Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,61

illegal storing of flammable materials in a residential neighborhood. Langley said if that were the case we would sue the Fire Department for the destruction of property. Your men’s boots have left a trail of mud on our floors, he said, the back door of the kitchen is off its hinges, they have stormed through here like vandals as you can see from these broken vases, these lamps here, and look at these valuable books soggy and bloated from the damn leaks in their hose.

Well, Mr. Collyer, is it? I should think it’s a small price to pay for having still an abode to live in.

The fire inspector, whom I took for an intelligent man of some years—he had used the word abode, a word you did not often hear in ordinary conversation—surely had looked around, taking it all in, and though he didn’t say anything, he must have passed on what he had seen of our rooms for within a week or so we received a certified letter from the Health Department requesting an appointment for the purpose of assessing the interior condition of—and here they indicated our home by its address.

We of course ignored the letter but our sense of a diminished freedom was palpable. All it took was for people with official credentials to have intentions regarding us. I think it was at this time that Langley ordered a complete course of law books from some college in the Midwest that offered a law degree by mail. By the time the books arrived—in a crate—we were in the sights not only of the Health Department, but of a collection agency acting on behalf of the New York Telephone Company, of lawyers from Consolidated Edison for having damaged their property—I assume they meant the electric meter in the basement, an irritating buzzing thingamajig which we had silenced with a hammer—and of the Dime Savings Bank, which had inherited our mortgage and claimed that in failing to meet our payments we were facing foreclosure, and the Woodlawn Cemetery had drawn a bead because we had somehow forgotten to pay the bills for the care of our parents’ grave site. That wasn’t all of it—there were other letters popping through the mail slot in the front door whose contents I can’t recall just now. But for some reason it was the cemetery bill that most engaged my brother’s attention. Homer, he said, can you think of anyone as depraved as these people who live on death even to the point of charging good money for snipping some leaves of grass around a headstone? After all who cares what graves look like? Certainly not their occupants. What a fraud, this is sheer irreverence, the professional care of the dead. Let the whole cemetery go back to its wild state I say. Just as it was in the days of the Manhattan Indians—let there be a necropolis of tilted stones and fallen angels lying half hidden in the North American forest. And that to me would show true respect for the dead, that would be a sacred acknowledgment, in beauty, of the awful system of life and death.

——

I HAD THE IDEA of ranking our problems as a means of solving them and the mortgage seemed to me the first order of business. It was a struggle to get Langley to sit down and go over our finances. He felt attention to these matters rendered one subservient. But I realized from his reading of the account books that we had sufficient funds to pay off the mortgage altogether. Let’s do that and get these people off our backs, I said, and never again will we have to worry about it.

We lose the deduction on our federal taxes if we pay off the damn thing, Langley said.

But we’re not getting the deduction if we’re not meeting the payments, I told him. All we’re getting is penalties that offset the deduction. And why are we talking about taxes since we don’t pay them.

He had an answer for that having to do with the war, though it went on from there and I’m not sure I can render it accurately. Something about primitive societies that function brilliantly without money, and then a discourse on corporate usury, and then he burst into song: “Oh the banks are made of marble / With a guard at every door / And the vaults are stuffed with silver / That the miner sweated for.” Langley’s tone-deaf, hoarse baritone was an