Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,66

class of disgustingly fallible human beings who turned themselves into infallible print every day, compounding the historical record that stood in our house like bales of cotton. If you talk to these people you are at their mercy, and if you don’t talk to them you are at their mercy. Langley said to me, We are a story, Homer. Listen to this—and he read this supposedly factual account about these weird eccentrics who had shuttered their windows and bolted their doors and run up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills though they were worth millions. It had our ages wrong, Langley was called Larry, and a neighbor, unnamed, thought we kept women against their will. That our house was a blight on the neighborhood was never in question. Even the abandoned peregrine nest up under the roof ledge was held against us.

I said to my brother: How would you run this in Collyer’s forever up-to-date newspaper?

We are sui generis, Homer, he said. Unless someone comes along as remarkably prophetic as we are, I’m obliged to ignore our existence.

THE ATTENTION FROM the press was not continuous, but we had become a stop on the beat, as it were, a reliable source of wonder for the reading public. We could laugh about this, at least at the beginning, but it became less funny and more alarming as time went on. Some of these reporters published the details of our parents’ lives—when they bought the house and how much they paid for it—all matters of public record if you had nothing better to do than go downtown and dig through city archives. And they found out from old census reports and ship manifests when our ancestors arrived on these shores—it was early in the nineteenth century—and where they lived, their generations, artisans risen to the professions, the marriages made, the children begotten, and so forth. So now all of that was public knowledge but what was the point except to indicate the decline of a House, the Fall of a reputable family, the shame of all that history in that it had led to us, the without-issue Collyer brothers lurking behind closed doors and coming out only at night.

I admit to feeling at secret times, usually just before falling asleep, that if one held to conventional bourgeois values he could read the Collyer brothers as end-of-the-line. Then I would get angry with myself. After all, we were living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention—could we not be a supreming of the line, a flowering of the family tree?

Langley said: Who cares who our distinguished ancestors were? What balderdash. All those census records, all those archives, attest only to the self-importance of the human being who gives himself a name and a pat on the back and doesn’t admit how irrelevant he is to the turnings of the planet.

I wasn’t prepared to go that far, for if you felt that way what was the use of living in the world, of believing in yourself as an identifiable person with an intellect and desires and the ability to learn and to affect outcomes? But of course Langley liked to say these things, he had been saying them all our adult lives, and for someone who had no regard for his own distinctiveness, he was certainly putting up a struggle, holding off the city agencies, the creditors, the neighbors, the press and relishing the battle. Oh and then one night he thought he had heard something scurrying about the house. I could hear it too when he brought it to my attention. We stood in the living room and listened. A clicking sound that I thought was above our heads. He thought it was inside the wall. Was it one creature or more than one? We couldn’t tell but whatever it was, it was weirdly busy, busier than we were. Langley decided we had mice. I didn’t tell him I thought it might be something larger. By this time I wouldn’t have heard mice. The sound was not that of something small, and not of a timid interloper, but of something living in our house impertinently, without our leave. This was a creature with clear intentions. Listening to its busy click click click I imagined it as arranging things to its satisfaction. It was unnerving, how presumptive the sound was, almost as to make me think I was the interloper. And if it was inside the walls or between the floors, how could we hope it