Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,54
Of course he had modeled his busty females after them. One day Langley told me that Connor had incorporated us as well into his strips. Ah the ruthlessness of art that consumes the world and everyone in it, he said. What do we look like, I said. What is he having us do? We are old gray-haired lechers with little heads with bulging eyes and buck teeth and our legs get wider as they reach the ankles and our feet are fitted with enormous shoes, Langley said. We like to dance with our index fingers pointing to the sky. We pinch ladies’ bottoms and hold them upside down so that their dresses fall over their heads. How insightful, I said. I’m going to buy these strips when he’s finished with them, Langley said. Museums will bid for them one day.
Langley told me Dawn and Sundown were nice but had not much going in the way of thought. They wore long skirts with boots, and fringed jackets, and beaded headbands and bracelets. They were taller than Connor and looked almost like sisters, except that their applied hair colors were different, blond in one case, auburn in the other. I thought at first they would be in some kind of competition for him which they would not disgrace themselves to acknowledge. But it was not like that at all. In the spirit of the times they shared him, and he was dutifully shareable and slept with each of them in turn as one would imagine to be the case in any polygamous and diurnally observant household. All of that was audibly apparent after I retired as I lay in my bed upstairs and heard them going at it in the basement room where they had chosen to bunk themselves.
Where any of them came from, who their families were, I never found out, except that Lissy did tell me she grew up in San Francisco. I pictured all of them from their voices and their footsteps—and perhaps even from the volume of air they displaced. The brightest of them was Lissy. She was usually the one who thought up the things for them to do from what she found by rummaging through the house. She came up with the dressmaker’s dummy lying under some other things in the drawing room and for a half day the three girls were dress designers, cutting and refitting some of our mother’s old evening dresses from the closet of her room. I didn’t mind. Lissy was a petite thing with short curly hair whose own frock went down to her ankles. She had made it herself, she told me in her sweetly cracked voice, it was tie-dyed in patterns of yellow and red and pink. Do you know what the color is when I mention it? she asked me. I assured her I did.
All told they would be living with us for a good month, these hippies. They were in and out of the house in no discernible pattern. They would go off to some rock-and-roll band concert and be gone for a couple of days. They would take menial jobs, make a few dollars, quit till their money ran out, and then find some other job. But for one stretch some astrological influence held sway, for they all went off to work in the morning—Lissy, a clerk in a bookshop, and Dawn and Sundown waitressing in a diner, the boys as phone solicitors for an insurance agency—and came home in the evening, just as if we were a typically square bourgeois household. That peculiar conjunction of the stars lasted almost a week.
I gathered, with the occasional overnight stays of more like them, that the word having gone out, we were part of a network of hostel-like places or pads where people could lay their heads for a night. But I was sure ours was the only pad on upper Fifth Avenue, which gave us some distinction.
Living as they did, these kids were more radical critics of society than the antiwar or civil rights people getting so much attention in the newspapers. They had no intention of trying to make things better. They had simply rejected the entire culture. If they attended that antiwar rally in the park it was because there was music there and it was pleasant to sit on the grass and drink wine and smoke their joints. They were itinerants who had chosen poverty and were too young and heedless to think what