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."

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."