Homer & Langley

THE HEAVY HOUSEWORK that went along with our enterprise was indeed too much for poor Siobhan. When she didn’t come down from her room one morning Mrs. Robileaux went up to see what was the matter and found the poor woman dead in her bed, a rosary wound around her fingers.Siobhan had no relatives that we knew of, and there were no letters in her bureau drawer, nothing to indicate she’d had a life outside our house. But we did find her savings bankbook. Three hundred and fifty dollars, a tidy sum in those days unless you understood these were her life savings after more than thirty years’ employment with our family. She did have her church, of course, St. Agnes on the West Side in the Fifties, and they took care of the obsequies for us. The priest there accepted Siobhan’s bankbook, whose sums, he said, could be designated for the church’s expenses after the State had gone through its usual rigmarole.By way of atonement Langley placed paid obituaries in every single paper in the city, not only the majors like the Telegram and the Sun and the Evening Post and the Tribune, the Herald, the World, the Journal, the Times, the American, the News, and the Mirror, but in the Irish Echo and the outlying papers, like the Brooklyn Eagle and the Bronx Home News and even the Amsterdam News, for colored folks. To the effect that this good and pious woman had devoted her life to the service of others, and with her simple heart and passion for cleanliness she had enriched the lives of two generations of a grateful family.But wait — I may be mistaken about the number of newspapers that ran Siobhan’s obituary, for by this time the World had merged with the Telegram, and the Journal had combined with the American and the Herald with the Tribune—mergers I remember Langley reporting to me with some satisfaction as early signs of the inevitable contraction of all newspapers to one ultimate edition for all time of one newspaper, namely his.Ours was the only car behind the hearse in the ride to Queens. We were to bury Siobhan in a vast hill-crawling necropolis of white marble crosses and winged angels cast in cement. Mrs. Robileaux, whom we had taken to calling Grandmamma in the manner of her grandson, Harold, sat in state next to me. For the occasion she wore a mothball-smelling stiff dress that crinkled as she moved and a hat whose broad brim kept slicing into the side of my head. She spoke of her fears for Harold, who was at this time back in New Orleans. He claimed in his letters that he was getting steady work playing the clubs, but she worried that he was making things out better than they really were so that she wouldn’t worry.We were all in a somber mood. With the image of poor Siobhan in my mind, and remembering my trips to the Woodlawn Cemetery to bury my parents, I could only think of how easily people die. And then there was 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.