Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,68

of the dispute before any eviction could occur—all you need do, sir, is retire the months in arrears and the bank will consider our customer relationship as in the past and there will be no need for a court hearing. We have had a long and amenable relationship with the Collyer family and have no wish to have it end badly.

Langley: No that’s all right. Even if a judge rules in your favor, which is not at all certain given your usurious four-point-five percent interest rate, he will issue a lis pendens, which as you know is a redemption period of another three months. Let’s see, on top of the two months until we appear in court that’s almost a half year before we have to do anything, or retire anything. And who knows, we might before the final bell decide to pay off the whole damn mortgage, or maybe not. Who can tell? Good day to you, sir. We do appreciate your taking time out of your busy banker’s day to personally call on us but now, if you don’t mind, take your marshal with you and get the hell off our property.

BY THE FOLLOWING spring we did pay off the mortgage. As I believe I’ve mentioned, Langley decided to do that in person. After having advised the bank by mail when he would appear, he walked from our house on upper Fifth Avenue to the Dime Savings on Worth Street in the Financial District, a distance nearly half the length of Manhattan.

Typically, the press got it wrong: my brother wasn’t trying merely to save carfare—that was a secondary consideration. Really he wanted to keep the officers of the Dime Savings in a state of suspense.

WITH LANGLEY ON his way that morning, I decided to get some air. I put on a clean shirt, an old but very comfortable cashmere sweater, my tweed jacket, and a reasonably unworn pair of trousers. If any reporters were hanging about I assumed that Langley would have drawn them off and I could get across to the park without incident. Also, it was fairly early in the day when the curiosity seekers were less likely to be found lingering in front of the house. That is what the newspaper stories had done for us, you see, made our home something to stare at, and there were times, usually on the weekends, when a small crowd would have gathered to look at our boarded-up windows, hoping for one of the maniac brothers to step outside and shake his fist at them. Or they would point at the gap in the cornice where the marble corbel had fallen to the sidewalk—have I mentioned that?—almost hitting someone walking past at that moment, except that it hadn’t and he had to be content with a suit claiming a small chip of the marble had flown up and damaged his eye. But with all these people coming around—if two or three were standing there and a passerby wondered what was going on, he would stop as well—they would engage in conversation, some of which I could hear when I stood behind the shutter of a window that was open a crack. It amazed me how proprietary some of these people felt—you’d think it was their house falling to pieces.

But at this time everything sounded quiet enough. I walked out into a warm spring morning and stood at the curb waiting for a lull in the traffic. My hearing at this point having lost a degree of its brilliance I thought the moment had come, and I’d already stepped off the curb when a woman called out No!—or Non!—for this was Jacqueline Roux, the about-to-be dear friend of my end of life—even at the same time as I heard tires screech and horns blow, perhaps even fenders creasing, but in any case I stood transfixed, having stopped traffic. Through all of this, footsteps approaching, and the same confident voice behind me saying, All right, now we may go, and her arm through my arm and her hand gripping my hand as, despite the shouts and curses, we walked unhurriedly across Fifth Avenue like old friends out for a stroll. And in this way, and not the only time, did Jacqueline Roux save my life.

I AM IN THE DARKNESS and silence deeper than the poet’s sea-dingle but I see that morning in the park and hear her voice and remember her words as if I was back outside of myself