Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,44

talking among themselves as to how glad they would be to escape from this place—madhouse, I think, is the word they used.

HERE I SHOULD mention the typewriters. Sometime before this, Langley had decided he needed a typewriter to begin to bring order to his master project, the single newspaper for all time. He first tried the one our father had used. It sat on the Doctor’s desk—an L. C. Smith Number 2. It wasn’t the engreased dust that bothered Langley, but that the ribbon was dried out and the keys required great pressure of the fingers. I think even if he had found the machine to be in perfect order Langley would have gone out, as he eventually did, to find some others because, as in all such matters, one would not do where an assortment might be had. Consequently after a while a battery of machines were in our possession—a Royal, a Remington, an Hermès, an Underwood, among the standard models, and, because he was delighted to locate it, a Smith-Corona that had been fitted with keys in Braille. That is the one I’m using now. So for a while, as Langley worked his way through the imperfections of each of the machines, there was a new music in my ears of key clacks and bell dings and slamming platens. I was surprised that he eventually found a model to satisfy him. The rest were accorded museum status, untended and forgotten, like everything else, with the exception of one beauty he found in a shop in the West Forties, a very old Blickensderfer Number 5, which felt to my touch like a metallic butterfly with its wiry wings in full flight. This was given an honored place on the washstand in his bedroom.

As the third day came around with no sign of Vincent’s departure—he slept most of the time—my brother and I slowly went back to the daily routine of our lives with no interference from the gangsters, and this bizarre situation took on a semblance of normality. Langley typed away on his project and I resumed my daily practice sessions at the piano. It was as if two separate households were sharing the same space. They brought in their food and we took care of ourselves, though after a while we ran out of most everything we had in the pantry and they began to leave things for us. Their cuisine came in white cardboard boxes and was quite good—Italian specialties brought in at night—theirs was a one-meal regimen—and in return we made coffee in the mornings and sat with them on the steps to the second floor. When Vincent awoke, he proceeded to complain from his kitchen bed and demand and curse and threaten everyone in sight. He turned us all into a kind of oppressed fraternity, he’d become a universal burden, and so finally there was a sort of bonding—the two brothers and the three hoodlums.

I should have thought his men preferred Vincent asleep to Vincent awake but they were increasingly nervous as they waited fitfully for their next orders. They wanted to know now what retaliation lay in store. They wanted to know what was to be done.

ON THE FOURTH MORNING I heard a terrible crash. It had come from the kitchen. The men ran in there. I followed. There was no sign of Vincent.

They kicked open the pantry door and found him cowering in the corner. You hear that? Vincent said. You hear that?

I heard it, we all heard it. The men were on alert now, their guns drawn, one of them prodding me in the ribs. Because there it was, the rat-a-tat of something relentlessly mechanical, like the deadly sputter of a tommy gun. Vincent had fallen or rolled off his makeshift kitchen bed having been startled awake by that sound, presumably familiar to him in his long life of crime. This was a delicate moment and I knew if I laughed it would be the end of me. I merely pointed at the ceiling and let them work it out for themselves that it was Langley at his typewriter, Langley being a very fast typist, his fingers racing to keep up with his thoughts, and his room located directly overhead. What typewriter he was using I didn’t know—the Remington, the Royal, or perhaps the Blickensderfer Number 5? He had set it up on a fold-out card table that was not quite steady and the clacking keys as transmitted through the spindly legs