Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,52

is a mature woman. Maybe it’s because she’s wearing a sun hat. You see just her hairline and her face. She looks heavier than I remember.

Good, I said.

Nor is the letter that of a girl. This is a grown woman talking. How old do you suppose she is?

I don’t want to hear it, I said.

Past fifty, I should think. But isn’t it interesting that someone in the grip of such a monstrous religious fantasy—believing she is doing the Lord’s work—is doing the work that the Lord would be doing if there was a Lord?

I could not be as philosophical as Langley about my sweet girl’s chosen life. I will not here detail the lascivious proposals of my imagination, the arch seductions that I composed at night from my memory of her slight figure, the modest indications of her form in the simple dresses she wore, or from the touch of her hand on my arm as we strode to the movie theater where she told me what was on the screen. The lips and eyes I had traced with my fingertips I now kissed, and from the shoulder that had brushed mine as we sat together at the piano I now let loose the strap of her shift. This went on for some nights, she in her shy acquiescence and I gently but firmly teaching her her pleasure and seeing to the conception of our child. How sad that I was reduced to these expedients till all my anguish was dissolved in futility and the tactile image of what had been Mary Elizabeth Riordan had faded from my mind.

I don’t know how Langley truly felt about her letter. He would rather hide behind some philosophical bon mot than reveal what love he had kept for the girl. It would not be in character for my brother to identify with Quasimodo. But it happened that the next period of our lives saw an uncharacteristic sociability akin to recklessness on both our parts, as we opened our house to the strange breed of citizen now springing up around the country. If there was a thin edge of bitterness to what we were doing, if we were moving as far away as we could from the saintliness of Mary Elizabeth Riordan, disinheriting her in our minds and consigning ourselves to hellish reality by looking for her replacement, we were not conscious of it.

Of course that another damnable war had sprung up was enough to strip away any residual inhibitions I may have had. Was this country unexceptional after all? I was at this point in my life as close in spirit to Langley’s philosophical despair as I had ever been.

WHAT HAPPENED WAS that an antiwar rally was held in Central Park on the Great Lawn and we thought we’d have a look at it. We could hear it long before we got there, the sound of the hoarse loudspeakered voice throbbing in my ears though the words were indistinct, and then the cheers, a flatter broader un-amplified sound, as if the speaker and the audience were in different realms—a mountaintop, perhaps, and a valley. And the blurred oration again for a line or two and the cheers again. This was early in October of that year. It was a warm afternoon, with an autumnal light that I felt on my face. You will say that was the warmth of the sun I felt, but it was the light. It lay on my eyelids, it was the golden light of the low quarter that comes with the dying of the year.

We stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to a folk music group performing a song in earnest praise of peace with that willed naïveté that goes along with such music. The audience joined in at the chorus and that turned out to be the last of it, there was a round of cheers by way of conclusion, and people began to file past us on their way out of the park.

Not everyone was willing to give up the occasion, among them Langley. We wandered among the groups sitting on the grass, or on lawn chairs, or blankets, and I was stunned to hear my brother exchanging pleasantries with strangers. An oddly convivial feeling came over me. The Collyers—principled separatists, recluses—and here we were, just two more of the crowd. And I don’t quite remember how it happened, but some young people there welcomed us into their company and what with one