Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,16

right accompaniment, Uncle Homer. He should come down from the screen and shake your hand, I mean it.

I CANNOT AT THIS moment bear to speak of what became of Mary Elizabeth Riordan. Not a night passes that I don’t recall how, when she was going off to school, we all stood with her on the sidewalk waiting for a taxicab that would take her and her one suitcase to Grand Central Terminal. I heard a cab pull up and everyone saying goodbye, Langley clearing his throat and Siobhan who cried, and Mrs. Robileaux blessing her from the doorway at the top of the steps. They told me how lovely Mary looked in the smart tailored coat that had been our gift. She was hatless on this chilly sunny September morning. You could feel both the warmth and the breeze blowing through it. I touched her hair and felt soft wisps of it lifting. And when I took her face in my hands—the lovely thin face and resolute chin, her temples with their soft and steady pulse, the slim straight nose and her soft smiling lips—she took my hand and kissed it. Goodbye, goodbye, I whisper to myself. Goodbye, my love, my girl, my dear one. Goodbye. As if it is happening at this moment.

BUT MEMORIES ARE not temporally driven, they detach themselves from time, and all of that was much later than our recklessly spendthrift years when Langley and I went out almost every night to one nightclub or another where ladies with rolled stockings and short skirts sat on your lap and blew smoke in your face and surreptitiously felt along the inside of your thigh to see what you had there. Some of the clubs were rather elegant, with a pretty good kitchen and a dance floor, others were basement dives where the music came from a radio on a wall shelf broadcasting some swing orchestra from Pittsburgh. But where you went didn’t matter, you could die of the gin in any of these joints, and the mood was the same everywhere, people laughing at what wasn’t funny. But it felt good to establish yourself in this or that club, to be let in the door and be greeted like someone important. In these peculiar nights of Prohibition, the law only had to say No Drinking to get everybody plastered. Langley said the speakeasy was the true democratic melting pot. And it was true, at this one club, the Cat’s Whiskers, I became friendly with a gangster who said to call him Vincent. I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him. He was very interested in my sightlessness, this Vincent. What’s it like without eyes, he said. I told him it wasn’t so bad, that I made up for it other ways. How, he said. I told him that when I had a few drinks I regained something like vision. In fact I believed this. I knew I was hallucinating, I was seeing all right but into my own mind of thought and impression as I generated visions from what I learned from my other senses and added, by way of detail, my judgments of character and my attraction to this one or revulsion for that one. Of course when you’re sober you make the same deductions, I know that, but at these times my brain synapses firing with the fumes of alcohol, a clarity of organized impressions amounted to a kind of vision. Naturally I didn’t go into all that, I just said that with a lot of noise and music and booze, of course, and cigarette smoke heavy enough to float in, I could make shadows out pretty well.

How many fingers am I holding up, he said. None, I said. I knew that old trick. He chuckled and slapped me on the shoulder. This bozo’s smart, he said. He had a thin whispery voice, tuneless except for a whistle that ran along the top of it as if one of his lungs had sprung a leak. He lit a match and held it up to my face to see the clouds in my eyes. He asked me to describe what he looked like. I reached out to touch his face and one of his henchmen yelled and grabbed my wrist. We don’t do that, he said. It’s okay, letim, Vincent said and so I touched his face, and felt sunken cheeks with pockmarks, a sharp