Homer & Langley (7 page)

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.

THAT DAY WHEN PEOPLE
came in from the street to hear the music of the Harold Robileaux Five may have been in the back of Langley’s mind when, some years later, he came up with the idea of a weekly tea dance. Or maybe he remembered how
Harold spoke of playing at rent parties in people’s apartments in Harlem.

In the old days our parents would throw an occasional tea dance, opening up the public rooms and inviting all their friends over in the late afternoon. My mother used to dress us up for those occasions. She would duly present us to be insincerely complimented by the guests before the governess took us back upstairs. And Langley may have remembered the elegance of those dances and seen something of a business opportunity in reviving the custom. For of course we had done our research, going over to Broadway where a good dozen or so dance halls had sprung up that charged a dime a dance and had women employed there to accommodate the men who came in without a partner of their own. We would each buy a strip of tickets and dance our way through them, surrendering a ticket to each woman we took into our arms for a dance. It was an indifferent experience to say the least, in these drafty second-floor lofts, atmospheric with cigar smoke and odorous bodies, where the music was broadcast over loudspeakers and whoever was playing the records would sometimes forget when a song was over and you heard the click click of the needle on the blank groove or even the loud scrunch as the needle jumped out of the groove and slid across the label at the center of the record. And everyone would stand around and wait for the next record, and after a minute if nothing happened the men would whistle or shout and everyone would start clapping. One of these places had been a skating rink, that’s how cavernous and gloomy it was. Langley said it was lit with colored lights that only cheapened
everything and that bouncers stood about with their arms folded. The women in these places tended to be bored, I thought, though some worked up enough energy to ask you your name and make small talk. If they were satisfied you weren’t a cop they might quietly make you a business proposition, which tended to happen to me more than to Langley since you don’t usually find police who are blind. But mostly they were overtired girls who’d clerked in the department stores, or waited tables, or worked in offices as typists, but were now on their uppers and trying to make a little money as piecework dancing partners. They turned in their collected tickets at the end of a shift and got paid accordingly. I could intuit their characters from their physicality, whether they were light to hold and to do the fox-trot with, or tended to lead you rather than be led, or were listless and maybe on some kind of drug, or were heavy and even fat so that you heard their stockings rub on the insides of their thighs as they stepped along with you. And just their hand in your hand told you a lot.

And as you’d suspect, Langley’s business idea was to give our dances for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those dance halls.

For the first few Tuesday afternoon tea dances, we invited people we knew, like friends of our mother and father’s, and whatever members of our own generation they brought with them. Langley and Siobhan converted the dining room, dismantling the dining table that seated eighteen, lining the chairs against the wall, and rolling up the rug. Our parents had hired musicians for their dances—a trio usually of piano, bass, and
snare drum, the drummer using the soft whispery brushes—but we had recorded music, because long before this time of the Great Depression, with so many people out of work, and men in suits and ties standing on line at the soup kitchens, Langley had been collecting phonographs, both the old table models that used steel needles and a voice box at the end of a hollow curved chrome arm, and the more up-to-date electric Victrolas, some of them standing on the floor like pieces of furniture, with speakers hidden behind ribbed panels with cloth webbing.

These first dances were strictly social invitations with no charge. During the breaks people sat in the chairs against the wall and sipped their tea and took cookies from the plate Mrs. Robileaux held in front of them. But of course the word spread and after a couple of weeks people were showing up who had no invitation and we began charging admission at the door. It had worked out just as we’d hoped it would.

I should say here that we were distinguished, we two brothers I mean, in having lost a good deal of our money well before the market crash, either from bad investments or our excessive nightclubbing and other spendthrift habits, though in fact we were far from destitute and things were never as bad for us as for other people. Yet Langley was of a mind to worry about finances even if there was nothing seriously to worry about. I was more relaxed and realistic about our situation but I did not argue when he predicted dire poverty for us as he did when going over the bills each month. It was as if he wanted to be as badly off in the Depression as everyone else. He said, You see,
Homer, how in those dance halls they make money from people who don’t have any? We can do that too!

Eventually things were going so well that there were too many dancers for the dining room, and so the drawing room and parlor were similarly stripped. Poor Siobhan was at the end of her endurance, shoving furniture into corners and rolling rugs and lifting hassocks and carrying Tiffany lamps down the basement stairs. Langley had hired men off the street to help out with all this moving, but Siobhan could not let them work unattended—every nick or scrape or floor gouge caused her anguish. To say nothing of the cleaning up and putting everything back afterward.

Langley had gone out and purchased several dozen popular music records so that we would not have to play the same tunes over and over. He had found a music shop over on Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street, where the Hippodrome theater was located, and the proprietor was a virtual musicologist, with recordings of swing orchestras and crooners and songstresses that no other store had. Our whole idea was to present a dignified social experience for people living hand to mouth. We didn’t charge by the dance but asked for a dollar admission per couple—we only admitted couples, no single men, no riffraff looking for women—and for that they got two hours of dancing, cookies and tea, and, for an extra twenty-five cents, a glass of cream sherry. Langley took up his position at the front door every afternoon a few minutes before four, and left an honor plate in the foyer after about ten minutes when most of the people
who were coming had arrived. A dollar was not an insignificant amount of money at this time and our customers, many of whom were our neighbors from the side streets off Fifth Avenue and who had once been well off and knew the value of a dollar, came to the tea dance promptly to get the most for their money.

We used three of our public rooms for dancing. Langley handled the turntable in the dining room, I took on the chores in the parlor, and, until Langley figured out how to wire everything with speakers so that one record player could be heard in the three rooms, he hired a man on a day-to-day basis to run things in the drawing room. Mrs. Robileaux tended the sherry bar and held out the salvers of her home-baked cookies to the customers sitting along the walls.

I had learned easily enough to set the record on the turntable without bumbling around and to put the needle in the groove just where it needed to be. I was pleased to be making a contribution. It was a special experience for me to be doing something that people were willing to pay for.

But there were lessons to be learned. Whenever I happened to play one of the livelier numbers, the dancers would leave the floor. Anything fast and happy, and they would sit right down. I would hear the chairs scraping. I said to Langley, The people who come to our tea dance have no fight left in them. They are not interested in having a good time. They come here to hold each other. That’s basically what they want to do, hold one another and drift around the room.