because Langley had imagined that I would forget a clothesline was strung out somewhere in the house and accidentally garrote myself.
You will never say a word, Vincent said. You will keep your mouths shut or we will come back and shut them for you.
And then I heard the front door slam and they were gone.
All was silent. We sat there tightly bound, back-to-back, in our kitchen chairs. I heard the ticking of the kitchen clock.
BEING TIED UP AND unable to move leads one to reflect. The fact was that thugs had broken into our home and taken it over and not once had we offered any resistance.
We had befriended the family, sitting with them and having coffee, I feeling sorry for Massimo—but how was that anything but propitiation? The more I thought about it the worse I felt. At no time did they consider us worth shooting.
The rope around my arms and chest seemed to be tightening with my every breath. I was ashamed, furious with myself. We could have played some kind of trick, suggested that Vincent was dying. These morons wouldn’t have known the difference. I might have persuaded them to let me leave and find a doctor.
I listened to the ticking of the kitchen clock. A sense of the futility of life rose in my gorge as an overwhelming despair. Here we were, the Collyer brothers, totally humiliated, absolutely helpless.
And then Langley cleared his throat and spoke as follows. I remember what he said as if it was yesterday:
Homer, you were too young at the time to be aware of it, but one summer our mother and father took us to a kind of religious resort on a lake somewhere upstate. We lived in a Victorian manse with wraparound porches on the first and second floors. And in the whole community every house was like that—Victorians with shade porches and cupolas and rocking chairs on the porches. And each house was painted a different color. Does any of this ring a bell? No? People got around on bicycles. Every morning began with a prayer breakfast in the community dining room. Every afternoon there were merry sing-alongs led by a banjo band of men in straw boaters and red-and-white-striped jackets. “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” “Heart of My Heart.” “You Are My Sunshine.” The children were kept busy—potato-sack races, classes in raffia weaving and soap carving—and down at the lake the community fire engine had the nozzle of its water cannon aimed at the sky so that we could run under the spray shrieking and laughing. Every afternoon with the sun beginning to set over the hills a paddle steamer came down the lake with hoots and whistles. In the evenings there were concerts or lectures on worthy subjects. Everyone was happy. Everyone was friendly. You couldn’t walk a few steps without being greeted with big smiles. And I tell you, I had never in my young life been so terrified. Because what could the purpose of such a place be but to persuade people that this was what Heaven would be like? What other purpose than to give an inkling of the joys of eternal life? I was young enough to think there was such a thing as Heaven … to imagine myself spending eternity with the banjo band in their straw boaters and striped jackets, to think I might someday be stuck there among all these imbecilic happy people praying and singing and being educated in worthy subjects. And to see my own parents embracing this hideously unproblematic existence, this life of continuous and unrelenting happiness so as to indoctrinate me to a life of virtue? Homer, that dismal summer is when I realized our mother and father would inevitably fail all my expectations of them. And I made a vow: I would do whatever it might take to avoid going to Heaven. Only when, just a few years later, it became clear to me that there was no Heaven was a heavy weight lifted from my shoulders. Why do I tell you this? I tell you this because to be a man in this world is to face the hard real life of awful circumstance, to know there is only life and death and such varieties of human torment as to confound any such personage as God. And so that is affirmed here, isn’t it? To find the Collyer brothers tied up, helpless and humiliated by a vulgar brute? This is one of life’s