he said.
A WEEK OR SO after our night in jail we went with Grandmamma Robileaux to a hearing in which our lawyers moved to have the charges against us dismissed. As to operating a business in a residential zone they provided Langley’s accounts to show that the small profits of each dance were absorbed by the expenses of the dance following so that in a sense it was true that our tea dances were a public service. As to resisting arrest, that charge was only applied to me, a blind man, and Mrs. Robileaux, a stout Negress of grandmotherly age, neither of whom could be reasonably expected, even reacting in fear, to have put up anything which New York’s Finest could claim as resistance. The judge said his understanding was that Mrs. Robileaux whacked a serving tray over the head of an arresting officer. Did she deny that? Oh no, Mr. Judge sir, I most certainly don’t deny anything I did, Grandmamma said, and I would do it again as a respectable woman to defend myself from the hands of any white devil who would have his way with me. The judge considered this answer with a chuckle. As to the last charge, serving alcoholic beverages without a license, surely a drop of sherry, said our lawyer, could not be seriously considered a crime in this regard. At this point the judge said, Sherry? They served sherry? For goodness’ sakes I like a drop of that myself before lunch. And so the charges were dismissed.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the police raid, the house seemed cavernous. The rooms having been emptied for the dance, we had somehow not gotten around to unrolling the rugs, bringing up the furniture, and putting everything back where it belonged. Our footsteps echoed, as if we were in a cave or an underground vault. Though the library still had books on the shelves and the music room still had its pianos, I felt as if we were no longer in the home we had lived in since our childhood, but in a new place, as yet unlived in, with its imprint on our souls still to be determined. Our footsteps echoed through the rooms. And the odor of Langley’s stacks of newspapers—they had, like some slow flow of lava, brimmed out of his study to the landing on the second floor—that odor was now apparent, a musty smell that would be especially noticeable on days of rain or dampness. There was a lot of rubble to clean up, all the broken records, smashed phonographs, and so on. Langley treated it all as salvage, inspecting everything for its value—electric cords, turntables, split chair legs, chipped glasses—and filing things according to category in cardboard boxes. This took several days.
Naturally I didn’t understand it as such, but this time marked the beginning of our abandonment of the outer world. It was not just the police raid and the neighborhood’s negative view of our dances, you understand. Both of us had failed in our relations with women, a specie now in my mind seeming to belong either to Heaven, as my dear unattainable piano student Mary Elizabeth Riordan, or to Hell, as surely was the case of the thieving seductress Julia. I still had hopes of finding someone to love but felt as I had never before that my sightlessness was a physical deformity as likely to drive away a comely woman as would a hunch of the back or a crippled leg. My sense of myself as damaged suggested the wiser course of seclusion as a means of avoiding pain, sorrow, and humiliation. Not that this would be my consistent state of mind, eventually I would rouse myself to discover my true love—as you must know, my dear Jacqueline—but what was gone from me by then was the mental vigor that comes of a natural happiness in finding oneself alive.
Langley had long since reworked his post-war bitterness into an iconoclastic life of the mind. As with the inspiration of the tea dances, he would from now on give full and uninhibited execution to whatever scheme or fancy occurred to him.
Did I mention how vast the dining room had become? A high-ceilinged voluminous rectangle that had always had a hollowness to it, even in the pre-dance days of its Persian rug, its tapestries and sideboards and torch-shaped sconces, its standing lamps and its Empire dining table and eighteen chairs. I had never really liked the dining room, perhaps because it