Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,36

meaning as they were, inevitably had gotten things wrong, which only added to the confusion.

Oh Lord, and then one terrible day, the phone rang and it was this tiny tearful girl’s voice, barely audible. She was Ella Robileaux, Harold’s wife, calling long-distance from New Orleans, and she wanted to speak with his Grandmamma. I hadn’t known Harold had married. I knew nothing about it, but I had no reason to doubt her identity, this child of the tremulous voice, and it took me a moment to collect myself, for I understood without being told why she was calling. When I shouted back to the kitchen for Grandmamma to come to the phone my voice broke and a sob escaped from my throat. This was wartime, you see, and people didn’t make expensive longdistance calls just to chat.

BEFORE HE WAS shipped overseas, Harold Robileaux had made one of those little Victory records that soldiers sent home in the mail so their family could hear their voice. Little three-minute recordings on scratchable plastic records the size of a saucer. Apparently there were these recording studios in the same penny arcades near the army bases where you got four photos for a quarter or a bearded mechanical fakir in a glass case would lift his hand and smile and send your printed fortune out of a slot. So Harold had sent Grandmamma his V-record though it took some months to reach us. Until Langley thought to check the postmark it was unnerving to have found something from Harold in our mailbox. You understand this was after Grandmamma had heard from Ella Robileaux that Harold had been killed in North Africa. Perhaps the army censors had to listen to every one of these V-records just as they read every letter the soldiers wrote, or perhaps the post office in Tuskegee was overwhelmed. In any case when this record arrived in the mail Grandmamma thought Harold was alive after all. Thank you, Jesus, thank you, she said, crying for joy. She clapped her hands together and praised the Lord and would not hear from us anything about a postmark. We sat with her in front of the big Victrola and heard him. It was a tinny-sounding record but at the same time it was Harold Robileaux, all right. He was well, he said, and excited to have been promoted to tech sergeant. He couldn’t tell us where he was going or when but he would write when he got there. In that soft New Orleans lilt, he said he trusted that Grandmamma was well and to please give his regards to Mr. Homer and Mr. Langley. It was all what you’d expect from any soldier in the circumstance, nothing unusual, except, being Harold, he had his cornet with him. And being Harold, he put it to his lips and played taps as if offering the musical equivalent of a photograph of himself in uniform. The quality of that cornet’s sound overcame the primitive nature of the recording. A clear pure heartbreaking sound, every phrase lifted to its unhurried perfection. But why did he play the elegiac taps rather than, say, reveille, to indicate his affiliation with the army? Grandmamma asked Langley to play the record over, and then again three or four more times, and though we didn’t have the heart to discourage her, maybe it was that solemnly reflective dirge, the mournful tones filling all our rooms over and over, as if Harold Robileaux was prophesying his own death, that made her admit to herself, after all, that her grandson was gone. The poor woman, having been made to suffer his death twice, could not control her tears. God, she cried, that was my blessed boy you took, that was my Harold.

Langley went out and bought gold-star pennants for the front windows of all four storeys, gold being the star for soldiers who had made what the politicians called “the ultimate sacrifice,” there being presumably a sequence of sacrifices a soldier could make—arms, legs?—before the ultimate one. Usually a single pennant with one star of blue or gold in a window was enough advertisement or consolation for a household, but Langley never did anything like everyone else. My brother’s sorrow was indistinguishable from rage. With the death of Harold Robileaux his whole attitude toward the war had changed and he said that when he finally prepared the front-page war dispatches for his eternally current and always up-to-date newspaper, its advocacy would be explicit. I