Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,20

who it was, of what quality of mind, who touched them.

Langley said only about his encounter that it was finally meaningless, two strangers copulating, and one of them for money. He was not prepared to acknowledge our champagne-induced excitements. He was convinced that one way or another we would end up paying for my gangster friend’s generosity, and that we had not heard the last of him. I agreed, though with every passing year and no further word from Vincent the Gangster we would quite forget him. But at this time Langley’s presentiment seemed all too valid. So that by noon of the next day the tender emotions of my drunken self were unseated and my gloomy spirit had returned to its throne.

IN THESE MANY years since the war Langley had still not found a companion in love. I knew he was looking. For a while he was very serious about a woman named Anna. If she had a last name I would not hear it. When I asked him what she looked like he said, A radical. I first knew of her existence when he began bringing home nothing from his nighttime explorations but handfuls of pamphlets, which he slapped down on the side table just inside the front door. I measured the seriousness of his passion by the uncharacteristic grooming ritual that he performed before going out in the evening. He would call to Siobhan when he couldn’t find a tie or wanted a washed shirt.

But he never got anywhere with this courtship. He returned home one evening rather early and came into the music room, where I had been practicing, and sat himself down to listen. So of course I stopped, turned on the bench, and asked him how the evening had gone. She has no time for dinner or anything else, he said. She will see me if I come to a meeting with her. If I stand on a corner with her and give out flyers to passersby. Like I have to pass these tests. I asked her to marry me. You know what her response was? A lecture about how marriage is a legalized form of prostitution. Can you imagine? Are all radicals that insane?

I asked Langley what sort of radical she was. Who knows, he said. What difference does it make? She’s some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you’re one of them you can’t tell exactly what any of them are. When they’re not throwing bombs they’re busy splitting into factions.

Not long after this Langley asked me one evening if I’d like to go with him over to a pier on Twentieth Street to see Anna off to Russia. She was being deported and he wanted to say goodbye. Let’s go, I said. I was curious to meet this woman who had so interested my brother.

We hailed a taxi. I couldn’t help thinking of the time we children saw our parents off to England on the Mauretania. I’d stopped crying when I saw the massive white hull and four towering red-and-black smokestacks. There were flags everywhere and hundreds of people at the rail waving as this huge ship began with some seemingly great and noble intelligence of its own to slip away from the dock. When her basso horns blew I nearly jumped out of my skin. How wonderful it all was. And nothing like the scene as we arrived at the Twentieth Street pier to say goodbye to Langley’s friend Anna. It was raining. There was some sort of demonstration going on. We were pushed back by a police line. We couldn’t get close. What a sad-looking tub, Langley said. Her passengers were deportees, a whole boatload of them. They stood at the rail shouting and singing “The Internationale,” their socialist anthem. People on the pier sang along, though unsynchronized. It was like hearing the music and then its echo. I don’t see her, Langley said. Whistles blew. I heard women crying, I heard cops cursing and using their clubs. In the distance a police siren. It was sickening to sense from the tremors in the air the application of official brute behavior. And then I heard thunder and the rain turned into a downpour. It seemed to me it was the river water swirled into the sky to drop down on us, so rank was the smell.

Langley and I went home and he poured us shots of scotch whiskey. You see, Homer, he said, there’s no such thing as an armistice.

THEN CAME