Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,21

A PERIOD when my brother would bring home a woman from one of our nightclub sprees and after enduring her for a week or a month, he would kick her out. He would even marry a lady named Lila van Dijk, who would live with us for a year before he kicked her out.

Almost from the beginning he and Lila van Dijk did not get along. It was not just that she couldn’t bear the stacks of newspapers—most women would feel that way who like their ducks in a row. Lila van Dijk had a mind to change everything. She would rearrange the furniture and he would put it all back the way it was. She complained about his coughing. She complained that cigarette ash was everywhere. She complained about Siobhan’s cleaning, she complained about Mrs. Robileaux’s cooking. She even complained about me: He’s just as bad as you are, I heard her say to Langley. She was an imperious little woman who had one leg shorter than the other and so wore a built-up shoe that I would hear tapping up and down the stairs and from one room to another as she went on her tours of inspection. I had intuited nothing about Langley’s Anna—an indistinct voice in a shipboard chorus. I knew more than I wanted to know about his Lila van Dijk.

They had married at her parents’ estate in Oyster Bay, and though I dressed for the occasion in my summer ducks and blue blazer, Langley stood before the pastor in his usual baggy corduroys and an open shirt with the sleeves rolled. I had tried to dissuade him but to no avail. And though the van Dijks handled it with dignity, pretending to believe their about-to-be son-in-law was dressed in some sort of bohemian Arts and Crafts style, I could tell they were furious.

Lila van Dijk and Langley practiced their debating skills on a daily basis. I’d go to the piano to drown them out, and if that didn’t work I’d go for a walk. What brought on the final break between them was our cook Mrs. Robileaux’s grandson, Harold, who had arrived from New Orleans with one suitcase and a cornet. Harold Robileaux. Once we realized he was in the house we converted a basement storage room into a place for him to stay. He was a serious musician and he practiced for hours at a time. He was good too. He would take a hymn like “He walks with me / And He talks with me / And He tells me I am His own …” slowing the tempo to bring out the pure tones of his cornet, a mellower sound than you’d ever expect from something made of brass. I could tell he really understood and loved this instrument. The music rose up through the walls and spread through the floors so that it seemed as if our house was the instrument. And then after he had gone through a verse or two, which was enough to make you repent of your pagan life, he’d up the tempo with little stuttering syncopations—as in He waw-walks with me, and taw-talks with me and tells me, yes he tells me I’m his own de own doe-in—and from one moment to the next it became a fervently joyous hymn that made you feel like dancing.

I had heard swing on the radio and of course frequented the clubs where there was a dance orchestra, but Harold Robileaux’s hymnal improvisations in our basement were my introduction to Negro jazz. I would never master that music myself, the stride piano, the blues, and that later development, boogie-woogie. Eventually Harold, who was very shy, was persuaded to come upstairs to the music room. We tried to play something together but it didn’t quite work, I was too thick, I didn’t have the ear for what he could do, I could not compose as he could, taking a tune and playing endless variations of it. He would try to get me to join in on this or that piece, he was a gentle fellow of endless patience, but I didn’t have it in me, that improvisatory gift, that spirit.

But we got along, Harold and I. He was short, portly of figure, and with a round smooth face with that brown coloration that feels different from white skin, and plump cheeks and thick lips—a perfect physiognomy, breath and embouchure, for his instrument. He would listen to my Bach and say, Uh-huh,