Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,37

look at all these papers, he said, and they may come at you from the right or the left or the muddled middle but they are inevitably of a place, they are set like stone in a location that they insist is the center of the universe. They are presumptively, arrogantly local, and at the same time nationally bullish. So that is what I will be. Collyer’s One Edition for All Time will not be for Berlin, or Tokyo, or even London. I will see the universe from right here just like all these rags. And the rest of the world can go on with their dim-witted daily editions, whereas without their knowing it, they and all their readers everywhere will have been fixed in amber.

GRANDMAMMA’S GRIEF FILLED the house. It was silent, monumental. Our condolences were met with indifference. One morning she announced that she was leaving our employ. She intended to go to New Orleans and find Harold’s widow, whom she did not know, a young girl, she said, who might need her help. Apparently an infant child was involved. Grandmamma was resolute and it was clear to us that these were relationships she would foster, putting together what was left of her family.

The day of Grandmamma’s departure she made breakfast for us in her traveling clothes and then washed the dishes. She was taking a Greyhound bus from the terminal on Thirty-fourth Street. Langley pressed traveling money upon her, which she accepted with a regal nod. We stood on the sidewalk as Langley waved for a cab. I was reminded of the day we stood here like this to say goodbye to Mary Elizabeth Riordan. There were no tears and no parting words from Grandmamma as she got into the cab. Her mind was already under way. And so as she rode off the last member of our household was gone, and Langley and I were left to ourselves.

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.

WHEN THE WAR ENDED with the victory over Japan it was one of those oppressively close August days in New York. Not that anyone minded. Cars paraded along Fifth Avenue, drivers blowing their horns and shouting out the windows. We stood at the top of our stoop like generals taking review, because people were running by as closely as in ranks, thousands of footsteps scuttling downtown looking for the party. I had listened to the same excitement, the laughter, the running feet like the whir of birds’ wings, on Armistice Day 1918. Langley and I crossing the street to the park found strangers dancing with one another, ice cream vendors tossing Popsicles to the crowds, balloon sellers letting go their inventory. Unleashed dogs ran in circles, barking and yelping and getting underfoot. People were laughing and crying. The joy rising from the city filled the sky like a melodious wind, like a celestial oratorio.

Of course I was as relieved as anyone that the war was over. But underneath all this gaiety I found myself in an awful sadness. What was the recompense for the ones who had died? Memorial days? In my mind I heard taps.

We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

WHILE THE WAR WAS on I had come to feel my life was purposeful, if only in its expectations for the future. But with peace I found there was no future, certainly not in any way to distinguish it from the past. In the light of naked truth I was a severely disabled man who could not expect for himself even the most normal and modest of lives—for instance, as a working man, a husband, and a father. This was a bad time in the midst of everyone’s joy. Even my music had lost its appeal. I was restless, slept poorly, and in fact was often afraid to go to sleep, as if to sleep was to put on one of the gas masks Langley had brought home in which I could not hope to breathe.

Have I not mentioned the gas masks? During the war he’d acquired a crateful. He saw to it that two were hung on nails in every room of the house so that wherever we happened to be, if the Axis powers did attack New York, and