Homer & Langley (18 page)

BUT A FEW MORE DAYS
were to pass before the exodus. I was at my piano—this was in the evening, I believe I was doing the elegiac slow movement of Mozart’s Twentieth—when other sounds began to intrude and these gradually defined themselves as shouts, and they were coming from all over the house. Apparently the lights had gone out. I at first thought Langley had blown something—one of his most sacred long-term missions being to defeat the Consolidated Edison Company—but in fact it was the whole city’s power failure, and it was as if a time of pre-civilization had come around again to deliver the meaning of night. Oddly enough, once people looked out the window and understood the extent of the blackout, everyone wanted to see it—all our squatters clamoring to get out there and be amazed by the moonlit city. I considered the possibility that this municipal blown fuse was, after all, something for which Langley’s tinkering was responsible, and it made me laugh. Langley! I called to him. What have you done!

He was upstairs in his room and was having as much trouble as the rest of them trying to get to the front door. It was the
blind brother who got everyone organized, telling them not to move, but to stay where they were until I came and got them. Nobody could have found a candle—where any candles or candle glasses were nobody knew by now, the chances of finding even one in the blackness of the house was nil, the candles had consigned themselves to our kingdom of rubble as had everything else.

The house by this time of our lives was a labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends. With enough light someone could make his way through the zigzagging corridors of newspaper bales, or find passage by slipping sideways between piles of equipment of one kind or another—the guts of pianos, motors wrapped in their power cords, boxes of tools, paintings, car body parts, tires, stacked chairs, tables on tables, headboards, barrels, collapsed stacks of books, antique lamps, dislodged pieces of our parents’ furniture, rolled-up carpet, piles of clothing, bicycles—but it needed the native gifts of a blind man who sensed where things were by the air they displaced to get from one room to another without killing himself in the process. As it was, I tripped several times, and fell down once and hurt my elbow, in the meantime finding people from the top of the house down, as I asked them to call out, one by one, and telling them to attach themselves to me, like boxcars to an engine. And it turned out to be a good time I was having actually as the deviser of this human train that wound its way through the Collyer residence, everyone laughing or yelping in pain as they banged their knees or tripped. And the train got heavier to pull along with each new person who hooked on—
clearly there were more of our hippie friends in residence than I had known about. Of course Lissy was the first one I had managed to find and I felt her hands on my waist as she giggled. This is so cool! she said. Then she decided we all had the makings of a conga line—how she had known about a dance that went out of fashion before she was ever born, I don’t know. But there she was, trying to instruct me and everyone behind her in that hip-shifting one-two-three followed by the leg-out BAM! which of course created even more chaos as the others tried to do it. I heard Langley at the very end of the line, and he was having a good time too, it was remarkable hearing my brother’s wheezing laugh, truly remarkable. And it was the darkness that made all of this possible—their darkness, not mine—and when I reached the front hall and lifted off the two-by-four dead bolt and opened the door, they all flew past me like birds from the cage, and I think it was Lissy’s kiss I felt on my cheek, though it may have been Dawn or Sundown’s, and I felt the brisk night air and stood at the top of the stoop and inhaled the earthy fragrance of the park, edged with the metallic taste of moonlight, and I heard their laughter as they fled across the street and into the park, all of them, including my brother, though he would come back, but the others, never, their laughter diminishing through the trees, for that was the last of them, they were gone.

OF COURSE I MISSED
them, I missed their appreciation of us, if that is the word. I envied their unsafe lives. Whether their vagrancy was the heedlessness of youth or had at its basis some
principled if inarticulate dissent was hard to know. It was a cultural wave that had lifted them, certainly, the war in Vietnam could not completely account for it, and any one of them might have had no more initiative than to be swept up into the wave. Still, in this house, now so terribly quiet, I felt my true age reclaiming me. Having all those people around had led me to understand that our habitual reclusion was needful. When they were gone and once again it was just my brother and me, my spirits slumped. We were our bothered selves once again with the world outside contesting with us as if it had withdrawn its ambassadors.

OUR TROUBLES BEGAN
with that kerosene stove Langley had brought in. It caught fire one morning as he was cooking our omelets. I was sitting at the kitchen table and I heard this small pufflike explosion. Of course we had accumulated several fire extinguishers of different kinds and makes over the years, but whichever of them was in the kitchen was of small use—I suppose their potency evaporates over time. He gave me a running account of what was happening in a voice of controlled urgency, Langley—that the foam from the extinguisher was just enough to leave the stove temporarily fireless but smoking. I could smell it. He wrapped it in dish towels and threw the whole thing out the kitchen door into the backyard.

That seemed to have solved the problem. I knew my brother was embarrassed by the quiet way he closed the kitchen door, and I said nothing as we ate a cold breakfast.

It wasn’t more than an hour later when I heard sirens. I was at the Aeolian and thinking nothing about it—you heard fire engines and ambulances day and night in this city. I found the siren’s notes on the piano—A’s sliding into B-flats and back to A’s—but then the sound got closer and died into a low growl seemingly right in front of the house. Poundings on the door, shouts of Where is it, where is it? as this herd of firemen clambered in, pushing me aside, cursing as they tried to find their way to the kitchen, and dragging hose behind them, which I tripped over, Langley shouting What are you doing in this house, get out get out! They had been called by the people in the brownstone next door, whose garden abutted our backyard. In all these years we’d never met these neighbors or spoken to them, we didn’t know who they were except as the likely culprits who’d left an unsigned letter in our mail protesting our tea dances of so many years before. And now they had reported that our backyard was on fire, which happened to have been the case. Why can’t these people ever mind their own business, Langley muttered as the fire hose, connected now to the hydrant at the curb in front of the house, pulsed through the labyrinth of baled newspapers and slapped this way and that into folded chairs and bridge tables, knocking down standing lamps, stacks of canvases, as the firemen aimed their nozzle through the back door down to the smoking racks of lumber, the used tires, and odd pieces of furniture, a legless bureau, a bedspring, two Adirondack chairs, and other items stored there in the expectation that someday we would find use for them.

Langley would insist afterward that the firemen had overreacted, though the smell of smoke would linger for weeks. When an inspector from the Fire Department arrived he looked over the smoking rubble and said we would be issued a summons and most likely fined for illegal storing of flammable materials in a residential neighborhood. Langley said if that were the case we would sue the Fire Department for the destruction of property. Your men’s boots have left a trail of mud on our floors, he said, the back door of the kitchen is off its hinges, they have stormed through here like vandals as you can see from these broken vases, these lamps here, and look at these valuable books soggy and bloated from the damn leaks in their hose.

Well, Mr. Collyer, is it? I should think it’s a small price to pay for having still an abode to live in.

The fire inspector, whom I took for an intelligent man of some years—he had used the word
abode
, a word you did not often hear in ordinary conversation—surely had looked around, taking it all in, and though he didn’t say anything, he must have passed on what he had seen of our rooms for within a week or so we received a certified letter from the Health Department requesting an appointment for the purpose of assessing the interior condition of—and here they indicated our home by its address.

We of course ignored the letter but our sense of a diminished freedom was palpable. All it took was for people with official credentials to have intentions regarding us. I think it was at this time that Langley ordered a complete course of law books from
some college in the Midwest that offered a law degree by mail. By the time the books arrived—in a crate—we were in the sights not only of the Health Department, but of a collection agency acting on behalf of the New York Telephone Company, of lawyers from Consolidated Edison for having damaged their property—I assume they meant the electric meter in the basement, an irritating buzzing thingamajig which we had silenced with a hammer—and of the Dime Savings Bank, which had inherited our mortgage and claimed that in failing to meet our payments we were facing foreclosure, and the Woodlawn Cemetery had drawn a bead because we had somehow forgotten to pay the bills for the care of our parents’ grave site. That wasn’t all of it—there were other letters popping through the mail slot in the front door whose contents I can’t recall just now. But for some reason it was the cemetery bill that most engaged my brother’s attention. Homer, he said, can you think of anyone as depraved as these people who live on death even to the point of charging good money for snipping some leaves of grass around a headstone? After all who cares what graves look like? Certainly not their occupants. What a fraud, this is sheer irreverence, the professional care of the dead. Let the whole cemetery go back to its wild state I say. Just as it was in the days of the Manhattan Indians—let there be a necropolis of tilted stones and fallen angels lying half hidden in the North American forest. And that to me would show true respect for the dead, that would be a sacred acknowledgment, in beauty, of the awful system of life and death.

——

I HAD THE IDEA
of ranking our problems as a means of solving them and the mortgage seemed to me the first order of business. It was a struggle to get Langley to sit down and go over our finances. He felt attention to these matters rendered one subservient. But I realized from his reading of the account books that we had sufficient funds to pay off the mortgage altogether. Let’s do that and get these people off our backs, I said, and never again will we have to worry about it.

We lose the deduction on our federal taxes if we pay off the damn thing, Langley said.

But we’re not getting the deduction if we’re not meeting the payments, I told him. All we’re getting is penalties that offset the deduction. And why are we talking about taxes since we don’t pay them.

He had an answer for that having to do with the war, though it went on from there and I’m not sure I can render it accurately. Something about primitive societies that function brilliantly without money, and then a discourse on corporate usury, and then he burst into song: “Oh the banks are made of marble / With a guard at every door / And the vaults are stuffed with silver / That the miner sweated for.” Langley’s tone-deaf, hoarse baritone was an instrument of undeniable power. I did not laugh or speak of the genetic caprices in life whereby a musical gift could be designated in its entirety to one brother, namely me. I did wonder what miners had to do with anything. Homer, he said, I remind you of the derivation of our name. Were not
our paternal ancestors diggers in the bowels of the earth? Were they not coal miners? Is a collier not a coal miner?

Soon we were discussing other trade names—Baker, Cooper, Farmer, Miller—and mulling over of the turnings of history in such names, and that was the end of our financial conference.

Langley would eventually agree with me and pay off the mortgage but by that time we were famous throughout the city and he was followed to the bank by newspaper reporters, and a photographer for the
Daily News
, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for his portrait of Langley shuffling down Fifth Avenue in a porkpie hat, a ragged coat down to his ankles, a shawl he’d made from a burlap sack, and house slippers.

I WILL SAY IN MY
brother’s defense that he had a lot on his mind. It was a period of appalling human behavior—for instance the bombing of the Baptist church down south in which four little black girls were killed while at Sunday school. The news left him distraught—there were occasions, you see, when his cynicism broke down and the heart was made visible. But the monstrousness of what had happened revealed to him yet another category of seminal events for his ultimate newspaper—the murder of innocents, not only for those little girls, but for the shooting down of college students, and for the slaying of young men registering people to vote, in that same appalling period. And then of course he had to open a file for political assassinations—we had had three or four of those—and perhaps a file for the mass detention of hundreds of street demonstrators in an outside
pen in Washington. He couldn’t decide if that event should be incorporated into the category of club-on-the-head police conduct as applied to antiwar demonstrators in other cities, or whether it was something different.

Langley’s dream newspaper could not be mere reportage, its single edition for all time demanded a painfully categorical account of what we are given to habitually as a specie. So it was a big organizational problem for him to cull from years of daily newspapers the signal episodes and kinds of activities that are timeless.

He would be tested in the years following: he told me one day about the mass suicide of nine hundred people living in a small South American country I had never heard of before. They were Americans who had fled there to live in rows of shacks which their leader proposed to them as an idealistic Communist paradise. They had practiced suicide by drinking a harmless red liquid in lieu of poison, but when it came time that their leader said they could no longer tolerate the repression of the outside world, they did not hesitate to swallow the real thing. All nine hundred of them. I asked Langley, Where do you put this event? He said he thought at first to file it under Fashion, as when everybody is all at once wearing the new color. Or when the same slang word is suddenly on everybody’s lips. But finally, he said, I’ve put it in a pending file of one-of-a-kind headline events. There it must stay awaiting another episode of insane lemminglike behavior to pop up again. As I suspect it will, he added.