Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,22

tha’s right. He was soft-spoken except when he played, and he was young enough to believe that the world would be fair to him if he worked hard and did his best and played his heart out. That’s how young he was, though he said he was twenty-three. And his grandmother, why, the minute he was set up in the house her whole personality changed, she adored him and looked on the rest of us with a new forbearance and understanding. We had accepted him without a moment’s hesitation even though, as was her wont, she had brought him in and tucked him away for a few days without bothering to inform us. The first we knew of our boarder was when we heard his cornet, and that’s when she was reminded to come to us and tell us Harold Robileaux would be staying for a while.

I liked to listen to him play, as Langley did—this was a new feature of our lives. Harold went out every evening to Harlem and eventually he got together with some other young musicians and they formed their own band and came to our house to rehearse. We were all very happy about this except for Lila van Dijk, who couldn’t believe that Langley would actually permit the Harold Robileaux Five to come play their vulgar music in the house without consulting her. Then one day Langley opened the front door and let passersby come up who had stopped at the foot of the front stoop to listen, and despite the music and the crowd gathered in the drawing room and the music room—for Langley had opened the sliding doors between them—right in the middle of all that, with the cornet leading and the snare drum and tuba keeping the beat, and my commandeered piano and the soprano saxophone riffling along, and people snapping their fingers in time, I heard with my acute hearing the screeches upstairs of Lila van Dijk and the growly cursing responses of my brother, as they formally went about ending their marriage.

This will cost us a pretty penny, Langley said after Lila was gone. If she’d cried just once, if she had showed any vulnerability whatsoever, I would have tried to see things from her point of view if only out of respect for her womanhood. But she was intractable. Stubborn. Willful.

Homer, maybe can you tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself.

THAT DAY WHEN PEOPLE came in from the street to hear the music of the Harold Robileaux Five may have been in the back of Langley’s mind when, some years later, he came up with the idea of a weekly tea dance. Or maybe he remembered how Harold spoke of playing at rent parties in people’s apartments in Harlem.

In the old days our parents would throw an occasional tea dance, opening up the public rooms and inviting all their friends over in the late afternoon. My mother used to dress us up for those occasions. She would duly present us to be insincerely complimented by the guests before the governess took us back upstairs. And Langley may have remembered the elegance of those dances and seen something of a business opportunity in reviving the custom. For of course we had done our research, going over to Broadway where a good dozen or so dance halls had sprung up that charged a dime a dance and had women employed there to accommodate the men who came in without a partner of their own. We would each buy a strip of tickets and dance our way through them, surrendering a ticket to each woman we took into our arms for a dance. It was an indifferent experience to say the least, in these drafty second-floor lofts, atmospheric with cigar smoke and odorous bodies, where the music was broadcast over loudspeakers and whoever was playing the records would sometimes forget when a song was over and you heard the click click of the needle on the blank groove or even the loud scrunch as the needle jumped out of the groove and slid across the label at the center of the record. And everyone would stand around and wait for the next record, and after a minute if nothing happened the men would whistle or shout and everyone would start clapping. One of these places had been a skating rink, that’s how cavernous and gloomy it was. Langley said it was