twenty blocks south and north, and as far east as First Avenue and to the paths in the park across the street all the way to Central Park West. I knew the length of the blocks by the number of steps it took from curb to curb. I was just as happy not to have to see the embarrassing Renaissance mansions of the robber barons to the south of us. I was a vigorous walker and gauged the progress of our times by the changing sounds and smells of the streets. In the past the carriages and the equipages hissed or squeaked or groaned, the drays rattled, the beer wagons pulled by teams passed thunderously, and the beat behind all this music was the clopping of the hooves. Then the combustive put-put of the motorcars was added to the mix and gradually the air lost its organic smell of hide and leather, the odor of horse manure on hot days did not hang like a miasma over the street nor did one now often hear that wide-pan shovel of the street cleaners shlushing it up, and eventually, at this particular time I am describing, it was all mechanical, the noise, as fleets of cars sailed past in both directions, horns tooting and policemen blowing their whistles.
I liked the nice sharp sound of my stick on the granite steps of the bank. And inside I sensed the architecture of high ceilings and marble walls and pillars from the hollowed-out murmur of voices and the chill on my ears. These were the days I thought I was acting responsibly, carrying on as a replacement of the previous Collyers as if I was hoping for their posthumous approval. And then Langley came home from the World War and I realized how foolish I had been.
DESPITE THE ASSURANCES of his letter, my brother returned was a different man. His voice was a kind of gargle and he kept coughing and clearing his throat. He had been a clear tenor when he left, and would sing the old arias as I played them. Not now. I felt his face and the hollowness of his cheeks and the sharpness of his cheekbones. And he had scars. When he removed his uniform I felt more scars on his bare back, and also small craters where blisters had been raised by the mustard gas.
He said: We are supposed to go on parade, marching in lock-step, one battalion after another, as if war is an orderly thing, as if there has been a victory. I will not parade. It is for idiots.
But we won, I said. It’s Armistice.
You want my rifle? Here. And he thrust it into my hands. This heavy rifle actually fired in the Great War. He was supposed to have stowed it at the armory on Sixty-seventh Street. Then I felt his overseas cap fitted on my head. Then suddenly his tunic was hanging off my shoulder. I felt ashamed that for all the accounts of the newspapers’ war that Julia read to me in her Hungarian accent at the breakfast table each morning, I had still not understood what it was like over there. Langley would tell me through the following weeks, interrupted occasionally by poundings on the door by the army constabulary for he had left his unit before being legally mustered out and given his discharge papers, and of all the difficulties with the law we were to endure in the years to come, this one, the matter of his technical desertion, was like the preview.
Each time I answered and swore that I hadn’t seen my brother, and that was no lie. And they would notice me looking at the sky as I spoke and would beat a retreat.
And when the Armistice Day parade was held, and I could hear the excitement in the city, people hurrying past our house, the cars crawling, their horns blowing, and through all of that the distant strains of military march music, I heard from Langley, as if antiphonically, of his experiences. I would not have asked him about it, I wanted him to be his old self, I recognized that he needed to recover. He had not known till he came back that our parents had succumbed to the flu. So that was another something he had to deal with. He slept a lot and didn’t take any notice of Julia, at least at first, although he might have found it odd to see her serving