Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,51
we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we’ll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.
I’M RECALLING NOW that tale of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame—this poor defective and how he loved a beautiful girl and would ring the great cathedral bells in his anguished passion. In my longing for a lover I wondered if that was me. Or could I, after all, find some woman who would take up with me from some genius of her own loving spirit. The model I had in mind for this person was Mary Elizabeth Riordan, my piano student of yore. Actually it was Mary Elizabeth Riordan herself I wished for. I had kept my feelings for her as one keeps a precious object hidden away in a box. I fantasized that someday she would return to us a grown young woman newly sensitive to the history of my diffident and formerly imperceptible courtship. It was a cruel coincidence or malign alignment of spiritual forces that even as I was thinking of her she was writing to us for the first time in many years.
Langley brought her letter in from the front hall. It had come slipped into the usual packet of bills, lawyers’ letters of warning, and Building Department notices that the mailman always thoughtfully bound with a rubber band. Well look at this, Langley said. A Belgian Congo stamp. Who is Sr. M. E. Riordan?
My God, I said, is that my piano student?
Her long silence was explained: she had taken vows, she was a sister in some worthy order. She was a nun! Dear friends, I know I should have written before this, I heard her say in Langley’s voice, but I hope you will forgive me.
Dear friends? What had happened to Uncle Homer and Uncle Langley? People didn’t just take vows, they took dictions. I asked Langley to read the letter over again: Dear friends, I know I should have written before this, but I hope you will forgive me and pray for these poor people who I am privileged to serve.
She explained that in her order the sisters were missioners, they went around the world where the people were poorest and most miserable and they lived among them and tended to them.
I am in this impoverished and drought-ridden country living in a village among the poor and oppressed, she wrote. Just last week army troops came through and killed several of the men of the village for no reason at all. These people are poor farmers wresting their food crops out of a harsh rocky hillside. Two of my sisters are here with me. We provide what sustenance and medicine and solace we can. I feel blessed by God in my work. The only thing I miss is a piano and I pray for the Lord to forgive me for this weakness. But sometimes in the evening when they have one of their village ceremonies, they bring out their hand drums and sing, and I sing with them.
I had Langley read the letter to me for several days running. I was trying to acclimate. The children are undernourished, she wrote, and they get sick a lot. We are trying to start a small school for them. Nobody here knows how to read. I ask my God why in some places people can be so poor and wretched and uneducated and yet love Jesus with a purity that transcends whatever might be possible in New York, a city so far away just now, so heedless, that huge city where I grew up.
It is a shameful thing to confess but, with the news of what Mary Elizabeth Riordan had done with her life, I felt betrayed. Her passion was for others, countless others, it was a dispensed passion, a love for anyone and everyone, whereas I wanted it to be for me. In all these years had she ever thought of me? I could match in neediness any broken-down indigent of the Congo. And if things were so godless in New York, what better place for a missioner?
The sister had enclosed a photograph of herself and some little children in front of what looked to be the village church. It is not much more than a stone hut with a cross over the door, Langley said. And she looks different.