Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,73

and for the upstairs hall with its clerestory window, a battery-powered sodium lamp which went on automatically as daylight faded. He even dug up an old buzzing sunlamp meant to tan the skin that we had once used to keep our mother’s plants alive, burning them to death in the process, so all that remained of her beloved nursery were stacks of clay pots and the soil they held.

When these lights were turned on all over the house, I imagined great looming shadows angled off in different directions, some streaming along the floor and bouncing up against the bales of newspapers, others shooting upward at the ceiling to illuminate each drop of a particular leak. Not much had changed as far as I was concerned, and I was diplomatic enough not to ask Langley the initial cost of our investment in independent power—to say nothing of the ongoing expense of battery replacements. The key thing here was our self-reliance and I was just as happy that we hadn’t found the candles, which, what with one thing or another in our congested rooms, would no doubt have set something on fire—the piles of mattresses, the bundles of newsprint, the stacks of wooden crates my oranges came in, the old hanging tapestries, spillages of books, dust bunnies, the congealed puddle of oil under the Model T, God knows what—and brought us a return visit of the firemen with their rampant hoses.

THEN, AS IF INSPIRED by the malevolent electric company, the city turned off our water. Langley greeted this setback with relish. And I found myself participating with a kind of grim joy in the system we set up to provide ourselves with water. The hydrant at the curb was of no use—you could not circumspectly wrestle with a hydrant. What a psychological boost for me, then, to be working with my brother, a co-conspirator, as just before dawn every other morning or so we set out with two baby carriages in tandem, his with a ten-gallon milk can long since acquired with the idea that it might someday prove useful, and I with a couple of segmented crates filled with empty milk bottles gathered from our stoop when milk was delivered each morning to one’s door with two or three inches of cream in the neck of the bottle.

A few blocks north of us there was an old water post from the days when water was made available for horses. The water post, a heavy-gauge faucet built into a low concave stone wall whose base was a cement trough, stood at the curb. Langley jammed the carriage up against the trough and positioned the milk can at a tilt under the faucet so that he wouldn’t have to lift it out of the carriage. When the can was full, we filled each of the bottles and capped it with aluminum foil. The trip back was the difficult part, water weighing a lot more than I would have thought. To avoid the curbs at the ends of each block we went along in the street. There were no cars at this hour. I brought up the rear of our procession by keeping the folded carriage hood in touch with Langley’s back. I think we both enjoyed a kind of boyish excitement there in the first light of morning, when nobody was abroad in the land except us and the freshness of the air was carried on a soft breeze redolent of a countryside, as if we were not pushing our carriages down Fifth Avenue, but along a back road.

We brought home our contraband through the basement door under the front steps. We would have enough water for drinking, and all our meals thenceforth would be on paper plates and with throwaway plastic utensils, though we didn’t exactly throw them away, but water for commode flushing and for bathing was another matter. It was the ground-floor guest bathroom that we would try to keep functioning, which was just as well, as the upstairs bathrooms had long since served also as storage areas. But sponge baths were the order of the day and after a couple of weeks of turning ourselves into water carriers, the sense of triumph, of having put one over on the city, had given way to the hard realities of our situation. Of course there was an ordinary drinking fountain not far into the park across from our house and we used that to fill our thermoses and army canteens, though