Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,12

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