Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,38
gas bombs were dropped, we were prepared. Given his lifelong cough and shredded vocal cords, his company having been without masks in 1918 when the fog rolled in, I did not demur. But he insisted that I practice putting on a mask so that when and if the time came I would not die fumbling around. To have my nose and mouth covered in addition to being in the dark was frightening. It was as if the sense of smell and taste, too, were being taken from me. I found it hard to breathe through the canister, which meant I could avoid dying of poison gas only by dying of suffocation. But I made the best of it and did not complain, even though I thought a German gas attack on Fifth Avenue highly unlikely.
By the time of war’s end, the productive might of the American economy having overproduced everything a soldier would need, we’d collected, besides the gas masks, enough military surplus to outfit an army of our own. Langley said G.I. stuff was so cheap in the flea markets that it presented a business opportunity. We had ammunition belts, boots, helmets, canteens, tin food containers with tin utensils, telegraph keys, or “bugs,” developed for the Army Signal Corps, a table-top full of olive drab trousers and Ike jackets, uniform fatigues, hard wool blankets, pocketknives, binoculars, boxes of service ribbons, and so on. It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war. Langley never did work out the details of any business opportunity. So along with everything else, all these helmets, boots, etc. ended up now where they had been deposited, artifacts of some enthusiasms of the past, almost as if we were a museum, though with our riches as yet uncataloged, the curating still to come.
Not everything would go to waste—when our clothes wore out we would take to wearing fatigues, both trousers and shirts. And boots too, when our shoes fell apart.
Oh, and the oiled M1 rifle that had never been fired. This was one of my brother’s prize acquisitions. Fortunately he hadn’t found the cartridges to go with it. He drilled a heavy nail into the marble mantel and we hung up the M1 by its shoulder strap. He fancied his work so well that he did the same for the Springfield rifle that had been sitting there for almost thirty years. They dangled over the fireplace, the two rifles, like Christmas stockings. We never touched them again and though at this point I cannot get anywhere near the mantel, so far as I know they are still there.
I SHOULD MAKE it clear that I did not wish for another war to lift my spirits. It seemed like just a few moments since V-J Day—that’s what the victory over Japan was called—and we were at it again. I thought how foolish we had all been that day of delirious celebration, the whole city shouting its joy to the heavens.
When I played piano for the silent movies the picture would end and the projectionist would stick his head out of the booth. The next feature will begin shortly, he’d say. A moment, please, while we change reels.
And so there we were at war in Korea, but, as if we needed something of more substance, we and the Russians were racing to build bigger nuclear bombs than the bombs dropped on Japan. Endless numbers of them—to drop on each other. I should have thought just a couple of superbombs to char the continents and boil the seas and suck up all the air would be sufficient to the purpose, but apparently not.
Langley had seen a photograph of the second atom bomb that had been used on Japan. A fat ugly thing, he said, not sleek and sharklike as you would expect a respectable bomb to be. You’d think it was something to hold beer. The moment he said that I remembered the empty kegs and ponies he had brought into the house from a brewery that had gone out of business. He lugged these aluminum barrels up to the front door, somehow lost control, and they bounced down the stone steps clanking and booming and rolling across the sidewalk so that I now thought of the atom bomb as an implodable beer keg, lying on its side and spinning on its axis until it decided to go off.
The trouble with listening to