Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,67

would stay there without venturing into the house proper?

Langley went out that night and came back with two stray cats, and set them out to catch whatever it was, and when that didn’t bring immediate results he added another three or four, all of them strays—tough street cats with loud voices—until we had a half dozen roaming among our crowded rooms like sentries, cats that had to be fed and spoken to and with litter boxes that had to be emptied. My brother, who had no regard for the pretensions of the human race, turned out to have the feelings of a fond father for these feral cats. They climbed upon the jumbles or piles or stacks of things and liked to leap down onto our shoulders. I would sometimes trip over one, for they had lengthy rest periods and lay about, upstairs and down, and if I stepped on a tail and produced a hissing protest Langley would say, Homer, try to be more careful.

So now we had cats on patrol, slinking everywhere around and under everything, and I still heard the toenail clicks in the ceiling at night as I lay in bed, and sometime a scratching at the walls. But this was not an exclusively nocturnal animal—I could hear it running about in the daytime as well, particularly when I stood in the dining room. I don’t think I have mentioned the elaborate crystal chandelier that hung in the dining room. Apparently the mysterious creature or family of creatures—for I was coming to believe that more than one was involved—had so befouled their residence over the dining room that the sodden ceiling buckled, looking, said Langley, like the bottom of the moon, and down came the chandelier—like some sort of parachute on a cable—shattering against the Model T, the pendant crystals flying off in every direction and scattering the yowling cats.

I remembered seeing, as a child, one of my mother’s maids standing on a ladder under that chandelier and removing each crystal, cleaning it with a cloth, and hanging it back on its hook. She had let me hold one. I was surprised at how heavy it was—it was shaped like two slender pyramids with their bases stuck together and when I told her that she had smiled and said what a smart boy I was.

OUR DIFFICULTIES WITH the bank that held our mortgage—by now the Dime Savings Bank, for these things are traded about, just as the banks themselves undergo metamorphoses, the original Corn Exchange of which I was so fond having become the Chemical Corn Exchange, with maybe the seeds of a potent hybrid crop secreted within its vaults, and then the Corn disappeared, perhaps burned away by its chemical components, and lo, it was the Chase Chemical and then the chemistry was gone and it was the rock-hard Chase Manhattan, and so on, in the endless process of corporate mutations in which nothing changes or is improved, according to Langley—but anyway, our difficulties with the Dime Savings culminated in a contretemps at the top of our front steps, with an actual banker—accompanied by a city marshal to suggest what an eviction would feel like—standing there and waving a summons in my face and, presumably, Langley’s as well.

We were, the four of us, standing at the top of the steps, the brothers confronting the two unwelcome guests, who, with their backs to the street, were, militarily speaking, in an indefensible position. I listened to the banker intone our dire fate—he was a baritone with a supercilious Park Avenue diction—and thought, If he breezes those papers in front of my nose one more time I shall give him a shove and listen to the fracturings of his skull as he goes down backward on our granite stoop. It was unlike me to contemplate violence—I was surprised by it myself and not entirely displeased—but Langley, from whom one would expect something that radical, said, Just wait a moment, and withdrew inside to emerge a minute later with one of his mail-order law books in hand. I heard the shuffle of the pages. Ah yes, he said, all right then, I accept your summons—give it here—and will see you at court—let’s see—the hearing should be in about six to eight weeks, as I understand these matters.

All you need do to avoid foreclosure, said the banker, somewhat disconcerted—for he had not expected any legal knowledge of us and a court hearing meant lawyers for the bank and endless protraction