Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,42

in our father’s study. I was startled. Nobody ever called us. Langley had gone to his room to type the day’s news précis for his filing system. He came running downstairs. The phone was in the front hall. I answered. A man’s voice said, Is this the archdiocese? I said, No this is the Collyer residence. And the line went dead. The archdiocese? Maybe a minute later there was a pounding at the door. You understand this was a barrage of loud sudden sounds, a ringing phone, a pounding at the door, that rendered us totally responsive. When we opened the door three men barged in carrying another under the arms and legs, and that was the actual Vincent, whose outflung arm knocked me aside, and left a wet streak on my shirt that turned out to be his blood.

What interests me—I discussed this many times with Langley over the years—was why we stood at the open door as these killers came past us, and instead of leaving the house to them and running off to find the police we responded dutifully to their shouts and orders, shutting the door and following them where they bumblingly wandered with Vincent howling when they stumbled over things, to settle in my father’s study, where amid the books and the shelves of bottled fetuses and pickled organs they sat him down in an armchair.

We were curious, Langley said.

One of the trio of henchmen would turn out to be Vincent’s son. Massimo, his name was. He had been the voice on the phone. The other two were the same men who had driven us home from the nightclub so many years before. I would never hear them speak more than a word or two, usually mumbled. I thought of them as granitelike—hard, verging on inanimate. Vincent’s left ear had been shot away and lest whoever was after him could finish the job—a cartel of New York crime families, if I had judged right—one of the granite men had remembered our house and, perhaps after driving around desperately looking for someplace to hole up, had realized nothing was more unlikely for the pursuit to imagine than a residence on Fifth Avenue, and so found our phone number to see if we were still in residence (as opposed to the archdiocese?) and voilà, there we were, a newly designated safe house for a famous criminal bleeding from what remained of his ear.

——

WITH THEIR BOSS deposited in the chair, and Massimo kneeling beside him and holding a bloodied restaurant napkin to the afflicted ear, the gangsters seemed unable to think further what must be done. There was this silence except for the soft moaning of Vincent, who, I must say, was totally unconnected in my mind to the man of my memory. There was none of the cool suave self-assurance that I remembered and that I expected of him now. It was disappointing. Possibly a bullet tearing off a chunk of ear might have left him with tinnitus, but really it was a minor wound in terms of what is essential to life. So his problem was no more than cosmetic. Do something, he muttered, do something. But his men, perhaps stunned by the array of our father’s collection of human organs and fetuses floating in jars of formaldehyde, the tons of books spilling artfully out of the shelves, the old wooden skis in the corner, the side chairs piled one on top of another, the flowerpots filled with the earth of my mother’s botany experiments, the Chinese amphora, the grandfather clock, the innards of two pianos, the tall electric fans, the several valises and a steamer trunk, the stacks of newspapers piled in the corners and on the desk, the old cracked black leather medical bag with the stethoscope hanging out of it—all of it evidence of life well lived—as I say, in the face of all this the men seemed unable to move. It was Langley who took charge, assessing the nature of Vincent’s wound and finding in a drawer of my father’s desk right there rolls of gauze, adhesive tape, cotton balls, and a bottle of iodine, which he judged to be at its maximum potency given the years of its aging.

Vincent’s yowls as he was treated apparently alerted his men for I felt something pressed under my ribs that I assumed was a gun barrel. But the critical moment passed—Here, I heard Langley say, wrap this around his head—and in short order the