Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,13

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 …”

MY EXPANDED REPERTOIRE came in very handy when I took