Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,39
the news with Langley was that he became agitated, he raved and ranted, he talked back to the radio. Langley, as an expert newspaper reader, reading all the papers every day, knew what was going on around the world better than the commentators. We’d listen to some commentator and then I’d have to listen to Langley commentating. He would tell me things I knew were true but which nevertheless I didn’t want to hear, all of it just adding to my depression. Eventually, he would stop giving me his political insights, which boiled down anyway to a hope that there would soon be a nuclear world war in which the human race would extinguish itself, to the great relief of God … who would thank Himself and maybe turn His talents to creating a more enlightened form of creature on a fresh new planet somewhere.
Whatever the news of the world, with Grandmamma Robileaux gone we were faced with the practical problem of how to feed ourselves. Homer, said my brother, we will take our meals out, and it will do you good to be up and about instead of sitting in a chair all day and feeling sorry for yourself.
We had our breakfast at a counter place on Lexington Avenue, a brisk ten-or twelve-minute walk. I’m just thinking a moment about the food: they served fresh orange juice, eggs any style with ham or bacon, hash brown potatoes, toast, and coffee for a dollar and a quarter. I usually had my eggs as an omelet sandwich on the toast as that was easy to handle. For a breakfast it wasn’t cheap but other places charged even more. For dinner we went to an Italian place on Second Avenue, a twenty-minute walk. They had various spaghetti dishes, or entrées of veal and chicken, chopped salad, and so on. It wasn’t very good but the owner saved the same table for us every night and we brought our own bottle of Chianti and so it was passable. We skipped lunch entirely, but in the afternoon Langley would boil water and we’d have tea with some crackers.
But then he toted up the month’s dining bills and, forgetting he had prescribed our eating out as a way of improving my state of mind, he decided to cook at home. He sought at first to duplicate the restaurant meals we had had for breakfast and dinner. But I would smell things burning and weave my way to the kitchen, where he was cursing and tossing hot and hissing frying pans into the sink, or I would sit patiently at the table long past the usual dinner hour, starving and in suspense, until something unnameable was laid before me. Langley asked me one day why I supposed I was looking so peaked and thin. I didn’t say, How else should I look given the culinary experiences I have endured? Finally, he gave up and we began to eat out of cans, though he had decided that oatmeal was an essential constituent of good health and put up a batch of the gluey stuff for breakfast every morning.
It would take some time before his interest in healthful eating expanded and he would turn his attention to my blindness as something curable via nutrition.
WHAT LANGLEY DID by way of cheering me up was to buy us a television set. I did not even try to understand his reasoning.
These were the early days of television. I touched the glass screen—it was square with rounded sides. Think of it as pictorial radio, he said. You don’t have to see the picture. Just listen. You’re not missing anything: what is static on a radio is like it’s snowing on the TV. And when the picture does clear, it tends to float up off the screen only to rise again from the bottom.
If I was not missing anything why bother with it? But I sat there in the interest of science.
Langley was right about the relation to radio. Television shows were structured like radio programs, coming in half-hour segments, or sometimes even whole hours, and with the same daytime soap operas, the same comedians, the same swing bands, and the same stupid advertising. There was not much point to my listening to television unless it was a news broadcast or a game show. The news was all about Communist spies and their worldwide conspiracy to destroy us. That was hardly cheering, but the game shows on television were another matter. We got