Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,9

deal with any of this emotional disorder, I made a mental distinction between anarchy and evolutionary change. The one was the world falling to pieces, the other was only the inevitable creep of time, which was what we had now in this house, I decided, the turning over of the seconds and minutes of life to show its ever new guise. This was my rationalization for doing nothing. Langley was privileged by his veterancy and Mrs. Robileaux by her cooking skills. I should have done something to support Siobhan but instead found my own guilty solace in looking away and accepting Julia on her own terms.

The girl was amatory in a matter-of-fact way. I had heard about Europeans that they didn’t make as much of a fuss about lovemaking as our women did, they just went ahead and accepted it as another appetite, as natural as hunger or thirst. So call Julia naughty by nature, but more than that, ambitious, which is why, having achieved my bed, she began to lord it over Siobhan as if in practice for the position of lady of the house. I knew that of course, I am only blind of eye. But I admired the immigrant verve of her. She had come to America under the auspices of a servant supply agency and had made a life for herself working first for a family my family knew, and then after they had moved themselves to Paris, arriving at our door with excellent references. I am sure Julia was older than I by some five or six years. However languorously attentive she was at night, she was up promptly at dawn and returned to her household responsibilities. I would lie there in the still warm sheets where she had lain and compose her image from the lingering tangy smell of her and from what my hands had learned of her person. She had tiny ears and a plump mouth. When we lay head to head, her toes barely reached my ankle bones. But she was generously proportioned, the flesh of her shoulders and arms giving under the lightest pressure of my thumbs. She was short-waisted, high-breasted, and with a firm backside and sturdy thighs and calves. She did not have an elegant foot, it was rather wide and, unlike the smooth soft rest of her, somewhat rough to the touch. Her straight hair when unbound fell below her shoulders—she would arrange herself on all fours above my recumbent form and flip her hair over her face so as to brush my chest and belly, sweeping her hair one way and then the other with a shake of her head. At such times she would murmur sentences which began in English and drifted into Hungarian. Like you this, sir, does the sir like his Julia? And somewhere along the line without my realizing it she would have reverted to her Hungarian, whispering her quizzical endearments as to whether I liked what she was doing so that I imagined I was literate in the Hungarian language. I would pull her down so as to get the same brushing effect from her nipples while her hair lay about my face and in my mouth. We did lots of creative things and kept each other amused well enough. The inside of her fit me rather well. She told me her hair was very light, the color of wheat—she said veet—and that her eyes were gray like a cat.

It was Julia’s warm and compliant body and immigrant murmurings that persuaded me to put out of mind the slow grinding away of Siobhan’s honor as her and Julia’s places in the household scheme of things were reversed and Siobhan was the one who found herself taking orders. This good woman had only two recourses, to quit our employ or to pray. But she was a single Irishwoman of middle or even late middle age, with no family as far as I knew. The years of employment in this house had been her life. In such circumstances people cling however unhappily to their jobs and save their money, coin by coin, against the time when they hope to have a decent burial. I did remember that when my mother died, it was Siobhan who wept piteously at the grave, she, Siobhan, as sentimental about death as only the deeply religious can be. And so, finally, prayer would be the means by which she would endure the profound offense to her pride of