitting judges, Siobhan the prosecuting attorney. This was in the library, where the shelved books, the globe, the portraits served for a juridical setting. Julia, my Hungarian darling, wept as she claimed it was
Siobhan’s idea to lend her the ring from my mother’s jewelry case so she, Julia, could be more the table guest than the serving maid. It would be a kind of credential, she insisted, although that word was not in her vocabulary. To look so Mr. Homer surr and I was to be marry, is what she actually said. I might have decided to take her side, but my own credibility as a responsible member of this household had been seriously damaged when I’d had to admit to Langley that I had forgotten about my mother’s jewelry when I’d settled her estate, and so it had remained, subject to theft, in the small unlocked wall safe in her bedroom behind a portrait of a great-aunt of hers who had achieved some notoriety by riding camelback across the Sudan for what reason nobody quite knew.

Siobhan denied having bestowed the ring on the girl, who, she said, had access to the entire house as the self-appointed maid in authority and could have noseyed about my mother’s bedroom without anyone being any the wiser. Siobhan reminded everyone how long she had been in service to this family as opposed to this thief who was trying to make her out as some devilish conspirator. And why would I myself help this slattern, she being the thief she is, said Siobhan.

Langley, he of the judicious temperament, said to Siobhan, Petitio principii—you assume in your premise what you have to establish in your conclusion.

That may be, Mr. Collyer, said she, but I know what I know.

And so the case was made.

Langley afterward took the jewel case, which contained not just that ring, but brooches, bracelets, pairs of earrings, and a diamond
tiara, and put it in a safe deposit box at the Corn Exchange against the time when we might need to sell these things—a time I couldn’t imagine ever coming, and which of course did come and fairly promptly at that.

And now my sweet weeping hard-nippled and felonious bed mate was gone from the premises as unceremoniously as Miss Perdita Spence, as if they were prototypes of the gender with which, through the years, Langley and I would, on one basis or another, find ourselves incompatible.

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 …”