Homer & Langley

THE WAR WAS BROUGHT home to us in many ways. We were told to buy War Bonds. We were told to save scrap metal and rubber bands, but that was nothing new. Meat was rationed. Draperies had to be pulled across the windows at night. As titular owner of a car, Langley was entitled to a book of gas-ration tickets. He put his “A” sticker on the windshield of the Model T, but having given up the idea of using its engine as a generator, he sold his tickets to a local garage mechanic, a bit of black marketeering which he justified in terms of our financial situation.Langley’s newspaper project seemed to be right in step with what was happening. He read the papers every morning and afternoon in an inflamed state of attention. For good measure we listened to the evening news on the radio. At times I thought my brother took a grim satisfaction from the crisis. Certainly he understood its business opportunities. He contributed to what was called the War Effort by selling off the copper rain gutters and chimney flashing of our house. That gave him the idea of also selling the walnut wood paneling from the library and our father’s study. I didn’t mind losing the copper gutters but walnut paneling didn’t seem to me relevant to the War Effort, and I told him so. He said to me, Homer, many people, general officers for instance, thrive on war. And 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.

I DID NOT REALLY fear for our country though for the first year or so the news was mostly bad. I couldn’t believe we and our Allies wouldn’t prevail. But I felt completely out of things, of no use to anyone. Even women had gone to war, serving in uniform or replacing their husbands in the factories. What could I do, save the tinfoil from chewing-gum wrappers? These war years found me sinking in my own estimation. The romantic young pianist with the Franz Liszt haircut was long gone. When I wasn’t sluggish, I was harshly self-critical as if, no one else noticing that I was a useless appendage, I would warrant that I was. Langley and I disagreed about this war. He didn’t see it in the same patriotic terms, his view was Olympian, he scorned the very idea of it apart from who was right and who was wrong. Was this a lingering effect of the mustard gas? War to his mind was only the most obvious indication of the fatal human insufficiency. But there were specifics to this Second World War, where evil could justifiably be assigned, and I thought his contrarian attitude was misguided. Of course, we didn’t argue, it was a characteristic of our family, going back to our parents, that if we disagreed with each other about a political matter, we simply avoided talking about it.When Langley went out on his nightly forays, I sometimes played the piano till he got back. The Hoshiyamas were my audience. They brought up two straight chairs and sat behind me and listened. They were familiar with the classical repertoire and would ask me if I knew this Schubert or that Brahms. I would play for them as if they represented a full house at Carnegie Hall. Having their attention brought my spirit out of the doldrums. I found myself particularly responsive to Mrs. Hoshiyama, who was younger than her husband. Though they spoke Japanese as they worked it was clear to me that he directed her. I wouldn’t ask to touch her face, of course, but my sense of her was of a trim little being with bright eyes. I listened as she walked about — she took very feminine, short, shuffling steps and I decided that she was pigeon-toed. When husband and wife worked together in one of the rooms and talked their Japanese talk, I would hear her laugh, probably at something of Langley’s newly acquired on one of his nightly rambles. Her laughter was lovely, the melodic trill of a young girl. Every time I heard it, there in our cavernous house, images of a sun-filled meadow flashed in my mind, and if I looked hard enough I could see us, Mrs. Hoshiyama and me, as a kimonoed couple in a wood-block print having a picnic under a cherry blossom tree. When the three of us were together in the evening and the formality of our daytime relationship was suspended, I felt that it was only my deep respect for Mr. Hoshiyama that prevented me from stealing his wife. On such gentle fantasies do men like me survive.