Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,30

my joke as I sat in the Model T and added exclamation marks with two quick squeezes of the rubber-bulb horn. The honks seemed to bounce around the room and dispense clownish echoes all the way to the top floor.

Langley took my question seriously. This was cheap, just a few dollars, he said. No one wants something this old that has to be cranked up.

Ah, that explains everything. I told Grandmamma Robileaux there was a rational explanation.

Why should this concern her?

She wonders why something from the street has to be in the dining room. Why something made for the outside is inside.

Mrs. Robileaux is a good woman but she should stick to cooking, Langley said. How can you make an ontological distinction between outside and inside? On the basis of staying dry when it rains? Warm when it’s cold? What after all can be said about having a roof over your head that is philosophically meaningful? The inside is the outside and the outside is the inside. Call it God’s inescapable world.

The truth is that Langley couldn’t say why he’d put the Model T in the dining room. I knew how his mind worked: he’d operated from an unthinking impulse, seeing the car on one of his collecting jaunts around town and instantly deciding he must have it while trusting that the reason he found it so valuable would eventually become clear to him. It took a while, though. He was defensive. For days he brought the matter up, though no one else did. He said, You wouldn’t think this car was hideous to behold on the street. But here in our elegant dining room its true nature as a monstrosity is apparent.

That was the first step in his thinking. A few days later as we dined one evening at the kitchen table, he said, out of the blue, that this antique car was our family totem. Inasmuch as Grandmamma Robileaux couldn’t be more displeased having someone now eating regularly in her kitchen, I understood the remark as something made for her benefit, because presumably, being from New Orleans, a city of primitive beliefs, she would have to respect the principle of symbolic kinship.

All theoretical considerations fell by the wayside the day Langley, having decided our electric bills were outrageous, proposed to set up the Model T’s engine as a generator. He ran rubber piping from its exhaust out through a hole he had a man drill in the dining room wall and tied in to the basement wiring board via another hole drilled through the floor. He struggled to get it all working, but succeeded only in making a racket, the running engine and the smell of gasoline together sending Grandmamma and me out the front door one particularly intolerable evening. We sat across the street on a bench at the park wall and Grandmamma announced, as if describing a boxing match, the struggle between Langley and the prevailing darkness, the lights in our windows flickering, sputtering, flaring, and then finally going down for the count. All at once the evening was blessedly quiet. We could not keep from laughing.

Thereafter, the Model T just stood there accumulating dust and cobwebs, and filling up with stacks of newspapers, and various other collectibles. Langley never mentioned it again, nor did I, it was our immovable possession, an inescapable condition of our lives, sunk to its wheel rims but risen from its debris as if unearthed, an industrial mummy.

WE NEEDED SOMEONE to clean house, if only to keep Grandmamma from leaving. Langley fretted about the cost, but I insisted and he finally gave in. We used the same agency that had supplied Julia and we hired the very first people they sent over, a Japanese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hoshiyama. The reference sheet gave their ages as forty-five and thirty-five. They spoke English, were quiet, businesslike, and totally uninquisitive, accepting everything about our bizarre household. I’d hear them talking as they went about their work, they communicated with each other in Japanese, and it was a lovely music they made, their reedy voices at a third interval, the long vowels punctuated with sharp expulsions of breath. At times I felt myself living in a Japanese wood-block print of the kind on the wall behind the desk in my father’s study—the thin tiny cartooned people dwarfed by the snow-covered mountains or making their way under their umbrellas across a wooden bridge in the rain. I attempted to show the Hoshiyamas those prints, which