Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,10
place and sense of possession of the house that a good servant has who is responsible for its upkeep. And if her prayers looked toward her restoration or, at moments of bitterness that would later have to be confessed to the Father, to vengeance, whatever the Lord might saith, I would have to say that they were answered in the Protestant form of Perdita Spence, a friend of Langley’s from childhood whom he had escorted at her coming out, and who now appeared for dinner one night at his invitation.
For as the weeks had passed Langley had begun to emerge from his doldrums. Not that you would hear him whistling or finding a reason to be excited about something, but his acerb intelligence was honing up as in the old days. Perdita Spence had stood in his consideration ever since their teens and that I suppose was the closest he could come to an outright feeling for her. I had seen her in our home once or twice before my eyes darkened and I projected that memory now, adding mentally to her age by listening to her conversation. I remembered her main features, which were a long nose and eyes set too close together and shoulders that looked as if she wore epaulets under her shirtwaist. I seem also to have an image in my mind of Miss Spence marching arm in arm with the suffragettes down Fifth Avenue, but that may be an embellishment of my own making. I do know that she was a comfortable height for Langley, who was a six-footer. So she was tall for a woman and, as I listened to her remarks before dinner about the society of which our two families had been a part, I thought that she was the perfect social match as well—someone who in her person invoked the life Langley had lived before he went to war, and so just what he needed to palliate the dark instincts of his own mind.
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.