7. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 169-208

From "OUR SHUTTERS WERE never again to be  ..." through "... Where is my brother?"

With the closing of the shutters comes more and more of a retreat from the world. Langley begins having the newspapers delivered instead of going out to buy them, and he goes out only at night. The changing demographics of the neighborhood -- the arrival of Latinos and blacks -- "was enough for our neighbors to throw up their hands," and for anonymous letter writers to blame it on the Collyers.

Langley pays less attention to his universal newspaper project and more to "his legal studies with the mail-order law school," in an effort to deal with creditors. Homer realizes that Langley enjoys it, and he approves of this turn toward the practical. "It brought a here-and-now component to his life, an immediacy, and the promise, good or bad, of an outcome, which was not the case with his eternal, never-to-be-achieved, Platonic newspaper." But it is also a time in which the city itself seems to be decaying, and Homer's life is increasingly confined to the house.

Then Homer notices that his piano seems to be going out of tune in the middle octaves. And when he checks the player piano, and an electronic keyboard that Langley had brought home, he finds the same distortion of sound. "At that moment I understood it was not any piano but my hearing that was off-key. I was hearing a C as a C-sharp." He is going deaf. It is a gradual process, "allowing me progressive degrees of acceptance," and he decides not to tell Langley about it.

Then their various legal battles attract the attention of the press. A reporter rings their bell and his obnoxious behavior makes them realize that they are fodder for the "human interest" story. Langley reads to him "this supposedly factual account about these weird eccentrics who had shuttered their windows and bolted their doors and run up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills though they were worth millions." The story gets Langley's name wrong, calling him "Larry," as well as their ages. Homer asks how Langley's newspaper would cover them. "We are sui generis, Homer, he said. Unless someone comes along as remarkably prophetic as we are, I'm obliged to ignore our existence."

By researching the Collyers' ancestry, the newspapers turn their story into "the decline of a House, the Fall of a respectable family." But Homer argues the opposite: "After all, we were living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention -- could we not be a supreming of the line, a flowering of the family tree?"

Langley begins to hear a scurrying sound in the house, and when it's brought to his attention, Homer hears it too. "The sound was not that of something small, and not of a timid interloper, but of something living in our house impertinently, without our leave." So Langley begins bringing home stray cats to try to trap whatever it is.

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. 

When a banker and a city marshal arrive with a summons, threatening their eviction, Langley handles it with a calm that surprises Homer, requesting a hearing which "meant lawyers for the bank and endless protraction of the dispute before any eviction could occur." He continues to point out the eventual legal complications, drawing on knowledge from his law books, and concludes by telling them to "get the hell off our property." It is after this confrontation that they do in fact pay off the mortgage. Langley walks "nearly half the length of Manhattan" to the bank, an action that is misreported in the press: "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."

While Langley is walking out on his errand, Homer decides to make a rare venture outside. It is a warm spring morning, but when he starts to cross the street, thinking that the traffic has stopped, his fading hearing fails him: "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.... And in this way, and not the only time, did Jacqueline Roux save my life."

She not only helps Homer cross the street, she goes with him into the park and sits with him on a bench. And she explains that she had come to see him because "you and your brother are famous now in France." He protests when he learns that she is a reporter for Le Monde, but she persists: "I am not here to interview you. I am to write about your country. I have been everywhere because I don't know what I am looking for." Her article is to be about "what cannot be seen," the "secrets" of America. She asks him about the closed shutters on the house. Houses in Europe have shutters "because of our history," she says. But in America "homes confront the street unafraid, for everyone to see. So why do you have black shutters on your windows, Homer Collyer?"

Homer is unable to explain, but as their conversation goes on he feels it bringing out in him a "competitive intelligence," or perhaps just flirtation. They talk about Central Park, and she tells him of a sensation she once had "that the Central Park was sunken at the bottom of the city. And with its ponds and pools and lakes as if, you know, it is slowly sinking?" He is "enchanted by the intensity of her conversation -- so poetic, so philosophical, so French, for all I knew. But at the same time it was all too fanciful for me."

He is glad that she isn't "trying out her ideas on Langley," who would have been too impatient with her. He realizes that her ideas about Central Park and shutters are "bizarre," but at the same time "her passionate engagement with her ideas was a revelation to me," and he envies her life, "going around the world and making up things about it." When the time comes to return to the house he invites her in, but she replies, "Ah no, merci, I have appointments. But sometime, yes." She lets him feel her face, though he doesn't touch her lips. She tells him she has been married, but isn't anymore, and that she has a son in secondary school in Paris. And that she will return to New York in a few weeks and they should have coffee. They part.

Langley is unimpressed when Homer reports on this encounter, telling him, "you have always been susceptible to the ladies, do you know that?" But Homer, expecting another visit from Jacqueline, decides that he wants a haircut and a new suit, and that he wants to eat more -- she has remarked on his thinness. But Langley also picks up on the fact that Jacqueline had helped Homer cross the street, which confirms Langley's suspicions that his brother is growing deaf. He studies the books in their father's library and one day tries a test of Homer's hearing, but goes no further with that.

Jacqueline doesn't call again, and he realizes that he has let his imagination run wild. "The haircuts I got and the new suit of clothes I had bought in anticipation of her return were like any other played-out fantasies of mine." So he turns back to what he "could rely on, the filial bond." But Langley is depressed, too. "Whereas I was relieved that we no longer had to worry about losing our home, he felt amortization, militarily, as a defeat." He is roused to battle again by a new enemy: Con Edison, which turns off the power because they haven't paid their bills.

He went out and bought marine lamps, wilderness lamps, long-handled searchlights, propane lamps, mercury lamps, hurricane lamps, pocket flashlights, high-intensity beam lamps on poles, and for the upstairs hall with its clerestory window, a battery-powered sodium lamp which went on automatically as daylight faded.

Homer is glad they haven't found their candles, which might have set fire to the place.

When the water is turned off as well, Langley is inspired to further efforts at independence, and the brothers set out every day before dawn with two baby carriages in which they haul home the water from an "old water post from the days when water was made available for horses." They restrict their bathroom use to the one in the ground-floor guest room, and for drinking water they fill thermoses and canteens at a drinking fountain in the park.

Children, perhaps having seen the brothers filling their canteens at the fountain, begin throwing rocks at the shutters. At first, Langley runs out to chase them away, but that only makes the children more active. So the brothers decide to endure it. Once, Langley peers out through the shutters and says that some of them are teenagers. "So you are right, Homer, this may be citywide, and we have the rare privilege of an advanced look at the replacement citizenry for the millennium." Langley considers using some of their guns to intimidate the tormentors, but Homer says they'll stop when the weather turns cold, and they do.

Something that Langley says bothers Homer: "He said everything alive was at war." He reflects on their situation and worries about "being turned into a mythic joke." Once they are gone, will anyone understand what they were? "My brother and I were going down, and he, lung-shot and half insane, knew that better than I." And so Homer begins to chronicle their lives, taking Jacqueline Roux as his muse. He imagines that she has returned, and that they dine together and he plays music for her. He confesses that he is a blind man going deaf, and she considers this as "a problem to be solved. Why not write, then, she says. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking." He should write about his life: "Your life across from the park. Your history deserving of the black shutters. Your house that is a greater attraction than the Empire State Building."

Langley had encouraged Homer to write, making sure that he has a Braille typewriter and plenty of paper.

I have been at it for some time now. I have no clear sense of how long. I sense the passage of time as a spatial thing, as Langley's voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked off down a long road, or is falling away in space, or as if some other sound that I can't hear, a waterfall, has washed away his words.

Langley develops a system of signals, of touches on Homer's arm to communicate when it is time to eat or go to bed, and he learns Braille so that he can give Homer other messages by placing his finger on the Braille keys of the typewriter to spell out the words. But a prowler tries to break in one night, and Langley hears other sounds that suggest people may be trying to get in, attracted by stories "that the Collyers, distrustful of banks, keep enormous amounts of cash stashed away." He builds barriers and boobytraps, with the result that Homer is essentially imprisoned in the house, unable to move about by himself.

"My bed is a mattress on the floor beside my typing table," Homer writes, and tells us that Langley sleeps on the kitchen table that once was a bed for Vincent. Rats begin to take over, and Homer sometimes feels them at his feet. "There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things themselves." But he is brought back by the touch of his brother's hand. Until the day that there is a crash that shakes the house and Langley comes no more.

6. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 136-169

From "I'M RECALLING NOW that tale of Quasimodo ..." through "... the prophecy of Langley's timeless newspaper."

Homer yearns for a soulmate, "some woman who would take up with me from some genius of her own loving spirit," and his model is his former piano student, Mary Elizabeth Riordan. And suddenly she writes to them: She is Sister M.E. Riordan, a missionary in the Belgian Congo. Homer has Langley read and re-read the letter to him, trying to get used to the idea that she is now a nun, but in the end he feels "betrayed": "I could match in neediness any broken-down indigent of the Congo."

She includes a photograph of herself with some children, and Langley says she looks "heavier," and reminds Homer that she must be over fifty now. But Homer is trapped in some erotic idealization of the Mary Elizabeth he had known.

The Vietnam War, "another damnable war," is being waged, and Homer and Langley decide to go to a protest rally in Central Park. Their long hair and their jeans and boots make them fit in, and soon they are sitting with hippies "on the Great Lawn and taking swigs from their wine bottles and breathing the fine acrid scent of their marijuana cigarettes." When it grows dark and the police chase the crowd from the park, some of their new friends follow them home.

They stood in awe in the dim light of the dining room looking upon our Model T on its sunken tires and with the cobwebs of years draped over it like an intricate netting of cat's cradles, and one of the girls, Lissy -- the one I was to bond with -- Lissy said, Oh, wow! and I considered the possibility, after drinking too much of their bad wine, that my brother and I were, willy-nilly and ipso facto, prophets of a new age.

The oldest of the group, JoJo, is twenty-three, and the others are eighteen or nineteen. JoJo takes it on himself to bale up Langley's newspapers and to create a maze of pathways through the house, using the bundles as building blocks. Connor is a cartoonist, and works Homer and Langley into his drawings. Langley plans to buy them, saying, "Museums will bid for them one day." The other girls are named Dawn and Sundown, and Langley sleeps with them. Homer prefers Lissy, who grew up in San Francisco and whom he regards as the brightest.

They stay with the Collyers for a month, disappearing occasionally, taking odd jobs, and drawing others to the house. "I was sure ours was the only pad on upper Fifth Avenue, which gave us some distinction." Homer finds himself falling in love with Lissy, who is fascinated by his blindness and sometimes walks around with her eyes closed to see what it's like. She reads to him from Siddhartha -- "a novel in which a Buddha-inflamed German wandered about seeking enlightenment" -- and Homer has to restrain from telling her "how funny I thought that was." One night, after washing Homer's feet in a ritual fashion, she decides to practice meditation with him, but the only place to sit in a lotus position in his room is on the bed, which leads to the inevitable.

Afterward, I held her in my arms and then there was a moment of mental confusion, some weird misstep of time itself, because I was briefly under the illusion that it was Sister Mary Elizabeth Riordan I was holding.

He wants to talk about this "momentary illusion" with Langley, but his brother is busy with the others, who are as avid at scavenging as he is. He buys a portable kerosene stove to end their "indebtedness to the gas company," and all sorts of kitchen equipment for their communal meals. JoJo has procured an electric guitar and speaker, and Langley adds to it with more speakers and recording equipment.

Homer wants to tell Langley that he has developed his own Theory of Replacements, but instead of generational, Homer's theory is lateral: "If what mattered was the universal form of Dear Girl, and if each dear girl was only a particular expression of the universal, any one of them might serve equally well, and could replace another as our morally insufficient nature demanded."

But then the weather starts to grow colder, and "none of these people could accept winter." They have a large communal farewell meal, and "Langley and I for the first and last time in our lives smoked joints, and my memory of the rest of the evening is a little blurry, except that both Dawn and Sundown seemed to have discovered me at this late date." He wakes up to find Lissy crying, but she won't say why. "Was it because I was an old man and she was overwhelmed with pity? Had she realized, finally, the ruinous state of this house?"

A few days later the lights go out: It is the great Northeast Blackout of 1965. "The house by this time of our lives was a labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends." But Homer is used to navigating it and so he goes through the house from the top down, calling out to people "and telling them to attach themselves to me, like boxcars to an engine." The train gets longer and longer as it descends through the house -- "clearly there were more of our hippie friends in residence than I had known about." Lissy is just behind Homer, and she decides to turn it into a conga line. Finally, they reach the front door, and "they all flew past me like birds from the cage." He hears them laughing "as they fled across the street and into the park, all of them, including by brother, though he would come back, but the others, never, their laughter diminishing through the trees, for that was the last of them, they were gone."

After the hippies leave, the kerosene stove catches fire, and Langley manages to smother the flames and toss the thing into the back yard. But before long the fire department arrives, having been called by the next-door neighbors, who "had reported that our backyard was on fire, which happened to have been the case." Langley complains about the mud tracked in and the trail of breakage as the fire fighters drag the hoses through the house. And a week or so later, they receive a letter from the Health Department, which apparently had received a report from the fire department about the state of the interior of the house. They ignore the letter as an intrusion on their freedom, but Langley orders a set of law books from a correspondence school

By the time the books arrived -- in a crate -- we were in the sights not only of the Health Department, but of a collection agency acting on behalf of the New York Telephone Company, of lawyers from Consolidated Edison for having damaged their property -- I assume they meant the electric meter in the basement, an irritating buzzing thingamajig which we had silenced with a hammer -- and of the Dime Savings Bank, which had inherited our mortgage and claimed that in failing to meet our payments we were facing foreclosure, and the Woodlawn Cemetery had drawn a bead because we had somehow forgotten to pay the bills for the care of our parents' grave site.

Homer argues that they should just pay off the mortgage, which they have enough money to do, but Langley worries about losing the mortgage interest deduction on their taxes. Homer points out that they don't pay their taxes anyway, but Langley has a counterargument "having to do with the war" and including "a discourse on corporate usury." Eventually he agrees, however, but when he goes to the bank to pay off the mortgage he is followed by reporters and by a photographer from the Daily News who wins a Pulitzer "for his portrait of Langley shuffling down Fifth Avenue in a porkpie hat, a ragged coat down to his ankles, a shawl he'd made from a burlap sack, and house slippers."

But their own troubles are put in perspective by "a period of appalling human behavior" that includes the Birmingham church bombing, which reveals to Langley "yet another category of seminal events for his ultimate newspaper -- the murder of innocents." He adds the Kent State shooting and the murders of civil rights workers, as well as the political assassinations and the arrests of anti-war protesters. Then comes the Jonestown massacre, which he puts "in a pending file of one-of-a-kind headline events. There it must stay awaiting another episode of insane lemminglike behavior to pop up again. As I suspect it will, he added." Another category includes the subversion of the Constitution by the president.

And then one day Langley comes in with the morning papers, goes to the windows, pulls the shutters together and locks them. Homer feels a kind of dread, and then Langley reads to him: "The bodies of four American nuns in a remote Central American village had been found in shallow graves. They had been raped and shot to death." Homer's initial reaction is denial: "we couldn't be sure that Mary Elizabeth Riordan was one of the nuns." But Langley goes to the box where they have kept her letters, and the last one "had been written a few months before from the same village named in the newspaper."

Homer recalls sitting by her on the piano bench, and earlier when she had prompted him in his accompaniment of the silent movies. He says to Langley, "This is martyrdom, this is what martyrdom is." But Langley is too angry for that, and can see only the senselessness in the deaths. Homer, recalling the argument, says, "Either my mind is turning in on itself and its memories are eliding, or I have finally understood the prophecy of Langley's timeless newspaper."

5. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 108-136

From "CHRIST, IF THERE was ever ..." through "... to destroy another with confidence."

Langley quickly develops a distaste for television, likening the American viewing public to the shrunken heads of the Jivaro, but one thing does capture their attention on it: "the hearings of a Senate committee investigating organized crime." And one of the witnesses turns out to be their old acquaintance, Vincent. Homer is the first to recognize him, by his voice. Langley says he's heavier and balder, but Homer is certain: "How many gangsters speak in a whisper with an attached wheeze in high C?"

The tabloids confirm Vincent's identity, with headlines like "Vincent Rats!" After the hearings end, Langley pulls the plug on the TV and they don't get it out again until the astronauts land on the moon. But a few weeks later the newspapers report that Vincent has been shot in an East Side restaurant. His associates carried him away, and there is no confirmation that he is dead. And then the phone rings at the Collyer house: A voice asks if this is the archdiocese, and Homer tells them no. Then there is a pounding at the door, and when they open it three men carry in a bleeding Vincent.

One of the three men is Vincent's son, Massimo, whose voice Homer recognizes as the man on the phone. The other two had driven Homer and Langley from the club that night long ago. Vincent's left ear has been shot off, and the men had recognized the house from their earlier visit. The phone call had established that Homer and Langley still lived there. Langley finds some gauze, tape, and iodine and begins to treat the wounded ear, and the men carry Vincent into the kitchen, where they put a mattress on the table for Vincent, who keeps up a stream of abuse of his son, to lie on. Homer notices that Massimo is very different from his father, suffering the abuse without complaint. "Some years later, when Vincent was finally shot to death, Massimo became the head of that crime family and was even more feared than his father had been."

Vincent doesn't recognize the Collyers, which makes Homer feel somehow humiliated. They remain at the house for four days, during which Vincent orders the phone removed, which Langley does gladly, yanking it from the wall and flinging it across the room where it breaks the glass on one of their father's bookcases. "The men were dumbfounded by the state of the hideaway they had chosen," and when they discover the Model T in the dining room Homer hears "them talking among themselves as to how glad they would be to escape from this place -- madhouse, I think, is the word they used."

Meanwhile, Langley types away on his newspaper project -- he has started collecting typewriters, including one with a Braille keyboard for Homer -- and Langley practices daily on the piano. On the fourth day there is a terrible crash and Vincent's men run to the kitchen to see about their boss. He is cowering in the pantry, and asks them, "You hear that?" They all heard "the rat-a-tat of something relentlessly mechanical, like the deadly sputter of a tommy gun." Vincent had been awakened by it and had fallen off the table. But Homer points to the ceiling and reveals that it is Langley typing in the room above, with the typewriter placed on a spindly card table. It created "a darker hammering tone that, I suppose, if you were a sleeping gangster who had recently been shot at, could have sounded like another attempt on your life."

When he figures out what it is, Vincent laughs, permitting the others to laugh as well, and decides that it's time for them to think about leaving what he calls "this rat's nest," and set about getting even with the men who had shot him. He finds one of Langley's army surplus helmets and some fatigues that fit him, and they put his blood-stained clothes in the washing machine. While waiting for his clothes to wash and dry, Vincent hears the typewriter again and tells Massimo to take care of it. "Massimo, showing an initiative in an effort to please his father, brought the typewriter down in his arms and Vincent took it and heaved it across the room and I heard it come apart with a silvery shatter, like a piece of china."

Then, when they're ready to go, they tie Homer and Langley to a pair of kitchen chairs, back to back. "You will never say a word, Vincent said. You will keep your mouths shut or we will come back and shut them for you." Homer is offended: "At no time did they consider us worth shooting." While they are sitting there, unable to move, Langley tells Homer a story about the time their parents took them "to a kind of religious resort on a lake somewhere upstate." Homer was too young to remember, but Langley recalls how pleasant everything and everyone was.

You couldn't walk a few steps without being greeted with big smiles. And I tell you, I had never in my young life been so terrified. Because what could the purpose of such a place be but to persuade people that this was what Heaven would be like? What other purpose than to give an inkling of the joys of eternal life? I was young enough to think there was such a thing as heaven ... to imagine myself spending eternity with the banjo band in their straw boaters and striped jackets, to think I might someday be stuck there among all these imbecilic happy people praying and singing and being educated in worthy subjects.... And I made a vow: I would do whatever it might take to avoid going to Heaven.

And now the Collyer brothers are tied up in their kitchen, which Langley takes as a reminder that "there is only life and death and such varieties of human torment as to confound any such personage as God." This cheers Homer up because their predicament "is just something else to deal with, so they remember how old and fragile the chairs are, tip themselves over and break free. They discuss going to the police, but Langley quotes Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and says they don't need anyone's help or protection.

Vincent had left a couple of hundred-dollar bills for them, and Langley goes out and buys some heavy louvered shutters for the windows and reinforces the front door with steel and a two-by-four brace. The shutters darken the front rooms, however, so after a while they open them again.

Langley then decides that Homer is "getting soft" and fits the Hoshiyamas' bicycle on a frame so Homer can exercise on it, and insists on a brisk walk around the block every day. He also begins forcing on Homer vitamins and health food that he finds advertised in a nudist magazine. And Langley decides to do something about Homer's deprivation when it comes to the visual arts by arranging "a course of tactile art appreciation," using some erotic "carvings of Oriental couples making love," as well as other sculptures he picks up at flea markets.

Then Langley decides that perhaps he can restore Homer's sight. "Rods and cones are what make the eye see, he told me. They're the basis of everything. And if a damn lizard can grow a new tail why can't a human being grow new rods and cones?" He tries working with children's finger paints to see if Homer can distinguish the colors by touch, which he can't. And he has him feel the paintings in the house that Homer remembers from the days when he could see. "I knew each painting by its placement, but visualizing it by touch was another matter, I felt only brushstrokes and dust." And Langley himself takes up painting while Homer plays the piano: "I was not to play pieces, I was to improvise and the resulting canvas would be the translation to the visual of what I had rendered in sound. Presumably, when the paint dried, in some synaptic flash of realization, I would see sound, or hear pain, and the rods and cones would begin to sprout and glow with life."

Homer goes along with it, though he considers "the possibility that my brother was insane." Finally, Langley gets so interested in painting for itself that he forgets about its therapeutic aims, to Homer's relief. And Homer's improvising at the piano makes him interested in composition, so he starts "working up études, ballades, sonatinas and, being unable to write them down, fixing them in my memory." Langley realizes what he is doing, so he goes out and buys a wire recording machine, and later some tape recorders, so Homer can hear himself and make changes in his compositions. "I felt that neither of the Collyer brothers had ever been happier at this time." Eventually both the paintings and the compositions fall by the wayside, and the pictures and recording disappear into the detritus of the house.

Langley does one final painting when the astronauts walk on the moon. He has Homer touch it, and he feels "a sandy surface embedded with rocks and cratered with mounds of what seemed to be some sort of sanded epoxy glue." Embedded in it is what turns out to be a golf club, and several small books whose pages are stiff with glue, "sticking up as if blow by the wind -- three or four of these in various sizes. Is there wind on the moon? I said. There is now, my brother said." Homer doesn't think it's very good: "I had no trouble visualizing it, was the problem." And Langley realizes it's an expression of his rage at the "crassness" of hitting golf balls on the moon and reading the Bible on its surface. "The entire class of blasphemies is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the other stupidly presumptuous."

Homer, on the other hand, argues for the sheer achievement of going to the moon: "I would forgive those astronauts whatever they did." But Langley argues, "The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency." He does realize, however, that he will have to make a new category for his universal newspaper: "technological achievement."

The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

4. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 82-108

From "WE NEEDED SOMEONE to clean house ..." through "...gotten past the front door."

An agency refers a Mr. and Mrs. Hoshiyama as house-cleaners, but when the United States enters World War II, one day the Hoshiyamas are forced to leave their home in Brooklyn and move in with the Collyers. There is some cultural conflict with Mrs. Robileaux at first, but she adjusts because "she felt bad for these people, she knew what it meant to have rocks thrown through your window."

Langley contributes "to what was called the War Effort by selling off the copper rain gutters and chimney flashing of our house." He also sells the walnut paneling in the library and their father's study, though Homer questions whether that really contributes to the War Effort. Langley retorts that "if some muck-a-muck sitting on his keister in Washington wants walnut paneling for his office, it will be relevant to the War Effort."

Homer enjoys having the Hoshiyamas there, and they spend evenings listening to him play the piano. But one day the FBI arrives to take them away. Homer protests furiously, but Mr. Hoshiyama restrains him. "The Hoshiyamas were born fatalists. it was if they and the FBI men seemed to understand one another so as to make me and everything I said irrelevant. Langley is out when they are taken, and becomes angry when he returns. "This house is our inviolate realm, Langley said. I don't care what kind of damn badge they flash." But there is nothing they can do.

The Hoshiyamas leave behind them a tandem bicycle, which Homer and Langley begin to ride every day. The excursions last through the spring until a tire goes flat, after which the bicycle built for two joins other bicycles in Langley's collection. The Hoshiyamas also left a collection of small ivory carvings, which the brothers decide to keep until they return, "though they never did and I don't know now where any of the little ivory carvings are -- buried somewhere under everything else."

Old men collecting for Jewish war relief begin to stop at the house, and one of them, Alan Roses, is welcomed by Langley because he wears a Victory Medal from World War I. Both he and Langley had served in the same division in the Argonne. Roses is full of information about what is happening to the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe, and Langley wonders, "How is it those old men who knocked on our door knew more than the news organizations?" Langley begins to scan the newspapers more closely: "The story was coming out on the back pages in dribs and drabs with no appreciation of the enormity of the horror." Both the atrocities and the indifference make Langley say, "Christ, what I wouldn't give to be something other than a human being."

They then learn that Harold Robileaux had joined the Army Air Forces and was overseas with a black squadron. And when Homer goes out, using a cane, he is approached by strangers who think he has been blinded in the service. They go to the movies with Mrs. Robileaux, who hopes to see Harold in one of the newsreels. Then one day they receive a phone call from Ella Robileaux, Harold's wife, who tells them of his death in North Africa. And they receive a V-record, a disk recording of Harold's voice that he had made and sent to his grandmother before his death. She misunderstands and thinks that it means he is still alive. At the end of the recording, he plays taps on his cornet, and after three or four listenings she realizes that he is dead. Langley goes out and buys gold-star pennants that he puts in the front windows on all four stories of the house. Then one day Mrs. Robileaux announces that she is leaving for New Orleans, to look for Harold's widow and baby. "Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past," and she leaves Homer and Langley on their own.

The end of the war leaves Homer depressed. Langley had accumulated a great store of gas masks during the war, as well as other army surplus, and for a time thinks of selling it at the flea markets. But "Langley never did work out the details of any business opportunity," so the military items join the rest of the detritus in the house. Except for the clothing, that is, which Homer and Langley take to wearing when their regular clothes wear out. Langley has also acquired an M1 rifle, which he hangs over the mantel beside his Springfield rifle from World War I. "We never touched them again and though at this point I cannot get anywhere near the mantel, so far as I know they are still there."

The Korean War and the nuclear arms race begin. The latter gives Langley some "hope that there would soon be a nuclear world war in which the human race would extinguish itself, to the great relief of God ... who would thank Himself and maybe turn His talents to creating a more enlightened form of creature on a fresh new planet somewhere."

Mrs. Robileaux's departure means that the brothers have to find a way of feeding themselves, which initially means dining out. But Langley grows concerned about the cost, and decides to cook at home. "I would sit patiently at the table long past the usual dinner hour, starving and in suspense, until something unnameable was laid before me." But Langley soon notices how thin his brother is going, so they start to eat out of cans, except for the oatmeal that Langley makes for breakfast every day.

Concerned about Homer's depression, Langley decides to buy a television set. It was the early days of TV, and Homer discovered that the screen "was square with rounded sides." Langley tells him to think of it as radio with pictures: "You don't have to see the picture. Just listen. You're not missing anything: what is static on a radio is like it's snowing on the TV. And when the picture does clear, it tends to float up off the screen only to rise again from the bottom." Eventually, Homer gives up on everything except news broadcasts and game shows. And the news shows are largely "about Communist spies and their worldwide conspiracy to destroy us," which doesn't cheer Homer up very much.

The game shows, on the other hand, are enjoyable because they are usually able to answer the questions before the contestants do, especially, in Homer's case, questions about classical and popular music, baseball and literature. Langley is good on history, philosophy, and science. They are so good that they think about applying to be contestants, but they realize that they don't quite fit the model of a TV game show contestant:

Of course I had some idea at the time that we were not sartorially typecast. He had told me the men predictably wore flannel suits and rep ties and crew cuts and women down-to-the-ankle skirts and blouses with big collars and bangy hairdos. Langley, who was now bald on top, had let the gray hair on the back of his head grow down to his shoulders. My own Lisztian fall from its center part was considerably thinned out. And our preferred dress was army greens and boots, leaving to the moths in the closets our old suits and blazers. We couldn't have gotten past the front door.

3. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 51-82

From "NOR WAS THERE any true consolation ..." through "... an industrial mummy."

Vincent, their new gangster acquaintance, sends over a couple of prostitutes one evening, and Homer and Langley are reluctant to send them away for fear of offending their new "and possibly murderous" friend. So they accept the women's favors, but Langley "was convinced that one way or another we would end up paying for my gangster friend's generosity, and that we had not heard the last of him." But in fact they have.

Langley for a time takes up with a woman named Anna, who is a radical, or as Langley describes her to Homer, "some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist." But eventually she is deported back to Russia. Then Langley goes through a series of girls he meets in nightclubs, but finally marries a woman named Lila van Dijk. Unfortunately, she complains not only about his newspaper-hoarding but about everything else in his life, including Homer.

Their marriage gets off to a bad start at the wedding at her parents' home in Oyster Bay, when Langley comes dressed "in his usual baggy corduroys and an open shirt with the sleeves rolled." The final break comes when Mrs. Robileaux's grandson, Harold, arrives from New Orleans. He is a jazz musician and they create a room in the basement where he can practice his cornet. Harold tries to teach Homer to play jazz piano, but to no avail. Eventually, he forms a group with some other musicians, and use the Collyers' house as a place to rehearse. "We were all very happy about this except for Lila van Dijk, who couldn't believe that Langley would actually permit the Harold Robileaux Five to come play their vulgar music in the house without consulting her." And when they invite people in to listen, Lila has had enough and the marriage end.

The crowd that gathers for Harold's music gives Langley the idea of having tea-dances. He and Homer go to some dance halls to do research, and inevitably end up chatting with the women who worked there. "If they were satisfied you weren't a cop they might quietly make you a business proposition, which tended to happen to me more than Langley since you don't usually find police who are blind."

Langley decides they should hold tea-dances for people who weren't the type to frequent dance halls, and begins by inviting old friends of their parents and others they knew. Langley has begun collecting phonographs, so they use recorded music. The first guests are invited, but when people begin showing up without invitations, the brothers start charging admission.

I should say here that we were distinguished, we two brothers I mean, in having lost a good deal of our money well before the market crash, either from bad investments or our excessive nightclubbing and other spendthrift habits, though in fact we were far from destitute and things were never as bad for us as for other people. 

The tea-dances are so successful that they have to expand from the dining room into the drawing room and parlor. They charge a dollar per couple "and for that they got two hours of dancing, cookies and tea, and for an extra twenty-five cents, a glass of cream sherry." They discover that fast, lively music causes the dance floor to empty, and Homer explains to Langley, "The people who come to our tea dance have no fight left in them. They are not interested in having a good time. They come here to hold each other."

But the tea-dances take their toll: Siobhan, who has to move the furniture around and clean up afterward, is found dead one morning. She leaves a savings account of three hundred fifty dollars, which they give to Siobhan's church to take care of the funeral. They attend the burial in Queens with Mrs. Robileaux, whom they now call Grandmamma because Harold did. Harold has returned to New Orleans, and she worries that he's not doing as well playing in clubs as he claims. Homer experiences "that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin -- an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition."

And then a notice gets in one of the newspapers about the tea-dances, and so many appear for the next one that they have to turn people away. The neighbors complain about the crowds, and a policeman shows up to say that they're violating an ordinance against operating a business out of a Fifth Avenue residence. He indicates his willingness to overlook it for a certain percent of the take, but Langley indignantly refuses. So in a week or two there is a raid, and the tea-dances are over.

Homer, Langley, and Mrs. Robileaux spend a night in jail. Langley is in a reflective mood and talks with Homer about the nature of popular music and its philosophical implications:

Well take that song where he says sometimes he's happy sometimes he's blue. 

"...my disposition depends on you."

Yes, well what if she's saying the same thing at the same time? 

Who? 

The girl, I mean if her disposition depends on him at the same time his disposition depends on her? In that case two circumstances would prevail: either they would lock together in an unchanging state of sadness or happiness, in which case life would be unendurable--

That's not good. And what's the other circumstance? 

The other circumstance is that if they began disynchronously, and each was dependent on the other's disposition, there would be this constantly alternating mood current running between them, from misery to happiness and back again, so that they would each be driven mad by the emotional instability of the other.

In the end, the charges are dismissed.

The house seems "cavernous" when they return, the furniture having been moved out and the rugs rolled up for the dancing. "And the odor of Langley's stacks of newspapers ... was now apparent, a musty smell that would be especially noticeable on days of rain or dampness." Records and phonographs were broken in the melee, and Langley decides to sort the rubble into cardboard boxes. "Naturally I didn't understand it as such, but this time marked the beginning of our abandonment of the outer world."

Homer is sick in bed when Langley decides to put a Model T Ford in the dining room, transforming it into a garage, "complete with the smell of motor oil." Homer can hear the sounds, "lots of grunting and hammering," as it is assembled, and thinks that Langley might be erecting a statue there. One day, Grandmamma Robileaux brings him a bowl of soup and says, "I knew when he came home from that war your brother's mind weren't right." She complains that her floor is "all tracked up with their boots, the back door off its hinges, black mechanical things, auto-mobile things, swinging through the window like clothes on a line." Homer is astonished, but assures her "There is some intelligent purpose behind this," though he hasn't "the remotest idea of what it might be."

So when he's well and goes back downstairs he asks Langley, "If you were going to bring a car into the house, why not a modern up-to-date model?" Langley explains that it was cheap, but Homer persists, saying that Mrs. Robileaux "wonders why something from the street has to be in the dining room. Why something made for the outside is inside." Langley asks how you can "make an ontological distinction between outside and inside," but Homer realizes that he doesn't really have a reason for doing it. The car was just something he had seen on the street and decided that "he must have it while trusting that the reason he found it so valuable would eventually become clear to him."

First Langley claims that the car is their "family totem," and then he conceives of a practical reason. He decides their electric bills are too high and decides to use the engine as a generator. But the smell of gasoline drives Homer and Mrs. Robileaux from the house. "Thereafter, the Model T just stood there accumulating dust and cobwebs, and filling up with stacks of newspapers, and various other collectibles. Langley never mentioned it again, nor did I."

2. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 21-51

From "DESPITE THE ASSURANCES of ..." through "... and the house would be like a tomb."

Langley's "clear tenor" voice has changed to "a kind of gargle," and Homer can feel the gauntness of his face and the scars on his back. When the Armistice comes, he refuses to march in the parade: "It is for idiots." And army officials begin visiting because "he had left his unit before being legally mustered out and given his discharge papers." These are a prelude, Homer comments, to their later legal difficulties.

In addition to his own disability, Langley now learns of his parents' deaths. When he goes to visit their graves, Homer hangs the rifle Langley had carried above the mantel, "and there it has stayed, almost the first piece in the collection of artifacts from our American life.

Homer's affair with Julia causes tension with Siobhan, the senior maid. And Mrs. Robileaux, the cook, serves whatever she wants, which sometimes causes Langley to push his plate away and leave the table. Homer is baffled by his inability to resolve these tensions. He resigns himself to "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."

As Langley begins to recover, he takes up with Perdita Spence, a childhood friend whom he invites to dinner. But during dinner, after serving the first two courses, Julia sits down with them at table. Julia says, "How novel, Langley, to put your guests to work. But where is my apron?" Langley replies that Julia isn't a guest, "When serving she is one of the staff. When seated she is Homer's inamorata." Homer says, "It's a kind of hybrid situation." Silence follows, and then Perdita upbraids Homer for taking advantage of an impoverished immigrant. Langley takes her home, leaving Julia and Homer to finish their dinners.

As he is eating, Homer takes hold of Julia's hand. He realizes that she is wearing his mother's diamond ring. "We had a trial, naturally, Langley and I the sitting judges, Siobhan the prosecuting attorney." Julia claims that Siobhan gave her the ring to look more presentable at the table, but Siobhan denies it. Langley takes the family jewels and puts them in a safe-deposit box at the bank, and Julia "was gone from the premises as unceremoniously as Miss Perdita Spence, as if they were prototypes of the gender with which, through the years, Langley and I would, on one basis or another, find ourselves incompatible."

Homer turns to his music for consolation, but the only pieces he knows are the ones he learned when he was sighted, and he finds himself unable to read Braille musical notation and then play what he has read. So Langley buys him a player piano, with rolls that re-create the performances of the great virtuosos. By placing his fingers on the keys as the rolls turn, Homer is able to learn new pieces and then perform them on his own Aeolian. But the player piano also becomes the first of at least a dozen pianos that Langley collects. He "came to see pianos as machines, music-making machines, to be taken apart and wondered at and put back together. Or not."

Langley's "passion for collecting things," Homer says, is part of his "morbidly thrifty" nature: "Saving money, saving things, finding value in things other people have thrown away or that may be of future use in one way or another." It is "a world view" that Homer doesn't share, but has gone along with. And here Homer addresses himself to "Jacqueline, my muse....: You have looked in on this house. You know there is just no other way for us to be. You know it is who we are."

The new repertoire gives Homer what he needs for an occupation: playing piano to accompany silent movies. He hires an assistant who watches the films for him and whispers to him what is happening on screen. Mary Elizabeth Riordan, sixteen at the time, is a music student, and Homer supplements her salary with free lessons. She is an orphan, and when Siobhan takes a liking to her, they invite her to come live with them.

How easily and with such grace she accommodated herself to her situation. After all, what an odd household we were, with these many rooms that must have seemed daunting to a child from the tenements, and a serving woman who had instantly adopted her and given her chores as a mother would do, and a cook whose characteristic glower did not change from morning till night. And a blind man whom she led to and from his job, and an iconoclast with a loud cough and a hoarse voice who rushed out ever day, morning and evening, to buy every newspaper published in the city.

Theorist Langley has a theory of music: Prehistoric man had invented it "to sound the vast emptiness of this strange world by saying 'I am here, I am here!'"

Both Homer and Langley fall in love with Mary Elizabeth, but they "were in loco parentis, and always would be." When the talkies come in, and Homer loses his job, they send her off to the Sisters of Mercy Junior College in Westchester County. But Homer says, "I cannot at this moment bear to speak of what became of Mary Elizabeth Riordan," remembering the household gathering to bid her farewell.

Homer and Langley throw themselves into the speakeasy life of the Prohibition era, to nightclubs that Langley calls "the true democratic melting pot." At one, Homer meets a gangster named Vincent and tells him that when he drinks he thinks he can see: "I generated visions from what I learned from my other senses and added, by way of detail, my judgments of character and my attention to this one or revulsion for that one." Vincent is fascinated with Homer's blindness, and Homer is excited to meet a gangster: "I found it to be true generally with the criminals we ran into that as a class they were extremely sensitive." But when Vincent drives them home one night, Langley says it was a mistake: "I don't like it that now those scum know where we live."

But Langley is intrigued by Homer's claim to be able to see when he's drunk. It is an epistemological problem, he tells Homer: "there is endless debate as to whether we see the real world or only the world as it appears in our minds, which is not necessarily the same thing. So if that's the case, if the real world is A, and what we see projected on our minds is B, and that's the best we can hope for, then it's not just your problem."

Langley has now turned his attention to his "major project, the collection of the daily papers with the ultimate aim of creating one day's edition of a newspaper that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day thereof." Hence the collection of the daily papers, which continues "to the end of his life when his newspaper bales and boxes of clippings rose from floor to ceiling in every room of our house." He counts and files newspaper stories according to categories, working toward the discovery of "the kinds of events that were, by their frequency, seminal human behavior." In the end he plans "to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer's eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need." It is a kind of Platonic newspaper: "The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would only be an example."

In response to Homer's objections, Langley says that sports coverage, for example, would be reduced to the fact that "Whatever the sport is ... someone wins and someone loses." As for art, "If it is art, it will offend before it is revered. There are calls for its destruction and then the bidding begins." As for unprecedented events and new scientific discoveries, these are subject to Langley's Theory of Replacement: "Albert Einstein replaces Newton, and Darwin replaces Genesis. Not that anything has been made clearer."

But I'll give you that both theories are unprecedented. What of it? What do we really know? If every question is answered so that we know everything there is to know about life and the universe, what then? What will be different? It will be like knowing how a combustion engine works. That's all. The darkness will still be there. 

But Homer knows, and thinks Langley did too, that the newspaper project would never be completed. The important thing was that it gave "him the mental boost he needed to keep going -- working on something that had no end other than to systematize his grim view of life." But even then he would sometimes fall into depression, and Homer would catch it from him: "Nothing would seem to be worth doing and the house would be like a tomb."

1. Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, pp. 4-21

From "I'M HOMER, THE BLIND BROTHER...." through "....I realized how foolish I had been."

Homer Collyer, the narrator, tells us that he began losing his sight in his late teens, watching things gradually fade out over the course of a long winter. But he had "exceptional hearing,' and trained it "to a degree of alertness that was almost visual." Fascinated by Homer's bat-like hearing, his older brother, Langley, would test it with experiments throughout their family's four-story house, through which Homer could move without hesitation. In the music room, Langley would move the grand piano to another corner from the one it usually sat in, and place a folding screen in the middle of the room, then spin Homer about before letting him go.

I had to laugh because don't you know I walked right around that folding screen and sat down at the piano exactly as if I knew where he had put it, as I did, I could hear surfaces, and I said to Langley, A blind bat whistles, that's the way he does it, but I didn't have to whistle, did I?

The historical Langley brothers, a pair of recluses who lived in a Harlem brownstone until their death in 1947, were somewhat different: Homer, for example, was the older brother by four years, not the younger by two, as Doctorow has it. And Homer didn't lose his sight until he was in his fifties. And Langley was the concert-level pianist, not Homer. Doctorow will also extend their lives well beyond 1947, finding yet another way to do what his novels typically do: view American history as it passes by, this time just incidentally touching the lives of the brothers.

Homer tells us that in these years -- "well before the Great War" -- he was a student at "the West End Conservatory of Music" and Langley was attending Columbia. His supposed "helplessness" is attractive to women when "the days of the flapper and women smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis were in the unimaginable future." He cultivated "Franz Lisztian hair" and "had a sexual experience or two in this time I am describing, this time of my blind life as a handsome young fellow not yet twenty." His parents were still alive and gave "soirees" in their home, "a monumental tribute to late Victorian design." Each year, their parents would travel abroad for a month and collect things: "ancient Islamic tiles, or rare books, or a marble water fountain, or busts of Romans with no noses or missing ears, or antique armoires with their fecal smell."

The brothers would attend summer camp in Maine, and at fourteen, before losing his sight, Homer falls in love with Eleanor, who attends the adjacent girls' camp. At night they would slip out of their camps and meet "to wander about under the stars and talk philosophically about life." Then one night they come across a lodge for adults, and through the window they see a group watching "what in later time would be called a blue movie." They witness the sexual activity of "The woman on the screen, naked but for a pair of high-heeled shoes" and "an ugly bald skinny man" with an enormous penis.

Homer is transfixed by what he is seeing, but when he turns around Eleanor has disappeared. "The summer had some weeks to go but my friend Eleanor never spoke to me again, or even looked my way, a decision I accepted as an accomplice, by gender, of the male performer. But he is struck by the difference between the performers in the movie and the staidness of his parents, for whom "Life was made tolerable by its formalities. Even the most intimate relationships were addressed in formal terms." But the result of this formal and predictable character is that his parents have faded from memory: "I can remember a girl  knew slightly, like that Eleanor, but of my parents, for instance, I remember not one word that either of them ever said."

Langley is a theorist, and one of his theories is "Langley's Theory of Replacements": "Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents' replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation." Homer objects that we are individuals: "A genius like Beethoven cannot be replaced." But Langley counters that "Beethoven was a genius for his time. We have the notations of his genius but he is not our genius. We will have our geniuses, and if not in music then in science or art." It is a matter, he says, of our "social constructions."

Homer objects that the idea of replacements negates the idea of progress. Langley replies, "There is progress while at the same time nothing changes." Homer by now has realized that "Langley's theory was something he was making up as he went along" and that "what Langley called his Theory of Replacements was his bitterness of life or despair of it." But one consequence of this theory is that Langley begins to hoard newspapers. He has been reading to Homer -- although Homer has learned Braille and even read Gibbon's Decline and Fall in Braille -- from popular novels, and before switching to newspapers -- "reading to me of the war in Europe to which he was destined to go" -- Langley has brought home "slim volumes of poetry and read from them as if poems were news." Homer doesn't remember the names of the poets, but he sometimes remembers lines from them: "Like Generations have trod, have trod, have trod / And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil." That bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins is "a Langley idea."

Then Langley goes off to fight in World War I, taking "the place of a dead Allied soldier, just according to his theory." Homer feels his brother's face to try to memorize it, and observes, "He stood straight and tall, taller and straighter than he would ever be again." Homer is without his brother for the first time in his life, and soon will be without his parents, who die in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.  Then Langley is reported missing in action, and Homer asks himself "if it was possible for my entire family to be wiped out in the space of a month or two." He decides that it isn't possible, and he's right: Langley writes from a hospital in Paris to say that he "had been gassed on the western front. Nothing fatal, he said."

Until Langley returns, Homer depends on the servants. He fires the butler, who "was too slyly solicitous of me, now that I was in charge and no longer the son." Besides, his name is Wolf and he is a German. Wolf challenges him on that score, and Homer asks if Wolf is short for Wolfgang. When he says yes, Homer tells him, "I'm firing you because you have no right to the name of the greatest genius in the history of music." Homer is left with only the cook, the Irish maid Siobhan "and the younger Hungarian girl Julia, who smelled of almonds and whom I eventually took to bed."

Once a week he walks down down Fifth Avenue to the bank, to take care of his father's estate and the household management. He takes a cane but doesn't use it, having memorized "everything for 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." He "gauged the progress of our times by the changing sounds and smells of the streets."

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.