Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,43

yowls had given way to a reprised moan.

THE MEN RECONNOITERED and decided to bring their boss into the kitchen. Upstairs he might be caught like a rat in a trap. The kitchen, being closest to the back door, offered a fast escape in the event pursuit came up the front steps. They brought down from Siobhan’s old room her mattress and two pillows. So there, propped on what had been Grandmamma Robileaux’s big, thick-planked, turned-leg farm table—I remember my mother had wanted a country look in the kitchen—was our celebrity criminal, petulant, self-pitying, demanding, and—heedless of the presence of strangers—abusive to his son.

Massimo seemed to have the rank of a gangster in training and nothing he did was right according to his father: if he wanted to summon the family doctor, that was stupid, if he ran out for cigarettes or something to eat, he was too goddamn slow. Massimo didn’t look like his father, or like I remembered his father: he was a roly-poly fellow and entirely bald with a rotund head and an ample double chin, as I suspected even before we were chummy enough for him to let me trace his features, and altogether unfortunate for a fellow not yet thirty. I would find myself trying to make him feel not so bad. Your father is in pain, I said, and doesn’t deal well with it. It’s no different than always, said Massimo.

I remember thinking that as a replacement for his father Massimo would never make the grade. I was wrong, though. Some years later, when Vincent was finally shot to death, Massimo became the head of that crime family and was even more feared than his father had been.

WE WERE BROUGHT into the kitchen when Vincent had calmed down enough to have a look at us. It was like being given an audience. Who are these people, he said with his whistly voice. Street bums looking for a handout? Massimo said, They live here, Pop. It’s their place. Don’t tell me, Vincent said. They got hair like they never seen a barber. And this one staring into space like some doper. Oh I see, he’s blind. Jesus, what comes out of the woodwork in this town. Get ’em outa here, I got enough troubles without having to look at these cretins.

I was shocked. Should I have told Vincent that we had met some years before? But that would have been to affirm my humiliation. I felt like a fool. As with any celebrity or politician, the man was your best friend until the next time around when he has no recollection of ever having met you. Langley being present had the good grace never after to remind me of my idiocy.

——

WE WERE TO HAVE our houseguests for four days. Pistols were trained on us just at the beginning. I wasn’t afraid and Langley wasn’t afraid either. He was furious to the point where I was sure that he would burst a blood vessel. Massimo, on orders of his father, tried to pull the phone cord out of the wall. It wouldn’t give. Langley said, Here, I’ll do it for you, we have no use for the damn thing, never have. And he yanked on the phone so hard that I heard pieces of plaster coming out of the wall with it and then he flung the whole thing across the study and broke the glass on one of our father’s bookcases.

My brother and I had to stay at all times where we could be seen. If we left the room, one of the thugs had to go with us. By the second day, this vigilance relaxed and Langley simply went back to his newspaper project, and in fact was helped in this by the men, who took turns going out in the morning and evening to pick up the papers so as to see what was being said about the shooting and Vincent’s disappearance.

The men were dumbfounded by the state of the hideaway they had chosen. They couldn’t understand the absence of a recognizable means of sitting down anywhere. In their minds we were a household given to strange otherworldly furnishings—like the stacks of old newspapers in most of the rooms and on the stair landings. But when they came upon the Model T in the dining room, if it had been up to them they would have departed immediately. It may be that their bewilderment is what saved us from harm, for I heard them