Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,23

lit with colored lights that only cheapened everything and that bouncers stood about with their arms folded. The women in these places tended to be bored, I thought, though some worked up enough energy to ask you your name and make small talk. If they were satisfied you weren’t a cop they might quietly make you a business proposition, which tended to happen to me more than to Langley since you don’t usually find police who are blind. But mostly they were overtired girls who’d clerked in the department stores, or waited tables, or worked in offices as typists, but were now on their uppers and trying to make a little money as piecework dancing partners. They turned in their collected tickets at the end of a shift and got paid accordingly. I could intuit their characters from their physicality, whether they were light to hold and to do the fox-trot with, or tended to lead you rather than be led, or were listless and maybe on some kind of drug, or were heavy and even fat so that you heard their stockings rub on the insides of their thighs as they stepped along with you. And just their hand in your hand told you a lot.

And as you’d suspect, Langley’s business idea was to give our dances for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those dance halls.

For the first few Tuesday afternoon tea dances, we invited people we knew, like friends of our mother and father’s, and whatever members of our own generation they brought with them. Langley and Siobhan converted the dining room, dismantling the dining table that seated eighteen, lining the chairs against the wall, and rolling up the rug. Our parents had hired musicians for their dances—a trio usually of piano, bass, and snare drum, the drummer using the soft whispery brushes—but we had recorded music, because long before this time of the Great Depression, with so many people out of work, and men in suits and ties standing on line at the soup kitchens, Langley had been collecting phonographs, both the old table models that used steel needles and a voice box at the end of a hollow curved chrome arm, and the more up-to-date electric Victrolas, some of them standing on the floor like pieces of furniture, with speakers hidden behind ribbed panels with cloth webbing.

These first dances were strictly social invitations with no charge. During the breaks people sat in the chairs against the wall and sipped their tea and took cookies from the plate Mrs. Robileaux held in front of them. But of course the word spread and after a couple of weeks people were showing up who had no invitation and we began charging admission at the door. It had worked out just as we’d hoped it would.

I should say here that we were distinguished, we two brothers I mean, in having lost a good deal of our money well before the market crash, either from bad investments or our excessive nightclubbing and other spendthrift habits, though in fact we were far from destitute and things were never as bad for us as for other people. Yet Langley was of a mind to worry about finances even if there was nothing seriously to worry about. I was more relaxed and realistic about our situation but I did not argue when he predicted dire poverty for us as he did when going over the bills each month. It was as if he wanted to be as badly off in the Depression as everyone else. He said, You see, Homer, how in those dance halls they make money from people who don’t have any? We can do that too!

Eventually things were going so well that there were too many dancers for the dining room, and so the drawing room and parlor were similarly stripped. Poor Siobhan was at the end of her endurance, shoving furniture into corners and rolling rugs and lifting hassocks and carrying Tiffany lamps down the basement stairs. Langley had hired men off the street to help out with all this moving, but Siobhan could not let them work unattended—every nick or scrape or floor gouge caused her anguish. To say nothing of the cleaning up and putting everything back afterward.

Langley had gone out and purchased several dozen popular music records so that we would not have to play the same tunes over and over. He had found a music shop over on Sixth Avenue and Forty-third